The Cockroaches of Stay More (32 page)

Leroy was all out of breath and he had to insufflate noisily through all his spiracles before he could continue, “Naw, I don’t mean Him. I mean
him
.”

“
Whom?
” Chid demanded.

“Squire Hank! He’s comin this way, up the Roamin Road. He’s comin
home
!”

“Who’s with him?” Chid asked. “Is Sam with him?”

“Nossir, he’s alone.”

“Then what are we worryin about?” Chid demanded.

Chapter thirty-four

S
am went out for a stroll. It was after midnight, the air was clear and clean, the sky was black and spangled with a zillion zillion stars.
I might be one of only two squires in Stay More
, Sam reflected,
but there are a zillion zillion other squires in Arkansas alone, and that’s just a little part of this world, which is only one of a zillion zillion worlds circling through the universe. Is it not enough to learn one’s own garden?
Sam noticed that the heavy rains had nurtured the burgeoning of plants, and particularly weeds, the roosterroaches of the plant kingdom, eating up the spare, leftover patches of soil not taken by the cultivated plants. Dandelion, plantain, dock, horsenettle, toad-flax, sowthistle: their names, to Sam, suggested unwanted, creeping, striving, but thriving things, like roosterroaches, despised by man but useful, each with its purpose in the grand scheme. When he was a child, Sam used to climb the tall ragweed, a beautiful, large-bladed, spreading, rank, and succulent plant, as high as a dozen feet or more above the ground; he had felt an affinity for it even before he learned that it was a pest, like himself.

A drought was coming, Sam knew. The one thing certain about too much rainfall was that it would be followed by too little, or none. Meanwhile, the weeds took hold, and thrived, and perfumed the night air with their vegetable voices. Sam hoped he would live long enough to understand the peculiar communication of one plant speaking to another in the night, by fragrance alone. He needed no tailprongs to study the voices of plants. But thinking of tailprongs made him think of what he was deliberately avoiding the thought of, with all this meditation on stars and weeds: Tish, and her power to talk gently to him in signs. There were now only two persons he could “hear”: Hoimin with his thrumming boom, and Tish with her soft gestures. How could he hope to exercise his duties as squire of Stay More if he could not hear his townsfolk? Even with Hoimin’s help, with Tish’s too, he could not listen to his people…or minister to them, and he realized that now that Chid Tichborne was abandoning the faith, he would have to replace him, not as an espouser of the Crustian religion but as a pastor of sorts in a confused pastoral populace. If not a pastor, a kind of schoolmaster, perhaps….

His eye fell upon the distant little tower of the schoolhouse. Sam found himself stopped in the middle of Roamin Road, with two directions to turn, a choice to make: north toward Parthenon, to reclaim his Clock and his girlfriend, or south toward the schoolhouse, to reclaim his hearing. If he chose the latter, he would not return before dawn. And he had no guarantee that the expedition would succeed, little faith in the efficacy of the cure.

He could not decide. While he stood immobile in Roamin Road, turning first toward the north and gazing with longing at Parthenon’s roof, and then turning south and trying to make out the belfry of the ancient schoolhouse, another roosterroach approached him, and his sniffwhips told him it was his father. “Morsel, Dad,” he said.

His father said something he could not hear; he assumed it was simply a return of the greeting. But then his father began talking, and Sam could tell from the expressions on his father’s face and the gestures of his sniffwhips that he was not simply making idle conversation; he was talking seriously to his son. Futilely Sam strained his tailprongs to hear.

His father’s tone indicated that now his father was asking him a question, and Sam had to remind him, “Dad, you know I can’t hear very well.”

His father looked irritated, and then committed a mistake that many of normal hearing make toward the hearing-impaired: he began to pronounce each word slowly, tonelessly, in an artificial rhythm that made it impossible for Sam to re-create a coherent sentence from the sounds. “How,” he thought he heard his father say, “come” seemed to be the following word, “her” was pronounced imperfectly, “to” seemed to open up one end of an infinitive that went on infinitely, followed by a rising inflection of a question mark following “that.”

“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?”

“Everything 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!