The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  Seeing his chance, he stopped darting to and fro and made a beeline for the underside of the Woman’s bed. There, She could not stomp him. She got down on Her knees and tried to see him, where he crouched panting and wheezing, but it was too dark for Her to see him, although he could see every configuration of wrath and disgust upon Her lovely face, which hurt his feelings. He was grievously insulted by Her attitude. He had intended to pray to Her, to worship Her, to pay Her lip service unendingly, but now he scowled at Her and said, “Woman, you aint a damn bit better than me. Yore shit stinks the same as mine. God is gonna wester you one of these days.”

  As if She had heard him, She rose up and disappeared. She passed entirely out of range of his sniffwhips. She was no longer in the room. Chid remained hiding under the bed for a while, then crawled out from beneath, grabbed hold of the coverlet, climbed the bed, marched upon the sheets, the bedsheets as well as the lettersheets; he was close enough to read the lettersheets, the florid sentiments that drunken Man had poured out to Her, His eloquent expressions of yearning, His hopes for their life together, His extravagant similes comparing her to the pastoral springtime unfolding around Them. Chid spat upon the sheets. He spat upon the lettersheets as well as upon the bedsheets.

  He climbed upon the Woman’s pillow and squatted and squeezed his haunches and deposited a black pellet of feces upon Her pillow. He was about to squeeze out a second one when She returned, coming back into the room, holding in Her hand a can. Chid darted beneath the pillow and watched Her. It appeared to be a can like the cans of beer that Man drank, but it had some sort of button-like gadget on top that She began to push with Her thumb, creating a most noxious spray. She got down on Her hands and knees again and sprayed the underside of the bed. The poisonous fumes rose and assaulted Chid’s sniffwhips, and he crept deeper under the pillow, and remained there, sheltered from the worst brunt of the gas, but still he smelled it, and knew it to be fatal.

  At length the Woman stopped Her spraying and sat down upon the side of the bed, speaking aloud, “There, you vermin, I hope that dissolves you into goo.”

  Chid was not dissolved into goo, but the vapors from the spray were so strong that some of their molecules penetrated into his hiding place and knocked him out. When he woke up, much later, he did not know where he was. He felt a tremendous pressure bearing down on him, almost but not quite squashing him, almost but not quite like he imagined the rupture of Rapture to be. He squirmed out from beneath it, and freed himself from the confines of the pillow. The pressure, he discovered, came from the Woman’s head, which was lying upon the pillow. Still dizzy and disoriented from the poisonous fumes, and suffering a terrible hangover from them, he could not at first determine what his attitude toward Her should be: should he hate Her for trying to gas him? Or had he been westered by the gas and was now in the promised heaven of his afterlife? He climbed upon Her right hand. The muscles in the hand twitched but She did not wake. Chid sat there for a long time, waiting for his wits to return to him, waiting for his hangover to go away, waiting to see if there was anything really pleasurable about sitting on the right hand of Woman, but he ultimately decided that it was not pleasurable; in fact, it was terribly boring. He could not conceive of spending eternity on the right hand of Woman.

  The sun rose. Chid watched the dreaded rays streaming into the room. He gazed at the mantelshelf, where the machine which had startled him into falling off the mantelshelf was now rumbling, and now clearing its throat, and now crying, “SCONE!”

  “Scone, yoreself,” Chid said back to it. His gaze scanned the mantelshelf for any sign of Squire John, but there was none. Most likely Squire John had succumbed to the deadly fumes of the Woman’s spray, but where was his corpse?

  Later, the mantel machine crooned, “SUGARPLUM!” but Chid was not charmed. He ignored it. The Woman, however, stirred, and began to rise. Chid jumped off Her right hand and scurried beneath the sheets. The Woman did not leave the bed, She just sat there, Her knees drawn up to Her chin and Her eyes gazing at nothing off in some corner. Then Her reverie—and Chid’s watching—were invaded by the screaming blare of the giant black beetle with the giant black ant on top of it. Chid watched in awe as She lifted the ant and held it against Her face.

  “Good morning, Gran,” he heard Her say to the ant.

  But this grandmother ant was mute, or else she communicated extrasensorily, while She kept speaking as if in reply to her. “No, that’s all right,” the Woman said. Then She said, as if answering a question, “Just this morning.” Chid listened with growing fascination as She went on: “I’ve decided that my letter probably angered him, he doesn’t want to be nagged, he doesn’t need me commenting upon his drinking habits. He probably thinks it sounded like a bribe: I’ll talk to him if he stops drinking. I guess it is a bribe, come to think of it. And of course he has no intention of stopping. So instead of answering my letter, he’s just giving me the silent treatment. Well, let him. I’ve been here longer than he has, and I intend to stay here after he’s gone, if he ever goes. Sometimes I wish he would. But maybe he intends to do the Montross book first. Yes, I think maybe one reason he hasn’t answered my letter is that he’s going back to work on that paper about Montross he was planning to write for The Southern Review. It could be he has sobered up enough to write it. At least I haven’t heard him shooting off his pistol for several days now. That must mean he’s not drinking too much. What? Um-huh. Unt-huh. Well, yes. Maybe you’re right, but I hadn’t thought of it that way. Could be. Well, I’ll tell you what, Gran. I think I’ll wait until the end of this week, just to see if he might answer my letter, okay? I don’t want to seem pushy, or anxious. I’ll wait until the end of this week, and if he still hasn’t answered my letter, I’ll write him another one. How does that sound? I’ll write to him again, and sort of apologize, if I offended him. Yes. Um-huh. That’s right. Well, thank you, Gran, I really appreciate it, I surely do.

  “And listen, one other thing. I think I do have a roach problem. I saw another one. It was climbing on my mantel, and fell off, or jumped off. I tried to mash it underfoot, but those things can really scoot, you know? It ran up under my bed. I tried to find some bug spray, but I don’t have any. All I could find was hair spray. I don’t know if it worked or not, but I didn’t see it again.

  “Don’t laugh. Anyway, after I sprayed the hair spray, I poured myself a drink, to calm my nerves. A hard drink. It’s the first one I’ve had since the last time he was over here. I wanted also, and you’d better not laugh at this, to see if I couldn’t find out, by drinking, why he likes to drink so much. No, I didn’t discover any answers. But I might try it again. Do you want to come over this afternoon and have a gin-and-tonic with me? Oh? Well, tomorrow then?…”

  Chapter twenty-nine

  If only you were with me, Tish, to be my interpreter. If only I had you here to tell me what these guys are saying. They are all talking at once, and have been at it for nights. One great difficulty that we deaf souls have, Tish, is that we lose selective hearing: we cannot single out a particular voice or sound to concentrate upon, but instead hear only the general hubbub of all sounds merging into one confusing noise. Your sweet cute tailprongs have the power to focus upon the voice of your choosing and banish all others into background noise, but my poor prongs cannot discriminate among the voices of: Doc Swain, my father, Archy and other youths, meddlesome Crustians and busybody butt-ins. Everybody talking at once. Where are you, Tish, my love?

  Everyone is discussing what can be done to help the helpless Man. For indeed He is helpless, if not beyond all help, not just from us but from His fellow men in this world, if there are any, and I’m sure there must be, other than Sharon. He is still east. Sometimes He even opens His eyes. His mouth, that dungeon from which my father escaped, with my help, is dry and parched and cracked. But He is immobile, confined to His couch, drifting in and out of consciousness, mostly out, terribly thirsty, and Doc Swain keeps shaking his head, to himself, just at the sight of
Him.

  The atmosphere is distinctly unpleasant, the air of the loafing room muggy with the must of west, the fetors of rot and gangrene and disease, and the foul odor of Man’s incontinence, which has soaked His couch. If He once had worshippers, they no longer find anything worth worshipping in Him. No one prays to Him or venerates Him or propitiates Him. The Reverend, His Holiness Tichborne, had abandoned Him already, and has not returned from, I suppose, Parthenon, where he is up to who knows what mischief—I almost said “Lord knows what mischief,” but the “Lord” knows nothing. The Lord has been invaded lately by bedbugs, bloodthirsty little creatures, dumb and determined. We search and destroy among them, but not fast enough to keep them from gorging themselves on the helpless Man’s blood.

  Because I cannot hear, I can only talk. One more voice, and a loud one, in the general clamor. But everyone listens to me. They listen as if I alone know the answer to this predicament, and maybe I do, but if I do, I haven’t quite discovered it yet myself. I have made a number of suggestions. They have been considered, and examined, and debated, and argued, but none of them have been tried….

  …except my suggestion that, before beginning to eat one another, we attempt to break into the cartons of the cookroom’s cabinets. We had been reduced to eating soap from the cookroom sink’s soapdish and from the bathroom shower’s soapdish. Have you ever eaten soap, Tish? Depending on the brand, it is edible and even palatable, and of course it contains essential nutrients and minerals: fats, alkali, potassium, glycerides, whatever, and there are Stay More legends of roosterroaches who survived the ancient depopulation of the village by discovering old bars of lye soap, terribly caustic but tastier than the perfumed modern stuff.

  Doc Swain and I are both proud of our collections of foodstuffs, but I’m sure that neither he nor I want to share our larders with all of our fellow villagers, except as the very last resort. Doc himself was with us the other night when we were gathered around the cookroom’s soapdish, having a supper of sorts, our mouths ludicrously foaming with suds and all of the fellows making jokes (which I could not hear) about the taste of the meal and our appearance or whatever they joked about.

  I told the others of my plan: to climb up into the cabinets above the cookroom’s counters and see if we couldn’t chew our way into some of the containers of cardboard, paper-board, pasteboard, whatever, and find something edible and more tasty than soap.

  We did, and there are, we discovered, enough boxes of cookies, crackers, wafers, chips, pretzels, Melba toasts, saltines, etc., etc., to sustain the populations of Holy House, and of Carlott too, until, and possibly beyond, doomsday. There will never be any need for these folks to invade Parthenon in search of salvation for their stomachs or their souls. Doc Swain yelled at my tailprongs the information that the roosterroaches of Stay More have been so overjoyed at the discovery revealed by my suggestion that they have referred to this immense treasure of sustenance as “samfood.” My own gratification over my resourcefulness, and my pride, are dampened only at the thought that you are not here with us, Tish, to share in this endless banquet. Where are you, my darling? Your Carlott neighbors, who have moved, one and all, into Holy House, report that nothing further of you, or any of your family, has been seen. Your new “boyfriend,” Archibald Tichborne, is almost as pining for you as I am; every night he goes out and searches Stay More for you. He comes home, shaking his head slowly, drooping his sniffwhips, languishing, anguishing. I am almost tempted to commiserate with him, but we are rivals, after all.

  The general jubilation over the discovery of samfood threatens to make us complaisant, sated, and indifferent to the plight of Lawrence Brace, who westers slowly. But Doc Swain and my father and I, at least, and a few others, even Archy, when he’s not out sniffing around for you, continue to discuss and plot ways to get help for Man.

  I suggested that we attempt to get word to Woman, to Sharon. I proposed that we attempt to write to Her. All my life I wanted to write a love letter to Sharon, but there was no way to make the words. Not even with the help of all the strongest roosterroaches, including my mighty father, could we even lift the cumbrous log of a pencil, let alone manipulate it.

  “Ink, maybe,” Doc suggested. “The old-timey kind that comes in a bottle and Humanfolk used to dip a goose-feather in.”

  Hunting through and upon Lawrence Brace’s writing desk for nonexistent ink, we discovered—or rather I should give Archy proper credit for it, for it was he who first climbed the machine and summoned the rest of us to observe it—the IBM Selectric, with its “on” button still engaged and its vitals humming. Doc told the others some things I could not hear, concerning his previous exploration of the machine and his own theories of its use and function. The several of us climbed all over it, hopping from letter-button to letter-button, reading the letters and numerals there. It was Archy who realized that if enough pressure was exerted against the buttons, it would cause the machine to impress a letter upon the sheet of paper which contained only the words already impressed: “Stay More, Arkansas,” and “Lawrence Brace,” and “Myth, Meaning and Narrative in the Poems of Daniel Lyam Montross,” and then the fragment of a sentence, “What are we to make of.”

  Archy began jumping up and down on the “I” key, yelling “THIS ORTER DO THE TRICK!” But for all his efforts, nothing whatever happened. The machine went on humming, but remained inactive. Your young fellow Archy is strong, stout, and agile, Tish, but for all his acrobatics—-jumps, backflips, somersaults—his weight was not enough to budge that “I” key. I tried, myself, and in all modesty I am the strongest of us all. I too jumped high and came down hard, and, while I could not do backflips and somersaults like Archy, I could exert more downward push upon the key. But to no avail. My father, the second-strongest roosterroach in all Stay More, tried to climb up and join me, but the key would scarcely accommodate both our bodies, and one or the other kept slipping off. We could, however, push downward on its edges, and, with Archy jumping up and down on the top, and Doc pulling down on one side too, we managed, with much grunting determination and super-physical exertion, to depress the key!

  The type-ball jerked, clattered, and slammed against the page. We fell down, panting, sighing, but victorious. There it was, our handiwork upon the page.

  What are we to make of I

  “Now, a comma, quick!” I exclaimed, exulting.

  “WHAT’S A COMMA?” Archy asked.

  “Down there!” I pointed, and he leapt upon the comma key, followed by us three others, and we got it down, down, down:

  What are we to make of I,

  “Where’s the ‘W’?” I asked, scampering about, and we all hunted.

  “UP OVER THAR!” my father called, and we joined him two rows up, and used all our strength to complete a three-letter word, “WHO.” Getting that “O” down nearly exhausted me, and we fell to the bottom key, which wasn’t a key at all, but the space bar, an easy bar to depress, but, for readability, an essential bar.

  None of them had the energy to heed my command, “Now let’s find the ‘A’ key!” They crouched and rested on the space bar, and then my father suggested we all needed a bite to eat to recoup our strength. After a visit to the cookroom for a heavy snack, the lot of us returned to the writing machine and continued our labors for another hour, until the whole bunch of us were exhausted. I began to wonder if this was really the afterlife, the prophesied Hell, in which we non-Crustians, true to predictions, had to work. We were all working for the first and only time in our lives, and it was not pleasant.

  A major difficulty occurred when the typing of the words reached the extreme right of the page, and we were at a loss for the means of moving the type-ball back. We could not budge it. Again it was clever Archy who figured out that the very large key inscribed RETURN might have something to do with moving the type-ball. But even with six of us crowded upon it and jumping up and down in unison, we could not depress it. Archy squeezed between the keys and discovered that the underside of
the RETURN key was attached to a bar which, if a dozen strong rooster-roaches pulled down on it at the same time a dozen others piled on top of the key, would cause it to lower sufficiently to activate the violent return shuttle of the type-ball.

  After hours of this hell, we observed our creation, and it was good:

  What are we to make of I, WHO AM HURT BADLY SHOT MYSELF IN GITALONG CAN’T MOVE PLEASE HELP SEND HELP AT ONCE

  I studied it, and wondered if, grammatically speaking, we shouldn’t have put in some more punctuation, but decided it wasn’t necessary. The several of us, after another big meal and a rest, and the recruitment of additional help from other Holy House and Carlott males (we had to threaten to withhold their samfood unless they helped), began the laborious task of chewing through the remainder of the sheet of paper and removing the written portion from out of the writing machine.

  Then came the tricky part. We had to take the message, now freed from the machine, carry it like an enormous sheet, forty or fifty of us holding it around the edges, down from the machine, down from the desk to the floor, across the floor, out of the ponder room, through the loafing room to the front door, which was shut tight; but, like all doors, with a narrow space between the bottom of the door and the top of the sill. By careful manipulation—a couple dozen or so went out through a bullethole and tugged from the opposite side—we were able to slide the sheet under and onto the porch.