With

by Donald Harington

  Why, to see you, silly, she said.

  Oh, dear me, he said. I’m frightfully flattered.

  Yes, dear you, she agreed. But she didn’t feel like doing any more talking until she’d had some rest and possibly something to eat and drink. Yowrfrowr obligingly exhumed one of his favorite bones for her, and led her to the springhouse, where she slaked her thirst. She rested a while and then told him about some of her adventures on the hike down from the mountains, and told him also of her experiences at the old Madewell homestead, where her new mistress was a charming young girl named Robin, whom the man had kidnapped.

  Good heavens, Yowrfrowr commented. You’ve been living with a felon.

  She told him all the good things about the place, even including the nice in-habit who lived in the cooper’s shed, as well as the beavers and their dam, and the recently acquired bobcat kitten. She wanted to make life up there sound as exciting as possible, on the chance she could persuade Yowrfrowr to go home with her. She told him that the man was very ill and would probably not last much longer.

  But doesn’t the girl want to escape and go home? Yowrfrowr wondered.

  Probably, Hreapha admitted, but even if there was a way she could get out of there, and there isn’t, she’s having the time of her life and is starting to think of the place as her home. I have to get back to her as soon as I can, but I just had to see you. I have been dying to see you.

  May I guess why? Yowrfrowr inquired, and that was all that either of them had to say for the rest of the day and night. They found privacy at a distance from the cabin, and there they went through the ritual of positionings, almost like a dance. She displayed her swollen afterplace to him, with her tail held to one side, then stood motionless while he rose up and clasped her around her flanks, inserted himself and began thrusting. Her mother, in describing the act she could eventually expect, had warned her in advance to expect to find herself tied or locked at the afterplace with her mate after he had deposited his discharge in her. Her mother had told her that the climax of mating was called ‘getting off,’ but you don’t get off at all. You remain hooked together for a long time. And indeed, fifteen or twenty minutes passed before they could separate, whereupon they just lay snuggly cuddled and resting for a long time, talking about Stay More gossip and all the things that had happened on Madewell Mountain, until, after going to the springhouse for another long drink of water, they repeated the whole process.

  Hreapha spent the night, and, in fact, another night after that one…or maybe two. She was not bothering to keep count, but it seemed they made love at least half a dozen times, until finally she had no desire remaining. But she had no desire to leave, either. Yowrfrowr gladly agreed to accompany her on a kind of sentimental journey to her old home, which she found completely abandoned and uncared for. No trace of her in-habit remained there, but she could not help reflecting that her poor master, if he had stayed there, might not now be in death’s embrace. Conceivably, Hreapha could have lived out her life in this old place, happy with occasional visits to her beloved Yowrfrowr, without ever knowing of the heaven of Madewell Mountain. She began to talk to Yowrfrowr in earnest about the possibility that he might be able to join her permanently at the Madewell homestead. She stopped just short of actually begging him to go with her.

  You make it sound so wonderful, he allowed. I am greatly tempted. But you must understand how devoted I am to my mistress, and how crushed and desolate she would be if I left her, even with all those uncompanionable pussycats she has.

  I’ll miss you for the rest of my life, she whined.

  Godspeed and take care, he said.

  And after she’d left him, she reflected that he might have gone with her if she were still in heat and if he had not exhausted himself servicing her. He also might have gone with her if she had asked for his protection against the coyotes. She hadn’t even mentioned to him that there was a pack of coyotes roaming Ledbetter Mountain, which was the sister mountain to Madewell.

  When she stopped to pee, she was relieved to note that her marking no longer bore the sexual advertisement. That was some small comfort in the hideous hike, mostly uphill, that lay ahead of her.

  She had no idea how long it took her to get back home; certainly more than the two days and one night the downhill journey had consumed. It should have been easier because she had the guidance of her own scent on the trail as well as of her in-habit at the Madewell place, and if it hadn’t been for the damned coyotes she would probably have got home without much more difficulty than she had had leaving it. She heard them before she smelled them, late on the second afternoon out. And then she saw them. There were five males, smaller than German shepherds, long legged, dark furred, pointy eared. They were good-looking, even handsome. They lacked Yowrfrowr’s jovial bearing and shaggy casualness, especially his jaunty flopping ears, and certainly, when they began attempting to communicate their wishes to her, they lacked his elegance of speech.

  Her first instinct was to run, but, tired as she was already from her uphill hike, she doubted that she would get very far out of their reach. So she stood motionless, cringing and snarling. Leave me alone, she said. I’ve already been bred.

  They gave no sign of having understood her. Expressing their one-track minds in their guttural language, they began circling her, moving ever closer. Keeping her afterplace covered firmly with her tail, she breathed deeply, filling her lungs, deciding that she would not give in without a fight. But the wiser course would be at least to make an attempt to run away from them. When the alpha male raised a paw to begin mounting her, she bolted and ran harder than she had ever run, not uphill on the original path, but downhill, off into the woods. If only she could reach the waterfall again, she would gladly go plunging over the fall and into the pool, anything to get away from these lechers.

  But they stopped her before she could reach the waterfall. The beta male and the gamma male jumped her and held her while the alpha male got himself into position to copulate. She struggled and bit viciously wherever she could find a piece of coyote to bite upon. But the alpha male poked and poked and got off without becoming locked, and then the beta and gamma males each got on and got off inside her. She had no strength to resist further when the delta and epsilon males each took their turn.

  Eventually they just left her lying there on the ground. Their claws as well as their teeth had drawn blood on several parts of her body. It seemed that in their throaty voices they had debated with one another whether or not to kill and eat her, a fate from which she was saved when they caught wind of a passing deer and took off after it.

  She was not able to move for another night—or perhaps two—laying in a thick pile of autumn leaves which offered only a little protection against the below-freezing temperature. Then when she finally could attempt to get to her feet, she could scarcely move. An entire day was consumed in covering less than half a mile of the trail. She found sufficient water to drink but nothing to eat. She saw an abundance of rodents and other small animals but lacked the strength to chase and catch one.

  Thus she was truly starving and very cold when she finally reached the beaver pond, the first sign of home territory. Her beaver friends were solicitous about her welfare but she couldn’t communicate her mishaps to them. She rested a while with them and then finished the journey home, exulting “HREAPHA!” when she came in sight of the house.

  She was so very thrilled to be home again. She never wanted to leave. For days and days she was content simply to rest, keeping warm by the stove, sleeping for hours on end, enjoying Robin’s company and even Robert’s, and eating her fill of doggy nuggets. Apparently the homestead had survived intact without her during her absence, and even the chickens had not needed her supervision.

  The man was obviously on his last legs, although he had a brief, mysterious spell of apparent freedom from his afflictions, beginning with an obvious intention to put his miraculously restored manthing to use, an intention which required intercession from
both Hreapha and Robert. The moment of her seizing one of his ankles in her teeth to prevent him from assaulting Robin was the moment when she understood that her longstanding fidelity to him was at an end. But Hreapha was glad to get outdoors again when the man began giving Robin her final instructions. Hreapha watched sympathetically but fearfully as he taught Robin how to behead a chicken, and then as he tried to teach her how to dig sweet potatoes. Hreapha couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to eat a sweet potato, but when it came to digging up things she was as good as a spade or fork and she demonstrated this ability to Robin by digging up some of the tubers for her. She also accompanied them to the old orchard, but being unable to climb trees there wasn’t any help she could offer there. She kept her distance during their deer hunt, which she hated, and was terribly proud of Robin for refusing to shoot the young buck.

  She had not had any “contact” with the in-habit since her return from Stay More, but as she was walking by the cooper’s shed on her daily check-up on the henhouse, she heard a distinct Psst! requiring her attention. And there he was again, wherever he was. She could only hear his voice, They’s a right fine turkey caller my paw made out of rosewood and frictionwood which makes the most wondrous noises just like them wild turkey gobblers and hens, if you’d care to take it to those folks so’s they could get ’em a turkey for their Thanksgiving. Then he led her to the box in the cooper’s shed which contained the pieces of wood and the corncob striker. Thanks so much, Hreapha said, and delivered this gift to the man, and heard herself called “good dog” by him for the first time in her life. She was sorry that Robin made her stay behind when she went off to use the turkey caller and shoot her turkey.

  Hreapha had never eaten turkey before, but the smell of it when it was cooking in the old stove was certainly interesting, even savory. Hreapha understood how she was supposed to participate in this special occasion called Thanksgiving. She had no conception of any deity toward whom thanks should be directed, but she certainly was ready to thank Robin for working so hard in the kitchen to prepare this marvelous dinner, and she had no objection whatsoever when Robin wanted to tie a little napkin around her neck so she could climb up into a chair and sit at the table with the human beings…and with Robert, similarly attired.

  The man was obviously in such bad shape he couldn’t even feed himself, and when Robin tried to feed him he vomited the food all over the table. Hreapha’s heart ached for the way he had ruined Robin’s Thanksgiving. And then he began to shove that piece of paper in her face.

  Hreapha was a very smart dog but of course she was not able to read the letters that humans use to communicate on paper. She knew the basic words of the Ouija Board such as yes, no, and goodbye, but she could not decipher letters as such, and thus she did not know what was printed on the piece of paper which the man insisted on waving back and forth in front of Robin’s face. It was something he was trying to say to her, something that he was trying to get her to do. Hreapha found herself breathing hard and feeling distinctly uneasy when the man got up from the table, fell down, was helped up again by Robin, and hobbled on his crutches in the direction of the outhouse. Robin followed, and so did Hreapha.

  With the door to the outhouse not closed, and the afternoon light still strong enough to illuminate the scene, Hreapha could only watch with great curiosity and no little fear as the man dropped his overalls, took out his manthing, and forced Robin to put it into her mouth. Although in itself this did not strike Hreapha as exceptional (she had licked Yowrfrowr’s genitals, and he hers), it was obvious that Robin hated it. She beat against him with her fists until he had to let her go, and then he collapsed upon the seat of the outhouse. Sobbing, with tears running down her cheeks, Robin brushed past Hreapha and rushed to the house, and Hreapha started to follow, but Robin came back at once, carrying in her hands the instrument she had used to kill the turkey. It had two barrels. Robin pointed the instrument at the man and the instrument fired twice, knocking Robin backward to the ground. Hreapha rushed up to her, but could only lick her face as Robin lay there for a long time crying her heart out.

  Hreapha walked slowly to the outhouse and studied the man, who was sitting there with many holes in his body, through which blood poured. He may have been a bad man, a very bad man, but now he was not a man of any kind any longer. He was a corpse. Some part of Hreapha felt the loss of her master, but the ultimate measure of her smartness was that she understood that the man was now better off. And so were they all.

  Chapter twenty-five

  Readers who have been holding their breath in expectation that Sugrue Alan would cause some great harm to Robin Kerr—or vice versa—can now let out a long sigh. The bastard was terminated, and regardless of whatever mixed feelings were being felt by Robin, by that darling cur Hreapha, and by the devoted reader, I personally was glad, glad, glad, and I was making plans already to move from the barrel factory to the house, not that I preferred the house to the shed (shelter as such had no meaning for me) but I had deliberately stayed away from the house as long as Sog Alan was the occupant of it. And now the only house he occupied was the outhouse, which he would continue to occupy for years, actual years for heaven’s sake, although it would be only his skeleton residing there. Of course his body was too big for poor Robin to move, and I was powerless to give her a hand—I didn’t have a hand to give—and while she doubtless eventually (because of the smell, for one thing) thought of trying to pull the deceased off his throne and drag him to a burying spot, she realized that was simply beyond her strength. So she had to leave him there. She never used that outhouse again herself for the purpose of micturition or defecation, although there was, after all, an unoccupied hole, if she had been able to ignore the macabre. She simply squatted in the yard, as Hreapha did, as Robert did, confident that her privacy was not being invaded, oblivious to the simple fact that I could watch her, if I chose, because while I might not have possessed any of the handicaps of selfhood such as appetite, sleepiness, sensitivity to hot or cold, or the need to micturate or defecate, I did possess a certain sentience which gave me sight and hearing and speech. More about this later, but for now I was thoroughly aware of what was going on, and I did not avert my gaze when the little girl needed to go out, nor when the turkey vultures—or buzzards as we called them—soaring high overhead with their keen eyesight detected the carrion occupying the outhouse and made short work of removing the meat from the bones, so that in a matter of weeks there was not even an odor remaining.

  This is not to say that Sugrue Alan, although his flesh became birdfeed, did not have any sort of funeral. One of my earliest memories of the jerk was when I was in the second grade at Stay More—no, not exactly I but rather my person, the person who went to California at the age of twelve and left me, whatever sentient form I had, to take his place as enchanted habitant of these premises (I like Hreapha’s use of that term, in-habit, but it suggests that there might also be an out-habit), anyway, my person, while still living here and trekking eight miles each schoolday over that terrible terrain poor Hreapha had recently essayed, had been required by Miss Jerram, the teacher, to accompany all the rest of the pupils on a march up into Butter-churn Holler, to conduct a funeral for a mule named Old Jarhead, the work animal of a poor family of kids named Dingletoon, a mule senselessly beaten to death by a pack of punks led by Sog Alan. Miss Jerram forced the gang to dig a grave and bury the mule, and instructed various pupils, including Old Jarhead’s owners as well as her murderers, to speak solemn requiems for the departed. Even Sog himself, miscreant and bully, was required to speak, and began, “I never done nothing in my life that I was sorry for,” but paused and added, “until now.” And spoke a sincere apology, which moved my person, seven-year-old Adam Madewell, to giggle, this causing him to be beaten up later by Sog and his cronies.

  What my person—and I too, now—remembered most about that mule’s funeral was the singing, at Miss Jerram’s request, of a funeral hymn, a traditional dirge known to everyone at Stay
More, which consisted of several verses and a chorus at the end of each:

  Farther along we’ll know all about it,

  Farther along we’ll understand why;

  Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine,

  We’ll understand it all by and by.

  The death of Sugrue Alan needed some sort of closure, a funeral or a service of some sort—no one in those days in that part of the world would have understood or appreciated the so-called “memorial service” held nowadays with its gaiety and laughter and jokes and digs amounting almost to a roasting rather than a commemoration of the departed—a ceremony of some sort to solemnize and ritualize the fact of Sugrue’s death. Even I, at the age the “in-habit” was at the time of Sugrue’s death (and still was, forever)—twelve—understood enough of human nature, without even the faintest notion of what psychology meant, to realize that the only way for poor Robin to climb out of her deep distress and grief would be to speak and sing some manner of last offices.

  She was having a terrible time, and more than ever needed her mother and missed her terribly. Neither Hreapha nor Robert could console her; indeed, the very fact that they were animals seemed to highlight her awareness of being the only living human being on the mountain. It was almost as if she were the only person in the world. She certainly was the only person in the world of Madewell Mountain, and the only other person who had occupied that world had died at her hand. She was wracked with the ambivalence of having killed him as an act of mercy at his own request, but having been forced into that killing by his nastiness to her in his last moments. His attempt to make her “go down” on him did not in itself offend her—it wasn’t pleasant but it wasn’t unbearable—so much as his rudeness and desperation in insisting upon it. Was she able to understand that he had made the attempt not because he actually desired it, but because in his reduced condition it was the only thing his poor mind could conceive of which might compel her to do his bidding and shoot him? Probably not, but she knew that he had ceased, in his last moments, being the Sugrue that she had known.