Darconville's Cat Read Online Free PDF

the one,
for instance, that doesn’t have a radio announcer named Don Dale; a
private white academy; Muddy Creek; a chili-dog emporium; the State
theatre; Jaycees with berry-knotted ties; a sheriff called
“Goober”; something like the ol’ Shuckcorn Place (it’s always
supposed to be haunted by J. E. B. Stuart); a popular delivery
boy-cum-halfwit named Willis Foster; and a local NRA enclave that
meets upstairs in the gunshop every Friday night to tell lies and
make up stories about niggers, nymphomania, and New York City?
      Darconville and Miss Trappe took time for tea at the
Seldom Inn (“A Place to Remember for Cares to Forget”)—a popular
meeting place downtown for the professional tie-and-jacket faction
(booths) who rotated matchbooks and told loud interminable tales
and various peckerwoods (stools) who gripcruppered their coffee
cups from the non-handle side and stared into a stippled
wall-mirror at their chinless faces and pointed ears. The jukebox
was blaring country music— Kitty Wells, “Honky Tonk Angels”—making
it impossible to talk, so Darconville and Miss Trappe together
watched through the window as the Quinsyburg townsfolk passed by,
peculiar people on the hop, remarkably alike all, with faces like
the trolls on German beer mugs, the curious result, perhaps, of
poultry-like inbreeding (farmers, farmers’ daughters, farmers’
daughters’ farmers) that had transmogrified a once vital
eighteenth-century Protestant Celtic stock into a hedgecreeping
lower-class breed of joltheads and jusqu’ aubouts and then
metastasized into one huge gene pool which seemed to reach from the
bulletheaded truckers of Mississippi to the triple-named senators
of Virginia, slackjawed and malplasmic to a one. It seemed an orgy
of kin, with everybody anybody’s cousin.
      It was a burlesque subordinating individuality to a
constant reference of type.
Quaeritis habitantes
?
Rotarians; wood-hewing gibeonites; 32° Masons and their ball-jars;
pushing tradesmen; zelators and zélatrices; Odd Fellows of
indecipherable worth; Hemerobaptists; racist Elks (B!P!O.E.) and
their shovelmouthed wives, usually named Lorinda or Moxone;
psalm-snufflers; longnosed umbrella-carrying joykillers; widows
with applepandowdy faces; Volsteaders; rattle-toothed almsters;
gout-footed Shriners; tiny birdheaded clerks in red suspenders;
supposititious chamberers of commerce; pullulating boosters; and
cretinous, peasant-like Colin Clouts on every street corner who
slunched against poles squinting and chewing down toothpicks in a
slow watchful rhythm.
      Growing depressed, Miss Trappe suggested she resume
showing Darconville the town she simultaneously warned him against,
arguing, convincingly, that a writer in staying too long would go
mad there. The suicide rate in Quinsyburg, she said, was—she
stopped and, in the reflection of a window, retied under her chin
the wide straw hat.
      “High?”
      The crabapple wrinkled. “Astronomical.”
      I will stay here for only a year, thought
Darconville, and try to do my work. He told Miss Trappe he’d take
the chance, but she told him that Mrs. Battle said chance is
nothing. And yet, he reasoned, wasn’t the price for privacy
anonymity?
Un altro, un altro, gran’ Dio, ma più
forte
.
      They now stood in front of the Wyanoid Baptist
Church, a plain white affair with the usual homiletic menu out
front and at the peak of its steeple, spiritual guerdon to a whole
community, a weathervane in the shape of a metal cricket (has
anyone ever figured that one out?).
      Quinsyburg, Va. was one of those places where pulpit
and drum ecclesiastick were beat with a fist instead of a stick,
and whatever the persuasion—whether Wycliffites, Old Order Bunkers,
Stundo-Baptists, or the International Church of the Foursquare
Gospel— religion was religion as long as it had been scoured of any
whim or wishet that flirted with Rome or ritual or racial equality.
It was, in fact, a reactionary little