The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  The only drawback to her fabulous world of paper Stay More was that she had to do it all alone, even if Hreapha and Robert watched and listened. She really did not like playing alone. In fact she hated it. One day when Hreapha was feeling much better, Robin got out the Ouija Board again and got Hreapha to put her paw on the planchette and they asked a lot of easy, random questions, such as “Is there a Tooth Fairy?” (“NO.”) And “Will Santa Claus be able to find his way to us out here in the woods?” (“NO.”) And “What month is this?” (“N-O-V-E-M-B-E-R.”) And “What day of the week is this?” (“T-H-U-R-S-D-A-Y.”)

  And then some questions like, “Did Hreapha find Yowrfrowr down in Stay More?” (“YES.”) “Did they have a happy time together?” (“YES.”) “Did Hreapha have a hard time reaching Stay More?” (“YES.”) “Did Hreapha have a hard time coming home from Stay More?” (“YES.”) “What happened?” (“C-O-Y-O-T-E-S.”)

  “My gosh,” Robin said not to the Ouija Board but to Hreapha. “Were you attacked by coyotes?”

  Hreapha moved the planchette to YES.

  “You poor thing,” Robin said, and thought about it and wished that Hreapha could give her details. “I guess you’re lucky they didn’t eat you.” Robin had searched Hreapha’s hide thoroughly, hunting for ticks (the best thing about the coming of cold weather was that the ticks and chiggers went into hibernation) and also for any wounds: she had found a few deep scratches and had used ointment from the first aid kit on the worst ones.

  Robert didn’t like being excluded from their Ouija Board game, so Robin decided to see if she could teach them how to play Hide and Seek. Hreapha caught on very quickly, although Robert was too impatient to wait while he was “it” to give the other two time to hide. There was no way to explain it to him, so they just had to play along with his finding one of them before they became hidden. Still, it was fun, and Hreapha apparently seemed to enjoy it a lot, it was the first fun she’d had in a long time.

  While looking for a place to hide, Robin found a book or booklet about three times as thick as a comic book, called Nudist Moppets. Somebody had sure been looking at it a lot; it was all smudged and the pages were bent and crumpled and coming apart. It was nothing but pictures, hundreds of pictures of boys and girls without any clothes on. When the game of Hide and Seek was over, Robin curled up on the davenport to study the book. She didn’t have much time before dark. She had made a decision never to light any of the kerosene lamps except in emergencies. The days were growing shorter and it was getting dark earlier, and she and Hreapha simply went to bed when it got dark, and even Robert was learning how to ignore his nocturnal habits and join them in bed.

  Now she had just a little while to study all the pictures before darkness fell, and even without words it was a form of entertainment such as she had been missing for a long time. She had not held a book or booklet in her hands for ages. Most of the kids in the pictures were near her age, some of them older, some younger, and she could identify with them and even envy their freedom to sport and play and mix with each other without any modesty. Some of the boys had weenies that were not just hanging down but sticking out! Robin turned the page and found a picture in which one of the girls had her fingers wrapped around a boy’s hard weenie. She tried to imagine what it would feel like to hold a weenie in your hand, especially if it was not limp like a hotdog weenie but hard and stiff.

  Then she turned the page and got a real shock. The same girl who had been holding the boy’s weenie had put it in her mouth! None of her friends had ever said anything about such a thing as that or what it was called or whether any of them had ever done it, probably because they didn’t even know about it. Robin wondered how much the girl and boy were really enjoying it or whether they were just doing it because some man with the camera was making them do it so he could take their picture. Their faces both looked as if they were in heaven, and Robin wondered if it felt better for the boy or better for the girl.

  Then it was too dark to keep looking at the book. She put it back where she found it, and she told Hreapha and Robert it was time for bed. She put more wood in the woodstove and turned the dampers so the wood would burn very slowly all night. It was going to be the coldest night so far, and Robin was glad to have her dog and kitty help her warm the cold sheets of the bed.

  While she tried to drift off into slumberland, she found herself doing something that she had not done for years, although according to her mother she’d done it all the time when she was small: sucking her thumb.

  Chapter twenty-three

  Boy howdy but wasn’t it a pure marvel how some mornings you could wake up without any sign or trace whatsoever of any bodily ailment? It was almost as if his fairy godmother—if she still cared for him at all—had passed her wand over him and taken away all his afflictions. Not only that, but the Lady had left him with the first genuine hard-on he’d had in recent memory. Not only that, but he hadn’t bepissed the pallet during his sleep. Not only that but he had no urge to reach immediately for the bottle of Jack D. Not only that but he practically leaped up from the floor and did a little jig just to show that he could use his legs just fine. He felt wonderful…although previous experience had learned him to tone down his joy because it wouldn’t last more’n a few days at the most, if that. Probably this was his last great bout of feeling fine before the final return of the disease which would wipe him out.

  But as long as he was feeling so fine, he might as well make the most of it. He gave his pecker a pump or two just to make sure it wasn’t a-fooling him, and then he headed for the bed, to enjoy at last the fruit of all these labors. The girl was surrounded by her pets, old Bitch and that darned bobkitten, all three of ’em sound asleep. “Good morning!” he said loudly and cheerily, to demonstrate that even his power of talking had returned. All three of them woke up at once and all three of them stared at his revivified pecker. Bitch said “HREAPHA!” The bobkitten said “WOOO!” Robin said “That’s a big weenie you’ve got.”

  “Hey Sugar,” he said, “let’s shoo these animals out of here so we can have us a little fun.” And he gave Bitch a swat on her tail to make her jump out of the bed. Then he picked up the bobkitten to toss him off too, but the damn critter bit him! “Shit on a stick!” he hollered and flung the cat away. Then Bitch chomped him around the ankle; she didn’t sink her teeth into his flesh but she held on and he couldn’t shake her loose. “Damn it, Bitch, leggo!” he hollered, and tried to pull her loose from his ankle. Here come the bobkitten again, a-clawing its way up his back! “Git him off me!” he ordered Robin, who climbed out of bed and detached her bobkitten from his back.

  By the time that he had got loose from the animals, Sog was dismayed to see that his erection had flopped. And Robin was laughing. He was mighty pleased to hear her laughing such a sweet laugh for the first time, but he felt she was amused by his drooping piece.

  “What’s so damn funny?” he said.

  “They were protecting me,” she said proudly. “You were getting ready to fuck me, and they knew it, and wanted to protect me!”

  “You’ll need all the protection you can get after I’m gone.”

  “You can talk right again,” she observed. “You must be feeling well enough to go someplace.”

  “I aint going nowheres,” he said. “But I’m not long for this earth.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “This morning I’m feeling hunky-dory, but it’s just a sign. It’s a sign that my days is numbered. It’s Mother Nature’s way of tellin me that the worst is yet to come, and we’d better get ready for it.”

  He put on his overalls and marched out to the kitchen and fixed them a big breakfast of pancakes and bacon, having to slice up a bacon slab. “How come you aint been carving up the bacon slabs?” he asked Robin.

  “You know I can’t cut meat very well,” she said.

  “Time you learned!” he thundered, and before the morning was over he had learned her how to carve meat. He also learned her how to
tie her shoes. Then he took her out to the chopping block and said, “You’re pretty good with the axe, aint you? Well, just play like this here stick is the neck of a chicken and see if you caint cut it in two.” She was real handy with the axe and could cut sticks just fine, but when he told her to grab a chicken and do the real thing, she had problems. She had trouble chasing down a chicken to catch. “Don’t chase ’em,” he advised. “Just sort of sidle up to a flock of ’em and reach down slow and grab one.” It took three attempts before she could hold on to one and bring it to the chopping block. “Now,” he said, “just hold its head down and pretend its neck is one of them sticks you just split.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t do it.”

  “You’ve got to,” he said. “You’ll never be able to cook fried chicken or roast chicken or chicken n’ dumplings if you can’t kill the damn chicken in the first place.”

  It took him a long time to persuade her to give it a try, and she botched the first attempt so he had to finish it himself to put the hen out of her misery. Then he insisted she try again with another hen, and he didn’t care if they had to slaughter every damn chicken on the place until she got the hang of it. But she managed to kill the chicken the second time, although she still screeched and squealed while the headless body was flopping around in the yard.

  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 arg
uing 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.