Darconville's Cat (5 page)

  The streets suddenly were then no longer paved.
There were, in fact, no streets at all, only stamped-out paths of
red Virginia soil winding through low scrubby bushland into an
outdistrict, poor, rundown, aimless, that dropped away to an
alfalfa field ballpark, where the trees were the color of dirty
money and the dust sifted into your shoes like talc. Rusted old
cars were humped on blocks in narrow driveways. Tarpaper hatcheries
were wired smack up to the tilted wooden shacks that had either
dirt or puncheon floors, no front doors, and through the dim
breezeways drifted the odors of frying bread, simmering collards,
and sweet potato pone. It was the black ghetto.

  Most of the shacks had no indoor plumbing, and the
listing outhouses in the back of each yard had simply been clapped
together with dull, misshapen planks. There were pipe chimneys,
makeshift windows, covered in plasti-sheet, and broken stairs, a
pauperization— the direct result of racism in Quinsyburg—that kept
the blacks, because poor, servile. It was a little world of
fatigue, inanition, and wasted minds. Quinsyburg, only a few years
previous, had closed its schools for half a decade rather than
integrate, simultaneously building a private white academy,
notwithstanding federal pressure, to maintain racial purity. The
blacks were forced into separate schools, separate churches, and
even a separate cemetery. The rents were adjusted: if a black
family aspired to fix up its house, that meant it had money; if it
had money, that meant not only a decrease in
servility—”uppityness”—but also that it could pay more rent. An
adjusted rent cured that. It was a “ceiling” theory, for people who
had no ceilings. Indeed, they hadn’t much of anything. They lived
out their lives as they had for centuries, cutting up logs, washing
toilets, scrubbing doorways, and quietly knocking on white folks’
backdoors with a nickel to ask if the noise of their old
gear-hobbing lawn-mowers would disturb the peace of the nobles
inside.

  The afternoon sun began to turn coppery as
Darconville and Miss Trappe crossed downhill toward the ring-road.
Old sambos, with napkins on their heads, sat on their warped
cane-chairs and waved, while out front little black girls—their
hair braided in corn-row tight plaits, their legs ashen—either
played with their pedaps or skipped barefoot, hand in hand, to the
Piggly Wiggly for gumballs. A few young men sloped back from the
A.B.C. liquor store with bottles of fruit wine in crinkled bags and
joked as they passed doorways where buxom young mothers in
bandanas, looking away as they smiled, rocked their carriages with
one foot and gave pieces of fatback to their children for
pacifiers. There was a life here that would forever go on
unchanged, immutable to pain, to policy, to the passing of
pleasure, and there was perhaps in the constancy of it all, if
finally in nothing else, at least something on which they could
depend.

  A loud chorus of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” could
be heard from the small mal-shingled Negro church that suddenly
came into view between several live-oaks and beyond which, as
Darconville and Miss Trappe turned, the two large dormitories of
Quinsy College rose across a half mile or so of woodland. The bell
in the church’s squat steeple was bonging slowly, a mournful,
solitary peal that seemed, echo upon echo, to get lost in the
sunshine and become, ironically, the more forsaken. A group of
phantom ladies in weepers, supporting each other, began to leave
the church. They were crying, trying to stifle sobs with their
handkerchiefs. What could have happened?

  Detective, Miss Thelma Trappe stood stock-still in
the middle of a hunch. She went suddenly skewbacked, unflapping her
copy of the
Quinsyburg Herald
, and ran her eyes over the
front page. She turned to page two. She turned to page three. She
turned to page four, bent down, newt-eyed, and sighed. Looking over
her shoulder, Darconville followed her finger—for she never said a
word—to a simple photograph. It was the quizzical face of a
spoon-headed black boy, about thirteen years old, and underneath
were given brief reportorial facts: name, age, address, place of
burial. He had been struck and instantly killed the day previous by
a hit-and-run pickup truck at the corner of Main and High streets.
The several witnesses from the Timberlake, dominoists by avocation,
could give no description of the driver, so the sheriff closed the
investigation. It was only God’s way, he no doubt felt, of turning
a leaf in the Book of Eternal Decrees.

  “Precisely,” said Miss Trappe.

  Darconville heard the irony but kept counsel,
feeling only the vibrations of her increased step in awkward
silence as she stumped along homeward, pausing only to eye the sky
at intervals from under her wide hat as if searching the heavens
for any indication of justice or balance, a clue, of any degree, to
the moderating power of the universe, some kind of proof of the
stamp celestial. They were soon not far from the street where
they’d first begun their walk when Darconville’s companion decided
to speak,

  “I lost my stepmother in the same way,” said Miss
Trappe, her little mouth trembling. She tried, unsuccessfully, to
shape her hands— carelessly hopping up—to an attitude of
resignation. “She was coming home at dusk with several just-packed
jars of autumn honey and was run down by a passing motorist, who
simply drove on.” Her eyes were filling up, her hat quivering. “She
was not killed right away—the report from the hospital was that she
kept feverishly repeating, ‘My honey. My honey.’ Just that. ‘My
honey.’ I mustn’t fail to tell you, Darconville,” sobbed Miss
Trappe, “I was neither the pretty nor the favored child, but how I
ran—” She gasped to breathe out pain. “—ran to her.” She smiled up
through a runnel of tears. “Hearts,” she said, “was Mrs. Battle’s
favorite suit.” And wiping a tear from her pitted nose, she
repeated, “ ‘My honey.’ “ She swallowed. “I wanted to believe, you
know, that she was asking for me.”

  “She
was
calling you.”

  Miss Trappe lifted up two little gerbil eyes and
simply shook her head. Her nose was dripping. And as Darconville
took her hand, soft as bird’s-eye, she heaved up the sorrow
weltering in her heart. “No,” she wept, “she said she never loved
me, then
screamed
it, Darconville, laying there like dead
metal, she sere—” Darconville’s heart almost misgave. “I was s-so
ashamed,” she whispered into his chest with a tiny humiliated
voice, shattering with sobs, “
I completely w-wet myself, all
over
.”

  Weeping to her feet, she suddenly turned her face up
defiantly toward the sky and looked with a hideous grimace into
infinity, as if to say not balanced yet, O crafty universe, not
balanced yet.

  It became impossible to think. Darconville could say
nothing: so overcome with pity, he could find no words adequate to
consolation and knew beyond reason that any poor stuttering attempt
on his own part must fall terribly short, for touching things
sometimes can only be felt, and yet before he could make any show
of what he felt, she kissed him on the neck, turned her little
crabapple of a head toward the westering sun, and then disappeared
over the hill like a dot.

  V

  Were There Reasons to Believe That in

  Quinsyburg

  Visionaries, Fabulists, Hilarodists, and

  Hermeneuts Would Suffer the Dooms,

  Chastisements, and Black Draughts of a

  Depression They Otherwise Didn’t Deserve

  and Deteriorate Utterly?

  Ample.

  VI

  President Greatracks Delivers

  “He hath builded towers of superarrogation in his
owne head.”

        —Gabriel Harvey,
Pierces Supererogation

  “College! There’s a little word for you, dear girls,
college
: neatly pronounced, pronounced as spelt, and
correctly spelt s-a-c-r-i-f-i-c-e—the battle cry of the United
States of God Bless America! And who’s telling y’all this, some
up-spoutin’ no account dingdong in a string tie pointing his head
out in the direction of his face and looking for to impress you?
Exactly wrong! It’s a man who knows what sacrifice means, and
costs! Now, button back your ears, little cousins, for I only aim
to say it once—I know all the tricks, every last one of them, and
unless someone out there can tell me how a brown cow can eat green
grass, give white milk, and make yellow butter, she best just sit
down tight and listen, OK? I been evywhere but the moon and seen
evything but the wind. I been to the edge of the world and looked
over. I mean, I can fight, shout, win, lose, draw, turn on a dime,
and meet you coming back for change, you hear? Good, now you mark
time on that and we gone get somewhere.”

  IT WAS PRESIDENT GREATRACKS, the college headmaster,
a man fat as a Fugger: a bun, a ham, a burgher. He was a charming
and resourceful academic illiterate, politically appointed, his
brain a
pot-au-feu
of boomism, bad grammar, and prejudice,
his face very like that of the legendary Leucrota whose mouth
opened as far as its ears. The school auditorium was decked out for
the opening assembly, with all eyes fixed on the keynote speaker.
He showed the conviction of a roundhead, and, having traversed the
dais with an oafish and peasant-like lumber that betrayed his
grim-the-collier background, he bulked now over the lectern around
which had been slung a banner lettered in blue and white

            QUINSY

           WELCOMES

             YOU

  and then hamfistedly fussbudgeted back and forth in
a suit the color of sea-fowl guano, wagging a finger like Elijah
the Tishbite and trooping out his dockets, posits, and quiddits
like a costermonger his pippins.

  “When I was a little wagpasty of a lad back in Free
Union, Va. in them days of the Depression, which you wouldn’t know
about, my tiny ol’ mammy wore galoshes, used thorns for fishhooks,
and buck-washed me in a hopper. We were so poor we couldn’t even
pay attention, and it was a dang holiday, nothin’ else, just to go
and play stoopball with the swivel-eyed halfwit next door or hop
along down to the grocery to splurge on a box of penny chicle.

  “I worked the nubs off my little fingers for wages
the coloreds laughed at, trundled out of bed at dawn like a filthy
sweep, blinking and looking for the life of me just as white and
hairless as a egg, a little eyesore in my mussed overhalls and my
sweater hind-side-to—so low I had to reach up to touch bottom—and
not a soul, but for mammy, who had a good word to say to me. But
you are what you are and you ain’t what you ain’t, right? We
thanked the good Lord, and thanked Him and how! Schoolrooms? Who
said anything about schoolrooms? Shoot, no one thought of them,
sir! Only thing I knew was my 15¢ Dicky Deadlight picture book—that
is, until mammy took me in tow to learn me my devotions and
reading. And if I didn’t oblige the dear thing? Why, she caned me
scarlet in the attic and set me to kneel on peppercorns for
punishment, and if you think that tickles! I want to tell you,
many’s the night—O, it seems like yesterday!—I sat up into the wee
hours in my ripped jim-jams, my eyes pinched tight from
candlesmoke, going over and over again the sentences in my
mustard-colored copy of Edward Clodd’s
Tom, Tit, Tot
. But,
dagnabbit, I got my sums, didn’t I? I got my Bible, didn’t I?”

  Greatracks rose up like a huge fat glyptodont,
capitalizing every word with his voice. He chop-gestured. He
beckoned to the ceiling. He took oaths and blew air and circled his
arms, all with a jumped-up and inquisitorious duncery that
thumbfumbled truth and opened up a museum of bygone pictorial
mediocrities which magnified puddles by rhetoric into blue fairy
lakes and fobbed off hawks for handsaws.

  “Now, I’m telling you all this for a mighty good
reason, girls—and paying it no mind, you’ll find me as unsociable a
creature as ever chawed gum, I guarandamntee you! At Quinsy College
here, it’s either fish or cut bait. Ain’t enough insurance in this
here world better than perspiration, which means nothin’ more than
good ol’ sweat to right-thinkin’ folks, which is just what you
better be aimin’ to be, hear? Yes? Then stand on it! I mean, I want
everybody—
evahbody
!—on automatic here! You mope. You get
bounced. You get up to tomfoolery. You gone tom-foolerize yourself
right out into the street, see?

  “Why, only last year, now to mention it, one of
those self-important little undergraduate cinderbritches with a
cheek rubied like a dang poppy pads into my office fixin’ to have
at me, see, stands there wheel-high to a rubbish truck, and then
comes out with, ‘I’m fed up with college!’ I remember standing
there amazed, thinking
what
the sam hill?
What the
tarnation hell
? O no. Said she was hangin’ it up. Said, shoot,
she couldn’t care a straw for book-learnin’, not me, no, I’m a big
shot—failin’ to realize, course, feelin’ sorry for herself and
walkin’ around on her lip, that what she really wanted was a 7 X 9
patch over her mouth! The poor little trapes, obviously humble of
brain, mistook college for the handball court or your Five County
Fair. I about died—
dahd
! Well, I read her the dang riot
act for starters and then helped her into tomorrow with a kick
strong enough to knock a billygoat off a gut-wagon! She spelled
college f-u-n, see, which is no kind of spelling at all. It’s
mis-spelling is what it is.
Mis
-dang-spelling! And if you
yourself ain’t wrapped too tight, I best remind you to prepare for
the same kind of treatment, girls, or there ain’t a hog in Georgia,
‘cause it’s only fifteen inches between a slap on the back and a
swift kick on the place you wear no hat!”