With

by Donald Harington

  “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 yo
u 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.

  In the morning she was gone. And the feather mattress was soaked. She had really done wee-wee all over it. He dragged the mattress out of the house into the sunlight, and wondered how much air and sunlight would be required to dry it out and remove the smell.

  Bitch was just sitting there and didn’t even bother to wag her tail. “Which way did she go?” he asked. “Did you happen to notice?”

  Chapter thirteen

  She wished she had some friends handy to help her make sense of this whole situation. Her haunch really hurt where he had kicked her out the door, which seemed to be his way of saying that she was being replaced by the girl. She had examined the child closely and determined that the girl probably could not fetch or beg, nor guard the henhouse nor bite intruders. So the girl was intended for some other purpose which escaped Hreapha. If that purpose was companionship, the girl obviously was not going to be very companionable, agreeable, or even pleasant. Maybe the man was just giving her a trial. Maybe the girl had found him somewhere on his travels and had decided to follow him home and see if he wanted to keep her. Hreapha’s own mother, Whuphvoff, had once upon a time when she was young secured her own position in a good family by that maneuver: she had just followed a boy home and the boy had said, “Mom, she followed me home. Can I keep her?” and Whuphvoff had thus been absorbed into a good family, where Hreapha had been eventually born. Hreapha’s mother told her that she hoped she would never have to resort to that method of securing a family, but it was something to keep in the back of her mind, where Hreapha already had so many things stored that they were crowding into the front.

  The very fact that the man was probably preparing breakfast for the new girl (Hreapha could smell the coffee and some kind of awful prepared meat frying) and had neglected to fill Hreapha’s dish made her sure that her place in this world was being supplanted by the newcomer. After a while the man came out and ran to the henhouse where he gathered up two handfuls of eggs, and Hreapha whimpered her name softly to him in hopes he would notice her and remember to feed her, but he did not. She had not had anything to eat since that thoughtful egg that the charitable hen had laid for her yesterday, and she was getting very hungry.

  Later the man brought the girl out of the house and showed her to the little building where people poop, and again Hreapha made mild whimperings to call attention to herself, and again she was ignored. And after that, they came out again so that the man could show the newcomer how to draw water from the well. During the operation, Hreapha positioned herself nearby and tried to look nice and eager and hopeful without outright begging, but again it did not dawn on the man that he had neglected to feed his faithful dog. Next the man attempted to show the newcomer how to chop wood, and after repeated attempts the girl was able to split a piece of it. Well now, at least that’s something I couldn’t ever do, Hreapha reflected. Nor could she draw water from the well. She did not need to, because, as she next discovered, the man was showing the girl to the springhouse, which was a perfectly good source of water. Hreapha followed, maintaining all the while her pleasant hopeful look and posture, but the man and the girl were caught up in a discussion about something called Kool-Aid and neither of them gave Hreapha a glance.

  Later in their tour of the premises, the girl was shown the barn and warned to stay away from it and then shown the shop, which, Hreapha had long since discovered, the in-habit liked to inhabit and where he could usually be found. Or, since “found” doesn’t apply to in-habits, perhaps “detected” was the word. The in-habit studied the girl with great attention and curiosity but did not reveal himself to her. Nor did the man discover the in-habit. The man did, however, begin to talk about the in-habit, or rather about the in-habit when the in-habit had actually inhabited the place, as a young schoolboy named Adam Madewell. Hreapha listened with great interest to what was said about Adam, and wished she could communicate with Adam In-habit and compare notes with him about his impressions of this newcomer. Did he think she was just a stray who had followed the man home? Should we keep her? Could we keep her? Even though the girl was not sociable, certainly not to Hreapha, whom she seemed to dislike intensely, the girl was, after all, lovely, even if she could not fetch and beg, and she might be loads of fun. Didn’t Adam think so? But Hreapha did not know how to ask these questions of Adam, and wasn’t sure he could answer. That would come later.

  And then she heard the girl say to the man, “Somebody is going to shoot you.” It did not sound very sociable at all.

  And she heard the man answer, “They’ve got to find me first.”

  After they had gone inside to have their lunch and she was left with only the prospect of becoming an egg-sucking dog, she pondered these statements and reasoned that the man was perhaps hiding from someone who wanted to shoot him. That would help explain all the trouble the man had taken to relocate, to abandon the house in the village of Stay More and stock up this mountain hideaway with enough food to last forever and enough drink to fly over the moon. It also gave Hreapha notice that one of her duties in the foreseeable future might be to protect the man against somebody trying to shoot him.

  Later, the man threw her some kind of small bones that had been pickled and were virtually inedible, so she did not try to eat them, but went on starving. Later still the man came out and rummaged through the shop and finally took notice of Hreapha and said to her, “Bitch, you haven’t seen any scissors anywhere, have you?”

  She stood on her hind legs in a begging posture, licking her chops and wagging her tail and sparkling her eyes in an attempt to communicate If you’ll give me some food I’ll find some scissors for you. But he could not hear her, and went back into the house.

  And still later, after Hreapha had gone to the henhouse and actually drooled upon an egg but resisted the overpowering urge to suck it, the man came out once again and said to her, “Bitch, keep an eye on this door. If she comes out to use the privy, that’s okay, but don’t let her wander off. You hear me?” Once again Hreapha rose up on her hind legs in the begging posture, licking her chops and smiling hopefully, but once again the man failed to get her message, and she began to conclude that he might actually be pretty dense. He took his shovel and his axe and disappeared down the trail in the direction of the truck’s parking place.

  Hreapha obediently guarded the door for a long time but the girl did not come out. Hreapha was bored. She’d much rather have followed the man to the truck, or accompanied the child to the privy, but there was nothing to do, and nothing to think about except her empty stomach. She was nodding off and ready for an afternoon nap when out of the corner of her eye she noticed a hawk circling overhead. She knew it was a red-tailed hawk. Even though she was colorblind like all her kindred, she had learned from Yowrfrowr that it was called a red-tailed hawk, even though it didn’t have a tail, at least not like a dog’s. Anyway, the big bird landed on a high tree limb and just sat there giving the evil eye to Hreapha and then to the various chickens who were pecking around in the yard. What intimidating eyes the hawk had! Hreapha tried to return the bird’s malevolent stare, but couldn’t maintain eye contact. It occurred to her that the hawk was sizing her up, trying to determine if there would be any resistance if the hawk made off with one of the hens. “HREAPHA!” Hreapha declared, letting the hawk know that Hreapha intended to protect the flock.

  But Hreapha’s warning went unheeded. Suddenly with a hideous bloodcurdling scream the hawk dived from its perch and headed straight for the selfsame hen who had benevolently provided Hreapha with the o
nly sustenance she’d had in ages, a single egg.

  Hreapha sprang into action. She reached the hen too late to spare it from being snatched in the hawk’s talons but she was quick enough to leap and seize the hawk’s head in her mouth, feeling its skull crunch beneath her teeth. The hawk screamed even louder, the sound deafening and petrifying Hreapha, who hung on for dear life as the three of them plummeted back to earth.

  The hen’s life was spared and she ran off squawking bloody murder. The hawk continued to thrash and shriek for a few interminable moments and then lay still. It was the first time that Hreapha had ever killed anything (if we do not count assorted sinister fleas). She was too stunned to move, for a long time. She could only stand and contemplate the dead hawk, a really huge bird with an enormous wingspan, now disheveled and askew. There was another hawk circling high overhead, possibly the wife or husband of this slain bird, but the other hawk did not come down to investigate.

  Good dog! said a voice behind her, and she, having never been called that before, turned eagerly, only to see nothing, or rather only to perceive the presence of the in-habit, who, at least, had demonstrated that he could communicate.

  After a while, first looking around to see if she was observed by anyone “real” and noticing that all the hens and the two roosters were watching her with awe, Hreapha ate the hawk.

  It was not easy. It was in fact very messy. The feathers got in the way of the meat, and Hreapha had to constantly spit out mouthfuls of feathers. She eschewed the drumsticks and the wings but chewed the breast and thighs and made a welcome meal of it. The meat was somewhat gamy—although Hreapha had absolutely no other game to compare it with. Perhaps “wild” would be a better word, and Hreapha was somewhat concerned that eating this hawk might make her feral and even vicious. But her hunger pangs were temporarily eradicated.