The Cockroaches of Stay More (24 page)

They left Sam’s apartment and explored the rest of Parthenon. Next to the Woman’s room was the great vacant room which had once been the general store and post office of the humans of Stay More, but was now unused, dusty, moldy, cobwebby, and contained only a few pieces of furniture attesting to its former use: the antique wood-and-glass post-office boxes and the postal counter, empty shelves, a couple of glass showcases, spool cabinets, and, on the walls, a variety of old advertisements for Garrett’s Snuff, Brown Mule Chewing Tobacco, Carter’s Little Liver Pills, Putnam Dyes, and Lydia Pinkham Remedies. This room, lost in time, was as foreign to Sharon Herself as it was to Jack and Josie Dingletoon. There was scarcely a thing to eat here that had been overlooked by previous generations of Ingledew roosterroaches or by other scavenging creatures. Indeed, there was no evidence of other living creatures in this room; even the Cobb spiders had long since given it up.

Their third night in Parthenon, Jack and Josie convinced themselves that they had the place all to themselves, except for the Woman, who had a regular schedule: She was finished with Her supper and the washing of its dishes each night when Jack and Josie awoke, and then, while they had breakfast, She sat on the porch in Her rocking cheer until dark, watching lightning bugs, then spent the balance of the evening, before bedtime, sitting in Her cheer-of-ease with a book, and listening to music not at all like the Purple Symphony, music of many instruments and voices that came from two separate large boxes placed on the floor of Her listening corner. The third night, Jack left Josie in the cookroom and sallied forth into the Woman’s room while the Woman was still awake and listening to the music. He kept out of sight along the edge of the wall, then crawled beneath Her cheer-of-ease, where he was able to perceive the reason there were
two
boxes from which music came. He discovered, by placing his body so that each of his tailprongs received the same amount of sound from each of the separate boxes, that the music surrounded him, it seemed to come not simply from the boxes but from the four walls and ceiling of the room, and it captivated his tailprongs. For a long time he listened to the music, which, whenever it came to a long silence, the Woman would start up again by turning over great circular black plates.

But once the Woman stopped the music before it came to its silence; She interrupted it, made it stop, because the giant black ant perched on the giant black beetle, who had given Tish such cause for wonder, was now making a discordant music louder than the music from the boxes. But Jack, or Squire John as he truly ought to be called when sober (and he had endured nearly four nights now without a drop), understood that these were not insectile creatures but mechanical, metallic thingumajimmies.

For three nights he had heard the Woman muttering aloud, talking to Herself, indistinguishably, in entire paragraphs, but now She was speaking aloud, clearly, into one end of the thingumajimmy.

“Hi, Gran. Just fine. No, not yet. Yes, I know. Um-huh. Wouldn’t you think? Yeah. Well, I couldn’t. That’s right.
If
I did. Sometimes. You’ve got me. Of course. Soon, I hope. You’re kidding. Well, possibly. Oh, come on. No, Gran. Never. Don’t say that. Huh? Ah, me. So what did you say? That bad, huh? You
didn’t
. And what did she say? Oh, no. Well, I’ll be. Um-huh. Unt-hum. Hunt-uh. Maybe. Who knows. Tomorrow morning. But not last night. If we get one more drop, I’ll go nuts. Did it? Well, you never know. If I don’t, he would. Yeah. What I’m telling you. Could be. Any time. Right. Bye-bye. Sleep tight.”

Squire John sat for a long moment puzzling over the significance of what he had heard. At a loss, he returned to the cookroom, where he had left Josie feasting upon a bit of strawberry shortcake fallen from the Woman’s supper dessert, and repeated to Josie, word for word, what the Woman had said. Then he asked, “What do ye make of that?”

“Wait a jerk, and let me git this straight,” Josie said. “What did She say right after ‘But not last night’?”

“She said, ‘If we git one more drop, I’ll go nuts.’”

“That’s what I thought ye said She said,” Josie said, and resumed munching her strawberry shortcake.

Squire John waited. At length he said, “Wal? What do you think?”

“I think this strawberry shortcake is the best thang ever I et,” Josie declared.

“I
mean
,” said Squire John, “what d’ye make of Her words? You’re a female, like Her. What-all kind of womenfolk talk is that-all?”

“Wal,” said Josie at length, finishing her food and cleaning her chops, “hit’s plain as the sniffwhip on yore face that She was a-talkin to Her grandmother. What did the Other Lady look like?”

Squire John tried to explain that there were no pictures, only words, on the thingumajimmy. Josie was dubious, but she explained to Squire John, “The Granny-Woman asked Her how She was doing, and She said She was doing just fine. Then Grandmaw says, ‘You haven’t gone to bed, have you?’ and the Woman says, ‘No, not yet.’ Grandmaw says, ‘The ten o’clock news said that Sheriff Tate was defeated in the run-off,’ and the Woman says, ‘Yes, I know.’ And Grandmaw says, ‘Did you vote for him?’ and the Woman says, ‘Um-huh.’ Then Grandmaw asks…”

Squire John’s mouth was hanging open; he listened in amazement as his wife, with a female intuition beyond his grasp, told him word for word the conversation between the Woman named Sharon and the Grandmother named Latha. The subjects covered, in addition to the aforementioned county election, were: the use of rotenone as a duster for vegetable crops, the progress of Sharon’s strawberry crop, the approaching visit of Sharon’s Sister coming from a place called California, the Sister’s divorce from her Husband, an earlier conversation on the telephone between the Grandmother and the Wife of Sharon’s Brother Vernon, the current duration, amount and possible future of the rainfall, and, finally, the current status of the ongoing relationship, or lack thereof, between Sharon and Man Our Lord of Holy House.

His wife, Squire John decided, had some intelligence that he had not given her credit for.

Josie had a troubled look. “It don’t appear that neither one of them Women has any idee that Man shot Hisself in His gitalong.”

But here Squire John’s sniffwhips detected the scent of rooster-roaches, and he spun around, expecting to see the Squires Ingledew and Tish.

Instead he saw, coming into the cookroom as if they owned it, three Holy House deacons, led by the preacher, Brother Chidiock Tichborne.

“Morsel, Reverend,” Squire John said, and added, “Morsel, boys,” and spat, marking his space.

“Good morsel to ye, Squire John,” said the parson, and spat too. Each of his confederates also spat.

Chapter twenty-seven

W
ould this redundant rain ever stop? All her life, or at least since the first cold rain she could remember, from her childhood back in November, Tish had loved the rain, its power to magnify all the scents of the world, its ability to quench thirst simply through the vapors it left in the air, to be squeezed from one’s sniffwhips. Without this moisture she would not have grown, no less than the zillion plants whose roots were constantly nourished by the water. But enough was enough, the rain had been falling constantly for five days, and continuously since the ark of Tish’s log home had come to rest atop a sandbar called Ararat many furlongs down Swain’s Creek from Stay More.

Would she ever find her way home again? Did she even
want
to—to reveal to all the world this easteregg that kept edging its way out of the end of her abdomen? Maybe the Fate-Thing had intended the rain to wash her and her house away until the easteregg dropped off the end of her abdomen and was hidden somewhere, or abandoned, or at least left her body unmarked and disemburdened.

Jubal had been the first to notice it, and during the downstream voyage, when it was clear he had nothing better to do than take his attention away from the roiling current to observe the condition of the passengers on the vessel, had remarked to her, matter-of-factly, “Looks like somebody has done went and knocked ye up.” She had flinched and been unable to say anything or divert her attention from the direction of the current that was carrying the log down the now-raging creek. Others of her brothers and sisters had remarked, “Tish is in a family way,” or “Tish is p.g.,” or “Tish has got a cake in her oven,” or “Tish has swallered a turnipseed,” or they had said that she was any one of the following: teeming, heavy, ketched, gravid, great with child, anticipating, sprung, pizened, or coming fresh. But mostly they said that she was “prego,” and Tish thought she would go crazy hearing them ask, “Are you prego, Tish?” and “How did you get so prego, Tish?” and “How prego are you, Tish?” and simply, “Preg, oh, Tish?”

But if it had not been for their interest in her easteregg, they might have been more frightened than they were by their plight, the undirected wandering plunge of the ark down the stream. In the course of the voyage nearly all of them had become seasick, and, despite all their mother had taught them about the need for puking in solitude, they had vomited in one another’s presence, openly and unashamedly, and now nobody could stand to go near the remainder of the pile of funeral feeds. Nobody had any appetite.

Despite her best efforts to captain the ship and keep everybody safe, Tish had lost several passengers. It wasn’t her fault. She had urged them all to stay off the top of the log, to keep inside of it, and they had, but the log kept crashing into rocks, or the shore, or tree limbs or roots, and each time this happened Tish would count heads afterwards and discover one or more passengers had been dislodged from the vessel and fallen into the tide, never to be seen again. The population of her brothers and sisters was now down from forty-two to thirty-one, and Tish wondered if Brother Tichborne could even keep track of all their names in his next funeralization.

Tish realized that the next funeralization was going to have to run all night and maybe have a matinee. Not alone for roosterroaches but for all critter-kind: the stream was full of the corpses of every conceivable insect. Not just insects of every possible configuration of soggy sniffwhips and drenched wings, but furred and feathered creatures too: when the brothers and sisters were not busy making remarks about Tish’s pregnancy they were observing and commenting upon the westered wildlife floating past. They saw drowned birds, they saw drowned rodents, they saw a drowned pig, a drowned possum, even a drowned fish. There were drowned frogs and drowned snakes and drowned turtles, and then, when the ark landed and lodged on the sandbar, there came a drowned mouse.

It was not just
a
mouse which washed up beside their log. It was the Great White Mouse himself…or maybe herself, nobody had the nerve to approach near enough to check, even if it was clearly drowned. The shore of the sandbar was littered with other corpses, drowned bugs and beetles and spiders, drowned slugs and leeches and snails, drowned ants and moths and flies, but the only drowned mammal on this stretch of shore was the Great White Mouse. Although she had never seen it before, Tish knew it at once, because she had heard many stories about it, and had in turn told many stories about it to her brothers and sisters, so that simply her hushed utterance of “The Great White Mouse!” at the sight of it sent thirty of them scurrying into the innermost recesses of their ark.

“Looks west to me,” declared Jubal, who alone beside Tish had not hidden himself.

“You don’t want to step over there and find out, do you?” she said.

“Me? I aint that dumb. Let’s jist wait and see if it moves.”

Tish and Jubal watched the Great White Mouse for a long time. He (they began to assume it was male) lay on his side, one gitalong bent at an odd angle, his eyes closed tight, his albino fur thoroughly soaked and grimed and matted.

“Do you smell any westwardness?” Tish asked Jubal.

He waved his sniffwhips slowly, turning them and tuning them closely. “Jist only all them other west critters. Pew.”

She could not detect any mammalian westwardness on her sniffwhips, but perhaps it was too soon; perhaps the Great White Mouse’s heart had stopped beating only within the past hour and the corpse had not yet begun decomposing. Tish stepped down from the entrance of the ark onto the sands, and took a few steps closer to the Mouse.

“Watcha
doing
?!” Jubal cried. “Don’t ye git no nearer to that thang!”

“He looks bad hurt,” Tish observed.

“Don’t ye jist hope he’s hurt
west
?” Jubal said. “
I
shore hope he’s hurt as west as ye can go! Now git yoreself back in here!”

But until a renewed pouring down of the rain drove her back into the log, Tish stood and stared at the Great White Mouse, and even from the shelter of the log she continued to watch the Mouse, having tired of watching the rain long ago. Eventually her vigilance was rewarded.

Beside her, Jubal jumped an inch and exclaimed, “Did ye see
that
!? His tongue crope out a bit!”

Sure enough, the Mouse’s tongue, as pink as the interior of his ears and the edges of the closed eyes, had poked out one corner of his mouth. Then, more unmistakable, the tip of the long scaly tail twitched ever so slightly.

“He’s still east!” Tish said, and realized she was whispering, as if the Mouse might hear her.

Then they began to hear a sound coming from the Mouse: a high-pitched nasal whining, a sort of squeaky hum coming from the throat and larynx and nasal passages all combined. The one intonation of this hum rose into a higher note and then piped into a droning, unmelodious melody, slightly liquid and gurgling because of all the water the animal had soaked up.

The Great White Mouse slightly opened one eye, which seemed to attempt to focus upon Tish and Jubal. The eye was pink all over, and turned up at the edge evilly like a snake’s. The Mouse hummed a feeble word, which sounded like “Mawris?” Tish and Jubal exchanged glances, and mumbled the word to each other, questioningly. Then the Mouse hummed, “Mawris, juicy da lim?”