Darconville's Cat (4 page)

  The main buildings of Quinsy College could now be
seen across the street, a cloister of white columns running along
by way of a portico. Disquisiting, somewhat abstractly, on the
college’s history, Miss Trappe stepped off the sidewalk. Suddenly
leaping back to the curb— peevishly screeching, “
You
!”—she
saved her toes, just, as a green pickup truck with an armament rack
at the back window whipped out onto High St. and raced toward Main,
pedal to the metal. The driver, an underscullion with a face like a
knife, called out something vile.

  Miss Trappe and Darconville continued walking, a
strange little mock-up—a skeptical Dante, a wizened Beatrice—in a
most un-paradisaical world: a matchbox-sized theatre, an ice-cream
shop, and the old Timberlake Hotel, with its chintz curtains, upon
whose shaded veranda sat several cut-to-the-pattern townies slumped
in black-lacquered wicker chairs and several careworn arteriopaths,
hunched up like angry hawks, fussily presiding over a game of
dominoes. “Percy,” came a squawk, “you ain’t got enough strength to
pull a greasy string out of a goose’s ass.” A slam followed.
“Move!” Miss Trappe shook her head. “I had a brother,” she said,
out of the blue, “who always played chess with me. We wouldn’t
consider
dominoes.” She paused. “He married, lost his wife
to another, took to drink—” A distinct sorrow came into her
eyes.

  “And is he—”

  Miss Trappe made a cataphatic nod. “By his own hand.
He was twenty.” She sighed and stumped along. “ ‘The rigor of the
game,’ “ she said, “as Mrs. Battle would say.”

  They came to Quinsyburg’s main street. It was a
contingent, down both sides, of shoulder-to-shoulder shops, a
frontage dull and repetitious but saved from the blight of
uniformity by cute mercantile jingles painted on each window—the
poetic effusions of various local struld-brugs and place-proud
retailers—which in small towns, for some peculiar reason, become
such a rich source of humor: United Dixiebelle Cup Co. (“Even Our
Name Begins with You”); Quinsyburg Bedding Co. (“We Give You a Lot
of Bunk”); The Old Dominion Outlet (“If Your Clothes Aren’t
Becoming to You, You Should Be Coming to Us”); Stars ‘N’ Bars
Exterminating Co. (“All Our Patients Die”); Piedmont Travel Service
( “Please Go Away” ); Southside Rug and Linoleum ( “The Best Floor
Show in Town” ); The Virginia Shook Co. (“We’ll Stave You In”); The
Quinsyburg Gun Shop (“The First to Last”); and The Prince Edward
Lumber Co. (“May We Strike a Cord for You?”)

  The Southern town, a parody of itself, is the
prototype from which every other one is copied. Where is the one,
for instance, that doesn’t have a radio announcer named Don Dale; a
private white academy; Muddy Creek; a chili-dog emporium; the State
theatre; Jaycees with berry-knotted ties; a sheriff called
“Goober”; something like the ol’ Shuckcorn Place (it’s always
supposed to be haunted by J. E. B. Stuart); a popular delivery
boy-cum-halfwit named Willis Foster; and a local NRA enclave that
meets upstairs in the gunshop every Friday night to tell lies and
make up stories about niggers, nymphomania, and New York City?

  Darconville and Miss Trappe took time for tea at the
Seldom Inn (“A Place to Remember for Cares to Forget”)—a popular
meeting place downtown for the professional tie-and-jacket faction
(booths) who rotated matchbooks and told loud interminable tales
and various peckerwoods (stools) who gripcruppered their coffee
cups from the non-handle side and stared into a stippled
wall-mirror at their chinless faces and pointed ears. The jukebox
was blaring country music— Kitty Wells, “Honky Tonk Angels”—making
it impossible to talk, so Darconville and Miss Trappe together
watched through the window as the Quinsyburg townsfolk passed by,
peculiar people on the hop, remarkably alike all, with faces like
the trolls on German beer mugs, the curious result, perhaps, of
poultry-like inbreeding (farmers, farmers’ daughters, farmers’
daughters’ farmers) that had transmogrified a once vital
eighteenth-century Protestant Celtic stock into a hedgecreeping
lower-class breed of joltheads and jusqu’ aubouts and then
metastasized into one huge gene pool which seemed to reach from the
bulletheaded truckers of Mississippi to the triple-named senators
of Virginia, slackjawed and malplasmic to a one. It seemed an orgy
of kin, with everybody anybody’s cousin.

  It was a burlesque subordinating individuality to a
constant reference of type.
Quaeritis habitantes
?
Rotarians; wood-hewing gibeonites; 32° Masons and their ball-jars;
pushing tradesmen; zelators and zélatrices; Odd Fellows of
indecipherable worth; Hemerobaptists; racist Elks (B!P!O.E.) and
their shovelmouthed wives, usually named Lorinda or Moxone;
psalm-snufflers; longnosed umbrella-carrying joykillers; widows
with applepandowdy faces; Volsteaders; rattle-toothed almsters;
gout-footed Shriners; tiny birdheaded clerks in red suspenders;
supposititious chamberers of commerce; pullulating boosters; and
cretinous, peasant-like Colin Clouts on every street corner who
slunched against poles squinting and chewing down toothpicks in a
slow watchful rhythm.

  Growing depressed, Miss Trappe suggested she resume
showing Darconville the town she simultaneously warned him against,
arguing, convincingly, that a writer in staying too long would go
mad there. The suicide rate in Quinsyburg, she said, was—she
stopped and, in the reflection of a window, retied under her chin
the wide straw hat.

  “High?”

  The crabapple wrinkled. “Astronomical.”

  I will stay here for only a year, thought
Darconville, and try to do my work. He told Miss Trappe he’d take
the chance, but she told him that Mrs. Battle said chance is
nothing. And yet, he reasoned, wasn’t the price for privacy
anonymity?
Un altro, un altro, gran’ Dio, ma più
forte
.

  They now stood in front of the Wyanoid Baptist
Church, a plain white affair with the usual homiletic menu out
front and at the peak of its steeple, spiritual guerdon to a whole
community, a weathervane in the shape of a metal cricket (has
anyone ever figured that one out?).

  Quinsyburg, Va. was one of those places where pulpit
and drum ecclesiastick were beat with a fist instead of a stick,
and whatever the persuasion—whether Wycliffites, Old Order Bunkers,
Stundo-Baptists, or the International Church of the Foursquare
Gospel— religion was religion as long as it had been scoured of any
whim or wishet that flirted with Rome or ritual or racial equality.
It was, in fact, a reactionary little town filled with stiff-nosed
Galatians, circuit-riders, and reformers with upsidedown bibles,
all looking up hill and down dale for a chance to save someone’s
soul. The place teemed with Presbyters Writ Large, and on every
Sunday this very church, become a hotbed of tracasseries and
dissent, swelled to overflowing with singing, ringing wonglers,
diehards from the U.D.C. looking for fellowship, and hundreds of
bag-in-hand geriatrics with voices like hoopoes who preferred their
theology muscular, their ministers mousy, and their church quite
definitely in the majority.

  Darconville bent forward to read the little
marquee—and cocked an eyebrow. It read:

            Sermon

    ”Did God Wink?” (Acts 17:30)

  W. C. Cloogy, Pastor and Evangelist

      Wyanoid Baptist Church

        Bethel of
Blessings

  God help us, thought Darconville, who quite frankly,
if somewhat surprisingly, had yet to be convinced that the Edict of
Nantes hadn’t perhaps caused more trouble on earth than original
sin.

  Darconville and Miss Trappe hadn’t gone two feet
when a woman came suddenly shooting out of the side-door of the
church. She looked like the wife of a manciple, frazzled, with
shocked eyes. Clutching a fistful of pamphlets, she identified
herself as an evangelist’s helper and quickly began batsqueaking
about God’s love, in support of which topic she swiftly presented
to each one of her little tracts: “Crumbs from My Table” by W. C.
Cloogy, Evangelist. As all three stood there, two bewildered, the
third—intense with eyeshine—spontaneously improvised a wee
sermonette on The Deluge, she playing Noah, her voice the animals
it knew, and the air was soon filled with a most ingenious array of
barks, oinks, croaks, snarls, cheeps, and moos, all articulating
the same curious complaint, that this world was too corrupt and
wretched to live in, the unavoidable implication of which seemed to
be that the lesser creatures of this earth shared, if not the same
size or shape, then at least the same agony and accent. And when,
she asked, would they make their assent to faith? Did they know
Jesus for their personal savior? Were they willing to be born
again?

  And, pray, were they in need of revival?

  
Revival
? The word sprouted a capital
letter. It was bad enough, thought Darconville, to suggest anything
to perfect strangers, but to dare to suggest one of those punk
kick-ups and premillennial antihomologoumena? He had a sudden
vision of all those bible-thumping wompsters, unscrupulous
sharpers, and pigeon-faced decretalicides who, having weaseled into
the narrow existentialate of the American South, had for so long
impunitively burked reason, honesty, and truth and set up false
gods to whom, like rats toward platters of meazled pork, the
illiterate
faex populi
had swarmed only to be bilked,
beggared, and buccaneered right on the spot. Was that religion?
Miss Trappe, agreeing, said she would rather take her own life—at
least that way, she added, she would not need to be scared anymore
about what would happen if she didn’t. They walked away in
silence.

  Then Miss Trappe adjusted her spectacles, waited
until her optic axes grew coincident, and took one last painful
look to the far end of Main St. She shook her head.

  “You know,” she said, “a thought just crossed my
feeble old mind, dear.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well,” offered Miss Trappe, “the act of committing
suicide may be very easy.”

  Darconville gently took her arm.

  “When you do it,” she said, shrugging and looking up
at him with eyes pale as air, “just simply pretend it isn’t
you!”

  There was nothing Darconville could find to say,
search his heart though he might. They slipped behind the
courthouse and walked through an alley past the Quinsyburg jail
where, high above their heads, they both noticed a series of black
fists gripping the bars of the grills. A lonesome song drifted from
one of the cells across the afternoon.

      ”What a beautiful mornin’
that will be,

          Let
my people go;

      When time breaks up in
eternity,

          Let
my people go.”

  Miss Trappe halted again on the edge of a thought,
the shadow of the building darkening her face. She looked up at him
like Van Eyck’s pinchfaced Amolfini in horizontal hat, and as
Darconville again took her arm—the skin seemed to crumble between
his fingers, like burial earth—she stared past him and placed a
finger on her chin.

  “And you know, the strangest thing of all is,” said
she, “you may not even have to pretend.”

  It was clear, Darconville now saw, that from her
lugubrious pronouncements Miss Trappe had seen to more terrible
depths than the town at first glance afforded, and, asking her
various questions, he began to learn more of what oppressed her.
Quinsyburg was a closed account. It was a place, apparently,
reduced to total irrelevance, to terms that, while having fallen to
the category of the tedious and the negligible, were yet maintained
in the hollowness of their churchianity, the religion,
deportmentalized and moralistic, of the Prodigal Son’s brother, and
reinforced in a terrible irony of reciprocity by the cynical and
nonconformist whingeings of Luther, Melanchthon, Bucer, Pomeranus,
Knox, Flacius Illyricus, and various other sons of revolt. If it
seemed, at first, the kind of town that customarily salted its
appeal with a sort of grassroots neighborliness, the notion didn’t
last. Insiders were in, outsiders out. When and if friendship were
shown, she said, it was the type of loving-kindness that
uncomfortably verged on tyranny. They wanted not so much to
convince you of their opinions as to deprive you of your own, and
typical of so many other one-crop regions that had taprooted out of
the normal world—pockets of homogeneity bypassed by culture and
change—most of its townsfolk were in the grip of an acute
xenophobia that filled the vocabularies of their villageois
language with a repetition of paranoid they/them pronouns and
convinced them that beyond the particular borders of their town
spread the etceterated sloughs of godlessness where people drank
swipes, backslid, and gambled away their wives. They stuck together
in the same way that piranhas, seeing certain maculate spots of
identification, would not attack each other. Politically, the
community was so far to the Right it jimmied the Left. In terms of
actual religious belief, Quinsyburg’s, oxymoronically, was in fact
a
civic
faith, for spiritual obligation had devolved to
the concept of good citizenry, a
quo ad sacra
invariably
performed as an endorsement for, and in the name of, the American
Way of Life. Knowledge to them was the parent of malice. Ideas they
met with derision, truth with suspicion, and differences with fear.
For any other way of life one couldn’t raise their temperatures a
therm. They lived, they knew, the way it was done, and the devil,
the great disturber of our faith in this world, couldn’t raise in
the townsfolk there one scruple whatsoever leading to alternatives.
They will be there yesterday. They were there tomorrow. They
are.

  Miss Trappe dodged into a dark overheated little
store, bought her paper, and they continued on past the Quinsyburg
post-office—the walls within painted over in flat WPA murals:
frigid square-jawed men in overalls, holding trowels and staring
off at horizons—and cut over by a semi-residential area toward the
back of the college. The houses, large and desolate, were all
clapboarded egg-brown affairs with sunken porches overcome with
wisteria, an eruption of domiciliary pasteboards rising up in
shingled capuches, far too close together, and although the
curtains were always pulled one could almost look through them by
way of imagination to see hooded furniture; engravings of stags in
the hallways; perhaps an obsolete oil stove; a clawfoot bathtub
upstairs (with elongated orange stains under the faucets); a single
bookshelf, with copies of Law’s
Serious Call
, Doddridge’s
Rise and Progress
, Orton’s
Discourse on the Aged
,
etc., and some poor someone sitting in a calico apron, shelling
peas, or all alone in the darkness of a backroom, desperately
praying for forgiveness.