The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  She had the town (and the Madewells up on their davenport-mountain) arranged so neatly that for many days she would not let the animals come back into the house, for fear they would mess up her paper dolls in their paper houses. It was getting warm enough now that even though the nights went below freezing Hreapha’s pups and Robert could snuggle up with Hreapha somewhere out in the yard or maybe the cooper’s shed and keep warm until the sun rose.

  And that good old sun started rising earlier and earlier and hotter and hotter. One morning Robin realized it was just too nice outside to stay indoors with her paper dolls, so she put on her light jacket and went out. The lovely daffodils had drooped and shriveled and would soon be finished with their flowering. Robin decided she might have to plant some flowers, if she wanted any more other than wildflowers. She went out to the garden spot and kicked out around the leaves that covered it. She was uncertain about that garden. On one hand her attempts to spade it up and plant it and all might require more muscle than she’d had to use in her failure to make the firkin, and she didn’t need another failure so soon after that one. But on the other hand, she really did love corn on the cob and muskmelons and even the vegetables that weren’t green, such as yellow squash and potatoes and onions and, yes, those big juicy tomatoes that Sugrue had grown which were so much tastier than the bland tomatoes her mother used to bring home from work.

  While she was kicking around through the leaves, she uncovered some spinach and turnips that had survived the winter. She was amazed that they were still alive and growing, even though she wouldn’t eat spinach and positively hated turnips. But later that same day, while she was poring over “The Garden” parts of her 1888 Cyclopædia, she came across the following, in a section on starting tender seeds such as tomatoes, squashes, and melons: “It is desirable in transplanting not to check the growth by disturbing the roots. A good way to avoid this is to scrape out turnips, fill them with good soil and plant in two or three seeds, setting them in a warm, light place, and keeping them moist. When the weather is suitable, place these out in the garden at the proper depth. The turnip will decay and the plant will thrive unchecked if properly cared for.” It sounded like a lot of fun, so Robin took the shovel and went back out to the garden and dug up all the turnips, just a dozen or so, and took them to the house and scooped out their insides. The pulp was earthy and piquant and she was almost tempted to cook it and see if she could stand to eat it.

  Where had Sugrue told her he was keeping the seeds? She searched through the storeroom (Adam’s room once, and now again) looking for the little box that contained the packets of seeds, but couldn’t find it. “Adam?” she called out. “Can you help me find the seeds?” There was no answer. She should have known better. She had learned that Adam would never “come” when called. In fact, she had learned that it was almost a guarantee he’d stay in hiding if she tried to find him or reach him or call him. It was frustrating. And it also made her think again that Adam was simply somebody she’d made up in her own head, the same way she made up all those paper people of Stay More. But how could she have even started on that firkin without his help? How could she have helped Hreapha give birth without his help? No, she knew that this place really was inhabited by Adam’s—what was that word he had used?—his leavings, his inhabit. She knew she didn’t have the imagination to come up with that name, in-habit, just as she didn’t have the imagination to come up with firkin or even the name of Adam’s dog, Hector. “Adam?” she said, louder. “Don’t you want me to have a garden? Can’t you help me find the seeds?” But there was no answer. She went on searching. The Madewell house had no closets or cabinets the way other houses do, so there weren’t any places like that to search in.

  She practically turned the storeroom upside down, moving all the boxes and bags and sacks. But the box wasn’t there. The only place she hadn’t looked was inside the Sentry money-box, and she opened the lid just to see if all her money was still there. And there amidst the money was the box of seeds! She certainly hadn’t put it there. Or she certainly didn’t remember putting it there. Had Sugrue’s ghost possibly put the seeds in the money-box? The thought made her flesh crawl. But she had enough trouble with in-habits, she didn’t want any trouble from ghosts. She knew that it wasn’t impossible that she herself had absent-mindedly put the seeds in the money box, because she was often confused and distracted with all her responsibilities that cluttered up the world worse than all the actual clutter that was everywhere.

  Anyway, she now had the seeds. She sat and slowly sorted them, setting aside any that she either wouldn’t plant or wouldn’t plant until she was old enough to develop a taste for that particular plant: green beans and peas and spinach and lettuce and cabbage and cucumber and beets and turnips and okra. To the other side she placed the packets for sweet corn, popcorn, tomatoes, squash, cantaloupe, wax beans, onions, carrots, and radishes. She couldn’t find the seeds for the potatoes, but then she remembered the instructions Sugrue had given her for sprouting a sweet potato to make “slips,” and how to cut up the Irish potatoes so that each had an “eye” that could be planted. She also added to the “using” pile the seed packets for some flowers: nasturtiums and marigolds and zinnias and petunias and sweet peas and morning glories and cosmos. The Cyclopædia didn’t say anything about planting and raising flowers; it had a whole chapter on “Floriculture,” but that was mostly on how to decorate with flowers after you’ve grown them.

  There was one thick envelope in the seed box that simply said “wheat” on it. She couldn’t remember that Sugrue had planted any wheat. She could remember a film she’d watched in school about gristmills and how they ground up wheat to make it into flour. She hadn’t been thinking of flour as something that was grown but she suddenly realized that the big cloth sack of flour on the storeroom floor was the last one; they’d had several to start out with. When that sack was used up, she wouldn’t have any more flour. She wouldn’t be able to do any more baking.

  “ADAM!” she called out. “Please help me. I’m frantic. Where did you get your flour? Did you grow wheat?” But again there was no answer. She decided to look up wheat in her Cyclopædia, but all it told her was how to harvest it and stack it into shocks. It didn’t say anything about how you could make your own flour.

  She took the scooped-out turnips and filled them with dirt and planted in each of them seeds of tomato, cantaloupe, and squash, as the book had said. She set them on the south window sills and forgot about them, until one day Robert knocked them all off, and she had to replant them and tell Robert that he was no longer allowed in the house.

  It was lonelier for her at night, not sleeping with her kitty (who wasn’t a kitty any more but a large cat), or her dog, and she started pining for Paddington again. And some nights she had to cry herself to sleep.

  Thinking of Paddington, she wondered how long it had been since she had seen him last. So one afternoon, after she was tired of trying to spade up the garden (the Cyclopædia talked about plowing your garden with a cultivator pulled by a horse, ha ha), she took a break and put her Ouija Board on the floor of the porch and called Hreapha to play with her. Hreapha was such a devoted mother that Robin didn’t see very much of her these days unless she made an effort to look her up, and often Hreapha took her pups out into the woods to run around and play and even hunt little animals to eat. Both Robert and Hreapha had learned to catch squirrels and rabbits and chew them up, which was a good thing, because Robin had nothing in the house to feed them with.

  The first thing they asked the Ouija Board was how to spell the names of the five puppies. Although Robin had been able, from the sounds of their barking, to guess roughly what Hreapha’s babies were named, it was good to find out how their names were actually spelled, and Robin was interested to note that they all started with “Hr” like their mother’s name, except for the odd one, the one who didn’t look at all like the others, and whose name wasn’t spelled at all like theirs, Yipyip. While Hreapha herself seemed
partial to the firstborn, Hrolf, and Robert liked to play with the one named Hroberta, Robin had from the beginning felt more affection for Yipyip, possibly because he was so different from the others, and Robin herself, as long as she’d had other children to compare herself with, had prized the differences in herself, how she was distinctly her own person and would not like anything simply because other kids liked it, and how she was often at odds with everyone else. Yipyip preferred to go his own way. And of course he spoke his own language.

  “Now,” Robin said to Hreapha, “what I want to ask the Ouija Board is how long I’ve been here at this house. Have I been here a whole year yet?” She tried to explain to Hreapha—and to the Ouija Board—that she wanted to do something to observe the occasion (she vaguely recalled the word “anniversary” but wasn’t certain about it), not that she wanted to celebrate, because she didn’t intend to celebrate a year of being taken away from her home and mother. “Whenever it’s a full year that I’ve been here, a whole twelve months, the earth has gone all the way around the sun. Does that mean anything to you?” She looked into Hreapha’s eyes and caught a glimmer of understanding. Then Hreapha put her paw on the planchette and moved it to the “YES.”

  The Ouija Board told them that the anniversary would occur in six days. “So we ought to do something on that day, six days from now, to, not to celebrate but just to keep the day. Don’t you think that would be a good day to escape, to try to find the way out of here?”

  Hreapha’s paw moved the planchette to “NO.”

  “No? Why not? Do you like it here so much?”

  Hreapha’s paw tapped the planchette as it was parked upon the “NO.”

  “Are you afraid to try to get out of here with your pups and Robert and me?”

  Hreapha moved the planchette to “YES.”

  Robin pondered. At length she said, “Well, we can’t stay here forever, can we?”

  Hreapha tapped the planchette at “yes.”

  “That’s not fair!” Robin said, realizing her voice was whining. “I can’t go on living my whole life here and never seeing anybody ever again. I mean anybody human.” When Hreapha made no response to that other than continuing to stare at Robin with her soulful eyes, Robin at length said, “Okay, I guess we’ll keep the day of the first year by doing something special like planting the garden.”

  And that is what she did. She spent the six days until that day working until she was exhausted, spading up as much of Sugrue’s garden space as she could possibly spade up. She wore her boots and stood up on the back of the tines of the spade and jumped up and down on them to force them into the soil. The third day it rained, so on the fourth day she discovered she could force the spade into the soil without jumping on it. By the sixth day, the awful anniversary of her captivity, she had enough of the soil turned over so that she could rake it and plant in it all the seeds that she had selected from the seed box. Unfortunately she did not know that some seeds must not be planted until after last frost, and these seeds did not take or the tender seedlings were killed when the last frost came a couple of weeks later. Worse than that, she had no idea how deep to plant seeds, and planted most of them too deep, although the potatoes she planted too shallow.

  Robin was going to have to learn gardening by trial and error, and she was going to have to remember from one year to the next what mistakes she had made. She thought of her first year’s garden as a worse failure than her attempt to put a firkin together, but that wasn’t strictly true. She would, in time, reap what she had sown. The stomach is the best teacher. The harvesting in less than a month of the first radishes that she had planted were such a joy that she made a lunch of nothing but radishes, and was motivated to do something Sugrue had never been able to persuade her to do: keep the weeds out of the garden.

  Her little garden plot covered less than a third of the space Sugrue had originally cleared for a garden, so she broadcast the wheat seeds over the other two thirds, and in time took an interest in watching the wheat come up and grow, and was informed by her Cyclopædia exactly when the wheat would be ready for harvest.

  As the spring passed into summer and the hot sun bore down, Robin discovered that she really didn’t need any clothes. So she stopped wearing them. They were getting too small for her anyway, and she remembered that stupid Sugrue had never realized that she would outgrow all the new clothes he’d bought for her. She had already decided never to cut her hair again, and it was down to her shoulder blades behind and to her nipples in front, and when the breeze came, as it often did, it blew her hair all around her face and shoulders, and she loved the feel of the breeze as well as the smell of it. She discovered that the breeze in her hair felt better if she washed her hair and made it fluffy, and this alone gave her the motivation to keep her hair washed.

  She recalled with amusement, as if watching a movie about somebody else, the Robin Kerr who could not stand to go barefoot even when all the other kids were doing it at recess. Now when she ran around without a stitch on, that included the stitches of her shoes. Sometimes she stepped on something sharp that caused her to yell, and a few times she stepped on something sharp that pierced the sole of her foot so that she had to run to the house and get out the first aid kit and apply antiseptic ointment and maybe a Band-aid. But her feet learned to love the feel of the cool moist earth.

  When work was done, she played. She went back to the practice of taekwondo, and perfected it, with her kicks and thrusts and jabs. “Come out, Adam!” she hollered, “and I’ll give you a chagi in the nuts!” She knew that he was probably watching her. Probably he was even all excited to see a naked girl jumping around like that doing her taekwondo. In the evenings before dark when she was tired of reading the Bible stories or the Cyclopædia, she would get out the third book, the only other book in the house, the Nudist Moppets, and have some fun looking again at the displays and antics, and she understood full well that if men (including twelve-year-old in-habits) got so much fun out of looking at such pictures, then Adam was probably getting more than an eyeful.

  One day when he made no response whatever to her inviting him to come out and get his nuts kicked, she hollered, “Come out, Adam, and I’ll give you a kiss!”

  And sure enough, that brought him out. Here I am, his unmistakable young voice said, but I reckon I don’t need no kiss.

  “You’ve been ignoring me for months!” she complained. “Where have you been, anyway? Gone fishing?”

  You ort to know I caint be living with ye, much as I’d keer to.

  “But can’t you answer simple questions? I wanted to know about wheat and flour and needed you to answer me. Did your folks grow wheat? Where did you get your flour?”

  Down to Latha’s store, where everbody else got it.

  “You mean the general store in Stay More? But how did you carry it home? An eighty-pound bag of flour would be awfully hard to carry on that terrible trail.”

  I took a mule the long way around, on the trail that you came in on, what Grampaw called the North Way. It took a while, but I generally had to get a bunch of other things that Maw needed from the store. And I generally wanted to say howdy to Roseleen.

  “Who was Roseleen?”

  He was slow in answering, as if he didn’t want to tell her. I aint tole ye about her yet, but I reckon I will one of these days.

  “But you bought all your flour at the store. You didn’t grow any wheat?”

  Grampaw used to grow it out in yon meader, but it’d have to be took to town to the mill, so it was easier jist to buy the flour. Mill’s been shut down for many a year.

  “Well, I can’t go to Latha’s store, and I’m nearly out of flour. I’ve got just enough to make maybe one more loaf of bread.”

  I notice you’ve planted a little bit of wheat. Adam laughed, as if that were funny.

  “So what can I do? Do you know how to turn wheat into flour?”

  I reckon it could be done, if you put your mind to it.

  “Thank you, Ada
m,” she said, but before he could go away again, she added, “I’m sorry I said that about giving you a kiss. You don’t even have any lips, do you?”

  Chapter thirty

  Ma, are all people as little as Mistress? Hrolf was full of such questions, but she didn’t mind answering them. She was glad to see that Hrolf was not going to merely accept the world as it was without wanting to understand it. The other pups—and they weren’t exactly pups any more; in dog age they were already as old as Robin—rarely asked her any questions other than, When can we eat, Ma? She considered the possibility that the answers she gave Hrolf to all of his questions were passed along to his brothers and sisters, for Hrolf was the natural leader of the pack, as he had been the firstborn male.

  She had explained to all of them, as soon as they were able to understand her, that Robin was their Mistress, the boss, the lady of the house, and they must not only refrain from biting her, chewing her garments or playing tug of war with them, disturbing her paper dolls and stealing her food, but also they should always obey her and worship her and be faithful to her unto death. Later, when Hreapha had begun to regale them with anecdotes and narratives, she told them stories about the man, the man who had set up this house and kidnapped Mistress long ago and then had died. Hrolf was full of questions about the man and even wanted her to describe the “vehicle” that the man had supposedly owned as a means of transportation. Will I ever be able to ride in a pickup? he wanted to know. I doubt it, she answered, but there are things to do that are a lot more fun than that.