She stared at Harry’s bulk. Tomorrow she would wonder how she had been able to drag such a heavy man across the kitchen, down the cellar steps, and into the cage, but tonight she merely knew that it must be done.
Harry stirred and moaned once or twice in the tortuous journey but never fully awakened from his drunken stupor. Perspiration trickled down Miriam’s back and between her breasts, and by the time she had hauled her unconscious husband into the caged area she was wringing wet. A wooden platform, raised a few inches from the floor, took up a portion of the cage. Apparently the dogs had slept on this. Miriam went upstairs and dragged two blankets from their bed and threw them in on the platform. Then she closed the cage door. There was a heavy padlock on the latch. She clicked it shut. She had no key for it, but that did not matter because she did not expect to open it again — ever.
The first few days were terribly noisy, of course. It was fortunate the house was so isolated or surely Harry’s bellows of disbelief, anger, and frustration would have been heard. Miriam took Bobby to the doctor the next day to have his wound attended. The doctor was aghast and wanted to know why she hadn’t come when it happened, and how did it happen?
“He fell against the latch of the sink cabinet last night and it would have been too difficult to come all this way on foot in the dark. My husband isn’t home with the car,” Miriam lied, confident that Bobby would not refute her story, and he did not. He was a quiet, obedient child, solemn beyond his years.
When they returned from the doctor’s, they could hear Harry’s shrieks of rage as they walked in the door. Bobby shrank against his mother. Miriam sat down on the straight chair near the door and took her son onto her lap. “Listen, Bobby, you mustn’t let those noises in the cellar bother you. It’s only...” She paused a moment, suddenly thinking of a different approach. “You remember those fairy tales we were reading the other night?”
Bobby nodded.
“Do you remember the one about the prince being turned into a frog?”
“Yes...”
“Well, something like that has happened, I think, to your father. He has been turned into a bear, a great shaggy bear, as punishment, I imagine, for not — for not being more kind. Well, anyway, he’s in a cage in the cellar so he cannot hurt us.”
Bobby’s eyes were round. A particularly loud bellow rose from below at this point, and the child trembled. “He-he c-can’t get out...” he quavered.
“No.” Miriam’s voice was firm. “He absolutely can’t get out — and after a while he’ll probably stop making so much noise.” She slid the child from her lap and stood up. Then she added, “By the way, Bobby, you mustn’t tell anybody at all about this, or they will make us let him out.”
Glancing down at him, she saw his eyes widen with horror at the thought. She smoothed down her dress, satisfied. Bobby would never tell.
Miriam allowed three days to pass before she went down to Harry. He was lying down, seemingly exhausted by three days of shouting, but at her approach he sprang up and clutched with trembling fingers at the heavy cage meshing. Miriam stopped a few feet from the cage and set down on the floor the plate of food and shallow bowl of milk she was carrying. Then, as if repeating something she had rehearsed many times, she picked up a broom that lay nearby and shoved first the plate and then the bowl toward the “gate” of the cage, which cleared the floor by about three inches.
Harry’s lips twitched. “All right, you, what’s this all about?”
She did not answer but continued to shove the food toward him.
Harry’s voice was shrill. “Dammit, Miriam, let me out! Miriam — Miriam, do you hear me...” His voice became uncertain. Her silence seemed to unnerve him. Was this the same woman whom he had browbeaten so king? The same woman who had heretofore quaked at his every command? He tried again, a conciliatory tone suddenly in his voice. “Listen, Miriam, I admit you may have a beef. Look, I know I had too much to drink, but you can’t keep me locked up here forever, can you?”
She answered him then. She straightened up and looked with her unblinking clear blue eyes into his. “Yes,” she said.
He was taken aback. “W-What?”
“Yes,” she repeated. “I can keep you locked up forever. I can and I must.” She indicated the food with her foot. The two dishes were half under the gate. “Here’s some food. I’ll bring you more tomorrow night.” Then she turned and started up the stairs.
He was apparently shocked into silence for a moment, but then an outraged bellow of venomous anger escaped him. “You’ll never be able to get away with it, Miriam!” he screamed. “People’ll find out. Don’t you realize, you idiot, you can’t get away with something like this. You’ll be arrested...”
The young woman on the stairs continued ascending as if she heard nothing. At the top she switched off the cellar light and shut the door carefully, quietly, behind her.
Every evening she took him food, seldom speaking herself, letting his increasingly hysterical screams of abuse cascade over her with no comment. When the stench in the cage became unbearable she employed the same means of cleaning it the former kennel owners apparently had used. She coupled a hose on a nearby spigot and hosed off the cage floor, the water and filth easily channeling themselves into the slight gully in the cement floor outside the cage. The gully led to an open drain in the floor, and this she kept sanitary by a periodic sprinkling with disinfecting powder. Several times a week she also slid a shallow basin of soapy water in to him so that he might clean himself if he wished.
As the weeks passed, Harry’s vilification, his threats, became less. He tried a new tack. It was just a matter of time, he assured her. His company would be checking up soon. And, anyway, how long did she think she could hold out by herself? How would she live? How would she earn money? If his questions did not seem to disconcert her, it was only because she had given those same questions great thought herself.
For instance, Miriam had already telephoned Harry’s company. She was sorry, she told them, but her husband had taken another job and wished to terminate his employment with them. As Harry had never been one of their better salesmen, they were not overly upset. Fine, they said, they wished him luck, but would he please send back his sample case and stock book. Miriam said she’d see that they were in the mail that day, and they were. Thus the company, which the man in the cage so desperately counted on to start a hullabaloo over his disappearance, quietly washed its hands of him.
The weeks immediately following Harry’s incarceration were idyllic ones for Miriam and Bobby. They went to the nearby fields to pick wild strawberries, they frolicked in the woods. Never had Miriam been so happy. Her childhood had consisted of one indifferent foster home after another. Her marriage to Harry, which she had thought would be an escape, had merely had the effect of putting her in a new foster home with a new foster parent — and a more brutal one, at that. But now she was free — free for the first time in her life. Even her headaches and that confused feeling seemed to be bothering her less. In the fall Bobby would be starting school, and she must then consider her future. Harry’s remarks about her inability to support herself were not lost on her, but there was enough money in the savings account for the present, and she was determined not to worry about anything until the fall.