The Cockroaches of Stay More (26 page)

The Woman was not, they discovered, asleep. A kerosene lamp burned on Her night table, and She was propped up against Her pillows, holding in Her hands sheets of paper, which Chid recognized as the sheets upon which Man had composed letters to Her. Squire John suggested to Chid that they climb the mantel to the mantelshelf, where they had a good view of the Woman, and they watched Her: She would read a few sheets of paper, then refold them, put them into an envelope, return them to a box, and take out from the box another envelope and unfold its sheets of paper. Often She smiled. Occasionally She laughed aloud, causing Chid to jump. He realized She had not received a new letter from Man but was merely rereading His old ones. Chid had never heard Human laughter before. Man had never laughed, and rarely even smiled.

If the Woman’s little bursts of laughter caught him by surprise, he was in for a bigger one. Right behind him, a huge voice clanged, “ECLAIR!” causing Chid to leap several inches in the air and then fall off the mantelshelf to the floor. All the way down he screeched a loud wail of “HHHELPPP!” But the loudness of his scream was not enough to reach the Woman, who would not even have noticed him had She not been staring in that direction to confirm the clockhands’ verification of the aural announcement of the hour.

Her eye, glancing at the Clock, saw the black roosterroach fall, and Her laughter at Her reading was interrupted by noises of fright and disgust. She sprang out of bed, put Her gitalongs into coverings, and then began attempting with those coverings to stomp upon Brother Chidiock Tichborne. The fall from the mantelshelf had not hurt him in any way, only stunned him momentarily, but now he was compelled to seek an avenue of escape from Her stomping gitalongs. He was reminded of the last Rapturing by Man, whose shoe-clad gitalongs were more fearsome than Woman’s slipper-clad gitalongs. Perhaps it would be more of a Rapture to be trampled by Woman’s slipper than by Man’s shoe. He was almost tempted to give in, to yield to the experience of the Rapture, to see what it was like. But Chid could not give in to a Rapture so soon after moving into Parthenon, not without experiencing the other joys the great house had to offer.

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

I
f 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.