Darconville's Cat (44 page)

  Cloogy pulled no stops now as, before the
congregation, he pumped and wheezed and bellowed. He hopped,
capricornified, across the stage, glaring. When he put one foot
down, he lifted the other up. He drove his fist down through the
air as if knocking, peg-wise, every last metaphorical demon who
dared lift his head. Barging up to the proscenium, he flung up his
hands and with cheek-shaking fury let himself loose in bombs of
rhetoric that hadn’t been felt in that part of the world since
Calhoun addressed himself to the doctrine of state sovereignty. It
was all advertisement, no news: the theatrically “shattered” voice,
moistened with sobs; the S’s altered to Th’s; the farm analogies;
the bird perch finger, wagging; the faraway look on the radiant
face on the glorious horizon; and, of course, the slow but
efficient whining that built up like feeding in small-arms
ammunition which culminated, suddenly, in the rapid-fire of
machine-gun prooftexting.

  “I can’t
believe
it! The Lord can’t believe
it! You tryin’ to abridge the Lord above, you hangdogs, you open
compurgators of Satan, you soupsnufflin’ excuses of Og and Zedekiah
and Tubal-Cain, whose face was black as soot! ‘Wail, O gate! Cry, O
city! Melt in fear, O Philistia, all of you!’
Isaiah,
14:31
. There is your faith? Is Hell havin’ a banquet? Do I see
you shootin’ into your pocket for contribution? Don’t Jesus count?
I want every man, woman, boy, and girl to lift their hand high if
they want Jesus to come hoppin’ into their flinty hearts! Lift them
high! I ain’t gone be up here all day, friends, having work in the
Holy Vineyard enough for a squad
roon
and outnumberin’
arithmetic itself! So hands up, c’mon, high—
hah, hah,
haher
! I cain’t haft see them, widow-ladies! I cain’t see
them, poor oP gentmin in over-hauls! Or are you just a cootie? A
stinkard? A inglorious piece of fat ram-mutton?
Hah
! Wag
your fingers!
Hah
! Shoggle your wrists or somethin’! How
many out there
cain’t
lift his hand to Goddlemighty? O how
many! O! O! And now may we pray?”

  Every hand, as if shot, suddenly fell as the organ
began to swell. All grabbed hands tightly in a display of tactile
prayer. A symphrase of indistinguishable nonsense ended up front
punctuated with a burplike “amen,” and Rev. W. C. Cloogy, striding
magnanimously forward— just minutes, presumably, before his
Bethany-like ascension—made available to everyone there his
pouchable goods, sundries, pigges’ bones, holy relikes. The
purchases, came the assurance, were all in-structible,
indestructible, and tax-deductable. Gimme that Ol’ Time
Revision!

  While Cloogy piously knelt, the collection baskets
were passed, and Roy LeRoy sang, “If You Take Two Steps Toward
Jesus, He’ll Take Three Steps Toward You.” The interlocutor in the
raspberry shirt came forward and advised each and every soul—before
the offers were either suspended or depleted—that he or she could
personally own in his own home any one of the following: a glossy
snapshot of Pastor Cloogy riding a dromedary across The Plains of
Sharon ($1.25); a real pinion wrestled from an angel in the Land of
Penuel ($6.00@); The Marvy Twins’ LP Album,
Hymns for Her
,
featuring the much-requested national hit, “My Dropsy Cured One
Night It Was” ($7.95); cigarette lighters with a microdot of Mt.
Vernon on the strikeflint ($6.50@); a holy tablecloth showing
Ishbosheth, King of Israel, Being Assassinated ($16.00); an actual
vessel of bottled darkness from the plague visited by Moses upon
Pharaoh ($12.75); stone piecelettes nicked from the Rock of Ages,
glued to a card underneath the legend “America: Right or Wrong!”
($2.25); and, confirming, perhaps, the idea, widely held, that the
evangelical mind is obsessed much more with bowel irregularity than
anything else, packets of lenitive powders ground from Palestinian
pistachio shells for the diagnostically restringent ($5.45 for
twelve).

  There were free hams, a gift only to those, however,
who made offerings of over $20
or
whose contributions
exceeded the mean of the per capita tally that day as certified by
the public accountant who, at that very moment, was collecting the
envelopes at the end of each pew. Certificates of honor would be
awarded, of course, to special contributors: Soul Winners ($500);
Prayer Warriors ($300); Scripture Seekers ($100); and Youth
Year-Arounds ($50).

  As the choir sang “Arphaxad from the Flood He Swam,”
the envelopes—a very small pile—were brought worshipfully forward
and placed on the lip of the stage, where W. C. Cloogy, spying the
size, had to bite his knuckles he was so angry, and then in one
last fit of entheomania he came howling out at them in heat like
the craven, great-gullied gastrolator he was, roaring horrisonously
and, with nictating eyes, seeking for a final time to make mad
mystery out of ignorance and inspiration out of dread. It was the
high point of the show: the Decisions for Christ.

  “Quail, O sinners! Cringe, O bedwarfed sons and
daughters, and pray for dear life that the yield on the baskets
will be bigger’n the envelopes ‘cause these here are lookin’
slimmer than a three-day fast! I don’t know from the next who’s
holdin’ back, I swear. But take the Lord—you fancy
He
don’t know who tiddlywinkin’ buttons and pewter pennies my way in
the name of tithes? That
He
don’t feel you weevilin’ your
checkbook around in the dungeon of your filthy pockets? That
He
don’t see you peppin’ up on nekkid pictures in the
corncrib or cropin’ down the backstairs at night like a red
Commonist with your guilty little face all jellied up with lipstick
and a dress on you tighter than a nigger’s thumbprint? Shoot, He
don’t!—and the mercy is He don’t snipe you right there in your
socks! For what’s He bound to think? Why, no evangel of Christ
Jesus, you! No fellow-shipper of the Lord, Who died for your
raggedy sins! No prophetess of adequate wardrobe, you! No advocate
of Christian endeavor, you! No wise virgin with her range-oil lamp
full, you! Well now, I’m about to give you one last chance to
accept Christ Jesus as your personal savior, because, failing that,
you poor bumblades, you lay whippin’ straight into Hell where you
gone be roasted into a snuff-stick the second you arrive by flames
cat-lappin’ up to your chin and head!
Ezekiel 40:2
. You
ask is hell hot, and I’ll ask is a bullfrog waterproof, OK? I tell
you, you gone be stir-fried! Barbecued! Whipsawed back and forth by
unnatural devils and squeezed ‘til your pips squeak! But you don’t
cotton to all this ruckin’ and raisin’ sand back there, do you?
Gettin’ creepy-bumps all over your flesh, ain’t you? Then stand up!
Stand up, you pathetic examples of homo dumbiens! Stand up, you
insolent arrogant sharpies! Grasshopper down here to the front of
this church and in this year of Restored Salvation accept Christ
Jesus into your life or you be swallowed up in perdition quicker
nor an alligator can claw a puppy! Is there sin come between you
and the Lord? Are you man enough to kneel down here with me and
pray? Then come on down! O, come! Come!”

  The organ swelled up in a chord and burst into that
old staple, “Just as I Am.” And toward the front of the church came
the inevitable parade of hobblers and tame villatic fowl: weeping
girls; the semi-cancroid; Malchians with severed ears; cured
demoniacs; the now thankfully upright hemorrhoidal; the luckless,
with bad draughts of fishes; the entrussed, the encrutched, and the
enfeebled, all tapping, jerking, and lurching altarwards in the
owl-light like the Beggars Come to Town.

  Beaming, Dr. Cloogy stroked his huge nose. He
greeted each soul with a congratulatory handquake and then aimed
them quickly on a beeline into a backroom behind an ellipse there
where each was given a fistful of leaflets and brochures—not unlike
those, in fact, commonly distributed year round by Harriet Bowdler
and Loretta Boyco—illustrated with pictures (lions nuzzling up to
lambs, idealized couples-in-profile staring into a nebula, etc. )
and chronicled by various physeters-of-lies who warned against the
wicked system of things and generally proscribed: two-tone shoes,
beards, polysyllabic words, ecologists, ritual, enemies of the
N.R.A., educated blacks, corn liquor, long hair, the word
whom
, wayside shrines, uneducated blacks, actors, Harvard
University, stickpins, Bolsheviks, and pomeranians.

  The recessional at the Wyanoid Baptist Church went
off without a hitch: Cloogy asked all ladies in the congregation
who wished to engage in family-planning to please see him in his
study, a last hysterical hymn was sung so loud it rocked the floor,
and bonking out of their pews the little folks put on their
sparrowbill caps and departed. Pastor Cloogy decamped to someone’s
house for dinner. The doors were then locked tight.

  And God?
Abiit, excessit, evasit,
erupit
.

  Darconville felt that Isabel—of no denomination
herself and knowing nothing of religion—could never take it
seriously again and so accepted the fact that, although he’d long
fondly wished for her baptism, any commitment that way after this
inefficacious Sunday must only be the first symptom of a great
betrayal to which for her personal integrity she’d never consent to
be party. That day would pass away, thought Darconville, with
Isabel lost to the grace she deserved if only for showing that
steadfastness so much less pronounced thousands of years ago when
Mother Eve she span.

  At the same time, the lapse of principle touching on
his own failure to defend the black girls earlier caused him deep
remorse. He tried to tell her what he felt, but before he could
strangely she put a finger to his lips as if, expressing an impulse
which exists only by opposition to the fear that ostensibly
oppresses it, humbly to stifle the praise she wouldn’t, couldn’t,
deserve.

  “I will always love you,” said Darconville, taking
her by the finger. She simply smiled.

  “Me too.”

  And they went to Darconville’s rooms and made
love.

  XLVII

  A Fallacy of the Consequent

  Can reason untwine the line that nature twists?

        —St. ALEXIS, the
Vagabond of God

  DARCONVILLE’S CAT peered from one to another in the
darkened room, to Isabel asleep for her rhythmical breathing, to
Darconville awake for his eyes moving down the rungs of a
syllogism. It was the end of the year, a time for reckoning, and in
consequence of his perhaps marvelous but certainly tenuous affair
with a student it had been judiciously pointed out to him—by
certain colleagues, to intercept fate—that no Quinsy girl was able
to love. Interesting, thought Darconville, for because of her poor
academic showing Isabel by rights
was
no longer a Quinsy
girl. And yet, having just made love, wasn’t she then a lover? And
so what, he wondered, from that given value were the values of
other propositions immediately inferred by opposition and
education?

  1. No Quinsy girl is a lover. (GIVEN)

  2. Some lover is a Quinsy girl. (False)

  3. Some Quinsy girl is a lover. (False)

  4. Some lover is not a non-Quinsy girl. (False)

  5. Some Quinsy girl is not a non-lover. (Fabe)

  6. No lover is a Quinsy girl. (True)

  7. Every Quinsy girl is a non-lover. (True)

  8. Every lover is a Quinsy girl. (False)

  9. No lover is a non-Quinsy girl. (False)

  10. No non-Quinsy girl is a lover. (False)

  11. Every non-Quinsy girl is a non-lover.
(False)

  12. Every Quinsy girl is a lover. (False)

  13. Some lover is not a Quinsy girl. (True)

  14. Some lover is a non-Quinsy girl. (True)

  15. Some non-Quinsy girl is a lover. (True)

  16. Some non-lover is a Quinsy girl. (True)

  17. Some Quinsy girl is not a lover. (True)

  18. Some non-lover is a non-Quinsy girl. (?)

  19. Some Quinsy girl is a non-lover. (True)

  20. Every lover is a non-Quinsy girl. (True)
No
!

  A paw stopped Darconville, almost sitting up in
panic; he’d tripped, unbalancing himself, over proposition %18 and
fell with a wild clutch at the question mark: the value was
impossible to determine. It was the
one
proposition—her
very age, at that—not available to formal inquiry. Words that
cannot exceed where they cannot express enough cannot succeed when
they try to learn too much. Yet mightn’t that matter unillumined
by, or contrary to, be above reason? He looked at Isabel. She
sometimes smiled in her sleep like a cat whose upcurvital mouth
showed perpetual joy. A non-lover?
Verbatim ac literatum
.
Ridiculous, thought Darconville, for when with logic, he asked
himself again, had love to do? If green is unripe, why then
blackberries are red when they’re green. And in that very same
darkness that muddled his poor thoughts hadn’t been consummated
that sweet warfare having victors only? True enough, one needn’t
necessarily be in love in order to—

  Darconville frowned.

  No value could be inferred. Better count the pulses
of Methuselah. Thank you, logic.

  XLVIII

  Charlottesville

  Now are they come nigh to the

      Bowre of blis,

  Of her fond favorites

      So nam’d amis.

        —EDMUND SPENSER,
The Faerie Queene

  THE FIRST DAYS of June, fickle, were cooled and
freshened by a touch of rain and then lapsed back again to a
.languorous warmth, the shivelights of bright sun teasing out of
every throughway and thicket the pale first fruits; mead blew, feed
grew, sounded the cuckoo, and summer, a-coming, came in.