Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

“It probably is a very nice place,” allowed Mrs. DeLove. “But Annette hasn’t left this house in fifteen years.”

Annette nodded and then cast down her eyes in sad regret. “Someday I will though, and I’ll climb that ridge over there and I’ll come and visit you.”

“You won’t climb the ridge, Annette, because of your legs. But Netty Girl, if you ever do someday find the courage to put your sorry ass outside this house, I will personally hire somebody to carry you piggyback all the way to the top of that mountain and then all the way down again, and baby, I’ll be shouting ‘hallelujah’ all the Goddamned while.”

Annette broke into a smile. There was a warm look between mother and daughter at that moment that wanted no words.

Gus now fixed his eyes upon his former captor: “Will you at least step out upon the porch to wave goodbye to me when I get strong enough to make my return trip?”

“I wish I could. I really want to.” And then Annette gave a hopeful smile and quitted the room to check on the tea.

I will move temporarily ahead in our story to tell you that Gus, with the help of his two Outland nurses, was put squarely upon the recuperative path, and two nights later under cover of darkness found sufficient strength to make his homebound journey. And a long and exhausting journey it was for a man who had only recently recovered from a near-fatal illness — a trip requiring a steep and steady climb up the spur that his own son had earlier taken to such a prominent height as the Northern Ridge. Yet as hard as it was for Gus, he essayed it with a burning desire to find his son returned home himself and happy and well, pushing back thoughts as best he could that Newman had been tragically lost to the murderous aims of that unknown force that the DeLoves had adumbrated.

Up the ridge Augustus Trimmers betook himself on that dark Friday night with the strength of a man only partially restored to his usual mettle, and with huffings and pantings and a stumble here and there and frequent rests upon the sturdy ash walking stick he had been given by Mother and Daughter DeLove. At last upon finally surmounting the mountaintop, Gus paused to behold the darkened valley of his birth, only faintly sparkling under distant Milltown street lamp, and then Gus turned to give a final parting glance back at the black, unwinking Outland — deep and dark and pricked only by the tiny glow of the DeLove porch light, still electrified long after his parting. Gus wondered if she was still there, still standing upon the porch, having found the courage to step out from behind the imprisoning walls of her mother’s house for the first time in fifteen years. Taking the clean night air fully into her lungs. Sending off her new Digglian friend with hopeful, heartening words and a whispered prayer on his behalf and one bag each of Milk Chocolate Milanos and Strawberry Veronas. Proud of what she herself had just accomplished, as monumental an achievement in those mere three or four steps as a walk across the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania!

y head throbbed. I had taken far too long to rouse myself from the bed in which Dabber’s manservant Fips had deposited me (pursuant to a word-slurring appeal by his employer that he must be the one to tuck me beneath the coverlet, for I could not execute the task myself whilst in such a severely intoxicated state, and Dabber was in no condition to do it, finding himself in a similar situation of full prostration.) It was post-noon before I could bring myself to rise and dress and force a piece of dry toast and the yolk of an egg upon my topsy-turvy stomach, and then to transport myself with a slack and painful gait out of the front door of Dabber Hall, having been medicated by the master of that lonely household with a salutary dose of salicylic powder that had at least reduced the size of the hammer that assaulted my recovering temples to something well nigh endurable.

I was prepared to betake myself to the offices of my friend Sheriff Muntle to relate the details of the preceding day when I recalled that Muntle would be unavailable for private counsel until eventide, owing to his having removed himself to the Chowser School for the purpose of investigating a matter of the utmost importance: that hothouse thievery of earlier mention. Having absented himself from Milltown for two days, the sheriff consequently found himself deprived not only of my society and all the intelligence I was fairly bursting to convey pertaining to the momentous events of the previous day, but also active participation in other events of that period, including — as I would later learn — a fresh example of rude impatience on the part of Montague Pupker in the form of the most clamant species of door-pounding and door-kicking as had ever been evinced outside a shop, this protracted display of insolent public impropriety sending my landlady Mrs. Lumbey (the imperiled protector of Pupker’s even more imperiled daughter Hannah, and owner of said door) into such a tizzy as to engender thoughts within her fervid brain of dropping a heavy mangle or iron safe from an upper storey window down upon Pupker’s raging head.

Thinking of Muntle and of Pupker and of the appointment that was to take place between those two gentlemen on Monday with regard to a certain sub-cellar containing a most amazing inventory of mysterious items, I was reminded of something along these same lines that I had seen from Dabber’s terrace the night before when my host and I had stepped out to take the night air, my mind fuzzy with drink, my vision hazy. In that late hour, through the fog of inebriation, I descried some three or four blocks away a waggon stopt before Pupker’s emporium being loaded from the cellar trap by three dark figures whose features would have been impossible to discern even had I been cold sober. All of the cargo was boxed and crated and would not have drawn interest even had there been passers-by at this desolate hour.“Ah,” I said to myself.“I was wondering when the deed would be done, and I see that Pupker doesn’t procrastinate.”

“When what deed would be done?” enquired Sir Dabber, peering with squeezed eyes into the night without knowing what he was supposed to be looking for.

“It is no great matter,” I replied. “At least not for the present. Bumper me, my good sir! Your guest is positively parched!”

I shelved the memory for later review, and was making every effort to direct my halting alcohol-poisoned person toward my own lodgings above Mrs. Lumbey’s dress shop (where I hoped to cover my pounding head with a blanket and sink back into the arms of recuperative Morpheus), when I noticed a barefoot man in rags and tatters backing his way out of the apothecary’s shop across the street, in response to an angry injunction by that business’s proprietor to “Go along and never cast your dirty shadow upon this upstanding establishment again!” The door was then promptly slammed shut in the man’s face. During the seconds that succeeded this overwrought rebuff, the penuriously-attired man stood in the manner of one giving close inspection to the wood grain of the door’s outer face (for quite close was he in proximity to it when he had been summarily dismissed by its closure), or perhaps the man’s eyes were shut tight as he was taking this quiet intervening moment to compose and steady himself. Shortly thereafter the shabby man turned round to behold the street and all potential witnesses therein, and in so doing, revealed himself to be the pauper Harry Scadger, who had only four days earlier quitted his clan’s gipsy-like encampment within the apricot grove, and moved himself, his wife Matilda, and their five children to the Pupker Mews, as he had duly been directed to do.