“So that,” Chid observed, staring upward, “is Squire Sam’s famous Clock?”
“Yeah, and it’s jist chock full o’ goodies!” Brother Stapleton declared.
“Well, we might as well start the weddin feed without the principals,” Chid declared. “Gene and Stan”—for so he had decided to begin calling Stapleton and Ledbetter—“you fellers scoot back up there and jist git all the food out and kick it off the mantelshelf, and we’ll stack it up right here.”
Soon the floor beneath the mantel had a sizeable little pile of assorted tidbits stacked up, and Chid was attempting to sample all of them, remembering, of course, his manners, and offering Josie a sample of each also.
“My, my,” Josie commented, eating. “Did ye ever? If this aint the. I swan. Fancy! Lord a mercy. Mmm-mmm. Hot diggety dog! O sweet papa.”
Chid was mildly concerned that the transfer of the arsenal of food from the Clock to the floor of the Woman’s sleeping room might increase the danger that the Woman, returning, would sweep it all away. But he dismissed this thought for several reasons, one, the Woman didn’t look as if She intended to return, not tonight, anyway; two, the wedding party would probably consume the whole pile before morning, anyhow; and three, he wasn’t a damn bit afraid of the Woman, Who didn’t scare him in the slightest. But just as a precaution, he said to Brother Sizemore, “Leroy, eat yore fill, and then git out thar on the porch and keep a eye out in case the Woman comes back.” Leroy gobbled his fill and did as he was told.
The others settled in for some serious eating, making determined inroads on the pile of wedding feeds. Archy and Tish had better get theirselfs back before too long, Chid chuckled, or else they wouldn’t get nary a bite! Chid was determined, for once in his life, to gluttonize. God, who had created him, had intended for him to be an eater. God had given the roosterroach a svelte, streamlined, trim body only to enable him to squeeze into tight places for purposes of escape. Chid had no further intention of running away from anything or anyone; he didn’t need to be skinny; he could afford, at last, to reach his full girth.
And Josie, his new consort, always somewhat pleasantly plump, could now afford to take on the dimensions of a Queen of the Colony. Just as the Queen of Termites, their remote cousins, was an obese giantess compared with her subjects, it was proper that Chid’s queen outweigh all the other females of Stay More. She didn’t have to look like a roly-poly, let alone the grotesquely bloated Termite Queen, but it would give Josie a certain stature in the eyes of other Stay Morons if her volume came to match that of the—yes, Chid permitted himself to use the word, the King. “King,” he said aloud, testing the sound of it.
“What did you say, hon?” Josie inquired.
Chid liked the little endearment she attached to the end of her question. They were going to get along together famously. “Mmmmph, um,” he replied, and passed her another piece of the mercedes, or whatever Tish had called it.
Still and all, Chid reflected, as his imagination allowed him to step deeper and deeper into the waters of monarchy, he was going to miss certain aspects of the ministry. As King, how would he ever find time to continue his hobby of local history and genealogy? No, he would have to give up interviewing little old ladies and learning the pedigrees of all the Stay More folks. He wouldn’t mind giving up the tedious preaching of funeralizations and weddings and baptisms and Wednesday-night prayer meetings, and he certainly wouldn’t miss attending the teas of the Ladies’ Aid Society and giving pep talks and sermonettes to the Crustian Young People’s Fellowship.
But he was going to miss—yes, he had to admit it—he was going to miss his special relationship with the Lord. Never mind that the Lord had turned out to be a nondeity: a drunken wastrel unworthy of simple love, let alone veneration. All his life Chid had devoted his time and his energy and his thoughts to the service of that Man; he had come to identify with that Man; he had believed that that Man had created him, Chid, if not in His own image, at least in the image of what He, Man, deemed the most intelligent and best-designed of all insects. For all His foibles and frailties and flaws, it was still sad to lose Him.
“DIVINITY!” cried the Clock, and Chid knew that this time, without question, the Clock or whatever Cosmic Force controlled it was speaking directly to him. He spat out his mouthful of blancmange.
“What’s the matter, hon?” Josie asked. “You find a fishbone in your food, tee hee?”
“Divinity,” said Chid, with much feeling.
“Naw, that aint none of that,” Josie observed. “Tish said it was ‘block mash,’ or somethin. That there is the divinity.” She reached out and grabbed some white stuff off the pile and offered it to him.
Chid rejected it. “Divinity,” he said again. “The Clock said ‘divinity’ to me. I have lost divinity.”
“Aw, he wasn’t speakin to you, personal,” Josie said. “He calls everbody that.”
But Chid prostrated himself and prayed. His prayer was interrupted by the return of his son. Archy did not have Tish with him, and he looked terrible. He was grumbling and mumbling a string of profanities and obscenities. Josie offered the white stuff to him, but he declined with a curse.
Chid was disturbed by his son’s indelicate language. “What’s eatin ye, boy?” he asked.
Archy raised his drooping head and regarded his father with large eyes that were stricken. “Tish aint a virgin,” he declared.
“How could ye tell?” Josie inquired.
“She told me. She confessed. Her and Squire Sam have done went and done it. Right up yonder in that Clock. Reckon you’ll have to unmarry us, Dad.”
“Divorce aint so simple as that, boy,” Chid said. “You have to take it to court, and get a Justice of the Peace to approve.”
“Who’s the Justice of the Peace?” Archy asked.
“That would be ole Doc Swain,” Chid announced.
Archy hung his head again, and muttered, “Wal, I might as well git on down to see him, then.”
“Where’s Tish?” Josie asked.
“I don’t keer,” Archy said. “I don’t honestly keer. She could be in Hell for all I keer.”
“Son, don’t take it so bad,” Chid attempted to comfort his boy. “Maybe it would make ye feel better to know that Tish was your half-sister, so it would’ve been incest anyhow.”
“What?!” Archy demanded.
“Aint that right, Josie?” Chid said.
“What?!” Josie demanded.
“Why, Josie, don’t ye remember?” Chid asked gently and fondly. “Don’t ye remember that night when me and you was out in the grass after my brush arbor meetin, last fall?”
“Huh?” Josie said, and seemed to try to recall. “Was that you? Whoever it was, I couldn’t see him because we was jined end to end, the way it’s supposed to be, you know. Was that you, Reverend?”
It was the first time anyone had called him “Reverend” ever since the late lamented Jack Dingletoon had employed the title, and Chid realized he missed it. “Why, of course it was, Josie, and I gave ye the marble that Tish come out of.”
“You couldn’t a done that, Reverend,” Josie replied, “because I had done met up with handsome Jack Dingletoon, and he had done sweet-talked me into having his marble, and, as anybody knows, once a lady has took a marble, she can’t take another’n.”
“What?!” Chid demanded.
This interesting discussion was interrupted by the abrupt appearance of Leroy Sizemore, the lookout, who was scampering into the room, calling out, “Chid! Chid! He’s coming!”
“He?” said Chid. “It was She I tole ye to look out for.”
Leroy was all out of breath and he had to insufflate noisily through all his spiracles before he could continue, “Naw, I don’t mean Him. I mean him.”
“Whom?” Chid demanded.
“Squire Hank! He’s comin this way, up the Roamin Road. He’s comin home!”
“Who’s with him?” Chid asked. “Is Sam with him?”
“Nossir, he
’s alone.”
“Then what are we worryin about?” Chid demanded.
Chapter thirty-four
Sam went out for a stroll. It was after midnight, the air was clear and clean, the sky was black and spangled with a zillion zillion stars. I might be one of only two squires in Stay More, Sam reflected, but there are a zillion zillion other squires in Arkansas alone, and that’s just a little part of this world, which is only one of a zillion zillion worlds circling through the universe. Is it not enough to learn one’s own garden? Sam noticed that the heavy rains had nurtured the burgeoning of plants, and particularly weeds, the roosterroaches of the plant kingdom, eating up the spare, leftover patches of soil not taken by the cultivated plants. Dandelion, plantain, dock, horsenettle, toad-flax, sowthistle: their names, to Sam, suggested unwanted, creeping, striving, but thriving things, like roosterroaches, despised by man but useful, each with its purpose in the grand scheme. When he was a child, Sam used to climb the tall ragweed, a beautiful, large-bladed, spreading, rank, and succulent plant, as high as a dozen feet or more above the ground; he had felt an affinity for it even before he learned that it was a pest, like himself.
A drought was coming, Sam knew. The one thing certain about too much rainfall was that it would be followed by too little, or none. Meanwhile, the weeds took hold, and thrived, and perfumed the night air with their vegetable voices. Sam hoped he would live long enough to understand the peculiar communication of one plant speaking to another in the night, by fragrance alone. He needed no tailprongs to study the voices of plants. But thinking of tailprongs made him think of what he was deliberately avoiding the thought of, with all this meditation on stars and weeds: Tish, and her power to talk gently to him in signs. There were now only two persons he could “hear”: Hoimin with his thrumming boom, and Tish with her soft gestures. How could he hope to exercise his duties as squire of Stay More if he could not hear his townsfolk? Even with Hoimin’s help, with Tish’s too, he could not listen to his people…or minister to them, and he realized that now that Chid Tichborne was abandoning the faith, he would have to replace him, not as an espouser of the Crustian religion but as a pastor of sorts in a confused pastoral populace. If not a pastor, a kind of schoolmaster, perhaps….
His eye fell upon the distant little tower of the schoolhouse. Sam found himself stopped in the middle of Roamin Road, with two directions to turn, a choice to make: north toward Parthenon, to reclaim his Clock and his girlfriend, or south toward the schoolhouse, to reclaim his hearing. If he chose the latter, he would not return before dawn. And he had no guarantee that the expedition would succeed, little faith in the efficacy of the cure.
He could not decide. While he stood immobile in Roamin Road, turning first toward the north and gazing with longing at Parthenon’s roof, and then turning south and trying to make out the belfry of the ancient schoolhouse, another roosterroach approached him, and his sniffwhips told him it was his father. “Morsel, Dad,” he said.
His father said something he could not hear; he assumed it was simply a return of the greeting. But then his father began talking, and Sam could tell from the expressions on his father’s face and the gestures of his sniffwhips that he was not simply making idle conversation; he was talking seriously to his son. Futilely Sam strained his tailprongs to hear.
His father’s tone indicated that now his father was asking him a question, and Sam had to remind him, “Dad, you know I can’t hear very well.”
His father looked irritated, and then committed a mistake that many of normal hearing make toward the hearing-impaired: he began to pronounce each word slowly, tonelessly, in an artificial rhythm that made it impossible for Sam to re-create a coherent sentence from the sounds. “How,” he thought he heard his father say, “come” seemed to be the following word, “her” was pronounced imperfectly, “to” seemed to open up one end of an infinitive that went on infinitely, followed by a rising inflection of a question mark following “that.”
“I’m sorry, Dad, I just can’t tell what you’re saying,” Sam declared.
His father’s expression changed to disgust and then he attempted a crude sign language of his own: Squire Hank pointed at himself, he pointed at the road, he pointed in the direction of Parthenon, he made the motions of walking, and he said one word Sam could hear clearly: “home.”
Sam was able to determine that his father was declaring his intention of returning to Parthenon. The decision that Sam was having so much trouble making was being made for him: he would have to go with his father, to help his father overcome any resistance from Chid and the deacons. But Sam was forced also to confront his reluctance, not to tussle with Chid, but to find that Archy might have proposed to Tish. He realized that he did not want to see Tish until after she had successfully escaped from Archy, if she wanted to, and returned to him.
His father made one more unintelligible statement, then turned to go. “Dad, I’ll go with you,” Sam offered, and walked alongside. But his father stopped, shook his head, said something else, and gestured for Sam to return to Holy House. “No, Dad, you might have trouble with Chid, and you’ll need me,” Sam protested. His father again shook his head, stamped his gitalong, and pointed at Holy House, then left his son standing there as he moved at a rapid clip toward Parthenon.
Sam felt ashamed, both of his own indecisiveness and his inability to hear his father. He muttered, to his father’s disappearing back, “The next time you see me, I’ll hear you.”
Then he turned and marched resolutely in the direction of the schoolhouse.
The journey to the schoolhouse took the rest of the night. No roosterroach in recent memory had made the journey, and there was no scent of anyone’s spit anywhere along the trail…or along the way, for there was no trail. The footsteps of the Woman had mashed down the grass and weeds in places, but not enough to clear a path for Sam, who walked under and through the thick forests of grass. He encountered hostile crickets, and was required to box a few of them out of his way. He encountered a fearsome Santa Fe, and had to fly above it. He was caught in the net of a funnel-web spider, and had to fight and kill the spider before he could laboriously break loose from the sticky ropes. Then, within prongshot of the schoolhouse, if there had been anyone there to hear his cry, he was pounced upon by a tarantula, who surely would have crushed him in its jaws, had he not danced a wild tarantella, whirling beyond the creature’s grasp.
He was exhausted, and the first slice of dawn was served upon the distant ridge when he gained the steps of the schoolhouse and collapsed upon them to rest. He did not rest for long. Soon, he entered the building and found his way to the bell-rope, so recently burnished by Sharon’s hands and therefore still smelling strongly of Her. He climbed beyond Her scent.
The bell-rope was coarse and easy to cling to, but it seemed to rise forever. He had climbed only half-way, too far to fall but still too far to go, when he felt but could not hear, bouncing off his prongs and his very cutin, the shrill echo that is broadcast by the vicious vespertilionidus, the big brown bat, in search of its prey by echo-location. Sam saw the bat at the same instant the bat located Sam—not only with bouncing echoes but with vision—and prepared to strike. Sam’s reflexes were much too slow to avoid the flying mammal. The bat’s needle-sharp teeth were opening to strike, and the evil eyes and ears were both focused on him. Sam did not even have time for his whole life to flash through his memory.
At the instant Sam braced himself for his fatal impalement on the bat’s teeth, a great insect interceded! A broad-winged roosterroach, screaming a curse that drowned out the bat’s echo-signal, flew into the space between the bat’s teeth intended for Sam, and bit the bat on the lips! Then bit the bat again! And again! The bat’s wings were in disarray as it tried to stop its flight and reverse course, and the great-winged roosterroach kept attacking it. The turbulence of the thrashing wings almost blew Sam off the rope, to which he clung desperately. Now the vicious bat was totally frightened and cowed into a frantic retrea
t, but as it tried to fly away, the roosterroach kept striking and biting until the bat decamped. Then the roosterroach flew back to Sam, and hovered before him like a hummingbird.
The roosterroach was a stranger, to put it mildly; at least Sam had never seen him around Stay More before, or at least not in conscious “reality”; perhaps Sam had seen him in dreams or in stories. He was the most powerful-looking, not to say the handsomest roosterroach that Sam had ever seen, dreamt, or imagined, but the look he gave Sam was enough to freeze the ichor in his veins. He spoke. “You may proceed.” He motioned for Sam to continue his climb up the bell-rope. Sam was stunned to realize that he could hear these words clearly, although the stranger had not raised his voice. It took a moment before Sam could raise one gitalong above the other and continue his climb up the bell-rope, and the roosterroach flew along beside him, in complete defiance of the known fact that the flight of a roosterroach may never last more than a few seconds.
Sam was not convinced that he was a roosterroach, but Sam continued climbing until he reached the bell, and stood precariously on the iron arm where the rope terminated. The stranger alighted and confronted him. With his wings at rest, the stranger did not seem quite so large; still, he was much bigger than Sam.
“Who are you?” Sam asked.
The stranger laughed. It was the first laughter that Sam had been able to pick up on his weakened tailprongs in a long time; it was almost a tonic, to hear laughter again. Then the stranger introduced himself by saying, “Most of your kinsmen call me the Mockroach, but that is not my name.”
“You…you’re Satan?” Sam asked.
Again the laughter. “Old Scratch. Old Split-foot. Old Harry. I go by many names.”
“You don’t look like the Devil,” Sam observed.
Again, the hearty guffaws, which made Sam understand why the creature was called the Mockroach. Was the laughter mocking? “How does the Devil look?” the Mockroach asked.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 148
