They heated the big iron kettle of water that they used for clothes washing (the hardest of all Robin’s many chores), and when it was boiling they poured it over the carcass and Sugrue dusted wood ashes all over it. “Got to get all that hair off,” he explained. Robin used a dull knife to scrape and scrape on the hide to remove the hair, while Sugrue kept pouring on more scalding water and wood ashes. It was messy and it took them hours and hours just to get the hide scraped clean. They didn’t even stop for lunch, which was a good thing, because when Sugrue started gutting the hog and made her pull the intestines out into a washtub she started to puke but didn’t have anything in her stomach to throw up.
He identified all the parts of the hog’s insides for her—the lungs, heart, kidneys, liver, stomach, and so on. He showed her how to separate the trimmings of fat to be made into lard and the trimmings of lean meat to be made into sausage. She thought about becoming a vegetarian, which she knew a lot of people were (her friend Beverly was), but she didn’t like vegetables. She liked bacon and hated Spam and as they worked Sugrue kept telling her all the good things that could be made from this hog—spareribs and hams and pork chops. All afternoon they butchered the hog, and Sugrue was ready to drop. “I reckon we’ll just have to wait till tomorrow to cure it,” he said. “Bitch will have to guard it all night.”
He went into the house and grabbed one of his bottles that said Jack Daniels Black Label Sour Mash Whiskey on it and he went to bed. And the next day he didn’t feel like doing any curing, whatever that meant. She wondered if the hog had had some terrible disease that it had to be cured of. “That good meat is sure to spoil,” he complained. “But I just don’t have the stren’th to lift a finger.” In the afternoon, he said, “Hon, do ye reckon you could fetch one of them bags of coarse salt from the side room?” It was a big bag but she fetched it. “Now,” he said, “If you’ll just listen careful, I’ll try to tell you what to do. And then next year if you’re lucky enough to kill another razorback, you’ll know how to do it all by yourself.”
He couldn’t even go with her to the cooper’s shed to supervise what she was doing. Hreapha kept her company but only for a while before falling asleep; she’d been awake all night guarding the meat (from what or from whom? Robin wondered). Robin spread the hunks of meat out on the shed’s workbenches and started to cover them with the coarse salt. Mix in molasses and pepper, a voice said to her, and she turned, thinking Sugrue had finally come to help, although it was a much younger voice than Sugrue’s. And Sugrue was not there. She wondered if she was imagining things, or maybe Sugrue was communicating with her through his mind. She went to the bedroom where he was sprawled out with his bottle, still conscious. “Did you tell me to mix some molasses and pepper with the salt?” she asked him.
“Why, no, I never,” he said. “But come to think on it, that’s what Grandpa Alan always done. We’ve got plenty of ‘lasses out to the kitchen.”
So she mixed the coarse salt with molasses and pepper and started smearing it on the meat. Red pepper and black pepper, the voice said. She wondered if she was suffering from overwork, but she went back to the kitchen and got the red pepper to add to the black pepper. It took her all the rest of the afternoon to finish covering all the hunks of meat with all of the salt mixture. She wondered if any other seven-year-old girl in history had ever cured a hog all by herself. Thinking of this, she realized that she was almost eight. She wondered if it might even be September already. She would be eight years old on September the twelfth. That’s still pretty young for curing a hog by yourself.
“Now what?” she said to Hreapha, as if the dog could tell her what now. “How long do I leave the salt stuff on there?”
Pends on the weather, the voice said. Reckon six or seven weeks ort to do her.
“Hreapha, did you say that?” Robin asked, delighted with the possibility that perhaps there was some way the dog could talk to her after all.
“Hreapha,” the dog said, which seemed to be negative.
She was tired and sweaty and dirty and had salt and molasses all over her. She went to ask Sugrue if he had any idea whether this might be September yet, but he was passed out. Or dead. She didn’t care. She opened a can of beans for her supper (it had pork in it, which made her impatient for the new meat to finish curing), and then, when it got dark, she lit a lantern and headed for the beaver pond. Hreapha happily followed. Robin decided Hreapha wouldn’t have to guard the meat, once it had been salted so much.
The pond had filled with water. Their beaver friends were enjoying a supper (or breakfast?) of alder bark. “Hello,” Robin said, but they did not run; they remembered her and knew she had helped them rebuild their dam. She took off all her clothes, but felt no shame at all to be naked in front of the beaver or Hreapha, who were all naked anyway. “Can you teach me how to swim?” she asked, and walked out into the pond.
The beaver taught her how to swim. Maybe even if she wasn’t the first nearly-eight year old girl in history to cure a hog, she was the first to receive swimming lessons from beavers, who are experts at it. She didn’t possess their large webbed feet to paddle with, but she could imitate the strokes of their arms and front feet. It wasn’t hard at all. And although the kerosene lantern helped her see what she was doing, she felt she could do it with her eyes shut. She was dizzy with pleasure and pride; not even her first spin at the roller rink had given her such a sense of escaping from humdrum reality. Hreapha jumped into the water too, and all of them swam and swam and splashed and flipped and bobbed. The beaver seemed to be trying to get her to dive underwater to reach their lodge, but she wasn’t ready for that yet.
Suddenly a light appeared, not from the kerosene lantern. It was the light of a flashlight, and Robin’s first thought was that some human being had finally found her and was coming to rescue her. Her excitement at that thought was mixed with a kind of sadness: if she were rescued and taken away from here she could never swim with these beaver again. Also she was a little concerned because she was naked, and didn’t want them to see her.
But it wasn’t a rescuer. It was Sugrue. The flashlight played over the figures in the water, and she could hear his voice behind it. “Just what in tarnation do you think you’re a-doing?” he hollered, and she knew he was not only angry but drunk. Then she heard a rifle shot. He was firing at the beaver! Hreapha barked at him, and he fired at her too, but didn’t hit her.
“Stop it!” she yelled at him.
“Get your little hide out of there!” he ordered her. She climbed out of the water, and he played the light over her naked body. “Bitch!” he yelled. “Bitch, you’re supposed to be a guard dog, goddammit, and you’ve let a fox get into the chicken house! Come on out of that water.” Hreapha climbed up onto the shore, and he immediately kicked her as hard as he could, knocking her back into the water with a big splash. “Stupid dog! I’ll learn ye to mind me.” Hreapha moaned and whimpered.
“You’re a mean man, Sugrue Alan,” Robin said to him. “I thought you might be nice, but you’re just plain old nasty mean.” He slapped her. It really hurt, too, and she felt her eyes welling up with water but she was determined not to let him, or anybody, ever make her cry. “I hate your guts,” she said.
“Just what do you mean anyhow, coming over here in the middle of the night and burning up all that kerosene? You won’t have none of it left to get you through next year.” His voice was really mad.
“I won’t be here next year!” she yelled at him.
He grabbed her and started spanking her bare bottom. He spanked her so hard it made her jump around. He spanked her so hard she was going to be not just red all over her bottom but black and blue too. For the longest time she held back her tears but then she couldn’t hold them any longer and she yelped and began crying. She really cried. It was the first time she had cried since she was three years old, and she was hurt more by the loss of that record than by the sting of his spanking. He had done so many bad things, starting with his kidnapping of her
, and she had never cried. But now she bawled her heart out.
“Get your clothes on and let’s get out of here,” he said finally, his voice not quite as angry, as if he’d got it out of his system by battering her.
She decided that as soon as they got back to the house and he put that rifle back where he kept it, she would snatch it up and kill him with it. He made a mistake when he taught her how to use the guns. He would pay for that mistake, and pay for his cruelty toward her and Hreapha.
But she abandoned her plan to kill him. For three reasons: one, she would never be able to escape from this place if he were dead; two, he was dying anyway, and she understood even that this terrible nasty mood he was in was because he knew he was dying; and three, his terrible nasty mood was completely gone the next morning and he told her how very sorry he was that he had slapped her and spanked her. He told her that he was completely ashamed of himself and would do anything to make it up to her.
“I wanted to be your husband,” he said to her. “That was my plan. But it aint never gon work out that way. So if I caint be your husband, leastways I can be your daddy. And help ye to get ready for all you’ve got to know and do to get through this life.”
She needed a minute to think about that. And then she said, “I don’t want you to die, Daddy.”
Chapter nineteen
Hell, he’d been madder at himself than he’d been at her or the damn dog. For the longest time he’d felt pretty sorry for himself, that this peculiar affliction was ravaging his body, but that self-pity had lately turned into self-loathing. It wasn’t simply that his body had let him down, completely, but that he still had possession of his brain, and his brain was letting him down worse than his body was. If he had the sense to come in out of the rain, he ought to be able to figure out some way to save himself, to get help, or get to somebody who could help, and save the girl into the bargain.
On one of the rare days (and why did his sickness come and go, come and go, like that?) when he was feeling well enough to put on his pants and shoes, he sneaked off from Robin and found the trail that led to where he used to park the pickup. He had done such a good job of covering up the trail, and the stretch of thunderstorms had also contributed, that he could hardly find it himself, but he found it, and, dragging one leg behind him like the mummy in those old mummy movies he’d loved as a kid, he traced the trail to where the bluff began and the path narrowed to just a ledge clinging to the side of the bluff. He took only one step out onto the ledge before feeling such vertigo he was lucky to back away from it without falling to his death. But he could see that farther along, the ledge was totally knocked out by boulders fallen in a mudslide. So that ledge, which he had traversed hundreds of times in stocking up the place, was no longer an option. He considered trying to climb down the bluff and going beneath it to reach the ravines that led to the gullies that led to the place where he’d burned the truck. But he realized that he was simply in no condition for such climbing and hiking.
On another good day he had the strength to try to braid Robin’s hair, at her request. She said her mother often braided her hair, and she tried to show him how, and he tried his best, but couldn’t really do it, and it made him mad. He offered to give her a haircut but she said she was never going to cut her hair.
On another good day he decided it was time to teach her how to line bees and find a hive of honey. He took his axe and crosscut saw, as well as his rifle, and she carried the four empty buckets, in one of them a bait of a corncob smeared with some of what little honey they had left. He’d only got one jar of honey from the store because he anticipated being able to find his own. Since they both had to give up such things as ice cream (he loved the stuff as much as she did, and missed it mightily), it would be good to have other ways of keeping the sweet tooth happy.
Dragging his leg behind him like the monster in those old Frankenstein movies, he led her and the dog for almost half a mile out into the deepest woods, where they set up that bait of honeyed corncob on a piece of bark in a glade. And then, as he explained to her, it was sort of like fishing: you just had to sit and wait. Wait for a bee to show up and discover the honey and then for the bee to head back for the hive to tell the other bees about it.
While they sat, and Bitch took a snooze, they got to talking about some things that was a-bothering them. He was in the habit of complaining, at least once a day, that his affliction must be God’s punishment on him. And now when he said it again, she wanted to know what specifically was God a-punishing him for. Besides, of course, stealing a innocent little girl. As if that wasn’t enough. Well, he thought back (he was having terrible problems with his memory these days) and told her near about every bad thing he’d ever done in his life that he might be paying the price for. Going all the way back to his schooldays, when he was the worst hell-raiser Stay More school had ever seen, and Miss Jerram had her hands full trying to deal with all his cussedness and wickedness. There was one time he used a baseball bat to break the arm of a kid he didn’t like. Another time he actually branded his initial “A” with a red-hot nail onto the chest of a kid he “owned.” The worst thing he’d done was to get even with some poor kids by killing their mule. And Miss Jerram when she found out about it made him dig a grave for the mule and give a speech at the mule’s funeral. It had been humiliating.
“Miss Jerram,” he related to Robin, “she. Wudn’t. Bogzh. Furrup. Thog. Ervers. Since. Hard.” He stopped because Robin was looking at him peculiar.
“What did you say?” Robin asked.
He suddenly realized that in addition to all his other misfortunes he was losing the power of speech. His tongue and his vocal chords seemed to be turning into rawhide. He grabbed his jaw and gave it a shake, but that didn’t help much. “Ahrg. Riggin. Ahrg. Cain. Tawg,” he managed to say.
“No wonder,” she said. “That’s a horrible story. What did you kill the mule with?”
“Stig,” Sog said.
“You stuck the mule? What with?”
“Stig,” he said, and pantomimed the piece of timber that he had bashed over the mule’s skull.
“That’s horrible.”
“Ahrg. Cain. Tawg,” he complained and pointed to his frozen jaw.
“Then just hush up,” she said, and sat there seeming like she was just a-thinking about what a bad boy he had been. But then she said, “Now I’ll tell you about all the bad things I did. That I’m being punished for.” And she started in to telling him all this stuff that she had done. She had once prayed that a certain girl would die, a girl who was very popular in school and the only one smarter than her. The girl hadn’t died, but she’d come down with scarlet fever and missed most of her classes. Another girl who had annoyed Robin got herself pushed so hard while she was swinging in the swings that she shot right out of her swing-seat and broke her arm, and Robin denied to the teachers that she had done it, although she later bragged about it to the other girls.
“Keeb. Yur. High. On. Thatur. Kobb,” he told her, but he had to sign-language his meaning by pointing first to his eye and then to the honeyed cob that was their bait.
Robin went on telling all the times she’d misbehaved or done something wrong, picking on other kids and being an all-around scamp and rascal. To hear her tell it, she’d been the holy terror of the school, just as Sog had been the holy terror of his, and he couldn’t help wondering sort of wishful-like what it would have been like if they’d been in school together, if Robin had been in the second grade with him at Stay More schoolhouse and they could have conspired to make life miserable for old Miss Jerram. He wanted to tell her this, but realized he had lost the power of speech. He hoped that maybe the power would come back again, just as he had good days as well as bad days with this disease, whatever it was. He had promised Robin that some day he would tell her all about Stay More, all the interesting people who had lived there and the very few who still did, and for him to do all that telling he’d have to be able to talk good again. She’d already ask
ed him the names of the families who had lived in Stay More so she could give these names to the families of paper dolls that she’d been cutting out and dressing up for a town she had decided to call Stay More instead of Robinsville, which was the name she’d already given a town back home.
If he couldn’t talk plain any more, they were really sunk, because he was counting on being able to tell her stories about Stay More as a substitute for the fact they couldn’t never again watch the TV or ever go to the movies or nothing.
“Hreapha!” said Bitch, and Sog looked around to see what the dog was barking at. But there wasn’t nothing nowheres. “Bidge,” he said. “Was gog yur?”
“Look,” Robin said. “She’s spotted a bee!”
And sure enough, the darn dog had pointed a bee alighting on the honeyed cob. The three of them watched as the bee took its fill of the honey and then flew away. Sog tried to tell her that now all they had to do was wait a bit more and that bee would fly back to its bee tree to tell the other bees of its discovery and before long there would be a bunch of them going back and forth from the bait to the bee tree and all they’d have to do is try and follow them. “Urs ussuns waig orwell,” Sog tried to explain, but all he could do was lay his hand on Robin’s arm as a sign of staying more. They waited.
By and by, that good old bee-dog said “Hreapha” once again, and here come a line of bees making for the cob. They lit, filled up on the honey, flew off and up, circling around and then headed the way they’d come, and Sog got to his feet and motioned for Robin to get up too. But old Bitch was ahead of them and she took off after the bees, so they just had to follow her. Sog wished he still lived in Stay More so he could spread the word about this incredible dog who could line bees.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 159