The Cockroaches of Stay More

by Donald Harington

  “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 retreat, 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.

  “Well…diabolical,” Sam ventured. “Sinister. Fiendish. You could almost pass for a nice guy.”

  The stranger scarcely stopped laughing. “I’d like to think that my intentions are benevolent, not evil.”

  “You saved me,” Sam said.

  “For a while there you were doing just fine, handling whatever came your way. But that bat was a different proposition.”

  “Then you’ve been looking out for me?” Sam turned the observation into a question at the last moment. “You know everything that’s going on?”

  The Mockroach bowed, and smiled, but said nothing.

  “I can’t believe you’re real,” Sam declared. “But here you are, aren’t you? When I was little, I heard the wildest stories about you. I suppose they’re all true. I didn’t believe them, but nobody would believe me if I told them how you scared that bat away.” The Mockroach continued his almost mocking smile. “Can you tell me,” Sam requested, “if Man still lives?”

  “Mankind still lives,” the Mockroach said.

  “But Lawrence Brace…does He live?”

  The Mockroach would not answer. Instead he said, “Behold the bell,” and gestured at it, the huge, bronze, black shape beside them, its shape comparable only to that of certain flowers Sam had seen in bloom, canterburies and lilies, but hard, impervious, and infinitely larger than any flower. “Read it,” the Mockroach commanded him.

  Around one edge of the rim of the bell were letters cast into the metal, and Sam read these aloud: “Samuels Foundry Works, St. Louis.”

  “Not those,” the Mockroach said. “Higher up.”

  Higher on the rim was an inscription in Latin, which Sam could not even pronounce, let alone understand:

  Nunquam aedepol temere tinnit tintinnabulum

  Nisi quis illud tractat aut movet, mutum est

  “Now what does that mean?” Sam asked.

  “You’ll find out before this story is done.”

  “Story? Is this only a story?”

  “Eve
rything that I become involved in,” said the Mockroach “is only a story. To hear them tell it.” He laughed once more, at his own joke this time, and then reminded Sam, “Don’t forget what you came up here for,” and at the instant Sam remembered, the Mockroach flew away as quickly as he had come.

  For a long time, before he could continue on the errand that had brought him here, Sam pondered whether the Mockroach had been “real.” But certainly that bat had been real, and Sam would not be “real” himself any longer if the bat had eaten him.

  The basic structure of the bell and its housing was much less complicated than that of his Clock: cast into the top of the bell was a large bolt which rested and balanced upon cradles in the mountings at the sides of the bell, from one of which sprang a metal lever attached to the end of the bell-rope, the pulling of which caused the bell to rock back and forth. Its motion was lubricated by grease in the cradles: this grease was very old, and dried, and caked, but the friction of its recent employment had thinned and solved the grease enough that Sam could daub a bit upon his touchers and taste it; it must have been rendered from hog lard; it was rancid and bitter. But he chewed off enough of it to smear along the lengths of his tailprongs. He anointed his prongs thoroughly. Nothing happened. He felt foolish. One of Doc’s old wives’ tales of a home remedy, that was more likely to dissolve his tailprongs than to treat them. Sam wondered how long he was supposed to wait, or whether the treatment required repeated applications at intervals; he became impatient and nervous. Daylight was in full upheaval now; somewhere roosters, toward whom he felt not even the affiliation of part of his generic name, were crowing an announcement he could not hear: WORK THE HERD OF LURKING DIRTY BIRDS!

  The long ordeal of his journey to the schoolhouse and up the belfry, his encounter with the Mockroach, and now the uncertainty, took their toll, and he realized how many hours had passed since he had fed, but had nothing to eat now except vintage hog lard. He was hungry and tired and impatient and nervous and felt foolish.

  At last he fell asleep, resting upon the framework of the bell housing, and a pigeon flew down and studied him and said to him, “You! You! You!” but Sam did not hear, nor wake. The pigeon decided he was not edible, and did not eat him…or perhaps the Mockroach was still protecting him.

  He slept all day, and when he woke at evening, it was because he had been awakened by the music of katydids, and the melodies of cicadas, and, yes, the sweet strains of crickets, and, yes yes, the lovely tunes of frogs, and yes yes yes, even the far-distant aria of his very own Clock calling, “EGG”—the last song it ever sang.

  Chapter thirty-five

  Eight o’clock, Doc thinks idly, or even unconsciously, or conscious only of the fact that it is the time the Loafer’s Court usually begins to assemble on his porch, but now he has the porch all to himself. Has? “Ortent thet to be ‘had’?” he wonders aloud, trying to get the tense correct. No, he has the porch to himself, and it is the present. The eighth hour, and the night after the leaving of Man, and of Woman. Neither has returned, and the Woman has not been home to tend to Parthenon, to wind the Clock, which is an eight-day affair that was last wound nine days ago, and now, with the strike of “EGG,” has breathed its last.

  There is no more time, in the counting sense, for Clocks or roosterroaches, and Doc Swain sits, or crouches, on the porch of his clinic, removed from time, aware that the Loafer’s Court is not convening at its usual hour—or, wait a minute, the days have gotten longer and the nights shorter, and it’s still daylight at eight o’clock, this night in early June, and the Loafer’s Court might or might not come along later. Fent Chism will not be there, because he’s west, and Squire Hank possibly won’t, because Squire Hank, the fool, has gone home to Parthenon and likely got hisself westered by the preacher and his gang.

  Nobody but me and the spiders, Doc observes, and even though it is still daylight at eight o’clock, the spiders have gone to sleep for the night. This is the way things ought to be, he reflects. This is how Stay More should be all the time: no excitement, nothing happening, a full belly, and the cool of the evening (but it’s a mite too dry and don’t look like it aims to rain again for quite a while), and the old familiar sounds out there in the yard and the road and the grass a-stirrin themselves up into the Purple Symphony. Doc Swain could just sit here forever, and hardly even breathe. Maybe spit now and again, not to mark his space, nor because he’s chewing tobacco or anything, but just to spit for the pure cussed sake of spitting.

  Now that the Clock has stopped, Time is resting. It isn’t the Woman’s fault, for Her failure to wind the Clock well before leaving, nor for Her failure to return and wind it again. In the stillness, Doc reflects that the Woman ought to have returned today, if not late last night, after seeing that the Man was safely in the House Pittle. Is She required to stay in the House Pittle too? Is She giving blood transfusions? Is the Man’s heart hooked up to Hers? Or, perish the thought, if Man has westered, or was already west to begin with before They took Him from Stay More, is the Woman simply busy handling the funeral arrangements, or the arrangements for the shipment of the body to whatever place Man had come from before? Doc cannot understand why the Woman is not returning. He can detect no sign of life over at Parthenon…although he knows that there is some roosterroach life there, Chid and his gang cavorting around and stirring up mischief.

  One other possibility occurs to Doc, to explain Woman’s non-return: She is so fond of Man that She is staying by His side. Yeah, that’s probably it, Doc says to himself, and wishes there were others around, any of the old loafers, to say it to.

  As if in response to his wish, one of the old loafers appears, but he is clearly more a patient than a loafer. Leroy Sizemore is missing two gitalongs, and dragging two others behind the two that will still work; one of his sniffwhips is cracked in two, with half dangling uselessly across his face. The remains of his wings are in tatters. He cannot even climb up to the porch where Doc is crouching, but halts out in the yard, barely able to raise his head and groan, “Doc, I’ve got some complaints.”

  “It shore looks like it, Brother Sizemore,” Doc observes.

  “I aint ‘Brother’ Sizemore no more,” Leroy declares. “I aint no brother nothin.” He takes three more steps in Doc’s direction, and collapses into the dust, lacking only the belly-up position to appear completely west.

  Doc hobbles down off the porch and feels for Leroy’s pulse, which is still faintly beating. “What happened to ye, son?” Doc asks.

  Without raising his head from the dust, Leroy narrates, “We was mobbed by Squire Hank. He come into Partheeny and druv us all out.”

  “All seven of you?” Doc asks.

  “They wasn’t but four of us,” Leroy protests, as if the reduced numbers made the story more likely. “Not countin Chid’s boy Archy, I mean. Just us three used-to-be deacons, and Chid. The other three used-to-be deacons is used-to-be, period. I reckon they westered in the flood. But just me and Stan and Gene, who aint deacons of nothin no more on account of Chid has done went and did away with religion, and we was about to resign from whatever fellowship Chid had in mind for us, when Squire Hank come back home to Partheeny and threw us all out.”

  “Threw you out?” Doc asks.

  “Yeah, sort of. He flang ole Gene right out the door, and picked up ole Stan and chunked him off the porch, then he lit into me, and I was stupid enough to try to fight back, and look what he done to me!”

  “What did he do to Chid?” Doc asks.

  “Lord knows,” Leroy says. “Naw, the Lord don’t know, does He? Wherever He is. Archy says some human beans come and took His body away. He aint in Holy House no more, is He?” Doc shakes his head, and Leroy asks, “Do you think I’ll easter long enough to see Holy House again, and my wife and kids?”

  “You ort to be in the House Pittle,” Doc declares.

  “Say what?”

  “Let’s see if we caint git you inside, so’s ye can lay easy and rest a good bit,” Doc says, and
helps Leroy struggle up the porch and into the infirmary. A canopy of cobwebs rises above Leroy’s bed, but the spiders have gone to sleep for the night, and they won’t bother Leroy anyhow. In fact, those ordinary house spiders will help, because the sticky strands of their webs are good for binding and dressing Leroy’s wounds.

  Before the night is over, Doc has two other patients in his house pittle, ex-deacons Gene Stapleton and Stan Ledbetter. The former lapses into unconsciousness and possible coma, but the latter is able to talk enough to corroborate Leroy’s story of the eviction of the three of them from Parthenon by Squire Hank, and, although he had not witnessed it, the presumed banishment of Chid too.

  “What about Archy and Tish?” Doc asks.

  “Him and her is hitched,” Stan declares, “so the Squire tole ’em they might as well stay in Partheeny for their honeymoon.”

  Doc does all he can for his patients, although it appears that Gene Stapleton is a goner. Doc wishes he had a nurse or two to help out. What’s a house pittle without a nurse? Doc doesn’t even have a receptionist. In his mind’s eye he sees the House Pittle where Lawrence Brace lies, attended and waited on by a receptionist, a secretary, a registered nurse, a practical nurse, a nurse’s aide, a respiratory therapist, a dietitian, and the health insurance officer, not to mention twelve different kinds of doctors, and an orderly. The human race is quite a bit advanced over the roosterroach race, Doc reflects, and allows himself a fleeting moment of self-pity.

  But there isn’t all that much to be done in his house pittle, and he knows it. Once the missing gitalongs are swabbed and cleaned and wrapped in cobweb to regenerate (or, like Doc’s own unregenerate legs, have healthy stubs), and the patient is made comfortable and given an occasional temperature check and pulse check, there really isn’t much to do. Often Doc can return to his porch and watch the world go by, or what little of it happens to be going by on this dull, still, typical lazy night. A youth, Freddy Coe, is ambling along the way, and he pauses just long enough to wave his whips and say, “Morsel, Doc.”