Now with the approach of September she had wanted desperately to see Yowrfrowr again, and had given much consideration to exploring the environs south of the farmstead in search of any remaining trace of the old trail that Adam Madewell had used to reach Stay More when he went to school there. The in-habit had told her he could describe the route and which landmarks to watch for, but he couldn’t take her or go with her, because it would lead beyond his haunt, that is, beyond the area of places that he was allowed to frequent. He also advised that she shouldn’t attempt to hike the trail, which was a long and possibly treacherous journey that had broken some of his bones the last time he’d tried to use it, when he was ten. His warning didn’t scare her sufficiently, because she had powerful motives: simply to enjoy canine companionship again, to tell Yowrfrowr of this particular situation she was in and Robin was in and the man was in, get his opinions thereof, and even, if nature so dictated, permit Yowrfrowr to assuage this peculiar nervousness she had been experiencing lately and the itching in her afterplace. But her principal motive, overriding the others, was this: she wanted to see if she couldn’t take possession of one of those kittens that overpopulated the yard of Yowrfrowr’s house. Hreapha had never bothered to count, but there were always dozens of felines on the premises, often openly and flagrantly engaged in procreation, and consequently no one would even notice if Hreapha removed one of the kittens, seizing the nape of its neck gently in her mouth as she had observed mother cats doing, and, carrying it thus, transporting it all the way back up to Madewell Mountain, and giving it to Robin, who wanted a kitten so badly. Could she do it? It was a challenge, and one that consumed many of Hreapha’s waking thoughts.
But as Robin’s birthday neared, Hreapha became frantic with the realization that such a journey would take at least one overnight and possibly two or three, and there was simply no way she could explain to the man, let alone to Robin the potential beneficiary, her disappearance.
As luck would have it, on one of Hreapha’s frequent visits to the beaver pond to visit with her friends there and make sure they were all right, she encountered once again that audacious bobcat who had previously killed one of the beaver kits and had apparently not been sufficiently deterred by the whipping Hreapha had given it. Hreapha wasn’t in the mood for further fighting; her body still ached and hurt from the time the man had kicked her into the beaver pond; but she resented the bobcat for not having learned its lesson in the first fight. So she attacked it again, and not only drove it away from the beaver pond but chased it for some distance through the woods. It was apparently trying to reach the safety of its den or lair when it stepped upon, or was attacked by, a copperhead snake. Copperheads are just as venomous as rattlesnakes, if not more so, and Hreapha had long learned to give them both a wide berth. The bitten bobcat staggered on toward its den, which was actually a nest of leaves in a hollow log, but just managed to reach the opening to the log when the venom took full effect and the bobcat crumpled and, calling out a sound that was like a dying calf’s, expired. Hreapha nudged it with her nose to make sure it was absolutely lifeless.
The dying-calf sound came again, and Hreapha thought possibly the bobcat was still alive, but when she looked into the hollow log, there was a bobkitten, a lone bobkitten, saying woo again and again. Hreapha’s first thought was to wonder if Robin would object to a kitten who said woo instead of meow. The bobkitten, oblivious or indifferent to Hreapha’s presence, came out of the hollow log and attempted to nurse from its dead mother. Hreapha was touched. Poor kitty, she said. Where’s your brothers and sisters? It occurred to her that a feline as large as a bobcat might not have a litter of more than one or two.
Hreapha waited until the poor kitty had discovered that it wasn’t going to be able to get any milk from the dead mother, and then she gently chomped the nape of the kitten’s neck, lifted it, and began the trek back home. The kitten remained motionless, as if paralyzed by the clasp of its neck in Hreapha’s jaws. But when eventually Hreapha reached home and set the kitten down in order to announce her return and her gift, the kitten attempted to run away, and Hreapha had to chase and catch it and seize its neck again. She mounted the porch and scratched at the door. Because of the bobkitty in her mouth, she couldn’t call out “Hreapha!” meaning Happy Birthday, but she could scratch the door and whimper, and finally Robin opened the door.
And you never saw such an astonished expression on anybody’s face! “What have you caught, Hreapha?” she said. “Is it alive?”
To demonstrate its possession of life, Hreapha gently set it down, and it immediately hollered WOO! WOO! WOO! and ran under the davenport.
“GURFLAGE!” yelled the man. “Laud faint bub cut! Wul sought my hide!”
Robin was full of questions which, alas, Hreapha could not answer, the chief one being “What is it?” but also “Where did you get it?” “How old is it?” “Is it a boy or a girl?” She got down on her knees and peered under the davenport and studied it closely. And began to answer her own questions: “It’s some kind of kitty. Hreapha must have found it somewhere. It’s just a baby. And I think it’s a boy. Come on out, kitty. Here kitty kitty.”
“BUB CUT!” yelled the man. “Glodge plairn fugadaze!”
“Can I keep him?” Robin asked.
“Wul hail far hit’sa wile beast,” the man said.
Robin had succeeded in fishing the critter out from under the davenport and was cradling it in her arms, where it began to purr.
“Hreapha,” said Hreapha, that is, Happy Birthday.
“Thank you so much,” Robin said. “It’s the best birthday present I ever had.”
Having determined, despite the man’s atrocious mispronunciation, that it was a bobcat kitten, Robin decided to name him “Robert.” She fetched one of her dollbaby’s bottles, which had a real nipple on it. She filled it with Pet Milk, and her new pet had its first meal in Robin’s arms.
“Floszh,” commented the man. Then he slowly and painfully rose to his feet and, taking one of his bottles, went off to bed, or, since the feather mattress was being aired in the yard from an accumulation of his markings upon it, his pallet on the floor.
“Thank you for the Ouija Board and everything,” she called to him, but he did not respond. He proceeded to guzzle the bottle.
Robert the kitten continued guzzling his bottle, and at length fell asleep. Robin set him down on a corner of the davenport. “I’ll show you my other presents,” Robin said to Hreapha. And she showed her the dress and the sweaters and the toys, including the Ouija Board, which she set up on the floor, suggesting, “Let’s see if you can play. Can you put one of your paws on this?” And she took one of Hreapha’s forefeet and set it upon a kind of miniature table with three legs. “Now I will ask a question, and put my fingertips here beside your paw, and this planchette will start moving until it finds the answer. Okay? I’ve already asked it how to spell your name and it spelled it out, H-R-E-A-P-H-A. So I know that’s your real name, and you’ll never be ‘Bitch’ again. Let’s ask it: How many years will Hreapha live?”
Hreapha felt the planchette, as it was called, moving beneath her paw and she was prompted to bark. But she watched with fascination as the planchette moved to the numeral 1 and then to the numeral 9.
“Wow!” Robin said. “Nineteen years is a long life for a dog. Okay? How many years will I live?”
The planchette moved to the 8 and just stayed there.
“Oh-oh!” Robin commented. “This is scaring me. Does this mean that I’m going to die before my ninth birthday?” But the planchette was not absolutely motionless. It was moving but never departing from the 8, just circling it. Hreapha wished she could explain to Robin that that might mean it was doing the same numeral twice, that is, not 8 but 88. Robin would live to be eighty-eight years old.
“Let’s ask it something else,” Robin suggested, but she was clearly disturbed at the thought she might not live beyond this, her eighth year. “Would you like to find out who you will marry?
Of course dogs don’t have weddings, but would you like to know who your mate will be?”
Hreapha was not able to declare that she already knew, so she silently participated with her paw as the planchette spelled out the letters Y-O-W-R-F-R-O-W-R. Robin attempted to pronounce it: “Yowrfrowr! That’s a cute name for a dog! Do you know any dogs named ‘Yowrfrowr’?”
Hreapha moved the planchette to “Yes.”
“Hey!” Robin exclaimed. “You can talk! You can answer yes or no questions. Are you and Yowrfrowr really, really good friends?”
“Yes.”
“Does he live somewhere around here?”
Hreapha moved the planchette to “No.” Of course it was relative: “around here” could possibly mean Stay More, miles and miles away.
“Do you like Sugrue?”
That was easy. “No.”
“He’s not going to live much longer, is he? I was playing the Ouija Board with him when you came back with Robert, and we asked it if he was going to get well, and it said No.”
The planchette was still resting on the “No,” and Hreapha tapped it with her paw.
“Could we ask the Ouija Board how much longer he’s going to live?” she suggested.
Hreapha was not comfortable learning so much about the future, but she consented, and they jointly “rode” the planchette as it moved to the 1 and circled it, meaning 11, then to the two and the three. 1,2,3. Maybe the planchette was just proving it knew the basic numbers. Did it mean that he was going to live for 123 days? No, it had circled the one, doubling it, so that would be 1123. That many days?
It was Robin who figured it out. “I think it is just trying to tell us the month and the day. Eleven twenty-three. The eleventh month is November. Sugrue will die on the twenty-third of November.”
“Hreapha,” Hreapha commented, meaning I can hardly wait.
But Robin said, “I don’t want him to die. If he dies, we are going to be in trouble.”
“Hreapha,” Hreapha said, meaning, That remains to be seen.
“Okay, let’s ask it who I am going to marry,” Robin suggested. And she put her fingertips on the planchette along with Hreapha’s paw. The planchette moved quickly to the letter A but stalled there and would go no further. They waited and waited, and then the planchette moved its way to the word that spelled “Goodbye.”
“Well, goodbye yourself,” Robin said to the Ouija Board, and put it back in its box.
In the weeks ahead, Robert grew so rapidly that both Hreapha and Robin had their hands full with his education and training. There is a natural antipathy between felines and canines and Robert did not like Hreapha, avoiding her and sometimes even hissing at her. But they were bedmates, the two of them sleeping every night with Robin on the aired-out feather mattress, while the man continued to sleep on the pallet on the floor, which he frequently marked, requiring its daily airing out.
The nights were beginning to grow cold, so Hreapha appreciated that she was able to get under the covers with Robin, even if she had to share the covers with a creature who was so thoroughly nocturnal he couldn’t sleep at night, and did most of his sleeping in the daytime. But Robin took him to bed with her every night anyway, and fell asleep herself with one arm around Robert and the other around Hreapha, whereupon, as soon as she was asleep, Robert would begin pestering Hreapha, hissing in her ear and nibbling on her flews, and trying to get Hreapha to fool around. By day, when Robin was playing with Robert (she seemed to have forgotten her paper dolls and her paper doll town), it was fun to watch the kitty rough-housing and running around, but at night the kitten was a nuisance. Hreapha endeavored to teach the kitten her own language, but the kitten wasn’t interested and would not respond to any instruction or commands that Hreapha tried to give him.
One instruction that was imperative, and to which Hreapha devoted considerable time, with some help from Robin, was letting Robert understand in no uncertain terms that he was not to chew upon any of the baby chicks. Even though there was a great surplus of them, since both roosters had been busy fertilizing the hens, and the hens had sat upon and hatched countless eggs, and there were chicks of various ages all over the place. Robert loved to chase them, which was permissible, and to catch and play with them, which was all right up to a point, but Hreapha knew that if he ever killed one he would become hopelessly feral and bloodthirsty, and she did her best to prevent that from happening. Robert loved water, and his favorite swimming place was Hreapha’s water dish, which made the water taste off.
One night, the last night of that autumn when it wasn’t too cold to swim, and the moon was full so that a kerosene lantern wouldn’t be needed, Robin got out the Ouija Board just long enough to ask Hreapha a yes-or-no question. “Should we take him to the beaver pond?” After some deliberation, realizing that Robert might grow up to get along with the beaver if he was introduced to them at an early age, Hreapha moved the planchette to “Yes” and they escorted Robert to the beaver pond. Since neither Robin nor Hreapha could communicate with the beaver in their language, they had a bit of a problem persuading the beaver that this kitten, who was their natural enemy, only wanted to use the pond for bathing purposes. But after a while they accepted him, or at least tolerated his frisky plunge into their pool. Both Hreapha and Robin joined him, although Robin shrieked with the coldness of the water. They didn’t have to worry about the man coming and finding them.
The man spent nearly all of his nights, and most of his days, in a state of constant drunkenness, getting up from the pallet or the davenport only to grab his crutches—he had fashioned a pair of crutches out of saplings—and hobble off to the outhouse, the only exercise he got, which was futile, because he was rarely able to leave anything behind at the outhouse. He seemed to have forgotten that Hreapha existed, never speaking to her or trying in his garbled speech to give her a word, kind or unkind, and she realized eventually that he probably couldn’t even see her; in addition to his other afflictions, he was going blind, or, if not blind, his vision was blurry and doubled: Robin told Hreapha that he had begun to think that there were two Robins, twins, or close look-alike sisters.
I have lived not because of you but despite you, Hreapha once said to him, but of course he couldn’t hear her. She could not understand why she still felt any sense of duty or fidelity or any need to provide protection for him. It was probably just inbred.
But it was strong enough that she was torn with guilt when, eventually, she realized that she could no longer ignore the intensity of the new bodily feelings that overwhelmed her and left her markings with a musky new aroma. She was going to have to abandon him again, at a time when he might really have need of her. She would be leaving Robin too, and Robert, and all the poultry who depended upon her protection, but they did not disturb her as much as her forsaking him did. She went out to the cooper’s shed and had a long chat with the in-habit, making sure that she understood his directions on how to find that trail that led to Stay More and how to stay on the trail if the trail no longer existed. Once again he warned her that she’d probably kill herself trying the trail, but he understood her desperation.
She wished there were some way she could explain her journey to Robin. Although she was smart enough to use the Ouija Board’s “Yes” and “No,” she was not smart enough to spell out words, to formulate language on the Ouija Board that would say, Robin girl, I am going to have to go away for two or three days. You know about Yowrfrowr? Well, he has something that I have to have.
There was nothing at all she could do. She had trouble enough explaining to her own in-habit that she was going to have to go away for a while. She cursed her body, she cursed her afterplace, she cursed her aromatic pee, but she went on peeing it, and then, one morning bright and early, all she could do was say to Robin, “Hreapha!” meaning, Goodbye for now, my dearest friend, I hope to see you again in a couple of days, three at the most.
And then to start trotting southward. Robin and Robert both tried to follow her, and she co
uld only turn and yell, “HREAPHA!” meaning, I’m not going to the beaver pond. I’m going to Stay More.
And then to run so fast that they could not keep up with her.
Part Three
Without
Chapter twenty-one
They let him go, and he sure went. The first thing he done, which was the reason he’d come back to Harrison in the first place (you can bet your life it wasn’t to see that crabby old grass widow he was married to) was to take his pickup to the used car lot and trade it in on a four-wheel drive. It was a trade-down, naturally, and he wound up with a piece of junk that reminded him of that bald-tired four-by-four his opponent had been a-driving, only his tires had good treads on them. So he could get to places that he hadn’t been able to reach with two-wheel drive. Many a time he’d been required to either turn back, on some hairpin climb in Searcy County or Newton County, or else strike out on foot for the rest of the way, and usually only to discover after a long hike that the supposed abandoned house had fallen in completely or was still just a-setting there empty except for rats and mice.
You’d be surprised how many empty houses there is at the end of the road all over the Ozarks. It kind of made Leo sad, at the thought that families had once lived there, and children had played, and people had worked hard to squeeze a living out of their rocky acres, only to have it come to nothing. Leo wondered what had become of them. He knew most of ’em had probably gone to California, like everbody else. Or else they’d moved into one of the big towns like Springdale or Fayetteville or Harrison, and enjoyed the comforts of city living. It was a real shame they’d never been able to find a buyer for their house, and Leo found a few houses that was really in pretty fair shape, and he even imagined himself taking possession of one of them. In fact, Leo entertained himself as he roamed the highways and byways (he didn’t much care for music or gospel preachers on the pickup’s radio) by having daydreams of moving into one of those abandoned farmsteads.
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