Darconville's Cat by Alexander Theroux Read Free Book Online

Otherwise Didn’t Deserve
      and Deteriorate Utterly?
     
     
      Ample.
     
     
     
     
      VI
     
      President Greatracks Delivers
     
     
      “He hath builded towers of superarrogation in his
owne head.”
            —Gabriel Harvey,
Pierces Supererogation
     
     
      “College! There’s a little word for you, dear girls,
college
: neatly pronounced, pronounced as spelt, and
correctly spelt s-a-c-r-i-f-i-c-e—the battle cry of the United
States of God Bless America! And who’s telling y’all this, some
up-spoutin’ no account dingdong in a string tie pointing his head
out in the direction of his face and looking for to impress you?
Exactly wrong! It’s a man who knows what sacrifice means, and
costs! Now, button back your ears, little cousins, for I only aim
to say it once—I know all the tricks, every last one of them, and
unless someone out there can tell me how a brown cow can eat green
grass, give white milk, and make yellow butter, she best just sit
down tight and listen, OK? I been evywhere but the moon and seen
evything but the wind. I been to the edge of the world and looked
over. I mean, I can fight, shout, win, lose, draw, turn on a dime,
and meet you coming back for change, you hear? Good, now you mark
time on that and we gone get somewhere.”
     
      IT WAS PRESIDENT GREATRACKS, the college headmaster,
a man fat as a Fugger: a bun, a ham, a burgher. He was a charming
and resourceful academic illiterate, politically appointed, his
brain a
pot-au-feu
of boomism, bad grammar, and prejudice,
his face very like that of the legendary Leucrota whose mouth
opened as far as its ears. The school auditorium was decked out for
the opening assembly, with all eyes fixed on the keynote speaker.
He showed the conviction of a roundhead, and, having traversed the
dais with an oafish and peasant-like lumber that betrayed his
grim-the-collier background, he bulked now over the lectern around
which had been slung a banner lettered in blue and white
     
                QUINSY
               WELCOMES
                 YOU
     
      and then hamfistedly fussbudgeted back and forth in
a suit the color of sea-fowl guano, wagging a finger like Elijah
the Tishbite and trooping out his dockets, posits, and quiddits
like a costermonger his pippins.
     
      “When I was a little wagpasty of a lad back in Free
Union, Va. in them days of the Depression, which you wouldn’t know
about, my tiny ol’ mammy wore galoshes, used thorns for fishhooks,
and buck-washed me in a hopper. We were so poor we couldn’t even
pay attention, and it was a dang holiday, nothin’ else, just to go
and play stoopball with the swivel-eyed halfwit next door or hop
along down to the grocery to splurge on a box of penny chicle.
      “I worked the nubs off my little fingers for wages
the coloreds laughed at, trundled out of bed at dawn like a filthy
sweep, blinking and looking for the life of me just as white and
hairless as a egg, a little eyesore in my mussed overhalls and my
sweater hind-side-to—so low I had to reach up to touch bottom—and
not a soul, but for mammy, who had a good word to say to me. But
you are what you are and you ain’t what you ain’t, right? We
thanked the good Lord, and thanked Him and how! Schoolrooms? Who
said anything about schoolrooms? Shoot, no one thought of them,
sir! Only thing I knew was my 15¢ Dicky Deadlight picture book—that
is, until mammy took me in tow to learn me my devotions and
reading. And if I didn’t oblige the dear thing? Why, she caned me
scarlet in the attic and set me to kneel on peppercorns for
punishment, and if you think that tickles! I want to tell you,
many’s the night—O, it seems like yesterday!—I sat up into the wee
hours in my ripped jim-jams, my eyes pinched tight from
candlesmoke, going over and over again the sentences in my
mustard-colored copy of Edward Clodd’s
Tom, Tit, Tot
. But,
dagnabbit, I got my sums, didn’t I? I got my