The Woman enters Her bedroom. She flings Herself across Her bed, and simply lies there, face down. Sam from this low perspective cannot see Her face. Are Her eyes closed? He waves his sniffwhips for a long time, trying to detect Her slumberscent. There is none. Is the Woman silently crying? Has Man westered, after all? Is Sharon alone in this world? For the longest time, or, since Time has stopped and the Clock sits west and silent on its mantelshelf, there is no movement or sound from the Woman.
Sam begins climbing the coverlet. He will not let Her see him, but he wants to get as close as possible to Her. He wants to see Her beautiful face, to tell if he can if She is grieving, if She is mourning the west of Man. Yes, Her eyes are open, but She looks not at him or at anything but off toward the general direction of the mantel, not looking at it but just toward it. If there is grief or even sadness in Her face, Sam cannot tell. She looks simply tired, very tired. “Sleep,” he says to Her. “Why don’t you sleep?”
If only She would fall asleep, he could have a grace period in which to make one last effort to save Tish. Sam has decided that if he cannot prevent Tish from being flushed away, he will go with her. Even if it is to westwardness and oblivion in a subterranean septic tank, he will join her on that last journey. If there is any chance in this world that the pipe leads not to an enclosed septic tank but to a drain field or even to the creek, there is always the chance that Tish could survive, if he is with her, to help her and guide her. But his many walks and hikes in the vicinity of Parthenon have never shown him any hole which could be the outlet of the drain, so probably its outlet is within the tank. Probably he and Tish both would drown before they reached the tank. But whatever her destiny, it shall be his too.
The Woman lies prone, staring vacantly into space for a very long time. If She remains much longer, inevitably She will have to get up and go use Her bathroom. As he is thinking this thought, Sharon moves. She turns over, raises Her upper body, and sits up. But She does not stand. Sitting on the edge of the bed, She reaches for the telephone, holds it to Her ear and listens for a long moment, then pokes Her finger into the dial and turns the dial, then again, several times.
“Gran,” Sharon says, “I’m home. Yes. Vernon drove to the airport and got me. Are you all right? How long have I been gone? I would have called you from Little Rock, but Vernon said he talked to you. That’s right. Yes. Um-hmm. Yes. Unt-uh. No, he didn’t. That was before. Probably Friday afternoon, they said. I hope. What day is this? It is? Gosh, Gran, are you sure? It seems like time has stopped. Just completely stopped. I’ll look. Yes, it says eight o’clock, isn’t that ridiculous? I’ll wind it. I thought something was funny, because it hasn’t bonged once since I got home. I don’t know. Are you sure you don’t want me to…. Well, thanks, yes, I guess. Of course I paid all his expenses, the doctors’ bills too, and all. The least I could do. Well, I’ll let you know. Thanks again. Goodnight, Gran. Sleep tight.”
Sharon puts the phone back where it was. Now She stands. Sam jumps off the bed and heads for the bathroom, intending to place his own person between Her and the bathroom door. But She does not move to the bathroom. She moves to the mantel. She opens the Clock face, lifts the key, inserts it into the Clock, and begins to wind. Sam can hear the old familiar scritches and grindings of the Clock’s internal vitals. Sharon continues to wind. Soon the Clock will be east again. Soon the Clock will run. Soon Time will…
Chapter thirty-eight
…Shift entirely into the future tense, because Sharon winds the Clock too tightly, too far, too easterly, too much: the mainspring will go haywire, the secondary gear will slip off the tertiary gear, something will snap, and the Clock will begin to keep exceptional Time, Time too fast and all future: it will be Time which will not have happened yet but will always stand in possibility of happening.
Sharon will exclaim, most unladylike, “Oh, shit.” Then she will sigh and say, “Oh well, I’ll just get a new one, an electric one that doesn’t have to be wound. Maybe I’ll just get a clock-radio for the bedside.”
Then, at last, she will head for the bathroom. She will see a cockroach standing in her path to the bathroom. She will gasp, and then she will stamp her foot, but the cockroach will just stand there, as if he is not afraid of her, as if he’s trying to block her way to the bathroom.
“Out of my way, Alfonse,” she will say, “or whatever your name is.”
Will it be just her weariness that will make her think the cockroach will be speaking in reply to her? Will she just fancy the bug will be trying to talk to her?
Since he will not budge, she will step over him, resisting an impulse to step onto him, and in her bathroom she will discover another cockroach floating in the toilet bowl, alive and kicking. “You little buggers really think you can take over my house while I’m gone?” she will say. “What are you trying to do?” She will stare down at the bug in the water, who will be staring back at her. She will impulsively reach for the handle which flushes the toilet. The first cockroach, the one she will have called Alfonse, will fly into the air, and hover above her hand without quite touching it, and she will draw back her hand, exclaiming, “Jesus! I didn’t know cockroaches could fly!” She will watch Alfonse fly down and land in the water of the bowl where the other roach will be. Now there will be two roaches in her toilet bowl.
“Are y’all trying to commit suicide, or some-thing?” she will ask them. “Or is this just your idea of a skinny-dip, huh, Gaston?” She will have decided to address the other one as Gaston, the lesser of the two; it has no wings like Alfonse. But then she will say, “Oh, I get it. You are a female, huh, Gaston? Then I’ll call you…I’ll call you Letitia, which means happiness.” Sharon will smile to herself, and look at herself in the vanity mirror, the dark circles under her eyes from lack of sleep, the unkempt hair. She will speak to her image, “I am being so silly.”
For the briefest instant, she will reach once again for the handle that makes the water swirl and lower and disappear in the bottom of the bowl of the toilet. But she will not. Instead, she will wad up a handful of toilet paper, and she will hold the wad down close to the water, close enough to touch the bugs or be touched by them, and she will suggest to them, “All right, Alfonse and Letitia, climb aboard.” The two cockroaches will not; they will seem to be conferring with each other about the meaning of her gesture; they will seem to be trying to back away from the offered wad of tissue.
But finally the one she will be calling Alfonse will actually nudge Letitia, pushing her toward the wad, and the one Sharon will be calling Letitia will climb onto the wad of tissue, and Sharon will lift the wad out and hold it close to the floor and give it a shake, and Letitia will be on the floor. Then Sharon will return the wad to the bowl and hold it close to the other one and she will say, “And now, Alfonse, you climb on too.” And he will. And then she will set him down on the floor beside Letitia.
The two bugs will seem reluctant to decamp. They will almost seem to be having a discussion on whether or not to decamp.
But then they will walk together, side by side, out through the door, and Sharon will be alone.
Before going to bed, she will set out a saucer with some milk in it, and a cookie on the edge of it. She will study the saucer for a while, as if she will be waiting to see if her cockroaches will come to it. They will not.
In the morning, she will look to see if any of the milk will be gone. It will not be. Nor will the cookie appear to have been sampled. She will throw the milk into the sink, and untie the garbage bag to put the cookie into the garbage. When she will untie the garbage bag, a cockroach will leap out of it, startling her. “Alfonse?!” she will cry. But there will have been no way the cockroach she will have called Alfonse will have been able to get inside that tied garbage bag.
The cockroach liberated from the garbage bag will make a beeline for the front door, and the porch, and she will follow, watching the cockroach scamper down from the porch and off in the direction of Larry’s house. The same direct
ion that the whole horde of cockroaches had seemed to point, that evening, oh so many evenings ago.
She will be tempted to follow, for she will intend to be going that way, anyway, soon. But first she will have her breakfast, and an extra cup of coffee, to dispel the remnant of the possibility that she will be imagining things.
Still, she will be edgy and nervous when she will at length walk to Larry’s house, and the sight of his car parked behind the house will cause her to stumble and grab a tree for support, until she will remember that the car will never have been moved. Or will it have?
It will be a beautiful morning in Stay More, a gorgeous morning, one of those sunny springtime (or early summer) days, more rare than June is rare, and she will be almost reluctant to go indoors. She will want to stay out here in the sunshine, breathing the nice air. It will be unpleasant inside the house.
It will be unpleasant inside the house: it will be unpleasant on the porch, as she will climb it. As she will climb the steps, she will see a strange little thing: right in the way, at the top of the steps, stuck into the wooden porch floor, there will be a cockroach impaled upon a straight pin. It will be a fat cockroach, much fatter than her Alfonse. The way the pin is stuck through the roach’s body and into the floor will remind her of the bug collection her brother Vernon kept inside a cigar box. But Vernon will not have done this. Larry could not have done it…unless…
The cockroach, fat and stupid-looking, will somehow arouse a fleeting pity in Sharon, pity that she will not have felt if it will not have been for the pity she will have taken on Alfonse and Letitia, sparing them. This dead, impaled cockroach, over which she will step as she will have stepped over Alfonse the day before, will cause her to recite aloud some old snatch of an elegy she has read in school: “And now I live, and now my life is done.”
Sharon will not know why she will be saying that aloud, but, thinking of poetry, she will be not totally unprepared for what she will find inside the house, in Larry’s study, in his typewriter: a poem. She will have known, of course, that he sometimes attempted poetry when he wasn’t analyzing it, and she will assume, even before reading it, that this will be his own creation. His black IBM Selectric will still be running, still be on. She will reach down to feel how warm it will be, and in doing so she will cause to fly up an enormous cockroach. This will not be, cannot be, Alfonse, nor the one she liberated from the garbage bag, nor any other cockroach she will ever have seen; it will be too large, and although she will have discovered, just yesterday, that cockroaches can fly, this one will be flying all over the place, like a bird, like a bat, and she will be much more afraid of it than of any insect she has ever seen. But it will at length fly through the door and away, and she will never see it again.
She will have one more fright before she can read the poem. She will see a mouse. If it will have been a black mouse, or a gray mouse, it will have made her cry out and jump, but it will be a white mouse, and it will not be totally a stranger, because it will be the same mouse who led the horde of cockroaches in their directive arrow and message.
The white mouse will be on the floor near Larry’s desk, and it will be looking at her, twitching its whiskers and bobbing its nose. And then it too, like the oversize roach, will decamp.
Sharon will return her glance to the poem, and read its title and begin reading it.
We will see her standing there, at Larry’s desk, reading. It will be almost like a painting by Vermeer. The lovely lady, the wonderful morning sunlight which seems to caress her face and her hands and the white, white sheet. She will read. She will smile.
And when the reading will be done, she will raise her eyes from the poem in the typewriter, and she will address the house: “Larry?”
IMAGO:
The Mockroach’s Song
If roach were man and man were roach,
the subjects both would brood and broach
are love, dependency, survival.
We trust you in your rearrival
to read this fable in reverse
and keep the world from getting worse.
We are the scurry of your ugly
despisèd motives—humble, bugly,
but not so bad we should be kaput.
You shot yourself in your own foot,
went nearly west. We kept you easter.
Before you blast off your own keister,
wise up, stay more, re-ken your kin.
We know you out, we know you in.
We drink your nectar, eat your shit.
We haven’t had enough of it.
You think you pine with love and grief?
Yet think how pitiful and brief
we are, your small, unloved familiars:
our hearts will bridge the Void. Will yours?
Some say your world will end in fire
and ours survive. Not so. No choir
can hymn or hum inhumanly.
Thou needest us. We needest Thee.
Grow up, earn Love, like us conceive
a God to pray to and believe.
Ring out bomb-doom and ring us true.
You live, we are, you die, we do.
Ding-dong the dang dumb don’ts to soundless hell.
In purple sympathy we twain shall dwell.
For Llewellyn Howland III
Once a great editor; still a great friend
The novelist wishes to thank Bob Razer, librarian, his perennial advocate among Arkansas readers, who once upon a time invited the novelist to serve as a judge for the essay contest of the Pulaski County Historical Association, one entry to which was a biography of a courageous Arkansas woman who sought to rescue an Ozarks mountaineer condemned to the electric chair. The author of that entry (which alas did not win the contest despite the novelist’s admiration for it) was Marcia Camp, who further assisted him by furnishing the original manuscript of that Arkansas woman’s memoirs, and by suggesting that he should convert the woman from a novelist, which she was, into an artist, which she is herein.
Some of the people in this work of fiction are as “real” as the places. The governor of Arkansas during 1913–1917 was George Washington Hays, who may actually have been as bad or as good as he seems to appear here, and he was replaced in 1917 by Charles Hillman Brough, who was better. The state penitentiary at Little Rock was a place called The Walls, and conditions there were just as terrible as the novelist has attempted to depict them here.
Steve Chism offered the novelist access to numerous materials that enabled him to stick close enough to the facts to give this story the semblance of life and truth. And copy editor Douglas Woodyard took the novelist’s words and gave them syntax, style, and sense.
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Far off
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas,
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.
—Andrew Marvell “The Garden,” stanza 6
Constable said that the superiority of the green he uses for his landscapes derives from the fact that it is composed of a multitude of different greens. What causes the lack of intensity and of life in verdure as it is painted by the common run of landscapists is that they ordinarily do it with a uniform tint. What he said about the green of the meadows can be applied to all the other shades.
—Eugène Delacroix Journals
On
At sundown, when they led him to the chair, Nail Chism began to understand the meaning of the name of h
is hometown, Stay More. Down through the years, citizens have theorized about the origin of the name, but Nail Chism had always taken it for granted: it was just a name, like you call a tree a pine: you don’t wonder if the tree’s name is a behest too, telling you to yearn or to long or something. But now it suddenly dawned on Nail that the name of the village of his birth and rearing might contain some kind of message, urging him not to go to the chair but to hang around awhile and see what the world was a-coming to.
How could he do that, in the last few yards of walking space left to him? Now they were trying to budge open the rusty iron door that led into Old Sparky’s room. The hinges needed grease, and the thing hadn’t been opened since they had cooked that colored boy, Skip, on Halloween. Fat Gabe spoke: “Chism, lean your shoulder into that. That’s the ticket, here she goes.” The iron door creaked open. The guests had already come into Old Sparky’s room from their designated door.
But there weren’t twelve of them. Nail Chism stopped thinking about the meaning of the name Stay More just long enough to squint into the dark room and take a head count. There weren’t but nine, including Fat Gabe and Short Leg, his guards, and Bobo, at the switch. The law said you were required to have twelve witnesses. Nail himself had been brought in to stand witness for Skip the colored boy, and before him for that mother-killer Clarence Smead, who sure enough had at least eleven other witnesses besides Nail.
Could this be a sign? Could it be that the presence of only nine witnesses indicated that it wouldn’t happen, that Nail would stay more? Or maybe they just hadn’t all arrived yet? Or maybe in the dark corners he’d missed one or two? Maybe they’d have to wait awhile for the others to show up, and that would be long enough for Nail to determine if they really intended to go through with it, before he made up his mind to do what he had to do, if it was clear that he wasn’t going to stay more.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 151