With (25 page)

Hreapha felt the planchette, as it was called, moving beneath her paw and she was prompted to bark. But she watched with fascination as the planchette moved to the numeral 1 and then to the numeral 9.

“Wow!” Robin said. “Nineteen years is a long life for a dog. Okay? How many years will
I
live?”

The planchette moved to the 8 and just stayed there.

“Oh-oh!” Robin commented. “This is scaring me. Does this mean that I’m going to die before my ninth birthday?” But the planchette was not absolutely motionless. It was moving but never departing from the 8, just circling it. Hreapha wished she could explain to Robin that that might mean it was doing the same numeral twice, that is, not 8 but 88. Robin would live to be eighty-eight years old.

“Let’s ask it something else,” Robin suggested, but she was clearly disturbed at the thought she might not live beyond this, her eighth year. “Would you like to find out who you will marry? Of course dogs don’t have weddings, but would you like to know who your mate will be?”

Hreapha was not able to declare that she already knew, so she silently participated with her paw as the planchette spelled out the letters Y-O-W-R-F-R-O-W-R. Robin attempted to pronounce it: “Yowrfrowr! That’s a cute name for a dog! Do you know any dogs named ‘Yowrfrowr’?”

Hreapha moved the planchette to “Yes.”

“Hey!” Robin exclaimed. “You can talk! You can answer yes or no questions. Are you and Yowrfrowr really, really good friends?”

“Yes.”

“Does he live somewhere around here?”

Hreapha moved the planchette to “No.” Of course it was relative: “around here” could possibly mean Stay More, miles and miles away.

“Do you like Sugrue?”

That was easy. “No.”

“He’s not going to live much longer, is he? I was playing the Ouija Board with him when you came back with Robert, and we asked it if he was going to get well, and it said No.”

The planchette was still resting on the “No,” and Hreapha tapped it with her paw.

“Could we ask the Ouija Board how much longer he’s going to live?” she suggested.

Hreapha was not comfortable learning so much about the future, but she consented, and they jointly “rode” the planchette as it moved to the 1 and circled it, meaning 11, then to the two and the three. 1,2,3. Maybe the planchette was just proving it knew the basic numbers. Did it mean that he was going to live for 123 days? No, it had circled the one, doubling it, so that would be 1123. That many days?

It was Robin who figured it out. “I think it is just trying to tell us the month and the day. Eleven twenty-three. The eleventh month is November. Sugrue will die on the twenty-third of November.”

“Hreapha,” Hreapha commented, meaning
I can hardly wait.

But Robin said, “I don’t want him to die. If he dies, we are going to be in trouble.”

“Hreapha,” Hreapha said, meaning,
That remains to be seen.

“Okay, let’s ask it who I am going to marry,” Robin suggested. And she put her fingertips on the planchette along with Hreapha’s paw. The planchette moved quickly to the letter A but stalled there and would go no further. They waited and waited, and then the planchette moved its way to the word that spelled “Goodbye.”

“Well, goodbye yourself,” Robin said to the Ouija Board, and put it back in its box.

In the weeks ahead, Robert grew so rapidly that both Hreapha and Robin had their hands full with his education and training. There is a natural antipathy between felines and canines and Robert did not like Hreapha, avoiding her and sometimes even hissing at her. But they were bedmates, the two of them sleeping every night with Robin on the aired-out feather mattress, while the man continued to sleep on the pallet on the floor, which he frequently marked, requiring its daily airing out.

The nights were beginning to grow cold, so Hreapha appreciated that she was able to get under the covers with Robin, even if she had to share the covers with a creature who was so thoroughly nocturnal he couldn’t sleep at night, and did most of his sleeping in the daytime. But Robin took him to bed with her every night anyway, and fell asleep herself with one arm around Robert and the other around Hreapha, whereupon, as soon as she was asleep, Robert would begin pestering Hreapha, hissing in her ear and nibbling on her flews, and trying to get Hreapha to fool around. By day, when Robin was playing with Robert (she seemed to have forgotten her paper dolls and her paper doll town), it was fun to watch the kitty rough-housing and running around, but at night the kitten was a nuisance. Hreapha endeavored to teach the kitten her own language, but the kitten wasn’t interested and would not respond to any instruction or commands that Hreapha tried to give him.

One instruction that was imperative, and to which Hreapha devoted considerable time, with some help from Robin, was letting Robert understand in no uncertain terms that he was not to chew upon any of the baby chicks. Even though there was a great surplus of them, since both roosters had been busy fertilizing the hens, and the hens had sat upon and hatched countless eggs, and there were chicks of various ages all over the place. Robert loved to chase them, which was permissible, and to catch and play with them, which was all right up to a point, but Hreapha knew that if he ever killed one he would become hopelessly feral and bloodthirsty, and she did her best to prevent that from happening. Robert loved water, and his favorite swimming place was Hreapha’s water dish, which made the water taste off.

One night, the last night of that autumn when it wasn’t too cold to swim, and the moon was full so that a kerosene lantern wouldn’t be needed, Robin got out the Ouija Board just long enough to ask Hreapha a yes-or-no question. “Should we take him to the beaver pond?” After some deliberation, realizing that Robert might grow up to get along with the beaver if he was introduced to them at an early age, Hreapha moved the planchette to “Yes” and they escorted Robert to the beaver pond. Since neither Robin nor Hreapha could communicate with the beaver in their language, they had a bit of a problem persuading the beaver that this kitten, who was their natural enemy, only wanted to use the pond for bathing purposes. But after a while they accepted him, or at least tolerated his frisky plunge into their pool. Both Hreapha and Robin joined him, although Robin shrieked with the coldness of the water. They didn’t have to worry about the man coming and finding them.

The man spent nearly all of his nights, and most of his days, in a state of constant drunkenness, getting up from the pallet or the davenport only to grab his crutches—he had fashioned a pair of crutches out of saplings—and hobble off to the outhouse, the only exercise he got, which was futile, because he was rarely able to leave anything behind at the outhouse. He seemed to have forgotten that Hreapha existed, never speaking to her or trying in his garbled speech to give her a word, kind or unkind, and she realized eventually that he probably couldn’t even see her; in addition to his other afflictions, he was going blind, or, if not blind, his vision was blurry and doubled: Robin told Hreapha that he had begun to think that there were two Robins, twins, or close look-alike sisters.

I have lived not because of you but despite you, Hreapha once said to him, but of course he couldn’t hear her. She could not understand why she still felt any sense of duty or fidelity or any need to provide protection for him. It was probably just inbred.

But it was strong enough that she was torn with guilt when, eventually, she realized that she could no longer ignore the intensity of the new bodily feelings that overwhelmed her and left her markings with a musky new aroma. She was going to have to abandon him again, at a time when he might really have need of her. She would be leaving Robin too, and Robert, and all the poultry who depended upon her protection, but they did not disturb her as much as her forsaking him did. She went out to the cooper’s shed and had a long chat with the
in-habit
, making sure that she understood his directions on how to find that trail that led to Stay More and how to stay on the trail if the trail no longer existed. Once again he warned her that she’d probably kill herself trying the trail, but he understood her desperation.

She wished there were some way she could explain her journey to Robin. Although she was smart enough to use the Ouija Board’s “Yes” and “No,” she was not smart enough to spell out words, to formulate language on the Ouija Board that would say,
Robin girl, I am going to have to go away for two or three days. You know about Yowrfrowr? Well, he has something that I have to have.

There was nothing at all she could do. She had trouble enough explaining to her own
in-habit
that she was going to have to go away for a while. She cursed her body, she cursed her afterplace, she cursed her aromatic pee, but she went on peeing it, and then, one morning bright and early, all she could do was say to Robin, “Hreapha!” meaning, Goodbye for now, my dearest friend, I hope to see you again in a couple of days, three at the most.

And then to start trotting southward. Robin and Robert both tried to follow her, and she could only turn and yell, “HREAPHA!” meaning, I’m not going to the beaver pond. I’m going to Stay More.

And then to run so fast that they could not keep up with her.

Part Three

Without

Chapter twenty-one

T
hey let him go, and he sure went. The first thing he done, which was the reason he’d come back to Harrison in the first place (you can bet your life it wasn’t to see that crabby old grass widow he was married to) was to take his pickup to the used car lot and trade it in on a four-wheel drive. It was a trade-down, naturally, and he wound up with a piece of junk that reminded him of that bald-tired four-by-four his opponent had been a-driving, only his tires had good treads on them. So he could get to places that he hadn’t been able to reach with two-wheel drive. Many a time he’d been required to either turn back, on some hairpin climb in Searcy County or Newton County, or else strike out on foot for the rest of the way, and usually only to discover after a long hike that the supposed abandoned house had fallen in completely or was still just a-setting there empty except for rats and mice.

You’d be surprised how many empty houses there is at the end of the road all over the Ozarks. It kind of made Leo sad, at the thought that families had once lived there, and children had played, and people had worked hard to squeeze a living out of their rocky acres, only to have it come to nothing. Leo wondered what had become of them. He knew most of ’em had probably gone to California, like everbody else. Or else they’d moved into one of the big towns like Springdale or Fayetteville or Harrison, and enjoyed the comforts of city living. It was a real shame they’d never been able to find a buyer for their house, and Leo found a few houses that was really in pretty fair shape, and he even imagined himself taking possession of one of them. In fact, Leo entertained himself as he roamed the highways and byways (he didn’t much care for music or gospel preachers on the pickup’s radio) by having daydreams of moving into one of those abandoned farmsteads.

Of course his ideal location wouldn’t be up here on one of these godforsaken mountaintops but down along the river somewhere, and he’d found plenty of abandoned houses where the old road stopped at the river. For most of his life, until he’d more or less quit it in order to give all his time to the search for Robin, Leo had earned his living as a guide on the Buffalo River, taking rich sportsmen from Little Rock or as far away as St. Louis, KC and Chicago, out in johnboats to float the Buffalo and fish for linesides and goggle-eyes. He knew ever inch of that river and couldn’t nobody direct the sportsmen to the best fishing spots better than he could. His customers always gave him a nice tip over and beyond the fee. Leo was constantly hoping that he’d find Robin safely living in some cabin at a dead-end along the river. If she was, and according to his daydreams after he’d shot and killed or taken prisoner that guy who’d stolen her, Mr. Bald Tires, why, he intended to return Robin straight to her mother, and then collect the reward and get his pitcher in the papers. And then he supposed he could just spend the rest of Robin’s growing-up years giving her presents and being a nice grandpappy to her and admiring her.

The abandoned houses of the Ozarks was spread out all over northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri, and Leo had already found quite a few of them in Missouri and intended to find quite a few more now that he had a four-by-four pickup. He was keeping track and whenever he found one of the places he had one of these here yeller high-lighters that he smeared around the little white empty square on the map that meant the dwelling was no longer dwelt-in (if it was black, it meant that it was occupied, but Leo had discovered a number of black ones that was empty too, so his maps was mostly out of date). There was just about the same number of empty houses up on the ridges and mountaintops as there was down along the river or off in some flat plateau somewheres.

It was the ones up high that made him need the four-by-four, and sure enough, as soon as he got the truck and headed south from Harrison (he could never forget that was the direction Mr. Bald Tires had headed), he found himself climbing a rough trail that led up a mountain near Gum Springs, south of Jasper in Newton County, a trail he couldn’t possibly have climbed in his old pickup, the way it turned every whichaway and was full of washouts and mud holes and his pickup had a real work-out getting there. And when he got to the end of the road and stopped at the house, he saw at once the house wasn’t really abandoned. There was chickens and pigs all about, and a garden patch. A man with a shotgun came out of the house, somebody Leo hadn’t never seen before, and the man just pointed the gun at him and said, “Well?”

“Looks like a dead end, don’t it?” Leo said.

“It’s the end but it aint dead,” the man said.