Oxherding Tale Read online

  Of this curious visit, Master Polkinghorne knew nothing, and it passed unnoticed in Hodges—as well as world history—because Marx came to South Carolina simply to unwind and see an old friend. At thirty-two, he was half a head shorter than Ezekiel, with crushed-down shoulders, and dark skin (he preferred the nickname Mohr), quick, Jewish gestures, and a tangled beard that would be rabbinical, if he let it go. Mainly, he spoke with his larynx, like most Germans. His hands were cold, thick-fingered, and stabbed the air when he spoke. Soon he would be stout. He was working over notes that summer for Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, a task he dreaded, Marx confessed, since he knew no more about the East than the errors in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History; Engels, for his part, was studying Persian, and Marx had found a bit on India in Mill’s Principles. Also, he had recently taught himself Japanese so he could read Kwanzan; spent months at it, too, then decided Kwanzan—or maybe all Oriental thought—wasn’t worth a footnote, but couldn’t figure what to do with all the Japanese. All the same, his knowledge in June, 1850, was piecemeal on prehistory, shamefully thin on primitive communal societies, and weak on Africa. What Ezekiel Sykes-Withers didn’t know about India could be written on a postcard, and his guest, though he found the subject tedious, listened humbly, eager to learn, holding his head at attention, his knees bumping Ezekiel’s in the carriage as we rode back to Cripplegate.

  It should have been a wonderful weekend.

  Marx was a charming guest, excited by everything American; he lavishly complimented Mattie on her cooking, kissed her hand, which made my stepmother giggle, asked for recipes, and was bored by nothing said by the bondsmen. But he was short with Ezekiel; he treated him like the most outstanding brickhead and donzel as ever broke a biscuit. My tutor had badly mistaken this man. Marx did not, like Ezekiel, live for ideas, political or otherwise; he was, in the old sense—the Sanskrit sense—a householder. The Marx of Ezekiel’s fancy, the humorless student radical of the 1830s, was—you cannot guess—a citizen devoted first, and foremost, to his family: a droll, Dickensian husband who, going fat—he would not exercise—unfastened the buttons on his vest when he ate, called his wife “Mohme,” and loved her dearly, but was not above diddling Hélène when he cornered her in the pantry. His reverence for Truth took (for Ezekiel) a strange form. When in their discussion it became clear to Ezekiel that Marx was right, Marx would at once shift to another subject—he took no pleasure in the fact that he was right. It rather embarrassed him. To be sure, what he saw of American slavery made him sore. But most often Marx diverted Ezekiel’s conversation from social evil and deep-ploughing philosophy to the few pockets of well-being made possible by capital. And capital alone. My tutor was badly disappointed. He thought Marx dull. And now it came to him that Marx, the materialist, would frown upon his association with the Transcendental Club, dismiss as alienation—species-being projected into the Absolute—any discussion of the spirit.

  After dinner our guest said nothing about Revolution, preferring to talk about African customs with me, or fiction—Cervantes and Balzac, Fielding and Dumas (père)—when not humoring Ezekiel. Against his better judgment, Ezekiel hauled out his latest articles, spreading them around grease-coated plates, jugs of whiskey, and makeshift ashtrays on the table; he talked, waving a slice of bread, about his recent work (ontology), on the Theologia Germanica, which had a sedative effect on Marx: a twelve-page sleeping pill. Listening, Marx beat one hand on the arm of his chair 224 times. He began a yawn, which failed and left him sitting like someone in a dentist’s chair. His beard trembled—you would have thought he was chewing; he was, in fact, grinding his teeth. Finally he remarked that Ezekiel’s paper had one error. Ezekiel looked from Marx to me. “Does it?”

  “Ja.” He gave his tight, in-bitten smile. “You chose to be miserable. Why?”

  Ezekiel twitched back from the table.

  “Can your Mama understand all this noise about the Transcendental Ego?”

  “My mother?”

  My tutor was divided—he later told me, though I saw it for myself—between sharing what he had written and fear of severe criticism: he was a graduate student (again) standing with his dissertation (fifth draft) outside the Great Man’s door. “I wrote it,” Ezekiel said, “for you.” His voice fluttered. “I had hoped a thoughtful reader, someone who loved truth….”

  “Truth?” Marx raised his eyebrows. “Truth is someone.”

  “Well, of course….” Ezekiel scratched through his beard; at that moment Marx scratched through his beard. It was as if a third person, a puppeteer, had pulled identical strings on two wooden dolls. “All scholarship is about and for people, I agree….” His fingers disappeared into his hair when he swept it back off his forehead. And then he said one word too many: “But certain lower, less polished classes of people simply don’t….”

  The Great Man boomed, “Vhat?” He stood and began to roll up one shirtsleeve. “Young Andrew,” said Marx, “please hold my coat and step behind me.”

  Eyes seeled, Ezekiel said, “Sorry.”

  For a moment they pulled in different directions. Marx sat, rolling down his sleeve. My tutor’s forehead wrinkled with the effort of thought. “I know your position on these matters, Professor Marx. I didn’t expect you to completely agree….”

  “Oh, I do agree,” said Marx.

  “You do?”

  “Ja.” Marx began unlacing his boots. “Is about the Self’s ontogenesis, this paper?” He examined now a hole in his stocking. “You vant to say that the Transcendental Ego is empty—correct?—and exists only through vhat it is conscious of, vhich means, as in Hegel, that alienation in the Other is necessary in every act of perception?”

  “Yes!” Ezekiel sat up. “Exactly! The point—”

  The Great Man touched his arm. “Ezekiel?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is wrong,” said Marx. “A mistake. Oh, your thesis is groβartig, technically, but you are, by your own argument, dead.”

  Ezekiel did not move.

  “Ja, dead.” His fingertips pushed the paper toward Ezekiel. “You argue that to exist is to exist through an Other. So far so good. But, as you say, someone must therefore be central to your existence, Ezekiel. Vhen two subjects come together, they realize in their reciprocal intersubjective life a common vorld. Yes? Compared to this, all other vays of being are fragmentary. Partial. Hollow. No matter how passionately you pursue them. The universal name for this final, ontological achievement, this liberation—Occidental or Oriental—in vhich each subject finds another essential is love.” The Great Man stood. He put his hand on Ezekiel’s shoulder. “Ja, love. Do you haf a lover?”

  The word “love” entangled with Ezekiel’s tongue and teeth. He got no farther than the luh-sound.

  Marx smiled sympathetically. “Then do you live if no Other’s gaze intends you as the beloved?”

  In his softest voice, Ezekiel, his hands tightly locked in his lap, whispered, “Suppose you’ve never been loved. What if whenever you try, the Others…look away?”

  “Then love someone.” Marx chuckled and shook his head. “On the stagecoach to Hodges there vas this voman….” He kissed his fingers, then looked, white-eyeballed, at the ceiling. “Vunderful! Hair to her vaist. A voice like a girl. I am grateful to her for being beautiful. For her sake, Ezekiel, I vill finish this book Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations.” He sighed and gave the air a little sweep with his hand. “Everything I’ve vritten has been for a voman—is one vay to view Socialism, no?”

  Now the cabin was silent. I could hear wind wheel outside the windows and slam into the cabin walls like seaswell. I looked from Ezekiel to Marx and found them deadlocked, Ezekiel deeply disappointed, Marx twirling his wineglass, sipping carefully so not to wet his moustache. My tutor poured himself Scotch, slammed his palm down on the cap, and brought out:

  “You say it’s reciprocal! What if the Others don’t love back? That girl—she doesn’t know what you felt! She’ll never read your goddamn
book!”

  “Temper,” said Marx, “temper!” He smoked and thought for a moment. “If they didn’t, how vould you feel?”

  “It would kill me.” Ezekiel’s voice had no body, no center as he spoke. “I would perceive them as beautiful, and I would obliterate myself to let be their beauty, which only I can do, but on their side they wouldn’t know I existed—denying me love, they would, strictly speaking, deny me life.”

  The Great Man pulled out his pocketwatch. Yawning, stripping down to his longjohns, he rubbed his stomach with both hands, then lay on the pallet we’d prepared for him.

  Ezekiel said, from the table:

  “We haven’t finished!” Watching Marx’s eyelids lower, he asked, “What would you do?”

  Marx said, perhaps in a half-sleep, the thing Ezekiel was not prepared to hear:

  “Rejoice.”

  But you have not heard the worst.

  Though Marx turned in at ten-thirty, Ezekiel did not sleep. That next morning he sat leaning into the carriage doorway, saying little as mud flew in a soft, wild rush from the wheels. Marx was ferociously polite. Waving off the stagecoach in Hodges, Ezekiel returned, weakly, to his cabin, took a hammer to the looking glasses in his study, and then fed one by one his papers into the fireplace. The Great Man, Ezekiel decided, had been talking through the back of his neck—his advice sounded like the lyrics of popular songs, which were no better than greeting cards set to music, but the most abstruse philosophy—real philosophy—doorwayed, after a process of infinite complexity, into exactly that stark, simple experience of which philosophers never (or seldom) spoke: love. By his own confession, he was prepared for suffering. That was no problem. And he was no less prepared for ruthlessly comparing the actual to the ideal (the actual always lost). But joy? No Revolutionary was prepared for joy. It seemed, when he thought about it, indecent to rejoice when, as any fool knew, so much of the world had gone wrong. Was not the spirit enslaved everywhere? The planet raped? The government in the hands of criminals? War prophesied? Where in the particulars of daily life, the flaws and imperfections, was there reason to rejoice?

  For two days Ezekiel sat in his study, or lay in bed like a tree stump, his head in his hands. This is the accepted position for those suffering heartbreak. Days ran into days. No matter how he sliced it—so he confided in me—Spirit was love, and the triumph of the Spirit exiled in World was in our age, or any age, to embrace things in their haeceittias, their thisness, to perceive—mad as this seemed—Matter as holy. And when at last he went through all the homebrewed beer at Cripplegate, he walked bareheaded past unpainted board buildings to a Hodges dancehall, his coat collar up, and sat behind four men playing poker under a newly lit kerosene lamp, drinking until flame forked through his chest. Bootheels stamped. A tinny piano to his left played an unidentifiable tune. Ezekiel laid his head on the table. In this place, in air shaking with flies, and logy heat, Shem Moses, a hired man on the Greenwood farm of Colonel Richard Hart, bowled over beside him. There was something marshy about Shem Moses. He was huge, spider-bellied, smelled like a farmer’s shoe, cared for no one, believed in nothing, a swindler and whorechaser. He stood with a slight stoop. His voice was terrible. He had thin, hair-frizzed arms, his nails were nubgnawed. Also, he had syphilis—this Ezekiel could tell by the way he cursed and wept when passing water behind the dancehall. Ezekiel’s first thought was to change tables. Fatigue kept him in his chair. Shem Moses brought a bottle to the table. He ticked off his troubles, as drunken men often do to perfect strangers, and his greatest burden was his daughter, Althea. “Transverse myelitis,” Moses slid his yellow eyes at Ezekiel—he sounded the syllables slowly, the way laymen (or church people) pronounce terms from the mysterious realms of doctors and priests. “She’s paralyzed from the waist down. It come over her in a week. There weren’t no signs.” He blew his nose into his hand, squeezed off strands of mucus with his fingers, then wiped his hand on the side of his chair. Through all this, Ezekiel only nodded, lips pursed, suspending judgment, giving a little noncommital headshake as Shem Moses detailed the disease, explaining how the girl had been through an operation that destroyed his savings. And then he produced from his coat a daguerreotype of his daughter, an underexposed print, sfumato, smudged by fingerprints. It was cracked, wine-stained. Moses kept it just out of the lamplight, which forced Ezekiel to crane his neck forward to see.

  My tutor squinted. “How old is she?”

  “Fifteen.”

  Moses tucked the portrait back into his shirt pocket. He scratched under one arm, then made a toothpick from wood splintered on the tabletop. “She be sixteen in a month, but I don’t ’spect she gonna see sixteen.” He slipped both thumbs into his beltless trousers. “Y’know, it sounds funny to say this but, as God is my secret judge, she might as well be planted right now. I can’t do for her—Colonel Hart don’t pay me enough to feed a chicken. Won’t nobody marry her, being crippled, and….”

  “May I see her picture again?”

  Moses waited before bringing out the daguerreotype. He put a finger in his mouth to adjust his teeth. “You ain’t gonna muss it up or nothing’?”

  “No,” said Ezekiel.

  He wiped both hands on his trousers. Moses handed him the portrait. And what did my tutor think? It is perhaps best to say that he did not think. Althea’s image was, by any standard, beautiful—a bit pale maybe, suffering from vitamin starvation, but lovely: a freckled, blackcherry-eyed girl with heaps of golden hair. Yet, she might have been, for all he knew, Zachary Taylor’s sister; Moses might have stolen the daguerreotype, or picked it up on the street. All this Ezekiel knew. And this: He could not stomach the idea that the future of such a girl—if the portrait was indeed hers—lay in the hands of a grimy, incendiary-breathed scorpion like Shem Moses, who’d drink anything. Stove fuel. Cleaning fluid. In every particle of the man he read: parasite. One hand pulled out his wallet, the other withdrew his whole month’s wages. He said, “I hope this will help.”

  “You givin’ me that?” Moses wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His boulderlike face beamed. Without counting the bills, he stuffed the money into his boot. His clothes gave a thin, dry crack as he leaned forward, dislodging dirt. “I can’t pay you back….”

  “I don’t want it back,” said Ezekiel. “And it’s for the girl, not you. If you spend it on drink, I’ll see that your daughter is placed in someone else’s custody.”

  The hired man bobbed his head, “Thank you.”

  “No, thank you.” He picked up the girl’s portrait again. “Can I keep this for a day or two?”

  “You ain’t with the law, are you?”

  “No, I’m a teacher. Why did you ask?”

  Moses released air in relief. He began to pick at his nose. “You a real Christian, Mr. Sykes. And we will pay you back, Lord willin’. And he had one boot out the door before Ezekiel could reply.

  It was, of course, neither Christian nor charitable, from Ezekiel’s point of view, to give his July wages to the hired man. It could be, he thought, after Moses left and he again sat alone, staring at the girl’s portrait, seen as the most self-righteous and, therefore, suspect thing he’d ever done. There was in every gift the feeling that you had overpowered another, performed a service that—in the gaudiest sense—displayed your superiority, or used their suffering to assuage your guilt, or to buy yourself a seat in the sweet by-and-by. But Ezekiel didn’t believe in the sweet by-and-by. And he certainly didn’t believe in the ego. What he did believe, strange as it sounds, was that if he took this business about the Good seriously, if he faced squarely his weariness with having and getting, he had to admit that the world seemed to fall into two halves. Not proletariat and bourgeoisie. Not black and white. Not even into wise and foolish. Granted, there were two halves, but the first, which was by far the greatest, was known simply by its single utterance, I need, I want, and the second by its quiet reply: All right. That made him reflect upon himself. What sort of self was it? Well, in popular te
rms, it was solipsistic; it was emotionally bankrupt; it was empty. He had a weak heart. Even Cripplegate’s bondsmen possessed, it struck Ezekiel, a greater sense of purpose than he, though they hated it, waited for the hour they would escape it, the thing Marx had hinted at, the thing that, once the furor over freedom died down, made real freedom intelligible:

  Something to serve.

  In his gift to Moses’ daughter—there would be more in the months that followed—there was a sense of right proportion, a clean asymmetry: a renunciation of the fruit of his works at Cripplegate, of reward, which created, in Ezekiel’s view, no further action. No evil. No stain. This fat idea (like all ideas) tugged long at my tutor. He returned each payday and inquired about Althea’s health. Her hobbies. Her friends. Did she have enough to eat? In what was she interested? Could he help in other ways? The numbers in his bankbook spooled backwards. After four such meetings with Shem Moses, whom he now hated—his oily manner, his whining and self-pity, the way he leveled everything to the coarsest common denominator—after five months of tolerating this man, who always spoke in a stupendous voice, as though each dialogue was a dispute, Ezekiel knew Althea’s history perfectly. On their fifth meeting, after the girl had received nearly fifty dollars from Ezekiel, the farmer brought him a letter. And a proposition.

  “She’s doing way better.” A thin smile. “She wanted you to have this.”