The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  Sam heard none of this, except the “here.” “What’s this?” he asked. “HIT’S SANG,” Doc Swain explained. “Root of the ginseng, and powerful scarce to come by.” Sam’s befuddlement was obvious and Doc had to yell and repeat himself and then yell and repeat a complicated explanation of how ginseng root works, and what it tastes like, and what the indications and contraindications were for its use. When, after much yelling and gesturing, Doc was convinced that Sam understood him, Doc said, “Well?”

  “Doc,” Sam declared, “I came to see you about my deafness and you give me a remedy for impotence.”

  Doc guffawed, and then he explained, loudly and with many repetitions, that the ginseng root would indirectly help Sam’s deafness by giving him the nerve to woo and wed a wife who would become his surrogate tailprongs and do his listening for him.

  “But can’t anything be done directly for my tailprongs?” Sam asked.

  “Wal…” Doc said, and hesitated, and tried to review in his mind all the cases of deafness that he had heard about or treated. Then Doc held up a foreclaw. “There’s only one substance, and it aint scientific like ginseng. It aint even medical, but it never fails. It aint even somethin I’ve seen work before myself, but my education has been sort of classical, ye know. Most likely you’d call this jist one of them oletimey superstitions, and maybe that’s all it is, but it works.”

  “Speak up, Doc,” Sam said. “What is it? Do you have to coat my prongs with mandrake sap or something?”

  “Worse than that,” Doc said. “I could go out tonight and find all the mandrake sap you’d ever hope to want, but that aint it. What you need is grease from the mountings of a church bell, and it has to be a church bell recently rung.”

  Sam stared at Doc and shook his head, and Doc repeated himself so loudly that the bats in the air folded their ears and covered them with their wings. When the prescription had finally registered, Sam exclaimed, “Joshua H. Crust!” without blasphemy to Doc, since Doc wasn’t a Crustian either. Sam tried to picture in his mind’s eye a church bell. The only bell he had ever seen was the bell in the Stay More schoolhouse, which long ago Men had used on infrequent occasion as a church.

  “Grease,” Sam said, and let several moments pass before adding, “from the mountings,” and a long silence ensued before his next words, “of a church bell,” followed by an interminable hiatus preceding his repetition of the words, “recently rung.” Then he sighed loudly and said to Doc, “History has it that that bell in the Stay More schoolhouse was never rung except for school…or for a funeral. There are no more schoolchildren of Man…or of Woman. And for there to be a funeral, one of Them would have to wester. Who will it be? Well, thanks a whole lot, Doc,” Sam said with no little sarcasm. “It does me a lot of good. Let me know if you hear of any reason They should ring the bell. Or let me know if you hear the bell.” Sam prepared to leave.

  Doc did not bother with the “stay more” ritual. All he said was, loudly, “DON’T FORGET THIS HERE SANG ROOT.”

  Sam stared at the “pill” of ginseng idly, remembered what it was for, and idly dragged it along home, where he ensconced it in a corner of his Clock among his other preserves and collectibles.

  Chapter nine

  Foredawn, that lambent time when the world becomes westerly quiet and still for nocturnal as well as diurnal creatures, Squire John Ingledew, a.k.a. Jack Dingletoon, found himself belly-up atop a liquid medium. The state, condition, or position of “belly-up” is so characteristic of west that some folks seeking to avoid the unpleasant associations of the word “west” employ the euphemism “belly-up.” No insect would consciously lie on its back unless it were west…and if it were west, it would not be conscious. Any insect who accidentally gets into the belly-up position will, like a turtle on its back, kick and struggle like mad to right itself. But Jack did not kick or struggle. He was happy. He was feeling better than he could ever remember having felt, although he was vaguely troubled by an inability to remember clearly how he had reached this state, condition, or position.

  He had been amazed at the welcome he had received in the cookroom of Holy House. He had expected to be denied admission, or at least challenged, and he had been prepared to assert the authority of his lineage. He could not have known that Squire Hank himself had quietly spread word throughout Stay More that Jack Dingletoon should be treated with respect and cordiality, that if Jack actually were an Ingledew then he was due such courtesy, and if he were only deluded into thinking he was an Ingledew he ought to be “humored.”

  Jack had been prepared to barge into the cook-room lashing his sniffwhips right and left and declaring, “Outa my way, boys! I’m a Ingledew, by cracky, and I aim to get my share!” But he’d scarcely had the chance to speak before he was greeted with loud exclamations of “Hidy, Squar John!” and “Proud to see ye, Squar John!” and “Light down and set, Squar John!” and before he knew it they were leading him to a right fair-sized puddle of beer on the linoleum. Between lapping up the brew and pausing to munch a morsel of potato chip or something they thrust upon him, he never got a chance to say a word.

  Late in the night, or rather early in the morning, he had been surprised to see a female come sashaying into the cookroom, and despite his intoxication, or because of what his fellows were saying about her, Jack learned that the female was his own wife, Josie. The cookroom was an all-male preserve, with strict rules governing attendance and excluding all females, but, strangely, the male rooster-roaches had shown Josie the same courtesy and welcome they tendered to Jack, and it had gone to Josie’s head, making her giddier than the beer on which she was allowed to fill up.

  Floating belly-up, Jack wondered, idly, what had become of his wife now. The last he’d paid any notice, she was flirting with Troy Dinsmore, a Smockroach, but it was all just innocent trifling, and old Troy was too drunk to get serious anyhow. Jack turned his head to one side, extended his touchers into the liquid and brought them to his lips. It was a fresher brew than what had been on the linoleum. It still had some fizz to it. Jack wiggled his tailprongs and made it foam a bit.

  Then he noticed the other roosterroach, also floating belly-up. It wasn’t Josie. It appeared to be Jaybird Coe, a Frockroach, who, Jack realized, had within the past few hours become his best buddy.

  “Aint this the life?” Jack said to Jaybird, and demonstrated how he could paddle with his tailprongs and actually scoot around on the surface of the beer, around and around within the confines of the metal tank. Tailprongs normally are sticking up overhead, or rather overtail, but if one is lying on one’s back, belly-up in beer, then they are extending downward into the liquid. Jack hoped his example would inspire Jaybird to paddle around too, but Jaybird wouldn’t do it. He just lay there, floating on his back. Jack dipped a sniffwhip into the brew and splashed Jaybird with it, right in the face, but Jaybird didn’t seem to mind. “Drunk as a wheelbarrow,” Jack observed, although the only wheelbarrow he had seen, across the road in the Lord’s Garden Patch, was a teetotaller.

  Jack studied the ceiling. There was a slot-shaped opening in it, through which poured the first light of dawn. It didn’t bother Jack, but he was vaguely bothered by the memory of having dropped through that slot to reach where he was. That implied, somehow, a problem, though at the moment he couldn’t put his sniffwhips on just what the problem was. He nudged Jaybird. “Hey, Jaybird,” he said. But Jaybird didn’t respond. Jack tickled his face with his sniffwhip. “Come on, Jay, pop out of it,” he urged, and bumped up against Jaybird forcefully, but his friend lay as still as west. West? Jack thought, and began to feel a rising panic.

  He heard a distant voice calling his name. Or calling him by the name he used to have, Jack. Now he was Squire John, but this voice didn’t seem to know that. It was a high-pitched female voice, and Jack tried to identify its owner with his sniffwhips, but all he could pick up on his sniffwhips was the smell of the beer all around him, along with a steadily growing scent of westwardness, the west of the belly
-up feller beside him, Jaybird.

  “Jack, whar air ye?” came the voice, again and again, and Jack realized it was Josie.

  He called back, “Josie? I’m down here inside of this beer can!” Soon he saw her face peering down at him from the slot overhead. How had she got up there, to the top of the can? She had no wings. Had someone boosted her up? “Keep back from the aidge!” he cautioned her. “You’ll fall in, too.”

  “What’re ye doin down thar, Jack?” she asked.

  “Jist a-layin here, floatin around and feelin fine,” he declared.

  “You aint drownded, air ye?”

  “Noo, but it ’pears thet ole Jaybird might be.”

  “How did ye git down thar, Jack?”

  “Same way you’re liable to git down here if ye don’t step back,” Jack warned her, but the words were not out of his mouth before he saw her tumbling headlong down into the can. With a gentle splash she landed beside him, and got a snootful of beer.

  “Mmm-mmm,” she purred, licking her mandibles. “This is the real stuff!”

  “Now look what ye’ve done went and done,” he pointed out. “Now we’re both trapped in here.” He had figured the problem out.

  She noticed belly-up Jaybird. “Is he really westered off?” she asked. “That, or he’s drunker’n a fried coot,” Jack said.

  Josie had never seen a fried coot. But she sniffed the distinct odor of westwardness that emanated from Jaybird’s corpse, and she felt both a mingling of sorrow for the westered and a sense of responsibility: she wondered which, if any, of the few edibles stored in her larder she could take to Samantha Coe for the funeral feed. Josie didn’t have a scrap of sweetstuff anywhere in the log, what with her big family, but the other ladies would be sure to bring Samantha a bit of pie or cake or at least cookie for the funeral feed, and Josie would look cheap, as usual. She complained to her husband, “I don’t have a blessit thing to take to the funeral feed.”

  “Lorgamercy, Maw, is thet all ye kin think of, at a time like this?” Jack demanded. “It aint Jaybird’s funeral we’re concerned with. It’s our own, if we caint git out of here.”

  Josie took another sip of the beer that surrounded her, and wondered how long it would take her, with Jack’s help, to drink all of it. “How deep is this, hon?” she asked.

  “I aint tried to touch bottom,” he declared. “And I aint so certain I’d keer to try.”

  Josie attempted to explain her plan. If they drank all the beer, they couldn’t drown in it.

  “Now thet is real, real clever,” Jack commented with sarcasm, tapping his forehead with a toucher. “But jist think about it a minute. Whar is all the beer we drink gonna go?”

  Josie thought for a minute. “Oh,” she then said. She lapsed into worried silence, and paddled around idly with her tailprongs, but the fun of it rapidly palled. “Jack,” she asked, “kin ye turn right side up?”

  “Maw, I wush ye’d stop callin me ‘Jack.’ You don’t have to call me ‘Squar John’ but at least ‘John’ would be a heap of improvement.”

  “Wal John, if you’re shore enough a Ingledew, you orter be able to turn right side up and spread yore wings and fly out of here.”

  Jack had a vague but pleasant memory of having recently escaped from a Santa Fe by using his wings. It was worth a try. He rolled to one side, and kicked all six of his gitalongs, but could not flip over onto his stomach. “Give me a shove,” he told his wife.

  Josie tried shoving him, to turn him over, but she only succeeded in pushing him across the pool. She pushed him up against the metal wall of the tank, and there, by continued shoving and his own splashing efforts, she was able to turn him right side up. He tried to spread his wings, but they were soaked with beer, and he quickly discovered that he had no buoyancy in this position. He could only float if he was belly-up.

  “Halp!” he cried, and sank.

  “Oh, Lord, save us!” Josie cried out to Man, who was still sound (or unsound) asleep in the back yard. “Climb the wall, Jack!” she begged her husband, and shoved him hard against the aluminum wall, and he scrabbled with his foreclaws and scratched with his hind claws, and clutched with his touchers and thrashed with his tailprongs and lashed with his sniffwhips, but could get no purchase whatever on the smooth metal. All his frantic efforts only had the effect of flipping Josie over onto her stomach, so that she no longer had any buoyancy either.

  They were sinking together. As he had done in the instant before the Santa Fe tried to seize him, Jack reflected upon his life’s brief moment of glory: how fleetingly he had been allowed to enjoy the privileges of Ingledewidity, how transitory the pleasure of fame. But this time he had neither wings nor courage to save him.

  Josie thought of her daughter Tish. Would Tish know how to receive properly all the guests who came bearing funeral feeds? Would Tish be certain that each child had a proper share of the bits of pie, cake, or cookie? Would she make certain that the log was scrubbed clean and that each child was thoroughly bathed and spruced up? Then, when the funeral feed was over, would she, as Josie had told Jubal to tell her to do, present herself at Parthenon and claim kin to the Ingledews?

  “Tish has got to claim kin to the Ingledews,” Josie said to Jack as they both floundered and sank.

  “What?” Jack wondered what nonsense his wife was babbling in her moment of west. “What’s that got to do with us a-westerin? All I kin think of, is when I git to Hell I’ll have to go to work.”

  Chapter ten

  “If a bird gits me, I deserve it, O Lord,” Brother Tichborne said aloud, as the dawn came up. There was not quite yet enough light for a bird to see him, and the earliest bird would get the worm, not him, but he knew that if he kept going in the direction he was heading, he would never get back to the safety of Holy House before he was visible to all daytime creatures, and west in the clutches of a bird or reptile would be no Rapture at all.

  Yes, the Lord still lay. In His profound stupor, He had slightly shifted, no longer flatly supine upon the grass of Carlott but twisted to one side with one of His knees flexed upward toward His chest, and His butt elevated like one of the mountain peaks that rimmed Stay More valley.

  It was this peak that Brother Tichborne boldly climbed, having no trouble gaining its summit but feeling shocked at his own audacity in scaling the Lord’s Butt. At the crest of the bluejeans-covered prat he sat, or crouched, and surveyed the world below and around, slowly lightening in the foredawn. He studied the Lord’s profile: a face never seen so near nor so lit up before. How many of his fellow roosterroaches had ever had such a view? There were certain unholy heathens particularly among the closet Smockroaches, who claimed to have crawled upon the Lord’s person while the Lord was in His bed; but Chid Tichborne doubted that any of them had seen His face with so much light upon it.

  It was a magnificent face, although the strong, firm jowls were hidden beneath a scraggly, gray-streaked beard. Brother Tichborne would have preferred, somehow, that the beard be all white, more in keeping with his concept of a deity, but the several white hairs or whiskers among the darker ones were enough to give the Lord a scholarly look. Some folks claimed there were other Men in the world; although Chid Tichborne preached against this polytheism, he admitted to himself that it was a possibility, even if he had never seen one of the other Men. But surely no other Man was as smart, as strong, and as all-powerful as our Man.

  …Unless, Chid Tichborne thought with a violent shudder, the Lord had westered. Was He stirring at all? Did His chest rise and fall perceptibly with His shallow breathing? In Brother Tichborne’s knees, as in the knees of all roosterroaches, there were special sensors which could detect the slightest vibration in the substratum, but the patch of jeans upon which Chid was perched was totally inert.

  If the Lord were west, what would become of His rooster-roaches? Of course they would not starve, but they would get powerfully hungry, and they would have to leave Holy House. Few of them could forage in the woods, like common Carlotters, eati
ng raw algae and fungi. Most of them would want to invade Parthenon, which is exactly what Chid was planning, although everybody feared the Ingledews almost as much as they feared the Lord. Silly of them, because the two Ingledews were vastly outnumbered, no matter what legendary powers of combat they were purported to possess.

  If the Holy House roosterroaches conquered the Ingledews and took over Parthenon, Chid realized, he would have to make revisions and alterations in his religion. He could no longer preach the Kingdom of Man, but would have to speak of the Queendom of Woman, and he was not certain he could do that. He had nothing against matriarchy itself; he simply didn’t have much use for females. A female, whether Woman or roosterroach, was all right as far as her functions went: bearing and raising children, keeping the house and all, but you couldn’t very easily base a whole system of theology around one of them. Chid tried to imagine himself beginning a prayer “Our Mother who art in Parthenon…” and felt ridiculous.

  Chid’s sniffwhips caused him to shift his gaze from the Lord’s handsome but possibly westered countenance to the grass of Carlott surrounding the Lord, where daytime life was beginning to stir. A nightcrawler had come to a stop near the Lord’s nose and was broadcasting, “BREAKER ONE OH. HOWBOUTCHA, GOOD BUDDY? GOT A DEAD WHALE TO STARBOARD. TUNNEL SIXTEEN BLOCKED.” This was followed by a buzz of static and then a distant nightcrawler on the other side of the Lord answered, “FOUR ROGER. TAKE A SHAKE TO TUNNEL TWENTY-SEVEN, AND SKIRT THE MOTHER. NO BLOCK ON TWENTY-SEVEN. DO YOU READ?”

  The nightcrawler shifted gears and changed direction, down the length of the earth beside the Lord’s body in search of another hole in the ground, but he had not gone far before a robin swooped out of the sky, took one hop, and seized the entire nightcrawler and lifted it, wriggling rig and all, off into the sky, its pitiful last message rapidly fading: “WE UP AND AWAY TO GLORYLAND, THREES AND EIGHTS….”