With

by Donald Harington

  He helped her with the work of plucking the feathers and scalding the birds and showed her the best ways to carve up the chickens. They had two fine big fat hens which would furnish them with plenty of good eating for a while. He was getting tired of pork himself.

  While dressing the poultry, he realized that he had never bothered to dig up his sweet potato patch, so right after lunch he took Robin out there and showed her how to dig the yams. She wore her boots and her cute pair of denim overalls, but the tater-fork was just too much for her; she just lacked the body weight to force it into the soil. “Next year you’ll be bigger and heavier and maybe you can work the fork into the earth. Also it helps if you do it after a rain when the earth is softened up.” He went ahead and did the spading himself and let her dig the big sweet potatoes out of the ground, more than a bushel of them, enough to get her through the winter and spring. He took one of the mature yams and explained how she should save it for next year’s crop, and how to poke nails in the side of it to suspend it in a jar of water until it rooted its slips. “Can you remember how to do that come next spring?” he asked.

  “I think so,” she said.

  As long as he was feeling so healthy and strong, he decided it would be a good thing to fell a few more trees so Robin could have a supply of logs to chop for firewood. In another year she might be big enough to force a tater-fork into the earth but she wouldn’t be big enough to cut down a tree by herself. He took her along that afternoon to watch him so she could see how it was done, if she ever got big enough to do it. With his crosscut he felled half a dozen oaks and maples not too big to drag back to the house, and she helped him drag them. It was a crisp autumn day, most of the color gone from the woods but the sky bright blue and the air not too cold. They found the tracks of bear, wild turkey, deer, possum, coon, porcupine and etsettery, and he learned her how to identify the tracks and even how to tell the difference between those of a buck deer and those of a doe. They also found some pecan trees, one of them a big one that had shed considerable amounts of its nuts that were just waiting to be gathered, and later on they could fill nearly a whole toesack with them. While he worked that day he told her helpful and philosophical things she ought to remember, that he’d been thinking about while he couldn’t talk. Such as, everything in this life worth getting requires being stung a few times. But just as you can ease the sting of a bee by applying the crushed leaves of any three plants, you can always find something in nature to ease the aches and pains of life. Howsomever, there aint no cure for cancer, the common cold and whatever the fuck has been a-bugging me for the past several months. You have to take the bitter with the sweet. You can’t get something for nothing. But be careful what you wish for because you’re liable to get it and not want it. We have all been sentenced to a life sentence in the prison of life, and there aint no parole.

  But he realized that she wouldn’t remember all that stuff. So that evening before it got dark he took the last paper sacks which she hadn’t already cut up into paper dolls and he borrowed her scissors and cut up some rectangles like sheets of writing paper and he told her to write down these things so she could remember them: Time once gone caint never be got back again. Pawpaws make fair catfish bait. Life is like a dead-end road: it don’t go nowhere and when it gets there it aint worth the trip. For a bad cough, just gather you a bunch of pine needles and bile ’em down with some molasses. People aint no damn good, and like medicine have to be took in small doses. Don’t never drop your broom so it falls flat on the floor, and if you do drop it don’t never step over it; if you do it means you won’t be able to keep house worth beans. Disappointment comes in all shapes and colors; the least ugly is called pleasure. Laugh before it’s light, you’ll cry before it’s night. If you sing before breakfast, you’ll be crying before suppertime. If you hear the firewood a-singing and a-popping and a-cracking, it’s a sure sign that snow’s about to fall.

  He went on and on, until Robin protested, “We’re using up all the paper. There won’t be any left for my paper dolls.”

  “Okay, I’ll hush,” he said. “I need just one last piece of paper, and I’ll tell you what for. I’ve been feeling pretty good today, and like I say it’s probably Mother Nature’s way of telling me that the worst is yet to come. And when it comes, I may not be able to speak at all or even grunt. So I have to write my last words to you on this last scrap of paper, and here they are.” He took the pencil from her and block-printed the letters: SHOOT ME. He showed them to her. “The time might come when I’ll have to show this to you because I caint talk at all, and you’ll have to do it. You can use the shotgun or the rifle or the handgun or whatever you want, but you’re gonna have to put me out of my misery.”

  “I won’t ever do that!” she yelled at him. “Don’t you ever tell me to do that!”

  He sympathized with her feelings and decided not to keep insisting on it right now. But soon he would have to force her someway to agree to it. He had thought about this a lot. Why couldn’t he just do the job hisself? Because, most likely, when the time came, he’d be too feeble and blind and shaky to handle any sort of firearm. Thinking about this so much, he had recollected that he had shot and killed that hermit named Dan Montross, not knowing at the time that he was the grandfather of the little girl he’d kidnapped and not knowing that his motive for kidnapping her was pure: to raise the child away from the evils of the world. It would be right and proper, Sog had decided, that he hisself be kilt by the same means that he had kilt Dan Montross. It would also be right and proper as well as practical for Robin to do away with the man who had illegally snatched her away from the world.

  There was so much to do, and so little time left. He had to take Robin up behind the house to the old orchard, help her pick a bushel or two of poor apples, which would at least do for drying and making cider and vinegar, and give her some hints on how to manage the orchard in the future, pruning it and grafting and such. She might even get some peaches and pears too if she took care of the orchard. Then he had to hurry. There was really just two more important things to do. He had to show Robin how to kill a deer and persuade her to do it, so she could have some venison. The meadow across from the house was often populated by a family of deer, and Bitch liked to get out there and mingle with them.

  Late one afternoon he took the .293 rifle and Robin and they went to the meadow and he showed her how to stand and how to hold the gun, and they didn’t have to wait too long before a young buck came out into the clearing, and he whispered, “Okay, aim for his chest.”

  “No,” Robin said. “He’s too beautiful to shoot.”

  By the time he was finished arguing with her, the buck had picked up their voices and run away. “Am I too beautiful to shoot?” he demanded. “Naw I aint, and you’d better believe that there are reasons for shooting something whether you like it or not.”

  The wonder dog, Bitch, one morning presented him with some junk she’d probably found in the cooper’s shed in the same place she’d found the scissors. It consisted of an old rough corncob on a stick, a rosewood striker, and a quarter-sawn striker block. Sog recognized at once that the contraption was a frictionwood turkey caller. “Good dog!” he said, and reflected that Bitch would take better care of Robin than he hisself could ever do. “We’re in business.”

  He persuaded Robin that turkey gobblers weren’t beautiful at all. They was, in fact, ugly, especially their red wattle. He got Robin to practice with the caller, showing her how to make it cluck and yelp and purr and even make the quaver of young hens. And then he took the shotgun and led Robin off to the woods (she had to make Hreapha and the bobkitten stay behind) and sure enough before the day was done she had learnt how to call a gobbler and then shoot the sonofabitch.

  “Hon, ask your Ouija Board if it’s Thanksgiving yet,” he requested, and she got out the board and they put their fingertips on the thing and it told them that Thanksgiving would be day after tomorrow. He helped her plan the menu for Thanksgiving: they would
have roast wild turkey stuffed with apples and cornbread, mashed potatoes and gravy, and for himself (if he felt like eating; his appetite seemed to be going away again) a mess of greens: turnip, mustard, etsettery. His eyesight was starting to go again too. His goddamn eyeballs seemed to be vibrating inside his head. He had considerable difficulty seeing well enough to crack and shell the pecans, but he got enough of ’em done so they could have roasted pecans as a side dish with the turkey, and also a pecan pie for dessert. He had to get out his crutches again to help him move around in the kitchen.

  He was proud of Robin, that she could do all those things, like roast a turkey. He tried to tell her so, but his voice was starting to disappear on him again. Too bad, because he still had so much to say to her. While he could still talk at all, he told her as best he could that he would tell her the location of a huge amount of money if she could agree to shoot him when the time came. Still she wouldn’t agree. He was starting to lose his temper. He was truly pissed that she couldn’t do this one simple little favor for him. He went ahead and showed her where the money-chest, the Sentry box, was buried under the front porch, but he decided to hold on to the key and offer it as a bribe when the time came that he needed to be shot.

  He didn’t know what time it was, or what day it was and even where he was at. She asked him, “Can Hreapha and Robert come to Thanksgiving too?” and that reminded him that it must be Thanksgiving. All his brains seemed to be turning into mush.

  In one hand he clutched a quart bottle of good old Mr. Daniels from Tennessee (where his forebears came from too). Maybe this was the last bottle he’d be able to drink, though there was enough more in the storeroom to pickle Robin until her middle age if she ever developed a taste for the stuff. He laughed. Or tried to. In the other hand he held the key to the Sentry and the scrap of paper that said for her to shoot him. Those three things was all he needed in the world.

  “Dinner’s ready,” she came and said to him, and helped him make his way to the table and sit down. There was a goddamn dog sitting in one of the chairs, and a fucking baby bobcat sitting in another one, and they both had little napkins tied around their necks. Or maybe he was just imagining it, because he couldn’t see worth shit nohow. Robin was talking to him but he couldn’t tell what she was saying.

  The dog and the kitty was staring at him. He tried to pick up his fork to start in to eating, but his hand shook so he couldn’t manage it. He wasn’t hungry anyhow. All he wanted was some more of this here bottle in his hand, which he could leastways hold steady to raise to his mouth.

  “We ought to say grace,” he heard her say. He tried to remember who Grace was.

  Nobody said her, so Robin came around and commenced feeding him, forking his food into his mouth until his mouth was filled and he tried and tried to chew and swallow, just to help out. But he couldn’t, so he had to just spit it out, and it splattered all over the table.

  It was time to go. Hell, it was long past time to go. He held up the sign that asked her to shoot him, and waved it back and forth in front of her face, and offered her the key, but she just shook her head and kept on a-shaking it.

  He realized he needed to piss, and not only that, he needed to shit. He grabbed his crutches and hobbled for the door, falling down before he reached it. She did her best to help him up. “You’d better sit down, Sugrue,” she told him.

  “Gotta go,” he managed to say, which was his next-to-last words. He struggled on out to the outhouse, and she went with him. He got her into the outhouse and dropped his overalls and said to her the only thing that would make any sense besides “Shoot me.” He grabbed the back of her head and said, “Sug my dig.” And there really wasn’t much that he remembered of this life after that.

  Chapter twenty-four

  Your own in-habit is always waiting for you whenever you meet up with it again, especially after a long absence. When she had come back from her long, terrible journey, her in-habit, which was now firmly and forever entrenched on these premises, had been happier to see her than even Robin had been.

  But she had discovered a strange and important thing about others’ in-habits. For whatever reason, someone else’s in-habit will appear to you—no, “appear” is the wrong word—will make itself known to you only when you are in great need of it. That was certainly true of the boy in-habit who had helped her find the scissors and the turkey caller and had given her such detailed but ultimately useless instructions on how to find her way to Stay More. He was a wonderful in-habit and she felt as if she were his dog as much as she was Robin’s and certainly much more than she was the man’s. And yet when she returned from her long rough journey, he had not been around to greet her. She had “looked” for him around the cooper’s shed, and had hreaphered for him a few times, but he seemed to have disappeared. Oh, of course, he was already and always disappeared, but his presence seemed to have evaporated. She had wanted to tell him that many parts of the trail he had used to get to Stay More simply no longer existed. She had also, since he seemed to be able to hear her as well as a fellow dog could, wanted to tell him that she was pregnant. It was an important announcement that she couldn’t communicate to Robin or Robert or her friends the deer or her friends the beaver or her friends the chickens. She wanted someone to know, although she herself was not at all certain who the father was, dear sweet Yowrfrowr or one of the pack of coyotes who had raped her on her way home.

  The trail to Stay More still existed in many places: she had watched for landmarks that the in-habit had told her to look for: a red bluff, a lone tall pine, a craggy gap through boulders, a steep slope of slate scree, a dark forest of hickory trees, a limestone ledge with a spectacular waterfall spilling over it and dropping fifty or more feet, a treacherous vertical path that she should skirt because she didn’t have hands for holding to the limbs beside it, the dark luxuriant holler or glen surrounding the run-off of the waterfall, and then, nearing Stay More, abandoned logging trails, abandoned pastures, abandoned orchards, abandoned farms.

  The last mile had been fairly easy, and even fun, although Hreapha realized that the entire route she had taken was simply not one that Robin could ever take, in order to escape her captivity, if that was her wish. Hreapha even doubted that Adam Madewell, if the boy were actually “around” today, could manage the journey that he had taken so often to reach the Stay More school. And she herself was nervous and disinclined to make the return journey when the time came. It would be mostly uphill going back.

  She had grown increasingly hungry, having been on the hike for two days and a night. The first day and night out, although she had sometimes detected actual remnants of the path once worn by the in-habit’s feet when he was a boy going to and from school, was confusing and difficult, and she had spent most of the cold night curled up in a cavern, not because she was tired yet or couldn’t see well in the dark, but because she had heard the coyotes, who were mostly nocturnal, and she did not wish to encounter them. She had tried her best to refrain from peeing, because she did not want to attract the coyotes with her advertisement or give them a trail to follow. Even so, on the second day out, one of them had picked up her scent and begun stalking her. She had become so increasingly desperate for mating that she was tempted to allow the coyote to catch her, but thoughts of dear Yowrfrowr made her seek to escape the coyote. In running as fast as she could to escape him, she had slipped on the slate scree and tumbled down a steep slope and landed in a briar patch that scratched her up badly, even bringing blood. But she had escaped the coyote, and after getting her wind back she ran onward, finding herself lost in the hickory forest, with only a vague sense of direction and no visual or olfactory clues. She tried to tune in to her old Stay More in-habit but it had long gone to the Madewell Mountain house, where its presence was sending her such strong signals that she was tempted to turn around and go home, even if she had to mate up with a coyote along the way. She had nothing against coyotes; their breeding was just as good as, if not better than, her own. In
fact, most of these local coyotes were descendants of the long-extinct red wolf, a magnificent dog. But she didn’t like the idea of quick mating with strangers, and after all, coyotes did not speak her language, or rather they spoke a form of it that was not at all intelligible to her.

  So she had gone on and managed to find her way out of the hickory forest. She had searched for but could not find the log which the in-habit had told her served as a footbridge over a little stream, so she had attempted simply to swim across in the frigid water, but she had been caught up in the current and thus discovered the fabulous waterfall by going over it! She had howled as she had fallen fifty feet to the pool beneath, had gone deeply underwater and struck herself on the bottom, losing consciousness. It was a wonder she hadn’t drowned. But when she had come to, she had found herself on the bank downstream in the glen of the waterfall, bruised and thoroughly wet and cold, but still alive.

  The rest of the journey had been fairly easy, although she was so sore she could hardly walk. And when, finally, she reached the dogtrot log cabin where Yowrfrowr lived with a thousand cats and a beautiful old lady, she could only weakly announce her name to him and then collapse at his feet.

  I’ll be jigswiggered! Yowrfrowr exclaimed. Will wonders never cease? I had given you up for permanently missing. Are you all right? And he licked her face.

  I’ve just made a trip, she said, such as you should hope you never have to make.

  For what reason? he said.