The Cockroaches of Stay More Read online

  Freddy was speechless for a long moment before he could say, “Holy Locust! Squire John, you’re a wizard! I reckon you really are a Ingledew, aint you?”

  Chapter two

  No, thought Brother Tichborne, as he approached a choice orifice punctured into the wooden wall of Holy House, beyond which he could no longer hear nor smell the scene of Jack, Freddy, and the Santa Fe, that feller aint any more a Ingledew than I am, so why did I have to go and tell him he was?

  He had wanted to get Jack Dingletoon to enter Parthenon, that was why, to get him to penetrate that stronghold of irreligious Ingledews who did not even bow down and worship the Woman who lived there. The Reverend Tichborne had seen Her more than once, from afar, or from not any closer than the front yard of Her house, upon the porch of which She sometimes sat at dusk, after Her supper, the leavings of which, if any, were bestowed only upon those two lucky Ingledews who were the squires of Stay More, just as Ingledews had always been squires since the beginning of time, although, true to the Lord Joshua Crust’s prophecy, they were now fast disappearing, and only two remained: Squire Hank and his son, Squire Sam.

  It simply wasn’t fair that those two should have Parthenon all to themselves, as if it were a royal castle. All of the other houses of Stay More had been abandoned by Man, except of course for Holy House, where Brother Tichborne made his residence along with most of the other quality roosterroaches of Stay More, who were reduced to fighting each other for the residues of Man’s table (as well as of His bed, His cheer-of-ease, or wherever else He chose to sit and eat). Brother Tichborne thought it a terrible irony that the Ingledews had the exclusive right to whatever morsels were left by the Woman in Parthenon, although they never prayed to Her. The Ingledews were not only atheists, but it was also commonly known that our Lord Joshua Crust had been pinnified by a person of the Ingledew name, a human person. We all take our names from Man.

  We take our names from Man, who is our rock and our salvation, although His wrath is great and unceasing. Man had a habit of routinely taking up and firing a revolver at the roosterroaches who dwelt in His house, with westerly accuracy depending on how much He had had to drink. Other ministers before Brother Tichborne had determined that this shooting and westering of chosen roosterroaches was both a form of punishment and an expression of Man’s love, and therefore the shooting, or the act of being shot, was called not a westering but a Rapture.

  There are two forms of Rapture, good Crustians believe: there is the instant Rapture of the bullet from Man, which is a guarantee that one will live upon the right hand of Man in the sweet heaven of the hereafter; but there is also the promise of the Rapture after The Bomb, when Man will lift the righteous off the floor and give them eternal life. The good Crustians will be raptured, but the faithless will perish in that holocaust and go to Hell. Hell, as everyone knows and fears, is a place of work. Unless we are righteous and obey the Lord’s commandments, we will find ourselves in Hell, the dominion of the Mockroach, hard at work.

  The bullets which Man fired to rapture the chosen Crustians always pierced the floor as well, the wall, the ceiling, a door, or a windowpane of the house, which was called Holy House because of all these holes. Each new hole created a new entrance for more roosterroaches, but it was not permissible for any “furrin” rooster-roach to enter Holy House. Each hole also created drafts, and this past winter had been terrible, causing even Man Himself to take to stronger drink than beer.

  If there was any consolation for Brother Tichborne in the gross injustice of the overpopulation of Holy House and underpopulation of Parthenon, it was that the Woman was such a fastidious keeper of Her cookroom and table that rarely did a crust or crumb fall from her table, lap, plate, pan, countertop, or mouth corner. Our Man of Holy House, by contrast, bestowed upon the multitudes a great continuous feast of crusts and crumbs, to say nothing of the countless dregs of beer that kept most Holy Housers nearly as intoxicated as Man Himself. Brother Tichborne was old enough to observe that Man’s use of beer, and of the more poisonous bourbon, was increasing.

  The ways of Man are inscrutable. Man giveth, and Man taketh away. Blessed be the Name of Man (though Brother Chidiock Tichborne, who had a fine old name himself, had to admit that he did not know the name of his Man, nor of the Woman either).

  Such were his thoughts as he climbed the pier of native fieldstone stacked into a cube which supported one corner, the southeastern, of the abandoned room of Holy House, a room containing a hodgepodge of relics, junk, castoff effects of generations of Man who had inhabited the house. Among this detritus was a heavy and crumpled frock coat, single-breasted, of black alpaca, narrow lapels, three pockets, which still bore traces of the sacred aroma of the sweat of some Man who had worn it an eon ago, possibly before the time of Joshua Crust. Chidiock Tichborne and his fifteen brothers and sisters had been born inside the folds of this frock. He had spent his first instar exploring the smooth lining of Italian cloth, playing hide-and-seek with his siblings through the tunnels of the sleeves, and visiting with other children who lived in the pockets and beneath the tails, for this frock coat had been home and birthplace not just to several generations of Tichbornes but to the Murrisons, the Chisms, the Duckworths, the Plowrights and other fine families of Stay More who, because they lived closest to the cookroom—much closer than the closet-dwelling roosterroaches who lived in an old smock, not a frock—were the higher strata of society in the village, the most prosperous, and, Brother Tichborne would have you know, the most devout, Crustlike, Manfearing, and faithful.

  All of Stay More had only one minister, and this was Brother Tichborne.

  Brother Tichborne returned home to the frock from his “gloaming constitutional,” as he called it, to find that his wife, Ila Frances, had risen and started breakfast for herself and their children.

  “Morsel, Sister Tichborne,” the minister greeted his wife, whom he was wont to address formally. He wished she would do the same, but:

  “Mors, Chid,” she said. “What-all’s the news out yander in the world?”

  “Hit’s purty nice and fair, the night a-comin on,” he observed. “Six zillion stars out and up.”

  “Only six?” she said. “Last night they was seven.”

  “Paw, kin we go to the play-party tonight, us younguns?” requested Archy, one of their sons, past his imago, and indicating himself and his siblings, mostly identical brothers.

  “Naw, Archibald,” the minister said. “They’s liable to be dancin at thet there play-party.”

  “Aw, we kin jist watch,” Archy declared.

  Mrs. Tichborne suggested, “They kin keep their sisters out of trouble.”

  “Shore, I reckon,” said Archy. “We kin watch out for our sisters.”

  “No dancin,” said Brother Tichborne wearily. “None of y’uns do no dancin.”

  The dozen-odd Tichborne offspring sprang away from breakfast—the boys skittled away, while the girls flittered away.

  Alone together, Brother and Sister Tichborne discussed their plans for the night. Sister Tichborne wanted to go visit her sister, who was married to a Smockroach. Brother Tichborne considered going with her; it would be an opportunity to convert a few of the Smockroaches. His ambition, if he lived long enough, if Man’s bullets did not rapture him and send him west, was to convert everyone into Crustians…even the Ingledews, whose domicile, Parthenon, he wanted to consecrate to Crustianity.

  But tonight there was a more pressing chore: Chid Tichborne needed to plan and rehearse his next Sunday prayer meeting and worship service, which, for the first time, he intended to conduct right in the presence of Man, right at Man’s feet, as it were. This bold move would be sure to convert some of the faithless.

  And when he had made those preparations, he had better drop in on that play-party, just to make sure that the young folks were behaving themselves….

  Chapter three

  Sam Ingledew preferred crusts to crumbs, especially when it was crust of Brie, Camembert or Bours
in; when it was crust of pretzel or waffle or éclair; when it was crust of brownie or macaroon or ladyfinger; his favorite of all edibles was apple fritter. The crust of beignet aux pommes was the measure of its quality: he could not conceive of a good beignet without a thoroughly crispy crust.

  But he was not a Crustian, not in the devotional sense. Certainly he believed that there had existed in ancient Stay More a certain roosterroach with the name of Joshua, who was called the Crust, and Sam was even ready to accept the possibility that this Joshua Crust had been impaled upon a pin by a Man, or Manchild, who had had the venerable Stay More family name of Ingledew. But Sam could not accept the commonly held belief that the roosterroach Joshua was the son of Man, any more than he could accept the idea that roosterroach Ingledews were descended from human ones. Enough, that we adopt the names and ways of Man; too much, that we should claim biological lineage.

  By temperament as well as by residence, Sam felt removed from the battles between Crustians and non-Crustians, Frockroaches and Smockroaches. Holy House was a world away, although the two buildings were only a couple of furlongs from each other, at opposite ends of the Roamin Road, which had been the Main Street of the village of Stay More when Stay More was still being proliferated by Ingledews, human and roosterroach alike. Sam’s father, Squire Hank Ingledew, loved to talk of the old days, although Squire Hank himself had never known them, nor had Hank’s immediate grandsires or great-grandsires, all the way back to Isaac Ingledew, who had led the roosterroaches into exile during the generations when Stay More had been totally abandoned by Man.

  Ingledews had always been leaders, long before the time of Joshua, and if Sam did not feel inclined to lead anyone, it was because he had even less taste for politics than for religion. A philosopher, an epicure, a naturalist, and a bon vivant, he felt that he was a stranger to the folkways of his kindred. He was a cosmopolite in a world of rustics.

  And unless he got busy and overcame his shyness and found a girlfriend, he was the last of the Ingledews. His father, Squire Hank, though still physically powerful, was psychologically impotent and would never again sire offspring. Sam had no brothers and sisters. When his mother had laid the ootheca which had been his prelife capsule, her easteregg, she had slipped away from his father and climbed the mantel above the unused fireplace in the Woman’s bedroom. She had entered this very Clock and deposited her easteregg carefully in one corner, far from the slow gnashing of the Clock’s gears and the swinging of its pendulum, safe from any spiders or scorpions. It was her third easteregg of the season; the other two had entirely failed to hatch.

  An ootheca hatches through the combined simultaneous and spontaneous inhalation and exhalation of its fourteen to sixteen inhabitants. Sam remembered—it was his first memory—the awful effort of sucking in and puffing out his abdomen, which failed to crack the crust of the ootheca, failed to hatch the easteregg, and the panic when he realized that the other fifteen “passengers” in the ootheca were not helping because they were west, or rather had not succeeded in eastering. They were stillborn, all of them, and Sam would have been also, despite his frantic and most desperate efforts, had not the Clock exclaimed “SUGARPLUM!” and begun striking seven times with such noise and vibration that the sound alone seemed to rupture the ootheca’s case and release him, squalling in fright and singing in triumph in the same breath, into this life.

  His mother had not crusted him “Sam”; that was not his “real” name. There were no Ingledews of any generation, human or roosterroach, with that given name, nor with the name his mother actually gave him, which has been forgotten, even by him (she had been west, lo, since Sam was in his fourth instar and an infestation of the cockroach mite, Pimeliaphilus podapolipophagus, carried her off). She had crusted him with a special name symbolic of the season in which he was born.

  “When ye git growed up,” she had explained, “when ye reach yore imago, you can call yoreself anything you like. Names is sorta sniffwhips on the front of yore face. You can wave ’em about, and use ’em to find yore way around in this world, and keep ’em clean all the time, and ye can touch things with ’em, and talk to other folkses with ’em, and all such as thet, but a given name is jist a sniffwhip.”

  So in his maturity—he was no longer young, but had lived a full circuit of the earth around the sun—he had dropped his Crustian name and chosen to call himself Gregor Samsa Ingledew, the full meaning of which was known, or appreciated, only by himself. How he learned the significance of it is one of those mysteries as puzzling as the fact that every roosterroach is born with all the knowledge that he needs to get him through to his west.

  When the Clock conspired with his mighty efforts to crack the case of his easteregg and he found himself alone with fifteen stillborn siblings on the floor of the Clock, he had no mother to care for him. She was somewhere down below, or in another part of Parthenon, where his infant cries could not reach her. No roosterroach mother can know the instant her easteregg hatches unless she keeps constant watch on it. Few do.

  He found himself alone and hungry and ignorant of his strange surroundings, the wheeling gears and meshing cogs and the swinging pendulum, the clacking rack and bobbing cock and ticking deadbeat escapement. He thought the Clock was his mother, but her mechanisms did not quite fit his imprinted genetic memory, and when he tried to talk with her in her own language—rapid clacking verbs, clittering adjectives, thrumming nouns, with tinkling commas, dingling periods, and bonging exclamation points, she would not respond to him. When she said “FONDUE!” he repeated her exactly, but she ignored him. For three days, he went hungry. His first night’s absolute whiteness, which frightened him, as if he were a ghost of himself, mellowed into amber, and then into tan. He prowled the length of the mantelshelf, greatly intimidated by the heights. He considered eating one of his stillborn siblings, for nothing is tastier to a rooster-roach than a westered embryo, but somehow he understood that the toothsome delight under consideration was his sister.

  One night (he kept to the darkest corner of the Clock whenever there was a bit of light), he saw the Woman. She stood near the mantelpiece, near enough for his sniffwhips to detect with ravenous recognition what She held in Her hands—in one hand a glass of milk, in the other hand an Oreo, that fabled delectation of chocolate crumbs. He knew She must be his mother, although She looked even less like a mother roosterroach than the Clock did. He felt an overpowering filial love for Her, which was a love not merely for the food She was bringing to him but for Her great beauty; for the golden waves of hair spread upon Her shoulders as white as his own body had lately been, for the surpassing sweetness of Her face, for the grace with which She moved, for the dulcet tones with which She created words—“Now is this Friday? Or is it Saturday? Why, yes, I do believe it’s Saturday.”

  Baby Sam returned the words: “Why, yes, I do believe it’s Saturday.” But She, like the Clock, ignored him. She did not even see him. Nor did She give him any of the food which She was bearing. She set the glass of milk down on the mantelshelf and abruptly opened the glass door on the face of the Clock, startling him into withdrawal further back in the shadows. With the hand that had held the milk She steadied the Clock, and with the other hand, the hand that held the Oreo, She stuck a key into the Clock face and began to wind it. The Clock made new sounds that Sam had not heard before, the scritching of the key, the spranging of the spring being tightened.

  She turned and turned the key, and in the long course of this labor a tiny corner of the Oreo She held crumbled off and fell to the floor of the Clock.

  This minute fragment of Oreo sustained young Sam for over a week, until his true mother arrived and led him down from the Clock and into the world and began explaining to him all the things he did not understand.

  She explained to him that certain things are “not nice.” For example, it is not nice to vomit your food while others are watching. “Gobble yore food, but puke in solitude,” was one of her many maxims. Although it is acceptable to speak
of discharges from the front end as “puke,” it is not acceptable to speak of discharges from the rear end by any of the numerous scatological words that many roosterroaches, particularly males, employ daily. It is better to speak of “making water,” or “going out” or “going out to see how high the moon is,” or even “heading for the john to do number two.”

  Above all, his mother explained, it is not nice, ever, to use the word “cockroach.” The simple reason is that “cock” is one of the unmentionable words for either the male generative organ or the female receptacle of same, depending on who uses either, the word or the organ. His mother called his organ a tallywhacker, and he knew what she meant and wished she would drop the subject, it embarrassed him so. In his sixth instar, just before his imago, Sam learned of the Spanish word cucaracha, which is the origin of the English “cockroach,” and has nothing to do with the male member or even male chickens, but in Stay More nobody with any decency would ever say “cockroach,” nor would they speak of cock in any form, such as cockeyed, cocksure, coxcomb, let alone peacock, and it was best to avoid any utterance of pecker, dick, peter, jemmison, prick, root, ducey, dinger, dood, yingyang, tool, goober, horn, rhubarb, okra or even penis.

  Why this prudery? Being already possessed of the uncommon wisdom of the Ingledews, which he refined through countless hours of meditation, Sam Ingledew understood in time that the essential reason for all sexual modesty is to give sex mystery, without which it would be dull, commonplace, obligatory, and uninviting. Modesty makes sex hard-to-get and therefore challenging, and therefore worthy of all one’s waking obsessions and half of one’s dreams. If it were otherwise, the generations would not generate.

  “Roosterroach” seemed ludicrous to Sam when it was applied to a female of his species, but, he supposed, no more ludicrous than “cockroach” itself. The female “cock,” he learned from his childhood companions, was called the twat, snatch, pussy, twitchet, moosey, monkey, or simply cunt, a word which his mother, first making him take a bite of a rancid bar of soap after he uttered it, told him should always be replaced by “gillyclicker,” the feminine equivalent of tallywhacker. “Gillyclicker” sounded forbidding and mechanical to Sam, but was still better than gonapophyses, which is unpronounceable.