The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  At the moment of this perception, he took the person down off his shoulder and stood her on her feet and said to her, “Look, here comes our doggie!”

  And she ran to join them.

  She danced around them, jumping up and down continually, her tail going a mile a minute, her voice announcing her name over and over. But almost at once she saw that the little female person, the charming girlchild, was extremely unhappy. Hreapha could smell the girl’s unhappiness, and her fear and her panic.

  “Down, Bitch,” he said, and she stopped dancing. Then he addressed the child, “She shore aint much to look at, is she? But she’s the smartest dog ever there was. Now I aim to let ye walk on the rest o’ the way to our house yonder. I don’t reckon you’ll try to run away, now will ye? Just wait till ye see what-all I’ve got for you.”

  And then, with him leading the way and the girl following slowly behind, her back bent and her head down, and Hreapha trotting last, they made their way up to the house.

  “Why, lookee here,” he said, “I do believe all our chickens has done come home to roost. We’ll shore have all the eggs we can eat and plenty of fried chicken besides. And that rooster will get us out of bed in the morning.” He opened the door, and they all went inside the house. Hreapha could see the opened bag of commercial chow through the door to another room, and she couldn’t wait for him to dole her out some of it. “Now you jist sit here on the davenport and get comfy,” he said to the girl, “and I’ll make a little fire in the stove to keep ye warm. Are you chilly? And then I’ll scare us up some breakfast. How bout some pancakes and syrup?”

  The girl did not answer.

  “Jam or jelly or molasses instead of syrup?” he wanted to know. But she would not answer. “I reckon I could run out and see if our hens has laid any eggs yet, and fry you up a bunch of eggs, if you’d druther have ’em.” The girl made no response. “Listen, sugar, you got to eat you some breakfast and keep up your strength,” he said. “I’m starving myself.”

  The girl did not answer, so he disappeared into the kitchen and Hreapha listened to him banging around some pots and pans in there. Hreapha studied the girl, who looked as if she wanted to jump up and run out the door. Hreapha tried to understand who she was and what she was doing here. Could she possibly be his daughter perhaps, long lost and now home? Granddaughter, even? Was she conceivably a stray he had found somewhere, or who had followed him home? Part of Hreapha felt a certain jealousy, if not resentment. She knew she was going to have to share the place with this girl. But part of her felt a powerful sense of attraction and protection. The child was lovely, and innocent and uncorrupt, and potentially loads of fun. Hreapha wagged her tail and moved closer to the girl and nuzzled her ankle.

  The girl spoke her first words. “Get away from me!” And she kicked Hreapha, who whimpered and backed off.

  Chapter ten

  And he wapped a wag awound her eyes so she could not see. And he knotted it too tight. And the twuck started up and she could not tell where they were going. And she could not bweathe. And then he. And the twuck went on and on. O why is this happening why why why? And then he finally started to talk. “I don’t aim to hurt ye,” he said. And he said. He said. She could not see him in the dark. And she knew it was him. It was him who. But why? The twuck went on and on. Bouncy bouncing bouncy. And she tried to cwy but could not. Why not? She wanted to cwy but the gag in her mouth kept her from cwying, yeah, she would cwy except for the gag. But she could not cwy with her eyes either. And why? And she was just too scared to cwy. And no, and no, she had not cwied since she was three years old. A long time ago. Why? And she heard him talk again. “Are you cold?” And she would not nod or shake her head. She had stopped sweating. All that skating had made her sweat, was why she’d skated out onto the balcony to catch the breeze. And she heard him talk again. “Here, let me put this blanket on ye.” And she felt the blanket on her, which she did not need because she was still all wet with sweat and the twuck’s heater was running and it was hot. And she was too scared to cry. And in the dark she reached with her hand to feel for where the door was, and she reached for the door handle. And she heard him talk again, heard him yell, “Hey now! Don’t do that! Take your hand off there!” And felt him reach across and grab her hand. “You don’t want to be trying to open the door, honey. If you was to open the door and you was to try to jump out, it would kill you!”

  And the twuck went on and on. The woad was wough, the wough woad went up and down, the woad started to climb, and it climbed and climbed and she wondered if maybe they were on their way to Heaven, and maybe she had already died and he was some kind of angel who was taking her to Heaven, and there really was a God and God lived at the end of this climbing woad. Yes. But then she thought no, no, he was not an angel but the Devil and he was not taking her to Heaven but to Hell because she had committed the terrible sin of vanity, too gosh proud of herself because her skating made all the other girls look like clumsy yo-yos, which they were. None of them could skate backward as she could, no. Nor do heel-to-heel spins. She put them all to utter shame and now she was paying the price for her dazzle. That was why. And the twuck stopped. And she heard him talk again. “Now, sugar, I’m a-taking off the gag, though I cain’t take off the blindfold just yet.” And he took the gag out of her mouth. “You can scream if you take a notion, but won’t nobody hear ye. We’re way off away from everybody.” And she did not scream. She could not cry and she could not scream. And the twuck started to move again and it climbed and climbed and bounced and bounced and she could not imagine that there was a woad anywhere in the world that climbed and turned and twisted and bounced like this woad. And she heard him speak again, talking very loud over the sounds the twuck was making. “You can talk now, sweetheart. You can tell me your name.” And she could not talk. No talk. She would not talk. “My name’s Sugrue Alan. You can call me Sugrue. Can you say ‘Sugrue’?” And she would not say anything. “I reckon I’ve gave ye a bad fright, but there aint nothing you need to fear from me. Like I told ye the other day, me and you are fated to spend the rest of our lifes together, and I mean to love ye more’n you’ve ever been loved. So I sure do hope that you can get over your scare and learn to be mine and—” His voice was lost behind a horrible sound, a scraping grinding wrenching banging. She jumped. “Well, there went the goldarn muffler!” he said, and drove on, the twuck motor so noisy that surely God could hear it if He was anywhere, but He was not.

  And the woad went up and up and up and then the twuck stopped, the noisy motor went off, and then she heard him speak again. “This here’s as far as the trail can reach. Good thing too on account of they’s just a drop or two of gas left. I reckon I’ll just take off your blindfold now, but you won’t be able to see nothing, out there in the dark. We’re nearly home but there’s still the worst mile to go and we caint do it in the dark, so we might as well just get cozy here in the truck and wait until daylight, when we can see to find our way along the rest of the trail. I promise ye you’ll be tickled to pieces with your new home as soon as you can lay eyes on it, come dayspring.” And she would not speak, nor move, nor see, nor feel, nor be. “You might as well go to sleep, honey,” he said to her. “You could stretch out here on the seat, or even put your head in my lap or whatever you want to do to get comfy.” And it was late at night, and then it was later at night, and she was very sleepy, very sleepy, but she could not sleep without Paddington. She really really needed to sleep but she could not sleep without Paddington. Of course she wanted her mommy but she wanted her bear even more. She could sleep without her mommy but she could not sleep without her bear. And she began to think that she might never see him again.

  “Here, no wonder you caint sleep with them there skates still on your feet. Let’s take ’em off.” And he got out of the truck and came around to her side and opened the door and lifted her feet and untied the skates and removed them and tossed them into the back of the truck. “Don’t reckon you’d ever have no use for �
�em no more, which is a shame, the way you was flying around that roller rink looked like you’d been born on skates.”

  So then yes maybe he was the Devil punishing her for her vanity at the skating rink. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “What’s that?” he said. “You said something, didn’t ye? I was afraid you’d turned deaf and dumb on me. Did you say your name is Sarah?”

  But she could not say anything else. He got back into his seat and talked a while more and told her she had better try to sleep and he said sleep so many times that the sound of the word put him to sleep. He even snored. She waited a while and then she gently opened her door and got out. Behind the twuck must have been the woad they had come up on. If she could follow that woad and get down there before he woke up, she would be free. But it was so dark, and nothing scared her more than the dark did, and the gravel hurt her feet in her sockies and worst of all she hated the woods. She walked just a few steps beyond the truck before she realized she was already lost, and there were monsters out there in the woods waiting for her who were much worse monsters than he was.

  She returned to the truck, glad to be back, but could not sleep. It was very cold now. She wrapped the blanket tightly around herself. She imagined her mother somewhere crying. She imagined Kelly and Rebecca and Gretchen and Beverly still wide awake at the slumber party, maybe crying too, and Kelly’s party was ruined and maybe the parents came and got the other girls and took them home. And Grandma and Grandpa were at Mommy’s house with the lights on and staying up all night waiting for her to come home. And if all those people could be staying awake there was no reason for her to sleep.

  But she must have drifted off out of sheer exhaustion because the next thing she knew he was shaking her shoulder and there was some light out and she could see all the trees surrounding them in the deep, deep forest. “Time to get on up home,” he said. “Watch your step getting out, because there’s lots of wood up under the truck.” She got out and he got out and she saw that while she had slept he had crammed many sticks and logs up underneath the truck. “Now you’d better stand back on over here,” he said, and led her a good ways off from the truck to the edge of a steep ravine and then he went back and knelt down and started a fire in the sticks and logs which blazed up and roared and then there was a whooshing boom as whatever gasoline left in the tank caught fire and exploded. And the truck burned. And in the back of it her skates, that weren’t her skates but just rented from the roller rink and which she’d have to pay for if she lost them, her skates must’ve burned too. When he came back to her he was smoking a cigarette. She really hated people who smoked.

  He watched the truck burn for a while, and then he said, “I reckon I ought to put the blindfold back on ye for the last awful mile, but it wouldn’t make no difference nohow even if you could see where we’re a-going, because you’d never be able to hike it by yourself. Now you’d better get on my back.” And he picked her up and put her up on his back, and then he climbed down into that ravine, so steep she yelped in fright, and he said, “Don’t worry, honeybunch, I’ve done this a many and a many a time.” And he reached the bottom of the gorge and climbed up out the other side, and went on. And then there was another ravine, with water in the bottom of it that he had to step across on rocks. And then another ravine with a tree-trunk fallen over the water at the bottom of it that he walked across carefully like a tightrope walker, and then climbed way up out of it like a mountain climber. If she had not been so frightened she would have enjoyed the ride. It was thrilling. “Here comes the tricky part,” he said, and it was really the worst part: on a narrow ledge across a bluff high above the forest below he had to turn sideways and walk sideways, holding her to his chest, saying, “Dropped a whole crate of chickens here yesterday morning, but don’t ye worry, girl, I don’t aim to drop you. Close your eyes if it skeers ye too much.” And she had to close her eyes.

  When she opened her eyes there were no more ravines or ledges but just a little path that climbed up through the deep dark forest, and he carried her a little ways on his shoulder up that path until it escaped from the forest and they were in a wide field rolling up to the top of the mountain, and there stood a house! “Yonder’s our home,” he said as if she hadn’t already noticed it. And as they climbed to it, she could see for miles and miles out across the valleys and mountains all around. Everything blue and green and it was almost like Paradise, so maybe this was some kind of Heaven. He took her off his shoulder and stood her on her feet and said, “You can walk from here.” And coming to meet them was a dog. He pointed, “Look, here comes our doggie!”

  It was the ugliest dog she had ever seen, some kind of mongrel cur, mostly white, not very big, and it was barking and prancing around and swishing its little tail back and forth, and for a moment she thought the dog was going to jump her. “Down, Bitch!’ he said and the dog stopped dancing. And they went on to the house and they went in it. It was a very old house and it was all dusty and faded and there were cobwebs all over the place. There was a fairly clean sofa and he had her sit on it while he built a fire in the room’s heater-stove to warm it up, and then he went to fix her some breakfast.

  The hideous dog was trying to lick her ankle. “Get away from me!” she said to it, kicking, and it backed off whimpering.

  The man came running from the kitchen. “Hey, you talked! Is Bitch bothering you?” He opened the front door and gave the revolting dog a hard kick that knocked it outside, and he shut the door after it. “If she ever bothers you, just let her know who’s boss.”

  She was, come to think of it, hungry, and he had her sit at a small table in the kitchen near the kitchen stove, one of those old-fashioned iron wood-burning stoves, not a great big one but a sort of squat one that was cute, and it was very warm and nice. He gave her scrambled eggs with some kind of oval-shaped meat stuff. “That’s Spam,” he said. “I reckon we won’t have fresh meat unless I can shoot a razorback one of these days. Now what do you like to drink with your breakfast? You don’t drink coffee, I bet.”

  And she spoke. “Milk,” she said.

  “Well, I hope you don’t mind powdered milk too awful much,” he apologized and fixed her a glass of something that just sort of tasted a little bit like milk. “‘Course they’s Pet Milk too, but it’s even worse.”

  He talked all the time they had their breakfast but she did not say another word. He apologized a lot. He apologized for the cobwebs, saying he’d been too busy trying to get the place stocked up and ready for her and starting a little spring vegetable garden and all, and he intended to give the place a thorough dusting and cleaning today or tomorrow. He apologized for the darkness of the kitchen, saying the windows needed to be washed and of course there wasn’t no lectric lights. He apologized for not having no orange juice, just something called Tang which was the same color and wasn’t very cold because there wasn’t no ice. He apologized for not having no ice cubes. He apologized for the awful dog. She waited to hear him apologize for having kidnapped her, but he did not. “Just tell me anything you need whenever,” he said.

  “I need to go to the bathroom,” she said.

  He hit himself on the forehead. “Now why didn’t that cross my mind? ‘Course, we aint got any indoor facilities, ha ha. No runnin water. But I’ll show you to our outdoor accommodation, ha hawr.” He started to lead her out of the house, but stopped. “I reckon you need something to put on your feet.” And he ran into the other room, leaving her. She was really desperate to pee. It had been such a long time and she had tried to hold it but now she couldn’t hold it any longer. Her panties started to get wet. He came back with a whole bunch of shoes. “Just take your pick,” he said, and she was amazed to see so many nice shoes, nearly all of them in her size, and she picked out the prettiest pair of sneakers she’d ever had. And put them on, real quick, hoping she wouldn’t pee any more until he showed her where the bathroom was. He had to help her tie them because she still had not completely mastered the tying of shoes.


  The bathroom, if that is what it was, was outside about a hundred feet from the house, off where the woods started. It was just a shack, and there was a bench sort of thing with two holes cut in it. “I’ll just wait outside here, this time,” he said, and closed the door after her leaving her alone in it. His voice called, “Have you got enough paper in there?” And she looked and there was a roll of toilet paper on a stob on the wall. She pulled down her blue jeans and her already wet panties and tried to sit on the hole. She had never been in one of these outhouses before although she had heard about them. She hadn’t been told they were so smelly. The hole was too big for her and she had to be careful not to fall into it.

  After a long time he called, “Are you okay in there?” But it was so hard and awful and stinky and sad and she could not say anything. But she finished and got out of there.

  “Now,” he said, “do you want to take a look at all the rest of the place, and see where the well’s at, and the henhouse yonder, and what’s left of the barn and all? Or would you rather see the real surprise I’ve got for ye?”

  “It’s cold out here,” she said. So they went back in the house, and first he let her take her pick of several jackets which he had bought for her. They were all very neat jackets and warm and comfy and beautiful, especially the one she picked and tried on, which was a perfect fit.

  Then he said, “And here comes your first surprise!” And he went into the other room and came back with the biggest doll she’d ever seen. It was nearly as big as she was, and was dressed better than she’d ever dressed, with a yellow/orange kimono type of dress, and fancy shoes. She had long dark hair and long eyelashes and such a sweet look on her face. If Robin had been a couple of years younger she would have adored the doll, but she had outgrown dolls of this nature, and much preferred her paper dolls.