The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  Chid, when he recovered from the thundershock, declared bravely, “Well, I can swim to Parthenon by myself, if need be. Anybody going with me?”

  Only a half-dozen Crustian deacons volunteered to accompany their minister on his brave outing, and they exited through a hole in the front of Holy House.

  Doc pantomimed the force he wanted Sam to exert against the corner of Larry’s mouth, and Sam went at it, with all his strength, which was still considerable despite the weakness of his convalescence. With fractions of a millisecond to spare, Sam threw his body against the right corner of the lips of Larry and pushed the flesh back just enough to uncover the missing tooth, making a gap through which Squire Hank instantly squeezed with an exclamation of deliverance.

  Man swallowed.

  Squire Hank did something he had never done before and might never do again: he embraced his son.

  Chapter twenty-six

  “If you cain’t shet yore mouth, Maw,” Jack warned, “you’re liable to git a midge caught in it.” For the longest time, from the moment they had first entered Parthenon, Josie, even in her sleep, had been hanging her mouth open like a nymph gaping at a swallowtail butterfly. There weren’t any butterflies in Parthenon, but the things Josie kept gawking at were no less stunning, if stationary: furniture of brass! tables of teak! machinery of mahogany! and shelves, ledges, benches, brackets, blocks, bends, knobs, pulls, handles, cribs, cubbies, curtains, and clothes! The walls were covered with images! Patterns, pictures, pretties everywhere! Neither Jack nor Josie had ever, even in their dreams of the houses of Man, conceived of anything like it. Jack himself, who had sense enough not to hang his mouth wide open as his wife was doing, still wondered if perhaps they might have westered after all and were now in heaven. But if this were heaven, they were not going to sit on the right hand of Man…or Woman, who clearly had the run of the place and didn’t look as if She had any intention of bending over and placing Jack or Josie or anybody on Her right hand.

  Their best instincts told Jack and Josie to stay out of Her sight, and they did. They waited until She was asleep before exploring the house, and then they seemed to have it all to themselves. There was no sign or scent of their daughter, Tish. What was more peculiar, there was no sign or scent of the Squires Ingledew, who, everybody knew, were the lords of the manor. For the longest time, Jack, without expressing his doubts to Josie, had feared that they might have entered the wrong house, that this was not Parthenon, that there was a third inhabited house in Stay More…but there were certain clues that this was the right place. In the cookroom, for example (a fabulous wonderland that put the cookroom of Holy House to shame, nay, to utter disgrace), they discovered a hidden apartment that obviously was the personal lodgings of Squire Hank, but without Squire Hank in it.

  Maybe, Jack decided, after waiting hours in the cookroom for the squires or Tish to return, the squires had taken Tish off to tour the rest of the fabulous castle. He decided to search elsewhere in Parthenon for them, but first he and Josie had to rest up from their long hike—and their swim—from Carlott, a more perilous journey than their recent attempt to get home from the Lord’s Refuse Pile. Jack realized he wasn’t in the very best of condition—hadn’t Doc said something about his pigeon tubes being squoze up by fatty bodies?—and he had traveled more in the past three nights than in all the rest of his life put together.

  Their first night at Parthenon, Jack and Josie dined lavishly in the cookroom on an assortment of particles they found beneath one of the stoves (there were two: an old woodstove and a modern electric range) and spent the rest of the night confining their explorations to the cookroom alone. Since Squire Hank appeared to have it to himself, except for occasional forages from the son squire, and the two squires could not hope to consume even a fraction of the scraps that the fastidious Woman overlooked, there was still an untouched bounty of edibles here and there, in cracks, crevices, and beneath things. Not alone on the floor beneath the stoves but on the countertops too, their sniffwhips kept drawing them to fresh discoveries of snippets of food.

  “Close yore mouth and eat,” Jack commanded his wife, but she was too awe-struck even to speak, let alone eat, and Jack could not remember when Josie had ever been at a loss for words.

  It was away along in the second night before a situation arose which finally moved Josie to close her mouth and speak. This night, after the Woman had climbed into her great fabulous brass bed and her slumber-scent wafted across the room, Jack and Josie began to explore this room and a small room adjoining. Josie’s mouth opened even wider at the sight of such things as a large oval rug braided of strips of colored wool, and Josie spent an hour just running around the grooves of the braids like a racehorse on an oval track.

  The adjoining room, the Woman’s washing room, contained a marvelous dresser, which Jack and Josie climbed, to explore such things as the Woman’s hairbrush, comb, and bottles from which emanated exotic fragrances. From a corner of the dresser they had a view of a pool of water, enclosed in a white porcelain bowl framed in a wooden oval, which gave them much wonder and conversation. It looked like a private swimming pool, but one much too small for the Woman. Did she have a pet fish? Or perhaps it was a birdbath—but there were no birds inside of Parthenon. Josie closed her mouth in fear of the water.

  They resumed their tour of the house, but when the Clock, in foppish tones, uttered “TUTTI-FRUTTI,” Josie’s mouth fell open again. Ever since entering Parthenon, they had been hearing the chiming of the Clock, although not close enough to distinguish “NOUGAT” from “ECLAIR.” But now, Josie exclaimed to Jack, “Did ye hear what that thing called me?”

  “Aw, now, he wasn’t speakin to you personal, Maw,” Jack assured her. “He probably calls everybody that.”

  Nothing would do but that they climb up the mantel and explore the Clock themselves, finding it every bit as enchanting as their daughter had, several nights previously, and finding even a trace of the scent of their daughter. Jack was smart enough to figure out that the interior of the Clock, with its library of edibles and the little wardrobe of Sam’s moults, was Sam’s apartment, and had been inhabited, at least overday, by his daughter. But where was she? Where was Sam?

  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

  Would 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.