The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  She had, after all, come to think of Sog as her father, and she preached a little sermon to the three of us in which she declared that Sugrue Alan was not all bad, that he had some good qualities, like for instance he tried to teach her stuff, why just recently he’d taught her finally how to tie her shoes and cut her meat, and we ought to feel sorry for him because of how sick he’d been for several months now, and how feeble he had become, and she was sure that even if she could not forgive him for kidnapping her and taking her away from her home and her mother probably God would not hold it against him and he was probably going to heaven instead of hell. Amen.

  “Okay, let’s sing,” she said to me. And I sang “Farther Along,” she joining in for the chorus, hampered not by keeping the key but by the variation of our pronunciation, hers the plain and simple accents of a Harrison schoolgirl, mine those of a backwoods country boy. Poor Robert was a bit spooked because he couldn’t tell where my voice was coming from.

  When the hymn was over, she asked me, “Could you tell me a good part of the Bible to read out loud?”

  Who, me? I said innocently. And then I added, I’m mighty sorry to have to tell ye, but I never got a chance to look at that book.

  So she flipped aimlessly through the thick book, searching for something appropriate, but found nothing, just meaningless lists of names she couldn’t pronounce. Finally she decided that it might be just as well to read something from the other book, the 1888 Cyclopædia, so she let it fall open at random, and read aloud:

  Bee stings.—Take a pinch in the fingers of common salt, put on the place stung and dissolve with water, rub with the finger. If not relieved in one minute wet the place with aqua ammonia. Care should be taken not to get the ammonia in the eye. I have used this remedy for several years and it has never failed with me.

  “This just goes to show,” she declared, ceremoniously, “that he wasn’t always right but sometimes wrong, because his idea was to mix up the crushed leaves of any three plants and put them on the sting.”

  Well heck, that’s what I’d do, myself, if I ever got stung, I declared. But the best thing is to try to keep from getting stung.

  “Besides I don’t think we have any ammonia,” she said. Then she said, “I can’t think of anything else to say. So I guess this service is over.”

  But one final gesture remained. When the buzzards and crows and rodents and maggots had left nothing but a skeleton sitting in the outhouse, a skeleton who would have looked scary except for the big grin on its face, Robin took a bottle of Sog’s favorite beverage, Jack Daniels Black Label, and, first tasting it herself but spitting it out, placed the bottle in the grip of one of the skeleton’s bony hands.

  Chapter twenty-six

  What she really wanted to ask the ghost of Adam Madewell was if he knew whether Sugrue had a ghost too, and if so, was the ghost going to be around like Adam? But she was afraid of the answer she might get. What if Adam said that Sugrue was already busy at work haunting the place? If that were true, Robin surely would have to leave, which scared her even more, although she had given it a lot of thought and had an emergency plan ready: she would wrap enough food for several days in a dishtowel, and take a flashlight with fresh batteries and the .293 rifle with several bullets, and getting Robert to ride on Hreapha’s back, she would just take off: heading south in the direction Hreapha had made her trip and hoping to come eventually to a path or trail or road of some sort. She’d have to wear her thickest coat, and maybe try to keep her hands in the pockets. There was already snow on the ground.

  Why hadn’t Sugrue thought to buy her some mittens or gloves? He had filled that storeroom—Adam’s bedroom—with enough food and supplies and presents for her to last for a long, long time: he must have been planning to keep her for years. But he had neglected to get so many things that she would need, and hadn’t even thought of Kool-Aid and scissors and paper and books, and he hadn’t seemed to realize that she would outgrow all the clothes he’d bought for her.

  Thinking of Christmas coming, she decided to go ahead and open everything he’d bought, searching for gloves or mittens, and while this would spoil the surprise of opening things he’d intended to give her for Christmas or Valentine’s or Easter or her next birthday or whenever, the whole idea of surprise and whatever fun is in the surprise means that there has to be another person involved, and there wasn’t any other person any more. Even with Hreapha and Robert in the bed with her each night, she had moments of panic at the thought that she was all alone now. Anyhow, being all alone allowed her to go ahead and open all the boxes and all the bags, and see all the stuff that Sugrue had intended to give her for presents eventually. “Thank you, thank you,” she kept saying to him again and again, as she opened the packages, which even included a box of ribbon candy intended for Christmas. Having learned to believe no longer in the Tooth Fairy, she was now prepared to accept this answer to her burning question, How could Santa Claus possibly find her this far off in the wilderness? She saw plenty of evidence that Sugrue had intended to be Santa, just as he had once been the Tooth Fairy. He had really got her some nice things, and she was sorry that he’d never be around to see her play with them or put them on…unless his ghost was here, and she surely had no awareness of his ghost being around, except for that ghastly skeleton in the outhouse.

  Why didn’t she just get rid of the skeleton, which wasn’t too heavy for her to drag off its perch? It certainly wasn’t because she was afraid to touch it, because after all she’d made sure that those finger-bones had wrapped around the neck of that whiskey bottle. And the skeleton as such didn’t scare her. She remembered last Halloween when some of the kids dressed themselves in skeleton costumes, which she had thought were the least frightful of all possible costumes. What is scary about a collection of bones? No, maybe there were only two reasons she had decided to leave the skeleton there. One was that the outhouse had been Sugrue’s favorite place, where he had spent an awful lot of time. Dozens of times when she’d needed to go, she had opened the outhouse door to find him sitting there reading a Police Gazette and she could only say “Oops” and shut the door and wait for him to come out. But the other reason, the main reason, was that she liked the idea of leaving the skeleton there as a reminder that this man, Sugrue Alan, who had brought this world into existence, had kidnapped her away from her mother and friends and taken her to live in this place, was now no longer alive. She wanted to be able to glance in the direction of the outhouse at any time and see that reminder sitting there with that stupid grin and that stupid bottle of stupid whiskey in his hand.

  Whenever Adam wasn’t around—that is, whenever she couldn’t detect that he was present, which quite often he was not—she just had to talk to Hreapha or Robert, or to herself. “I need to grow up fast,” she said one day, to any ears that cared to hear it. Her own ears did: she was painfully aware of how little and helpless and innocent she was, and she wanted to become an adult as soon as she could. But the more she thought about it, and wondered how long it would take for her to become an adult, the more she understood that actually what she really, really wanted, more than anything else in the world, was just to stay the age she was right now forevermore. Just not ever change, just always be little and fragile and simple.

  She knew she spent too much time thinking. And too much thinking wasn’t good for her. She tried to avoid it by spending as much time as she could with her two precious books, the old Cyclopædia filled with all kinds of handy hints on how to live and manage a homestead, and the Bible filled with all kinds of interesting stories.

  Much of the Cyclopædia was either over her head (“Farm Fences,” “Making Our Own Fertilizers,” “Caponizing,”) or useless (“The Best Known Recipe for Corning Beef,” “To Banish Crows From a Field,” “How to Judge a Horse”) but there were pages and pages of things she ought to know (“How to Keep Sweet Potatoes,” “Winter Egg Production,” “To Stop Bleeding,” “Washing Made Easy,” “Burns and Scalds”), and there we
re hundreds of recipes to be tried out, and she proceeded each day to try a new one: hominy fritters and potato cakes for breakfast, chicken patties and potato salad for lunch. There was something called “Sauce Robert,” easy, with onions, which she couldn’t resist making and trying out on her kitty, who liked it if it was poured over protein like chicken or ham. There were desserts galore she tried. There were sixty different recipes for pudding, but she had the ingredients for less than half of them, which was more than she could eat. Her favorite was called “Kiss Pudding,” using mostly egg yolks (which was spelled “yelks” throughout the book). There was a simple recipe “To Cook a Rabbit,” so with Hreapha’s help she went out and shot a rabbit and cooked it according to the directions and it was delicious, although not that much different from chicken. One dish that was different somewhat from chicken was the pigeon pie. She used the .22 rifle to kill a few pigeons (remembering of course Sugrue’s “Pigeon eat”). The recipe called for lining the bottom of the dish with a veal cutlet or rump steak, which she did not have, so she substituted ham, and it was just fine. She always shared her dishes with Hreapha and Robert, who greatly appreciated them.

  She also took her mind off of thinking too much by playing with her paper dolls in her paper town of Stay More. The problem was that her paper dolls talked to her. Oh, of course it was probably just her own voice, but the paper dolls, those old country people of Stay More named Ingledew and Swain and Whitter and Duckworth and Coe and Dinsmore and Chism and so on, seemed to be talking to her in voices that weren’t her own, that she couldn’t even imitate, because they were country voices, like Adam’s. They told her stories that she couldn’t possibly have made up by herself, stories about floods and droughts and periods of darkness and periods of light, and an Unforgettable Picnic and the organization of a Masonic lodge—surely she couldn’t have been making all of this up in play. But she distinctly heard their voices.

  “Hreapha, can’t you hear them too?” she asked, but her adorable dog just cocked her head to one side as if she were trying to listen, without acknowledging the voices.

  For the longest time she had persuaded herself that the voice of the ghost Adam Madewell was just something she was imagining, although she couldn’t imagine how she would have been able to know the particular way he talked and some of the words he used. But how could she explain his finding those two books for her? Did she just have a hunch to see what was beyond that little door in the ceiling of the kitchen and go up there with her flashlight and find those two books? Well, it wasn’t impossible, but she was pretty well convinced that there really was a ghost named Adam who sometimes talked to her. And what about that business of singing the “Farther Along” hymn? She had heard Sugrue make some references to it, but he’d never sung it, so how did she learn the words and tune, unless she learned them from Adam?

  She loved that song, and every day she sang it; she even sang it in bed at night when she was trying to go to sleep. She understood that “Farther Along” was a funeral hymn and ought to be reserved for funerals, but day by day the people in her paper town of Stay More began to die, of natural causes or illnesses or whatever people died of, including murder, and while she didn’t actually try to bury the paper dolls she had a little memorial service for those who died and sang “Farther Along.”

  And when she got to that lovely verse which said, “When we see Jesus coming in glory, When He comes from his home in the sky; Then we will meet Him in that bright mansion, We’ll understand it all by and by,” she always began to wonder if this old house in which she lived might possibly be That Bright Mansion. She had never seen a mansion; Harrison had some fancy houses but not any mansions, which she knew were supposed to be very large and very imposing, neither of which this old house was. Still, she began to think that perhaps when Jesus came to meet her in this house, the house would be transformed into a mansion, just as pumpkins could be transformed into coaches in “Cinderella.”

  Robin was ready for Jesus. She took the Bible and, avoiding all those stories about unpronounceable names like Zelophehad, Ahinoam, Zedekiah, and Athaliah, began at the beginning of the New Testament and read the four gospels. It took her a week to read each one, but by then according to the Ouija Board it was Christmas, appropriately, because she could celebrate the first Christmas in her life in which the meaning of the day had real significance as the birthday of the nice interesting kind man named Jesus, who was called the Christ.

  She had got out the Ouija Board again and with Hreapha’s help determined that Christmas this year was only three days away. She took the axe and cut down a little cedar tree behind the house, and figured out a way to make it stand up in the living room, “planting” it in one of the wooden bails from the cooper’s shed. “Adam, do you mind if I borrow this?” she asked, but got no answer. She decorated her Christmas tree with stars that she cut out of toilet paper tubes (although she never used the outhouse any more, she still used toilet paper) and colored with her crayons, which were in danger of being used up. Searching through the storeroom for the possibility that Sugrue might have bought more than one big box of crayons, she came upon a paper sack she’d overlooked before. In it were a half dozen ears of dried up yellow corn, and there was a note, hand-lettered on a piece of brown paper, which said, “THESE HERE IS POPCORN, FOR YOU TO POP ON THE STOVE AND EAT OR MAYBE MAKE YOU SOME STRINGS FOR YOUR CHRISTMAS TREE. SORRY THERE’S NOT NO ORANGES TO PUT IN YOUR STOCKING BUT I GOT YOU SOME RIBBON CANDY SOMEWHERE AROUND IN HERE. MERRY CHRISTMAS AND LOVE, SUGRUE.” Before she shelled the kernels from the ears and attempted to pop them, she had to spend just a little time crying. Then when her tears were dry, she put some of the popcorn in a pot and popped it, and spent the rest of the day stringing it on coarse cotton thread (although Sugrue had never thought to have bought some scissors, he’d stocked a supply of other sewing things, like needles and thread). Thus her Christmas tree was garlanded with white fluffy strings of popcorn. It was the prettiest Christmas tree she’d ever had. She had a bit of trouble keeping Robert from climbing the tree, but she scolded him about it, and he left it alone, although when he thought she wasn’t looking he took a swat or two at one of the dangling stars.

  The next day she took the shotgun and the turkey caller and went off with Hreapha (she had to shut Robert in the house to keep him from going too, commanding him to stay off the Christmas tree) to find a turkey for Christmas dinner, although she’d eaten so many leftovers from Thanksgiving that she was really tired of turkey and didn’t care whether she found one or not. The Cyclopædia had a great recipe for roast partridge and another recipe for a bread sauce for partridges, but she had no idea what a partridge was, apart from the “Twelve Days of Christmas” song. There was a pear tree up in the old orchard (which hadn’t borne any fruit this year), and she looked there first for the partridge. “Hreapha, do you know what a partridge looks like?” she asked. Poor Hreapha looked very sorrowful not to be able to help, but Robin assumed that one bird was the same as the next to her.

  The snow in the woods was deep in places, and they couldn’t go very far. Robin didn’t even bother with the turkey caller. She decided just to serve ham for Christmas and turned around and headed back toward the house. Suddenly a large bird of some kind flew up out of the leaves and landed on the limb of an oak, and she loaded the shotgun with one shell and aimed it and fired, and the bird was hit. She didn’t know if it was a partridge or maybe a prairie chicken or grouse or quail or what.

  But she plucked all the feathers off and washed it and stuffed it and prepared to cook it according to the Cyclopædia’s recipe for partridge. Christmas morning they woke early because of the brightness: it had snowed during the night and the sunlight was reflecting off the snow and brightening up everything (“In that bright mansion,” she sang.) Still entertaining a shred of hope that Santa might somehow have found her house, she ran to the Christmas tree, but could only stand there pretending, “Oh look! A bicycle!” She realized there really wasn’t any place
she could ride a bicycle in this weedy wilderness. “Oh look! Skis!” she exclaimed and sat down to try them on. Hreapha and Robert observed her oddly. “Merry Christmas, Hreapha!” she said. “Here’s a sweater I knitted for you!” and she pretended to put the play-like sweater on Hreapha. She noticed that Hreapha’s belly was really swollen. “Merry Christmas, Robert!” she said. “Here’s a toy mouse I got for you to chase!” and she wound up the make-believe toy mouse and set it free, but Robert wouldn’t chase it. She was sorry that animals couldn’t make-believe. She had gift-wrapped just a few of the presents that Sugrue had intended to give her, which were real, not make-believe, and she slowly opened them and thanked him for each one.

  She could not help wondering what she might actually have received at Christmas from her mother (and maybe even her father too). She wondered how much her mother missed her, and thought that possibly her mother had even gone ahead and wrapped gifts for her even though she wasn’t there. But she was proud of herself for putting together such a good Christmas without any help from her mother.

  She’d left three of Sugrue’s long socks (which she’d laundered) tacked to the wall beside the stove, and filled them with ribbon candy and popcorn balls made with sugar syrup. Hreapha’s stocking also had in it some of the Purina dog chow (which was running low), and Robert’s stocking had a can of tuna-fish, and the animals were really able to appreciate the edible contents of their stockings, except the ribbon candy, which they wouldn’t eat.