With

by Donald Harington

  “My eyes are going bad!” she yelled. “Adam, god damn it, I’ll have to start wearing glasses!”

  I caint imagine you in spectacles. Where do you plan to find ary?

  To use one of his favorite expressions, he had her there. Her chances of getting glasses were more remote than her chances of finding some soap or some sugar. She was learning to substitute other sweeteners for sugar; the previous spring, when the sap was rising in the trees, Adam had shown her how to take the bung augur and drill a hole in the trunk of a maple tree and catch the sap in a bucket and boil it down into a kind of dark but very sweet maple syrup. And then of course each autumn she took Hreapha and the other dogs out to “line” bees, as Sugrue had shown her, and find honey, and although she usually got stung (and had to treat the stings with three kinds of crushed leaves), she had more honey than she could eat, and also plenty of beeswax, which she liked to chew; it was almost as good as having some chewing gum.

  Most recently, while she and Hreapha were at a bee tree, she saw again the footprint which Sugrue had taught her to identify, a track so much like a human’s footprint: a bear’s. She still hadn’t seen a bear, and she wasn’t completely convinced this was not the footprint of a human. She was only a little frightened, because no wild animal could ever scare her any more, not since she’d made friends with Sheba. “Hreapha,” she said, “I think I’d like to have a bear cub for my twelfth birthday.”

  “Hreapha,” her sweet dog said.

  And one day she was sitting on the davenport chewing some beeswax, feeling restless and itchy, unable, as she often was, to sit still on the davenport. As she often did, she began squirming around, bouncing, and twisting and wriggling and throwing a leg over the arm, and swinging her feet, and cocking her head this way and that and then making faces to herself, and laughing, all signs that her mind was busy at work. She suddenly realized that the texture of beeswax was such that it might make the base of soap, if only she had the other ingredients, whatever they were. Her Cyclopædia had mentioned beef tallow, which of course she didn’t have and could never get, unless some old beef came wandering into the yard; she also didn’t have the Cyclopædia’s other ingredients such as gum camphor, borax, bergamot and sal soda. But Adam had mentioned his grandmother using lye to make soap.

  “What’s lye, Adam?” she asked the air. He didn’t answer, as usual. She let the matter drop for a little while, and went on flouncing her body around on the davenport, giving full thought to the practicality of making soap, if she could figure it out. After a while, she said, “Tell me what lye is, god damn it.” That had become her favorite swear-expression lately; she had memories of how Grampaw had said it and how Sugrue had said it, and although she read her Bible regularly and knew that you aren’t supposed to take the Lord’s name in vain, she didn’t think there was anything vain about it, and she was always careful that “god” was not capitalized.

  Keep your shirt on, gal. Naw, I don’t mean your shirt, ’cause you aint wearin ary, but don’t get your back up. Gentle down. You been a-squirmin and a-fidgetin around on that davenport like a bunch of blister beetles was a-chompin on ye.

  “Tell me how to make lye, gol dang it.”

  Lie? You mean like a whopper or just a windy?

  “The kind of lye that was used to make soap, silly.”

  Never heared tell of no silly soap.

  She sighed. “Adam, you are impossible. I have got to have some soap. You said your grandmother made soap with lye. Did she have to buy it at the store?”

  Naw, they just made it out of wood ashes.

  “Wood ashes? We’ve got gobs of those.”

  You’d have to make you a ash hopper. Let me see if I caint remember what it looked like.

  He could remember. And he told her how to make it, at least a crude makeshift funnel sort of thing out of slats of wood—old staves, but not the staves she was saving to finish that firkin whenever she got around to it. He said that as best as he could remember, they’d lined the hopper with paper to filter the water through the ashes, and of course there wasn’t a scrap of paper left in the house that she hadn’t made into dolls. She thought of using pages torn out of those issues of Police Gazette that Sugrue had kept and which she never cared to read. That did okay to line the hopper, and then she filled it with all the ashes she could get from the kitchen stove and the living room stove. She poured water on top, and behold, lye dripped into the bucket (the same bucket she’d used for collecting maple sap), and she realized her firkin, when she got around to finishing it, would do a better job.

  “Now I need to know, what’s ‘tallow’?”

  Taller? Why, I reckon taller’s just the hard fat that comes from beef.

  “Seen any beef lately? Can you get tallow from chicken fat?”

  I misdoubt it. Say, maybe you could get it from hogs.

  “Seen any hogs lately? Which reminds me, it’s been a long time since I had any meat from that pork I smoked a few years back. We had the last of the ham last Christmas.”

  But Sugrue had taught her to save all her bacon grease, which he said was the best thing for frying chicken in, and she had several jars of it. She decided to see if you couldn’t get tallow out of bacon grease.

  She built a fire under the big iron kettle that was used for washing clothes (which she hadn’t used since she ran out of soap), and put some water into it and brought it to a boil. All her friends were gathered around, watching her as if she were preparing something special to eat: there was Dewey, and Ralgrub, and Sheba, and Hreapha, and Hrolf, and Hroberta, and Robert, and of course Adam too was somewhere around. Making a ceremony out of it, she dumped in the bacon grease, the lye, and several big chunks of beeswax, and took a wooden stick and began to stir. She stirred and she stirred, feeling like a witch stirring a cauldron and wondering if she ought to add magic ingredients or at least something that would perfume it and take away the greasy smell. At least she had plenty of energy for stirring, the kind of energy that had gone to waste bouncing around on the davenport. But after an hour of stirring, the whole mess just looked like dark gravy and didn’t smell anything at all like soap.

  One more failure in her education. But at least she was learning something. She reflected that if she were in Harrison she’d be in the sixth grade, about to graduate from Woodland Heights Elementary, but she wouldn’t have learned a fraction of all that she’d learned up here at Madewell Mountain Elementary. She went to bed not brooding about her failure but wondering just what she’d learned from the experience.

  The next morning she went out to dump the contents out of the kettle, reflecting that she’d probably not need the pot for washing anyway, if she didn’t have soap. But she discovered she did have soap! Overnight the dark gravy had hardened. She took a knife and cut into it and brought forth a cube of honest-to-god soap! It wasn’t nearly as hard as store soap. But it was soap. Soap!

  She cut all the hardened soap into rectangles and squares, and stacked them up in the house, and then scraped out all the remainder in the kettle to be used for flakes of dishwashing and clothes-washing soap. Then she filled the kettle with water, built up a fire to boil the water, dumped in all her filthy towels and sheets and rags and the few items of clothing she wore from time to time, and began to sing as she worked:

  Here we go ’round the mulberry bush,

  The mulberry bush, the mulberry bush.

  Here we go ’round the mulberry bush,

  So early in the morning.

  This is the way we wash our clothes

  Wash our clothes, wash our clothes.

  This is the way we wash our clothes,

  So early Monday morning.

  Come to think of it, maybe it was Monday. It might as well be. One nice thing about not having a calendar is that one day was just as important as another, or as unimportant as you wanted it to be.

  She finished the job of washing all the clothes, and hung them out on the clothesline to dry in the sunshine. It felt so good to
have everything fresh and clean…except herself, which was next. In the kitchen she filled the galvanized tub with hot water from the stove, enough for her hair as well as her body, and she climbed in, discovering she couldn’t really stretch out the way she had been able to in earlier years, and got her body and hair thoroughly wet and rubbed her homemade soap all over herself. It didn’t smell very much like bacon grease; maybe that was what the lye was supposed to do: bleach out the greasy smell.

  She was so happy to be getting clean and so delighted by the feeling of the bar of homemade soap running over her body that she became not just overjoyed but intensely excited, so much so that she had to slide the bar of soap down to her groin and move it around there for quite a while. The sensation of the wet slathery bar of soap, her own handiwork, rubbing against her poody lifted her higher and higher in her feelings. She gasped. She knew that Adam was probably watching her, but he had been watching her for so long that she felt not the least bit self-conscious; on the contrary, the idea of his watching made all of this even more exciting.

  “The soap works,” she said to him, wherever he was. “Oh, the soap works!”

  She felt tingly as well as soapy all over, and the tingle spread from her hair to her toes and changed from being just a tingle to a ripple, and then a tremor, almost as if an electric current was starting to pass through her body. She jiggled the bar of soap against herself so rapidly that she was sloshing water out of the tub. She’d never felt anything like this before. She felt a sense of certainty that something she couldn’t avoid was about to happen, a sense of expectation and anticipation that was all the more thrilling because it also scared her just a little. But it didn’t stop her. She was all out of breath and the sweat of her body was mingling with the water of the bath. She searched for a word to name what she was feeling, but all she could come up with was reach. She was reaching for something, and the reach was about to happen.

  And then it happened! It was as if she’d been turned inside out or, like Sheba, shed her skin, or like Adam taken leave of his whole body: she shivered and shook uncontrollably, not reaching anymore but getting there, and there was the most awesome and intense feeling she’d ever had. It went on and on for nearly a minute and left her exhausted but happier than she’d ever been. She could only lie perfectly still in the water, marveling at what had happened. She felt so good and so peaceful that she might have easily fallen asleep and drowned herself, but the bathwater was beginning to grow cold, and she climbed out. Realizing all her towels were hanging on the line, she shook the water from herself like a dog and then went outside to dry herself in the sunshine. She resumed her song, with her own words:

  That was the way we washed ourselves,

  And that was the way we reached ourselves,

  That was the way we reached ourselves

  So early in the morning.

  “Adam, sweet honey, is there a mulberry bush anywhere around here?” she asked.

  As was often the case, there wasn’t any immediate answer. But couldn’t she hear his breathing? Or rather his panting? He seemed to be breathing real hard. What was he doing? Had he been running around his haunt? Did he really run? What did he do for exercise? Finally, with his voice still out of breath, he said, They’s only one mulberry I know of, but it aint a bush. It’s a full-growed tree yonder on the east edge of the meader.

  “Why are you panting so, Adam?” she asked. “What are you doing?” But there was no answer.

  For most of the summer thereafter, Robin took a bath nearly every day. Imagine that. Usually when the weather was warm she bathed by swimming in the beaver pond, but she had learned long ago that the beaver didn’t like for her to use soap in their pond, so she didn’t use the beaver pond very much any more, except to visit it to say hello to her friends.

  Toward the end of that summer, not long before she was going to have her twelfth birthday, there was a drought. She didn’t know that word, although she’d encountered it several times in the Bible, but she knew that it was getting harder and harder to draw the water from the well for her frequent baths. And then the well dried up entirely! Adam instructed her on how to roll one of the shed’s barrels up to the corner of the house where it could be connected to the downspout to make a rain barrel. But it didn’t rain. Not for the longest time. The spring at the springhouse dried up too, which not only removed that source of water but made the springhouse useless for cooling leftovers or keeping anything cool. It was very hot, as well as very dry. The animals didn’t suffer too much; they could always get a drink from the beaver pond, which was too far for the chickens to hike, so she had to haul water in buckets from the beaver pond to keep the chickens from dying. Robin wouldn’t drink the pond water herself without boiling it first, but that at least gave her drinking water.

  Baths were out of the question, and she missed them terribly. For a little while she tried simply to soap her poody, but without water to wash the soap off it wouldn’t work, and she couldn’t reach at all again. In frustration she tried to make herself reach without the help of the soap, and was shocked to see that her fingers became covered with blood!

  She had probably done something terribly wrong. She couldn’t ask Adam to explain it to her. He probably didn’t know, anyhow.

  The bleeding went on and on slowly day by day. She wiped it up with rags. She needed water to clean herself, but had none. The beaver pond was beginning to dry up, and what would she do if there was no water at all anywhere? And no rain came? How would she live? How would any of them live? The beaver too would die.

  “Adam!” she cried. “I think I’m dying. Please help me!”

  I’m here, he said. I reckon I’m allus here.

  She frankly confessed to him what she had done to herself, although she knew he had probably witnessed it anyway. She was really and truly sorry that she had done it. She should have known better. She should have realized that anything which felt so good must be wrong. She had done a terribly wrong thing, and now she was bleeding, and the bleeding wouldn’t stop, and she needed to see a doctor, but there was no way she could do that. Was there nothing Adam could do that would help? Or tell her how to stop the bleeding? Or something? Anything? Adam? Adam?

  You’ve got me all afeared now. I caint imagine what could be wrong with ye.

  Chapter thirty-six

  His mother told him that, yes, there was a possibility that Mistress was dying, but that did not excuse him from his responsibility to assist in, and perhaps even direct, the task of locating and taking possession of a bear cub for Mistress’ twelfth birthday. It was an awesome obligation which had given him much thought, search, practice and discussion with his lieutenants, only one of whom, Ralgrub, had anything to contribute, because she claimed that she was cousin to the bears and understood their habits and their ways…not to mention that she was the only one of them other than Robert who could climb trees.

  What if they went to all the trouble to capture a bear cub and bring it home and even put a red ribbon around its neck as a birthday present, and then Mistress died of whatever was ailing her and causing all that blood? What would they do with the bear cub then? Just set it free, and say, Sorry, pal, but we don’t need you after all? Well, of course they could eat it, but Hrolf didn’t have much appetite these days, what with having to eat the chickens as they died. The drought was killing off the chickens, although Mistress each day brought a bucket of water from the beaver pond just to give the chickens some water, but that wasn’t enough to keep them from dying, and his mother had decreed that it was now permissible to eat a chicken if it was clearly dead, and Hrolf would be just as happy if he never saw another chicken again, he’d eaten so many of them.

  Hrolf realized that the only way to get out of the responsibility of bringing home a bear cub would be for Mistress to die before her twelfth birthday. He hated to see that happening, but she was bleeding, and it wouldn’t stop.

  It was a long hike to the beaver pond for a sip of stagnant slime. And t
hen the beaver pond went completely dry. The beaver disappeared, without a word to anyone. Nobody knew whether the beaver had simply died or had gone elsewhere in search of water. Hrolf’s campaign to teach the beaver how to communicate in dog language had not been successful. The beaver were too ignorant, or too stubborn, or perhaps even too proud, to attempt to master the easy rudiments of dogtalk. And thus they had not said anything to anybody before departing. Hrolf considered it one of his failures. He had been proud and triumphant in his campaign to teach dog language to all the other creatures of their acquaintance, except of course Sheba, who had her own mysterious language that was unfathomable. But Ralgrub spoke a passable tongue, and Robert from a very early age had been quick to pick up on the language, although he never had learned to bark and still said “WOO! WOO!” as his primary exclamation. Hrolf had taken it upon himself to stress to everyone the superiority, nay, the nobility, of canine communication, and his efforts to dogize the other creatures, at least in dogese, were rewarding. They were all noble.

  Thus, when he gathered them around him, in the presence (the omnipresence) of the in-habit, Adam, he knew that they could all (except Sheba) understand him when he declared, Friends, we’re going to have to go on an expedition. Our main objective is to find water, somewhere, anywhere. But our secondary purpose is to honor Mother’s request to find a bear cub for Mistress’ forthcoming birthday. I’ll take with me only the following: Mother if she wants to go, Hroberta and Robert and Ralgrub. And Adam.

  You’uns know I caint leave the haunt, Adam declared.