The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Even so, he choked on his coffee and needed a minute to gentle down. And then he asked, “Where’d you pick up that word?”

  “Everybody knows it,” she said, staring him straight in the eye, feisty and brash as all get out.

  “Sweet little girls don’t know it,” he said.

  “You should hear all the words Gretchen Scott knows,” she declared. “She knows all of them.”

  “Who’s Gretchen Scott?”

  “One of my best friends at school.”

  “Did Gretchen tell you what that word means? Did she explain what happens when you go to bed with somebody?”

  “Sort of,” she said. “But you’re not answering my question. Is that what you’re going to do to me?”

  “Not today,” he said, and that was all he could think to say, which was true. He didn’t intend to rush things. He wasn’t one of these here goddamn rapists. Aw, of course he knew what statutory rape was, but this wasn’t the same thing. He really hoped that whatever they did would be consensual on her part. He wasn’t never going to force her to do nothing. And besides for some strange reason he wasn’t feeling an awful lot of lust, not at the moment, anyhow. He’d thought for a while that he wouldn’t be able to hold himself back, once he got ahold of her, but now that he had her he didn’t seem to have the itch in his britches that he’d expected.

  “But tomorrow maybe?” she said. “Or sometime?”

  “Not if you don’t feel like it,” he declared, and then, because the subject was something that ought not be discussed too much but just acted upon whenever the occasion called for it, he decided to change the subject. “It’s warming up out there,” he observed. “You want to take a look at the place?”

  “I want to brush my teeth,” she said.

  “Fine and dandy. What color toothbrush do you want?”

  “Blue.”

  He got her a nice blue toothbrush out of the box of new toothbrushes, and then, because she’d never brushed her teeth without running water, which they didn’t have, he showed her the new system of using the wash basin and a gourd dipper filled with water from the water bucket. He had to hold the dipper for her at first, but she got the hang of it, and brushed her teeth and then he wanted to show her how to draw water herself. He took her out to the well, and showed her how to let the well bucket run down on its chain down and down deep into the well and then you let the bucket submerge itself and you pull it up on the pulley with the chain. She had a struggle, at first, pulling that chain with the bucket full on the other end of it, but she finally got it up and then he showed her how to pour the well bucket into the kitchen bucket and take it to the house and set it on the bucket shelf and put the gourd dipper in it.

  “See?” he said. “Nothing to it.”

  She frowned. “It’s not nearly as easy as just turning the faucet handle.”

  “If you think that aint easy, let’s see if you can split some stove wood,” and he took her out to the woodpile, where a chopping stump was surrounded by a good stack of logs he’d dragged in from the woods and cut up with his chain-saw. The chain-saw was one of the few things he’d sold at the yard sale. He hated to let it go but knew they had to learn how to cut timber with just a axe and crosscut. He had some doubts about showing her how to use the axe, not that he was afraid she’d hurt herself but she might just get it into her head to take a whack at him while he was asleep or something. But that was just a risk he’d have to take, because he wanted her to do her share of helping with the stove wood. He started off with little pieces, propped steady on the chopping stump, and made sure she stood with the axe in such a way that it wouldn’t slip and hurt her. Bitch was watching them, and the girl asked him to make the dog go away. Then she missed her first few licks but got the hang of it and actually managed to split a piece in two. “Hey, you did it!” he said and tried to give her a hug, but she backed off from him. Then he showed her where the stove wood was stacked in a big wooden box beside the kitchen door. Even if she wasn’t very good at splitting wood with the axe, she could be handy at toting the wood to the wood box.

  He showed her the little springhouse, and explained it was the nearest thing they had to a refrigerator. If they had any fresh cow’s milk or butter, which they didn’t and never would, they could keep it in the springhouse. He did have some powdered lemonade mix and directly he’d show her how to mix a jar of it and get it cooled in the springhouse. “We could keep our Kool-Aid here too,” she offered, and it was the first thing she’d said that made it sound like she really wanted to participate in this life. That made him happy but he was real sorry to realize that it had never occurred to him to buy any Kool-Aid mix because he never used the stuff himself.

  “Sweetheart, I really do hate to tell ye, but it complete slipped my mind to get us any Kool-Aid,” he said.

  She looked as if she was about to cry, and he wished she would, just to prove that she still knew how to cry. “You’re not ever going to the store again?” she said and he wasn’t sure whether it was just a statement of fact or maybe a question. Either way, it didn’t need to be said.

  He showed her the rest of the place—the barn, which they wouldn’t have no use for since they didn’t have any cows or mules or any need to store hay. And it looked like it might fall on their heads anyhow, and he told her she’d better not even play around in or near the barn. That wasn’t true of the shop, which was still a pretty sturdy shed and still had all the tools and stuff that Gabe Madewell had just abandoned when he pulled up stakes. He explained to her that this had been the workshop of the barrel-maker who had lived here but hit the trail some twenty-odd years before. He showed her one of the two barrels that had been left behind and attempted to explain how the staves were cut from the white oak timber in the surrounding forests and shaped to go inside the steel bands to make a barrel that was probably used for whiskey. Madewell had also made wooden buckets and tubs and churns, and there was still one churn left behind, never used but slightly damaged. Sog showed it to her and explained how it would have been used to make butter. They wouldn’t have no use for it, but it sure was a handsome piece of woodwork to look at. “There was some kind of name for the work he did, which was a family name or something—Turner or Carver or Cutter.”

  “Cooper,” she said.

  “Yeah, that’s it! How’d you know it?”

  “I read it in a book,” she said. Then she asked, “Why did he build his house way off up here on this mountain?”

  “Well, I believe it was probably his daddy, Braxton Madewell, who was also a cooper, who built the place way back around the turn of the century. I reckon he built it here because it was handy to all the timber.”

  “How far is the nearest neighbor?” she asked.

  He started to answer but then realized it could be a trick question. “If you was a crow and could fly, and headed thataway,” he pointed toward the south, “you might fly over a house where people still lived in about three mile or so, in a place called Stay More, just a ghost town, really. But there just aint no way to go from here to there on foot.” He decided to tell her about Adam Madewell. Gabe had a boy named Adam who’d been several years behind Sog at the Stay More school, and Adam had to walk it, getting up before daylight every morning and hiking four miles over the roughest trail you could imagine and him not but a first or second grader, just a kid, hiking eight miles round-trip every day of the school year, carrying his dinner pail and his schoolbooks in places where he practically had to do mountain-climbing, until finally he’d had some kind of accident at home, helping his daddy make barrels and gashing his leg so badly he couldn’t walk on it, and they never saw him again at the schoolhouse. Ad Madewell had been a real smart and proud and hardworking kid at school, and the teacher, Miss Jerram, had loved him and was sorry to see him go, or rather stay, because he must’ve stayed home from school for a couple of years before they left for California and the school itself didn’t last much longer than that. But folks on the store porch—Latha Bo
urne’s General Store—used to kid Ad because his paw and maw never did come to town for anything. “Hey, Ad,” they’d say, “why don’t ye show ’em that trail you come in on?” Adam’s trail, which went through a lost holler with a big waterfall in it, had been washed away after he quit using it, and now there wasn’t a sign of it, although Sog had been in that lost holler one time and in fact had shot a bad man there when he was with the state police.

  “You were a policeman?” the girl asked.

  “Yeah, that’s what I did most all of my life,” he said.

  The girl was staring at him in a way that bothered him, as if she was trying to picture him in his uniform or just trying to figure out why a law-abiding officer of the law would do something illegal like stealing a little girl. “What did you shoot the bad man for?” she asked.

  “He had kidnapped a little girl,” Sog said, and felt he might even be blushing. “Yeah, I know, it sounds ironic, don’t it? As it turned out, this feller, Dan Montross was his name, just an old hermit, he was the girl’s grandfather. But I didn’t know that.”

  She fixed him with that look again and said, “Somebody is going to shoot you.” She sounded like she meant it. He hated to hear her talk mean like that.

  “They’ve got to find me first,” he said.

  It wasn’t a good day. Both of them were tired from lack of sleep the night before, but he had a lot to do, and there was plenty he could find for her to do. He asked her what she’d like for lunch and she said a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He had plenty of jars of peanut butter and plenty of jars of jelly, but no bread. He explained that bread gets stale, and it gets moldy, and you can’t keep it in a jar, and he hadn’t thought to buy even one loaf to hold them until they could make some. He had all the fixings for making bread and he intended to show her soon how to do it and how to bake it in the woodstove, and maybe bake some pies and cakes and biscuits while they were at it. But not today. They had all kinds of crackers, plain saltines as well as fancy ones, and he asked her if she could just make do with peanut butter and jelly on crackers. For himself he had a hankering for some pig’s feet, and opened a jar and forked a couple of ’em out. He fixed himself a generous glass of Jack D to wash them down with.

  “I’m going to throw up,” the girl declared.

  “You aint even et yet,” he said.

  “If you eat that stuff, I won’t feel like eating,” she said.

  “Here, try a little taste. Won’t kill you, and they’re scrumptious when you get to know them.”

  She got up from the table and left the kitchen, taking her plate of peanut-buttered crackers with her.

  “Don’t eat on the davenport!” he called after her. “My momma wouldn’t never let me eat a-settin there.”

  After lunch he had to go work a while on covering the trail to where the truck had been parked. He asked her if she didn’t feel like taking a little nap. She claimed she didn’t. What did she feel like doing then? What would she ordinarily be doing this time of day on a Sunday afternoon? She said she’d be working on Wobbinsville. What’s Wobbinsville? he asked. Just a town she made up for her paper dolls to live in, she said. Did he have any paper she could use to cut some paper dolls and clothes for them? Well, of course they had enough toilet paper to last for a few years, but he had to apologize that there wasn’t any other paper except the brown paper sacks that stuff had come in from the grocery. That would do, I guess, she said, if you could let me use the scissors.

  Sog looked and he looked in the boxes of kitchen gadgets he’d brought from home, and there wasn’t no pair of scissors to be found nowhere. Maybe it was just as well. He didn’t want her fooling around with something sharp like a pair of scissors that she could stab him with. But he went out and searched the shop for scissors. There was a pair of what looked like sheep shears, but that wasn’t the same thing. “Bitch,” he said to the dog, “you haven’t seen any scissors anywhere, have you?” Bitch was a real smart dog but she couldn’t answer that one. He went back to the house and informed the girl, “I sure do hate to have to tell you but it appears they just aint no scissors nowhere.”

  She hung her head and for a moment there he was almost sure she was finally going to let herself cry. But she didn’t. He went into the storeroom and rummaged through the toys he’d got for her, and brought out a little Fisher Price xylophone which had different colored bars and he showed her how it would play itself if you pulled it across the floor. But maybe she just wasn’t musically inclined. There was a whole bunch of board games but they required two or more to play and he was going to be busy all afternoon. He went ahead and showed her the one called What Shall I Be? Career Game for Girls, which features a nurse, a teacher, a airline hostess, a model, a ballet dancer, and a actress. He promised to play the game with her later, but right now he had work to do. She could maybe learn it by herself. No? Well, he wasn’t going to drag out any more of the stuff right now, because he had to save it so that he’d have something to give her at Christmastimes and on her birthdays.

  “You’d better try to take a little nap,” he urged. “Come on and I’ll show you our bedroom.” He took her in there, where he had rehabilitated the old iron bedstead and springs the Madewells had left behind along with a real mattress stuffed with feathers, so soft he figured it must’ve been goose down. “You never slept on a featherbed before?” he asked, and when she shook her head, he said, “Well, just climb up there and see if you don’t fall right to sleep.”

  She laid down and closed her eyes and he tiptoed out and on out of the house and told Bitch to keep an eye on the door. He told Bitch it was okay for the girl to go to the outhouse if she had to but not to go anywheres else. Then he took his axe and shovel and hiked the mile back to where the truck, or what was left of it, was still smoldering. The embers had died out enough that he could commence cutting a lot of saplings and brush and stacking them on top of the remains of the truck to cover it up. He didn’t think anybody would ever come up the old trail this far, but if they did they wouldn’t see nothing but a brush pile. Then he went over the trail to the house, walking backward and covering up any signs of the path and covering them with brush. All of this wasn’t so much to keep anyone from finding the path as it was to keep her from finding it.

  When he was done late in the afternoon it was time to give thought to supper, and he considered killing one of the chickens. But he was just too blamed tired and sleepy himself to bother with it. The girl, however, wasn’t asleep. She was talking to that big doll he’d given her. He was pleased to see she’d found some use for the doll. “What would you like for supper?” he asked her.

  “Basketti,” she said.

  “Say what?” he said and she repeated herself and it finally dawned on him that she was just baby-talking spaghetti. That too was something he didn’t have in stock. “Wop food,” he said.

  “What?” she said. “It’s my favorite of everything.”

  “It’s what Eye-talians eat,” he said. “I never could abide it, nor even tried it. Like pizza, it’s for Wops.”

  “I love pizza,” she said.

  “Well, I’m sorry but we just don’t have the makings of any of that Wop food.”

  And again she seemed right on the edge of hauling off and having herself a good cry. This has been a bad day, he reflected, but he was confident that given the passage of time she could learn to overcome all her likes and dislikes. For supper he opened a can of beef stew and for dessert they had canned peaches with cookies. At least there was plenty of cookies, enough bags to last them until they learned how to make them.

  When he lit up after dessert she said, “Please don’t smoke.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” he assured her.

  After supper they played board games. He had a good one called Dealer’s Choice that involves purchasing cars and maintaining a used car lot, with lots of vintage car cards. But she didn’t like it much. It grew dark and he lit one of the kerosene lamps and he tried to show her how
to do it but she said she was not allowed to play with matches. “You don’t play with ’em,” he said. “You just light the darn lamp with ’em.” They tried a game called Clue but it seemed to be over her head and maybe his too. They briefly played a game called Sorry, and fooled around just a bit with a game called Charge It: The Family Credit Card Game. They played a board game called Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the object of which was to help Goldilocks escape. Then it was bedtime. Well, actually, he had thrown his wristwatch that they’d given him at retirement off the bluff and didn’t know what time it was, and maybe it was early, but he was bushed. He didn’t feel a smidgin of desire. He told her that tonight he’d sleep on the davenport and she could have the featherbed all to herself. She told him that she couldn’t sleep without Paddington, and it took her a while to explain just who the hell this Paddington was. He went into the storeroom and came back with a stuffed rabbit, a big one, and told her to give it a hug and pretend it was Paddington. Then he tucked her in, in her nice new flannel jammies, and gave her a little kiss on the forehead.

  “Mommy always leaves on the night light,” she said. “I can’t sleep in the dark.”

  “Well, tough titty,” he snapped, growing short. “As you can see we don’t have no lectricity up here.” He could leave a kerosene lamp turned down real low but that was dangerous and he didn’t want to try it. Ditto the idea of leaving a candle lit. He had an emergency flashlight with enough spare batteries to last until maybe she got old enough to grow out of her stupid little fear of the dark. So he set up that flashlight but she complained it was too bright. He covered it with a handkerchief and said goodnight, wiping his brow and thinking this sure has been a shitty day.