The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  When the bridge will be finished, the road will be constructed onward to the dooryard, making it possible for Adam to park his vehicle at the house, and he will use his vehicle, for the first time after the road and the bridge are finished, to take Robin to Stay More, and Adam will explain to all the other animals that for this trip only Hreapha will be allowed to accompany them, because she is the first and oldest of all the menagerie, but that for future trips in this wonderful future tense he will give the others, even Sparkle, but not Bess or Dewey, a ride in his wonderful car. Hreapha will be thrilled, and although riding down the mountain sitting on the front seat with her head out the window will remind her of all the many long-ago times she will have ridden in the man’s pickup truck down that mountain, she will come to understand what thrills the future, and the future tense, will have for her, riding in cars, and, that very first trip, riding down to Stay More to visit with Yowrfrowr and her daughter and grandchildren, and, my goodness gracious sakes, one great-grandchild. Adam and Robin will spend hours visiting with the nice old lady who lives in the dogtrot, so Hreapha will have plenty of time to visit with dear Yowrfrowr and the multitude of their offspring. If there is a heaven, this will be it. But Yowrfrowr will not be in good shape. He will say to Hreapha, Dear Girl, I am afflicted not merely with rheumatism but an host of other sufferings, and I fear I am not long for this world.

  Hreapha will chide him for speaking in the present tense and she will tell him how she has bitten the present tense and chased it away. Sweetheart, she will say to him, in the future tense I will never let you leave us.

  And he will give her a grateful lick. She will ask him if he understands that this man, Adam, is indeed the in-habit, the same one whom Yowrfrowr met in the orchard of the Madewell place that time that Yowrfrowr had helped them hunt for Paddington.

  Yowrfrowr will say, Don’t you recall, my dear, that it was I who taught you all about in-habits in the first place?

  Adam will invite the nice old lady to ride with them back up to the Madewell place, and they will decide that they have room for Yowrfrowr too, although Adam will explain to all the others, to Hruschka and everyone and even the dozens of cats, that he’ll give them all a ride too eventually, but for this trip he will take only Yowrfrowr, because he is the first and the oldest. Hreapha will be delighted, although they will have to sit together in the back end and will not be able to stick their heads out the windows.

  Crossing the new bridge, which will be just wide enough for one vehicle but will seem to be suspended hundreds of feet above the ground below, both Yowrfrowr and his mistress will be amazed. “It’s just a viaduct,” Adam will say, “but it sure is extending our haunt.”

  Yes, their haunt will reach at least as far as Harrison, where Hreapha will ride with them one day to do some shopping at some of the same stores where the man had stocked up for his abduction of the little girl, and Robin will show Adam the house where the little girl lived, still there, almost unchanged, but inhabited by strangers. Adam will offer to knock and ask that Robin be allowed to visit the interior, but she will not want to. She will say to Adam, “I’m not ready. I don’t want anyone to know who I am. Not anyone who doesn’t already know.”

  One problem of Hreapha’s new and greatly improved life will be the matter of returning after so many years to commercial dog food. She will have become so accustomed to a diet from the wild—of rabbits and squirrels and various birds—that she will not immediately relish the idea of Purina Dog Chow again. But Adam, with Robin’s help, will pick out a lot of canned dog food of the very best grade, as well as cat food, and Hreapha will eventually decide that she appreciates the comfort and convenience, if not the taste, of not having to chase down, capture, kill and chew up her supper. It will be a comfort in her old age.

  The viaduct and the new road will also make possible the crew of men who will come and dig big holes all along the mountain trail and plant in the holes tall poles, upon which will be strung wires. Just in time for their Christmas tree, a traditional red cedar, traditionally strung with Robin’s garlands of popcorn and many of the stars she had cut from toilet paper tubes and hand-colored so many years before and had used every Christmas since. But in addition to those, there will now be many new glass ornaments and garlands and tinsel and bows and boughs and sprays, and, most marvelous of all, myriad wired bulbs, large and small, which, when Robin flicks a switch on the wall, in a ceremony in the presence of all of them, will burst with light and will sparkle throughout the holiday season.

  But several days before that ceremony, Hreapha, knowing that it will be Adam’s birthday, will say to him, Sir, as you know, I have always obtained, or directed the obtaining of, a pet for each of Robin’s birthdays, including, for the most recent one, yourself, Sir, if you don’t mind being called a pet, which you are, of course. Anyway, I should like to continue this tradition by getting you a pet for your birthday. You name it, I’ll get it.

  Adam will laugh and laugh. His eyes will water. When he will finally get control of himself, he will say, “Dear Hreapha, you are not merely a good dog. You are the world’s best dog. But the ‘pet’ I reckon I’d like doesn’t grow in these woods or anywhere hereabouts. And it isn’t an elephant. It’s something I’ve wanted all my life, which Robin almost wanted for her eighteenth birthday instead of me, or before she thought of me. You wouldn’t have been able to get it for her either.”

  A horse? Hreapha will ask. And when he will smile and nod, she will say, Well, don’t put it past me. I’ll find you a horse, by golly.

  “I have a better idea,” he will say. And he will take her with him in his big car, just the two of them, and he will drive a long way, farther than Harrison, to a big farm surrounded by paddocks with many horses. He will hook to the rear of his big car another car, which he will say is called a horse trailer. “Now, pick one out for me,” he will tell her, a tall order, but she will carefully examine all of the horses, and will choose the one which she considers most noble, most stately, and most handsome. They will take him home. When Robin will screech and whimper, he will tell her that for a Christmas present he will take her back to the horse farm and let her pick one out for herself.

  So, that day, after they will light the Christmas tree, Robin and Adam will ride out together across the meadow and all over the mountain on two horses who Robin will have been named Wish and Desire, objects of envy and admiration for all the other animals. Much to Hrolf’s dismay, neither Wish nor Desire will ever attempt to learn dogtalk, the official language of the menagerie. Rather, they will teach him a passable horsetalk, and he will spend the rest of his life, whenever he feels lordly, as he often will, speaking it.

  Hrolf will remain always nominally in charge of the menagerie, even when, on those many occasions when Robin and Adam are gone away, sometimes for days on end, the care and keeping of the menagerie will be taken over by the very good man named George, the very same George who will have been intended as the original birthday present for Robin but through no fault of his own will have been relieved from that responsibility by the miraculous coming of Adam. Hreapha will like George very much and will often speculate about what life will have been like if he will not have been supplanted by Adam. George will not be nearly as handsome as Adam, nor as intelligent, and certainly not as wealthy, but he will have many admirable qualities which will always make Hreapha glad to see him, whenever he comes to feed them all during the occasional absences of Adam and Robin.

  Adam will always tell Hreapha where they are going and how long they will be gone, and while Hreapha will wish she could go with them, she will know that she could not possibly ride in a vehicle which rises above the earth and flies over mountains and rivers and even oceans, which she will not even be able to imagine. She will be happy for them that they will be able to extend their haunt to the entire world, but she will miss them terribly while they will be gone.

  While they will be gone, she will just take it easy and wait for them to come back. She w
ill laze under her favorite tree, a white oak of course, and will watch the world either go by or fail to go by, as it will choose. Her favorite lounging hole, in the earthen floor of the cooper’s shed, will have been covered with hard cement in the renovation of the shed. She will not have minded. That is, minded in the sense of being offended or bothered. The better sense of minding, which Yowrfrowr will have explained to her so many years before, namely, the faculty of knowing what is in one’s master’s mind, is a talent that she will continue to employ whenever in the presence of Robin or Adam, and which she will regret being unable to employ while they will be gone.

  There under her oak tree, she will reflect that the nicest thing about an in-habit’s becoming visible, as Adam’s will spectacularly have done, is that one will be permitted to mind more readily by examining the lineaments and demeanor of the master. That is, one will be able to read and therefore to mind the visible face. You can’t very well mind something you can’t see.

  While she will be having these thoughts, she will suddenly sit up, and she will perk her ears, and will sniff the air, and will look all around her, but she will perceive nothing, except, eventually, a small, timid voice, which will say to her, Ma, things sure is a-changing hereabouts.

  Her memory will not be that good. It will be a voice she will not have heard for a number of years and it will be speaking in coarse, guttural accents. Because it will have no body nor scent attached to it, it will obviously be an in-habit, and she cannot mind it. Because it will have addressed her as “Ma,” she will only be able to assume that it is a relative of hers, and she will correct it: Son, we will be in the future tense hereabouts. You will not be able to say ‘is a-changing’. You’ll have to say ‘will be a-changing.’

  Thanks for the grammar lesson, Ma, but don’t ye know me? Or I reckon I should say ‘will ye not be a-knowing me?’

  She will be standing now, fully alert, and focusing all her senses on the source of the voice. In a voice as hesitant and awestruck as Robin will have first used to say to the rematerialized in-habit, “Adam?” Hreapha will say, Yipyip?

  Ma, I’m sure sorry I took off with them fellers, he will say. But I left my heart behind. I’ve actually been right here ever since but I just couldn’t bear to let ye know it. Now I want to come home.

  Then come home, boy, she will say. This here will be the future tense and you will be able to do anything you will like in it.

  She will gaze out across the meadow and will see him, in full trot. He will be an old dog, or at least a middle-aged dog, and he will have changed, but she will know him. It will be Yipyip, and very soon he will be surrounded not just by her but by his brother Hrolf and his sister Hroberta and all those of the menagerie who will have remembered him and all those who will never have met him but will be eager to sniff and ogle and listen to a wild dog of partial coyote parentage. He will be very hungry, but as soon as they will have fed him he will regale them all with stories of his many adventures in the pack of coyotes, who will have long since departed this countryside and roamed far away.

  He will attempt to explain that he will have come home not only because of his desire to encounter his in-habit and return to his boyhood haunt but because he will have missed his mother, and he will never want to leave her again.

  She will permit him to establish a loafing spot under her own private oak. She will attempt to bring him up to date on everything that will have happened around here, but he will hush her, saying, Ma, in-habits know all that stuff anyway.

  She will not even need to show him all the improvements that will have been made around here, the renovations of the house and barn and cooper’s shed and henhouse, as well as the construction of a garage and toolshed and greenhouse and something called a gazebo, because supposedly his in-habit will have already witnessed all of those.

  But there will be one building that will not have been renovated, which will have been left exactly as it was, and Hreapha will direct her son’s attention to it.

  The outhouse, with its door open wide, will yet be occupied by a skeleton, the remains of a man who Yipyip will never have known. The skeleton will be wearing a big grin, and it will occur to Hreapha that he must be finding this future tense very funny.

  Let me tell you all about him, she will begin to tell her son. Once upon a time, long ago, I decided to run away from him because

  Chapter forty-nine

  We will be charmed by darling Hreapha’s conversion of this recital into the future tense, which, whether or not it is perpetual and boundless, is best-suited for dénouement, a graphic French word derived from the untying of knots.

  The principal knot of this whole narrative will not of necessity have been our love story, but the more intricate knot of a girl’s passage into womanhood in a condition of isolation and seclusion from the mundane milieux of society. The untying of that knot, consequently, will be a matter of that woman’s decision either to remain in seclusion or to allow herself to accept and to receive certain satisfactions from the outside world. We will not wish to rush her into becoming sociable, because we ourselves will have led a rather private and circumscribed life, but at the same time we will feel obliged to steer her away from her determination to remain a hermit.

  “I’m scared,” she will confide to us one night in bed on the day that the finishing of the road has allowed us to park our SUV in the dooryard. “What’s to keep the whole world from driving up that road?”

  “For one thing, a big iron gate at the bottom of the trail,” we will assure her. “But I reckon nobody would have ary motive for coming up that road anyhow even if they could get in.”

  She will roll over into our arms. “Promise me you won’t let anybody find out about us.”

  That will be easy for us to promise. But that iron gate will have to open to let us out, and there will be any number of places we will want to go, things we will want to buy, things we will want to do, pleasures we will have earned the right to enjoy. The first trip back to Harrison, for example, which Hreapha will have already mentioned, having been allowed to ride along with us. Robin will point out to us the modest little house in which she had spent all her early years, and we will drive past the Woodland Heights Elementary School, which she will have attended but not finished, and the Harrison High School, where she will never have been able to go. (A topic we will already have discussed: she will have been too old to go back to high school but will she want perhaps to prepare for some sort of high school equivalency certificate so that she will be able to go to college, if she desires? “I don’t think so, but let me consider it,” she will say.) Robin will even show us the roller skating rink from which she was abducted, and we will get out of the SUV and examine the low little balcony from which Sog Alan had snatched her. We will watch her carefully, we will mind her in Hreapha’s sense, to see if any remnants of the trauma cling to her, but while she will obviously be lost in thought in the effort of remembering, she will not be disturbed. (Long, long ago we will have learned that one of the many things we love about her is her imperturbability in the face of hardship, shock, disappointment, and loss.)

  Among the several and sundry stores where we will stop to load the SUV with all the food and goods and needs that we can haul, is the discount supermarket where once her mother will have worked. Robin will want to buy a few things there, including, for sentimental reasons, a quart jar of pickled pigs’ feet, and she will call to our attention the fact that the manager of the store will still be the same Mr. Purvis who will have been her mother’s boss. We will already have reflected and observed, not simply here in Harrison, that the world does not really change very much in eleven years, that except for the coming and going of new fads and fashions and the latest developments in technology, the world of this future tense will not essentially differ greatly from that world of the past tense in which Robin’s story will have begun. Now she will tell us that she wants to speak to Mr. Purvis. She will not have spoken to anyone except us, our good frien
d George Dinsmore, and our excellent friend Latha Bourne Dill, and she will tell us that she will never have spoken to Mr. Purvis before. He will have seen her on several occasions at the ages of five, six, and seven, but he will not recognize her now, as she will have expected him not to do. The falls of her extraordinarily long hair (about which we’ll soon be making suggestions) are concealed inside her winter coat.

  “When did Karen Kerr quit?” she will ask him. She will have to repeat herself, because he will not immediately recognize the name.

  “Oh, my, I don’t believe she’s worked here for a number of years,” he will say. “You know, she married that FBI guy and moved to Little Rock, I suppose it must’ve been at least six or seven years ago. Are you a relative or friend?”

  “Both,” Robin will say, and will take our arm and lead us out through the check-out.

  In time we will feel constrained to offer, “Robin, any time you feel like it, we’d be glad to take you to Little Rock to see your mother.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” she will want to know.

  “Well, I reckon it was just sort of an editorial ‘we,’ just meaning me myself.”