“Come go home with me and eat supper and stay all night with me,” she said.
Having never heard such an invitation before I did not realize that it was just polite and perfunctory, a commonplace way of saying goodbye that isn’t meant to be taken literally. I didn’t know how to reply. I didn’t know that I was expected to return the invitation at once by saying, “I don’t reckon I can tonight, but why don’t you come go home with me and eat supper and stay all night with me?” which would allow her to counter it by saying “Not this time, I reckon, but I’ll be looking for ye.”
All I could think to say was, “Really?”
That caught her by surprise. She had to think about it for a while before saying, “Well, yeah, if you really want to.”
“I’d really like to,” I said. “But my folks are looking for me, I reckon.”
“So I’ll see ye tomorrow at school,” she said. And she kissed me on the cheek, and walked away.
In the third grade she kissed me on the mouth.
The summer before the fourth grade I had a bad accident in the shop when I grabbed for a backing knife that fell off the bench, and I cut off my first finger and I gashed my leg something terrible. My mother wanted to see if they couldn’t get a doctor to come, or at least take me to see one, but my father said I could just take off from work for a while and see if it didn’t get better. I never could walk too well on my left leg after that.
And I was out of luck the last time I tried to use that trail, which was the morning of the first day of the fourth grade. I had missed Roseleen all summer, and I had no idea if she even knew anything about my accident. Surely she must have wondered why I didn’t ever come into Stay More again to shop at Latha’s Store. Surely she was just as eager as I was to see how far we could go. Surely she had delightful memories of how far we’d already gone.
My father and mother both didn’t want me to attempt to go back to the school with my very bad leg and the fact that Grampaw was practically bedridden with rheumatism and Paw needed my help more than ever in the shop.
But I couldn’t put off seeing Roseleen any longer, and besides Miss Jerram had promised us that the fourth grade would be really special, when we’d really take up the study of geography (and it was going to be her last year, before a soldier she’d met during the war took her away from Stay More). So I begged my mother to fill my dinner pail for me, and I got up before dawn and dressed. I was no longer wearing overalls; but a shirt and trousers, and I felt grown up. But I had covered less than a mile of the trail, hobbling with my bad leg and practically having to drag it behind me as Sog Alan would be required to drag his leg so often toward the end, before I began to have serious doubts about my ability to complete the journey. Only my vision of Roseleen kept me going. And that vision was not enough to sustain me when, attempting the most hazardous and vertical drop of the trail, I lost my grip on the branch I was clinging to—or perhaps the branch broke under my weight (I was a real big boy now) and I plummeted to the rocks below. It was some kind of miracle I didn’t break every bone in my body. I broke only four of them, in my wrist, arm, ankle, and skull. The cracking of the skull gave me a concussion that left me unconscious for hours, and when I came to I could scarcely move. I drifted in and out of consciousness for the rest of the day, sometimes having dreams of Roseleen, even very sexual dreams of Roseleen, and managing only, at one point, to crawl far enough to reach my dinner pail and eat its contents. That was probably around suppertime. When I did not return home for supper, or at any time during the night, my folks figured that something must have happened to me, and the next day my father went out upon that trail himself, the first time he’d ever used the trail his father had blazed to allow a doctor to come for his birth, and he found me and carried me on his shoulder the rest of the way into Stay More, where Doc Swain set my broken bones.
I was never able to go to school in Stay More again. I never saw Roseleen again…until…but that will have to wait.
Chapter thirty-two
It was the longest stretch she’d ever listened to the in-habit and it left her convinced he really was there, not just a voice in her own head. It was very timely too, because more and more lately she had been bothered by the inescapable idea that she was just inventing the whole world inside her mind, that nothing actually existed except her mind. Even before all of this began, when she still lived happily at home with her mother, she had noticed the strange developments that whenever she thought about something, or was hoping for something, that that something came to pass, it occurred, it appeared as if by magic, the magic that was in her head, as if she had just made it happen. This left her feeling powerful and it made her wonder if she had the ability to perceive things that other people could not. But it also, now, left her doubtful of the existence of other people, or even if other people had ever existed at all except in her creation, the way she created the paper inhabitants of Stay More. The last living human being she had seen, a year ago, was Sugrue, and she had done away with him. Although Adam was here, she could not see him nor touch him nor kiss him, and it was so easy to think that he was only the most remarkable product of her lively mind.
One of her favorite lines in the Bible, in the very second chapter, was “And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”
It was so easy, when she was feeling lonely, as God must have felt, to think that she might really be God herself, and that she had created Adam out of the dust and told him to name everything. Sometimes she tested the idea: “Adam, what’s the name of that little tree over there?”
Why, that’s a sassafras, I reckon. It aint good for much. Slack cooperage, maybe, but we don’t make slack barrels, just tight ones. Course, you could make tea out of the small roots.
“Adam, what name have you given to that big bird pecking on that tree trunk over there?”
I call it a woodhen, but I’ve heared Grampaw call it Lord God Peckerwood on account of it’s so big. It’s actual named a pileated woodpecker, I don’t know why. Maybe because of that red crest.
“Adam, what did you decide to name this big spotty spider?”
That there is jist a orange garden spider, but don’t she make a perty nest? I had one I named Mirandy and she made a web that was ten foot acrost, and I’ve watched her catch grasshoppers in it. Look at them there cocoons, big as hickernuts! They won’t hatch till after Christmas but the babies will stay in the cocoon till May or June.
And She saw everything that She had made, and, behold, it was very good.
When she turned nine years old her new motto was, “Let’s be real.” Having for some time now decided that Adam simply could not be pure imagination, although her imagination never ceased to amaze her, she was not surprised that two important things happened because of him. The first was that he helped her make flour, something she couldn’t possibly have figured out how to do on her own. And something she desperately needed. She had run out of flour a long time back. It had been ages since she’d been able to make any bread or biscuits or cakes or pies. She could still make cornbread with the cornmeal (which was also about to run out), but that was it. She had broadcast the wheat seeds Sugrue had left, and harvested enough of the wheat, stacked into shocks as the Cyclopædia directed her, to result in almost two bushels of wheat, after she’d followed Adam’s instructions for making a primitive winnowing fork (out of sassafras) to throw the threshed grain into the air and separate the wheat from the chaff. (Here her other book, the Bible, was more helpful than the Cyclopædia.)
Adam told her that down the trail toward Stay More, very near a large waterfall, in a glade or glen into which he had fallen during his last attempt to reach the Stay More school, were several caverns once inhabited by Bluff-dweller Indians. He had explored those caverns and had found an Indian mortar and pestle which he had brought home
and shown to his folks, but his father had said “We aint got no use for such as that,” and Adam had put them away in the barn somewhere. Robin searched the barn and found them in one of the stalls.
Pounding the wheat by hand with the Indian mortar and pestle was a lot of work, taking hours and hours, and then Adam said it would have to be sieved, and he helped her fashion a sieve from a tin can with nail holes punched in the bottom, which was slow but it worked. In the box of kitchen gadgets Sugrue had brought from home was one of those old tin hand-crank flour sifters, and when she got through using that she discovered that she had enough flour to make at least one loaf of bread, and maybe a pie.
But when she got up one morning to light a fire in the kitchen stove so she could bake that loaf of bread, she discovered that she was out of matches. There had been several boxes of Diamond “Strike Anywhere” Kitchen Matches, but she had used one or two whenever she wanted to light a fire or a lantern or even a candle, and now she was all out! And winter was coming on and it was cold in the house!
“ADAM!” she yelled. “How can I start a fire?”
This time, thank heavens, he came when he was called. Put on your coat, silly, he said. He could say that, not ever feeling cold or hot himself.
“I have to light a fire in the stove!” she said. “And I’m all out of matches!”
I don’t have ary a match, he said.
“You don’t have ary a anything!” she mocked his language. She had once asked him what “ary” meant, and he said he figured it was just a way of saying the old-time “ever a” or “e’er a”.
“How did you make a new fire when you ran out?” she asked.
We didn’t never run out. It’s terrible bad luck to let a fire go out, and it never happened to us.
“But didn’t you ever make a fire without matches? The way the Boy Scouts do or whatever? Rub a couple or sticks together or something?”
What’s Boy Scouts? he wanted to know. Naw, but one time I lit the forge in the shop with a kind of bow drill like the Indians made. Let’s see if that there bow drill aint still anywheres about.
But it wasn’t. They searched through all the stuff in the shop and even with her coat on she was getting very cold. Many days later she remembered that Sugrue had possessed a pocket lighter that he lit his cigarettes with, and she went to the outhouse and searched in the remains of his disintegrating trousers on the floor, managing to say “ew” not more than a couple of times, and found the Zippo lighter. But that was many days later, and now she was cold and eager to get the oven ready for some bread.
Listen careful, Adam said, and I’ll try and tell ye how to fashion a bow drill. It aint near as hard as making a firkin.
It took some whittling of an Osage orange branch, the type of tree that left those big inedible (except by Ralgrub, who loved them) horse apples all over the ground, the tree that got its name from the fact the Osages who’d lived and hunted hereabouts (years after the Bluff-dwellers had died out) made their bows and arrows out of it. She made the bow drill’s bow out of that, and also the spindle. The bearing block she made from an oak barrel stave which she drilled with the bung-borer, an augur Adam said was used to make the bungholes in barrels.
The idea was fairly simple, and all she needed now was something for a little bundle of tinder. Adam said the fluff of cattail was the best thing, but that not being within hiking distance, she substituted the fluff of a milkweed pod (It’s called butterfly weed, Adam explained, and it’s good for all kinds of things). The idea was to wrap the bow’s string around the spindle and saw back and forth to set the spindle spinning in the hole of the bearing block until it charred and then the hearth board began to smoke as the char dust ignited into a coal, and the red coal was dumped onto the milkweed down of the tinder bundle, which you blew upon until it burst into flames.
Although the idea was fairly simple, it took Robin most of the day to make it work. By the time she got the tinder bundle burning and carried it into the house and put it in the kindling in the stove, it was too late to make the bread that day, but at least if she kept the fire burning and never let it go out completely for the rest of the winter, she’d have no problems. She was proud of herself for making fire. She understood how the very first people who lived must have felt when they learned how to make fire. But she understood she’d never have been able to do it without Adam.
She left the woodstove in the living room burning all night. It was a cold night, but she did not let the animals into the house. There were too many of them, and while Ralgrub was still young and practically helpless it wouldn’t be fair to let her spend the night in the house if none of the others could, and it wouldn’t be smart to let all those dogs into the house. “You understand, don’t you, Hreapha?” Robin said, and Hreapha was content to spend the night in her usual spot, a hole she’d dug in the earthen floor of the barrel shop, out of the wind. As for Robert, he never came around at night any more anyway. Wherever he spent the night, he was all worn out the next day, and spent the whole day sleeping on the porch.
Robin slept alone now, and usually it didn’t bother her too much, but occasionally she felt lonely. She’d not forgotten Paddington, and ached to have him with her. Sometimes, even, she recalled how nice it had been to go to sleep lying snuggled with Sugrue. One evening she spoke aloud, “Adam, would you like to sleep with me?” But, as so often was the case, she got no answer. It didn’t matter. Even if he had answered, and said he’d be glad to sleep with her, she wouldn’t know he was there. She wouldn’t be able to feel him. She’d just have to pretend that they were snuggling up and keeping each other warm…but no, his body wouldn’t be warm because he didn’t have any body.
Sometimes he occupied her dreams. She had never seen him by day nor even made any attempt to imagine what he looked like, but he was clearly visible in her dreams, a tall boy of twelve in overalls with an unruly shock of brown hair and a very nice face. She could almost touch him. In fact, she did touch him in her dreams. It seems she kissed him, and hugged him. He was very bashful, and blushed a lot. When she wasn’t dreaming about Adam, usually her dreams went bad, and involved being lost in the woods and pursued by animals that wanted to eat her, or fires or tornadoes. Her ninth year included a lot of nightmares, from which she sometimes woke up screaming or crying for her mommy. She also knew that when she read the horror stories in the Bible—the beheading of John the Baptist, Absalom accidentally hanging himself, Moab making lime out of the king’s skeleton (did she need any lime for anything?), the murder of the daughter of Jephthah, and David killing Goliath not once but twice—these stories would give her nightmares, and she tried to stop reading whenever she came to one of those parts of the Bible. The few times she had really nice dreams, often involving Adam, were mostly just before waking in the mornings, so that she had trouble waking up and wanted to go back to sleep and return to the dream.
Often in her ninth year she repeated her invitation, “Adam, would you like to sleep with me?”
Finally when warm weather had returned she got a reply. Gal, I don’t never sleep.
“Oh,” she said, and thought about that. “There’s no bed in your bedroom,” she observed. But he didn’t seem to spend any time in that room anyhow. She couldn’t imagine how anybody, not even an in-habit, could stay awake constantly all the time. “Don’t you ever get bored?” she asked.
What’s bored? Bored is when you caint find something to keep you curious. So long as there’s anything going on in the world, I’ll never be bored.
“But what’s going on in the world? Nothing ever happens around here.”
She heard his scoffing laughter. You just aint looking for it. Or you caint see it. Or caint hear it. Or caint taste it or smell it or feel it. Why, there aint a moment goes by that something wondrous don’t occur.
“Like what?”
Like a orange garden spider building her web. Or like the wind a-slewing through the cedars. Or the sound of them dogs afar off a-hrolfing and a-h
rothgaring as they chase their game. Or the lightning bugs all over the meader at dusky dark. Or the fine smell of oak wood fresh cut. Or the sweet breeze that puffs from your nose when you’re a-sleeping.
“So you watch me when I’m sleeping?” she wanted to know. Her breath caught and she felt uneasy.
Iffen I don’t have nothing better to watch. Which aint too often.
“And you watch me when I go to the bathroom?” She didn’t mean bathroom, because there wasn’t one, and she didn’t mean when she was taking a bath, although she did mean that too, except that she didn’t take a bath very often.
He did not answer, which she took to mean that he did. But somehow her sense of modesty, what little was left of it, wasn’t offended. Being watched by an invisible in-habit isn’t nearly as embarrassing as being watched by someone who has real eyes. And since she rarely wore any clothes any more when it was warm, and had outgrown all her clothes anyhow, her going naked made her less and less self-conscious about it. In fact she felt more self-conscious when she had to dress against cold: when it was cold she had to try to squeeze into an outgrown coat or else wear something of Sugrue’s that was too big for her. She had thought about taking the scissors and the needle-and-thread and cutting down some his garments to make them fit her, but she wisely realized it would be better to just wait until she grew into them, and meanwhile she went without clothing in warm weather and made do with whatever would fit or wrap around her in cold weather. None of her shoes fit any more, and all of Sugrue’s were much too big for her, but she wore them if she had to walk in the snow. Otherwise she went barefoot all the time.
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