With (58 page)

“You’uns be sure to come and visit me whenever you can,” she said.

As he drove off up the Right Prong that skirted the east end of Ledbetter Mountain, he reflected that maybe he didn’t remember Ozark speech as well as he’d thought. He’d always considered “you’uns,” which is a contraction of “you ones,” to be plural, referring to more than one person. In the Deep South, supposedly people said “You all” or “Y’all” when they were addressing only one person, but not in the Ozarks. Maybe he simply hadn’t heard her correctly.

When he turns into the mountain trail at the north foot of Madewell Mountain, he notices another grammatical oddity, which gives him pause: time seems to have reallocated itself into the present tense, which doesn’t bother him greatly. He understands that the present tense is more cozy and immediate, at least if you don’t allow the urgency of it to make you nervous. And he isn’t nervous at all. He’s exultant. He’s rapturous. He’s going home.

Hardly has he turned up into the trail when he encounters a man in a pickup. He is quick to recognize good old George Dinsmore, who’d been just a year ahead of him in school. He is glad to have learned from Latha that George is one of the few remaining citizens of Stay More. But it takes George a little while to recognize him, and when he does he is flabbergasted.

They chat a while, and he asks George, “Have you been up yonder to the top lately? Do you know if my house is still there?”

George laughs. “I aint
never
been to the top of that mountain. I been practically everywheres else, but for some reason I never been up there. If you’re a-fixing to go and see if you caint make it up to your old homeplace, why, good luck to ye.”

Further up the steep trail, which is in such terrible condition it gives his mighty
SUV
the workout of its life, Adam encounters a bobcat, who scampers off into the woods. Before Adam reaches the gulley where he’d had to turn back before, where that fellow named Leo Spurlock had mired his pick-up, he encounters, or catches glimpses of, several other animals: a mongrel dog, a possum, three raccoons, and that thirteen-point buck that George had mentioned, a magnificent animal. Adam knows that this isn’t typical of the animal population of these environs; he’d never in his boyhood seen such a diversity of animals together in one spot. As he is rounding a hairpin curve on the trail he glances into the rear view mirror and it appears that all those animals are following him! He stops, and waits, to see if they catch up with him, but the animals stop too, and keep their distance until he drives on.

Maybe it is the present tense, after all, which is making him feel funny. He is having distinct premonitions of disorder even before he reaches the spot where, he discovers unhappily, the trail comes to a complete end, far short of its original destination. He must stop and exit the vehicle, taking his rifle with him. He examines the terrain, trying to spot anything familiar, but apparently time and thunderstorms have transformed everything. The original course of the trail, over which his grandfather and father had driven so many mule-team loads of barrels and staves, has been totally obliterated. Not a trace remains of the ledges his grandfather had hacked into the bluffs. Now in every direction there are only deep gullies and ravines. In one of the ravines appears to be the remains of a burnt pick-up which had crashed, maybe years before.

Adam makes slow progress on foot. His bad leg hampers his descent into the ravines and his climbing out of them. Looking behind him, he catches an occasional glimpse of one or more of those animals who have been following him, even that big buck.

Finally he comes upon a very strange thing: in a clearing above one of the ravines, in a patch of grass, is standing a bottle of Jack Daniels Black Label whiskey! He opens it, sniffs it, and determines that it is a fresh bottle, untouched, undiluted, unpolluted, perhaps recently left behind by some hunter. But the hunting season, as George has reminded him, hasn’t yet begun. His hiking has left Adam thirsty, so he takes a generous swig of the stuff, and it tastes just fine. He lights himself a cigarette. He carries the bottle with him as he continues his hike. But then he comes to another bottle, identical to the first. He does not open the second bottle but continues onward with the first, until he comes to the third, at which point he is distinctly beginning to feel funny, and needs more than a swig from the bottle to settle his nerves. From the lay of the land he has a distinct feeling that he is nearing his destination, and this drives him onward. By the time he arrives at the tenth bottle, he is stumbling not because of his bad leg but because he has consumed nearly a third of the one bottle he carries.

And then he hears the sound. At first he thinks it is just the wind in the trees, but as he listens, limping onward toward the source of the sound, he realizes that what he is hearing is too liquid to be the wind—it is an angel singing, or, no, not singing but vocalizing in wordless tones that rise and hide themselves and then reappear. He stops and listens, entranced. He is reminded of the soprano solo in Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 3, the
Pastoral,
the soft off-stage
cantilena
, incredibly beautiful and incredibly haunting. Yes, that is the word: haunting. When he reaches the eleventh bottle he converts that adjective into a noun:
haunt,
and he looks down at the earth beside the eleventh bottle, seeing there an imaginary boundary line, and knows that something truly fantastic is happening to me.

This is not merely present tense, it is present tense first person singular, and I having reached my haunt have come at long last into full possession of myself.

But perhaps not completely full, just yet. Because as I reach the twelfth and last bottle, which stands at the very edge of my meadow, and I happily behold in the distance that my beloved house and its outbuildings are all still standing, I descry the source of that lovely singing. In the yard of my house stands a tall woman, nude, her blonde hair cascading to her knees but not concealing her nakedness. There is a serpent entwined around her neck and upper torso. My whisky-fuddled head is a vortex of thoughts; I am thrilled beyond measure to be home at last but I am uncertain if I am actually alive or just dreaming of some Eve in Paradise. I am Adam. And then practical reality takes hold of me, and I realize that probably my homestead has been expropriated by some hippies, and she is just some free-spirited flower child left over or lost from a previous time, as the Ozarkers themselves were left-over and lost from the mainstream. This thought fills me with chagrin.

And then she spots me. She seems to be having trouble focusing her eyes on me, but she has seen me. Although I have an impulse to turn and flee, I am visited by the last and most powerful of this day’s haunting oddities; she may or may not be Eve, but I am certainly Adam, and I have not ever left this place, my haunt, nor shall I ever leave it again.

Chapter forty-seven

I
t was the most challenging and wracking thing she’d ever had to do, and the doing of it had practically ruined this special day of days. She cared so much for his feelings and did not want to hurt him in any way. She really was deeply in love with him, but she had to make him understand that she simply could not face a future in which he not only remained ethereal and invisible but also remained twelve years old forever. What would it be like when she was thirty or forty or fifty years old, and he was still only twelve? She had hoped that his wisdom and mother wit, greater than she herself had possessed at twelve, would permit him to accept and even welcome the presence of the newest addition to the circus, but she could hear her own voice quavering when she said to him, “I think I’d better ask you how you’d feel if my eighteenth birthday present from the others was a man, I mean a real live one, I mean one who could truly lift things and eat what I cooked for him and even be able to go to sleep at night…”

In yore bed.
His voice was matter-of-fact, and he added,
Tell ye the honest truth, I druther see a man a-sleeping there than a bar, but you’uns would just have to be able to sleep with me a-watching over you’uns.

“And you’d be watching everything else we did, wouldn’t you?” she asked. “Would you be terribly jealous of him? Would you hate me for it?”

As was so often the case that it didn’t even bother her, he did not answer. She waited, as usual, giving him plenty of time to come up with the courtesy of a reply, and, as usual, he did not. She had much to do today, to get ready, and as she put the layer cake into the oven, she went on talking. “Don’t you see? That’s one of the main things I want him for, that he’ll answer me when I say something to him, which you won’t do.” But he still did not speak. “Or at least, if he won’t answer, at least I can
see
his face and tell what he’s thinking or feeling. Don’t you understand how frustrating it is for me that I can’t even see your face?”

There was not any response to that question, either. She poured hot water into the tin tub and got a fresh bar of her special lavender-scented beeswax lye soap. She climbed into the tub and said, “Would you like to get in here with me? I’ll scrub your back and behind your ears and under your cods.” But he did not make his presence known or felt. She decided, for the first time, for this special occasion, to shave her legs, which were just too downy and even hairy in places, and she used Sugrue’s razor to scrape it all off, although she nicked the skin in a couple of places. “There,” she said when she was finished. “See how smooth they are. Put your hand on them and feel them.” But he did not.

She trimmed her fingernails and her toenails and cleaned under them. She washed her hair and was tempted to cut it, and she asked Adam if he’d mind if she cut her hair, but he wouldn’t answer. She decided not to cut it; she started braiding it but then determined it would look better if she just let it hang loose to her knees. She studied herself in the mirror, and carefully brushed some pokeberry juice onto her lips to empurple them. She dabbed a generous amount of Tabu around her chin, her neck and the top of her full breasts. “Before I get dressed,” she said to Adam, “could you see your way to making love once again?” Surprise: he didn’t answer. “Oh, Adam,” she sighed. “Don’t you understand? When the man is here, I’ll still always love you and I’ll still make love to you whenever you want to. Whenever you get hard, all you’ll have to do is let me know. We’ll have to keep it a secret from him, but that shouldn’t be too difficult, should it?”

She put on Latha’s old-timey dress, which had already gone through several washings since Robin had acquired it, and was beginning to look faded and frayed. She studied herself in the mirror again with the dress on and was skeptical. She wondered, for the first time, how particular the man might be. Would he think she looked cheap? She had no idea what sort of man she’d be getting for her birthday. All she knew about him was that he’d have two arms, two legs, a head, and a dood…no, that would have to remain Adam’s private word. And it was to be hoped that the man would be able to speak English. She believed without any doubt that Hreapha and the others
would
be presenting her with a man for her birthday. If she had asked them for an elephant, they would have got one for her. Or at least a horse, and now with her misgivings she began to wish that she’d asked for a horse instead.

She was starting to feel uneasy about the arrival of the gift, and she went into the storeroom to get a bottle of Jack Daniels. An entire case was empty, and she wondered if she had been consuming more of the stuff than she had realized. She opened a bottle, and drank straight from it, which she didn’t usually like to do. “Care for a swig, honey?” she asked, but Adam was still sulking and silent and maybe even absent. Maybe he had gone out to the cooper’s shed to escape from her entirely, and possibly he was curled up inside her barrel. He had told her that he was so proud of the barrel that she’d made with his advice and instructions that it had become his favorite place, not to sleep, since he never slept, but just to curl up and hide from the world. “Why would you want to hide from the world?” she had asked him. “Especially since you’re invisible anyhow?” And for once he had tried to answer her.

Sometimes it’s just too much with me,
he’d said, and she had thought about that for a long time.

The man coming was of the world, and she feared that he might be too much
with
her. She didn’t care if he was young or old, so long as he was older than Adam and ideally younger than Sugrue. She hoped he would be good-looking, and perhaps tall, and she hoped he would be intelligent enough to carry on a decent conversation with, and she certainly hoped, above all else, that he would be marvelous at sex. But what if he was too much
with
her? What if he couldn’t accept her as she was? And
love
, or learn to love, her as she was?

And what am I? she asks herself. Do I know? The question haunts her almost as much as she is troubled by the sudden realization that her entire past, her whole story of eleven long years endured in this lonely aerie, is all now past, behind her, and she is living in and for the present, the very real but still fantastic present.

She removes the dress. She thinks aloud, “If he will have me, he will have me as I truly am, unadorned.”

She takes another lusty swallow from her bottle, and steps outside the door. Many of her family are there, those who have not gone off on the quest for a man—Hreapha, Ged, Latha, Bess, Hroberta, Sigh and Sue, and Sheba, resting atop Sparkle—Robin lifts Sheba, gives her a kiss, and wraps her around her neck. Robin breaks spontaneously into song, or rather an inspired vocalization of abstract sounds born deep inside her lungs and transformed through all her vocal chords and tongue and the chamber of her mouth and even her nose. Such music delights most of her family, except Adam, who has complained that her melodious chants are
jist a lot of hootin and a-hollerin.
Another reason she wants a man, and with any luck a man who appreciates her singing.