With (42 page)

The wagon has halfway to Harrison before he realized that he had never pissed on the fire. He smiled at the thought. Maybe the house would burn down. But maybe the fire would just die out.

“So you left yourself here on purpose?” Robin said. It wasn’t a question so much as a statement of fact. And it was as good a way as any of stating the truth, namely, that Adam Madewell had created me, had made me and bade me become his proxy, to inhabit these beloved premises after he was gone. I looked at Robin, aware that she was almost seeing me, aware that she had been listening to the story along with her dear dog.

“
You,
” she said, “never did go to California.”

Nope, I never did, nor will I ever.

“Does Adam know you’re here? Do you somehow talk to him?”

Naw, I caint reach him. Nor vicey versy.

“You don’t know what he’s doing in California? Or even if he’s still alive?”

I reckon he must still be alive and kicking, or else I wouldn’t be, myself. But I’m sorry to say I aint got the least notion what-all he’s up to.

The lad in his awkward way had stated an accurate but perplexing fact:
I,
Adam Madewell, already forty years old, was indeed living and working in Rutherford, California, having endured some experiences about which we’ll at least have a synopsis farther along, but I had no awareness at all that the little ritual I’d performed upon leaving Madewell Mountain had actually had the magic effect I’d intended, of creating not a second self but an ersatz self, free from time and appetite, forever keeping the home fires burning (literally, in view of his showing Robin how to make a fire). It would have been so nice if somehow I could have contacted him from time to time to ask how things were going. Or if he could have followed my progress through life, my fortunes, literally, in California. But we were as two brothers who went their separate ways and never corresponded. I suppose that is simply an inescapable condition of all
in-habits
everywhere.

How then, you’re wondering, can I, the mature, learned, and even, I hope, occasionally entertaining adult Adam, switch places, or at least first-person pronouns, so readily and glibly with that backwoods hobbledehoy or his lively understandable spirit? Because, as I’ve hinted before, this story, at least for now, is all in the past tense, of which I am master. This does not mean that I could omnisciently witness everything that was happening on Madewell Mountain at the time of the story, but that from this retrospective of the present,
now,
I can reconstruct all of it for your benefit at least as adroitly as Robin had been reconstructing with her paper dolls the entire history of Stay More.

Alas, she had outgrown the paper dolls. Or lost interest in them. Or found other things to play with. She had not destroyed them, and when I asked her,
How come you aint played with them little paper people for some time now?
she shrugged and said she had run out of paper.

Which was true. Robin was running out of everything…except determination and resourcefulness, which, with my help, would get her through. She ran out of sugar. She ran out of toothpaste. Sog Alan had stocked up several dozen tubes, but Robin despite a general laxity in her personal grooming liked to brush her teeth at least once a day (which was a good thing because she was not going to get any care at all from a dentist), and the toothpaste was all gone. She vaguely remembered something she’d learned in school about using baking soda as a substitute for toothpaste, and there were enough boxes of baking soda to last her until she was able to devise or invent some other dentifrice (at fourteen, having taking an interest in geology after Hreapha gave her a chunk of crystal quartz for her fourteenth birthday, she would discover a small deposit of chalk on a cliff side, and discover that chalk makes a splendid dentifrice).

But you can live without toothpaste. It’s hard to live without soap, and now that was all gone too. Nothing to bathe with, nothing to wash the dishes with, nothing to clean your clothes with (although she rarely wore clothes, it was nice to keep the bedsheets and pillow-cases laundered). The
Cyclopædia
had a recipe for hard soap with three ingredients, sal-soda, unslacked lime, and rainwater, only one of which she possessed (although she knew from the Bible that lime could be made from a skeleton), and although I had watched Grandma Laura and my mother making lye soap I had only the vaguest idea of the process or the ingredients, and thus was of no help to Robin. Often I, the
in-habit
, could only say I was sorry I couldn’t help, or didn’t know what to advise her.

Robin’s body was getting dirty. It was also changing, as I couldn’t help noticing and admiring. She was already as tall as I was, and I in my innocence began to wonder if she would eventually outgrow me entirely. I already knew that she would soon become as old as I was, and thereafter she’d get progressively older than I. As her childish body had grown, it had softened and rounded, especially in the hips as her pelvic area broadened, her waist was more accented and narrow, her arms were rounder—her body was taking on the classical feminine vase shape. She was no longer a child, at all. Most delightfully her nipples were beginning to project, and the area around them was swelling into a conelike projection on her otherwise flat chest, although, curious to young Adam’s ogling
in-habit
, one breast seemed to be developing more rapidly than the other one.

Having the advantage of invisibility, the
in-habit
could indulge his desire by gazing upon her ripening body to his heart’s content, and even to his part’s content.

Chapter thirty-five

T
here was only one mirror in the house, a half-length wall mirror with its edges fading and rotted-looking, but she loved to stand in front of it, even if she badly needed to wash off some of her dirt (if she could only figure out how to make soap), and examine what was happening to her body, how she was not just growing up but filling out. When she went to the mirror, she liked to allow Sheba to wrap herself around her neck and upper body (she’d measured with the yardstick, and Sheba was nearly six feet long now), which Sheba herself seemed to think was her favorite place in all the world, wrapping around her and gently squeezing. Her blonde hair was a mess. It came down to her waist and she hadn’t been able to shampoo it since the soap ran out a long time back. Studying herself and Sheba in the mirror, although she loved her nakedness, she wished that maybe sometime she could dress up in a really nice fancy dress, but all the dresses Sugrue had bought her were ridiculously small now.

She caught sight of her fawn Dewey watching her. She often let him into the house, and even let him sleep with her, along with Ralgrub, the three of them all snuggled up. Dewey was cute beyond belief, with those big innocent eyes and big ears and his head too big for his little body. But now, as she studied his reflection in the mirror behind her, he seemed to look too fuzzy, and she knew he wasn’t that fuzzy. His speckled coat was smoother than that. She thought at first there was something wrong with the old mirror, but then she backed away from the mirror as far as she could back, and studied her own reflection with Sheba wrapped around her. She looked fuzzy too, or blurry, and maybe it wasn’t the mirror’s fault. She moved to the window and looked out at the yard and the trees all around and the garden and in the distance the blue mountains rolling off to infinity, and all of it was kind of hazy.

“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.