The Cockroaches of Stay More (19 page)

Unless…and this was another, different thought…unless this event now, tonight,
was
The Bomb. Perhaps The Bomb was just this one pistol shot into the gitalong of Man, that would start Him westering, if not wester Him off completely for good for once and for all, so that He would no longer be here to provide for His roosterroaches, who would have to seek their salvation elsewhere or starve to west.

“Theology is really complicated,” Doc Swain said to his patient, remembering again but not caring that his patient was too deaf to hear him, and as the night hours passed he went on talking. The patient kept his eyes focused on Doc Swain’s face almost as if reading his lips, and kept his useless tailprongs erect, and gave the semblance of listening. Doc Swain talked about the Stay More of old, that he had never known but only studied and still diurnally dreamed of, the Stay More populated with almost as many Men, and Women, and Children, as there were now roosterroaches remaining with the one Man. This Man, our Man, was not even of any kinship to those ancient folk of Stay More; He was a furriner, from distant parts, an outlander, a newcomer, even if He had lived in Holy House longer than all but the oldest roosterroaches could remember. Doc Swain was one of these: he could remember, as a child, nearly two years before, watching Man move into the old Stay More Hotel, which had once been the home for human Ingledews before becoming a hotel, and had been abandoned for years before Man moved into it and installed the Fabulous Fridge and the pantry and breadbasket and grocery sack and other good things. Although the Man did not dress like the ancient Men of Stay More, or talk like Them, or practice Their customs, He was still Man, and the only Man we had. He might not be as Almighty as the Crustians thought He was, but He was the Lord.

“LORD, DON’T PASS OUT!” Doc Swain called, because it was evident that He intended to anesthetize His pain into oblivion with the bourbon. Doc was tempted to make his way over to Him, climb on Him, tickle Him, try to keep Him awake and conscious, or, failing that, persuade others to join in the effort. To do so, he would have to leave his patient, and as far as he was concerned, even apart from the sense of loyalty to his own kind, if Doc had to choose between Man and Sam, he would pick Sam, any old day.

It was day now. The rain was letting up, but only for a moment, as if pausing to catch its breath before trying harder.

Chapter twenty-one

H
it’s pourin down pitchforks, cats and dogs!” Jack observed, flinching from the pelting rain. He didn’t mind the wet, which couldn’t penetrate his cutin, but the force of the heavy drops kept knocking him off his gitalongs, and the drops were cold.

Josie thought, which kept her from minding the long hike. “Do some folks think that cats and dogs fall with the rain?” she asked, and belched.

“Huh?” said Jack. “Naw, that’s jist one a them ole sayins, pourin down cats and dogs. You ever see a dog fall from the sky?”

“I aint never seen a dog,” Josie said, and tripped over a pebble of sandstone and fell down.

“You still drunk as a fiddler’s bitch?” Jack asked her, helping her to her gitalongs. He wasn’t exactly sober himself, but they would never get home if his old lady didn’t stop falling down and asking dumb questions and burping like a grasshopper.

“What’s a fiddler’s bitch?” Josie asked.

“Aw, that’s jist a breed of dog,” he said. “Now shut up, Maw, and watch where you’re going.” He raised a limb of grass to clear her sniffwhips, then passed under himself. It was hard going. Ever since the previous night, except for the bright daylight hours which had forced them to seek darkness in an abandoned ants’ burrow, they had been making their way slowly homeward from the Lord’s Garden and Refuse Pile, where they had been lost for the entire length of time it took them to sober up enough to walk. Jack would never forget the terror of those impossibly long moments he was airborne, inside the beer can hurtling into the unknown, the dregs of beer swirling all around and over them and getting into their mouths and spiracles, and the weightlessness that went on and on, until, with a horrible jolt and crash, the can landed amidst a pile of other cans, not just empty beer cans but cans of emptied pork and beans, cans of emptied pineapple, cans of emptied ravioli, cans of emptied 30 w motor oil.
If I hadn’t of been a Ingledew
, Jack told himself,
I would of been westered shore as shootin
. They had spent hours recovering from the crash, sustained by nothing more than whatever beer remained in the can, quite a lot of it, and then they had found their way out through the opening of the lid of the can, which fortunately lay on its side, and had found themselves among all those other cans, the exploration of which, and the escape from which, had consumed all of the rest of their night.

The Lord’s Refuse Pile was a fabulous place, and Jack was determined to return with his whole family there on an outing and picnic, some night when the weather was fair. Tonight the weather was awful unfair, and the flashes of lightning had panicked Josie and driven Jack not into complete sobriety but into a partial cure of his hangover. There was so much illumination from the sky’s electrical display that Jack feared he would be easy prey for any nocturnal creature, until he realized two things: the nocturnal creatures of prey were just as unsettled by the lightning as he was, and they were all getting wet and seeking shelter.
If I had the sense Man gave to a flea
, Jack told himself,
I’d seek shelter too
, but he knew that if this rain kept going the way it was going, so much of it would fall that the ground would be cut by new rivulets and rills and runlets, and they would never reach home. Already it was a struggle to keep to relatively high ground. Of course Jack was a fair swimmer, and so was Josie, but swimming made slow and tedious progress.

The paths that Man had trod from Carlott to His Refuse Pile, or vice versa, were few and infrequent, and thus the forest of grass and weeds impeded their long journey. The distance could not have been half a furlong, but it seemed like miles, and it was nearly morning when Jack and Josie straggled around a corner of Holy House and espied their native Carlott once again, with a mixture of exultation and weariness.

The last mile of any journey is the hardest, and it seemed they would never reach home before daylight. The cats and dogs stopped falling once they crossed the threshold of their familiar log. All of their children were already self-tucked into their sleeping crannies…all except one, the boy Jubal, crouched in the center of the main hall amid a pile of tiny smidgens of foodstuffs, with some of which he was attempting to stuff himself. As the two adult roosterroaches staggered, wet and weary, into the room, Jubal’s mouth dropped open and he sprang into full alert. But his sniffwhips recognized the two as his parents.

“
Maw?!
” said Jubal. “
Paw?!
” He rushed to them and passed his sniffwhips all over them and felt them with his touchers. “Air ye still
east?!
”

“Howdy, hon,” said Josie. “How’s ever little thang?”

“But, but,” said Jubal. “But, but, but but but.”

“Whar’s Tish?” asked Jack.

“But, but,” said Jubal, “but
ever
body said you’uns had done went and westered off!” He indicated the pile of foodstuff fragments. “Folkses has done already started bringin the funeral feeds.”

“My, my,” said Josie, and reached out to sample a crumb of Hostess chocolate cupcake, her very first taste of chocolate, of which so much had been said and rumored and gossiped. Then she tried a pinch of peach fried pie, a snippet of oatmeal cookie, a tittle of zwieback, and a fleck of cough drop. “I never in all my born days dreamt that we’uns was so
popular
!” she observed. She asked Jubal, “Did ye remember who-all brung which-all? Did Sally Dinsmore bring us ary a thang?”

Jubal hung his head. “Yes’m, she brung some whitish lookin stuff, but I done et it.”

“Marshmaller!” cried Josie. “How dast ye?” She drew back a sniffwhip as if to slap the youngun.

Jack stopped her. “Whar is yore big sister Tish at?” he asked the boy.

“She did lak ye said, Momma, Tish did. She up and took herself to Partheeny, for to claim kin to the Ingledews.”

“Naw!” said Jack and Josie together, and looked at one another and then looked back at Jubal. “Did she
really
, now?” Josie asked. “Why, bless her heart! Here we aint been west two nights and already she’s done went and done it!”

“We aint west, Maw,” Jack pointed out. To Jubal he said, “When did ye see her last? How do ye know she went to Partheeny? What-all else do ye know?”

Jubal told them everything he knew, or had heard. He had not left the Dingletoon bungalow, because Tish had made him promise to watch out for his brothers and sisters during her absence. When she had passed beyond reach of his sniffwhips, night before last, she was heading toward Hinglerocks, but she did that all the time anyway and she hadn’t come home, so Jubal figured that if she hadn’t been et by something, she had gone on to Parthenon.

“My, my,” Josie said to Jack. “Do you suppose our Letitia is a-dwellin at Partheeny now?”

“If she wasn’t et by some critter along the way,” Jack said.

“Why, if she has done went and moved into Partheeny, she’s probably expectin us to come and visit and stay the night or even forever!” Josie said.

“She thinks you’uns is both west,” Jubal declared.

“Let’s go susprise her!” Josie urged Jack.

“Not today, Maw,” Jack said, stretching and yawning. “We aint goin nowhere in the daylight. I aim to git me some sleep.” He took a particle of some creamy looking stuff from the pile of funeral feed, and said, “Jubal, you turn in, now, and leave these here eats alone.”

Jack and Josie turned in, too, and slept all day, deeply and soundly, recuperating from their long journey and their ordeal, and woke at the dip of dusk almost completely sober, to greet their assembled offspring, share with them in the consumption of a fraction of the funeral feeds, caution them not to breathe a word to any other visitors bearing funeral feeds that their parents were not solemnly west, and then announce that they intended to sneak off to Parthenon to check up on Letitia and see if she might have prepared the way for
all
of them to move into Parthenon.

The children, between mouthfuls of funeral feeds, cheered and hugged one another and thanked their lucky stars, and wished their parents the very best of luck.

Jubal was still trying to get them to hush up when Jack and Josie disappeared into the still-falling rain on their journey toward Parthenon. Jubal had just lost scent of his parents on his sniffwhips when he picked up a different scent: that of his sister, Tish, returning home from another direction.

Chapter twenty-two

S
he had not allowed him to accompany her all of the way home. She didn’t want her brothers and sisters to see him, and get wrong ideas about what she had been doing, out all day. She felt wracked with guilt, on several counts, the least of which was she had no business staying away from home so long. But she hadn’t done anything wrong…not with Archy, anyway. It was funny. They had spent the entire rest of the night together, and even slept together all day, almost side by side, but he hadn’t actually given her a marble. Not that he hadn’t tried to, and not that she wouldn’t have let him at least try, but the process of making connection, as she had already discovered with Squire Sam, was such a complicated procedure of fastening the right latches and hooking the right clamps and putting this thing alongside of that thing, and then the other thing inside of the round thing, that in the process of all the maneuvering and straining Archy had lost his marble. Well, it hadn’t been completely lost, it was still there, rolling around on the floor, and eventually they even made a kind of game, playing with it, rolling it around and bouncing it.

Archy had tried to make the whole business seem all right by declaring that he was glad he hadn’t been able to take her virginity, that he hoped she would remain a virgin until they got married. He hadn’t come right out and proposed to her. He hadn’t asked her, “Let’s me and you git hitched,” or anything like that. He had simply said he wanted her to remain a virgin until they could do it properly with the approval of the church. Of course she hadn’t told him that she already had a marble inside her, Squire Sam’s marble. She hadn’t even mentioned Squire Sam.

As a substitute for the hours they would have spent properly hooked up, joining together, fused, Archy had told her practically the entire story of his life, past, present
and
future: his dreams of adventure, his plans for exploring the world, his desire to travel in search of fabled houses far away, even outside of Stay More. He had talked a blue streak, never showing any concern over the incident of Man’s shooting Himself, nor ever once expressing grief over the westering of his mother. Hadn’t he noticed? Tish wondered, without asking him, if he had seen, heard, or smelled the erasure of Ila Frances Tichborne by the second bullet of the Lord. Maybe he was happy for her Rapture, or maybe he didn’t care; there were countless roosterroaches, particularly males, who felt no attachment to their mothers.

Squire Sam’s mother had died when he was in his fourth instar, but Sam had not talked much about her to Tish: one of the very few things Sam and Archy had in common was a reluctance to mention their mothers. Tish had wished they would, so she could talk about hers, so recently westered. She really needed to tell someone how much she had loved her mother, and how much she missed her already. Her father too, of course, but Jack Dingletoon hadn’t been much of a family man; he had been a happy-go-lucky drunkard, and Tish had never felt really close to him, not the way she had toward her mother, even if her mother was rather giddy and even silly at times.

There had been moments when Tish had almost blurted to Archy, “Don’t you even
care
about your mom?” but she had kept her mouth shut and let him do all the talking. He had spoken a great deal about his father, Brother Chidiock Tichborne, who was his ideal of Manliness and malehood, although Archy had turned a deaf tailprong to his father’s attempts to get Archy to follow him in the “preacherin business.” Two of Archy’s brothers were preparing for the ministry, but Archy had decided against it. Of course, there was always the possibility, if he found himself in some foreign land where the folks needed a preacher but didn’t have one, that Archy might change his mind. Tish didn’t want to be a preacher’s wife, now did she? No, she didn’t.