If the two of them were really having a good girlie talk, she ought to be able to tell Robin about Yowrfrowr, and she greatly regretted that she could not. Robin told her about a boy named Jimmy Chaney that she had sort of had a crush on, and even asked, “Are there any boy doggies that you like?” But Hreapha could not tell her about cute and smart Yowrfrowr. Abruptly Robin asked, “Have you ever done it with another dog?” And when Hreapha could not vocalize her virginity, Robin said, “You know, fucked?” And then added, “I wonder what it’s like. You know, he has never done that to me. I thought he was going to. I thought that was the main reason he kidnapped me and brought me up here. I was expecting it. I was sort of getting myself ready for it.”
All of this talk about sexual matters did not embarrass Hreapha in the slightest, but rather gave her some strange and curious stirrings of desire. Her mother—and eventually in their long talks together Hreapha was to discover that among the many other things she and Robin had in common, for example, their fear of thunder and of spiders, not to mention their virginity, their mothers were somewhat alike, as Whuphvoff and Karen had both possessed a didactic nature—her mother had once given her a long explanation of the periodic condition she could eventually expect to experience, wherein her markings would begin to take on a faint olfactory signal easily detectable by the noses of any male dog within miles, informing them that she was in the mood for romance. Her mother had cautioned her not to permit such romance unless the marking’s scent clearly indicated that she was “ready.”
Hreapha’s markings had never yet borne this aroma. She wondered what she would feel the first time they did. What would she do? Would the scent carry all the way to Stay More, three miles away, where Yowrfrowr could pick it up? Such thoughts could not fail to titillate her.
“Don’t take this wrong,” Robin was saying, “but I wish I had a kitty cat.” Hreapha’s ears snapped into better hearing position. “I mean, you’re a really good dog, and I never had a dog before, and I’m awfully glad to have you as my dog. But I’ve really and truly always, always wanted a kitty cat.”
Chapter eighteen
Talking with Hreapha was so much more fun than talking with that stupid doll, who had been the only one she could talk to for so very long and who just sat there and had to play-like listen. Robin had wasted so many hours saying things to that doll, pouring out her heart to it, when all along she could have had Hreapha, who was so attentive and appreciative and smart. Robin was convinced that if by some magic Hreapha could really talk, the dog could tell her what she ought to do, the dog could even tell her how to find her way out of here if she wanted to, and above all the dog could tell her how she ought to feel toward Sugrue Alan. Should she feel sorry for him? Should she truly hate him? After all, he was all she had in this world. Unless and until she could be rescued. Or by some miracle find her way out of here. For the longest time Robin had been almost happy sleeping in the featherbed with him beside her; sometimes her head was so close to his chest that she could feel his breathing and hear his heart beat and he was a lot more alive than Paddington had ever been. And she hadn’t even needed to have a night light on, because she knew he was her protection. She hadn’t wet the bed again, not once. In the summertime when the weather warmed up and some nights were almost hot, she didn’t need her pajamas but she wore them anyway out of modesty and sweated inside of them. But when he became too ill to work in his garden, he no longer stank of his sweat although he stank of the whiskey that he kept on drinking, and he stank of his illness, whatever it was, and she had to scrounge over to the side of the bed to escape his stench. She hadn’t slept close to him for a long time now. She knew that he was probably never going to be able to do anything to her. He never would fuck her. He was so sick now.
But the weird thing was, some days he seemed to be okay. Not only well enough to fix his own breakfast for a change but also to go out and try to do something, if he could. He would go out and chop wood until he was all worn out again, and she would have to help him back to the house, and then she would go stack the wood up into a neat pile. Among all the things he’d bought for her were a pair of work gloves so she wouldn’t get splinters in her hands. They were getting lots and lots of stove wood. “I reckon it’ll get right airish and crimpy up here come fall,” he said. “And doggone dithery come winter. You’ll need more firewood than you’ll be able to cut yourself, tiny as you are.” His saying that somehow made it sound as if he didn’t think he’d be around in the winter, or if he was he wouldn’t be able to cut any more firewood.
He was also concerned that when the snows came the chickens wouldn’t be able to get out and scratch around in the yard hunting for bugs and worms to eat. There wouldn’t be any bugs and worms in the winter! He confessed he’d made a mistake not to have brought more than one thirty-pound bag of chicken feed, which was all gone now. Chickens will eat just about anything (and Hreapha had a hard time keeping them out of her chow, as well as out of the garden) and ever since Robin’s first experiments at baking bread, biscuits and cornbread had failed, the chickens had helped to eat the failures and they still ate all the leftovers, now that she had finally learned how to bake some decent bread. To make sure the chickens could have a food supply for the winter, Sugrue had planted extra corn—Robin had roasted or boiled corn-on-the-cob so many times she was almost tired of it—and they could dry the leftover ears and feed them to the chickens all winter.
Very early Robin had discovered that the chickens were flocking around behind and beneath the outhouse, and looking down into the hole she sat upon she was horrified to discover that they were eating doo-doo. For a while after that she could not eat either chicken or eggs, and she put their disgusting habit at the top of her mental list of all the things she couldn’t stand about living here. But in time she realized that it was just a fact of country life, and if you stopped to think about it, it wasn’t any worse than chickens eating worms.
She was glad to help store corn for the chickens to eat in the winter, and while she was helping Sugrue do it, he took a Mason jar and filled it with dried kernels of corn, and then took a handful and said to her, “I need to show you how to plant your corn next spring,” and took her out to the corn patch with his hoe and showed her how to hoe up a furrow and plant it with the corn kernels. “Think you can remember all that?” he said to her afterward, and again she thought it sounded as if he didn’t expect to be around in the spring.
One morning they were all just sitting on the porch when Hreapha jumped up and started barking, and they saw a hog raiding the corn patch! “Wooee,” said Sugrue, “if that aint a razorback!” And for a sick man he was pretty quick and nimble in fetching his rifle and shooting the hog. “I ort to’ve let you shoot him,” he said to her, “but if you’d’ve missed, we wouldn’t’ve had no secont chance.” Robin doubted she could have hit it, although Sugrue had made her practice with targets again and again and she was very good with the rifle, although the shotgun was still too much for her.
It was a big hog, and Sugrue’s only shot had hit it right square in the side of the head. “This is sure enough a wild razorback. Aint seen one of these since I was a kid,” Sugrue said. “Be damned if we aint got us a right smart of meat.” She helped him drag the hog, which must’ve weighed more than him and her put together, to the cooper’s shed, where they rigged up a pulley to hoist the carcass to a beam. And Sugrue insisted she watch closely, every step of the way, as he cut into the hog’s neck (“Smack in the goozle,” he explained) to make the hog’s blood run out. “The moon aint right, probably,” he observed. “You ort to kill your hog on the full moon.”
They heated the big iron kettle of water that they used for clothes washing (the hardest of all Robin’s many chores), and when it was boiling they poured it over the carcass and Sugrue dusted wood ashes all over it. “Got to get all that hair off,” he explained. Robin used a dull knife to scrape and scrape on the hide to remove the hair, while Sugrue kept pouring on more scalding
water and wood ashes. It was messy and it took them hours and hours just to get the hide scraped clean. They didn’t even stop for lunch, which was a good thing, because when Sugrue started gutting the hog and made her pull the intestines out into a washtub she started to puke but didn’t have anything in her stomach to throw up.
He identified all the parts of the hog’s insides for her—the lungs, heart, kidneys, liver, stomach, and so on. He showed her how to separate the trimmings of fat to be made into lard and the trimmings of lean meat to be made into sausage. She thought about becoming a vegetarian, which she knew a lot of people were (her friend Beverly was), but she didn’t like vegetables. She liked bacon and hated Spam and as they worked Sugrue kept telling her all the good things that could be made from this hog—spareribs and hams and pork chops. All afternoon they butchered the hog, and Sugrue was ready to drop. “I reckon we’ll just have to wait till tomorrow to cure it,” he said. “Bitch will have to guard it all night.”
He went into the house and grabbed one of his bottles that said Jack Daniels Black Label Sour Mash Whiskey on it and he went to bed. And the next day he didn’t feel like doing any curing, whatever that meant. She wondered if the hog had had some terrible disease that it had to be cured of. “That good meat is sure to spoil,” he complained. “But I just don’t have the stren’th to lift a finger.” In the afternoon, he said, “Hon, do ye reckon you could fetch one of them bags of coarse salt from the side room?” It was a big bag but she fetched it. “Now,” he said, “If you’ll just listen careful, I’ll try to tell you what to do. And then next year if you’re lucky enough to kill another razorback, you’ll know how to do it all by yourself.”
He couldn’t even go with her to the cooper’s shed to supervise what she was doing. Hreapha kept her company but only for a while before falling asleep; she’d been awake all night guarding the meat (from what or from whom? Robin wondered). Robin spread the hunks of meat out on the shed’s workbenches and started to cover them with the coarse salt. Mix in molasses and pepper, a voice said to her, and she turned, thinking Sugrue had finally come to help, although it was a much younger voice than Sugrue’s. And Sugrue was not there. She wondered if she was imagining things, or maybe Sugrue was communicating with her through his mind. She went to the bedroom where he was sprawled out with his bottle, still conscious. “Did you tell me to mix some molasses and pepper with the salt?” she asked him.
“Why, no, I never,” he said. “But come to think on it, that’s what Grandpa Alan always done. We’ve got plenty of ‘lasses out to the kitchen.”
So she mixed the coarse salt with molasses and pepper and started smearing it on the meat. Red pepper and black pepper, the voice said. She wondered if she was suffering from overwork, but she went back to the kitchen and got the red pepper to add to the black pepper. It took her all the rest of the afternoon to finish covering all the hunks of meat with all of the salt mixture. She wondered if any other seven-year-old girl in history had ever cured a hog all by herself. Thinking of this, she realized that she was almost eight. She wondered if it might even be September already. She would be eight years old on September the twelfth. That’s still pretty young for curing a hog by yourself.
“Now what?” she said to Hreapha, as if the dog could tell her what now. “How long do I leave the salt stuff on there?”
Pends on the weather, the voice said. Reckon six or seven weeks ort to do her.
“Hreapha, did you say that?” Robin asked, delighted with the possibility that perhaps there was some way the dog could talk to her after all.
“Hreapha,” the dog said, which seemed to be negative.
She was tired and sweaty and dirty and had salt and molasses all over her. She went to ask Sugrue if he had any idea whether this might be September yet, but he was passed out. Or dead. She didn’t care. She opened a can of beans for her supper (it had pork in it, which made her impatient for the new meat to finish curing), and then, when it got dark, she lit a lantern and headed for the beaver pond. Hreapha happily followed. Robin decided Hreapha wouldn’t have to guard the meat, once it had been salted so much.
The pond had filled with water. Their beaver friends were enjoying a supper (or breakfast?) of alder bark. “Hello,” Robin said, but they did not run; they remembered her and knew she had helped them rebuild their dam. She took off all her clothes, but felt no shame at all to be naked in front of the beaver or Hreapha, who were all naked anyway. “Can you teach me how to swim?” she asked, and walked out into the pond.
The beaver taught her how to swim. Maybe even if she wasn’t the first nearly-eight year old girl in history to cure a hog, she was the first to receive swimming lessons from beavers, who are experts at it. She didn’t possess their large webbed feet to paddle with, but she could imitate the strokes of their arms and front feet. It wasn’t hard at all. And although the kerosene lantern helped her see what she was doing, she felt she could do it with her eyes shut. She was dizzy with pleasure and pride; not even her first spin at the roller rink had given her such a sense of escaping from humdrum reality. Hreapha jumped into the water too, and all of them swam and swam and splashed and flipped and bobbed. The beaver seemed to be trying to get her to dive underwater to reach their lodge, but she wasn’t ready for that yet.
Suddenly a light appeared, not from the kerosene lantern. It was the light of a flashlight, and Robin’s first thought was that some human being had finally found her and was coming to rescue her. Her excitement at that thought was mixed with a kind of sadness: if she were rescued and taken away from here she could never swim with these beaver again. Also she was a little concerned because she was naked, and didn’t want them to see her.
But it wasn’t a rescuer. It was Sugrue. The flashlight played over the figures in the water, and she could hear his voice behind it. “Just what in tarnation do you think you’re a-doing?” he hollered, and she knew he was not only angry but drunk. Then she heard a rifle shot. He was firing at the beaver! Hreapha barked at him, and he fired at her too, but didn’t hit her.
“Stop it!” she yelled at him.
“Get your little hide out of there!” he ordered her. She climbed out of the water, and he played the light over her naked body. “Bitch!” he yelled. “Bitch, you’re supposed to be a guard dog, goddammit, and you’ve let a fox get into the chicken house! Come on out of that water.” Hreapha climbed up onto the shore, and he immediately kicked her as hard as he could, knocking her back into the water with a big splash. “Stupid dog! I’ll learn ye to mind me.” Hreapha moaned and whimpered.
“You’re a mean man, Sugrue Alan,” Robin said to him. “I thought you might be nice, but you’re just plain old nasty mean.” He slapped her. It really hurt, too, and she felt her eyes welling up with water but she was determined not to let him, or anybody, ever make her cry. “I hate your guts,” she said.
“Just what do you mean anyhow, coming over here in the middle of the night and burning up all that kerosene? You won’t have none of it left to get you through next year.” His voice was really mad.
“I won’t be here next year!” she yelled at him.
He grabbed her and started spanking her bare bottom. He spanked her so hard it made her jump around. He spanked her so hard she was going to be not just red all over her bottom but black and blue too. For the longest time she held back her tears but then she couldn’t hold them any longer and she yelped and began crying. She really cried. It was the first time she had cried since she was three years old, and she was hurt more by the loss of that record than by the sting of his spanking. He had done so many bad things, starting with his kidnapping of her, and she had never cried. But now she bawled her heart out.
“Get your clothes on and let’s get out of here,” he said finally, his voice not quite as angry, as if he’d got it out of his system by battering her.
She decided that as soon as they got back to the house and he put that rifle back where he kept it, she would snatch it up and kill him with it. He mad
e a mistake when he taught her how to use the guns. He would pay for that mistake, and pay for his cruelty toward her and Hreapha.
But she abandoned her plan to kill him. For three reasons: one, she would never be able to escape from this place if he were dead; two, he was dying anyway, and she understood even that this terrible nasty mood he was in was because he knew he was dying; and three, his terrible nasty mood was completely gone the next morning and he told her how very sorry he was that he had slapped her and spanked her. He told her that he was completely ashamed of himself and would do anything to make it up to her.
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