Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

The roadhouse was like all others in the South. The pattern never varies. A crusty exhaust-fan, wafting out the bacon smoke, whines in a high pigeon-flecked window. In a cubby-like pantry off at one end slouches the plongeur —a bindlestiff, working his way down to Chattanooga or Mobile, in a paper hat, ripped T-shirt, and apron tied gracelessly low — who has his mouth pursed to a perpetual whistle (nothing ever comes out) and is dunking in and out of the cold, soap-less water thick white cups and bowls washed over the years almost to fossils. The owner, of course, works the grill, clarifying his drippings and juicing alive the comestibles — fat snaps, grease cracks, oil spats— but he’s a windmill of efficiency, jackflipping burgers, whiffling batter, and sieving oil out of the fries, his ear professionally cocked to the laconic input of orders barked by the waitress, his perspiring eye on the dusty moon of the clock on the flame-scorched ceiling above him, next to that pair of antlers you love, and the calendar printed up by the local dairymen’s association showing in front of a red barn a freckled girl-child in pigtails and overalls hugging a cow, its caption reading, “Let’s Bring the Curtain Down on Mastitis.”

That tone held here. There was one addition, however — an unpredictable variant — on a side-wall by the door. It was a framed photograph, frilled around in the crushed bunting of the Stars ‘n’ Bars, of a group of thirty or so country jakes in string ties, identified collectively on a plaque underneath as “Knights of the Great Forrest.” Darconville, always curious, wondered who they were. The Prophets of Zwickau? Contra-Remonstrants of the Old Dominion? The Second Synod of Dort? “Bunkum,” he demoted.

Darconville took Isabel’s hands on the table and smiled, for he saw she was justifiably uneasy about the place. He wanted to avoid saying something from the it’s-important-that-you-understand-that-you-must-trust-me-if-you-want-me-to-help-you school but, as she seemed distraught, he gave her full attention. This , she said, peeping her eyes sideways and lowering her head, was exactly what she wanted to avoid in her life. Please, said Darconville. No, she said, her eyes filming over, she meant it, really, she meant it. And then out of the blue, for the first time, she explained — her heart now a hotpond of regrets — how she’d grown up in the midst of such, such — she fought for words—

“Lower-class— things !” she whispered hoarsely. Isabel thrust out her underlip, blew up at her hair, and then told Darconville in language a shade too vehement how, how, how weak, really weak , her mother was, although she loved her, naturally, who wouldn’t love their own mother? O, said Isabel, couldn’t he see ? She bemoaned the fact that her mother rattled dishes in the sink early in the morning, that she drank too much, that she mispronounced words, and on and on. Why, her uncle never even flushed the toilet after using it! They were poor, uneducated, didn’t even talk right!

Darconville listened to her, who seemed now so out of charity with almost everything, as if all joy had suddenly passed out of the world, as if God, and simultaneously with Him all creation, had suddenly bowled up on the horizon, angry, revengeful, and cruel. Isabel had a woman’s worries, but the child lingered on in her complexion and in the sweetness of her mouth. Apparently, for Isabel, her mother’s failed marriage was a crushing blow — her thunderbolt, her Stotternheim— which dropped her into such darkness of soul that she saw herself doomed. No, she didn’t hate her uncle; see, it was what he represented . And what was that? How, Isabel fell to an even lower whisper, how could she know where to begin?

Poor simple voice, thought Darconville, she fails, and failing grieves, and grieving dies; she dies — and leaves her life the victor’s prize, falling upon his lute. O fit to have, that lived so sweetly, dead, so sweet a grave.

The confession was diffident, scrambled, and unclear. Darconville, however, pieced together what he could: Isabel’s mother worked in Charlottesville, the source, she granted, along with her uncle’s job in a local parts factory, of her college tuition, but on weekends, apparently, both of them were foolishly given to inviting pig-ignorant loons and locals over to their house for potlatches of excessive drinking, loud music, card playing, and — with Isabel sitting quietly in her bedroom absolutely mortified — frivolous and nearly insane displays of laughter and vulgarity that lasted into the wee hours of the morning. O yes, said Isabel ruefully, she owed a great deal to them, it was true, but nevertheless she still resented them and the desperateness in her they wouldn’t, couldn’t , even recognize! Why, her mother, added Isabel, the scar on her cheek whitening, her mother even considered her to be a snob for placing herself above the neighbors. Neighbors? asked Isabel with fire, metonym of war, in her eyes. Neighbors ?

Silently, Darconville listened to her descriptions of them — I shall never have any trouble from her neighbors, he felt — and, looking around him, ironically discovered there in that very roadhouse the perfect illustrations of her running text.

On the long row of stools by the counter and in the booths sat old whiskerandos blowing their whit-flawed fingers; baleful giants with narrow eyes and unijugate ears; a cowboy out of nowhere; interstate truckers with pussle-bellied paunches and split shoes; tiny women wearing baseball caps; and in general an entire assortment of culex-ridden farmers, bust-hogs, and chawbacons, most banging in and out for coffee, some doped from stupidity into motionlessness, and others synoptically eyeing the waitress and making gawky, insinuative reverences whenever she bent over to flap away the pack of cats snooping the local accumulations on the floor and anybody’s inflamed feet.

The patrons ranged over their plates like nimble spaniels, each using his primary utensil — an aggressive fork, pointed down — to cut, saw, shear, shape, and worry around his food. They buttered their bread in the air, folded it, and held it out, bitten in gouges. They shook salt onto the counter by their plates, dropped sops into their gravy, slurped soup from the front of their spoons. They masticated, smacking, with open mouths. They ate asparagus and celery by the fist, spat out the hulls of peanuts, and twitched bones onto the table or cracked them for marrow at the back of their teeth. They tongued icecubes, while talking and grunting, from glasses stippled white with lip-prints and drank with their spoons in their cups, elevating the vessels as if, rather than drinking, they were trying to stand them inverted on their noses. Finishing their meals, they tipped up their plates for any spilled chankings, fingered up any, and then, burping, banged down a few coins, shoved backwards from the counter — pausing maybe to catch on the jukebox the last clanging, twanging offerings about store-brought happiness, careless love, and women either living on the cheat-in’ side of life and/or takin’ their love to town — and went out. You were looking for the overture to Xerxes ? This was the Vale of Tempe?

O Fawx’s Mt., Fawx’s Mt.! thought Darconville. Behold, your house is forsaken and desolate.

“You see? What it’s like? I don’t know what I’d do” cried Isabel, her hands beseech-side up, “if I hadn’t found you — be thrown to the wolves, I suspect, I really do. I don’t think I can live here another day. I have nothing.” Darconville heard in her words the locutions of her mother. He didn’t know what to say in response, but he who at one clap would have summoned from above all the Angels of the Triplicities to help her knew it fell to him alone. The prospect frankly delighted him, for he loved her, although in that, he feared, perhaps he wasn’t alone. “I have only the woods and fields,” she said with a forlorn look. She pulled her thumb. “And animals.”