With

by Donald Harington

  Dadblast it, this aint a smokehouse, you idjits, said that voice she’d heard when she was curing the pork. And then the voice began coughing. She thought that was funny, that an invisible spirit which had no body and no lungs and no throat to cough with, would be coughing at the smoke. It made her cough too, but she had lungs and throat.

  “Are you really coughing?” she asked. “Or just faking it?”

  I’m jist a-making out like it, he said. Paw would skin ye like a hog if he knew you was smoking up his workshop thisaway.

  “He started the fire, not me,” she said and pointed toward the house where Sugrue had gone. She wondered if the spirit could see her point.

  He is a miserable cuss, aint he? Bad enough when he could talk plain, much worser since he caint.

  “How old are you?” she suddenly wanted to know.

  Me? I reckon I must be about three, four years older’n you, gal.

  “Is your name Adam?” she bravely asked.

  How’d ye know?

  “Sugrue told me how this place had belonged to the Madewells, and they had a boy named Adam. Do you just live out here in this shed all the time?”

  Why, no, I wouldn’t rightly call it such as that. But you’uns has stuffed my room with all them boxes and bags and such that a body couldn’t turn around in there.

  “The storeroom was your bedroom?” she asked.

  Not was but is.

  “I can’t see you, you know,” she pointed out. “And I think maybe I’m just imagining you. Maybe I’m just going crazy because Hreapha is lost.”

  Aw shoot, that dog aint lost. She’s just gone down to Stay More for a visit with her friends.

  “Really? Whenever I talk about Hreapha, Sugrue always says ‘Pigeon eat.’”

  Her invisible friend Adam laughed. It was a boyish laugh that was more than just the kind of giggle that Jimmy Chaney made when he laughed. Don’t he have a lot of trouble talking, though? I reckon what he was trying to say was ‘Bitch in heat.’ He was just trying to tell you that she’s having her time of estrus.

  “What does that mean?”

  There was silence, and then he said, Darn, you’re a-makin me blush. It aint fitten to talk about, but you know what she-dogs and he-dogs do when they get together?

  She thought about that for a while, and then she smiled and said, “Oh. So maybe she’s just gone to Stay More to see her favorite he-dog, Yowrfrowr.”

  That’s the one, he said. I had to tell her how to get there, because it’s a long ways over the roughest country you ever seen, and I aint even so sure she could’ve made it.

  “I feel a lot better, knowing she hasn’t been eaten by a bear.”

  Aint nothing ever going to eat that dog.

  “I’m sorry we’re smoking up your father’s workshop, but I don’t know what else to do.”

  Our smokehouse aint standing no more. It was right over yonder. She could not see the way he was pointing, if he was pointing. So I don’t reckon it will do no harm to Paw’s shop if you just go on and smoke your hog in here. But you caint stay awake all night tending the fire, so I’ll help ye with it.

  “Thanks so much,” she said. And that night she put more chips and corncobs on the fire and watched to be sure it would keep burning, and then she bundled up in her thickest jacket and with a blanket and pillow made herself comfortable outside the cooper’s shed but close enough to keep an eye on it. And she eventually drifted off to sleep, with Robert joining her under the blanket. Sometime late in the night or early morning she was awakened—maybe Robert did it—she was awakened by something and saw that the fire was dying out, and got up to add more chips and cobs to it.

  She smoked the meat for nearly three days, until it was good and dark reddish-brown. Every time the fire was getting too low while she slept, she would be awakened again, but her new friend never spoke, although she occasionally called to him, saying “Hello?” This bothered her, and she wondered if he was tired of talking to her. Or if she had said anything to bother him. Eventually she decided that he wasn’t really there, that she had just imagined him, that she had been talking aloud to herself.

  When the smoking of the meat was all finished, and she had hung it up to keep in the storeroom, she returned to her neglected paper dolls. It was hard to play with her paper dolls when Robert was in the house, because he’d mess up her paper town of Stay More, which she had laid out so carefully and populated with dozens of paper dolls named Ingledew and Swain and Whitter and Duckworth and Coe and Dinsmore and Chism and so on. Now she wanted to put into the Stay More schoolhouse a paper doll named Adam Madewell, and she tried to imagine what he looked like. If he was three or four years older than she, he’d be twelve years old and in the fifth or sixth grade.

  Late one cold afternoon Robin was standing on the porch of the house, admiring the pretty colors in the distant trees and in the yard, where a giant maple had turned bright red, when suddenly she heard, far out across the way, the name of her dog announcing her return home. Robin’s heart nearly exploded with joy. And then she saw the dog, limping slowly across the field. Robin ran out to meet her.

  “Hreapha!” Robin shouted gleefully.

  “Hreapha,” said the dog, and while there was happiness in the way she said it, there was also a kind of pain too, as if something was wrong with her.

  Robin reached Hreapha long before Hreapha could reach her. And Robin knelt to hug the dog, but did so gently, astonished to see how hurt the poor dog was. “Oh, Hreapha,” she cried, “what has happened to you?” And found herself astonished that she expected an answer, as if her friend could tell her the story of her adventure.

  Hreapha could not even say her name. She could only whimper.

  “Let’s get you some food and water,” Robin said, and tried to pick her up to carry her to the house, but Hreapha struggled and whined and had to be put down. So Robin walked slowly as Hreapha limped onward to the house, where Robert was so thrilled to see her that he forgot he hated dogs and jumped on her back and began licking her. Robin drew a bucket of water from the well and rinsed Hreapha’s big plastic water dish, which Robert had been using as a wading pool, and then held Robert back while she filled it so Hreapha could have a drink.

  For several days Hreapha did not feel like doing anything. Robin made a pallet for her with an old blanket on the floor beside the living room stove, which she kept running day and night. She had a practiced swing with the axe, and was very good now at splitting firewood. Day by day the weather grew colder; there were even dustings of snow. On one of her trips to the woodpile, Robin stopped in at the workshop/smokehouse and said, “Hello? Adam? Would you like to come in the house and keep warm?” She waited a long time for an answer, but it never came, and made her realize that Adam was just a figment of her imagination, whose voice had come to her only when she was in desperate need of help.

  She didn’t need any help now. She kept everything going. She had always been strong-willed but now she had to be stronger than ever. Her appetite had returned with Hreapha’s return and she did a good job in the kitchen, although Sugrue didn’t much care for anything she tried to fix for him. She wondered if there was something in whiskey that was nourishing and a good substitute for food. She learned all on her own how to make a good ham omelet, with onions that had been dried from the garden, and it was so tasty she had it several times a week. She always ate too fast, much too fast, but simply assumed that was because her appetite was good. She appreciated that there was no one to remind her to wash her hands before supper, although she wished her mother was still around to nag her about it, and she thought of her mother when she usually washed her hands anyway. She wished her mother could be there to praise her for being clean and to sample her cooking. After enjoying a scrumptious ham omelet, she followed it up with one of her desserts: using the box of mix according to instructions, she made perfect fudge brownies. A month earlier Sugrue had shown her the location of a grove of pawpaw trees and they had brought home a couple of
sacks full of them to ripen, and there were still a few that were ripening, and she had learned almost to like them as a kind of inferior banana. No, she didn’t need any help. She looked at herself in the mirror one morning and decided, “I don’t look like myself.” What she meant was that whatever self she had been thinking of herself as having was no longer there. Maybe her mother wouldn’t recognize her. Whatever remained of her human self she now projected into her paper dolls, so that she became each of the citizens of her little town of Stay More and fabricated their lives for them, and did a passably good job of having them speak to each other. Hreapha and Robert always seemed to enjoy listening when she was talking in the voices of the citizens of Stay More as they lived through their lives. She wished her mother could listen to her talk about Stay More. Almost as much as missing her mother, she missed comic books, even more than she missed movies and television, and she took it for granted that she might never again see a comic book, so she would have to make up replacements for them.

  The only drawback to her fabulous world of paper Stay More was that she had to do it all alone, even if Hreapha and Robert watched and listened. She really did not like playing alone. In fact she hated it. One day when Hreapha was feeling much better, Robin got out the Ouija Board again and got Hreapha to put her paw on the planchette and they asked a lot of easy, random questions, such as “Is there a Tooth Fairy?” (“NO.”) And “Will Santa Claus be able to find his way to us out here in the woods?” (“NO.”) And “What month is this?” (“N-O-V-E-M-B-E-R.”) And “What day of the week is this?” (“T-H-U-R-S-D-A-Y.”)

  And then some questions like, “Did Hreapha find Yowrfrowr down in Stay More?” (“YES.”) “Did they have a happy time together?” (“YES.”) “Did Hreapha have a hard time reaching Stay More?” (“YES.”) “Did Hreapha have a hard time coming home from Stay More?” (“YES.”) “What happened?” (“C-O-Y-O-T-E-S.”)

  “My gosh,” Robin said not to the Ouija Board but to Hreapha. “Were you attacked by coyotes?”

  Hreapha moved the planchette to YES.

  “You poor thing,” Robin said, and thought about it and wished that Hreapha could give her details. “I guess you’re lucky they didn’t eat you.” Robin had searched Hreapha’s hide thoroughly, hunting for ticks (the best thing about the coming of cold weather was that the ticks and chiggers went into hibernation) and also for any wounds: she had found a few deep scratches and had used ointment from the first aid kit on the worst ones.

  Robert didn’t like being excluded from their Ouija Board game, so Robin decided to see if she could teach them how to play Hide and Seek. Hreapha caught on very quickly, although Robert was too impatient to wait while he was “it” to give the other two time to hide. There was no way to explain it to him, so they just had to play along with his finding one of them before they became hidden. Still, it was fun, and Hreapha apparently seemed to enjoy it a lot, it was the first fun she’d had in a long time.

  While looking for a place to hide, Robin found a book or booklet about three times as thick as a comic book, called Nudist Moppets. Somebody had sure been looking at it a lot; it was all smudged and the pages were bent and crumpled and coming apart. It was nothing but pictures, hundreds of pictures of boys and girls without any clothes on. When the game of Hide and Seek was over, Robin curled up on the davenport to study the book. She didn’t have much time before dark. She had made a decision never to light any of the kerosene lamps except in emergencies. The days were growing shorter and it was getting dark earlier, and she and Hreapha simply went to bed when it got dark, and even Robert was learning how to ignore his nocturnal habits and join them in bed.

  Now she had just a little while to study all the pictures before darkness fell, and even without words it was a form of entertainment such as she had been missing for a long time. She had not held a book or booklet in her hands for ages. Most of the kids in the pictures were near her age, some of them older, some younger, and she could identify with them and even envy their freedom to sport and play and mix with each other without any modesty. Some of the boys had weenies that were not just hanging down but sticking out! Robin turned the page and found a picture in which one of the girls had her fingers wrapped around a boy’s hard weenie. She tried to imagine what it would feel like to hold a weenie in your hand, especially if it was not limp like a hotdog weenie but hard and stiff.

  Then she turned the page and got a real shock. The same girl who had been holding the boy’s weenie had put it in her mouth! None of her friends had ever said anything about such a thing as that or what it was called or whether any of them had ever done it, probably because they didn’t even know about it. Robin wondered how much the girl and boy were really enjoying it or whether they were just doing it because some man with the camera was making them do it so he could take their picture. Their faces both looked as if they were in heaven, and Robin wondered if it felt better for the boy or better for the girl.

  Then it was too dark to keep looking at the book. She put it back where she found it, and she told Hreapha and Robert it was time for bed. She put more wood in the woodstove and turned the dampers so the wood would burn very slowly all night. It was going to be the coldest night so far, and Robin was glad to have her dog and kitty help her warm the cold sheets of the bed.

  While she tried to drift off into slumberland, she found herself doing something that she had not done for years, although according to her mother she’d done it all the time when she was small: sucking her thumb.

  Chapter twenty-three

  Boy howdy but wasn’t it a pure marvel how some mornings you could wake up without any sign or trace whatsoever of any bodily ailment? It was almost as if his fairy godmother—if she still cared for him at all—had passed her wand over him and taken away all his afflictions. Not only that, but the Lady had left him with the first genuine hard-on he’d had in recent memory. Not only that, but he hadn’t bepissed the pallet during his sleep. Not only that but he had no urge to reach immediately for the bottle of Jack D. Not only that but he practically leaped up from the floor and did a little jig just to show that he could use his legs just fine. He felt wonderful…although previous experience had learned him to tone down his joy because it wouldn’t last more’n a few days at the most, if that. Probably this was his last great bout of feeling fine before the final return of the disease which would wipe him out.

  But as long as he was feeling so fine, he might as well make the most of it. He gave his pecker a pump or two just to make sure it wasn’t a-fooling him, and then he headed for the bed, to enjoy at last the fruit of all these labors. The girl was surrounded by her pets, old Bitch and that darned bobkitten, all three of ’em sound asleep. “Good morning!” he said loudly and cheerily, to demonstrate that even his power of talking had returned. All three of them woke up at once and all three of them stared at his revivified pecker. Bitch said “HREAPHA!” The bobkitten said “WOOO!” Robin said “That’s a big weenie you’ve got.”

  “Hey Sugar,” he said, “let’s shoo these animals out of here so we can have us a little fun.” And he gave Bitch a swat on her tail to make her jump out of the bed. Then he picked up the bobkitten to toss him off too, but the damn critter bit him! “Shit on a stick!” he hollered and flung the cat away. Then Bitch chomped him around the ankle; she didn’t sink her teeth into his flesh but she held on and he couldn’t shake her loose. “Damn it, Bitch, leggo!” he hollered, and tried to pull her loose from his ankle. Here come the bobkitten again, a-clawing its way up his back! “Git him off me!” he ordered Robin, who climbed out of bed and detached her bobkitten from his back.

  By the time that he had got loose from the animals, Sog was dismayed to see that his erection had flopped. And Robin was laughing. He was mighty pleased to hear her laughing such a sweet laugh for the first time, but he felt she was amused by his drooping piece.

  “What’s so damn funny?” he said.

  “They were protecting me,” she said proudly. “You were getti
ng ready to fuck me, and they knew it, and wanted to protect me!”

  “You’ll need all the protection you can get after I’m gone.”

  “You can talk right again,” she observed. “You must be feeling well enough to go someplace.”

  “I aint going nowheres,” he said. “But I’m not long for this earth.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “This morning I’m feeling hunky-dory, but it’s just a sign. It’s a sign that my days is numbered. It’s Mother Nature’s way of tellin me that the worst is yet to come, and we’d better get ready for it.”

  He put on his overalls and marched out to the kitchen and fixed them a big breakfast of pancakes and bacon, having to slice up a bacon slab. “How come you aint been carving up the bacon slabs?” he asked Robin.

  “You know I can’t cut meat very well,” she said.

  “Time you learned!” he thundered, and before the morning was over he had learned her how to carve meat. He also learned her how to tie her shoes. Then he took her out to the chopping block and said, “You’re pretty good with the axe, aint you? Well, just play like this here stick is the neck of a chicken and see if you caint cut it in two.” She was real handy with the axe and could cut sticks just fine, but when he told her to grab a chicken and do the real thing, she had problems. She had trouble chasing down a chicken to catch. “Don’t chase ’em,” he advised. “Just sort of sidle up to a flock of ’em and reach down slow and grab one.” It took three attempts before she could hold on to one and bring it to the chopping block. “Now,” he said, “just hold its head down and pretend its neck is one of them sticks you just split.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t do it.”

  “You’ve got to,” he said. “You’ll never be able to cook fried chicken or roast chicken or chicken n’ dumplings if you can’t kill the damn chicken in the first place.”

  It took him a long time to persuade her to give it a try, and she botched the first attempt so he had to finish it himself to put the hen out of her misery. Then he insisted she try again with another hen, and he didn’t care if they had to slaughter every damn chicken on the place until she got the hang of it. But she managed to kill the chicken the second time, although she still screeched and squealed while the headless body was flopping around in the yard.