With

by Donald Harington

  He rose up on his hind legs, holding his forepaws in a begging gesture, smiling broadly all the while. Hreapha thought he was indeed funny, perhaps ludicrous. The cats averted their faces in disgust.

  When that failed to convey his message he went to his empty food bowl and nudged it with his nose toward the old woman’s feet. “You want more food?” she said. “Good heavens, boy, I gave you as much as you always get. You don’t want to get fat.” She scratched him behind the ears and closed the door.

  Well, you tried, Hreapha told him. Thank you.

  I know where there’s a dead pigeon, he declared. If one of those mewly pussies hasn’t found it first.

  Thanks, but I’ll be running along, she said.

  His soulful eyes looked heartbroken. Aw, dearest, don’t depart, he whined with theatrical emphasis. Stay more and let’s frolic.

  I know what ‘frolic’ means to you, you old goat. “Hreapha!” She turned tail.

  “Yowrfrowr!” he called after her mournfully.

  As she went on, she reflected that there might come a time when she’d gladly eat that dead pigeon. But if worst came to worst, she could catch and kill one of the chickens at home, although that would surely outrage him if he knew it was her, not to mention violating her principles about not killing anything but fleas. She trotted down into the main street of the village, which was deserted. She had explored it many times and never found any sign of recent activity or life in it. There wasn’t much left to it: a few empty houses, one of them big; a couple of stores, a big one and a little one, both long abandoned. She had explored the pile of hewn stones that Yowrfrowr told her had once been a bank where people kept their money, and a huge cellar which had been the foundation of a gristmill.

  The derelict village wasn’t her destination. That was another half mile or so beyond it, up the main road that led out of it. She passed one other occupied house, and spoke only briefly with Ouruff, who wasn’t very sociable because she was preoccupied with the rearing of a litter of puppies and didn’t have time for Hreapha. They were practically next-door neighbors, although the house where Hreapha had lived was another quarter-mile beyond Ouruff’s house. She didn’t want to ask Ouruff for food, because she knew that Ouruff was still nursing and needed to eat everything she could lay her paws on. How’s the pups? Hreapha asked politely as she moseyed on past. Jist a-feelin hunkydory, Ouruff said. Stay more and take a look-see.

  Got to be getting on, Hreapha declared. “Hreapha!”

  She arrived at home. Or what used to be home. Although her in-habit was clearly there, and glad to see her, the pickup wasn’t there. She hadn’t expected it to be, didn’t want it to be. She went at once to her food dish, just an old green plastic bowl that he hadn’t washed in ages. It was empty, of course. What had she expected? Well, she knew how absent-minded he was, and half-hoped that he might have put food out for her, just from force of habit. She looked around for the chickens, who were ordinarily free-ranging and had the run of the place and even left their droppings in Hreapha’s favorite spots. But they were all gone! Hreapha visited their coop but they weren’t there either. Had he also taken the chickens to the other place?

  She sighed, and suddenly remembered that the back yard was a cemetery for a great number of bones that she had interred in the course of time, and she had but to remember the best and biggest one, and she could dig it up and gnaw happily on it. She had dug up the back yard not just to bury bones but also to make herself a den, to keep warm in cold weather and keep cool in hot weather, and a number of pits she had dug simply out of boredom. But most of the holes had been for the burial of bones, which he had generously thrown to her after gnawing most of the meat off himself.

  The disinterred bone might not provide much substance for her stomach but the very act of chewing on it kept her from feeling hungry, and it also controlled tartar and prevented build-up and gum disease.

  Hreapha spent the rest of the morning digging up and gnawing bones. There was still some water, rather stale, in her water bowl. Everything around her had her stamp on it; these were her things and smelled like her and therefore belonged to her, and she was happy among her possessions. Eschewing her doghouse with its stinky blanket, she climbed down into one of her holes and curled up and took a long nap.

  As usual, her sleep was full of dreams. She knew that the purpose of dreams, sometimes disturbing and sometimes blissful but always mysterious and puzzling, was to help her make some sense out of her life, and to know what to do day by day. Sometimes she dreamed of being chased by people, other dogs, and monsters. Sometimes she dreamed of chasing people, other dogs, or monsters. Sometimes she had dreams of being able to fly like a bird. Sometimes she had weird dreams: once she was required to put on a dress and a hat to cover her nakedness. Most often though, she dreamed of houses: big houses, little houses, henhouses, doghouses. Doors. Attics. Porches. Windows. Kitchens. Roofs. Bedrooms. None of the houses were actually places she had ever seen or lived in. Always the houses in her dreams were dilapidated, even the doghouses, and had been abandoned, were not being used, although each of them was inhabited by at least one in-habit. And they were not necessarily empty. They were cluttered, and it was somehow her responsibility to move the clutter.

  Whatever she dreamed during her long nap this afternoon, she woke up from it having come to a most disturbing decision. She looked over the rim of the hole in which she had slept and noticed that there was no sign of him or the pickup. Much as she liked this house, which was her home, she was going to abandon it. She was going to reverse her direction and hike all the way back up to that mountaintop, to that other house where her master was moving. For the life of her, she could not understand why she decided to do this. But she knew she must do it. Something in her dreams had persuaded her.

  She gnawed on one more bone and did not bother to bury the remains of it. She took a long drink of the unfresh water. She considered stopping to tell Yowrfrowr where she was going, but she did not. She summoned up her in-habit and said to it, I’m sorry but you’ve outgrown this place. Let’s go.

  Chapter five

  He decided to take the chickens first, as a warm-up for the much harder task of carrying the davenport. He’d already had plenty of exercise chasing them down and catching them and putting them into the two crates. The crates were the real McCoy, the same kind that Tyson used to coop and ship all their birds in, made of wood that could rail in twelve to fifteen four-pound hens, and he’d helped himself to a couple of them several weeks before when he was still driving the cruiser and a Tyson truck had stopped along the highway. But the crates were big and he had to use both hands to lift and carry each one of them, and it was real tricky. In fact it was a son of a bitch. He’d toted so many boxes and sacks on this same path so many times that he knew almost every step by heart and could do it in the dark, although part of it amounted practically to no-hands mountain-climbing, getting his boot up into this crack and then raising the other boot above it to that crack. Christ almighty. For the pure hell of it, he’d tried to calculate just how far he’d gone already, moving everything into the Madewell place. It was just under a mile from where he had to leave the pickup to the front door of the old house. That meant that it was practically a two-mile round trip. Multiply that by the number of sacks and boxes and bags he’d carried, and it came to the equivalent of walking all the way to Little Rock and back. But any fool walking to Little Rock would stick to the nice smooth road, and his route had been steep down and steep up, reminding him of the old joke that if you was to iron Newton County out flat it would cover the whole state of Texas.

  And he’d never had to carry anything as big as a chicken crate. That was one hell of a hefty job, and it lathered him with sweat not from the heat but the nervousness of it. And then there was the damn birds a-cackling the whole time and even pecking his goddamn fingers. He sure did relish fried chicken and he had to have his scrambled eggs two or three mornings a week, but he just didn’t know if it was wor
th all the trouble.

  On the trickiest part of the trail, that goddamn ledge against the bluff that was just barely wide enough to stand on, he had to turn sideways and hold the crate sideways and move sideways a step at a time, bit by slow bit. That ledge was such tough going that even Bitch had shied away from it. He hated to remember Bitch now. He truly wished he’d been nicer to her.

  His thoughts lost on the damned dog, he took a misstep, lost his balance, lost his hold on the crate, tripped, and the whole fucking crate went flying off the bluff and it was kind of a miracle he didn’t go flying after it. It landed in a treetop down below, the tree boughs breaking the fall so the crate and birds weren’t smashed into the ground. But the impact tore open the crate’s door and the birds flew out. Some of them landed on branches of the tree, others fell to the ground, a couple of them lay motionless as if dead, but all the damn chickens were out there loose. He wasn’t going to try to climb down there and recover them, and he knew he couldn’t get that crate out of the tree. The hell with it. Their wings was clipped, and they might come home to roost, ha ha. He figured they’d find their way on up to the house, those that didn’t get eaten by foxes or bobcats or whatever was waiting for them out there in the woods.

  He went back to the truck and got the other crate and was even more careful transporting it, sweating and winded both, and especially careful along that ledge where he’d lost the first crate. The second crate contained a rooster, at least, and he could start in to breeding the flock right away, and as soon as the eggs hatched he’d have nearly as many as he’d lost.

  He reflected that all of this labor of hauling and carrying all the supplies for his new home had been a peck of trouble but it had slimmed him down a good bit. His beer gut didn’t hang out over his belt buckle anymore. His biceps were thicker than he’d ever known them to be. He was in good shape for doing the repairs that needed to be done on the house, which was the first big job as soon as he got the girl moved in and settled.

  He got the second crate of chickens to the house successfully and turned them loose beside the henhouse, then opened a bag of chicken mash and broadcast it liberally around the yard, near the henhouse. He didn’t intend to feed the chickens regularly, and had only one thirty-pound bag of mash. When that ran out, they’d have to learn to feed themselves on bugs and worms and whatever they could catch. But the mash would tell them that this was their new home and they’d better stay here and maybe they’d better cackle loud enough for those other chickens down below to come up and join ’em.

  Sog dusted his hands and made himself a little drink of Jack Daniels before going back for the davenport. He’d prefer to have his drink on the rocks, but the only rocks he was ever going to have up here was the real rock kind of rock. No ice. He sipped his drink and watched the chickens out in the tall grass a-scratching around for the mash he’d scattered. He hoped the girl would be partial to fried chicken as much as he was, and maybe even learn how to cook it. Serafina, his first wife, had been the best chicken-fryer in the country; must’ve been something she put in the batter. Fina had been just too good to last, and he’d had her for just a few years after he’d come home from Korea and found out her man Gene had been killed there, and had taken her and her sweet little daughter Brigit into his house. Brigit had been just five at the time, and he’d waited patiently for two years before he’d ever tried anything with her, and then he made sure that she really wanted to do it and that she understood it was just between him and her and never to be told to a soul, and he rewarded her as much as he could, and sweet Brigit had just loved him to pieces and was completely heartbroke when her mother decided to move on. Fina never found out about them. She just didn’t like living in a dying town like Stay More, and she didn’t think Sog had much future. At least that’s what she tried to say in the note that he found when he come home from work one day. He was so pissed he went out and wrote tickets all over the place, stopping everybody for everything, especially for driving one mile over the speed limit.

  He could still enjoy Brigit in his fantasies, although it had been fifteen years since last he’d enjoyed her in the flesh. The funny thing was, and this was something he’d been asking himself about, this girl of his dreams that he had found and was going to be moving into this house any day now didn’t look anything at all like Brigit. She was far lovelier, for one thing. Brigit had been real cute, black hair in bangs and a cute little mouth with just the right size lips, but this Harrison girl that was his truelove was just something else, completely.

  He finished his drink and went back for the davenport. It was clouding up and looked like it might come on to rain, which they sure needed. It hadn’t rained a drop so far this April. He told himself that if he could just somehow get that big couch into his new home, the very worst would be all over. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the davenport wound up in a treetop like the chicken crate, but he was bound and determined to get his dear mother’s favorite possession into his final home. The experience with the first crate of chickens was good in the sense that it had taught him there was no way he could get the davenport along that same narrow ledge. He had plenty of rope and was going to have to figure out a way to rig the rope over a tree limb on top of the bluff and tie it around the davenport and either swing the davenport over and across the ledge or else hoist it all the way up the bluff. But first he had to get the davenport through those ravines. He’d already carried the davenport upside down on his back to get it into the pickup, and he knew it weighed just about a hundred and fifty pounds. That wouldn’t break his back, stout as he was, but the footing was sure going to be tough going.

  It took Sog all of an hour to lug that davenport on his back down into and up out of the three ravines that had to be traversed before he could reach that precarious ledge. He was just climbing out of the last ravine, huffing and puffing and sweating like a studhorse, when sure enough it come onto a rain, just a light sprinkle at first. He told himself not to hurry because getting the davenport across that ledge had to be done carefully, but by the time he’d rigged his ropes and tied them proper and was ready to swing the davenport across, it had commenced to rain pretty steady and he sure hated his mother’s davenport getting drenched like that. In his impatience he climbed aboard the davenport and rode it as it swung across the ledge, and he grabbed aholt of a tree trunk on the other side, telling himself what a smart boy he was to have devised that system of ropes for getting the davenport beyond that ledge…although if it hadn’t worked he and the davenport both would have crashed a hundred feet down to the earth below.

  Getting the davenport the rest of the way through the forest was fairly easy and he cleared the front door of the Madewell house just as thunder crashed and a real toad-strangling downpour hit. He righted the davenport into its place in the living room, and admired it there for a long moment before he went to shut the front door and just as he did a flash of lightning illuminated a creature dashing into Madewell’s shop out across the way. The open-ended shed was the place where Madewell had rived his staves and assembled his barrels and buckets and piggins and churns, and it had a little forge in it for the metal bands. That creature wasn’t no wild beast of the woods. Damned if it wasn’t old Bitch, sure looked like. He wasn’t going out in this downpour to investigate. If she took a notion to come on to the house, he’d be nice to her. He wondered if maybe she’d never really left but had just been hanging around here waiting for him.

  Sog made himself another Jack D and sat on the davenport and enjoyed it. The davenport was wet but not too wet, and it would dry off. It was going to be real comfy a-sitting here with his truelove, and he could hardly wait to do it. After all this work, there were just two things left: holding the yard sale Saturday, and finding some way to take possession of his truelove. He wished he knew her name, so he could think of her by name instead of just “truelove.” He knew her last name, which was on their mailbox: Kerr. He hoped she would have a real nice first name. He sure didn’t have a v
ery good one hisself, although his grandpap had explained to him that Sugrue, which was his grandpap’s family name, was a distinguished Irish name that went all the way back to the Irish Siocfhraidh, meaning victory and peace. Kids in school had started calling him Sog in the first grade, although the teacher called him Sugrue all the way through the eighth. He didn’t mind, except Sog sounded a little like soggy, which everything was getting in this downpour. He had told his second wife, Arlene, to call him Sugrue instead of Sog, but she had preferred to call him Daddy, though of course they never had any children, and she was just a overgrown child herself, which was probably what had drawn him to her in the first place. Every bit of thirty-five when she’d married him, she was just a little bitty old slip of a girl, flat-chested and baby-faced. She could have passed for ten or less. Most people thought she was his daughter, or even his granddaughter, for heavensakes. But she sure wasn’t innocent. Nor sweet. Nor fresh. She’d had a fairly wild past that he never learned all the particulars of, but he suspected she might even have been a whore at one time. He’d rescued her from a guy who beat her and was now serving time at Cummins. Worst of all about Arlene, compared with a genuine girlchild, was that she wouldn’t mind him; he never could tell her what to do, and she was headstrong and did as she pleased. Arlene hadn’t lasted as long as Fina before she commenced complaining that he simply couldn’t hold out long enough for her. She had a fancy name for it that she taunted him with: premature ejaculator. She said his fuse was too short. One day she said, “You go off too fast so I’m going off, period.” And she left him. Just like that. Fuck her.

  As the rain kept beating down, Sog figured this would be a good time to check the place for leaks. Gabe Madewell and his daddy Braxton who’d built this place had been real craftsmen, and the same tight workmanship they’d put into all those barrels and buckets and piggins and churns had gone into the house. The roof was covered with cedar shingles that Brax Madewell had rived with even more care than he’d rived his white oak staves, and those shingles was still tight and solid, although the ones on the north side was all covered with moss. Except for a couple of window lights that Sog was going to have to replace (and he had lugged in a box full of glass pre-cut to the exact size of the window lights), the house was tight, a miracle in view of how long it had been abandoned. Why hadn’t anybody ever wanted to take it over after Gabe Madewell left? Probably because they couldn’t find it! No, honestly, the only reason anybody would want the place, assuming they knew it was there, would be because of one of two things: either they wanted to become a barrel-maker like Madewell or, like Sog, they wanted it as a hideaway, a hermitage.