The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  I can tell ye how to find out, the in-habit said, and he instructed her in a procedure called “popping” whereby she turned the snake over to locate its afterplace and then pressed or “popped” in a certain place to see if it had the snake’s equivalent of a penis. It didn’t. So I reckon it’s a female, sure enough, the in-habit said.

  “Then how can you call it a ‘king’ snake?” Robin wanted to know.

  You got me there, he said. I never heared tell of no queen snake, though, but it appears that’s what you’ve got.

  So Robin decided to name her snake The Queen of Sheba, explaining there was a woman of that name in her book called the Bible who had brought rich treasures to King Solomon.

  They all called the snake Sheba for short, and everybody lived happily ever after.

  No, that wasn’t true, Hreapha realized. Sheba was going to live for many, many years, and in no time Robin had made friends with her, so much so that after Sheba’s eighth shedding of her skin they could release her from the glass jar and she wouldn’t try to run away and they didn’t have to feed her any more. She kept the whole haunt free of mice and rats, even to the extent of depriving Robert of part of his food supply, so that he had to roam farther and farther into the woods for his supper, although on at least two occasions he saved Sheba’s life, once by killing an owl that attempted to prey upon her, and the other time by killing an opposum also bent upon making a meal of Sheba. Sheba had a number of natural predators, including skunks and coyotes. She established her throne in the stall of the barn where she’d grown up, and she could usually be found there, where Robin often visited her and enjoyed picking her up and holding her and even wrapping her around her neck or waist. King snakes—and in this case a queen snake—are constrictors, and they capture and kill their prey, including the poisonous snakes, by wrapping themselves around the prey and squeezing it to death. Sheba’s squeezes on Robin were gentle and sensuous.

  Hreapha understood that sex was the most important part of every creature, that all creatures lived in order to mate, and thus mating had been intended to be a main source of pleasure. She herself never again came into heat—something had gone wrong during her first and only experience at birthing, and whatever internal triggers or switches consume and devote the body to procreation were no longer operative in her—but she still enjoyed observing the manifold manifestations of love in all other creatures, including her own offspring. Recently Hreapha had witnessed an act that she had been suspecting for some time: Robert was not merely a constant companion and mentor to his protégé Hroberta but had also become her lover. Hreapha didn’t mind; she thought it was cute. And it couldn’t result in Hroberta’s pregnancy and overpopulation of the premises. But when Hroberta’s sister Hruschka also went into heat, she simply disappeared. Hreapha could only assume that Hruschka, who was the quietest and shyest of her offspring, was neither willing to discuss her feelings with her mother nor willing to have one of her brothers or Robert put her passion to rest, so she wandered off in search of succor elsewhere in the world. Hreapha wondered if she might have managed to reach Stay More and even unknowingly mated with her father, Yowrfrowr. Or, more likely, she had encountered the pack of coyotes who roamed these hills. Or perhaps she had headed north and found other dogs somewhere. They were all sad to lose her, and they hoped that she might come home after she had been bred, but she never did.

  Her three brothers began to pester their mother to allow them to attempt to find Stay More, not just to search for Hruschka but also to meet their father. Hreapha had promised to take Hrolf on his first birthday to see Yowrfrowr, but the birthday had come and gone and Hreapha had never been able to overcome her fear that the journey was no longer possible…although it wasn’t inconceivable that Hruschka had somehow accomplished it. But now she had another motive for making the attempt, in addition to all her other motives, not least of which was her desire to see dear Yowrfrowr again.

  So, in the early springtime, not long after the dogs’ second birthday and thus, she told them, worth considering as a belated birthday present, she took them to see if they could find Stay More. Hroberta wanted to go too, but Robert dissuaded her. Of course Hreapha explained her destination and itinerary to the in-habit, who in turn explained it to Robin.

  “Don’t go, Hreapha!” Robin said to her. “I’ll worry about you. It’s dangerous. Have you forgotten the last time you tried it?”

  “Hreapha,” she said, that is, No, I certainly haven’t forgotten, but that time I was all alone and this time I have my three big boys to help me.

  Leave her to give it a try, the in-habit urged Robin. They can allus turn back if the going’s too rough. Then in parting he said to Hreapha, You’ll just have to find some way to skirt around that there drop-off in the trail where it goes straight down near the waterfall.

  Which indeed proved to be their downfall, in both senses of the word.

  But before they even reached it, they encountered another obstacle: the coyotes. There weren’t five of them, or not the same five who had raped Hreapha, but only four. The four of them circled Hreapha and her three boys, and the eight dogs went through the formalities of sniffing each other’s afterplaces. She did not recognize, or could not recall the specific scent, of any of them. They were especially curious about the scent of Yipyip, and he was equally curious about them.

  He looked at her. Ma, am I any kin to these guys?

  She did not say, as she was tempted to, One of them might be your father. Instead she said, They’re coyotes, and you’ve probably got some coyote in you.

  In their guttural language the coyotes began conversing among themselves, perhaps debating whether to attack. Yipyip listened with great interest, and almost seemed to understand them, which Hreapha couldn’t do.

  Ma, Hrolf said to her, would you mind if I took a bite out of one of these bastards?

  Not until they bite first, she said. Her boys were full grown and had their father’s muscular build, and she knew they could hold their own in a fight with these bastards. As her own mother had done for her, she had taught all her offspring the full array of martial skills: each of them was an excellent fighter, although none of them had had a full chance to put their skills to the test. They hadn’t yet encountered a bear.

  One of the coyotes, possibly the alpha male who had inherited the position from the leader of the previous pack Hreapha had encountered, spoke at length to Yipyip, who listened with excitement and then turned to her and said, Ma, they’re inviting me to go hunting a bear with them. Can I?

  What could she say? He was too old even to be asking her permission. It’s your decision, she said. Don’t stay too long. Then she addressed the alpha male, You’d better take good care of him, and let him come home when he’s ready.

  But she wasn’t at all certain the alpha male knew her language. She could only watch as the pack loped off into the woods with her Yipyip in their midst.

  Hreapha resumed the journey and they came at last to the head of the waterfall, the place where she had attempted to swim across the little creek and had been caught up in the water and swept over the falls. She had told this story several times to her offspring. I recognize it, Ma! Hrothgar exclaimed, and before she could stop him he leapt into the water and attempted to paddle his way across it, and was seized by it and carried over the falls, and, as his mother had done, plummeted fifty feet down to the pool beneath, where he disappeared underwater. Hreapha and Hrolf crept warily to the edge of the precipice and peered over, waiting to see Hrothgar emerge from the water, but he did not. “Hreapha!” she wailed down to him.

  “Hrolf!” howled his brother.

  They waited a long time but Hrothgar did not come to the surface. They searched all along the cliff for some way to get down to the pool. They found the remains of the trail, in the place where it was nearly vertical, the place where Adam had fallen on his last attempt to reach the Stay More school, a place that was nearly impossible for humans and completely impossible fo
r dogs.

  There was no way that Hruschka could have gone down there. She must have gone northward, or, as Hreapha herself had done the first time she’d tried to reach Stay More, taken the road that ran along the east side of Madewell Mountain.

  Hreapha and her one remaining boy returned sadly homeward, their heads held low and their tails drooping. They waited a long time, months and months, to see if either Hruschka or Yipyip might come home, but they did not. Nor, of course, did Hrothgar.

  Chapter thirty-four

  My heart went out to Hreapha. It went out to all the survivors but especially to her, the mother, who had lost three of her progeny and was disconsolate for a long time. Eventually I got them all together—Hreapha, Hrolf, Hroberta, Robert, and Robin, as well as Ralgrub, Sheba, and Dewey, the fawn that Robin got for her eleventh birthday—and told them something that I had been keeping to myself: how Grandma Laura Madewell had lost three of the children she’d had after my father, Gabriel, was born. I did not wish to malign either Laura or Hreapha with the comparison, but they had much in common, especially that their mates were so much alike: Braxton Madewell wasn’t as well-spoken as Yowrfrowr but he was very like him, even in his shaggy, droop-eared appearance. I told my audience about the romance of Braxton and Laura, pointing out how similar it was to that of Yowrfrowr and Hreapha, with one important exception: that the latter two were not permitted to live together. There were some marvelous parallels, even including the fact that Laura had hiked a long way from her home, in a place called Boxley, in order to be with Braxton and try to persuade him to move to Boxley, and just as Yowrfrowr was too devoted to his mistress to leave her, Braxton was too devoted to his, the oak-forested mountain. Gabriel was their first born male, as Hrolf was Hreapha’s…but I would save for another day spelling out the many similarities between Gabe and Hrolf. Laura would have two other boys, and two girls. One of the girls ran away from home—like Hruschka? Eventually there was only one remaining, Gabe, my father—like Hrolf?

  In the earlier part of my childhood I knew Grandma Laura well. She was a small woman, as Hreapha was small, and her white hair was the color of Hreapha’s. What I remembered most about Grandma—and this held my audience, who began to drool—were the buttermilk biscuits she made, light as feathers, which practically dissolved just as you sank your teeth into them. Robin wanted to know if she’d got the recipe out of that 1888 Housekeeper’s Cyclopædia, which she’d brought from Boxley to Madewell Mountain as part of her small dowry or trousseau or whatever. No, the secret of those biscuits was something she’d learned from her mother, a Villines, and which she passed on to her daughter-in-law Sarah, my mother, but which my mother could never make as nicely as Grandma Laura could.

  In-habits, who retain all their senses, including taste, but possess no need to eat nor any hunger, can only endow with rich memory such an experience as biting into Laura Madewell’s biscuits. Even if Robin discovered, as she was busily investigating recipes all on her own, a way to make perfect biscuits, and assuming her rather crude home-milled flour would permit her, her biscuits could never do for me what Grandma’s did, what Proust’s madeleines did for him.

  But remembrance of biscuits past was distracting me from my main point, the tragedy of Laura’s loss of her children, which corresponded to Hreapha’s loss of hers. I would not go into the details of how each of them lost their lives, although the stories had been told me by Grandma herself: the important thing is not that one of your children dies in a waterfall and another one runs away from home but that some vicissitude robs you forever of the pleasure of their company. Farther along we’ll know all about it.

  That little narrative and sermon were for the benefit of the whole company (including you), and were delivered in the elegiac accents of a twelve-year-old country boy who had been left behind by that actual part of himself who against his will had been removed from these beloved premises. I was only a simulacrum, no, an eidolon in the classical Greek sense, a presence, and my presence was needed more these days not by Robin but by Hreapha, and I spent countless hours (what is a mere hour to an in-habit?) in the latter’s company, not merely consoling her for her loss but honoring the promise that farther along we’ll know all about it.

  I hate it here, Hreapha said to me one day when she was feeling despondent. I wish I were anywhere else.

  Is that a fact, now? I rejoined. How can ye be certain that anywheres else would be any better?

  I can’t, she said. But it just wouldn’t be here. Here is so dismal.

  I reckon I may of felt that way sometimes. Or Adam did, I mean. Until it was time to leave. Until they was a-fixing to take him away. And then he got right mastered by the thought of leaving.

  I told Hreapha the story of Adam’s last day on Madewell Mountain, of Gabe loading the wagon with just the bare essentials of their possessions, just what the wagon would hold in addition to the three of them—or the two of them, because at the moment of departure Adam kissed his mother and said, “You’uns have a good time in Californy. I aint a-going.” And ran away into the woods. No, not ran, because with that game leg of his he couldn’t even walk very fast, but it was fast enough to get away from his father, who had been busy loading the wagon, and by the time Sarah told Gabe that their son had gone off into the woods, he was too far behind to catch him. Still, Gabe plunged into the woods in pursuit, yelling over and over again, “AD! AD! AD!”

  Adam knew he was being stupid. He didn’t manage to get so far off into the woods that he couldn’t hear in the distance that voice, “AD! ADAM MADEWELL, YOU BETTER JUST STOP AND GIVE A THOUGHT TO WHAT YOU’RE A-DOING!”

  But Adam was so determined not to leave Madewell Mountain that he spent the whole night in the woods, cold and hungry. He discovered the unburied corpse of his dog, Hector, whom his father had shot days earlier. (This part of my story moved Hreapha out of her megrims.) Early in the morning he went back to the house to make certain that his parents had in fact departed. He searched the kitchen for something to eat, but his mother had left nothing behind. Days earlier, his father had taken the remaining livestock—the cow, the pigs, the goats, the chickens and geese—to his brother-in-law in Parthenon. Gabe Madewell had planned after reaching Harrison to sell the wagon and the mules for whatever he could get and pay a family in Harrison who were planning to drive a truck to California and would have room for the Madewells. Adam assumed they were already on their way to that Promised Land. Up until the day of the departure he had almost persuaded himself that the only good reason for going to California was that he might find Roseleen there; he had heard that the year before her parents had joined the endless migration of Arkansawyers (or “Arkies” as they were called) to California. But on the day of the departure he had had to choose between Madewell Mountain and California, and he knew that the latter, for all its fabled splendors, was simply no match for the former.

  Now, even if he was only twelve (which, after all, Robin herself wouldn’t reach for another year), he planned to live here by himself, fend for himself, make do, subsist, exactly as Robin was doing so many years later. His father had taken the firearms, but Adam had a slingshot he’d left in the cooper’s shed, and he also had some fishing tackle and he could make a spear or two, and catch enough game to cook on the nice old kitchen stove that had been left behind. He didn’t even have the advantages that Robin had, not just of firearms but of a stock of edibles (albeit hers were practically gone now) salted away by Sog Alan, so Adam had to start from scratch in fending for himself. It was a daunting prospect.

  But right away he killed a squirrel with his slingshot and fried it on the kitchen stove, having just a little difficulty with the recipe because all the previous times he had killed squirrels with his slingshot his mother had done the cooking. He overcooked the squirrel but it was still edible, and something for his stomach.

  “Better piss on that fire, and put it out,” said Gabe Madewell, and Adam wheeled around to see his father standing there. His father was holding
his rifle loosely in one hand. Adam was instantly scared, wondering, What’s the rifle for?

  “I figured you’uns had done gone,” he said.

  “You didn’t figure your maw would let me go off without ye, did ye? Why, I didn’t hardly make it to the foot of the mountain afore she commenced a-bawlin at the top of her lungs.”

  “So you’ve made up your mind to stay?” Adam said hopefully.

  “Naw, not a chance. The wagon’s still at the foot of the mountain, where we had to camp out last night. I’ve hoofed it back up here to get ye. Now unbutton yore britches and piss on that fire and let’s go.”

  Adam would not piss on the fire. “I aint leavin, Paw,” he declared.

  “Well, we aint goin nowheres without ye. Yore maw won’t allow it.”

  “Then bring the wagon on back up here.”

  “Boy, you aint yet learnt why we caint do that? When your grampaw died, this place died with him. This place aint fit for nothing. I caint run the cooperage without your grampaw, and you aint much help, and besides there just aint much of a market no more for homemade barrels, nor even stave bolts. I’ve told ye all that, time and time again.”

  “Come and look, Paw,” Adam requested and led his father out to the cooper’s shed where, in one corner, Adam had hidden the cedar churn he’d recently made. “Look at that, Paw,” he said. “I can make anything, and if you’ll just give me time I can make a barrel ever bit as good as you can.”

  Gabe Madewell laughed, but he fondled the churn and admired it and allowed as how it was pretty good made. “But nobody uses churns no more,” he observed. “You can buy your butter at the store real easy.” He tossed the churn aside, and Adam heard it crack as it fell. “It’ll be another two or three years afore you’re big enough to make a barrel, and no telling but what there won’t be no market at all for homemade barrels.” He took the boy’s upper arm in a tight grip, the muscular vise-like grip of a cooper, and led him out of the cooperage. “I never should’ve dragged your maw up here in the first place, but your grampaw needed me, and now he don’t because he’s dead. And now it’s time to make your maw happy and get the hell out of here.”