With (63 page)
Authors: Donald Harington
“Adam, sweet honey,” she will ask him one night during one of those postcoital moments of—what was the term he used? detumescent denouement—“do you think we ought to give up birth control?”
His silence will remind her of the way the
in-habit
Adam often would not answer her questions. Moments will drift by. She will hear him, in the dark, in the bed, quietly chuckling. Then he will say, “I reckon there’s sure room for another of us.”
There will be room for not just one but two of them, and the noise they make crying for her will be the one most tolerable noise in her life.
“This future tense is nice,” she will sometimes comment to him. “Everything about you is nice. What’s nicest about you is that you know me so well and yet you love me so much.”
“Do you want to know when I first fell in love? Not the first time I watched ye reaching by yourself. That was pure frustrated craving, not love. The first time I knew I loved ye was when you weren’t but ten or eleven and you told me that my initials which I burned into the first churn I made, ‘AM,’ could be taken to mean that I
am,
that I exist, that I have an identity. No one else could have given me that. You created me, Robin.”
“I didn’t create you. For the longest time I thought I might have just dreamed you up, and even when you appeared in the flesh I continued to wonder if you were just a reverie, if maraichinage is just a mirage, but then you made me believe that I
am
too, that I am not merely some storyteller’s wildest fancy, and that Madewell Mountain with all its inhabitants is really my domain, and, believing that I am, I know that you are.”
“Future tense, remember? Always ‘will be.’”
“Always will be
with
,” she will say, leaving the sentence, like the future tense itself, unfinished, indeterminate, open to infinite possibility.
With a determination never to finish, they will go on expanding their haunt, to the world, but first to the world around them, until they will know every rock and flower of Madewell Mountain, and then beyond it to Ledbetter Mountain and all of Stay More. Robin will never feel truly sociable, and she will hate crowds to the point of being almost agoraphobic, but she will learn to feel comfortable with her neighbors. She will visit often with Latha. Adam will visit often with George Dinsmore. They will occasionally have Latha and George to dinner. In time Latha will introduce them to her grandson Vernon Ingledew and his lovely companion Jelena. Latha will introduce them also to her granddaughter Sharon and the man Larry she is living with in the old Stay More post office/store/house that had once been Latha’s home. They will also meet another couple who will be living in the house that had been built by Daniel Lyam Montross, who was the grandfather or father of the woman Diana Stoving who will now be living in the house with her companion Day Whittacker. Montross had been the hermit who had kidnapped Diana as a child and been killed by Sugrue Alan. Robin and Adam will learn the stories of all these people, stories that Robin had already foretold to herself when she had created Stay More out of paper.
Denouements, Adam will have warned her, should not contain surprises, but there will be one little astonishment in the confession by Day Whittacker, a professional forester, that on one of his regular reconnoiterings of the timberlands of Stay More, a number of years before, he had stumbled upon the Madewell Mountain homestead, had taken a good look at a naked girl playing with a fawn in the yard, and had decided not to intrude upon her privacy.
Day’s audience will have been curious: did he not wonder if she lived there alone? Was he not tempted to speak to her and find out? Had he ever wondered if she might be in need of rescue? “Something,” Day will have said, “simply told me that she wasn’t in need of me.”
They will be in need of him now, will be in need of all of them, as friends. Eventually Vernon Ingledew, a very intelligent and wise person, will decide to run for governor of the state of Arkansas, and Adam and Robin will contribute gladly and generously to his campaign. Stay More will temporarily be invaded by others during the campaign, and there will be a few additional people that Robin and Adam will want to know. The old Stay More hotel, which had been the home of Vernon’s ancestor, Jacob Ingledew, who had been governor of Arkansas during Reconstruction, and which Larry had temporarily inhabited when it was overrun with cockroaches, will become the home of a strange woman named Ekaterina, not from Russia itself but near enough to it to have piqued Adam’s interest, since he will never forget André Tchelistcheff, who will continue until his death at ninety-three to keep in touch with Adam and send him a case of wine on his birthday. Two additional new residents who Robin and Adam will enjoy meeting will be an Oklahoma oil heiress, an Indian woman, and her manservant, also Indian. All of these people will also have their own stories, not ones that Robin will have foretold in her paper Stay More, but ones she will enjoy hearing and reading about.
Although there will come an occasion in the distant future when articles will be written about the coincidence, or design, that the impoverished backwater ghost town (one of which will propose a neologism, “
in-habit
town”) of Stay More will have happened to have contained half a dozen millionaires, including Adam and Robin, no one, according to their proscription, will ever write about Adam and Robin, who will be allowed to enjoy their seclusion and privacy for as long as they will wish.
They will rarely leave except, before settling down to have and to raise Deborah and Braxton, their daughter and son, they will go to Europe. After her very first trip to England, which she will enormously enjoy, Robin will return home and will be surprised to discover that Hreapha and the other animals have not missed her. She will be almost hurt, and will say accusingly to Hreapha, “You haven’t seen me for several weeks, and you’re acting as if I didn’t even leave.”
You didn’t,
a sweet female voice will say to her, and she will wonder if at last she has acquired the ability to hear Hreapha’s speech.
She will stare at Hreapha, who in her nonchalance will seem to be smirking. She will think about what she will have thought that Hreapha will have just spoken. Can it be?
Welcome home anyhow,
the voice will say.
I missed you. I wanted you back. I’ve always been the model of patience, but your absence was beginning to get to me. I’m
with
you now, though.
“
Robin?
” Robin will say.
“Hreapha,” her dog will say, that is, Well, it sure isn’t
me.
And Robin will realize that she will be hearing Hreapha speak those words, that if her
in-habit
is now part of her, she will have acquired the ability of
in-habits
to know the language of animals, particularly dogtalk, that most noble of them all.
“Do you mean to tell me,” she will ask Hreapha, “that my
inhabit
has been here
with
you all the time I’ve been gone?”
Yes, and she tells better stories than you do, Hreapha will reply.
Robin will give Hreapha a hug. Robin will give the
in-habit
Robin a hug, so happy to be
with
her again, and happier to have her and to be able to talk to Hreapha.
Robin’s
in-habit
will look around in search of Adam’s
in-habit
, and will find him, and the two of them will frolic and chat and cavort, and cohabit, conceiving Deborah, who, though created by sex between
in-habits,
will be born of woman and man.
Isn’t this wonderful?
the
in-habit
Robin will say.
Don’t ye know it’s future tense? Ye ort to say, “Won’t this be wonderful?”
All right. But it sure will be wonderful.
She will be delighted in all the things that
in-habits
can do, in what they can say, and hear, and what they can see. She will be surrounded by all the eloquent animals of her menagerie, and she will recall those words from Isaiah, “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”
I will have led them,
she will say.
In looking at the wonderful world through the eyes of her
in-habit
, she will not be surprised, because dear Adam will have already told her, that
in-habits
can see ghosts and she will be able to see Sugrue again. But Adam will have been mistaken about one thing. Sugrue’s ghost will not be free to roam and prowl and trouble the premises. The poor thing will be imprisoned eternally inside the skeleton in the outhouse, like an inmate behind bars, sitting there forlorn and unhappy. She will stare at Sugrue’s ghost with a return of the compassion she will have felt when she will have killed him. She will also know that none of this will have been possible without him.
Thank you, Sugrue,
she will say.
About the Author
Donald Harington
A
lthough he was born and raised in Little Rock, Donald Harington spent nearly all of his early summers in the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, his mother’s hometown, where his grandparents operated the general store and post office. There, before he lost his hearing to meningitis at the age of twelve, he listened carefully to the vanishing Ozark folk language and the old tales told by storytellers.
His academic career is in art and art history and he has taught art history at a variety of colleges, including his alma mater, the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he lectured for twenty-one years.
His first novel was published in 1965, and since then he has published fourteen other novels, most of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his own creation, Stay More, based loosely upon Drakes Creek. He has also written books about artists.
He won the Robert Penn Warren Award in 2003, the Porter Prize in 1987, the Heasley Prize at Lyon College in 1998, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 1999 and that same year won the Arkansas Fiction Award of the Arkansas Library Association. In 2006, he was awarded the inaugural
Oxford American
award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. He has been called “an undiscovered continent” (Fred Chappell) and “America’s Greatest Unknown Novelist” (
Entertainment Weekly
).
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