Darconville's Cat Read Online Free PDF Page B

town filled with stiff-nosed
Galatians, circuit-riders, and reformers with upsidedown bibles,
all looking up hill and down dale for a chance to save someone’s
soul. The place teemed with Presbyters Writ Large, and on every
Sunday this very church, become a hotbed of tracasseries and
dissent, swelled to overflowing with singing, ringing wonglers,
diehards from the U.D.C. looking for fellowship, and hundreds of
bag-in-hand geriatrics with voices like hoopoes who preferred their
theology muscular, their ministers mousy, and their church quite
definitely in the majority.
      Darconville bent forward to read the little
marquee—and cocked an eyebrow. It read:
     
                Sermon
        ”Did God Wink?” (Acts 17:30)
      W. C. Cloogy, Pastor and Evangelist
          Wyanoid Baptist Church
            Bethel of
Blessings
     
      God help us, thought Darconville, who quite frankly,
if somewhat surprisingly, had yet to be convinced that the Edict of
Nantes hadn’t perhaps caused more trouble on earth than original
sin.
      Darconville and Miss Trappe hadn’t gone two feet
when a woman came suddenly shooting out of the side-door of the
church. She looked like the wife of a manciple, frazzled, with
shocked eyes. Clutching a fistful of pamphlets, she identified
herself as an evangelist’s helper and quickly began batsqueaking
about God’s love, in support of which topic she swiftly presented
to each one of her little tracts: “Crumbs from My Table” by W. C.
Cloogy, Evangelist. As all three stood there, two bewildered, the
third—intense with eyeshine—spontaneously improvised a wee
sermonette on The Deluge, she playing Noah, her voice the animals
it knew, and the air was soon filled with a most ingenious array of
barks, oinks, croaks, snarls, cheeps, and moos, all articulating
the same curious complaint, that this world was too corrupt and
wretched to live in, the unavoidable implication of which seemed to
be that the lesser creatures of this earth shared, if not the same
size or shape, then at least the same agony and accent. And when,
she asked, would they make their assent to faith? Did they know
Jesus for their personal savior? Were they willing to be born
again?
      And, pray, were they in need of revival?
      
Revival
? The word sprouted a capital
letter. It was bad enough, thought Darconville, to suggest anything
to perfect strangers, but to dare to suggest one of those punk
kick-ups and premillennial antihomologoumena? He had a sudden
vision of all those bible-thumping wompsters, unscrupulous
sharpers, and pigeon-faced decretalicides who, having weaseled into
the narrow existentialate of the American South, had for so long
impunitively burked reason, honesty, and truth and set up false
gods to whom, like rats toward platters of meazled pork, the
illiterate
faex populi
had swarmed only to be bilked,
beggared, and buccaneered right on the spot. Was that religion?
Miss Trappe, agreeing, said she would rather take her own life—at
least that way, she added, she would not need to be scared anymore
about what would happen if she didn’t. They walked away in
silence.
      Then Miss Trappe adjusted her spectacles, waited
until her optic axes grew coincident, and took one last painful
look to the far end of Main St. She shook her head.
      “You know,” she said, “a thought just crossed my
feeble old mind, dear.”
      “Yes?”
      “Well,” offered Miss Trappe, “the act of committing
suicide may be very easy.”
      Darconville gently took her arm.
      “When you do it,” she said, shrugging and looking up
at him with eyes pale as air, “just simply pretend it isn’t
you!”
      There was nothing Darconville could find to say,
search his heart though he might. They slipped behind the
courthouse and walked through an alley past the Quinsyburg jail
where, high above their heads, they both noticed a series of black
fists gripping the bars of the grills. A lonesome song