Darconville's Cat Read Online Free PDF Page A

enthusiasm for church bake-offs, barbershop gossip, and all
that hand-me-down bumpkinry touching on Bryanism, vice-crusading,
and prohibition. It was a town nonascriptive, nonchalant, and
nonentitative, one of those places that lent itself to uneasy jokes
or gave rise to dismissive quips, like “I spent a whole week there
one Sunday” or “It’d be a great place to live if you were dead” or
“I visited there once, but it was closed.”
      “Look,” pointed Miss Trappe, coming to a halt. “I
never see him without thinking, for some reason, of my father.” The
statue of a sinople-green Confederate soldier, so common in
Southern communities, stood above them on a granite pediment,
surrounded by cannonballs, with a dapper Van Dyke beard, a
bandolier, a rifle-at-the-ready, and a chivalric squint into the
heart of the legitimacy of states’ rights, honoring those who
died—so read the inscription—”in a just and holy cause.” He was the
Defender of State Sovereignty. He stood there in all weather,
unphased by birdlime or pigeons. He never flinched. “My father left
us, you know. I was only a child, but almost died of shame. Oh yes,
but that was long ago, and, besides,” she sighed, “that, as they
say, was in another country.”
      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