The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  He went back to the truck and got the other crate and was even more careful transporting it, sweating and winded both, and especially careful along that ledge where he’d lost the first crate. The second crate contained a rooster, at least, and he could start in to breeding the flock right away, and as soon as the eggs hatched he’d have nearly as many as he’d lost.

  He reflected that all of this labor of hauling and carrying all the supplies for his new home had been a peck of trouble but it had slimmed him down a good bit. His beer gut didn’t hang out over his belt buckle anymore. His biceps were thicker than he’d ever known them to be. He was in good shape for doing the repairs that needed to be done on the house, which was the first big job as soon as he got the girl moved in and settled.

  He got the second crate of chickens to the house successfully and turned them loose beside the henhouse, then opened a bag of chicken mash and broadcast it liberally around the yard, near the henhouse. He didn’t intend to feed the chickens regularly, and had only one thirty-pound bag of mash. When that ran out, they’d have to learn to feed themselves on bugs and worms and whatever they could catch. But the mash would tell them that this was their new home and they’d better stay here and maybe they’d better cackle loud enough for those other chickens down below to come up and join ’em.

  Sog dusted his hands and made himself a little drink of Jack Daniels before going back for the davenport. He’d prefer to have his drink on the rocks, but the only rocks he was ever going to have up here was the real rock kind of rock. No ice. He sipped his drink and watched the chickens out in the tall grass a-scratching around for the mash he’d scattered. He hoped the girl would be partial to fried chicken as much as he was, and maybe even learn how to cook it. Serafina, his first wife, had been the best chicken-fryer in the country; must’ve been something she put in the batter. Fina had been just too good to last, and he’d had her for just a few years after he’d come home from Korea and found out her man Gene had been killed there, and had taken her and her sweet little daughter Brigit into his house. Brigit had been just five at the time, and he’d waited patiently for two years before he’d ever tried anything with her, and then he made sure that she really wanted to do it and that she understood it was just between him and her and never to be told to a soul, and he rewarded her as much as he could, and sweet Brigit had just loved him to pieces and was completely heartbroke when her mother decided to move on. Fina never found out about them. She just didn’t like living in a dying town like Stay More, and she didn’t think Sog had much future. At least that’s what she tried to say in the note that he found when he come home from work one day. He was so pissed he went out and wrote tickets all over the place, stopping everybody for everything, especially for driving one mile over the speed limit.

  He could still enjoy Brigit in his fantasies, although it had been fifteen years since last he’d enjoyed her in the flesh. The funny thing was, and this was something he’d been asking himself about, this girl of his dreams that he had found and was going to be moving into this house any day now didn’t look anything at all like Brigit. She was far lovelier, for one thing. Brigit had been real cute, black hair in bangs and a cute little mouth with just the right size lips, but this Harrison girl that was his truelove was just something else, completely.

  He finished his drink and went back for the davenport. It was clouding up and looked like it might come on to rain, which they sure needed. It hadn’t rained a drop so far this April. He told himself that if he could just somehow get that big couch into his new home, the very worst would be all over. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the davenport wound up in a treetop like the chicken crate, but he was bound and determined to get his dear mother’s favorite possession into his final home. The experience with the first crate of chickens was good in the sense that it had taught him there was no way he could get the davenport along that same narrow ledge. He had plenty of rope and was going to have to figure out a way to rig the rope over a tree limb on top of the bluff and tie it around the davenport and either swing the davenport over and across the ledge or else hoist it all the way up the bluff. But first he had to get the davenport through those ravines. He’d already carried the davenport upside down on his back to get it into the pickup, and he knew it weighed just about a hundred and fifty pounds. That wouldn’t break his back, stout as he was, but the footing was sure going to be tough going.

  It took Sog all of an hour to lug that davenport on his back down into and up out of the three ravines that had to be traversed before he could reach that precarious ledge. He was just climbing out of the last ravine, huffing and puffing and sweating like a studhorse, when sure enough it come onto a rain, just a light sprinkle at first. He told himself not to hurry because getting the davenport across that ledge had to be done carefully, but by the time he’d rigged his ropes and tied them proper and was ready to swing the davenport across, it had commenced to rain pretty steady and he sure hated his mother’s davenport getting drenched like that. In his impatience he climbed aboard the davenport and rode it as it swung across the ledge, and he grabbed aholt of a tree trunk on the other side, telling himself what a smart boy he was to have devised that system of ropes for getting the davenport beyond that ledge…although if it hadn’t worked he and the davenport both would have crashed a hundred feet down to the earth below.

  Getting the davenport the rest of the way through the forest was fairly easy and he cleared the front door of the Madewell house just as thunder crashed and a real toad-strangling downpour hit. He righted the davenport into its place in the living room, and admired it there for a long moment before he went to shut the front door and just as he did a flash of lightning illuminated a creature dashing into Madewell’s shop out across the way. The open-ended shed was the place where Madewell had rived his staves and assembled his barrels and buckets and piggins and churns, and it had a little forge in it for the metal bands. That creature wasn’t no wild beast of the woods. Damned if it wasn’t old Bitch, sure looked like. He wasn’t going out in this downpour to investigate. If she took a notion to come on to the house, he’d be nice to her. He wondered if maybe she’d never really left but had just been hanging around here waiting for him.

  Sog made himself another Jack D and sat on the davenport and enjoyed it. The davenport was wet but not too wet, and it would dry off. It was going to be real comfy a-sitting here with his truelove, and he could hardly wait to do it. After all this work, there were just two things left: holding the yard sale Saturday, and finding some way to take possession of his truelove. He wished he knew her name, so he could think of her by name instead of just “truelove.” He knew her last name, which was on their mailbox: Kerr. He hoped she would have a real nice first name. He sure didn’t have a very good one hisself, although his grandpap had explained to him that Sugrue, which was his grandpap’s family name, was a distinguished Irish name that went all the way back to the Irish Siocfhraidh, meaning victory and peace. Kids in school had started calling him Sog in the first grade, although the teacher called him Sugrue all the way through the eighth. He didn’t mind, except Sog sounded a little like soggy, which everything was getting in this downpour. He had told his second wife, Arlene, to call him Sugrue instead of Sog, but she had preferred to call him Daddy, though of course they never had any children, and she was just a overgrown child herself, which was probably what had drawn him to her in the first place. Every bit of thirty-five when she’d married him, she was just a little bitty old slip of a girl, flat-chested and baby-faced. She could have passed for ten or less. Most people thought she was his daughter, or even his granddaughter, for heavensakes. But she sure wasn’t innocent. Nor sweet. Nor fresh. She’d had a fairly wild past that he never learned all the particulars of, but he suspected she might even have been a whore at one time. He’d rescued her from a guy who beat her and was now serving time at Cummins. Worst of all about Arlene, compared with a genuine girlchild, was that she wouldn’t mind him; he never could tell h
er what to do, and she was headstrong and did as she pleased. Arlene hadn’t lasted as long as Fina before she commenced complaining that he simply couldn’t hold out long enough for her. She had a fancy name for it that she taunted him with: premature ejaculator. She said his fuse was too short. One day she said, “You go off too fast so I’m going off, period.” And she left him. Just like that. Fuck her.

  As the rain kept beating down, Sog figured this would be a good time to check the place for leaks. Gabe Madewell and his daddy Braxton who’d built this place had been real craftsmen, and the same tight workmanship they’d put into all those barrels and buckets and piggins and churns had gone into the house. The roof was covered with cedar shingles that Brax Madewell had rived with even more care than he’d rived his white oak staves, and those shingles was still tight and solid, although the ones on the north side was all covered with moss. Except for a couple of window lights that Sog was going to have to replace (and he had lugged in a box full of glass pre-cut to the exact size of the window lights), the house was tight, a miracle in view of how long it had been abandoned. Why hadn’t anybody ever wanted to take it over after Gabe Madewell left? Probably because they couldn’t find it! No, honestly, the only reason anybody would want the place, assuming they knew it was there, would be because of one of two things: either they wanted to become a barrel-maker like Madewell or, like Sog, they wanted it as a hideaway, a hermitage.

  There was, Sog discovered, one leak in the roof, which was coming down into the smaller bedroom which Sog was using entirely as a storage room, with boxes stacked to the ceiling, a ceiling which was steadily dripping water upon the boxes. Hastily Sog took a bucket and climbed his stepladder and positioned the bucket to catch the drip of the leak. He watched the bucket for a while to assure himself that it wouldn’t fill up and overflow for a good long time. Then he resumed his inspection of the house and took satisfaction in seeing that it was practically all ready for the arrival of his truelove. It was a good old house. They had everything they needed for years. And it was reasonably clean. When he’d first entered it, it had been inhabited by a pair of buzzards who’d laid their eggs right on the floor and hatched ’em and there was a bunch of godawful ugly baby birds a-screaming and also a-puking. One of them baby birds could hit you with puke from twenty feet away. Once he’d shot ’em or shooed ’em off, he had to clean up the terrible mess they’d left behind. Buzzards was the unsightliest, grossest bird on earth, and they’d probably flown in through one of those missing windows. Sog wasn’t superstitious, not compared with most of these here so-called Ozark hillbillies, and he didn’t believe the superstition that buzzards will puke upon any man who commits incest. It didn’t matter to Sog because he would never think of committing incest anyhow if he had a real daughter. But he did believe, or knew for a fact, that buzzards are a sure sign winter is over, that there will not be another freeze after buzzards are seen. It hardly ever froze in April anyhow, but Sog knew when he saw the buzzards that good times as well as good weather lay ahead. He also believed what was simply a matter of fact: buzzards will fly and soar and hover over anything dead.

  Late in the afternoon the rain stopped. Sog went out to the workshop, where he thought he’d seen Bitch disappear. She wasn’t there. Sog even peered into the two big barrels that for some reason Madewell had left behind and not sold with his other barrels. Sog intended to use one of them as an old-fashioned rain barrel, to collect water, although there was a good deep well behind the house, still with its operating pulley, to which Sog had attached a new chain and a new galvanized tin bucket. He didn’t think they’d ever run out of water, but wanted the rain barrel for insurance, and maybe just as a kind of tribute to old Madewell, who had made all of this possible.

  “Bitchie babe?” he called. But she wasn’t around. Maybe he’d just imagined her. Or maybe it was her ghost. Yeah, probably she’d been eaten by a coyote or a bear off in the woods and her ghost was here to keep him company. But just in case it was her, he opened one of the bags of Purina Dog Chow, filled a new plastic dish he’d bought in the pet aisle of a supermarket, and set it out for her.

  Then he hiked back to the pickup, and drove to Harrison. He checked the gas gauge and noted it was getting low. He didn’t need a full tank. He needed just enough to make this trip to Harrison, then one more trip to Stay More for the yard sale and one last trip to Harrison to pick up his truelove.

  Chapter six

  If you stare and stare at a mirror, and not because you’re getting dressed or fixing your hair, does it mean that you’re vain? She liked to just look at herself and try to imagine what she’d look like when she was eighteen or twenty. If she wasn’t badly mistaken, she would be a dish, which is what her grandfather often called her. Grandpa Spurlock liked to say to her, “Honey, you’re going to break hearts all over the place.” She’d had explained to her what he meant when he called her a bombshell, and she knew what he meant when he called her “cutie pie” and “turtledove” and “chickabiddy” but she had trouble understanding what he meant when he called her “jailbait” and especially when he called her a “killer,” because she couldn’t be blamed if somebody’s heart broke over her and they died. She would never deliberately kill anybody, although actually she might kill Jimmy Chaney if he didn’t back off. Today at school during that horrible thunderstorm he got very flirty with her and even talked nasty. Thunder petrified her, and Miss Moore had stopped teaching the class and allowed them to take cover in the cloakroom, and Jimmy had snuggled up beside her. He said he was going to crash the birthday party and sleep with her. Jimmy was really the only boy she liked, usually, but he was ill-behaved and unpleasant, the same as all boys are. And possibly he had a wicked mind. She would never forget the time last fall when he’d come over to her house after school, breaking the strict rule that she was never allowed any visitors—girl or boy—when her mother wasn’t there, and the fact that he wasn’t supposed to be there made her dizzy and so titillated she didn’t know what she was doing, and she probably encouraged him. He suggested that they ought to uncover their genitals and show them to each other. “Parts,” he had said, and maybe if he had used some other word she might have been willing, but the fact of the matter was that she didn’t have any parts. There was nothing there. This in itself didn’t bother her too much—she had taken shower-baths with her mother at a very early age and one time she and Becky McGraw had not only shown each other theirs but had drawn pictures of each other’s, so she knew this was a fact of the way all females were made, without parts.

  But she hadn’t wanted to compare what she didn’t have with whatever he did have. She’d never seen a part. She had heard several things it was called besides “part”—the thought of that word made her giggle at the idea that it could be replaced, like automobile parts. Becky said it was just called “thing.” Beverly knew it was properly called “doodad.” Gretchen had heard it referred to as “pecker.” Only Kelly had ever actually seen one, belonging to her father, and she said it was called “weenie” and attempted to describe it, and the two little pouches drooping from it, called, everybody knew, “nuts,” although sometimes simply “balls.” Robin had never seen a weenie and doubted that it looked anything at all like a hot-dog-type weenie, or frankfurter. Although blessed with a fabulous imagination, she had difficulty imagining what it looked like, and just out of curiosity she nearly allowed Jimmy to take down his pants. But instead she had told him that she was very sorry to have to tell him that they would both have to wait until they were much older before they could exchange peeks as he suggested. “You’re so smart you won’t ever have any fun,” he said.

  Once a couple of years ago while she was sitting on Grandpa Spurlock’s lap and he was telling her one of his stories—he told such great stories about the old-time folks who had lived in these Ozark mountains—she had noticed some kind of bump or lump beneath her bottom and reached down to squeeze it and ask, “Grampa, what is that?” And he had squirmed and got real red in the
face and said, “Aw, Cupcake, that’s jist my mousy. Don’t you be a-foolin with it.” And she hadn’t tried to squeeze it again. But later when her friends were talking about what a part could be called, she contributed “mousy,” although she didn’t say she’d learned it from her step-grandfather.

  She just loved Grandpa Spurlock. He was the only male she knew (including Jimmy and Mr. Palmer, her Sunday school teacher, and Dr. Vanderpool, her pediatrician) toward whom she really felt respect and affection. She knew he wasn’t really her grandfather but just married to her grandmother. Still, she felt closer to him than to her mother, who was so strict and distracted, or even her dear grandmother, who was so religious she had once told Robin she didn’t care what she did so long as she got into Heaven, by and by.

  The reason she was thinking of Grandpa this afternoon was not because of his mousy but because she was playing with her paper dolls, and every time she did that she thought of him, because one of her paper dolls was Grandpa Spurlock. It had been he who had given her a book of punch-out paper-dolls when she was four, and who, upon discovering that she liked to create her own paper dolls, had provided her with reams of paper and pasteboard with which to cut them out and clothe them. He had even given her a very good pair of scissors so that she didn’t have to use her mother’s, although her mother was very upset at the idea of Robin owning something so sharp and pointed. Although Grandpa Spurlock had also given her Paddington, her beloved teddy bear without whom she could not sleep at night, it was the paper dolls that really made her think of him, and even name one after him as a citizen, in fact the mayor, of her little town. Robin had created a whole village of paper dolls: men, women and children, families named White, and Brown, and Green, and Black, and Gray, and she had her hands full managing their wardrobes, not to mention inventing a life story for each one of them, and creating enough struggles and entanglements among them to give drama to her private world. Paddington sat in the chair opposite and watched her solemnly while she snipped and snipped and snipped. Her village, which was called Robinsville, even contained a paper bear named Paddington.