The Cockroaches of Stay More

by Donald Harington

  The Lord’s Refuse Pile was a fabulous place, and Jack was determined to return with his whole family there on an outing and picnic, some night when the weather was fair. Tonight the weather was awful unfair, and the flashes of lightning had panicked Josie and driven Jack not into complete sobriety but into a partial cure of his hangover. There was so much illumination from the sky’s electrical display that Jack feared he would be easy prey for any nocturnal creature, until he realized two things: the nocturnal creatures of prey were just as unsettled by the lightning as he was, and they were all getting wet and seeking shelter. If I had the sense Man gave to a flea, Jack told himself, I’d seek shelter too, but he knew that if this rain kept going the way it was going, so much of it would fall that the ground would be cut by new rivulets and rills and runlets, and they would never reach home. Already it was a struggle to keep to relatively high ground. Of course Jack was a fair swimmer, and so was Josie, but swimming made slow and tedious progress.

  The paths that Man had trod from Carlott to His Refuse Pile, or vice versa, were few and infrequent, and thus the forest of grass and weeds impeded their long journey. The distance could not have been half a furlong, but it seemed like miles, and it was nearly morning when Jack and Josie straggled around a corner of Holy House and espied their native Carlott once again, with a mixture of exultation and weariness.

  The last mile of any journey is the hardest, and it seemed they would never reach home before daylight. The cats and dogs stopped falling once they crossed the threshold of their familiar log. All of their children were already self-tucked into their sleeping crannies…all except one, the boy Jubal, crouched in the center of the main hall amid a pile of tiny smidgens of foodstuffs, with some of which he was attempting to stuff himself. As the two adult roosterroaches staggered, wet and weary, into the room, Jubal’s mouth dropped open and he sprang into full alert. But his sniffwhips recognized the two as his parents.

  “Maw?!” said Jubal. “Paw?!” He rushed to them and passed his sniffwhips all over them and felt them with his touchers. “Air ye still east?!”

  “Howdy, hon,” said Josie. “How’s ever little thang?”

  “But, but,” said Jubal. “But, but, but but but.”

  “Whar’s Tish?” asked Jack.

  “But, but,” said Jubal, “but ever body said you’uns had done went and westered off!” He indicated the pile of foodstuff fragments. “Folkses has done already started bringin the funeral feeds.”

  “My, my,” said Josie, and reached out to sample a crumb of Hostess chocolate cupcake, her very first taste of chocolate, of which so much had been said and rumored and gossiped. Then she tried a pinch of peach fried pie, a snippet of oatmeal cookie, a tittle of zwieback, and a fleck of cough drop. “I never in all my born days dreamt that we’uns was so popular!” she observed. She asked Jubal, “Did ye remember who-all brung which-all? Did Sally Dinsmore bring us ary a thang?”

  Jubal hung his head. “Yes’m, she brung some whitish lookin stuff, but I done et it.”

  “Marshmaller!” cried Josie. “How dast ye?” She drew back a sniffwhip as if to slap the youngun.

  Jack stopped her. “Whar is yore big sister Tish at?” he asked the boy.

  “She did lak ye said, Momma, Tish did. She up and took herself to Partheeny, for to claim kin to the Ingledews.”

  “Naw!” said Jack and Josie together, and looked at one another and then looked back at Jubal. “Did she really, now?” Josie asked. “Why, bless her heart! Here we aint been west two nights and already she’s done went and done it!”

  “We aint west, Maw,” Jack pointed out. To Jubal he said, “When did ye see her last? How do ye know she went to Partheeny? What-all else do ye know?”

  Jubal told them everything he knew, or had heard. He had not left the Dingletoon bungalow, because Tish had made him promise to watch out for his brothers and sisters during her absence. When she had passed beyond reach of his sniffwhips, night before last, she was heading toward Hinglerocks, but she did that all the time anyway and she hadn’t come home, so Jubal figured that if she hadn’t been et by something, she had gone on to Parthenon.

  “My, my,” Josie said to Jack. “Do you suppose our Letitia is a-dwellin at Partheeny now?”

  “If she wasn’t et by some critter along the way,” Jack said.

  “Why, if she has done went and moved into Partheeny, she’s probably expectin us to come and visit and stay the night or even forever!” Josie said.

  “She thinks you’uns is both west,” Jubal declared.

  “Let’s go susprise her!” Josie urged Jack.

  “Not today, Maw,” Jack said, stretching and yawning. “We aint goin nowhere in the daylight. I aim to git me some sleep.” He took a particle of some creamy looking stuff from the pile of funeral feed, and said, “Jubal, you turn in, now, and leave these here eats alone.”

  Jack and Josie turned in, too, and slept all day, deeply and soundly, recuperating from their long journey and their ordeal, and woke at the dip of dusk almost completely sober, to greet their assembled offspring, share with them in the consumption of a fraction of the funeral feeds, caution them not to breathe a word to any other visitors bearing funeral feeds that their parents were not solemnly west, and then announce that they intended to sneak off to Parthenon to check up on Letitia and see if she might have prepared the way for all of them to move into Parthenon.

  The children, between mouthfuls of funeral feeds, cheered and hugged one another and thanked their lucky stars, and wished their parents the very best of luck.

  Jubal was still trying to get them to hush up when Jack and Josie disappeared into the still-falling rain on their journey toward Parthenon. Jubal had just lost scent of his parents on his sniffwhips when he picked up a different scent: that of his sister, Tish, returning home from another direction.

  Chapter twenty-two

  She had not allowed him to accompany her all of the way home. She didn’t want her brothers and sisters to see him, and get wrong ideas about what she had been doing, out all day. She felt wracked with guilt, on several counts, the least of which was she had no business staying away from home so long. But she hadn’t done anything wrong…not with Archy, anyway. It was funny. They had spent the entire rest of the night together, and even slept together all day, almost side by side, but he hadn’t actually given her a marble. Not that he hadn’t tried to, and not that she wouldn’t have let him at least try, but the process of making connection, as she had already discovered with Squire Sam, was such a complicated procedure of fastening the right latches and hooking the right clamps and putting this thing alongside of that thing, and then the other thing inside of the round thing, that in the process of all the maneuvering and straining Archy had lost his marble. Well, it hadn’t been completely lost, it was still there, rolling around on the floor, and eventually they even made a kind of game, playing with it, rolling it around and bouncing it.

  Archy had tried to make the whole business seem all right by declaring that he was glad he hadn’t been able to take her virginity, that he hoped she would remain a virgin until they got married. He hadn’t come right out and proposed to her. He hadn’t asked her, “Let’s me and you git hitched,” or anything like that. He had simply said he wanted her to remain a virgin until they could do it properly with the approval of the church. Of course she hadn’t told him that she already had a marble inside her, Squire Sam’s marble. She hadn’t even mentioned Squire Sam.

  As a substitute for the hours they would have spent properly hooked up, joining together, fused, Archy had told her practically the entire story of his life, past, present and future: his dreams of adventure, his plans for exploring the world, his desire to travel in search of fabled houses far away, even outside of Stay More. He had talked a blue streak, never showing any concern over the incident of Man’s shooting Himself, nor ever once expressing grief over the westering of his mother. Hadn’t he noticed? Tish wondered, without asking him, if he had seen, heard, o
r smelled the erasure of Ila Frances Tichborne by the second bullet of the Lord. Maybe he was happy for her Rapture, or maybe he didn’t care; there were countless roosterroaches, particularly males, who felt no attachment to their mothers.

  Squire Sam’s mother had died when he was in his fourth instar, but Sam had not talked much about her to Tish: one of the very few things Sam and Archy had in common was a reluctance to mention their mothers. Tish had wished they would, so she could talk about hers, so recently westered. She really needed to tell someone how much she had loved her mother, and how much she missed her already. Her father too, of course, but Jack Dingletoon hadn’t been much of a family man; he had been a happy-go-lucky drunkard, and Tish had never felt really close to him, not the way she had toward her mother, even if her mother was rather giddy and even silly at times.

  There had been moments when Tish had almost blurted to Archy, “Don’t you even care about your mom?” but she had kept her mouth shut and let him do all the talking. He had spoken a great deal about his father, Brother Chidiock Tichborne, who was his ideal of Manliness and malehood, although Archy had turned a deaf tailprong to his father’s attempts to get Archy to follow him in the “preacherin business.” Two of Archy’s brothers were preparing for the ministry, but Archy had decided against it. Of course, there was always the possibility, if he found himself in some foreign land where the folks needed a preacher but didn’t have one, that Archy might change his mind. Tish didn’t want to be a preacher’s wife, now did she? No, she didn’t.

  The confines of the corridor in which they laid low throughout the hours of conversation had been snug and cozy for a while but had eventually become stifling and dank. There were strong odors of mouse scat, snail-slime, fly-spittle, termite-trail, and ant-spoor; generations of critters had used this corridor for a passageway, and the offensive smells destroyed Tish’s pheromone and were magnified by an increasing humidity because of the rain: yes, the world outside Holy House was being deluged, as the weather station of her sniffwhip told her: a real frog-choker. She loved rain and hated frogs.

  She wished Archy would take her out to the porch, such a glamorous architectural wonder, where she had never been, so that the two of them could watch the rain, but she did not suggest it to him. She wondered if he might take her to his home, in the frock, in some distant room of Holy House, and introduce her to his brothers and sisters. Maybe he had sisters who needed comforting because of the loss of their mother. Maybe if Tish comforted them for their loss, they would comfort her for hers. At this thought she had begun to weep, quietly, and finally Archy had stopped talking long enough to ask her why she was crying; had his narration of his childhood and his outlining of his dreams for the bright future made her cry? She could not explain that she was thinking there was no one to comfort her that her mother was west, no one to comfort her that she had foolishly thrown away her virginity, no one to aid her in this time of loss and stress and confusion, no one but Archy, who could only talk on and on about the great world away out yonder that he planned to conquer.

  She had fallen asleep. Day was coming anyway, or, if not day, because the stormclouds would never let the sun appear, the time of sleep, almost automatic for roosterroaches, but not quite for Archy, who went on talking for some time before he noticed that she slept, and then he went to sleep himself.

  Upon awakening at eventide she had told him that she must return to Carlott, to the family log, to see about her brothers and sisters. He had insisted upon going with her, because the rain was still pouring down. They found that three rivers ran around and through Carlott, where none had been before, and no doubt Tish would never have been able to ford these rivers without the help of Archy, who assisted her in swimming across or, in the case of the worse torrent, devised a raft of weedstems and floated the two of them over. The water was nearly up to the level of the Platform, and most of the automotive thingumajigs and doomahitchies littering the ground were submerged. Water was up to the hubcaps of the Lord’s nonjunk vehicle, His Ford Torino. Some of the dwellings of Carlott were underwater or washed away, and the refugees, Tish’s neighbors, were milling in confusion and fright on patches of higher ground above the village. In the distance she could see her home: the log was not submerged, but waves lapped at its door.

  “You’d best turn back, and get on home before this rain gets any worse,” she told Archy.

  “But I’d be proud to meet yore mother,” Archy insisted.

  “My momma has westered, same as yours,” Tish declared.

  “Mine?” he said. “What gives ye the idee my momma has westered?”

  “You didn’t see?” Tish asked, and realized, too late, that indeed he had not watched the shooting of Ila Frances Tichborne and, all this time, had no idea his mother was west. Should she tell him? Yes, she had better: “Last night, didn’t ye notice, the second bullet of the Lord hit your momma and Raptured her.”

  “No!” Archy exclaimed. “Don’t tell me that! When did you hear this?”

  “I didn’t hear it,” she said. “I mean, I didn’t only hear it. I saw it too.”

  “Are ye certain it was her?” he asked her. “How do ye know?”

  “Everybody knows the preacher’s wife,” she declared.

  Archy continued to appear incredulous, then became credulous, then grew angry. “Why didn’t ye tell me?” he asked.

  “I thought ye knew,” she said.

  “You mean all this time I been so sweet to ye, all this time I was a-lovin ye and talkin so nice to ye and all, all this time ye knew I was motherless?”

  Tish could only nod. Then she added, softly, “I’m motherless too.”

  Archy snorted a hollow laugh. “I was fixin to ast ye to come and meet my momma tomorrow night and have breakfast with us,” he declared. “But it don’t look like I can, do it?” When she did not respond to this rhetorical question, he said, “Well, I’ll see you around, somewhere, sooner or later,” and he swung his six gitalongs around to decamp.

  “Archy!” she called after him, but he did not turn.

  Sadly, she entered her home, finding it waterlogged but all her brothers and sisters not only safe but manic with joy, jumping up and down, hugging one another, and babbling about “Partheeny.” The highest up-and-down jumper was Jubal, who exclaimed, “Wal, looky who’s here!”

  “Hidy, Jubal, how’s stuff?” she said.

  “I’ll tell ye how stuff is!” he exclaimed. “Paw aint west! Neither is Maw! Both of ’em is jist as eastern as me and you!”

  “What!?” said Tish, and began searching with her sniffwhips. “Where are they?”

  “They done went to Partheeny to look for you.”

  “Me? But I’m here.”

  “But aint ye been to PARTHEENY? Didn’t ye claim kin to the Ingledews?”

  “Well, sort of,” she admitted.

  “Aint we’uns all gonna move into Partheeny?” he asked, and the question was picked up and chorused by the assembled brothers and sisters, who kept chanting, “Aint we’uns all?” and “We’uns gonna?” and “Move into?” and “Partheeny?”

  “Let me sit down and try to explain,” Tish protested, and crouched to the loggy floor and sighed, “I’m wore to a frazzel,” and asked, “Could ye scare me up a bite of fungus?”

  “Fungus, heck!” Jubal said. “Lookee here at what-all we got to eat!” and shooed aside the mob of siblings to reveal the pile of funeral feeds. Tish recognized them for what they were; it is the dream and dread of every young roosterroach to experience the mixture of grief and delight that comes from a funeral feed.

  “This is called ‘peanut brickle,’” she knowledgeably explained to Jubal, as she helped herself to a bite.

  Not to be out-knowledged, he said, “This is called marshmaller,” and showed her a bit he had been hoarding.

  The assorted Dingletoon offspring surrounded the funeral feed and dined, while Tish, between bites, attempted to tell them the story of her visit to Parthenon, omitting, of course, her in
discretion with Squire Sam. When she had finished, all the children rattled and blathered, “When air we’uns gonna move into Partheeny?” and “When air?” and “Move into?” and “Partheeny?” and “We’uns gonna?” Tish attempted to explain that Parthenon was the exclusive domain of the Squires Ingledew, and even if the Dingletoons were Ingledews, they couldn’t just go rushing all of a heap into that marvelous house.

  When she had finished the story of Parthenon, her brothers and sisters urged, “Tell us another’n, Sis!” so she told the story of the latest shootings at the church-meetin at Holy House, one shot of which had wounded the Lord Himself. They could not believe that part. Man is bulletproof, they said; Man is punctureproof, He is holeproof. Not so, Tish insisted; she had seen the Holy Blood. She described it. It was red. It was thicker than ichor.