The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Hrolf’s mother suggested using the abandoned beaver lodge, a brilliant idea. They coaxed the cub into it, left him with a small but adequate supply of mast, and closed the opening to the lodge with sticks and brush. Ralgrub attempted to have a chat with the cub before they left it, to tell the cub they’d soon be back and would soon be delivering the cub as an offering to a goddess, a beautiful human girl whose twelfth birthday would be greatly enhanced by the cub’s presence. Whether the cub understood any of Ralgrub’s words was doubtful, but he promptly curled himself up and fell asleep in his new temporary home.

  The beaver lodge was just outside the haunt of the in-habit, and as soon as they stepped across the line on their way home, the in-habit met them, or at least his voice did. Well, howdy, did you’uns find any water anywheres?

  No, but we found a bear cub, Hrolf told him. We’re keeping him in the beaver lodge.

  Won’t be ary bit of use, lessen you find some water.

  They all sighed. Hrolf was tempted to say to the in-habit, You’re lucky you don’t have to drink anyhow. But that would be catty, and he was a noble dog. Instead he asked, How’s Mistress?

  She aint a-bleedin no more, the in-habit said. She’s just fine, aside from being real thirsty, but she’s been missin you’uns something terrible.

  They all went home to kiss and lick and be hugged by Mistress. Although she said she was just fine, she was obviously suffering from lack of water. So were they all. There was a nearly tangible or smellable pall in the air, a sense of impending doom. Hrolf decided that if they were all going to perish from the drought, as all those creatures in the forest had perished, he would be noble to the end, and with his last breath he would be guarding the bodies of his mother, Mistress, and the others. Or, come to think of it, probably Dewey and Sheba would be the last ones alive. Sheba didn’t seem to need any water, or at least she could go for a long time without drinking, and Dewey seemed to be able to get the moisture he needed out of bushes and leaves. Hrolf didn’t like the idea of being survived by others, and he would try his best to stay alive. The bear cub was an inspiration to him. If the cub had somehow survived after his mother and his sister died, Hrolf could do likewise.

  Knowing that bears are mostly nocturnal, Hrolf went back at night to the beaver lodge to sit outside the closed opening and try to teach his noble language to the cub, so he could tell the cub of the kinship he felt for it as well as the encouragement he’d received from the cub’s example in surviving the passing of his family. But the only dogtalk the cub was interested in learning were swear words, coarse exclamations that sounded like he was trying to say Shoot far! and Up yours! and Your mother! Hrolf shook his head and decided, This is one cantankerous bear.

  Hrolf’s mother decided which day would be Mistress’ birthday, possibly in consultation with Mistress herself and that device they used which was called a Ouija Board. Nothing else was planned for the birthday. The supply of flour Robin had ground from her wheat was insufficient for making a birthday cake. Ralgrub went into the storeroom while Mistress wasn’t looking and filched a red ribbon. Ralgrub had already told the cub how handsome he would look with a red ribbon tied around his neck, and all the other promises and expectations that she and Hrolf had bombarded the cub with appeared to be the reasons the cub was willing to leave the beaver lodge readily and walk the distance to the homestead with his canine and feline escorts. Adam joined them when they stopped so that Ralgrub with her dexterous fingers could attempt to tie the red ribbon around the cub’s neck. That sure is a mighty fine bar, Adam complimented Hrolf. Let’s just hope he aint too rambunctious.

  Hrolf could see Mistress waiting for them. She was standing on the porch of her house, with Sheba wrapped around her neck and bare chest. She was shading her eyes from the sun and squinting but the squinting wasn’t because of the sun; it was because her eyes were going bad. As they approached across the meadow and into the yard of the house, they were finally close enough for her to recognize them, although she couldn’t recognize the beribboned bear cub they had in tow. Her squinting eyes finally lit up in recognition of the new animal, but then her face darkened, as if a cloud had passed over it. Indeed, Hrolf looked up at the sky and saw the clouds, and then he heard the rumble, and then the boom. Hrolf was the only one of them all, except possibly the in-habit, who was not frightened by the sound of the thunder. The rain began before they reached the porch, so they ran joyfully the last of the way. Shoot far! Hrolf yelled. Water! They all reached the porch, and the cub was very reluctant to climb the porch steps into human company, but the downpour began and prompted him into the porch’s shelter.

  Happy birthday, gal! the in-habit spoke for them all, although they were each trying in noble dog language to say the same thing. “Hrolf! Hrolf! Hrolf!” he shouted blissfully, joining his voice to the chorus all around them. He didn’t know which made him happier, the downpour ending the drought, or his accomplishment of his mother’s decree to obtain for Mistress a bear cub for her birthday.

  Mistress was beside herself with joy. She held her arms up to the heavens to feel the rain and she splashed it onto her face as it fell and happily drank it. Then she dropped to her knees and attempted to hug the cub, who would have none of it, who said Piss off! and shied away from her.

  “Oh, Paddington!” she cried.

  Chapter thirty-seven

  I had distinctly mixed feelings about that bear cub. While I agreed with the others that the acquisition of a twelfth birthday present for Robin was almost as wonderful as the coming of the rain (which went on and on until the well filled and the spring ran and the beaver pond brought its builders home), I had many reservations about bringing such an obstreperous beast into the menagerie. During the time Adam had lived there, that is, the same number of years Robin had now been alive, he had never seen a bear. I had seen their plantigrade tracks here and there, but I could only imagine, from stories my grandfather told me about them, what they looked like. I had heard plenty of these, such as the tale about the bear hunter who always shot his bear just enough to irritate and not cripple it and then ran for home with the mad bear hot on his heels and waited until they’d reached the cabin before shooting the bear dead; that way, he didn’t have to worry about lugging home a five-hundred pound carcass. I had plenty of respect for and fear of the largest of all local wild creatures, but I had never encountered one. Now the beast that Robin unwisely chose to call by the same name she’d called her little stuffed animal (and she’d told me all about that Paddington) was very young and very cute (“adorable” was her word for his deceptively mild and cuddly appearance) and bore no resemblance to the fearsome hulking monster I’d imagined, but would in time come to lose his cuteness, and become a thoroughly ferocious, virile and lumbering fellow. I was, quite frankly, jealous of what he would become.

  In my present maturity I’ve learned a few things apart from the appearance and behavior of adult bears: the name Paddington was cribbed from a mythical (and adorable) bear in the stories of Michael Bond, who gave the animal that name because he happened to live near Paddington Railway Station in London. And, unlike the other creatures in Robin’s menagerie, this Paddington should not have been made into a pet, because wild bears, being solitary creatures who don’t do mutual grooming of one another, don’t understand the idea of petting. Thus, for a long time Paddington resisted Robin’s efforts to take him to bed with her. She did not know that his assorted screeches and snarls were obscene and hostile in dogtalk, but she was hurt that he refused to snuggle up with her in bed or even on the davenport. And I, at twelve, was at a loss to explain anything to her or to help her.

  She, at twelve, had already outgrown me. That in itself was unsettling enough, although of course she didn’t know it, being unable to see that the top of my head came only to her hairline, and I wasn’t going to tell her that she was taller than I. She seemed to be leaving me behind in her growth, not just physically but intellectually and emotionally.

  The in-habi
t, meaning me, was certainly capable of crying, laughing, coughing, sneezing, and, to use that quaint participle created out of the verb, coming (although I preferred Robin’s reaching). This might be the proper place to confess that Adam Madewell as he turned thirteen and then fourteen out there in Rutherford, California may have sometimes remembered the self that he willed himself to leave behind on Madewell Mountain, and in such moments of remembrance or at least in his dreams wondered if the in-habit was having a good time jacking off, as he’d learned to call it in California.

  What frustrated me more than the inability to actually have sex with Robin was the inability to do anything physical for her. She needed someone to cut down some trees for her: each winter she had to get her firewood by dragging in limbs of deadwood, usually the result of the ice storms that came nearly every winter. She needed someone to help her spade the garden, although year by year as she grew older and stronger she was able to spade more and more of it by herself. There was so much work to be done around the place, chores that Adam had regularly performed when he lived there but which his puny in-habit could not handle. If I’d been able to lift a finger to help, the first thing I would have done, years earlier, would have been to give Sog Alan’s skeleton a burial, but it was still there now, sitting and grinning in the outhouse, although Robin was old enough and strong enough to dig a hole to bury it if she chose. She had the decency, if that is the word, to put one of Sog’s hats on the skeleton’s head, so he wasn’t completely nude, although the result reminded me of Donatello’s David, that is, it simply called attention to the rest of the skeleton’s nakedness. Sometimes she went and spoke to it, and of course I eavesdropped, as I pricked up my ears at her every word and gawked at her every act. “I hope you’re satisfied,” was something she often said to it, the skeleton. Just the other morning she said to it, “I think that sometime around now I’m supposed to start eighth grade at Harrison Junior High, but I can’t, because you wanted a little girl to fuck, although you never did, or never could.”

  But back to that bear. Another mistake people make when they attempt to “tame” a bear is to feed it. Feeding wild bears simply turns them into greedy, lazy parasites. Robin didn’t have an awful lot around the house that the cub would eat, but she apparently reasoned that since she’d seen bear tracks around the trees where’d she got her honey, bears must be fond of honey, so she spooned up a dollop for Paddington and sure enough he was crazy about the stuff, so much so that before she could stop him he had swiped the honey bucket from her and was dipping his cute little nose into it. And before she could stop him he’d eaten it all. And before she could stop him she learned that she couldn’t stop Paddington from doing whatever he damn well pleased. And he seemed to get angry with her for not being able to furnish a perpetual supply of honey.

  He would never look her in the eye, even when she tried to make him do so. He might look overhead or sideways or down or behind him, but he would never look her in the eye. It was easy to believe that Paddington might simply be shy, but I don’t think this was the case. I think he had some peculiar notion that as long as he didn’t look at you, you weren’t there, or you couldn’t see him. And therefore he was safe from you. It wasn’t simply Robin he refused to look at. He wouldn’t make eye contact with any of the other inhabitants of the place, even including, for heaven’s sake, the in-habit, me. Did he know I had eyes? Could he see my eyes? It always bugged him if I ever tried to look him square in the eye. Maybe, I decided, he was afraid that making eye contact would allow us to “read” the mischief that was brewing in his mind. I’ve heard that many rapists can’t make eye contact with their victims.

  Almost a month had gone by since the episode of Robin’s bleeding, and during that month, although she felt itchings and longings, she did not again attempt to touch herself down there, out of fear. But the time came when she simply had to try it again. With soap and plenty of water. And wouldn’t you know it? She started bleeding again, without even reaching. Wouldn’t she ever learn? She got out the supply of rags (Sog’s ripped up shirts) she’d laundered from the previous experience with bleeding. We all assumed that whatever wound she’d suffered had not healed completely. So she was having a relapse. Again, I didn’t know what to do. Adam out there in California would turn fifteen years old before he learned that fertile females bleed each and every month, year around, and it is a non-threatening condition called menstruation. He learned quite a few of the slangy synonyms as well, one of which, “on the rag,” referred literally to Robin’s method of dealing with the problem. But Adam In-habit, age twelve, had never heard or imagined that such an affliction would curse all womankind periodically from puberty to menopause, and in his isolation on Madewell Mountain he had been ignorant of all the quaint Ozark superstitions, such as that a menstruating woman must never take a bath and must always bury rather than burn the contaminated rags. Robin went on bathing during her periods, now that there was a plentiful supply of water, and with that water she washed and rinsed her bloody rags, month after month until sometime in her fifteenth year it finally dawned on her that her recurrent bleeding was not caused by her fondling of herself but rather had something to do with being ready for reproduction. She would even attempt to explain it to me, three years her junior by that point and still as ignorant as ever.

  Which raises an interesting question. If in-habits never change and never grow old, but always remain the age they were when they were installed with their real self’s departure, are they capable of learning anything? Wouldn’t the acquisition of knowledge imply a change? Oh, as we’ll see, I learned as much from Robin as she ever learned from me; we grew in wisdom together, but she would eventually outgrow me in every way. I would always be essentially a boy; she would become a woman. It was fun to watch. I had been able for years before her coming to take pleasure in the mere act of observing the development of an acorn into an oak sapling and thence into a sturdy tree. Robin’s maturity came faster and more spectacularly.

  Was she happy? I like to think so. She did not often dwell upon the world she’d left behind in Harrison, or have intolerably painful yearnings for her mother (Karen Kerr had married Hal Knight and reluctantly moved to Little Rock to live with him, despite her fear that Robin might any day return to her old home and find Karen gone from it. Karen and Hal Knight became the parents of a little boy, Robin’s half-brother, Richard Knight, but Karen’s new motherhood, while it eased some of the pain of her loss, did not stop Karen from remaining always active in an organization, called The Robin Kerr League, devoted to the prevention of child molestation and the recovery of kidnapping victims). Of course Robin no longer pined for Paddington the First, now that she had a breathing, snorting Paddington the Second to entertain her. She missed being able to go roller skating and bicycle riding and having a sparring partner for taekwondo, although eventually she’d teach Paddington how to stand up and take it. Sometimes when she had nothing better to do (which was rare) she would fantasize about, and make mental lists of, all the things she would spend her money on if she had an opportunity to spend that nearly half a million dollars. She’d get herself a fabulous wardrobe out of the kind of women’s catalogues her mother used to receive in the mail. She would buy huge quantities of all the foods she hadn’t had for years: spaghetti, ice cream, pizza, hot dogs, milk shakes, Kool-Aid, Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, Dr. Pepper, Seven-Up. She would of course have to have herself fitted for eyeglasses, but she would buy the most attractive and expensive kind, maybe seven pairs so she could wear a different one each day of the week. But all of these expenditures would only make a tiny dent in her fortune. She needed to buy something that really cost a whole lot. What?

  One afternoon when she was trying to teach taekwondo to Paddington (he always fell on his butt when he tried to kick a chagi), she heard a rumble up in the air, and thought for a while it was only thunder, but as it grew and changed in tone to a rhythmic drone, she looked up and saw a helicopter.

  She knew what it was alth
ough she could not remember what it was called; she had seen photographs of them during the Vietnamese war. Forgetting that she was stark naked, or having been so long out of the habit of clothing herself that it didn’t even occur to her, she started waving her hands overhead to attract the attention of the pilot. Was this her rescue? Did she really want to be rescued? Even if the helicopter landed in the yard and offered to take her back to the world, would she be willing to leave all her friends? Of course not. But maybe she could tell the helicopter people to let the world know that she was okay.

  The pilot and one other man in the helicopter finally caught sight of her and waved back at her. The other man put two of his fingers in his mouth and made a shrill wolf whistle which she could barely hear over the sound of the helicopter’s rotors. Then he made a circle of one thumb and forefinger and took the index finger of his other hand and poked it through the circle and thrust it in and out. The pilot blew her a kiss. Then the helicopter drifted on away and never came back.

  I have tried to imagine, or to learn, what might have been going through the heads of those guys. Supposedly during those years there was a hunt for marijuana growers in the Ozarks that involved using one or more helicopters for surveillance. Is that what those two men were doing, hunting for patches of pot? Then what did they think, finding a homestead on a mountaintop at which no marijuana was growing but at which there was plenty of evidence of habitation, including a lovely young nubile nude, waist-length blonde hair barely concealing her breasts, with a rapidly-growing black bear cub in her company? Maybe those guys were smoking pot themselves. Why didn’t they land? I suppose we shall never know.

  But that helicopter gave Robin a bright idea for how she would spend her money, if she could. She would buy one of those aircraft and hire a pilot to fly her over Harrison and all the rest of wherever she wanted to go. She would take Paddington with her, to see what he could see. She sang: