With (49 page)

During those years of her adolescence, she missed out on all the things that were happening to her generation’s delight in movies, music, literature and culture in general. In music alone, she never had the experience of hearing all the fabulous new songs and rhythms, just as she was also denied exposure to the great classical composers. But it may be observed that what she missed, she invented. Art, after all, is the expression of that which the ordinary mortal cannot express. Her solitude forced Robin into extraordinariness, and she filled the air with her own music, her own attempt to translate into pure sounds those universal emotions—exultation and despondency, the yearning and seeking and the glory in finding—out of which all music, classical and popular, springs.

Her health was quite good, in fact remarkable, but of course there were no communicable diseases for her to catch, not even the common cold. In her fourteenth year she had the usual problems with complexion: pimples, blackheads, pustules, and blotches, with no one to explain them to her (since I at twelve had not yet experienced these dreads the way that Adam in California would endure acne but grow out of it) and there were times she worried her complexion would be permanently disfigured. She continued to be (as she always would be) a chronic worrier, and sometimes her tension gave her stomach-aches or headaches, although she had long since discovered the very best outlet for tension was simply a quick (or leisurely, depending on her mood)
reach,
having eventually convinced herself that it was not the reaching which brought about the monthly bleeding.

She had remarkably few dental problems. In her sixteenth year she had a yeast infection, but in time it cleared up. It may safely and incredibly be said that she never had anything wrong with her that demanded a visit to the doctor or dentist.

A visit to an ophthalmologist might have been desirable, but the only real inconvenience her myopia caused her was in her shooting: it became impossible for her to bag game with the rifle, and her use of the shotgun was limited to things within easy view. In her thirteenth September a wild razorback hog, which she could not have caught in the rifle’s sights, happened to discover her sweet potato patch and was so busily preoccupied with rooting up and munching the yams that it didn’t notice Robin sneaking within range. She fired pointblank and enjoyed ham and bacon again for a whole year or more, although she had run out of salt with which to cure it and had to condescend to accepting my instructions on how to extract salt from hickory ashes, cow parsnips, and pigweed. By her fourteenth year she had run out of everything that Sog had originally stocked, except for a few jars of pickled pig’s feet, and of course the huge supply of Jack Daniels, which, by the way, she had begun imbibing on occasions. One summer she had an unusually severe problem with chiggers, those maddeningly itchy mites, and I happened to mention to her that whenever the chiggers had caused great distress in my family, we treated the bites with small applications of Chism’s Dew, as the local moonshine was called, a jug of which my mother kept strictly for such medicinal purposes (ironically, although their lives were devoted to making whiskey barrels, neither Braxton nor Gabe Madewell ever touched the stuff). Robin wondered if Jack Daniels might effectuate the same result as Chism’s Dew, and tried it, pouring some on the bites on her long lovely legs, and sure enough it did the trick, killing the chiggers, and as long as she had the bottle open she poured a small amount into a glass, diluted it with water, sipped it, and made a variety of grimaces which diminished on the second sip and disappeared on the third. She finished the glass and poured another, and, as the saying goes, acquired a taste for it. She learned it could greatly enhance her music.

Out in California Adam acquired a taste for the wine that went into the barrels which gave the wine the many flavors of the oak. Although California law prohibited Adam from going to work in the cooperage until he was sixteen, his father circumvented that restriction by taking Adam into the cooperage after hours, when Gabe Madewell, eager for the time-and-a-half they paid him for working overtime, often toiled at the cooper’s trade, sometimes late into the night. There, as Adam grew older and stronger, he learned the advanced labors and tricks of coopering, until, by the time he was sixteen and allowed by law to become officially employed, he was no longer an apprentice cooper but a journeyman. Still, despite being able to do anything his father could do as well as him, he was only his father’s assistant, constantly under orders and instructions and criticism from his father, who, when their arguments grew bitter, reminded him that he might have been left a corpse on Madewell Mountain, a notion that Adam sometimes dwelt upon, thinking he could still have inhabited the place as a ghost and not knowing that he was definitely inhabiting it as an
in-habit
.

The Inglenook Winery was in a great stone chateau, with the cooperage in one basement of it, and some nights when his father had no immediate task for him to do, Adam would wander into other parts of the chateau, where he discovered the sampling room and could help himself to different tastes of wine, always careful, of course, not to consume so much of it that his father would notice. Thus at an early age he learned how to avoid drunkenness.

The topography of Napa County bears some resemblance to that of Newton County, enough to have kept Adam from being hopelessly homesick. To the west of Rutherford rise the Mayacama Mountains, the highest point, Mt. Veeder, being the same height, 2,500 feet, as the loftier mountains of Newton County, and another peak, Mount St. John, still wild enough to remind Adam of his explorations of Madewell Mountain back home. To the east could be seen a muscular mountain called Stag’s Leap, the very name of it suggesting an affinity to Stay More’s Leapin Rock, from which at least four people had been known to commit suicide (and Robin in her now-outgrown paper doll period had emulated that tradition by having four paper dolls fall from the top of the davenport to their deaths, each followed by her ad libitum descant of “Farther Along.”)

Every available slope and terrace of the valley was covered with vineyards, all lovingly cultivated, the neatness of which presented a striking contrast to the wildness of Newton County. Whenever he could, Adam would get out into the countryside and wander limpingly among those vineyards, or hike up into the semi-wilderness of Mount St. John, where he found an abandoned house to explore, and a quicksilver mine. East of Rutherford the Napa River flowed, with a swimming hole that Adam visited on hot summer afternoons, although the other kids there teased him and mocked his Ozark pronunciation and vocabulary, and came to call him Arkie. There was also a large reservoir called Lake Hennessey, unlike anything Adam had seen before, since Newton County does not have a single lake. Nor does Newton County have a single mile of railway, and there was a track of the Southern Pacific Railroad running through Rutherford, which carried the huge cargo of wine off to market. Adam liked to visit the Rutherford Depot, a plain building in a long shed, and watch the loading of the big tank cars with wine or the loading of cartons of bottled wine into boxcars. Studying the train’s schedule and behavior, Adam learned how to climb aboard unnoticed and ride the train five miles down to Yountville, which wasn’t as big as St. Helena but possessed more shops than Rutherford and had a building that became Adam’s refuge during those years when he awaited the legal working age of sixteen: a public library. The kindly librarian, a young woman from San Francisco who told him it was all right for him to call her Frances, said to him at closing time one day, “You know, if you like, I could issue you a library card and you could take some books home with you.”

“I reckon not, ma’am,” he said. “Paw don’t allow no books in the house.”

“That’s too bad,” she said. Then she asked, “Why aren’t you in school?”

“Iffen I was let to go back to school, ma’am, I’d just be in the fourth grade, and I’m too big for that.”

“Oh. How old are you?”

He told her he was fifteen and she kept on asking him questions. He told her his whole story so far, how he’d hurt himself trying to get to school in the wild mountains of the Ozarks, how he’d lost the index finger of his right hand working in his father’s cooperage, and so forth. He even told her how he’d been coming to Yountville to visit the library by climbing up on the freight train. She told him she admired his desire to give himself an education, and she wondered if he needed any help picking out books. He told her he’d just been picking them out at random, but he hoped eventually to read every book she had.

“Who are your favorite authors, so far?” she asked.

“Arthurs, ma’am? You mean the folks who wrote the books? Tell ye the truth, I never paid much attention to that, just the titles.”

And from then on she told him some authors she thought he would like. Joseph Conrad. Mark Twain. Thomas Hardy. Did he know, by the way, that Ambrose Bierce, who wrote some fine satirical fables and some short stories shot through with savage irony, had lived just up the road at St. Helena? Yes, she said, and after Adam finished reading some of Bierce’s tales, she would be happy to drive him up to St. Helena some Sunday and show him the house in which Bierce had lived. Also he ought to know that the splendid Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, before he became famous, lived with his California bride in a squatter’s shack up the road on Mount St. Helena.

Among the hundreds of books that Adam read at the Yountville Public Library were Stevenson’s
Silverado Squatters
, based on that experience, as well as his
Treasure Island.
He also enjoyed Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe
and W.H. Hudson’s
Green Mansions.

A railroad guard caught Adam climbing down from the freight train on one of his trips to Yountville, and that put an end to that mode of transportation. Desperate, he tried walking the five miles from Rutherford to Yountville, but with his bad leg the hike hurt him and tired him, and he told Frances he was going to have to quit, and why.

“It won’t be long anyhow, ma’am,” he said, “afore I’ll turn sixteen and be let to go to work, and my paw has plans to start me in to a-coopering at the place where he works.”

“Until then,” she said, “you know I have a car and I can come and get you any time you want me to.”

She not only did that, and took him to see Ambrose Bierce’s house, and to the site of Stevenson’s squatter’s shack as well as for Sunday drives all over the countryside, but she taught him how to drive, and eventually she taught him how to make love, that is, in his sixteenth year she taught him what he needed to do for her in order to get her ready and willing, and she taught him what he ought to try to do so that either he could hold off coming until she was good and ready or else how to be patient enough to make her come too. He’d had no idea that females actually came. It surprised him and filled him with wonder. He asked her if there were any books which explained it; she let him read a novel by D.H. Lawrence which belonged not to the library but to Frances herself. He’d had no idea that authors could actually write about things like that, and he acquired a taste for it, the way he’d acquired a taste for the Cabernet Sauvignon that all the local wineries made. She let him read some of the other books that were in her own private library, books by Henry Miller, and a recent novel by J.P. Donleavy, and his favorite, by some Russian named Nabokov about a girl and a man. He had nearly as much fun reading all those books as he did in the act itself, which they continued doing whenever they found the opportunity, especially on Sundays at her little house in Yountville, where sometimes they spent the whole afternoon doing it. Frances was a thin woman not nearly as tall as Adam, and her favorite place to be was on top of him, where he bore her weight easily and marveled at her velocity and shaking. When Adam was seventeen, his father found out about Frances. His mother had already known, or at least she had met Frances, and being blind could not see her and determine that she was older than Adam and believed him when he said that Frances was his girlfriend and he hoped to marry her eventually. His father was not blind, not physically; his soul was blind, but his eyesight was good enough to detect that Frances was an older woman, and when Adam finally introduced Frances to his father, the first thing Gabe Madewell said was to ask her how old she was, and she told the truth, which surprised Adam: she was thirty-one.

Later his father said to him, “How come you caint get yourself a gal your own age?”

“Tell me where I’d find one,” Adam replied.

Not that there weren’t any girls in Rutherford, or St. Helena, or Yountville, who were his own age. But they were all in high school, where Adam would never go. Usually he saw girls his own age at the movies in St. Helena, where Frances often took him, which he enjoyed more than anything next to sex and books. Frances had not only told Adam all the best books for him to read, for the improvement of his mind as well as for fun and pleasure and excitement, but she had tried to tutor him in a few things he might have taken in high school if he had gone: geometry, Spanish, U.S. and World history, and biology. He was always resistant to learning anything that he could not put to practical use, but it is fair to assume that by the time he would have graduated from high school he already possessed a greater store of learning than most high school students, and had a knowledge of social relationships and sex that went far beyond anything ever acquired in high school.

But when he proposed to Frances, she laughed. “Why do you want to ruin a good thing by doing something like that?” she asked.

That was about the time the little Russian fellow started coming into the Yountville library on Saturdays at the same time Adam was there. The Russian was a dapper, well-dressed man in his fifties with slick dark hair and very bushy eyebrows. He spoke with an aristocratic accent and for some time after he began coming into the library Adam worried that the man might be pursuing Frances, even though he wasn’t as tall as she, in fact he was an inch short of five feet, and Adam himself had already shot up beyond six feet. But when he confronted Frances with the notion, she laughed and said, “Oh, no, he’s just a very courtly and nice gentleman. André isn’t after me, he’s after some books he can’t find in the St. Helena library. Have you noticed the car he drives? He’s very well-to-do.”