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
Although 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).
Table of Contents
Part One: Parted with
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Part Two: Sleeping with
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Part Three: Without
Chapter twenty-one
Chapter twenty-two
Chapter twenty-three
Chapter twenty-four
Chapter twenty-five
Chapter twenty-six
Chapter twenty-seven
Chapter twenty-eight
Chapter twenty-nine
Chapter thirty
Part Four: Within
Chapter thirty-one
Chapter thirty-two
Chapter thirty-three
Chapter thirty-four
Chapter thirty-five
Chapter thirty-six
Chapter thirty-seven
Chapter thirty-eight
Chapter thirty-nine
Chapter forty
Part Five: Whither with her
Chapter forty-one
Chapter forty-two
Chapter forty-three
Chapter forty-four
Chapter forty-five
Chapter forty-six
Chapter forty-seven
Chapter forty-eight
Chapter forty-nine
Chapter fifty
About the Author