The Cockroaches of Stay More (7 page)

Tonight, Doc Swain, Squire Hank, and the Loafer’s Court had watched the parade of damsels go sashaying down Roamin Road to Parthenon and back, had seen drunk Jack Dingletoon straggling along in pursuit, and had made comments, jokes, and insinuations about various of the girls, about Jack, about one another, and about anything within the visible or sniffable world.

When the end of the train hove into view and there was comical Jack Dingletoon yelling, “Hi yoop! I aint no Dingeltoon no more! By cracky, I’m a pure dee pure blood Ingledew now, and a
squire
to boot!” the members of the Loafer’s Court cast glances and sniffs at Squire Hank to see his reaction, and one of them, O.D. Ledbetter, remarked, “Now what d’ye reckon has guv that fool sech a notion?”

“Chism’s Dew allus makes a feller feel bigger than he is,” observed Elbert Kimber. “That’s what it’s suppose to do, aint it?”

Squire Hank did not comment, but spat, and made ruminative gestures of his cheeks. No one could remember when he had ever been silent before.

“Naw,” remarked Doc Swain, “that aint it. He’s jist out of his head, maybe, because I tole him a little while ago that he aint got long for this world afore he goes west. He ast me to look ’im over, and blamed if his old Malpighian tubes aint all kivvered with fatty bodies.”

The loafers stared at Doc and at one another. “Is that a fack?” several said, and “You don’t mean to say so,” said others, and one even said, “What’s a malpigeon tube?” Each of them spat, each in his turn. Most of them had good reason for spitting, not to mark any territory (for all of
this
territory belonged to Doc), but because among the many other blessings bestowed upon them by Man, He left cigarette butts scattered throughout Holy House, from which an abundance of chewable leaf was salvaged and masticated by most of the male roosterroaches of Stay More. Tobacco did give one’s head a pleasant giddiness and ease, but the chewing and spitting of it was essentially a ritual way of asserting one’s identity and masculinity and the merging of one’s identity with that of the male group.

“The Malpighian tubes,” Doc explained, “are part of the digestive system, sorta wrapped around your gut like little wires. Man calls them ‘kidneys’.”

“Aw, shore,” said Tolbert Duckworth, “I allus have a little drink fer my wife’s kidneys.”

The other loafers laughed, but Doc said, “Not
that
kind of kidney. This kind is sort of midway between yore gizzard and yore butthole. It sorta strains all the juice that runs through yore system.”

Several of the company nodded their heads in understanding, spat, and Lum Plowright observed, “So ole Jack’s strainer is on the blink?”

“Wal, the fatty bodies has shore squoze up his Malpighian tubes,” Doc declared, feeling just a little guilty for breaking the Hypocritic Oath by openly discussing a patient’s problems.

“His wife is a real fatty body,” Fent Chism remarked, and the assembly guffawed, picturing Josie Dingletoon, a still-shapely dish despite her many and frequent litterings of eastereggs.

“She’ll be a mandamn widow-gal, shore, afore long,” Doc remarked.

This comment caused each loafer to reflect, as loafers will, upon his own mortality, the widow he would leave behind if he were not already widowered, the children who would survive and mourn or not for him, and the nature of west and of life, if any, after west. Such meditations naturally introduced one or the other of their two most popular topics, Janus-faced: the glorious history of now-almost-westered Stay More, and the any-day-now (or any-night-now) advent of The Bomb.

Tonight the court lingered upon each subject until it was exhausted. Perhaps it is unfair to call this assembly “loafers,” because all roosterroaches are by nature gentlefolk of leisure, nonworkers, even vagrants, as the name
Periplaneta
suggests. Especially in contrast to the busy bee, the hyperactive ant, the industrious termite, the various nest-builders, daubers, potters, borers, and biters whose diurnal or nocturnal existence is of ceaseless activity, the roosterroach, once he has found his nightly share of morsels, crust or crumb, does nothing, knocks off, loiters about, putters, piddles, takes his ease without any responsibility other than the heavy chore of finding ways to fill up the time between dusk breakfast and dawn supper.

No wonder roosterroaches are fond of gossip, philosophy, kidding and kibitzing, jokes, stories, tall tales, legends, superstitions, and half-baked religion. In this natural inclination, roosterroaches are ideally suited to imitate the Man of the Ozarks, or at least Ozark Man as He used to be, in the legendary days of Stay More’s past, when Man, although a farmer, and a capable one, devoted only enough labor to His farm to provide food for His family and His devoted roosterroaches, and spent the major portion of His life in unhurried idleness.

Although there was only one Man left in Stay More for these roosterroaches to depend upon and venerate, and although He was not nearly as interesting as the fabled Stay Morons of yore, He was at least, like them, devoted to leisure. He did not work. He did not farm, though there were rumors that He spent a tiny portion of His daylight hours, late afternoon, before any roosterroach awoke to watch, puttering in a tiny vegetable garden across Roamin Road from Holy House. One night a delegation of roosterroaches had gone there and inspected His puny lettuce. The last of the human Ingledews had been gardeners, if nothing else, famed for their ability to grow onions as big as apples, but also pronouncing them “ingurns” as in the first syllable of their name. This Man did not pronounce them that way…or perhaps He did. It was hard to tell, because He never spoke. He had no one to speak to.

The loafers, if we must call them that, admired their Man because He was a total loafer too, but pitied Him because he had no one to loaf
with
. None of the roosterroaches now living could ever recall when there was more than one Man, and indeed most of the fundamentalist Crustians believed that there was only one Man in all the world, but the old stories which the loafers told and retold on the porch of Doc Swain’s place always involved a Stay More peopled with many Men, and Men (as well as Women and Children) living together and loafing together in an idyllic Golden Age.

The Golden Age of Stay More would remain only the subject of endless legends and embellished conjectures among the tale-telling roosterroaches until after The Bomb, when according to Crustian belief, Joshua Crust Himself would be resurrected from the west and take everyone in a Rapture to live on the right hand of Man in the perfect Ozark Golden Age of yore. Even those roosterroaches who were such infidels that they could not accept the idea of Joshua Crust and His resurrection still believed that life after The Bomb would become a new Golden Age.

Doc Swain alone did not believe this. Cheerful philosopher as he was, he was an utter pessimist on the subject of The Bomb. The Bomb, in his opinion, was inevitable. Whatever catastrophic form it took—asphyxiation, earthquake, famine, or, most dreadful for heat-loving roosterroaches, a big freeze—it would be horrible.

Roosterroaches are omnivorous, but that would do them no good if there was nothing to eat. “Fellers, if it comes to it,” a loafer posed the question, “can we eat caterpillar shit?”

“After The Bomb,” Doc pointed out, “caterpillars would be the first to wester.”

The one drawback of the roosterroach’s durability, longevity, adaptiveness, and imperishability was that being the last creature alive after the holocaust would pose a great problem: Who, or what, would the roosterroach eat?

“I’d shore hate to be the last roosterroach still east,” Doc remarked to the assembled loafers.

“Nor me neither,” said several of the other loafers, and spat, thoughtfully but decisively, each in his turn.

“Wal, Doc,” Squire Hank Ingledew spoke up, “if you was the last, you’d have to whup me first afore you could commence eatin me, and once you’d et me, then yore biggest problem would be to figger out which part of yoreself to eat first, next.”

The loafers guffawed, and O.D. Ledbetter suggested, “Me, I’d eat my hind end first.”

“Haw,” said Elbert Kimber, “then you wouldn’t have no butthole to ee-liminate what you’d done et!” All the loafers snorted or snickered.

“I reckon I’d eat my sniffwhips first,” said Tolbert Duckworth, “since I wouldn’t be needin ’em no more nohow, what with nobody else around to sniff at.”

“Then you’d never know how much you stunk,” Squire Hank observed.

“Wouldn’t make no difference nohow,” Lum Plowright put in. “But me, what I’d do, since it’d be my last meal on earth, I’d enjoy myself and eat my stomach first!” Several others nodded in agreement, and spat.

“That’d wester ye right off,” Doc Swain said. “Now I tell ye fellers, assumin I could whup Squire Hank and be the last ’stead of him, and assumin I’d done already had the satisfaction of watchin that White Mouse wester a slow, painful west, I reckon I’d jist not eat none of me, but slowly starve to west, and take a last stroll down to Banty Creek and back.”

“Might as well hop in it and drown,” Squire Hank said, and spat.

“Naw,” said Doc Swain. “I’d jist look all around me, at ever livin thing that had westered, includin that putrefied White Mouse, and I would know that I was the very last mandamn livin thing on earth. Wouldn’t that be a satisfaction? Wouldn’t that be a reward for what-all I’d had to live through? Jist to know that? Jist to say to myself, ‘I am the last mandamned livin thing on earth?’”

Since these were mostly heuristic questions, or rhetorical, or both, no one responded. The company of loafers lost themselves in meditation, imagining the scenario that Doc had pictured. At length, Tolbert Duckworth, who was a good Crustian and an elder in the church, remarked, “Hit shore is enough to make a body glad that our Lord Joshua Crust is gonna rapture us and save us from all sech as that, if Man Himself don’t rapture us first.”

Several others nodded, and spat. Neither Squire Hank nor Doc Swain nodded, but they spat.

Chapter seven

T
ish Dingletoon tarried beneath the Platform long after the play-party had been broken up by Brother Tichborne and everyone had gone home or elsewhere. She wondered if she would ever again have a chance to attract Archy Tichborne to her, ever to get him within range of her pheromones when she was ready to use them. No, probably the Fate-Thing intended for her to marry a Carlotter. How vain of her to aspire to the attentions of a Holy House roosterroach. Sure, Jim Tom Dinsmore would be glad to have her and would take her to live in the Smock if she would marry him, but he was a puny and unsightly specimen, compared with Archy Tichborne.

Might just as well be getting on back, Tish told herself, and crawled out from under the Platform and turned her steps sadly homeward. But as she sought the path to the hollow log that was the Dingletoon home, she bumped into one of the fingertips of Man, who lay prone with his arms outstretched in the grass of Carlott. The closeness of Him overwhelmed her, even more than His great size. Tish passed her sniffwhips slowly over the tip of His fingernail and attempted to identify the plethora of traces of all that Man had touched, scratched, tickled or tapped within the past several hours. This was the closest she had ever been to Man, and she had never approached any of the things He had touched, scratched, tickled or tapped, so she could not readily identify these strange new sensations on her sniffwhips. She was in total awe, but not in fear.
Fear the Lord thy Man
, she had heard, again and again, and yet she was not afraid of Him. As she moved closer to the tall grass into which His face was pressed, and then drew so close that the tips of her sniffwhips could touch the tips of His beard-whiskers, whatever fear or worship she was supposed to feel for Him was replaced by a sudden compassion, something she had no business feeling, as if she were better than Him, or more fortunate than Him, or at least much more sober than Him, or not smaller than Him at all but His own size. This would have amounted almost to blasphemous condescension had it not been a pure impulse of sympathy, without any vanity behind it.

“Pore feller,” she said aloud, knowing He couldn’t hear her. “You’re just a critter, like me. Whatever’s troublin Ye aint all that different from the kinds of troubles I got. You git hungry too, don’t Ye? And You git sad too, I bet. And most of all, Man, You git lonely all the time.”

Never mind that if He awakened, and had His gun, He would rapture her quicker than the wink of a stargazer. For this moment, Tish loved Him, and it was not the sort of love that all Crustians spoke of when they said,
Love the Lord thy Man
.

Tish knew that the Fate-Thing was more powerful than Him, that He was under the dominion of the Fate-Thing just as much as she was. Did the Fate-Thing have a better name? Was its name “Sharon”? Had He been calling out to the Fate-Thing, Sharon? If Sharon was the name of the Fate-Thing, then Tish ought to address her prayers not to Man but to Sharon.

Experimentally, Tish called out, as He had done, “SHARON!” Again she called, louder but questioningly, “SHAY-RONN?” But if that was the Fate-Thing’s name, it—or She—did not respond, any more than it—or She—had responded to the Lord Himself.

Meditating on her walk homeward, Tish realized that perhaps “Sharon” was not the name of any Fate-Thing, but, rather, of the Woman who dwelt in Parthenon. Or perhaps the Woman was the Fate-Thing. Tish had had her very first glimpse of the Woman earlier tonight when the parade of maidens turned their train in the yard of Parthenon, that fabled house which was a private castle for the squires Ingledew. Although Tish had seen Squire Hank around the village often, she had never seen handsome Squire Sam, who, her friends told her, did not mix. Tish’s girlfriends were always having nightdreams in which they were endlessly noticed and courted by Squire Sam, like a commoner by a prince, and perhaps wedded by him and made into a princess and taken to live in his fabulous Clock. Tish could not even conceive of what a Clock looked like, although she heard it distantly every hour, and somehow she associated the sound it made, its chiming of “BUN,” “TART,” etc., with Squire Sam, as if in a sweet pealing voice he were calling out the times of night for her.