Oxherding Tale Read online

  “She loves me—it was a lover’s quarrel,” I told him. “These things straighten themselves out, don’t they?”

  “Where you been, boy?” Reb cackled. “On the moon? You didn’t hit yo mistress. You hit yo master two seconds befo’ she got her cookies. Think about that.”

  I didn’t want to think about it.

  He rolled over again, so huge his legs hung over his pallet. Waiting, I watched him curl up, then stretch like a bear in an effort to get comfortable again, trying this side, then that, and, finally, he sat up on one balustrade-thick arm and rubbed his face. Crabby, he fixed me through two bloodshot eyes.

  “Just what the hell you want me to do?”

  “Go to her house,” I said. “Tell Flo I’m sorry.”

  “Be yo lawyer, huhn?”

  “Reb,” I said, “I’m in trouble.”

  “You stay in trouble, Freshmeat. That’s yo nature. You think too damn much. You think too deep. You think yoself into corners. All them high-priced books and expensive ideas—they what gets you in trouble! Even if you’d never seen Flo Hatfield, even if you was white, you’d still be in trouble.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I know so.”

  Grumbling, he swung two shovel-sized feet, without the slightest arch, to the floor, pulled on his shirt (he slept in his trousers), then stepped outside into the weeds, passed water, and made his way, moving so slowly you’d have thought he regulated each breath as he walked, to the Big House.

  Note well, I did not truly understand the Coffinmaker, but I trusted and had my theory about him. In his shed, taking long pulls on a reed-covered jug from his table, I found that, unlike Flo’s house, or even my former room, Reb’s quarters left no residue of its lodger. He appeared busy—the hardest worker at Leviathan—but his shed and many carvings, the wood sculptures that ranged from finely wrought caskets to footstools in Flo Hatfield’s boudoir, had the anonymity of Egyptian artifacts. He was not in the shed. Not in his work. Not truly in the thickness of the world-web, as I was—boomeranging from desire to desire—and, waiting, I wondered if Reb hungered for freedom as I did. What did he want? Seldom, if ever, did Reb take the initiative in producing anything. He waited, quiet as a cat. Something acted upon him, a pressure, a shove, a cosmic finger on the spine, and only then did he move. Now and anon, he reminded me of Ezekiel, whose sad fight for spirituality fizzled out in a romance that ruined Transcendentalism forever in South Carolina. Both men, I decided, were subversive, Ezekiel in the sabre-rattling style of Western activists, Reb in a much softer and more devastating Old World way that made Harper’s Ferry look foolish. Torching a master’s house, Mau-Mauing his property, was fine, for we hated being propertyless—it was exactly a correlate to the emptiness of the ego, and everyone feared that, especially Flo Hatfield. Again and again, and yet again, the New World said to blacks and women, “You are nothing.” It had the best of arguments to back this up: nightriders. Predictably, we fought this massive assault on the ego, even inverted the values of whites (or men)—anything to avoid self-obliteration. And if you embraced this? Absorbed it? Said “Yes” to illness. “Yes” to suffering. “Yes” to liberation. “Yes” to misfortune. What did you become?

  The Coffinmaker.

  Slavery had made him a saint in 1839. Waiting, I remembered what Reb told me about the deaths of his wife and daughter.

  Diseases at Leviathan often became plagues, for the Vet administered potions of castor oil and turpentine for most afflictions, and only those slaves with savings could afford treatment in town. That year Reb’s wife Lucy died. His daughter Biddy, he said, showed signs of pellagra—blisters bursting with yellow-green fluid—and he ran fifteen miles to Abbeville. Thereat, Reb begged up and down the boardwalk for coins. He turned his pockets inside-out. He wept. He struck the eleventh man who passed him by, then dropped, as it happened, beside another bondsman, an experienced beggar named Jupiter. “You been doin’ it all wrong,” said Jupiter. He spit into the street. “I been watchin’ you carryin’ on about yo girl for half an hour now. Pullin’ yo hair. Pesterin’ folks ’cause you about to lose somethin’.” Jupiter spit again. “Boy, you don’t git nothin’ ’til you don’t want it.” This was such unwanted advice that Reb moved across the street. He would receive no money—that was clear. His daughter would drop into West Hell with Lucy. His only strategy, the one option left, was surrender, accepting—said the Coffinmaker—the shock of nihilation. The knots of his heart were broken. In this poverty of spirit, this resignation, the Coffinmaker felt metal—Mexican coins—and shinplasters splatter onto his lap. These he collected in his straw hat, then carried to a doctor, who rode back to Leviathan, and pronounced the girl dead.

  From that day on Reb took nothing on himself. So deep was the experience of sacrifice engraved in him—his forty or fifty years of adjustment to self-denial—that even in his eating he was wont to make sacrifice, saying, “Lawd, you better take this food!” So often had food, property, and loved ones been snatched away that now he treated whatever he had as someone else’s property, with the care and attention that another’s property deserved. Reward he did not expect. Nor pleasure. Desire was painful. Duty was everything—the casket promised tomorrow, a carving for the blacksmith’s daughter, the floorboards that needed fixing. This was his Way. It was, I thought, a Way of strength and spiritual heroism—doing what must be done, dead to hope—but like Flo Hatfield’s path of the senses, it was not my Way.

  It was now two hours since Reb left.

  Trip-hammering again, my heart made the sort of mad, mouse-in-a-cage racing that preceded pulmonary mishap. (“A slight coronary accident,” the Vet called it, a phrase that made it equivalent to knocking over your water glass at the dinner table.) What had delayed Reb? He had only to explain to our mistress that I was troubled by Anna’s letter—it should have taken no more than a few minutes. I took another pull on the bottle. If she would not have me back, what then? Flight? The Underground Railroad was, I’d heard, a route to freedom. But I had no contacts for escape to Canada. Furthermore, I had seen the Soulcatcher; the man had weapons up the yin-yang, seemed able to sniff out slaves anywhere; had perhaps been a slave himself, even a champion of abolition, a lover of freedom, I speculated, who—like a revolutionary turned reactionary—so cherished the object of his passion that his feelings turned, with equal intensity, to hatred. Thinking of the Soulcatcher made me shiver. Reclining, on Reb’s pallet, I busied my thoughts by inspecting his shelf of carvings overhead. Among these was the sculpture—the then uncarved block—he had started of me.

  The replica was finished, but only the first side bore my likeness: a face of feathery lines, which felt—beneath my fingers—smooth-grained. Unstained. The second portrayed someone else, the knife marks deeper gouges in wood that gave the portraiture a splintered feel, its expression a worldly blend of ecstasy and pain, sickness and satiation. The third side was stranger still: a Master who had made his fortune long ago; aging, he would be on the Village Board, the Chamber of Commerce—a Whig in political matters, perhaps a church father. The fourth side was blank. The back, I supposed as I drifted off mercifully to sleep, was where one mounted this odd figurine.

  Shortly after dawn the Coffinmaker stomped in. Swearing. Dragging his feet toward the pallet. He kicked me awake. Said: “C’mon.” His face was pale with the strain of a man who has given too much and must give more. His lips shook. He said, “Decide what you gonna take with you. You won’t be needin’ all them clothes.”

  “Did you talk with Flo?” I stood up. My pulse soared. Slowly, I sat again. “Reb?”

  “I talked with her.”

  He went through his boxes, pulling out old shoes repaired with wire, shirts and trousers, which he stuffed into a sack. His face was set now. Polished metal. “You ain’t nothin’,” he said, “but trouble.”

  “What did she say?”

  “I went walkin’,” he said, ignoring me. “Thinkin’ ’bout how all my life I been in the wrong
place at the wrong time. Washin’ in a river when they caught me. Workin’ late that evening you come up from Greenwood—I shoulda chased you off as soon as I seen you. If I’d hit you upside the head, things would be the same. And me…” he laughed, low in his throat, “I coulda passed my time in peace heah, Freshmeat.”

  “Reb,” I asked, “what did Flo Hatfield say?”

  The Coffinmaker folded blunt fingers, like strips of steel, on my left shoulder, and spoke in the slow, guttural voice I believed issued from his belly.

  “She say it’s our turn in the mines.”

  VI

  THE YELLOW DOG MINE.

  KARL MARX AT CRIPPLEGATE.

  ALTHEA

  North-northwest of Flo Hatfield’s estate, the land was blackened by the sites of old shafts and heaps of slate, the air was fouled by carbonic gas and smoke from blasting. Red dust, like plague, settled filmy on the ribcages of workhorses burned in ditches by the road. From five miles off, riding back-to-back in a canvas-covered wagon drawn by four horses, we could see smoke mounting in columns against the sky. The rest of the mine’s history we were told by Flo Hatfield’s coachman, Sam Plunkett. Dozens of gangs, grimy with dust and from farms as far away as Greenwood, went regularly into the Yellowdog Mine. Trinitrotoluene, dualin, gunpowder, and mica followed on caravans. They poured in—shovelers and wheelers, borers and slave teams—to replace those who perished from consumption. Silicosis. From dust particles in their lungs. Or, above, from camp brawls that broke out over women. A misplaced bottle. An impolitic word. From murder, more often than not.

  Josiah Dabner (said Plunkett) was in charge of blasting; Henry Shea handled cuts, embankments, and coal shipments; Captain Noah Walters, a fat, fretful man with a withered hand and dirt in his neckseams, was Chief Engineer. “You come this way just ten years earlier,” said Plunkett, talking like a tour guide—afraid no doubt because we were five, the flotsam from Leviathan, the unruly, the lazy, the rejected lovers, and he, Plunkett, a whiskery old man with so little skin on his leathery face he had to shut his eyes to speak or chew, equipped with only an owlhead pistol—Plunkett wondered if he’d ever see his family again. His fears were unfounded. These men, I saw, were shattered—they had the unseeing gazes I’d glimpsed on birds my father had shot, just before he finished them, and Reb, even he, had no fight left in him—“you wouldn’ta seen nothin’. Sprawlin’ wilderness. Forests fulla deer. Rabbits. Skunks. Maybe a lynx or two.” Plunkett forced a laugh. “Wild country so tough the hootowls all sang bass.” No one thought this funny. Two miles west (said Plunkett, squirming) the Savannah roared with currents so swift, so treacherous that navigation across was impossible. Not even sturdy lumber rafts withstood its waves. When the mining company’s surveying team commenced work two years before, they found no bottomland. No flat shores whatsoever between boiling springs and falls. Twisting through the dark valley between the plantation and the Mine was a path so steep and nookshotten that the surveying team took measurements and calculated levels by suspending themselves from the escarpments by ropes. It would not be an easy place to escape from—I was thinking already of flight. Work (said Plunkett) began January, 1850. Twelve of Flo Hatfield’s slaves were the first on the site. Six months later, after some fifteen deaths, the first deep shafts were in.

  “There,” said Plunkett, looking back again, “that’s where y’all goin’.”

  “You finished?” asked Reb.

  “Why, yeah.” Plunkett blinked. “’Course, I don’t approve of what goes on there! Oh, it’s terrible, treating men like animals! Or machines! I’m a Socialist,” he blurted, “I’m on your side! You men should pull together. I mean, we oughta pull together.” Plunkett tugged at his collar for air.

  Reb asked, “How come?”

  “Because….” Plunkett was silent a spell. “Because all property is theft.” He pulled the phrase around him for protection. “You’re stolen property,” improving a little on it now. “And me, I’m sorta on rental terms, like a cabin.” He looked at Reb. “That doesn’t work, does it?”

  “Not really,” said Reb.

  “Well,” snorted Plunkett, “you get the idea. The people on the bottom belongs on top.”

  “Sam?” said Reb.

  “Yeah?”

  “Watch the road.”

  On the ridingboard, Reb put his chin on his fist and, like the others, fell silent. We were prisoners. Condemned men with a fool steering the ferryboat, the Underworld but four hours away. “Anybody want a chew?” Plunkett fumbled through his pockets, cackled, “I stole it,” and peered back at his passengers. He placed his tobacco on the seat. “You’re welcome to it all, if you want any.”

  Reb broke off a mouthful, handing the rest to me. “You mighty quiet, Hawkins. You ain’t gonna be sick are you?”

  “Trust me,” I whispered. “I’ve got a plan.”

  The last thing the Coffinmaker cared to hear was one of my plans; he looked back at Plunkett. The old man tucked his head like a turtle. “I hate slavery! Nobody’s free, ’specially a workin’ man like myself. We’re brothers,” said Plunkett. “Underneath. Don’t let nobody tell you Sam Plunkett ain’t for Revolution….”

  Plunkett defended himself in vain. Flo Hatfield’s work-ruined bondsmen had never heard of Socialism, and Sam Plunkett no more understood this movement than did my tutor Ezekiel before the weekend he entertained Karl Marx at Cripplegate. Reaching back, I remembered Ezekiel planning for weeks in advance—I can see him now, asking Mattie to cook, rereading his underlinings in The Holy Family, purchasing Marx’s favorite dishes and cigars. On the day of his arrival—a hot June morning in 1850—my tutor nearly collapsed from nervous exhaustion.

  Marx arrived at Cripplegate dazed by a dizzying cycle of banishment that bounced his family from Belgium to Cologne and, finally, to a two-bedroom firetrap at 1 Leicester Street in London. These were hard years, those of his London exile. His ratio of false starts to finished copy was twenty to one. He thought of suicide. He wrote poems, his first poems since his days at the Gymnasium at Trier, plunged into mathematics for moral consolation against the police, the indifference of bourgeois publishers, and bill collectors, who threw his furniture into the street. The landlord bullied Jenny, his wife, for the preposterous rent of forty-two thalers a month. She was, that May, bleeding at the breast, forced to sell her silver—a family treasure—and, as Marx did algebra at his desk, brought her disappointments to their housekeeper Hélène Demuth. This troubled Marx all the more, though he said nothing—Hélène had been with Jenny for years; he watched the breakdown quietly, took long walks on Hampstead Heath, and wrote to his American friends Jonathan Streitburgher, a printer of an Abolitionist paper in Abbeville, Bob Abrams, an authority on Hawthorne, and Ezekiel Sykes-Withers. “My children are dying,” he wrote. “My work meets silence.”

  Engels, whom Marx’s daughter Eleanor called “The General,” in regards to his obsession with the history of military operations (“A silly way,” wrote Marx, “for a grown man to spend his time, but I humor him.”), was reduced, after the romance of Left Hegelianism, to clerking again in the same Manchester sweatshop where he’d toiled as a child. His checks were slow. As of late, political affairs affected Marx physically. When he felt a headcold coming on, a toothache, he looked immediately for its social cause. A new tax law had cost Marx a molar. Nearby at a button factory a strike that failed brought on an attack of asthma. These things were dialectical. As the political world declined, so did Marx’s health. As for Jenny, she wrote friends in Germany, sparing no detail of their destitution to bring in charity, another humiliation for Marx, especially since editor Charles Dana at the New York Daily Tribune had written “We’ll see” to Marx’s offer to work as a European stringer. “You will readily understand my despair,” Marx wrote Ezekiel in May, “at being destitute after so many books. We are very, very low. Jenny has been shoplifting our meat; I wouldn’t blame her if she left me. I would give almost anything now to see America.” My tutor mailed him the
price of a boat ticket to New York and back, provided that after seeing Dana he visit Master Polkinghorne’s estate in South Carolina.

  His stagecoach was delayed, having thrown a wheel outside Charlotte. Like any traveler, Marx descended disheveled from his coach with trenchmouth, his collar wilted and overcoat lopped over one shoulder, his eyes unfocused as he backsheeshed his driver, and peered round at Hodges in bewilderment. Stepping forward, Ezekiel said, “Professor Marx, we’re over here,” and steered him toward our rented carriage.

  “Streitburgher, too?” asked Marx.

  Ezekiel staggered a little.

  “I’m afraid I’ve never met him. The locals aren’t very interesting—a little dull,” Ezekiel laughed. “There are fewer spots in the civilized world more bleak than Hodges.”

  “You don’t know Streitburgher?” He and Ezekiel walked out of step for a second and, for two or three steps, Marx walked sideways.

  “No, sir.”

  Marx pulled one of Ezekiel’s letters from his coat and held it up. “Is that you?”

  “Yes—yes, you’ve been corresponding with me.”

  We walked on for some paces in silence. Our guest stepped into the carriage, settled himself, and asked—it sounded like a challenge—“How long you lived here?”

  “Seven years now,” said Ezekiel. “Come November.”

  “As long as that? And you’ve never met Streitburgher?”

  “No.”

  Our guest was disappointed. That was plain. “Hodges is out of the way. Yes?” he said. “You should maybe stand a mirror at both ends to make it bigger.” And he roared. It was Marx’s effort to put Ezekiel at ease. Abruptly, I saw my tutor through his eyes: a lonely, unsocial creature unused to visitors, as awkward with people as a recluse. Not a Socialist, as he fancied himself. No, his rejection of society, his radicalism, was not, as he thought, due to some subtle rareness of soul. It was stinginess. Resentment for the richness of things. A smoke screen for his own social shortcomings. Regardless, Marx’s spirits remained high. Dana had promised him a series on conditions in Germany. Ezekiel replied, recklessly, that he never read newspapers. “Nor I,” lied Marx, politely. His smile flashed. Fell away. If you watched him closely, you noticed a certain discomfiture in his crossing and recrossing his legs, the unease of a visitor at pains to find something in common with his host.