When the man came home from whatever he’d been doing with the shovel and axe, obviously tired from his work, he saw the remains of the hawk and hollered, “Goddamn it, Bitch, have you been eating one of the chickens?” She cowered and whined, and he kicked the hawk’s remains preparatory to kicking her. When he did so, the enormous wingspan and the beaked head became evident to him and he said, “Well, what do you know? It’s a hawk!” He stood there looking at the hawk and counting the chickens and taxing his limited intelligence and finally said, “This hawk must’ve got in a fight with a fox or something. Shitfire, what kind of watchdog are you?”
He went on to the house and she did not see him again until he came out at bedtime to use the pooping-perch. It was dark and after the lamps were extinguished within the house it remained dark and quiet for the rest of the night. Hreapha brooded about what kind of watchdog she was. His mention of a fox reminded her that the chickens had more to fear from foxes than from hawks. More than once at the old place in Stay More she had had to chase foxes away from the henhouse, and had fought a couple of them, and knew that they were mean. She understood that foxes were dogs and therefore her cousins, but she intensely disliked them. And vice versa.
She napped fitfully through the night, perhaps dreaming a time or two. It seemed that in one of her dreams she was a hawk, soaring high above Madewell Mountain with a fine view of this homestead, which, however, was completely abandoned again, except for its in-habits. But now there were three in-habits, including that of a female dog.
She woke at dawn from this dream at the scent of the girl-child stepping out the front door. “Shhh!” the girl said to Hreapha with her finger over her lips, and then left the premises. In one hand she was carrying a flashlight, not lit; in the other hand a small paper sack which had the scent of edibles, possibly crackers.
Naturally Hreapha followed, but once they had left the yard the girl turned and stomped her foot and hissed at her, “Get home!” and swished her hands holding the flashlight and sack. Naturally Hreapha did not get home but waited just a while and resumed following the child, who seemed to be trying to find the path that led to the trail that led to the truck’s parking place, but she could not find it. If the girl had asked Hreapha politely, the latter, who could easily smell the trail, would have shown her where it was. But the girl tried to find it by herself and got extremely off course. Hreapha said “Hreapha” in a gentle way that was meant to correct her bearings, but the girl picked up a rock and threw it at her. It missed. “Get home!” she said again, and threw some more rocks. None of the rocks succeeded in finding its mark. But Hreapha understood that the girl did not want her company. She waited, and allowed the girl to wander on out of sight, and waited some more, and then easily picked up the scent and followed unseen from a distance.
The child really had no idea where she was going, and began drifting southward instead of northeastward where the truck parking place was. Soon, Hreapha perceived, the child was hopelessly lost, but she kept plodding on, and circling back, while getting deeper into the tall white oak forest. Even from a distance Hreapha could smell the child’s extreme fear and panic as well as her unreasonable determination. Nothing smells worse than unreasonable determination.
It had not been too awfully long ago when Hreapha herself had reached the momentous decision to run away, and thus she understood and empathized with the girl, and even wondered if possibly the man had beaten the girl with a stick as he had Hreapha. But the essential difference between this girl’s running away and Hreapha’s was that the latter at least had some idea of where she was going, and this girl had none whatsoever.
At least the act of running away made it pretty clear to Hreapha that the girl was not a stray who had followed him home.
After a while the girl came upon a marvelous but useless discovery: there was a pond of water where beavers had felled trees and made a beaver dam. From a distance Hreapha could smell the animals’ scent, although she knew they were nocturnal and would not be visible now. She was delighted to discover that beaver were living here on the mountainside so near the farmstead, and she was keen to investigate their dam and lodge, but did not want to be seen by the girl. The girl herself had paused in her flight to study the pond and the beavers’ log structures, which seemed to fascinate her, as if she knew what sort of creature had built this remarkable edifice.
Hreapha was fascinated too, but she realized the man would be waking soon and would be exceedingly angry at finding that Hreapha had abandoned her post. So Hreapha ran home quickly. And just in time. The door opened and the man struggled to drag an entire piece of bedding out of the house. Having seen him transporting a davenport on his back, Hreapha was not surprised to find him in this act, but she soon perceived that the bedding bore the strong scent of the girl’s marking. Hreapha herself did a lot of marking, as was the nature of any canine, but the girl was not a canine and Hreapha did not understand why she had so thoroughly marked the bed, unless it was a kind of defiant farewell gesture to the man.
The man dragged the mattress on out into the yard, where he left it, and then he turned to Hreapha. “Which way did she go?” he asked. “Did you happen to notice?”
Of course this was one of those occasional situations when Hreapha wished that she could use the human language, but all she could do was turn a circle, reverse the circle, and then begin trotting in the exact direction from whence she had just trotted. Although the man’s thinking faculties were somewhat slow, even retarded, he managed to understand that she intended to lead him in that direction, so he followed her. She led him out across the field and to the edge of the woods and into the woods and down into a dale and over a knoll and into the deeper woods and down the hillside to a little stream which flowed and flowed and culminated in a beaver pond. She was not unmindful that she was thus betraying the child, if indeed the child was trying to run away. But her first allegiances and responsibilities, after all, were to her master, bastard though he was.
The girl was not at the beaver pond. The man paused for only a moment to marvel at the beavers’ engineering achievement, then he said to Hreapha, “Well, Bitch? So where is she?” For a moment Hreapha wondered if maybe the girl had gone underwater with the beavers into their lodge, a ridiculous conjecture. But she sniffed along the sluiceway of the dam for a while and picked up the girl’s scent again, and followed it not very far to a glade in the sunlight where the child was sitting on a rock, nibbling on a cracker.
“Get home!” the girl snapped at Hreapha and began looking for a rock to throw at her. But at that moment the man came into view, and she stood up and tried to run away. The man quickly caught up with her and swept her up off her feet and held her in the air.
“Honeybunch!” he said. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You could get real bad lost out here and just perish!”
The girl’s eyes were dampening and it looked as if she were trying very hard to cry. But she did not. He set her down, and put his hand on her shoulder and steered her in the direction of home. Hreapha followed happily along after, and the man stopped to reach down to pat his dog on the head. It was the first time she’d ever been patted. “Good ole Bitchie,” he said, and he said to the girl, “she might not have the sense to keep the foxes or hawks away from the chickens, but she knew how to find you. If it weren’t for her, you’d of got hopeless lost out here and you’d of been et by the bears or the wolves, I guarantee you.”
The girl kicked at Hreapha and connected, right in the ribs. “I hate your dog and I hate you,” she said. “I want to go home.”
“We’re going home, sweetheart,” he said. They came again to the beaver pond. “How about me and you come over here sometime and do some fishing?” he suggested.
Chapter fourteen
In the days ahead she acquired a mission in life: to do away with that horrible dog. Watching her captor shave one morning, watching him open the blade and sharpen it on the leather strop and mix the soap in a dish and br
ush it on his cheeks and then lift his nose with his thumb while he drew the blade slowly down across his upper lip, she plotted the idea of getting that razor and sneaking up on the dog while the dog was asleep and slashing its throat. Then the next time she ran away there would be no dog to follow her and she could just keep on walking and walking and if she started early enough in the morning she might find that place called Stay More before the sun went down and there might be somebody still living there.
The awful dog slept a lot, and in the days ahead she watched for a chance when the man wasn’t around or not watching and she could snatch his razor and slash the dog’s throat. The man was spending a lot of time in his garden, so it would be easy to do it while he was out there if his back was turned or if she could find the dog sleeping somewhere where he couldn’t see her from the garden.
Day after day, he tried to get her to help with the garden, but she would not. They had their first real fight about that. Usually the man tried to be nice to her, and he hadn’t lost his temper yet, and he hadn’t even been angry at her for wetting the bed, which had compelled her to apologize to him for the first and only time, saying she couldn’t help it and she didn’t mean to and she wouldn’t do it again, although she did do it again, every night of the nights ahead, until finally he made her sleep on what he called a “pallet”: just some quilts on some pillows on the floor. And she wet that pallet too, and he made her put it out each morning to dry and air in the sunshine.
But they had a fight about the garden, because she didn’t want anything to do with it, and she came close to having to use her taekwondo on him.
“Darn your little hide, you want to eat, don’t you?” he said. “And not just today but this summer and next fall and winter? It’s hard work to raise a little truck garden but it pays off in the long run.”
“I hate veggies,” she said.
“How come?”
“Because they’re green! If I wanted to eat something green, I would eat grass or leaves.”
“Shoot, I’m planting lots out there that’s not green. Maters aint green. Crookneck squash aint green. Taters aint green. Hell, corn aint green. Don’t you like corn on the cob? Roastin ears?”
Come to think of it, she did, but it had never occurred to her that corn on the cob was something you could grow. It came from the store, like all the many other things that came from the store which they would never ever have again because they’d never go to the store again. Bananas, for example. She loved bananas, and liked them sliced on her Fruit Loops at breakfast. But she couldn’t even have any Fruit Loops because he hadn’t bought any, although he had Wheaties and Corn Chex, which didn’t taste very good with that powdered milk on them instead of cream.
“If you could grow bananas in that garden, I’d help you plant them,” she said.
“I’m sorry about the bananas,” he said. “But late this summer there will be pawpaws aplenty hereabouts, and a pawpaw is just as good as a banana if you develop a taste for it.”
She had never seen a pawpaw and didn’t like the sound of it. She didn’t tell him that the main reason she wouldn’t work in the garden is that she had to watch for a chance to catch the dog sleeping and slash its throat. But there were other reasons. When he was out there working hard and sweating it made him smell bad, and she hated to get close to him. She had already told him his breath was bad but that wasn’t because of the garden work, it was because of his bad teeth and his cigarettes and all that whiskey he drank. She couldn’t imagine any woman wanting to be married to him, and she certainly wasn’t going to even pretend to be his wife. It was bad enough she had to be near him at the kitchen table and when they played their board games; she didn’t want to be near him in the garden. “You stink,” she said to him, more than once, and all he could say was that any day now they’d both have to get out the old washtub and have a bath. Or take a swim in the beaver pond when the water warmed up one of these days. She did not know how to swim; her mother had never allowed her to go swimming, for fear she’d drown. But the beaver pond was the only thing she liked in this whole world where she was trapped. In the days ahead when she missed her daily routine of getting up and taking a shower with Mommy and getting dressed and going to school, and she wondered if her classmates were really missing her and if they were even sorry that they had ever criticized her and called her names like “snot” and “pest” and “meany,” she thought of at least one advantage of being a prisoner in this wilderness: in school they had been studying mammals and rodents and beavers and she had even seen a film about the busy beaver, which fascinated her, and here she was actually in the presence of real live beavers! Wouldn’t she have a lot to tell in school if she could get back and tell it? She had studied up on the beaver so much that she recognized the dam the moment she saw it, and she knew that beavers come out only at night and thus she hadn’t seen any, but she hoped she could go back to the beaver pond sometime at night with the flashlight or a lantern to watch the beavers and maybe even make friends with them. Of course the man would have to go with her.
“The least you could do,” the man whined, “since I’ve took the trouble to spade up all that there soil and plant the strawberries, is for you to help weed them and also pluck off the blossoms, because we can’t eat them this year but just get them ready to eat next year.”
But she would not work in the strawberry patch. She couldn’t conceive of doing something now that wouldn’t have any benefit until a year from now, when she was sure she would no longer be here. If she couldn’t find her way out of this place, or if someone didn’t come and rescue her, she would be dead a year from now, either from being eaten by bears or wolves while trying to escape, or else, if it came down to that, she would just decide to stop living and figure out some way to die.
“Help me mulch the sweet potaters?” he would whine. “Don’t you just love sweet potaters baked with marshmallers on top?”
“I hate sweet potatoes,” she would say. And then she would say, “I’ll help you plant the marshmallows, though.”
And he would look at her to see if she was kidding, and say, “We’ve got bags and bags of marshmallers.”
In the days ahead he worked every day in that garden, and not once but twice she took his razor from the place where he kept it and unfolded it and went off looking for that dog. The first time the dog woke up and saw her coming with the razor and jumped up and ran off. The second time the dog stayed asleep and she was just about to slash its throat when the man came up behind her and snapped, “What are you doing with my razor?”
“We don’t have any scissors. I need it to cut my paper dolls some clothes.”
“You don’t have any paper dolls,” he said.
“I need to cut some out of something.”
“And you’ll slice your finger off. Give me that.” And he took the razor and hid it in a place where she couldn’t find it. So she had to think about other ways of getting rid of the dog.
In the days ahead there was not much else to do. She had already spent so much time brooding and moping about her predicament that she had nothing else to think on the subject. There were no books to read, not even comic books. She had been addicted to comic books and being weaned from them so suddenly gave her real heartbreak. There was a stack of some kind of magazine called Police Gazette full of stories about murder and crime and evildoing, but she read one issue and lost interest. She was bored. There was no music to listen to or any way to play it, and all she could do was sing to herself. Worst of all, there was no television. If Sugrue Alan thought that he was going to deprive her of television for the rest of her life, he had another think coming to him.
She reflected that the only other thing she liked about this place, besides the beaver pond, was the fact that she didn’t have to worry about burglars. All her life, one of her biggest fears had been that somebody would break in and rob them. Her father, when he had still lived with them, had tucked her in at bedtime every night and reassured he
r about her fears that they would be poor or that he would leave her or that they would be robbed. He had left her, so she was right about that one fear. But way up here on this mountain they were so far away from everybody that no burglar would ever find them. For whatever comfort that was worth. Yet even though they were so far away, she knew that there were other people somewhere out there. At night when it was dark and still and she sat out on the porch and listened very carefully, above the sounds of the frogs (“peepers” the man called them), she could sometimes hear, far away, the sound of a truck shifting gears, or, sometimes, what seemed to be a gunshot. And sometimes the sound of airplanes far overhead. So there were people out there. Would she ever see them again?
As the days dragged by she tried to alleviate her boredom by making believe that she was in school and that Miss Moore was giving her a lesson which she had to learn. But such make-believe only got her to first recess, and there was nowhere to go, because the other girls and boys were out in the yard barefoot and she couldn’t stand being barefoot.
She missed her jump rope. She wondered if, among all the things he had got for her, there might be a jump rope somewhere. Was he saving it for her birthday in September? She went into the storeroom where the boxes were stacked to the ceiling and the sacks and packages were stacked on top of them, and she wondered what-all was waiting for her in there. She couldn’t open anything. Finally she came right out and asked him if he had a jump rope in there anywhere and he wasn’t sure what she meant. “For skipping, you know?” she said. He had lots of rope, and showed it to her, but most of it would have made a good lariat or lasso or noose but not a jump rope.
In the days ahead, with nothing better to do, she practiced her taekwondo moves, getting her feet and hands into their best maneuvers. The dog watched, and she knew that if she wanted to she could kick the dog up under the throat with a chagi that would snap its neck and kill it.
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