Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

The Americanistic pitch, of course, was old hat on the Bible circuit, as were subterranean virility fears common, the latter always animating the former in the extra-defensive and recurrent dream of the evangelist in which he sees himself, in full color and cinemascope, a lantern-jawed begrenaded U. S. Marine leaping out of a trench to beat the living shit out of the Devil who, widespread was the assumption, wore perfume, spoke Russian, and carried a purse.

“I must have your attention now, Lies and German”—it was the mannerbereft in the string-tie again, raising his eyes like Enoch Translated—”for to welcome the shepherd of you sheep, God’s chosen minister and,” he winked cutely, “the best li’l oP buddy around — Dr. W. C. Cloogy!”

The star appeared in the east wing. And then he rumbled out, threw out his arms, and drew a bead directly on the ceiling overhead.

“The text for today, brothers and sisters, is: ‘ Why do you boast of your valleys, O faithless daughter ?’ Jeremiah 49:4.”

Everyone crouched.

“Sex! I’m puttin’ in here today to talk to you about sex! Utter that blackest of words, neighbors, speak its two little syllables compared to which, dear, dear brethren, nothin’ll give you the fantods quicker, hear? It’s been the world’s favorite word since tune began, from Lot’s wife to Pharaoh to the Queen of Sheeby, and yet as I speak I know full certain that half of you sorry pieces of plunder ain’t in no more mood to give it up than to cross the Rivanna River in a hollow tooth! The Lord axin’ you to be pure of flesh was axin’ back small change on the dollar, see, but what? You smug as barncats, huh? Actin’ like Nebuckadunsaw, right? Givin’ in to your cravin’s? Don’t look around! I talkin’ to you, not someotherbody ! I talkin’ to you out there, all stinking feathers and no hat, who say ‘I’m mone live forever!’ who say ‘Not me!’ who say ‘Bull!’ until you wake up one day to find the Devil hoppin’ on you like a duck on a June bug, OK? Eyes closed, ears deef, lips silent, fanny stopped up, yes, yes, yes! O God, help! O God, rescue! O God, I seen it all before!”

The Rev. W. C. Cloogy, Doctor Fundatus , took his mumping cant right to the lip of the stage. There was about his face a more than passing resemblance to Ulrich Zwingli: a nose like a doorknob, round and brassy, poked out of an odd rutabaga-shaped head, while under his hooded eyelids two distrustful eyes constantly shifted back and forth black and snapping like a jackdaw’s. Farcically he jigged in his smoldering clothes, flaring his nose, thrashing the language in accents penacute and rude, and, with deep and ominous wefts of breath, sidling up toward the congregation in jits. The Abbot of Unreason was loose.

“Mo-tels! Pa’back books! Sippin’-liquor! Goosedown pillows! Supposed hayrides! Men in bulgin’ pants from magazines! Girlies with eyelashes like dang rakes! Profanity, that’s how I pronounce it! But shall I put you in the picture, friend? Ain’t never been a soul tumblin’ through them Gates of Eternity but wadn’t first a li’l heap of trash, born in shame, and set on magnetic north to grab at every pair of glands in sight, pawin’ flesh and doin’ like hawgs ! You proud of it? You aim to be just another one of these crapmouses? That what I get for confabulatin’ with y’all up here every Sunday of a morning? No? Well, you best get saved , boy, Ephesians 2:2 , or don’t come runnin’ to me, ‘cause ain’t nobody nohow better plan on eatin’ fish muddle n’ shoe-fly pie forever, clear? You vaporin’ with the Lord, you and you? And plannin’ on gettin’ away with it? Why, you gonna get jerked up, every last one of you! The wages of sin is death! The wages of sin, don’t bet your chewing gum otherwise, is that you gonna die, die, die, die, you with me? Everything from figpecker to philosopher gonna dah! Hosea 9:7. Why, on the Day of the Great Dividin’, Jack, you’ll be pawnin’ your crisping pins, big-city suits, mantles, fancy duded-up hats, and you name what-all from the Montgomery Ward, Habakkuk 3:7 , and why, you ask? Go no farther’n here, I’ll tell you, why just to buy your greedy profane little self one minute from Hell’s black flames which can burn, sear, blister, spit, bubble, and boil, but too late, you dracs and sorcerers and fornicators, because by then the fahrenheit will have shot through the nipple of the thermometer like you wouldn’t believe and be scorchin’ out your spatchcock and gizzards, which’ll be a thousand times worse if you took liquor ‘cause that catches ! And do you think the Lord is gonna care two diddlies if you fry— frah ! — wipin’ hellsmoke out of your eyes and dobbin’ your body with ashes to dink the heat? Not if you ain’t willin’ to walk down Redemption Avenue! Not if you sloppy-kissin’ the foot of Pharaoh! Not if you ain’t right with Him —but that’s either here or there, ain’t it, ‘cause if you was right with Him, you things of Gomorrah, you’d-a not been there in the first damn place!”

Darconville couldn’t believe it. He looked about him. It was a limbus fatuus of devotees: old horsefaced ladies in absurd hats; various paralytici; hominids and monorhines; dishlicking Hutterites; tobacco farmers, their necks cracked and veneered by sun and wind; goosecaps with bowl haircuts; crofters and their wives, both with toothless Punch-and-Judy profiles; and, of course, the little foxes who spoil the vines, little teratogenic kids with wide mouths, round simpleton faces, and water-parted hair. And naturally there were those two bedizened women-in-orchids (there always are) sitting together and complaining they couldn’t hear a thing. Most of the people, stiff as pipes, sat non-introspectively upright with the orthodox stares of faces on church windows, but others, perhaps reaffirming the idea that the human mind is more easily unhinged in matters of divinity than anything else, began jerking back and forth like woodpeckers. A few wept. And one or two tremebundi were knotted up in prayer, like frogs poised for a jump. There was the sprawler, the huncher, the croucher, the percher, the squatter, and one lady, either daft or in the “rapture” —the boundaries touch — was coiled around herself in a side-aisle and flapping in an arc de cercle , the characteristic posture of the hysteric.

Cloogy the concionator, meanwhile, saw he had them where he wanted them, mustn’t lose them, and so wanned to the task, a hot scaldabanco now cuffing his assailant’s shadow on the wall, wringing his fingers, and verjuicing his sermon with every fright he could, he spit his wrath and spanked the vices of his age without a break or breath.

“I seen the end and the beginning! I seen fallen women, painted up like baboons, who could sweet-talk a cat into a doghouse and, hopin’ to God never to see more, sportin’ men in zoot suits shagging them at the dance hall. But what really cracks my acorns is to see young folks leavin’ their little truck patches nowadays just to go mousin’ around the city with cigarettes like the ten-horned fiends of Revelations, and for what? — sexual monkeyshines ! Misfits, that’s all! Misfits and compost-sniffin’ neathogs who don’t give a pin’s fee or a penny for the Lord Jesus, born in the winter of the year i, died in the spring of 33! Joshua ben Joseph they called Him back then, bein’ Jews of course and too blamebusted ee-literate to ascertain He was callin’ Hisself by the name of Jesus, El Shaddai if you want to be fancy, which I don’t! ‘Course, I know nothin’, you know it all, huh? So go ahead, smoke yourself into fidgets! Coat your belly with the devil’s drink! Fashion yourself out as friends of pope-worshippers and fai -ries! Pinch up your waist in calico, half nekkid, and take your love to town under them bright city lights and honky-tonks, Sirach 34:4 ! But put you in mind, you nasty little trapes, come the last trump of thunder — O mercy, mercy on your souls! — you’ll have no wheel to spin, no loom on which to weave, no sickle to harvest with, no well-sweep to draw up precious water! And then what a scouring! What an upturnin’! Lordy, what a dee-molition!”