Oxherding Tale Read online

  It was from Anna Polkinghorne.

  As I tore open the letter, Flo, lying down beside me, her knees drawn up, oozing her own fluids and mine, began to dry herself on the bedsheet. She ate off my plate. “That was downstairs on the dining room table, lover. What does Jonathan say?”

  “It’s from his wife.” My hands trembled so I could hardly read the letter for my shaking.

  Flo sat up. “What does she say?”

  “She’s sold half the slaves at Cripplegate to speculators.”

  Flo put down the sandwich. “Why?”

  My hand dropped over the bedside; I could not lift my head. “She doesn’t say. She tells me to stay here with you.”

  Flo laid her head sideways on one hand. “Is that so bad?”

  The letter was two weeks old. What had gone wrong? What about Minty? And my parents—were they among those sold? Her letter held no clue, no hint of their progress. They were property. Not people. At that instant something slammed dead center against my chest, from the inside; I sat bolt upright in bed.

  “What did I do?” Flo made a face. “Andrew, you’re acting introspective again. You’re no fun when you act introspective.”

  I told her I was stepping outside to relieve myself, but the fact was that, as soon as I dropped the letter and lay back, my heart clenched like a fist; when I focused consciously on the pain, the constrictions redoubled. If you have ever seen a man’s heart fail—his lips pulled back, belching whoops of pain and astonishment, spit flying everywhere, his blind fingers at his throat—you will understand my terror. Straightaway, I decided to see the Vet. I scuffed from the house to the stabling shed, one hand over my heart, fearing that if I brooded about this mystery at home, walked too fast, felt joy or anger too suddenly, belched or hiccoughed more than twice, I would suffer coronary arrest. From Leviathan’s stabling shed into a smear of odors—hay and horse manure—coming from Flo Hatfield’s barn. Outside, I saw a great war-horse with padded hooves. The pain forked up again: a flurry of birds (crows) in my chest.

  The Vet turned round as I entered. There was someone seated beside him in the darkness. “Oh my,” said Groll. “Oh my.” Recovering, he coughed to clear his throat. “Andrew,” he said, “this is Horace Bannon.”

  It was my first glimpse of the Soulcatcher. To some it may sound peculiar that—but wait; this had best commence a new chapter.

  V

  A NEW CHAPTER

  To some it may sound peculiar that I consulted the Vet for a serious medical problem. In the South before Surrender, men of color were treated, if treated at all, by the local veterinarian. He set slipped discs, served as a dentist, and, when I blundered into Dr. Groll’s workshop in the barn, was dressing one of Leviathan’s newly dead behind the strawcutter—a runaway hauled back by Horace Bannon—for burial. The boy’s hands and feet were tied. Hoping to identify him, I looked into his face. His face? He might have been anyone, given the decay, blisters, the green stains on his groin, gas ballooning his genitalia in a ghastly parody of eros. The Vet saw me wobble. He took my arm.

  “He escaped three days ago from the mine,” Groll said. “He was returned this evening by….” The Vet looked at the Soulcatcher, then dropped his eyes. “We should step outside.”

  “Ah was just gettin’ mah hat,” said Bannon.

  The Soulcatcher’s voice, I swear, was black. The kind of deepfried Mississippi Delta twang that magically turned floor into flow. Door into doe. Yet, this was the same man, now framed by lofts of hay and straw in Flo’s barn, cribs and bins for grain, that I’d seen months earlier in her yard—a manhunter, a great, slack-shouldered monster with a gray Cathedral beard, a racial mongrel, like most Americans, but the genetic mix in the Soulcatcher was graphic: a collage of features that forced me, as he labored toward the door, looking down at me steadily, the corners of his mouth curled up, to stare. Here the deltoid nose of a Wazimba, here a “snotcup” (so my stepmother called them) cut deeply above his lips, which were the sheerest line, a slash; here curly hair coarsely textured like my father’s; here heavily lidded eyes, one teal blue, one green beneath a low brow that bulged with veins. Two rifles were strapped on his saddle. And, more startling, his clothes were a cross between house—Rob Roy jeans, a redingote, cartridge belts, and Ivanhoe cap—and fields. I could not shake the feeling that Bannon was in masquerade, a slave who, for reasons too fantastic to guess, hunted slaves.

  “You favor somebody,” said Bannon. “Would yo father be an oxherd in Hodges? A George Hawkins?”

  “Nossir.” I stepped back. “My mother is Anna Polkinghorne.”

  He made a bow. All mockery. “Mah mistake, suh. Ah saw that resemblance, too—in the eyes—but Ah have heard in mah travels that the Polkinghorne’s were childless. Well, not quite childless. Ah heard,” he paused with one foot in the stirrup, “that Anna Polkinghorne had a son by this scalawag George Hawkins during a night of misunderstandin’s. These things interest me, you see, because one drop of black blood makes a Negro, and Negroes are mah trade.”

  “You have heard from Hodges?”

  “A slave uprisin’,” he said. “It was squelched the same day. You know how that is: a bondsman loses his temper—the oxherd in this case. He starts swingin’. Others pitch in. They burn their sheds. March on the House. A few are shot. Most sold.” Bannon turned his head to Groll. “You called him Andrew, didn’t you?”

  The Vet shrugged. “Did I?”

  “The oxherd Ah mentioned had a boy named Andrew.”

  “Stillbirth,” I said.

  Bannon pursed his lips. “Ah see. So you are the legitimate Polkinghorne heir? What might yo name be, son?”

  “It might be James.”

  “Well put,” the Soulcatcher slapped his knee—he was definitely enjoying himself. “And it might not be James, eh? You’s clever, ‘James,’” he said. “You’ll go far in this world.” His horse moved forward; on his saddle, Bannon turned halfway round to face me. His smile flashed again. “But let’s hope you’ll not go too far.”

  Having said his say, he left.

  “That man makes me nervous,” said the Vet. He shook his head. “You can’t trust anyone who makes his living repossessing stolen—or runaway—property.”

  “What about men who sell bogus burial policies?”

  The Vet frowned.

  “He was,” I asked, “one of Flo Hatfield’s lovers, wasn’t he?”

  “Horace Bannon?”

  “That boy in the barn!” I said. “Do you know his name?”

  “He’s no one now, Andrew.” The Vet watched Bannon’s horse canter away, then maneuvered: “On the market, he’s worth about ninety-five cents in chemicals—five pounds of minerals, one pound of carbohydrates, one-quarter ounce of vitamins, a few pounds of protein….”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  The Vet sighed, “His name is—was Moon.”

  So here was the boy who was replaced by Flo’s butler Patrick: pulped, reduced—in Nature’s grim perversion of democracy—to liquifying tissue, his head smashed like a melon, chest and belly splintered from gas building like boiler steam in his abdomen, his flesh the color of cooked veal—Patrick would be pleased. I was not pleased. Was this horror the coda of pleasure? There was, it seemed to me, something especially hideous in this end to enlightened hedonism, for the johnson (as we say—pronounced yawn-sun) of the lover expanded to Rabelaisian proportions, the testicles bloated bigger than coconuts, as if Death mocked a man’s single distinguishing feature by enlarging the genitals, exploded and powdered them green with breadmold: a nest for maggots.

  “Andrew?” asked the Vet, softly.

  I snapped back, sick, as if from a dream.

  “Yessir?”

  “Come outside.” He covered the body with tarpaulin. “You didn’t come here tonight for a chemistry lesson, did you?”

  To his credit, the Vet examined me and explained that since my arrival at Leviathan my heart had developed an extra sound: a sort of whisper,
or moan on the diastolic downbeat, which meant it never exactly rested now. Would never rest again, he said, “Unless you stop being a Negro.” Groll chuckled. “Internal medicine can’t help you there.” Politely, I laughed, but the last words of my father months before flashed through my mind: “You could pass, if you wanted to.” As the Vet thumped my chest, listening, I wondered if life would indeed be easier if I abandoned what appeared to be a no-win struggle for happiness in the Black World. You needed little more proof than I’d received to believe that this world was, had always been, and might ever be a slaughterhouse—a style of being characterized by stasis, denial, humiliation, thinghood, and, as the philosophers said, “relative being.” If you didn’t believe this—couldn’t see it—you had only to listen to Leviathan’s slaves who, late at night, each swapped tales no man in his right mind would laugh at, but we did—Negro humor was nothing if not a defense against hysteria. Yes, I could turn my back on Cripplegate’s bondsmen—circumstance had scattered them like seeds—but how could I leave my only friend on Flo Hatfield’s estate: the Coffinmaker?

  “There’s nothing I can do to control my heart?”

  “One thing maybe.”

  The Vet stepped back into the shadows, fumbling through papers near his bunk. “If you had life-assurance, your heart might return to normal.” He handed me a sheet of paper. “Does Flo Hatfield pay you a wage—give you something now and then?”

  “She owes me,” I said, sourly, “a year in back wages.”

  “Well,” said Groll, “if you are willing to pay, and engage in a scientific experiment, I might be able to provide you with a life-affirmative vision.”

  “What kind of experiment?”

  “Mental Healing through Animal Magnetism. As a medical technique, it’s new,” he said, “still in the hands of fools and faith healers, but its principles are ancient. In Robert Fludd’s Philosophia Moysaica and Maxwell’s treatise De Mecina Magnetica, both propose that all creatures have their own heaven—or harmony—within them, which corresponds to the harmony of the universe. Fludd and Maxwell supposed sick persons have wandered, as it were, from the motions of the universe.”

  “How,” I asked; “can a man stop wandering?”

  “You need an unshakable faith—fiction or fact, it makes no difference, a life-assurance that will place everything in proportion, including evil.” The Vet jabbed the air with one finger. “Especially evil. I’ve listed several on that paper.”

  I unfolded the page he’d given me. Depending upon your ability to pay, Leviathan’s veterinarian offered a series of values that brought a man peace. These he ranked according to price. They included: (1) The faith that someday you would be honored by your community for your contributions, $100. (2) That, if not honored, your children would one day regard you as a source of inspiration, $75.00. (3) If neither of the above, you would enjoy the benefits of a good marriage, a little property, and pride in your work, $50.00. (4) If none of these, then you would enjoy all the above, plus life-everlasting, in the afterworld, $25.00. (5) If none of the above, you would, at least, die mercifully in your sleep, $5.00.

  “The last policy is, lately, our most popular,” said Groll. “You have only to select a hope. Through the techniques of Friedrich Mesmer, it will seem apodictic.”

  “That’s wicked!” I shouted. “They’re all lies!”

  The Vet nodded, sadly, in agreement. “What value isn’t?”

  I took Groll’s proposed life-assurances with me and sat on Flo Hatfield’s steps, though I still believed these assurances were evil. There had to be, as my tutor hoped, a value greater than the flimsy lies peddled by the Vet—so I reasoned—greater than the deadend, wheel-spinning life of desire I shared with Flo Hatfield: a male fantasy, I realized, with both Flo and me victims enslaved to an experience—a part of the masculine ego—that neither of us truly wanted. What this new value was, I did not know. And, when she heard me, I had no time to brood on it, for Flo stepped outside.

  “Andrew?” She sat down beside me, wearing her trollopee. “Where have you been? I needed you.”

  “Tell me about Moon,” I said.

  Flo played with my hair. “He doesn’t concern you.”

  “We have to settle something,” I said. “I’ve been here a year now….”

  “It’s been a wonderful year. I think you’re the one, Andrew.”

  “The one what?”

  Playfully, she gave me a push back against the stairs. “The one I’ve waited for, silly.” And then she said, quickly, as if saying this was admitting defeat:

  “I love you.”

  For a moment I said nothing. That such a woman could love me seemed impossible. She was my superior in so many things, my teacher, the kind of woman men pulled knives and killed over. But Flo Hatfield was in bondage. I said, “We must settle my wages.”

  “Andrew, I never pay for it.”

  (A man would put it that way. She was the creature of men; she was me.)

  “Ma’am,” I shifted on the stairs, “I came here to earn enough to buy my freedom. That’s all changed now. Everything has changed. I don’t know what to do, but if you’ll at least pay me in part what I have coming, then….”

  “We’ll have no more vulgar talk about money,” she said. “You’re tired.” She took both my hands, then led me into her boudoir. “And you don’t look well, lover. Let me fix you something.”

  Except for a single candle, her boudoir was dark. Flo walked barefoot across the room, gliding like a spirit with feet spun from air, and opened a small, painted box on her wigstand. From this she carefully pinched a goodly measure of powder. With a writing quill she lined the powder into six rails, or columns, about five inches long, then handed me the hollow reed she also kept on the wigstand. “Here,” she said, “this will relax you.”

  It was not in my power to refuse.

  It did not seem in my power to do anything since I could not return to Hodges. My mistress waited. I breathed in my portion, sneezed (grabbing my heart), and, as I wiped white circles off my nose, Flo opened her cabinet and removed a decanter of wine, which she carried upstairs to her bedroom. There, she closed the door, ran a comb through her hair, closed her eyes, then lifted her arms, her wrists crossed above her head so I could undress her. She had early established this prelude to our lovemaking, this circling round (for me) the object of pleasure, and I must confess that I enjoyed it—she knew I would enjoy it—there being, paradoxically, something of the pursuit of truth in a good lay, an epistemological edge in exposing a woman stitch by stitch to the lamplight, as if knowledge had an affective tone (Begriffsgefü), was somehow delicious, and the lover as sincere a seeker after wisdom as any physicist.

  Well.

  This practice my mistress taught me, but the confluence of opium and wine in my bloodstream, Anna’s letter and Groll’s cynicism, to say nothing of the dead boy and the Soulcatcher I’d seen made me edgy and impatient. Beside her, I said, “Even if you pay me only half my year’s wages, I’ll have enough to buy my freedom papers.”

  “You’re hurting me, Andrew!” She said, “Be gentle.”

  I swallowed.

  “I hate to talk wages at a time like this….”

  “Then don’t talk wages!” Pushing my hands away, she exhaled heavily. “Andrew, you’re spoiling everything. Just get it over with.”

  As I mounted her, I felt dizzy, a blur of disorientation, and to center myself I tried to reconstruct Minty’s face from memory, only to find that I’d forgotten certain features—her skin, nose, and I could not remember her ears. How could I forget the ears of the first woman I’d ever loved? Vertigo washed over me. The chandoo played hob with my sense of touch. Then Flo began to rub against me in a raw, hard way. It was, I thought, like using me as a kind of scratching post. What this action said was: What good are you? You have failed to rouse me. Be still while I satisfy myself. And ever she did this the pain was quick, the insult deep, the self-hatred more complete, and I did not, as she worked toward d
etumescence, truly exist. Suddenly, I wanted to hurt her. My fist shot up without telling my brain what it had in mind—these things happen—then smashed five times, straight from the shoulder, into Flo Hatfield’s nose, which flattened like soft clay—I watched all this in a daze, distant—and the next thing I knew I was standing across the room, wringing my hands.

  My knees banged together.

  “I didn’t mean that!”

  My mistress held both her hands to her nose. Blood spilled like liquid light through her fingers.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Get me something to catch this, Andrew.”

  I took a step toward her; a step back. I fisted myself on the head. “Something came over me!”

  “Will you get me a cloth, Andrew?”

  I threw Flo her trollopee.

  “It’s been a terrible day!” I said. My hands flew, then froze. “You know I’d never do anything like that if I was in my right mind.”

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t.”

  “You must hate me.”

  “I don’t feel anything at all for you, Andrew Hawkins.”

  She was as calm, her voice as cold as when discussing the weather. Thinking this a good sign—better than rage—I came closer to examine the damage, and Flo gave me a glacial look and hissed, “Stay on that side of the room, Andrew. Are all your clothes in the next room?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then,” she said, “it might be best for you to gather them up and move to the quarters until you feel better.”

  “Oh, I feel fine now.”

  Flo Hatfield, pinching the bridge of her nose, left the room. Her leaving had the feel of a death sentence—it was indeed a foretaste of a death sentence. But believing her anger might blow over, I packed my things and moved in with the Coffinmaker.

  “You did what?” asked Reb.

  I told him again.

  “You goin’ to the gallows, Freshmeat.” The Coffinmaker pulled up his blanket and rolled over, his crinkly hair mashed against his head from sleeping on his side. “And you a fool. I make it a practice never to talk to fools befo’ breakfast.” Helplessly, I waited beside my heavy portmanteau—it was crammed with gifts she’d given me—still unsteady from the chemicals in my system. I shook his shoulder.