The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  In the weeks afterward, as everything went to the dogs, so to speak, Hreapha had to be careful whenever she was in the house not to walk upon or disturb the paper dolls, who were breeding like rabbits. The girl let Hreapha into the house whenever the frequent thunderstorms occurred, having discovered that Hreapha shared her intense dread of thunder, and the two fear-stricken females cowered and quaked together. Ordinarily the man would not have allowed Hreapha in the house so much, but he was too out of it to notice.

  When it wasn’t raining too hard, Hreapha spent a lot of time guarding the chickens and the garden, and trying to keep the former out of the latter. She despaired of explaining to the chickens that the various succulent vegetables in the garden were intended for the exclusive use of the poor sick master and the mistress. How do you tell a chicken to leave be the vegetables that are intended to be served with chicken? It took Hreapha days and days of shouting her name at the hens and the two roosters whenever they attempted to wander into the garden until finally the fowl seemed to decide that it wasn’t worth the bother, listening to all that hreaphering in order to grab a bite of lettuce, and they kept out of the garden. Hreapha had more problems with the occasional deer who came down to nibble the veggies, and also the rabbits. But the poor sick master rose up from his davenport long enough to teach the girl how to shoot at and finally hit the rabbits. Your turn is next, Hreapha tried to tell the deer, but they just backed off and waited for her to leave the garden, which, eventually, went to the dogs, so to speak, what little was left of it that the weeds didn’t choke out. Hreapha had never been able to understand the difference between a cultivated vegetable and a so-called weed, many of which were just as edible and tasty as the vegetables. Thus, while Hreapha was very good at protecting the garden from mobile creatures, she could do nothing to protect it from vegetative creatures.

  Despite the neglect and assault, the garden managed to produce, in time, some edible produce. Especially the melons: huge watermelons and cantaloupes that almost frightened Hreapha with their looming bulk, and which, once cooled in the springhouse, gave the man the only happiness he knew all summer.

  Hreapha, who had never eaten any kind of melon herself, wondered if the melons could possibly be held to account for the latest development in the man’s list of distresses: his inability to do his business. With only one eye open, Hreapha could observe that each morning the man staggered, dragging a foot behind him, out to the outhouse, where he remained forever, and from whence came the sounds of his grunting and straining, which Hreapha easily recognized because she too, like all creatures, suffered from occasional difficulty in emptying her bowels. She knew of certain grasses that could be eaten for the condition, but there was simply no way she could prescribe these to him. His inability to poop contributed further to his melancholy and his unpleasantness. And the only way he could alleviate his mood was by stepping up his consumption of the moonward beverage, so that in time Hreapha’s minding could not determine whether he staggered from his drinking or staggered from his illness.

  Eventually he began to fall down. Once he fell off the porch. Once he fell repeatedly trying to reach the beaver pond, and gave it up, returning to the house, where the girl drew many buckets of water from the well to fill a large tin tub for him to bathe in. Hreapha could not tell him, or her, that she had discovered the beaver pond no longer existed. The hideous rains had washed away the beaver’s dam, and they had not yet been able to rebuild it. In the middle of one night Hreapha had gone to see if there was anything she could do to help, short of felling or dragging timber, and found a bobcat menacing the beaver family. The bobcat had already killed one of the kits and was trying to catch another one when Hreapha arrived and did battle with the cat. She had never fought a bobcat before and hoped she would never have to do so again. They are bigger than Hreapha and they claw and scratch something awful. But Hreapha inflicted sufficient bites all over the cat’s anatomy to give the cat second thoughts about further disturbance of the beavers.

  Mr. and Mrs. Beaver attempted by their body language and assorted unintelligible snorts and squeaks to tell Hreapha how grateful they were that she had spared the other four kits from the snatches of the bobcat. Hreapha wished there were some way she could communicate to them her desire to help in whatever way possible with the reconstruction of their dam and pond. In her teeth she took hold of a long hefty stick and dragged it to the dam site, and the beavers perceived that she wanted to help, and for the rest of the night she worked alongside them. When she got home in the morning she was all worn out, but so was the man, who had fallen on his way to the outhouse and was just lying there resting in the outhouse path. He didn’t seem to mind or even notice that Hreapha had to sleep all day, and that she returned after dark once again to the dam site.

  The third night she set out for the dam site, Robin followed her with a flashlight. “Where are you going, B—?” she started to use the not-nice name the man had given her, but caught herself and said “Your name isn’t really Bitch, is it? Did you ever have another name?”

  “Hreapha,” she said, matter-of-factly, not barking it.

  “Oh?” the girl said, and then she did a wonderful thing: she tried to pronounce it. She didn’t quite get the aspirate correct or trill the r as much as it should have been, but she did a good job on the plosive ph and the whole thing sounded almost like the way Hreapha herself said it. “I’ll just call you Hreapha then, okay?” Robin said.

  “Hreapha!” she said excitedly, and trotted on toward the beaver’s place with Robin right behind her.

  “Where are we going, Hreapha?” the girl wanted to know.

  “Hreapha,” was the only way she could pronounce “beaver dam.”

  “Will you protect me if we meet a bear or wolf?”

  “Hreapha,” was the only way she could tell Robin that she would protect her against any harm in this world but that they had nothing to fear from wolves, who didn’t exist hereabouts, and as for bear, they were pretty scarce or at least she had not yet seen one.

  At last they came upon the construction site for the new dam, where Mr. and Mrs. Beaver were busy as beavers, working with the help of their four kits. Since the beaver didn’t have the impounded waters of a new pond ready yet, they had nowhere to hide when this human being showed up, and Hreapha could not explain to them that the girl had no intention of causing them any harm. So the family of beaver simply shrank back and trembled as Hreapha demonstrated to Robin how she had been grasping sticks and dragging them up to the dam site.

  “What happened to the dam?” Robin asked. And then answered her own question. “Oh, did all that rain wash it away?”

  “Hreapha,” Hreapha said. And dragged another limb to the dam site. Fortunately many of the limbs and sticks and logs which had made up the original dam had not been completely washed away but had lodged against boulders further downstream.

  “You’re helping them build it back?” Robin said.

  “Hreapha.”

  “You really are a good dog,” Robin said.

  Hreapha was pleased and proud. She was even more pleased and proud that Robin herself began to help, and was strong enough to drag larger limbs than little Hreapha could drag. Robin also observed how the beaver were picking up large rocks in their dexterous fingers to anchor the base of the sticks making up the dam, and Robin was able to do this work too. The kits were all four busy dredging up mud from the streambed above the dam and packing it against the sticks, so that step by step the water flowing down would distribute the mud among the sticks, chinking the dam and closing it up. The water began to rise, and as it rose the eight of them—two adult beaver, four baby beaver, a dog and a girl—added more sticks and mud to the top of the dam.

  The dam was finished before morning! The new pond began to fill. “That was fun,” Robin said to the beavers. “When the pond is filled, I’ll come back, and you can teach me how to swim.” Then she said to Hreapha, “I’d better get home. He’s going to be mad I was
out all night.”

  But he didn’t even notice. Robin went into the house and came back out to report to Hreapha that he was sound asleep and snoring, even though the sun was well up in the sky. “Let’s have breakfast,” she said, and filled Hreapha’s dish with the Purina Chow, and got her own bowl of cereal and sat with Hreapha to eat it. There were a few peaches she had found ripened on the old trees up in the orchard, and Robin sliced one of these atop her cereal. “This is almost good,” she told Hreapha. “There’s no real milk, and it’s not my kind of cereal, but I can eat it. Are you okay with the doggy chow?”

  “Hreapha,” she assured her.

  After breakfast they had a long and chummy chat. Or rather Robin did all the talking, and Hreapha was content merely to listen and to interject occasionally a mild Hreapha or a milder whimper, and at a few points a growl to indicate she understood the serious import of what Robin was saying.

  “I think he’s dying,” Robin said. “Don’t you?” Actually Hreapha’s minding of him had not yet dared reach that conclusion, and she dreaded contemplating it, but already was beginning to feel not that she was losing a master but gaining a mistress, and a good one. “He talks about sending me to find a doctor, but isn’t that silly? He says he’ll tell me how to find a road that leads down the mountain if I will promise to get help for him. Do you know how to find the road?” Hreapha wished that dogs had at least been given the ability to nod or shake their heads as humans do to signify yes or no. But if she could really communicate, she was sorry she’d have to inform Robin that as a result of the recent severe rainstorms the whole east side of Madewell Mountain had been eroded into deep gullies and ravines that obliterated any trace of the old trail. Hreapha had recently attempted to locate the remains of the pickup and had discovered that even its burnt carcass had been washed far down the mountainside. And that precarious narrow ledge along the bluff leading to it had had sections of it knocked out by boulders in mudslides. Hreapha had had to make an elaborate detour along a rock-face that would be impassable by a human being, especially a young girl. Getting down off the mountain in that northern direction was unthinkable. Hreapha had not yet explored the southern direction, but intended to do so in the near future, because she was beginning to miss Yowrfrowr.

  If the two of them were really having a good girlie talk, she ought to be able to tell Robin about Yowrfrowr, and she greatly regretted that she could not. Robin told her about a boy named Jimmy Chaney that she had sort of had a crush on, and even asked, “Are there any boy doggies that you like?” But Hreapha could not tell her about cute and smart Yowrfrowr. Abruptly Robin asked, “Have you ever done it with another dog?” And when Hreapha could not vocalize her virginity, Robin said, “You know, fucked?” And then added, “I wonder what it’s like. You know, he has never done that to me. I thought he was going to. I thought that was the main reason he kidnapped me and brought me up here. I was expecting it. I was sort of getting myself ready for it.”

  All of this talk about sexual matters did not embarrass Hreapha in the slightest, but rather gave her some strange and curious stirrings of desire. Her mother—and eventually in their long talks together Hreapha was to discover that among the many other things she and Robin had in common, for example, their fear of thunder and of spiders, not to mention their virginity, their mothers were somewhat alike, as Whuphvoff and Karen had both possessed a didactic nature—her mother had once given her a long explanation of the periodic condition she could eventually expect to experience, wherein her markings would begin to take on a faint olfactory signal easily detectable by the noses of any male dog within miles, informing them that she was in the mood for romance. Her mother had cautioned her not to permit such romance unless the marking’s scent clearly indicated that she was “ready.”

  Hreapha’s markings had never yet borne this aroma. She wondered what she would feel the first time they did. What would she do? Would the scent carry all the way to Stay More, three miles away, where Yowrfrowr could pick it up? Such thoughts could not fail to titillate her.

  “Don’t take this wrong,” Robin was saying, “but I wish I had a kitty cat.” Hreapha’s ears snapped into better hearing position. “I mean, you’re a really good dog, and I never had a dog before, and I’m awfully glad to have you as my dog. But I’ve really and truly always, always wanted a kitty cat.”

  Chapter eighteen

  Talking with Hreapha was so much more fun than talking with that stupid doll, who had been the only one she could talk to for so very long and who just sat there and had to play-like listen. Robin had wasted so many hours saying things to that doll, pouring out her heart to it, when all along she could have had Hreapha, who was so attentive and appreciative and smart. Robin was convinced that if by some magic Hreapha could really talk, the dog could tell her what she ought to do, the dog could even tell her how to find her way out of here if she wanted to, and above all the dog could tell her how she ought to feel toward Sugrue Alan. Should she feel sorry for him? Should she truly hate him? After all, he was all she had in this world. Unless and until she could be rescued. Or by some miracle find her way out of here. For the longest time Robin had been almost happy sleeping in the featherbed with him beside her; sometimes her head was so close to his chest that she could feel his breathing and hear his heart beat and he was a lot more alive than Paddington had ever been. And she hadn’t even needed to have a night light on, because she knew he was her protection. She hadn’t wet the bed again, not once. In the summertime when the weather warmed up and some nights were almost hot, she didn’t need her pajamas but she wore them anyway out of modesty and sweated inside of them. But when he became too ill to work in his garden, he no longer stank of his sweat although he stank of the whiskey that he kept on drinking, and he stank of his illness, whatever it was, and she had to scrounge over to the side of the bed to escape his stench. She hadn’t slept close to him for a long time now. She knew that he was probably never going to be able to do anything to her. He never would fuck her. He was so sick now.

  But the weird thing was, some days he seemed to be okay. Not only well enough to fix his own breakfast for a change but also to go out and try to do something, if he could. He would go out and chop wood until he was all worn out again, and she would have to help him back to the house, and then she would go stack the wood up into a neat pile. Among all the things he’d bought for her were a pair of work gloves so she wouldn’t get splinters in her hands. They were getting lots and lots of stove wood. “I reckon it’ll get right airish and crimpy up here come fall,” he said. “And doggone dithery come winter. You’ll need more firewood than you’ll be able to cut yourself, tiny as you are.” His saying that somehow made it sound as if he didn’t think he’d be around in the winter, or if he was he wouldn’t be able to cut any more firewood.

  He was also concerned that when the snows came the chickens wouldn’t be able to get out and scratch around in the yard hunting for bugs and worms to eat. There wouldn’t be any bugs and worms in the winter! He confessed he’d made a mistake not to have brought more than one thirty-pound bag of chicken feed, which was all gone now. Chickens will eat just about anything (and Hreapha had a hard time keeping them out of her chow, as well as out of the garden) and ever since Robin’s first experiments at baking bread, biscuits and cornbread had failed, the chickens had helped to eat the failures and they still ate all the leftovers, now that she had finally learned how to bake some decent bread. To make sure the chickens could have a food supply for the winter, Sugrue had planted extra corn—Robin had roasted or boiled corn-on-the-cob so many times she was almost tired of it—and they could dry the leftover ears and feed them to the chickens all winter.

  Very early Robin had discovered that the chickens were flocking around behind and beneath the outhouse, and looking down into the hole she sat upon she was horrified to discover that they were eating doo-doo. For a while after that she could not eat either chicken or eggs, and she put their disgusting habit at the top of
her mental list of all the things she couldn’t stand about living here. But in time she realized that it was just a fact of country life, and if you stopped to think about it, it wasn’t any worse than chickens eating worms.

  She was glad to help store corn for the chickens to eat in the winter, and while she was helping Sugrue do it, he took a Mason jar and filled it with dried kernels of corn, and then took a handful and said to her, “I need to show you how to plant your corn next spring,” and took her out to the corn patch with his hoe and showed her how to hoe up a furrow and plant it with the corn kernels. “Think you can remember all that?” he said to her afterward, and again she thought it sounded as if he didn’t expect to be around in the spring.

  One morning they were all just sitting on the porch when Hreapha jumped up and started barking, and they saw a hog raiding the corn patch! “Wooee,” said Sugrue, “if that aint a razorback!” And for a sick man he was pretty quick and nimble in fetching his rifle and shooting the hog. “I ort to’ve let you shoot him,” he said to her, “but if you’d’ve missed, we wouldn’t’ve had no secont chance.” Robin doubted she could have hit it, although Sugrue had made her practice with targets again and again and she was very good with the rifle, although the shotgun was still too much for her.

  It was a big hog, and Sugrue’s only shot had hit it right square in the side of the head. “This is sure enough a wild razorback. Aint seen one of these since I was a kid,” Sugrue said. “Be damned if we aint got us a right smart of meat.” She helped him drag the hog, which must’ve weighed more than him and her put together, to the cooper’s shed, where they rigged up a pulley to hoist the carcass to a beam. And Sugrue insisted she watch closely, every step of the way, as he cut into the hog’s neck (“Smack in the goozle,” he explained) to make the hog’s blood run out. “The moon aint right, probably,” he observed. “You ort to kill your hog on the full moon.”