With (46 page)

In the years the Madewells settled in Rutherford, wine-making in California had fallen on hard times, and the Inglenook vintage itself was inferior to the great wines that Gustav Neibaum had produced, equaling the best of Europe (and in fact winning awards at the Paris Exposition of 1889 at which the Eiffel Tower was dedicated) and continuing until the 1930s to win awards as the best American wine.

When Gabe Madewell went to work as a cooper for Inglenook, there were only two other men in the cooperage, and they used redwood staves to make the wine barrels. French wines have always been racked in oaken barrels. Gabe Madewell had been accustomed to making 50-gallon whiskey barrels of oak; he had just a little trouble learning to make the standard 59-gallon French Bordeaux barrel out of redwood. In time, he would persuade his superiors to switch to oak, which would eventually become the standard. In later years, Adam liked to think that his father was the “inventor” of the American oak wine barrel, which lends its distinctive flavors to even a jug of the cheapest grocery store wine. Whether or not Gabe Madewell actually deserved the credit, the aromas or flavors of wine, such as coconut, caramel, vanilla, fresh toast, dill, nuts and butter, or spices like clove and cinnamon are not inherent in the grape but come from the oak barrel. Adam was destined to become the foremost expert in these aromas.

If Adam couldn’t work beside his father making barrels (at least not until he turned sixteen), what could he do with himself? Rutherford was just a village, not much larger than Jasper, Newton County’s tiny seat, but it didn’t even have Jasper’s supermarkets or movie theater or newspaper. For major shopping, people in Rutherford had to go into the city of Napa, fifteen miles away, and Gabe Madewell would not be able to buy a car and learn to drive it until he’d been there for a few years. Meanwhile, Adam, hobbled by his bad leg, led his blind mother to one of the two grocery stores in Rutherford and helped her shop, a wonderful thing she’d never done back home.

The two things he remembered most about his first year in Rutherford: attempting to describe to his sightless mother the items on the shelves and in the cases of the grocery store (she had not dreamt you could buy meat in a store), and, one Saturday, limping four miles (the same distance he’d hiked to the Stay More school but over far more hospitable terrain) to the town of St. Helena, where there was a movie theater. Adam had never seen a movie before, and it would be several years before his father would buy a television.

The experience of that movie (although he cannot remember its title or cast or plot) made him almost glad he no longer dwelt on Madewell Mountain.

Chapter thirty-eight

S
he had grown at last into Sugrue’s clothes. Not that they really fit, but with the pants cuffs rolled up and the shoulder straps taken in as far as they would go, a pair of Sugrue’s denim overalls would hang from her body, at least during cold weather, which was the only time she ever wore clothes, together with one of Sugrue’s thick sweaters, which made her wish she had something knitted of her own. The winter of her twelfth year was very cold, in fact the coldest of all the winters she had been there, and she really envied Paddington his ability to sleep through most of it, at the same time that she was grateful for the warmth of his body and the softness of his fur under the covers on the worst winter nights. The howling winds outside left long icicles hanging from the eaves of the house, and tree limbs snapped all over the forest, and she was moved to permit all her friends to move into the house temporarily, even Sheba, who, Robin had learned, actually did hibernate every winter. For that matter, so did Ralgrub; on the awfullest day of winter Robin put on Sugrue’s thickest jacket, and his boots that were much too large for her, and trudged out through the snow to the barn to lift Sheba out of the pile of leaves in which she was coiled into winter sleep, and reinstalled her on a pile of leaves in the corner of the living room. Then she went back out in the snow for a considerable distance to the hollow tree where Ralgrub had settled into hibernation. The raccoon woke up when Robin tried to lift her out of the tree’s interior.

“Sweetheart,” Robin said, “it’s absolutely freezing, and it’s going well below zero tonight and you won’t survive. Wouldn’t you like to come in the house?”

Ralgrub moaned and squirmed and chittered but allowed Robin to carry her into the house, where she was given a new den among the debris in the storeroom, Adam’s room, which was the coldest room in the house, but much warmer than outdoors, and of course Adam didn’t care what the temperature was.

Better than growing into Sugrue’s clothes was growing into Adam’s age, and Robin didn’t have to feel younger or inferior to him any more. He might know an awful lot that she didn’t know about how to live in the country and how to take care of a homestead, not to mention how to make a churn and firkin (and she was determined during her twelfth year to finish that firkin), but now he wasn’t any older than she, and he certainly wasn’t that much smarter than she, and she bet she knew a lot of things he didn’t know. Maybe his ignorance of sex was just the result of growing up among people who considered anything sexual as unmentionable or forbidden. He’d told her that
Hereabouts, it aint fitten to say ‘bull.’ You have to call ’em ‘topcow’ or ‘brute’ or ‘cow-critter.’

“By the way,” she’d said, “when is that cow you mentioned going to come wandering into the pasture, so I can make some butter in your churn?”

Haw,
he’d laughed.
Why don’t ye jist ask Hreapha to get ye a cow for yore thirteenth birthday? That’d be sure to do the trick.

“For my thirteenth birthday,” she’d declared, “I want an elephant.”

What’s an elerphant?
he’d asked.

“Huh?” she’d said, but sure enough he had no idea what an elephant was. For that matter she’d never seen a live one herself, but she’d seen pictures of them, and she certainly knew what they were and what they looked like. Poor Adam really had a lot to learn.

And the thought of that gave her a worry (she was to discover throughout her twelfth year that she spent entirely too much time worrying, about all kinds of things): if Adam stayed twelve forever and she kept getting older and older, wouldn’t she become—what was that word?
condescending
—wouldn’t she look down upon him? How long could they remain friends before she started thinking of him as just a kid? She certainly wasn’t a kid any more. Not only could she wear Sugrue’s clothes, but her hips and thighs were fully developed, almost like a grown woman’s. Although she was spreading out down there, her face, neck and shoulders were slimming, losing the last vestiges of baby fat. Her breasts kept growing and the nipples were darkening, and she was only mildly disturbed by the hair that was sprouting in her armpits and around her poody. She remembered that her mother had had hair in those places, although she could hardly remember what her mother had looked like, or her teachers, and she really wanted to see other women so she could confirm or disprove her suspicion that she was turning into a very beautiful woman. Her fingernails were dirty and needed trimming badly (although she chewed off the ends of her thumb-nails, possibly a bad habit), and she sometimes was tempted to cut her long, long hair but had taken a vow never to do it.

What she really wanted was a brassiere. Although she thoroughly enjoyed the freedom to run around naked in warm weather (and even in the winter when the living room stove was hot), she liked the idea of having a bra, something that she and her girlfriends in the second grade could only distantly aspire to. She considered that she might look kind of funny, running around in a bra and nothing else (she had no similar cravings for a pair of panties), and since it was highly unlikely that a bra would come wandering into the pasture like a cow, she ought to put the thought out of her mind, which was too crowded with other thoughts anyhow, although most of her thoughts were just as useless or senseless as having a bra. For instance, she gave too much thought to the fantasy of going to college eventually, which was completely stupid in view of the fact that she’d never be able to finish high school. She wasn’t exactly sure what “college” was, but Miss Moore had told the class what to expect when they finished twelve grades. Robin liked to have fantasies (which were harmless enough even though they wasted brain energy) about using a chunk of her money, if she ever got out of here, to go off to some nice college somewhere, maybe even—what was the name of that best one which Miss Moore used to talk about? yes, Harbard—going to Harbard and wearing smart college clothes and learning all kinds of fabulous stuff, especially about her chosen subject, wildflowers. She adored imagining college. It would be so different from elementary school. Everything she learned would be worth learning.

In her twelfth year she began to have an intense hunger for knowledge. She wanted to get ready for college, somehow. If she’d been home in Harrison she would have gone to the public library and read each and every book in it until she’d read them all. She had nothing to read except the Bible (which she’d already read all the way through twice and was now on the third reading) and the
Cyclopædia
(which she could cite or recite from memory, even the parts on rural architecture, live stock management, the dairy, and Ladies’ Fancy Work). When February came and Paddington woke up and smacked his lips and grunted what sounded like a bunch of cusswords, she took him out to watch the daffodils blooming. He promptly ate a few. She led him off into the woods in search of nuts and acorns. There weren’t many; other animals had already got most of them. She saw some pig tracks, and realized that sometime soon she was going to have to try to find, and kill, and butcher, and smoke, another hog; it had been so long since she’d had bacon she couldn’t even remember what it tasted like.

Often that spring she took Paddington out and away from the house, telling the other animals to stay behind because she was teaching Paddington the things his mother would have taught him, how to recognize what was edible and what wasn’t. Their hikes deep into the woods in search of food for Paddington also turned into nature walks for Robin; the beginning of her realization that books weren’t the only source of knowledge. Paddington would never leave her side, except to chase and swat at a butterfly, or to wander off while she was down on her knees looking at some liverwort or tiny wildflower. Often he would look at her quizzically and snort a noise that sounded like he was asking her a question, “Ma, what’s that there little critter with those stripes down his back?” Robin realized that whether he thought of her as his mother or not he was expecting her to teach him the ways of the world or the ways of the wild, and she couldn’t explain to him that she herself was just as woods-ignorant as he was when it came to naming things. If he or she wanted the name of something they’d have to ask Adam, but she knew that there was an area called the “haunt” that limited the space Adam could traverse (she almost thought to call it “reach”) and she had already taken Paddington beyond the haunt.

The main difficulty she had with Paddington was that often she found a wildflower or plant of some kind that she wanted to study, but he wanted only to eat it. Once, in a crevice on the side of a gorge, she found a really marvelous little flower that looked like an elf’s penis standing under a hood to protect it from the rain. Beetles were crawling into it, and gnats were being caught by it and swallowed inside the chamber in which the elf’s penis was standing. The idea of a plant that could eat bugs really captivated her attention, but then Paddington came along and ate the flower before she could stop him. “Hey, that had bugs in it!” she protested. Whether it was the bugs or something else—maybe the plant was trying to teach him a lesson not to eat any more of them—he immediately got a stinging pain in his mouth and all the water he could drink wouldn’t make the sting go away. He was miserable for a long time. “Did you learn anything?” she asked him.

Whenever they went on a nature walk after that, she searched and searched for another one of the flowers, which she had come to think of as “elfsdick,” but it was a long time before she found another one, and she watched to see if Paddington would recognize it without any word from her, and sure enough when he saw it he made a big show of leaving it alone. She carefully dug it up (it had a big root like turnip) and took it home to show it to Adam and ask him if he knew if elfsdick would be a good name for it. He laughed and said,
Sure, but we allus called ’em jack-in-the-pulpit.

She became fascinated with all the wildflowers and even had visions of sitting in a classroom at Harbard listening to a very smart man giving lectures about wildflowers. In her restless search for more and more varieties that she had not found before, she took Paddington deeper and deeper into the woods, in every direction from the house, but she always made sure to remember things that they passed, a big rock here, and a lone pine tree there, so that she could find her way home. But on one of their nature walks, Paddington flushed some kind of large rodent, maybe a woodchuck, and began chasing it, over hill and over dale, with Robin following as fast as she could. By the time Paddington had chased it into its den or burrow, she had neglected to observe any landmarks along the way, and when she tried to get her bearings after persuading Paddington that he’d have to give up the critter for lost, she herself was lost. She realized she didn’t know where they were, or which way to turn. She had a very poor sense of direction.

“Paddington, do you have any idea how to go back the way we came?” she asked. “Do you know which way we should even turn?” But his reply, a kind of growling which sounded sort of like the way Sugrue used to snore, was not much help. “Well god damn it,” she said, and began walking just to see if he might make any attempt to correct her direction. He did not, but just followed along. She tried to run away from him, but he snorted sounds that were clearly the bear equivalent of “holy shit” and “smoley hokes,” and caught up with her and knocked her down. One of his claws raked her back and drew blood. “Now look what you’ve done!” she said, showing him the blood. She wiped at it and slapped him with the wiping hand. “Bad bear!” she said. He whimpered and hung his head.