With

by Donald Harington

  “I wanted to be your husband,” he said to her. “That was my plan. But it aint never gon work out that way. So if I caint be your husband, leastways I can be your daddy. And help ye to get ready for all you’ve got to know and do to get through this life.”

  She needed a minute to think about that. And then she said, “I don’t want you to die, Daddy.”

  Chapter nineteen

  Hell, he’d been madder at himself than he’d been at her or the damn dog. For the longest time he’d felt pretty sorry for himself, that this peculiar affliction was ravaging his body, but that self-pity had lately turned into self-loathing. It wasn’t simply that his body had let him down, completely, but that he still had possession of his brain, and his brain was letting him down worse than his body was. If he had the sense to come in out of the rain, he ought to be able to figure out some way to save himself, to get help, or get to somebody who could help, and save the girl into the bargain.

  On one of the rare days (and why did his sickness come and go, come and go, like that?) when he was feeling well enough to put on his pants and shoes, he sneaked off from Robin and found the trail that led to where he used to park the pickup. He had done such a good job of covering up the trail, and the stretch of thunderstorms had also contributed, that he could hardly find it himself, but he found it, and, dragging one leg behind him like the mummy in those old mummy movies he’d loved as a kid, he traced the trail to where the bluff began and the path narrowed to just a ledge clinging to the side of the bluff. He took only one step out onto the ledge before feeling such vertigo he was lucky to back away from it without falling to his death. But he could see that farther along, the ledge was totally knocked out by boulders fallen in a mudslide. So that ledge, which he had traversed hundreds of times in stocking up the place, was no longer an option. He considered trying to climb down the bluff and going beneath it to reach the ravines that led to the gullies that led to the place where he’d burned the truck. But he realized that he was simply in no condition for such climbing and hiking.

  On another good day he had the strength to try to braid Robin’s hair, at her request. She said her mother often braided her hair, and she tried to show him how, and he tried his best, but couldn’t really do it, and it made him mad. He offered to give her a haircut but she said she was never going to cut her hair.

  On another good day he decided it was time to teach her how to line bees and find a hive of honey. He took his axe and crosscut saw, as well as his rifle, and she carried the four empty buckets, in one of them a bait of a corncob smeared with some of what little honey they had left. He’d only got one jar of honey from the store because he anticipated being able to find his own. Since they both had to give up such things as ice cream (he loved the stuff as much as she did, and missed it mightily), it would be good to have other ways of keeping the sweet tooth happy.

  Dragging his leg behind him like the monster in those old Frankenstein movies, he led her and the dog for almost half a mile out into the deepest woods, where they set up that bait of honeyed corncob on a piece of bark in a glade. And then, as he explained to her, it was sort of like fishing: you just had to sit and wait. Wait for a bee to show up and discover the honey and then for the bee to head back for the hive to tell the other bees about it.

  While they sat, and Bitch took a snooze, they got to talking about some things that was a-bothering them. He was in the habit of complaining, at least once a day, that his affliction must be God’s punishment on him. And now when he said it again, she wanted to know what specifically was God a-punishing him for. Besides, of course, stealing a innocent little girl. As if that wasn’t enough. Well, he thought back (he was having terrible problems with his memory these days) and told her near about every bad thing he’d ever done in his life that he might be paying the price for. Going all the way back to his schooldays, when he was the worst hell-raiser Stay More school had ever seen, and Miss Jerram had her hands full trying to deal with all his cussedness and wickedness. There was one time he used a baseball bat to break the arm of a kid he didn’t like. Another time he actually branded his initial “A” with a red-hot nail onto the chest of a kid he “owned.” The worst thing he’d done was to get even with some poor kids by killing their mule. And Miss Jerram when she found out about it made him dig a grave for the mule and give a speech at the mule’s funeral. It had been humiliating.

  “Miss Jerram,” he related to Robin, “she. Wudn’t. Bogzh. Furrup. Thog. Ervers. Since. Hard.” He stopped because Robin was looking at him peculiar.

  “What did you say?” Robin asked.

  He suddenly realized that in addition to all his other misfortunes he was losing the power of speech. His tongue and his vocal chords seemed to be turning into rawhide. He grabbed his jaw and gave it a shake, but that didn’t help much. “Ahrg. Riggin. Ahrg. Cain. Tawg,” he managed to say.

  “No wonder,” she said. “That’s a horrible story. What did you kill the mule with?”

  “Stig,” Sog said.

  “You stuck the mule? What with?”

  “Stig,” he said, and pantomimed the piece of timber that he had bashed over the mule’s skull.

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Ahrg. Cain. Tawg,” he complained and pointed to his frozen jaw.

  “Then just hush up,” she said, and sat there seeming like she was just a-thinking about what a bad boy he had been. But then she said, “Now I’ll tell you about all the bad things I did. That I’m being punished for.” And she started in to telling him all this stuff that she had done. She had once prayed that a certain girl would die, a girl who was very popular in school and the only one smarter than her. The girl hadn’t died, but she’d come down with scarlet fever and missed most of her classes. Another girl who had annoyed Robin got herself pushed so hard while she was swinging in the swings that she shot right out of her swing-seat and broke her arm, and Robin denied to the teachers that she had done it, although she later bragged about it to the other girls.

  “Keeb. Yur. High. On. Thatur. Kobb,” he told her, but he had to sign-language his meaning by pointing first to his eye and then to the honeyed cob that was their bait.

  Robin went on telling all the times she’d misbehaved or done something wrong, picking on other kids and being an all-around scamp and rascal. To hear her tell it, she’d been the holy terror of the school, just as Sog had been the holy terror of his, and he couldn’t help wondering sort of wishful-like what it would have been like if they’d been in school together, if Robin had been in the second grade with him at Stay More schoolhouse and they could have conspired to make life miserable for old Miss Jerram. He wanted to tell her this, but realized he had lost the power of speech. He hoped that maybe the power would come back again, just as he had good days as well as bad days with this disease, whatever it was. He had promised Robin that some day he would tell her all about Stay More, all the interesting people who had lived there and the very few who still did, and for him to do all that telling he’d have to be able to talk good again. She’d already asked him the names of the families who had lived in Stay More so she could give these names to the families of paper dolls that she’d been cutting out and dressing up for a town she had decided to call Stay More instead of Robinsville, which was the name she’d already given a town back home.

  If he couldn’t talk plain any more, they were really sunk, because he was counting on being able to tell her stories about Stay More as a substitute for the fact they couldn’t never again watch the TV or ever go to the movies or nothing.

  “Hreapha!” said Bitch, and Sog looked around to see what the dog was barking at. But there wasn’t nothing nowheres. “Bidge,” he said. “Was gog yur?”

  “Look,” Robin said. “She’s spotted a bee!”

  And sure enough, the darn dog had pointed a bee alighting on the honeyed cob. The three of them watched as the bee took its fill of the honey and then flew away. Sog tried to tell her that now all they had to do was wait a bit more
and that bee would fly back to its bee tree to tell the other bees of its discovery and before long there would be a bunch of them going back and forth from the bait to the bee tree and all they’d have to do is try and follow them. “Urs ussuns waig orwell,” Sog tried to explain, but all he could do was lay his hand on Robin’s arm as a sign of staying more. They waited.

  By and by, that good old bee-dog said “Hreapha” once again, and here come a line of bees making for the cob. They lit, filled up on the honey, flew off and up, circling around and then headed the way they’d come, and Sog got to his feet and motioned for Robin to get up too. But old Bitch was ahead of them and she took off after the bees, so they just had to follow her. Sog wished he still lived in Stay More so he could spread the word about this incredible dog who could line bees.

  Sure enough, Bitch led them to this middling-size white oak tree with a bulge and a crack halfway up, and the bees swarming in and out of that crack. “Shud far!” Sog exclaimed.

  The main problem with not being able to talk was that he now had to explain a crucial thing about bees to Robin but couldn’t do it. Bees will only sting you if you’re afraid of ’em. If you don’t fight ’em or swat at ’em or nothing, but just act calm and still, they won’t sting you. It was going to be hard to get this across to Robin but he tried his best with pantomime and going through all the motions of trying to get her to keep real still. He was able to say “Saw,” which is what you say to a cow to keep her calm.

  Bitch was sniffing around the trunk of the bee tree, and when she commenced barking again he figured it was just because she knew this was the right tree, but he took a look and there were some bear tracks around the base of the trunk! Bear! He knew how bears sure did crave honey, and he found claw marks on the trunk which seemed to indicate the bear had tried to climb the tree to get at the honey. Sog asked himself whether he ought to tell Robin that a bear had been here. No sense in scaring her, right now, but he had warned her that time she’d tried to run away that the bears or wolves would get her if she were out in the woods by herself. He knew there weren’t any wolves in Newton County, maybe a few coyotes, but not any big bad wolves. But he’d seen black bears himself. Yes, I’ll tell her, he said, and pointed at the bear tracks and said, “Mawr.” He tried again, “Parr.” But he couldn’t say the name right. He motioned for her to stand a good distance back while he cut down the bee tree.

  He hadn’t hit the trunk more than a few licks with his axe when he felt the first sting. It sure don’t do you a lot of good to know that you keep still to keep from being stung if you have to swing an axe. “Gahrdommid,” he swore, and backed off and waited a while.

  By the time he got the tree cut down, he’d been stung maybe a dozen times, but he knew from past experience that after a while the sting doesn’t sting as much; the more you get stung the less you feel it. He’d heard stories about bee stings being good for arthritis, rheumatism and all kinds of other problems in the joints, and he figured maybe his foot might even stop dragging like the mummy’s or Frankenstein’s.

  They got four buckets full to the brim with honey, but poor Robin herself got stung a few times in the process, and she didn’t like it one bit. He gathered up the leaves of three separate plants—he didn’t know which plants they were but according to the ages-old remedy it didn’t matter which three so long as there was exactly three—and crushed the leaves together and applied them to her bee stings and to his, and the relief was almost instantaneous, but still she was pissed off. He wished he could speak and be philosophical. If he could be philosophical he could tell her that everything in this life worth getting requires being stung a few times. Thinking about this on the way home, he realized the main drawback of losing the power of speech wasn’t that he wouldn’t be able to tell her all those Stay More stories but that he wouldn’t be able to tell her his philosophical thoughts about how the world was just no damn good, life was a joke, the world was full of meanness and wrongdoing and corruption and selfishness and evil and backstabbing and shoddy merchandise and wickedness and bum raps and disorderly conduct and weakness and malpractice and greed and moral turpitude and what not. It had been his plan to learn her to appreciate the isolation of this wilderness that protected her from all that badness and transgression. But how could he do it if he couldn’t talk? Thinking of his bee stings and hers and the tried and true folk remedy he’d applied to the stings, he also thought of all the things he had to learn her about the old ways, the uses of plants, the phases of the moon, the reading of signs. What kind of teacher can’t even talk?

  On the way home he spotted the tracks of a wild turkey! “Darg eek,” he exclaimed, and pantomimed the swagger of a turkey tom and flapped his arms to represent its wings, but he couldn’t get across to her that somewhere out here in these woods their Thanksgiving dinner was a-running around loose.

  When he got home after toting all that honey plus his axe and crosscut and rifle, even with her help, he was plumb dead on his feet and could only crawl into bed with Dr. Jack D’s remedy. There he remained for several more days, thinking philosophical thoughts not only about all the stuff that was wrong with the world but how life itself was just one big joke that wasn’t even funny, and the biggest joke was that if you ever got to finding anything good about life you’d soon enough discover that the only thing that mattered about life is that it comes to an end, by and by. There was this good old funeral hymn everbody used to sing, that Miss Jerram had got them to sing at that mule’s funeral, which said that farther along we’ll know all about it, farther along we’ll understand why, but Sog wasn’t too sure he’d ever be able to know all about it or understand nothing.

  He didn’t even have any notion what time of year it was. What was left of the garden was still producing some fine maters, as well as all the melons they could eat, and although some of the nights had got right crimpy the days was still warm enough to indicate that summer wasn’t quite done by a long shot. But he figured that it must be at least well into September, and the next morning he woke up feeling tolerable he decided it was time for Robin’s birthday.

  He put on his overalls for the first time since he’d been a-beeing, and went out to the kitchen and stirred hisself around and set into making a birthday cake for Robin. He hadn’t forgot how, and they had quite a few boxes of cake mix that all you have to do is follow the directions.

  “What are you doing?” Robin asked him.

  “Awr, og us ursings ur sprose,” he tried to get around telling her what he was up to, and she left him alone.

  While the cake was in the oven, he went into the storeroom and fished in some of the bags and brought out the pretty packages of birthday gift wrap that he’d stocked up on, and some ribbons and Scotch tape. Then he picked out from the hoard assorted little toys and games, as well as this one real nice dress that he’d bought her at the Wal-Mart, and a couple of pretty sweaters. That was more than he’d intended to give her at any one of her birthdays, but he might not even be around for the next one. He wrapped everything up nice and pretty. He sent Robin out to dig up taters, both Irish and sweet taters. And while the oven was still hot he put in a cut of ham off that razorback they’d slaughtered. The meat hadn’t been smoked yet, but that wasn’t necessary for just a cut of ham.

  He served her a fine dinner and then afterward he brought out the cake, with candles lit on top and all. “Hubby bart deg tyoo,” he tried to sing but gave it up and just set the cake on the table.

  “Oh!” Robin said. “Oh!” she said again. “Is it my birthday?”

  “Yur aid,” he said. “Hubby bart deg.”

  And then he brought out all the wrapped presents and she had such a lot of fun opening them one by one. Too bad that dress was too small, and he realized that when he’d got all her clothes he hadn’t even thought that she’d ever outgrow them. He reckoned that he had probably hoped she’d stay seven years old for the rest of her life. But now that she was eight, did he no longer desire her? That was a dumb question, s
ince he didn’t have no desire to speak of nohow.

  “Oh!” she said, taking the wraps off a game. “A Ouija Board! I always wanted a Ouija Board!”

  It was just a plain old game board with all this stuff written on it: all the letters of the alphabet and all the numbers, plus “Yes.” “No.” “Good Bye.” There was a three-legged gizmo that was the only game piece, and Robin explained how you use it. Trouble was, you’re supposed to rest your fingertips gently on that three-legged doodad, but his hands was so shaky he couldn’t do it without jiggling the darn thing. And what it was supposed to do was answer any questions you might have, and he couldn’t ask any questions without the power of speech. So they just had to make do with Robin’s questions. They started off with easy questions, like “Is this September 12?” and the pointer thing crept its way over to the “Yes.” So it really was her birthday, after all! If you could believe that pointer. What is the dog’s real name? they asked the Ouija board, and it moved bit by bit to the letter H, the letter R, the letter E, the letter A, the letter P, the letter H again, and the letter A again. “Roffa,” said Robin, which was what Bitch always said.

  By and by, Robin asked the Ouija Board, “Will I ever see my mommy again?”

  The board said, “Yes.”

  When she asked the Board, “Is Sugrue going to get well?” he wanted to stop her, but his curiosity got the better of him.

  “No,” said the damned board.

  Chapter twenty

  Her ambitious project for some time had been to procure a kitten as a birthday present for Robin. She herself had had only one birthday so far, the previous winter. Since it is the lot of most animals not even to know, let alone to observe, their birthdays, she had not expected that hers would be special. She had observed it simply by digging up her favorite bone, declaring I am one, and wishing herself a happy birthday. Of course she had realized the ambiguity of her words: not simply that she was one year old but that she was one fine dog, she was number one, one of the best, one of those, one to reckon with. She had been happily surprised later when Yowrfrowr had shown up in her yard, saying A pity I have no gifts for you but I do want to give you a birthday lick. And he had given her a birthday lick and then had tried to become more romantic than that, but the man had come out of the house and run him off.