Read Online The Cockroaches of Stay More by Donald Harington - Free Book Online Page A

Carlott. The closeness of Him overwhelmed her, even more than His great size. Tish passed her sniffwhips slowly over the tip of His fingernail and attempted to identify the plethora of traces of all that Man had touched, scratched, tickled or tapped within the past several hours. This was the closest she had ever been to Man, and she had never approached any of the things He had touched, scratched, tickled or tapped, so she could not readily identify these strange new sensations on her sniffwhips. She was in total awe, but not in fear. Fear the Lord thy Man , she had heard, again and again, and yet she was not afraid of Him. As she moved closer to the tall grass into which His face was pressed, and then drew so close that the tips of her sniffwhips could touch the tips of His beard-whiskers, whatever fear or worship she was supposed to feel for Him was replaced by a sudden compassion, something she had no business feeling, as if she were better than Him, or more fortunate than Him, or at least much more sober than Him, or not smaller than Him at all but His own size. This would have amounted almost to blasphemous condescension had it not been a pure impulse of sympathy, without any vanity behind it.
    “Pore feller,” she said aloud, knowing He couldn’t hear her. “You’re just a critter, like me. Whatever’s troublin Ye aint all that different from the kinds of troubles I got. You git hungry too, don’t Ye? And You git sad too, I bet. And most of all, Man, You git lonely all the time.”
    Never mind that if He awakened, and had His gun, He would rapture her quicker than the wink of a stargazer. For this moment, Tish loved Him, and it was not the sort of love that all Crustians spoke of when they said, Love the Lord thy Man .
    Tish knew that the Fate-Thing was more powerful than Him, that He was under the dominion of the Fate-Thing just as much as she was. Did the Fate-Thing have a better name? Was its name “Sharon”? Had He been calling out to the Fate-Thing, Sharon? If Sharon was the name of the Fate-Thing, then Tish ought to address her prayers not to Man but to Sharon.
    Experimentally, Tish called out, as He had done, “SHARON!” Again she called, louder but questioningly, “SHAY-RONN?” But if that was the Fate-Thing’s name, it—or She—did not respond, any more than it—or She—had responded to the Lord Himself.
    Meditating on her walk homeward, Tish realized that perhaps “Sharon” was not the name of any Fate-Thing, but, rather, of the Woman who dwelt in Parthenon. Or perhaps the Woman was the Fate-Thing. Tish had had her very first glimpse of the Woman earlier tonight when the parade of maidens turned their train in the yard of Parthenon, that fabled house which was a private castle for the squires Ingledew. Although Tish had seen Squire Hank around the village often, she had never seen handsome Squire Sam, who, her friends told her, did not mix. Tish’s girlfriends were always having nightdreams in which they were endlessly noticed and courted by Squire Sam, like a commoner by a prince, and perhaps wedded by him and made into a princess and taken to live in his fabulous Clock. Tish could not even conceive of what a Clock looked like, although she heard it distantly every hour, and somehow she associated the sound it made, its chiming of “BUN,” “TART,” etc., with Squire Sam, as if in a sweet pealing voice he were calling out the times of night for her.
    These were the thoughts that filled her young head as she walked slowly homeward. As she neared the Dingletoon log, she heard certain rhythmic sounds which she recognized as her mother’s crooning to Tish’s infant siblings:
    “Joshua bless yore pitchy eyeses! And yore waxy cheekses! And yore cherry mouthses! And yore scraggly legses! And ever bitty bits of you’unses’ blessit bodies!”
    There were so many of them, in the several broods of Jack and Josie Dingletoon, including a freshly hatched litter of fifteen scarcely out of