With (29 page)

He didn’t know what time it was, or what day it was and even where he was at. She asked him, “Can Hreapha and Robert come to Thanksgiving too?” and that reminded him that it must be Thanksgiving. All his brains seemed to be turning into mush.

In one hand he clutched a quart bottle of good old Mr. Daniels from Tennessee (where his forebears came from too). Maybe this was the last bottle he’d be able to drink, though there was enough more in the storeroom to pickle Robin until her middle age if she ever developed a taste for the stuff. He laughed. Or tried to. In the other hand he held the key to the Sentry and the scrap of paper that said for her to shoot him. Those three things was all he needed in the world.

“Dinner’s ready,” she came and said to him, and helped him make his way to the table and sit down. There was a goddamn dog sitting in one of the chairs, and a fucking baby bobcat sitting in another one, and they both had little napkins tied around their necks. Or maybe he was just imagining it, because he couldn’t see worth shit nohow. Robin was talking to him but he couldn’t tell what she was saying.

The dog and the kitty was staring at him. He tried to pick up his fork to start in to eating, but his hand shook so he couldn’t manage it. He wasn’t hungry anyhow. All he wanted was some more of this here bottle in his hand, which he could leastways hold steady to raise to his mouth.

“We ought to say grace,” he heard her say. He tried to remember who Grace was.

Nobody said her, so Robin came around and commenced feeding him, forking his food into his mouth until his mouth was filled and he tried and tried to chew and swallow, just to help out. But he couldn’t, so he had to just spit it out, and it splattered all over the table.

It was time to go. Hell, it was long past time to go. He held up the sign that asked her to shoot him, and waved it back and forth in front of her face, and offered her the key, but she just shook her head and kept on a-shaking it.

He realized he needed to piss, and not only that, he needed to shit. He grabbed his crutches and hobbled for the door, falling down before he reached it. She did her best to help him up. “You’d better sit down, Sugrue,” she told him.

“Gotta go,” he managed to say, which was his next-to-last words. He struggled on out to the outhouse, and she went with him. He got her into the outhouse and dropped his overalls and said to her the only thing that would make any sense besides “Shoot me.” He grabbed the back of her head and said, “Sug my dig.” And there really wasn’t much that he remembered of this life after that.

Chapter twenty-four

Y
our own
in-habit
is always waiting for you whenever you meet up with it again, especially after a long absence. When she had come back from her long, terrible journey, her
in-habit
, which was now firmly and forever entrenched on these premises, had been happier to see her than even Robin had been.

But she had discovered a strange and important thing about others’
in-habits
. For whatever reason, someone else’s
in-habit
will appear to you—no, “appear” is the wrong word—will make itself known to you only when you are in great need of it. That was certainly true of the boy
in-habit
who had helped her find the scissors and the turkey caller and had given her such detailed but ultimately useless instructions on how to find her way to Stay More. He was a wonderful
in-habit
and she felt as if she were his dog as much as she was Robin’s and certainly much more than she was the man’s. And yet when she returned from her long rough journey, he had not been around to greet her. She had “looked” for him around the cooper’s shed, and had hreaphered for him a few times, but he seemed to have disappeared. Oh, of course, he was already and always disappeared, but his presence seemed to have evaporated. She had wanted to tell him that many parts of the trail he had used to get to Stay More simply no longer existed. She had also, since he seemed to be able to hear her as well as a fellow dog could, wanted to tell him that she was pregnant. It was an important announcement that she couldn’t communicate to Robin or Robert or her friends the deer or her friends the beaver or her friends the chickens. She wanted someone to know, although she herself was not at all certain who the father was, dear sweet Yowrfrowr or one of the pack of coyotes who had raped her on her way home.

The trail to Stay More still existed in many places: she had watched for landmarks that the
in-habit
had told her to look for: a red bluff, a lone tall pine, a craggy gap through boulders, a steep slope of slate scree, a dark forest of hickory trees, a limestone ledge with a spectacular waterfall spilling over it and dropping fifty or more feet, a treacherous vertical path that she should skirt because she didn’t have hands for holding to the limbs beside it, the dark luxuriant holler or glen surrounding the run-off of the waterfall, and then, nearing Stay More, abandoned logging trails, abandoned pastures, abandoned orchards, abandoned farms.

The last mile had been fairly easy, and even fun, although Hreapha realized that the entire route she had taken was simply not one that Robin could ever take, in order to escape her captivity, if that was her wish. Hreapha even doubted that Adam Madewell, if the boy were actually “around” today, could manage the journey that he had taken so often to reach the Stay More school. And she herself was nervous and disinclined to make the return journey when the time came. It would be mostly uphill going back.

She had grown increasingly hungry, having been on the hike for two days and a night. The first day and night out, although she had sometimes detected actual remnants of the path once worn by the
in-habit’s
feet when he was a boy going to and from school, was confusing and difficult, and she had spent most of the cold night curled up in a cavern, not because she was tired yet or couldn’t see well in the dark, but because she had heard the coyotes, who were mostly nocturnal, and she did not wish to encounter them. She had tried her best to refrain from peeing, because she did not want to attract the coyotes with her advertisement or give them a trail to follow. Even so, on the second day out, one of them had picked up her scent and begun stalking her. She had become so increasingly desperate for mating that she was tempted to allow the coyote to catch her, but thoughts of dear Yowrfrowr made her seek to escape the coyote. In running as fast as she could to escape him, she had slipped on the slate scree and tumbled down a steep slope and landed in a briar patch that scratched her up badly, even bringing blood. But she had escaped the coyote, and after getting her wind back she ran onward, finding herself lost in the hickory forest, with only a vague sense of direction and no visual or olfactory clues. She tried to tune in to her old Stay More
in-habit
but it had long gone to the Madewell Mountain house, where its presence was sending her such strong signals that she was tempted to turn around and go home, even if she had to mate up with a coyote along the way. She had nothing against coyotes; their breeding was just as good as, if not better than, her own. In fact, most of these local coyotes were descendants of the long-extinct red wolf, a magnificent dog. But she didn’t like the idea of quick mating with strangers, and after all, coyotes did not speak her language, or rather they spoke a form of it that was not at all intelligible to her.

So she had gone on and managed to find her way out of the hickory forest. She had searched for but could not find the log which the
in-habit
had told her served as a footbridge over a little stream, so she had attempted simply to swim across in the frigid water, but she had been caught up in the current and thus discovered the fabulous waterfall by going over it! She had howled as she had fallen fifty feet to the pool beneath, had gone deeply underwater and struck herself on the bottom, losing consciousness. It was a wonder she hadn’t drowned. But when she had come to, she had found herself on the bank downstream in the glen of the waterfall, bruised and thoroughly wet and cold, but still alive.

The rest of the journey had been fairly easy, although she was so sore she could hardly walk. And when, finally, she reached the dogtrot log cabin where Yowrfrowr lived with a thousand cats and a beautiful old lady, she could only weakly announce her name to him and then collapse at his feet.

I’ll be jigswiggered! Yowrfrowr exclaimed. Will wonders never cease? I had given you up for permanently missing. Are you all right? And he licked her face.

I’ve just made a trip, she said, such as you should hope you never have to make.

For what reason? he said.

Why, to see
you
, silly, she said.

Oh, dear me, he said. I’m frightfully flattered.

Yes, dear you, she agreed. But she didn’t feel like doing any more talking until she’d had some rest and possibly something to eat and drink. Yowrfrowr obligingly exhumed one of his favorite bones for her, and led her to the springhouse, where she slaked her thirst. She rested a while and then told him about some of her adventures on the hike down from the mountains, and told him also of her experiences at the old Madewell homestead, where her new mistress was a charming young girl named Robin, whom the man had kidnapped.

Good heavens, Yowrfrowr commented. You’ve been living with a felon.

She told him all the good things about the place, even including the nice
in-habit
who lived in the cooper’s shed, as well as the beavers and their dam, and the recently acquired bobcat kitten. She wanted to make life up there sound as exciting as possible, on the chance she could persuade Yowrfrowr to go home with her. She told him that the man was very ill and would probably not last much longer.

But doesn’t the girl want to escape and go home? Yowrfrowr wondered.

Probably, Hreapha admitted, but even if there was a way she could get out of there, and there isn’t, she’s having the time of her life and is starting to think of the place as her home. I have to get back to her as soon as I can, but I just had to see you. I have been dying to see you.

May I guess why? Yowrfrowr inquired, and that was all that either of them had to say for the rest of the day and night. They found privacy at a distance from the cabin, and there they went through the ritual of positionings, almost like a dance. She displayed her swollen afterplace to him, with her tail held to one side, then stood motionless while he rose up and clasped her around her flanks, inserted himself and began thrusting. Her mother, in describing the act she could eventually expect, had warned her in advance to expect to find herself tied or locked at the afterplace with her mate after he had deposited his discharge in her. Her mother had told her that the climax of mating was called ‘getting off,’ but you don’t get off at all. You remain hooked together for a long time. And indeed, fifteen or twenty minutes passed before they could separate, whereupon they just lay snuggly cuddled and resting for a long time, talking about Stay More gossip and all the things that had happened on Madewell Mountain, until, after going to the springhouse for another long drink of water, they repeated the whole process.

Hreapha spent the night, and, in fact, another night after that one…or maybe two. She was not bothering to keep count, but it seemed they made love at least half a dozen times, until finally she had no desire remaining. But she had no desire to leave, either. Yowrfrowr gladly agreed to accompany her on a kind of sentimental journey to her old home, which she found completely abandoned and uncared for. No trace of her
in-habit
remained there, but she could not help reflecting that her poor master, if he had stayed there, might not now be in death’s embrace. Conceivably, Hreapha could have lived out her life in this old place, happy with occasional visits to her beloved Yowrfrowr, without ever knowing of the heaven of Madewell Mountain. She began to talk to Yowrfrowr in earnest about the possibility that he might be able to join her permanently at the Madewell homestead. She stopped just short of actually begging him to go with her.

You make it sound so wonderful, he allowed. I am greatly tempted. But you must understand how devoted I am to my mistress, and how crushed and desolate she would be if I left her, even with all those uncompanionable pussycats she has.

I’ll miss you for the rest of my life, she whined.

Godspeed and take care, he said.

And after she’d left him, she reflected that he might have gone with her if she were still in heat and if he had not exhausted himself servicing her. He also might have gone with her if she had asked for his protection against the coyotes. She hadn’t even mentioned to him that there was a pack of coyotes roaming Ledbetter Mountain, which was the sister mountain to Madewell.

When she stopped to pee, she was relieved to note that her marking no longer bore the sexual advertisement. That was some small comfort in the hideous hike, mostly uphill, that lay ahead of her.

She had no idea how long it took her to get back home; certainly more than the two days and one night the downhill journey had consumed. It should have been easier because she had the guidance of her own scent on the trail as well as of her
in-habit
at the Madewell place, and if it hadn’t been for the damned coyotes she would probably have got home without much more difficulty than she had had leaving it. She heard them before she smelled them, late on the second afternoon out. And then she saw them. There were five males, smaller than German shepherds, long legged, dark furred, pointy eared. They were good-looking, even handsome. They lacked Yowrfrowr’s jovial bearing and shaggy casualness, especially his jaunty flopping ears, and certainly, when they began attempting to communicate their wishes to her, they lacked his elegance of speech.