The Cockroaches of Stay More (11 page)

The Lord stumbled against the cookroom table, and in doing so jostled a pile of books stacked on the table alongside an opened beer can. Some of the books fell to the floor but the beer can only tottered; the Lord grabbed it and raised it to His lips. The Lord took a lusty swallow. The Lord gagged, coughed, opened the door leading from the cookroom to the front yard, drew back His arm, and threw the beer can and whatever contents remained across the yard, westward across the weed-grown Roamin Road and into the edge of the Lord’s Garden and Refuse Pile.

Then the Lord made Himself a pot of coffee. The aroma offended Chid, who had once attempted to eat a ground of coffee and been sickened by it. The Lord poured himself a large cup of the stuff, then took down from the cupboard a box and out of the box He drew an oatmeal cookie. Crumbs fell to the floor, and Chid fought the great temptation to drop down from the Lord’s collar and help himself to the food on the floor, but it was full daylight now, and no roosterroach ever dines after dawn.

With His cookie and coffee, the Lord left the cookroom, crossed the eating room and loafing room, and entered the ponder room. Usually all the Lord ever did in this room was sit in a swiveling chair at His desk and stare out the window and ponder. Occasionally the Lord was known, at night when roosterroaches could observe Him, to take one or more or several of the many books which lined the walls of the ponder room, and sit in the loafing room and read. One of the first lessons that roosterroaches were taught in the second or third instar was to leave alone the tempting glue in the bindings of these books. Edible though it was, nutritious though it was, tasty though it was, the consumption of bookbinding glue would be a serious offense unto the Lord, an unforgivable sin, and no rooster-roach bothered the books.

But this morning the Lord neither pondered nor read a book. He sat at His desk, at the machine which was called, from the label Chid deciphered on it, Selec Trick, referring perhaps to the tricks which the Lord made it do, usually by tapping the beast’s fifty eyes, which caused a dancing globe to spread words upon sheets of yellow paper. But this morning He chose white paper and put it into the Selec Trick.

Resisting the powerful urge to scamper down and fetch one of the several crumbs of oatmeal cookie which continued to fall from the Lord’s hand, and trying to avoid the fumes of coffee that insulted his sniffwhips, the Reverend Chidiock Tichborne sat on the Lord’s shoulder and watched Him perform tricks on His Selec Trick.

The first letters were the day of the week, Saturday, no problem for the minister to decipher. These were followed by the month, May, and the date, and the year. The Lord pushed and poked eyes on the Selec Trick which made its dancing globe run and bounce. And the Lord typed: “Dear Sharon,” and paused but the briefest moment, then did tricks all the morning long, and much of the afternoon.

Chapter eleven

S
urely, thought Tish, as she woke at the first dim of dusk to find that her parents had not returned, they will come home any minute now that the sun is set. She made all the children wait, before foraging for the night’s first meal, in order to welcome the return of Daddy and Momma. But the full dark came, everyone was ravenous enough to eat dirt, and still there was no sign of the parents. The older children kept their sniffwhips finely tuned in search of the first hint of Jack and/or Josie Dingletoon, and eager Jubal received permission from Tish to leave the log and walk out across Carlott in the direction of Holy House to reconnoiter the expected return. When Jubal did not come home after an hour, Tish went out in search of him, and found him sitting atop the deserted Platform, staring toward Holy House and swinging his sniffwhips slowly but steadily in every direction.

“Reckon ye might as well come on back home, Jubal, boy,” his elder sister said to him. “They’re not a-comin tonight, it don’t look like.”

The boy rose up and glanced around. “Where did the Lord lay?” he asked.

“Right yonder,” Tish pointed a sniffwhip. The impress of the Lord’s body was still detectable in the grass. “His head was there, and His feet were way over
there
, and out yonder is where I touched His finger.”

The boy climbed down from the Platform and walked slowly homeward beside his sister, retracing their steps. After a while he raised his bent head and with upturned face, with stargazers and big eyes alike, he gazed at the stars, whose cold pulses were beating amid the black hollows above, serenely removed from these two wisps of roosterroach life. Jubal asked Tish how far away those twinklers were, and whether Man was Lord of all those worlds as well as of this one.

“Did ye tell me wunst the stars are worlds, Tish?” he asked her.

“Yes.”

“All like ours, with roosterroaches all over all of ’em?”

“I reckon so, Jubal.”

“Do they all have to go west, everywhere, jist like us?”

“Everything goes west, sooner or later. Even those whole stars, each and ever, sputter and go dark and go cold and go west.”

Jubal grew very reflective. “And is our world ever going to go cold?”

Tish realized that Jubal was too young to remember the last winter. She herself had been still too young during the worst part of it to realize its severity. “Yes,” she said. “It will become very cold.”

“When we go live in Partheeny, can we stay warm all the time?”

“Why, Jubal, what gives ye the notion that we could ever go live in
Partheeny
?”

“If you was to marry a Squar Ingledew, we could!”

Tish could not suppress a great laugh. “I’m not about to marry no Squar Ingledew!” she said. “Whatever give ye such a notion?”

“Momma said.”

“Huh? What-all did Momma say?”

“She said if ever anything happened to her and Daddy, you was to remember that the Dingletoons was actually Ingledews, and that you orter go and visit the squires and claim kin.”

“Claimin kin is one thing,” Tish told Jubal. “Gittin married to one of ’em is a gray moth of a different color. Besides, if we was kin, it’d be incest to marry one. And Brother Tichborne says there’s nothing worser than incest.”

“When will ye claim kin?” he wanted to know.

She was confounded, nay, dumbfounded, by the prospect. From the woods all around came the opening bars of the Purple Symphony, but she mistook these sounds for strains in her own heart: someone had told her that when you hear the Purple Symphony it makes you yearn for something. The lower bristles of her sniffwhips tingled with the scent of pining, and even though she realized the scent was coming from herself, it still meant good luck. Would she have good luck if she tried to claim kin to the Ingledews?

“When will ye claim kin?” Jubal intruded on her reverie once more, and Tish discovered herself back home in the rotlog hovel, surrounded by her siblings, all of whom were picking up Jubal’s question and drumming it at her: When will ye claim kin? When will ye claim kin?
When will ye claim kin?

Tish suddenly felt overwhelmed by her responsibility, her duty, and the burden of the knowledge that they were Ingledews. Why had this knowledge come so abruptly, almost as a foretokening of tragedy? If her father had not discovered, on the same night of his westering, that he was an Ingledew, his children would have faced the vicissitudes of their lot in life with the same resignation and the same acceptance of reality that all roosterroaches possess. They would have been content to go on living as Dingletoons. Somewhere, somehow, Tish might have crossed paths with Archy Tichborne again, whom she had encountered so fleetingly at the play-party. “Just to think,” she said to herself morosely, “only last night I danced and laughed!” Now, as the oldest survivor among the Dingletoon children, she had to take over the household…or find a way to move to Parthenon.

“Better claim kin tonight,” Jubal prodded. “Grab time by the sniffwhips, as Momma allus said. The early worm fools the bird.”

“Just leave me be!” Tish wailed, and fled from the house. She climbed the Great Rock to the north of Carlott, a boulder almost as high as Holy House itself, which was in its shadow. On the top of this Great Rock was a small level place, which Man Himself had never visited and could scarcely reach, where a group of small rocks, column-like, had been arranged, some flat ones, post-and-lintel, capping and spanning others, into a circle. According to legend, powerful rooster-roaches years before the time of Joshua Crust had placed the rocks into this circle, although it was not conceivable that
any
roosterroach, not even a crew of mighty Ingledews, could have budged or nudged any of these stones. Still this circle of stones was a special place, pagan, non-Crustian, and perhaps witchlike, where few roosterroaches ever went any more. One had to traverse deep mosses to reach it. It had been called Hinglerocks, long ago, and Tish knew the name but had never heard anyone else speak of it, or go there. To her Hinglerocks was a private ruined temple, where she could go to escape the puzzles and vexations of life, or, now, to mourn the westering of her parents and try to give herself nerve to claim kin to the Ingledews. Because nothing except moss grew there to tempt any food-searching creature, she was never molested, except en route, when she might encounter a hostile cricket, a Santa Fe or scorpion, or meet up with some fat nightcrawler whose lingo she could not fathom.

From Hinglerocks Tish could see all the way to Parthenon, two furlongs distant; the house-long-ago-converted-into-a-general-storeand-now-back-into-a-house was silhouetted in the moonlight against the holler in which it nestled, a single light burning within one room to the left, a kerosene light, pale as a distant star. The weed-forested Roamin Road led to it; the closest Tish had ever been to Parthenon was the edge of this forest on the Roamin Road just the night before, when the parade of damsels marched there. The Lord never drove His vehicle over this road any more, nor did He even walk it any more, except to put envelopes into the Woman’s mailbox.

For what must have been an hour or more, Tish sat at Hinglerocks gazing out toward Parthenon and summoning her courage to venture there. At last she decided at least to approach the place, and sniff around it.

Another hour was consumed in her journey: as she approached the forest of weeds that loomed between her and her destination, she almost hoped to be spared arrival by some forest-creature: the oblivion of a shrew’s gullet would be preferable to the rigors of interviews with Ingledews. She would rather encounter a badger, a possum, even the weird rare armadillo, than face an Ingledew. Then she remembered that her own dear late father had been an Ingledew, and there had been nothing fearsome about him. For that matter,
she
was an Ingledew! Suddenly she became very self-conscious, and as she entered the forest of weeds she examined herself. Weren’t her hips and thighs too long and fat? All six of them, or at least four of them? Were her gitalongs too tiny? Was her thorax full enough?

Before she crossed the front yard of Parthenon, she paused to give herself a thorough bath, washing her sniffwhips twice each, and cleaning every spike on her gitalongs; she felt that this was the most important bath she had ever given herself, and she was thorough and meticulous. She passed her sniffwhips slowly over her entire body and examined the result. Did she detect the faintest trace of fragrant pheromone? If so, it was from excitement, not from lust.

She crossed the yard. Among the random patches of grass, the unceremonious expanse of smooth dirt was strewn with commemorative statuary: here a copper penny, there a wad of tinfoil; here a threaded screw and a washer, there a poptop from a beverage can; here a glass bead, there a nacreous button. Tish paused to examine a round glass marble, a Man-child’s plaything, streaked with colors, transparent, wonderful. She considered the contrast of this yard of Parthenon with that of Carlott, which was littered with roller bearings, rusting cotter pins, oily couplings, bent valves, sparkplugs, the miscellaneous detritus of automobile parts. Tish could have spent the whole night examining Parthenon’s marvelous yard, but there ahead of her was the porch of Parthenon itself.

Stone piers supported the porch, and she climbed the one nearest to the window whose light she had seen from afar. She scaled the wooden wall to the ledge of this window, and looked through the screen. There, in a cheer-of-ease, sat the Woman. Tish had heard many legends, reports, histories, descriptions, and rumors about the Woman, but had never seen Her so close before, big as life, bigger than life, almost as big as Man. But Man, when Tish had seen Him the night before and even touched Him, had been deeply asleep, if not drunker than a pied piper. This Woman was wide awake, Her eyes open. She was reading. In Her hands She held some sheets of paper, white, and She was reading one of these. Her hair was as yellow as a comet moth’s wings, and Her smooth mouth was turned up at one corner in a smile. She had a very kind and gentle expression. Tish would have liked to climb up into Her lap and talk with Her, but Tish was old enough to know that the Woman would not tolerate the touch of a roosterroach any more than the Man would.

High on one wall of the room was a mantelshelf, above a boarded-up fireplace, and on the mantelshelf rose a clock,
the
Clock, of which Tish had heard so much, and whose chimes she had heard all her life. But those chimes, from the distance of Carlott, had sounded like only so many little pings and pongs. Now, as Tish waited and watched, the Clock began to strike the hour, and it said “BUN!” nearly startling Tish off her perch. Then it said, “TART!” A third time it struck: “TRIFLE!” Tish counted a fourth: “FUDGE!” And a fifth: “FONDANT!” The Clock pealed six: “SCONE!” And the Clock struck seven: “SUGARPLUM!” Tish was debating with herself whether it had really said all these things, when it said “EGG!” For nine o’clock, the Clock said “NOU-GAT!” Then it struck ten: “DIVINITY!” with a reverberation that seemed to shake the very ledge that Tish sat upon. The last thing the Clock said was “ECLAIR!” Tish waited for a twelfth chime, and was prepared to count it, but it never came.