With (43 page)

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

H
is 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 then 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.

Sorry, I forgot Sir, Hrolf said. He’d never called the boy “Sir” before, but he felt it was needed in this context.

Why can’t I go too? Dewey asked in his still fumbling form of dogtalk. Dewey wasn’t a mere fawn any more, but a young buck. He was growing up, and before long he’d start sprouting antlers.

Well, I suppose you could, Hrolf allowed.

I can find water as good as any of the rest of you can, Dewey boasted. And I bet I could find a bear even better.

All right, Hrolf said. Let’s go. Adam, Sir, would you explain to Mistress where we went, and that we may be gone more than a day or two. Don’t mention the bear cub.

The expedition set out, the six of them romping abreast across the meadow but changing to single file as they reached the dry beaver pond and the old path that was known as the South Way. I’m real proud of you for doing this, son, Hrolf’s mother said to him.

Ma, we’d all die of thirst if we didn’t.

But they were perishing of thirst by the time they’d gone a mile or so through the forest. They hoped that the creek which fed the waterfall would slake their dehydration, but they discovered it was bone dry, as was the waterfall itself. Peering over the precipice, Hrolf could see a dog’s skeleton in the dry bed of what had been the pool at the base of the waterfall. He realized that must be poor Hrothgar. He nudged his mother aside to keep her from peering over the precipice.

I can’t go another step without a drink, Hroberta declared.

They all sat around panting and moaning in the torture of extreme thirst. And before the sun set on that day of the expedition, Hrolf said apologetically, I’m sorry I brought you’uns out here. But we can’t go back. There’s nothing to drink anywhere.

Woo, Robert said, there’s got to be some way to get off this fucking mountain and find a creek.

Ralgrub said, Whatever creek you found might be dry too.

As night fell, several of them chewed on grass to get just a little moisture.

The next morning, it was Dewey who found the spring. It wasn’t much of a spring, and hard to reach, a trickle seeping out from beneath a rock on the cliff side, but it was genuine water. Each of them had to wait their turn (Hrolf insisted that his mother go first) to dip their tongue into the seep and lap a bit, and then wait a minute for more water to seep out for the next creature. Hrolf was sad to realize that even if he got Mistress to bring her bucket to this place, it would take hours or days for the bucket to fill.

But they’d each had enough water to sustain them through another day of searching. As they traversed the forests of Madewell Mountain, and Ledbetter Mountain too, everywhere they saw the effects of the drought: the carcasses of birds, animals, and reptiles who had perished. They came across the bodies of whole families of mice, squirrel, rabbit, possum, porcupine, skunk and coon. Some of the creatures were sprawled out full length on the ground as if they had used the last of their strength to try to reach water somewhere.