With (28 page)

Chapter twenty-three

B
oy 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 arguing 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.

He was proud of Robin, that she could do all those things, like roast a turkey. He tried to tell her so, but his voice was starting to disappear on him again. Too bad, because he still had so much to say to her. While he could still talk at all, he told her as best he could that he would tell her the location of a huge amount of money if she could agree to shoot him when the time came. Still she wouldn’t agree. He was starting to lose his temper. He was truly pissed that she couldn’t do this one simple little favor for him. He went ahead and showed her where the money-chest, the Sentry box, was buried under the front porch, but he decided to hold on to the key and offer it as a bribe when the time came that he needed to be shot.