The Cockroaches of Stay More

by Donald Harington

  “Wait!” Tish said. “I haven’t even said I will.”

  “That comes later,” Chid pointed out patiently. “First, I have to ask him. Do you, Archibald, take this gal, Tish, to be yore lawful wedded wife, to have and to hold, in sickness and health, till west do ye part?”

  “I do,” Archy said.

  “Okay. Now then, Tish, do you, Letitia, take this fine feller, Archy, to be yore lawful wedded husband, to love, honor, cherish and obey, in sickness and in health, till west do ye part?”

  “No, I do not,” Tish said.

  Chid wondered if his tailprongs needed cleaning. In all the weddings he had officiated—four hundred or more, he had lost count—not once had the bride ever said anything other than a modest “Ah do” at this point in the ceremony. He regarded Tish with curiosity. Possibly, he realized, she was feeling bereaved for her father, and was in mourning, and not really herself. “You don’t?” he said.

  She nodded her head. But then she shook her head. She was confused, obviously, and he tried coaching her, “When I ask that question, you’re supposed to lower yore head and smile real sweet and say, ‘I do.’ Okay? Let’s try it again. Do you, Letitia, take this feller, Archibald, to—”

  “No,” Tish said. “No. Stop. This aint a weddin!”

  Chid looked to Josie for help, as if Josie might be able to put some sense into the poor girl’s head.

  “Hon,” Josie said to her daughter, “watch yore manners. You’re embarrassin me.”

  “Mother, I don’t want to get married tonight,” Tish protested. “How could we even have a weddin when we ought to be having Daddy’s funeral?”

  “Yore father done had his funeralization a week ago,” Josie pointed out.

  “But he wasn’t west then,” Tish said.

  The girl had a point, Chid admitted, but it was academic, and besides, he wasn’t in the mood for preaching any more funerals. For that matter, he wasn’t in the mood for preaching the rest of this wedding. He didn’t have to have the girl say “I do.” As Boss Squire and Lord of the Manor, Chid had the right, among all his other droits, simply to decree the marriage, without the consent of either party. “Well, Dearly Beloved,” he announced, “since we aint gittin full cooperation in this matter, looks like I’ll jist have to git it all over with. I now pronounce you’uns husband and wife.” He added, to Archy, “You may kiss the bride.”

  Archy tried to do his duty, but Tish pushed him away. “You can’t do this!” she protested. “I aint married! I don’t want to be ‘Tish Tichborne.’ It sounds like somebody clucking!”

  The girl was probably in need of a good marbling, Chid decided, but it could wait until noctis. Meanwhile, the girl could probably use a good meal. Traditionally in the Ozarks the groom’s family is supposed to sponsor the enfare, or wedding feed, which occurs the night after the wedding night, but the bride’s family is responsible for the refreshments immediately following the wedding. Chid did some mental calculating, and determined that he was both the groom’s family and the bride’s family, since he was the bride’s actual father, so he ought to be the host for all the eats. “Let’s have the wedding feed, folks,” Chid announced, and led the way into the Parthenon, towards the cookroom.

  But the problem was, the Woman, confound Her witchy bones, had skipped supper. Maybe because with all of those gin-and-tonics She was sipping all afternoon, She hadn’t had any appetite. Anyway, She hadn’t had a blessit thing to eat for supper, and the floor of the cookroom contained not the faintest trace of crust or crumb, and the countertops had nothing except the lethal drops of gin and the unfilling tonic water and lime. When would the Woman return? It didn’t appear that She was coming back tonight.

  Chid’s sniffwhips told him that some where in Parthenon was a cache of crusts and crumbs, but whenever he tried to fine-tune the direction of the signal, it only seemed to come from the vicinity of that same mantelshelf he had fallen off of, when the machine had said “ECLAIR!” so rudely to him. Perhaps the machine ate crusts and crumbs, and had a supply of them, but Chid wasn’t about to climb up there again and mess around with it.

  “Brother Sizemore,” he said to one of his deacons, “suppose ye scoot up yonder to the mantelshelf in the Woman’s sleepin room and see if ye caint find out where the smell of all them goodies is a-comin from?” Chid realized he would have to think of a better name for ole Leroy Sizemore than “Brother,” because, without religion, they weren’t brethering and sistering any more.

  Leroy Sizemore climbed the mantel, with his sniffwhips flicking in every direction, and homed in on the source of the scent of the yum-yums. As he approached the Clock, it greeted him loudly with “NOUGAT!” and he duplicated exactly the plunge that Chid had taken the night before, off the shelf and down to the floor. After picking himself up, he sheepishly claimed, “Lost my balance,” and then he said, “Shore nuff, they’s a power of victuals up yonder inside thet machine.”

  They waited until the machine had chimed its nine bongs, then Chid dispatched Brothers Ledbetter and Stapleton up to investigate, and they returned with their mouths and touchers full of exotic foodstuffs.

  “Stop!” Tish yelled angrily. “That’s Sam’s blancmange!” And she tried to pull Brother Stapleton’s mouthful away from him. “This is Sam’s prize mammon chiffon!” she cried. Any roosterroach who encounters another insect attempting to interfere with his feeding will quickly swallow whatever he’s got in his mouth, and Brother Ledbetter nearly choked getting down his mouthful. “Oh no!” Tish cried. “You’ve eaten Sam’s brazo demercedes!”

  Chid wondered what was bothering the girl, but before he could put his concern into words, his son beat him to it. “Tish!” exclaimed Archy. “How do you know so much about Sam’s stuff?!” The question seemed to stun the girl into realizing she had given away some secret; she hung her head and could not answer. “Have you been up to the Clock before?” Archy demanded of her. She continued silent, but feebly nodded her head. “When?!” he asked, but she would not speak. “Maybe,” he said, “you and me had better have us a little talk.” He took her by one of her gitalongs and said, “Excuse us, folks,” and led her away, into another room.

  “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 gestur
es. 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.”