Darconville's Cat (24 page)

  These were the “hearties” of Fawx’s Mt., not a great
deal different, truth to tell, from the other wonderful sapsuckers
down South that might be classified under
ordo squamata
:
yomp heads, mountain boomers, rackensacks, hoopies, haw-eaters,
snags, pot-wallopers, buckras, goober goopers, scataways,
pee-willies, wool hats, pukes, rag-geds, boondockers, dug downs,
tackies, crackers, and no-lobes. It’s a kind of club—300-pound
dipshits, always named something like “Hawg,” Kincaid, or
Harley-—who drink flask bourbon, have chigger-bites on their arms,
and wear their hair either short or slicked back (the comb tracks
are always visible) to reveal faces like those reversible
trompe-l’oeil
funheads you snip from the Sunday paper to
fool someone with. They have no chins, are inclined to be goitral,
and are always chewing down a blade of grass fiercely and
absentmindedly. They are given to wearing suntans, white socks,
work boots, and cheap acetate shirts, the sleeves of which are
always rolled up to a point higher than the triceps brachii in
tight little knots. They like whiskey with good bead, respect
Shriners, whistle a lot, drive with one hand, slide crotch-first
onto barstools, and—just “funnin’ “—love to hang around
butt-slapping and goosing each other, punctuating certain remarks
of course with that significant nudge just before they’re going to
fart. They like to wade into swamps and jacklight rats, are big
lodge-joiners, and know everything about guns which they always
handle, silently, with phallic reverence. They have hands like
cow-horn, with nails bitten to the quick. They have spools of
rusting cable in their backyards, nail coons to the walls, adore
rodeos, and their execrable grammar is half informed by protective
coloration, half by rank stupidity.

  Chainsaws are their toys. They’re given to sheep
jokes, often engage in games with each other like “Squail the Pig”
or rustic variations of “
Detur Tetriori
: or, The Ugliest
Grinner Shall Be the Winner,” and are fond of spitting contests.
But the favorite redneck recreation is incest. They fear women, so
hate them, but as most are latently homosexual they fear that even
more, and so fifty times a day boastfully and loudly proclaim for
each other’s benefit that they’d hump a rockpile if they thought a
snake were under it. They invariably refer to their penises as “Big
Sid.” They are usually married, but each willfully keeps confined
to home his jittery gap-toothed wife, always either pronouncedly
fat or thin—they all look as if they support nature on a diet of
lucifer matches and gin—who, when not peeking half-wittedly around
the doorframe of a dogtrot cabin, squats on her porch dandling a
big thick-necked gosling of a child with a purple hairbow and an
I.Q. that doesn’t even register, repeatedly telling it, “Wave to
the street!”

  They loathe sentiment but thrive on sentimentality,
violently beat their women with pony-leads on Saturday night but
weep with guilt at Sunday-Go-to-Meeting during the singing of “The
Old Rugged Cross,” their favorite. In groups, they’re dangerous;
each, alone, is a simpleton. Fanatically patriotic, they’re all
knee-jerk defenders of state sovereignty and go blubbery at the
mere sight of the Confederate Battle Flag. They’re either
whispering sideways about Jesus or bawling obscenities, georgic in
imagery, with stentorophonic might. They’re handy, can always tell
one car from another, know the right weights of oil, love to use
the word “ratchet,” and always know when to use baling wire and
when to use bagging wire. They know everything about loggerheads,
trace-chains, and hames and can always be found driving the
backroads in trucks, filled with wood, wedged with chocks, toward a
sawmill shed in the mountains. They all smoke, snite from the nose
with the forefinger, and suffer from very particular ailments:
Basedow’s Disease; gleet; fishskin itch; furunculosis; rodent
ulcer; pyorrhea of the gums; Walking Typhoid; mucous patches; and
tic douloureux. They all know shortcuts through the woods. They
lurk.

  It was a Saturday, then, much like the others, and
all the feebs-in-overalls and donkeyphuckers one saw pitching hay
in meadows during the week—they stand stock-still, with upright
pitchforks, and stare out of expressionless faces as you pass—were
now in high report. They’d
met
to be. And the best place
was the general store.

  Darconville and Isabel pulled up in front. The big
car resembled a hearse, with Darconville undertaking, this time, to
buy some cigarettes: he looked out the car window and, although
torn between feelings of suspicion and frank amusement, got out and
shut the door. A crow rased out of the eaves of the store.

  The Diet of Schmalkalden had convened: there sat the
country gnoofes, Hob, Dick, Hick, and a few others all perched on
palings, eating cheese with clasp knives and whittling and spitting
in the direction of a battered expectoroon behind them. Darconville
couldn’t take it in all at once. It looked like a group of
people—
quocumque modo
—who’d somehow just about managed to
survive the Permian extinction: sowskins, ferox-faced oaves,
hedge-creepers, pig-slopping curmudgeons, bungpegs and
lickspittles, scummers-of-pots, and low ve-nereals with red-nosed
papier-mâche faces gumming chaws of Mail Pouch tobacco. But what
seemed incredible was that each and every one of them—minds,
clearly, unviolated by the slightest idea—all looked remarkably the
same
, wearing in their faces the fatal traces of
degeneracy and the physiological signs of the consanguineous
parentage that caused it. Not a word was spoken.

  Custodially, Darconville walked by Isabel into the
creepy low-lit store, a sheet-iron stove prominent, its half-filled
shelves a wilderness of canned abominations and pioneeriana:
fishing tackle, diuretic pills, jerked beef, tires, secondhand
rifles, tractor parts, wholesale tins of peas, hoses, galvanized
pails, tins of fish roe, flypaper, thistle seed, and a magazine
rack—Darconville stepped closer to look—crammed with back-issues of
Midnight Cry
;
Watson’s Magazine
,
The
Christian Banner
,
American Opinion
,
Menace
,
The Searchlight
and, sanspareil of the lot,
The Fiery
Cross
. Taking Isabel by the finger, Darconville nodded to that
last magazine; she closed her eyes, smiled, and shrugged. How,
Darconville wondered, could there be such innocence, such beauty,
in the midst of such ugliness? She was a perfect lotus springing
from a swamp. The greatest balsams, he’d heard, lie enveloped in
the bodies of the most powerful corrosives; poisons contain within
themselves their own antidote. He kissed her quickly, thinking
but pray, not the reverse
, and made his purchase.

  The proprietor—someone, to Darconville’s
astonishment, addressed him as Mr. Shiftlett!—stood behind the
counter, serving notice on him with an arsonist’s eye, like the
squint of one polyplectronic cock eyeing another; he was about
three feet high and had the face of a barn-owl, angry, surprised,
harelipped. He ignored Darconville’s pleasantries and, turning
away, ended them with a rude fnast of disgust down his nose. And so
they left.

  Out front, as Isabel got into the car, Darconville
heard from behind him one of the peckerwoods make a snort, followed
by a dry ster-corous whistle—and he turned. No one moved.
Darconville got into the car. Quickly, a young bumswink with hair
the color of jackass stepped forward; it was a face full of
mother-wit—the perfect redneck’s—with a long nose and a voluted
nostril, and, turning to grin at his partners, he revealed a
mouthful of imperfect teeth, pegged and pumpkin-seed shaped. Thin,
tattered, and lousy, he scarcely retained a human semblance; in his
filthy face two minute glittering eyes squinted furiously inwards
at his nose. He hitched up his trousers with his wrists, spat
sideways, and nodded toward Isabel. “I like a good milk cow myself,
Captain,” he said, “don’ mean, yowever, I got to sleep with one.”
Darconville kicked open the door but saw it was no good: he was
suddenly looking down the barrels of two rusty shotguns, wagging
impatiently up and down—and meaning
go
. He backed slowly
into the car, where Isabel sat ashen, and then thundered away up a
small road, driving as if behind them lay not a hill-town of
twisted pines, broken fences, and scutch-grass but the Abomination
of Desolation itself.

  Without a word, Darconville drove on, cradling
Isabel’s head to his shoulder while she kept repeating through her
tears, “It’s unfair! It’s unfair!”

  They wound through country roads, a repetition of
gimp fences, quirked barns, and fields with dead rusted machinery,
for what seemed like hours, riding into and then around the low
hills. Cattle, skewbald, roan, and dappled, drowsily munched tall
grasses and meadow weeds as field upon field led past woodlands
toward the mountains that, upon approach, seemed indefinitely
prolonged. The mountains, however, surprising him, turned out to be
more low hills, unimpressive and empty except for an occasional
farmer or two who, never saluting, rolled by in old buckboards with
sawn-oak wheels. Out of the hills now, they swung around returning
by backroads eroded by spring branches and runs all bubbling along,
an area at several points of which, Darconville noticed, stood
small signs directing the way to:
Zutphen Farm
.

  It was, Darconville remembered, the van der Slang
property— Govert’s house.

  Silently, Darconville kept to those directions. They
jounced onto a fairly good road and, heading straight west, soon
got clear of the woods when a large farm came into view. Isabel
crouched lower, her mood of oppression seeming to darken here even
more. The farm was larger by far than any in Fawx’s Mt, but grand,
he thought, only by comparison, for on the mountain side of it were
nothing but grim little shacks and hovels-with-tin-chimneys,
whereas on the town side, though not much better, could be found a
few normal but still insignificant spit-and-brick affairs of the
modern stamp—the Shiftletts’ house was an example—built soon to
bury. A white wooden fence by the dirt road circled the grounds of
the van der Slangs’ where grazed some horses, goats, a herd of
black cattle, and set back in a dim glade stood the main house,
white and cold and silent. Surrounded by fat whin-blown
meadowlands, it was one of those spacious farmhouses with
high-ridged but sloping roofs and low projecting eaves under which
hung flails, harnesses, various bits of husbandry. So, thought
Darconville, there in that stronghold farm lived that broad-skirted
and faceless Dutch urchin he feared; he saw himself as Ichabod
Crane: a New England country schoolmaster and worthy-wight—in form
and spirit like a supplejack (yielding but tough)—sojourning in
that by-place of nature, in love, but somewhat out of his element
and exposed to the commonness of rantipole heroes given to boorish
practical jokes and rough country swains and bumpkins, standing
back, envying his person, his address, and his girl.

  A bowlegged woman in a bandanna and high rubber
boots appeared in the near distance of that property feeding a
goat. Darconville intended to say nothing but found he
couldn’t.

  “Could that,” he asked, driving past, “possibly have
been Mrs. van der Slang?”

  Slouched down, Isabel slowly peered up and then back
in the direction of the receding figure. Are there silences,
wondered Darconville at that moment, in which if one listens
closely may be heard screams?

  “Really?” she asked. “I didn’t even notice.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “
Maybe
—” Isabel’s eyes flashed in
anger.

  “Not maybe you didn’t notice,” said Darconville,
surprised, “maybe it wasn’t Mrs. van—”

  “But,” repeated Isabel, exasperated, almost as if
wanting of him what she wouldn’t of the figure, “I didn’t even
notice.” Strange, thought Darconville, strange. And so there was
nothing more said on the subject, which of course, he knew, was a
good deal.

  They spent much of the afternoon driving, exchanging
small talk. Darconville would often ask ‘ innocent, almost
childlike questions dealing with things Isabel might know and
things she could never be expected to know, leading her through
entire dialogues before arriving not at truth as such, but at some
final irresolvable question of which, perhaps, they
together—curiously—both loved to be ignorant. Actually, Isabel said
rather little on such occasions, far less indeed on others, those
predominantly of the social stamp. She never directly approached
people: if she came upon people she wanted to know, she allowed
herself only a smile to bridge the distance, and invariably they
approached her, with Isabel feeling then the boon of sudden value
she initially suspected neither of them had. Fair is not fair, he
thought, but that which pleases. Helen was not, but whilst she
was.

  Darconville wanted badly to know her, her successive
selves—why, in fact, he loved her. In a way, he wanted to
be
her, that much better to know. Perspective as seen, he
thought, is never reality. Wasn’t a stopped clock correct twice a
day? In fact, perspective was anti-creative, for if we painted what
we actually saw—reality, say—we’d literally have to paint double
images. Compensating, compromising, we look toward dead center only
to contect what we’d know, to scrutinize the inscrutable. Isabel
was
inscrutable. Was he, for instance, Darconville
wondered, charmed only by the fact that she lived a life of which
essentially he knew nothing? Where so little was given, he thought,
much was left to the imagination. The man in love, he knew, often
constructed his beloved from the compilation of small data he was
insistently delighted was so small. On the other hand, perhaps,
maybe she was simply the product of his own temperament, the image,
the reversed projection and “negative” of his own sensibility,
opposed
and
complementary? Did she lead a life unknown to
him to which he could gain right of entry only by loving her? Was
he merely unloading on her the state of himself, the worth of the
girl not in question, but only the quiddity of that state? And did
her silences simply feed his own vanity whereby, giving him the
illusion of intelligence, he saw reflected only the worth he
pompously assumed he himself had?