Oxherding Tale Read online

  This deep insult Undercliff did not want for his daughter. Nor Lesbianism. There were, according to Evelyn Pomeroy, town historian, a few childhood incidents with Nora Sullivan, the youngest daughter of Spartanburg’s saloonkeeper, the natural curiosity of girls who, sequestered from boys, spent their pent-up humors in caresses both frightening and faintly pleasant, the experience beginning innocently enough with talk about boys, what they’d seen through the window of their parent’s bedroom (Nora’s, not Peggy’s, for Gerald Undercliff’s greatest virtue—or complaint—was chastity), or in the stables, and then, to demonstrate, a small hand moves toward—never mind. Lord knows, I was not the ideal husband for Peggy Undercliff. My life was a patchwork of lies. My personality whipstitched from a dozen sources. But the doctor was right about one thing: Virtue was doing beautifully what the moment demanded.

  To shorten the story of our courtship, the moment demanded—on July 23, 1860—a new, subtle, loss of identity. A moment to explain: The night before our wedding I forgot instructions the instant I heard them; I put my lingerie on backwards. Burned my black, velvet waistcoat chainsmoking myself into a sore throat. Dr. Undercliff, to lower my blood pressure, prescribed a sedative, which made me sleep to within an hour of the ceremony. He came to the schoolhouse, roused and escorted me to the church by three. As I waited, pulling at my tight collar, adjusting my eyes to changing light patterns at the front of the church, my fob-top boots pinching, I heard organ music begin behind me. The dream, if this was a dream (so it seemed), was remarkably thorough—a spectacle staged so often I could not, at first, truly feel that I, as an individual, mattered in the least. We were fed, I thought, into a form that flattened out our humanity. My liberal-humanist hackles rose. Better we should create our own ceremony! Then my gaze went to the old woman, Beatrice Jackson, who commanded the organ and twisted her head to squint as Peggy’s bridesmaids (three girls from the choir) walked down the aisle in flesh-pink, flowing dresses, and I saw it. I saw it clearly. I saw it with the simplicity of a child: every molecule of the old woman, every wrinkle, every cell and ancient desire wrecked or realized in her seventy-eight years, gave the abstract form flesh, glorified this woman—all of us; all through a ceremony that suspended Time. The heart knew nothing of hours. Minutes. It moved on a plane above history, error. The good doctor straightened his glasses. He came forward, bordered by fifty guests, with Peggy against the background of a stained glass window awash with sunlight, the church constructed such that light rippled, ever richer, as it neared the pulpit, like Platonic nous emanating from the One. The organist wept. Peggy, holding a spray of roses, wore a white dress with an empire collar. Flowers were embroidered on her bust, her collar, her sleeves. Tears came flying down behind her fishnet veil. Dearly beloved, intoned Reverend Blake, We are gathered here today….“William,” croaked Peggy, “this is dumb! It’s the gaudiest thing since the carnival came to town. It’s silly. And unnecessarily noetic, and”—she hiccoughed; I gave her a hefty whack on her back—“wonderful!” Standing between us, the minister touched Peggy’s arm. He hemmed. He hawed. And me? I heard only the run, the gentle ribboning of his words. A longish dream, I thought, pinching myself. Ouch. And, all at once, the guests weren’t there. Only the Minister, the Woman, the Man. We stood, I felt, translated, lifted a few feet off the ground, exchanging replies in old, old voices in a different tongue we borrowed from our better selves—the people we were intended to be—in some parallel world, where the absences of this life were presences, the failures here triumphs there, a realm of changeless meaning for which the only portal was surrender.

  After the ceremony this nearly mystical feeling of transport faded. We fell back into clock time (the saying of vows had taken only five minutes), fed each other forksful from a four-tiered cake, and received guests at Undercliff’s many-roomed house. His parlor spilled over into the hallway, where well-wishers mingled, some wearing the dark blue frock and trousers, the black collars and cuff stripes of the Confederacy; overflowed with enough gifts to open a General Store. The party was difficult for Peggy. Crowds, sixty people in small groups, mirroring each other’s postures, made her nauseated. It was not in her nature to enjoy spectacle, much less be the spectacle. After an hour of glad-handing and gliding through a blitz of laughter seriocomic chatter and tinkling glasses, her eyes were glazed. Undercliff stood, one hand behind his back, the other rubbing his nose, listening to a guest whose argument for the necessity of Negro slavery drew from the most recent studies in breeding, from the Old Testament, from history, and from the subordination of one creature by another in the natural world. Beneath his voice, in a lower strata of noise, one of the bridesmaids said, to her friend, “My problem is that whenever someone gives me a quick feel in a crowded room, I wheel round, naturally, and slug him, then I realize he’s Indian, black, or Mexican, and I feel simply dreadful for the rest of the day because I’ve hurt someone disadvantaged.” Sheets of smoke floated over their heads. Sixty voices blurred like a watercolor in the rain. “This country, as I see it, runs on economic fact,” the guest who’d now trapped Undercliff in the kitchen was saying, “not good will. We brought these people here as one essential ingredient in an agrarian society.” He kept touching the doctor’s sleeve to hold his attention. “Their purpose as a group, and every group has its purpose, its mission, is tied in the Negroes’ case to a specific form of production….”

  Behind me, as I strained to listen to Beatrice Jackson discuss her recent operation, another guest told a story to kill your appetite. “You’ve heard the one about the Chinese, Iranian, and Japanese fishermen? In a small boat on the ocean, right? And the boat springs a leak, right? The Chinese had so many coins in his pocket he sank. The Iranian couldn’t keep his big mouth shut so he drowned. And the Japanese—get this—the Jap didn’t know what to do so he copied the others. Ha-aaagh!” Undercliff’s antagonist, to be heard, raised his voice an octave, “If there’s war, and there will be, Doctor, if the Abolitionists get their way, and they will, then the North and the South will move to manufacture and no longer need the Negro. May I proceed? Well, we shall always need them poetically, but they will be, as a people, without a national purpose, if you follow me. It will be generations before the Nation discovers what to do with them. Can we ship them back, eh? Answer me that. Be careful now.” Before Undercliff could answer, his antagonist said, “I ask you, is it reasonable to suppose they are more suited for a life in Africa than they are for full participation in democracy? They are here, but not really here. Do you see the dilemma?” Undercliff, then on his fifth cup of bitters, did not, but for the sake of form, said, “Life is certainly disappointing, isn’t it?” His antagonist, a little miffed, said, “Do you see the problem?” to another guest, then looked at Peggy, who’d unlaced her shoes and was carrying them, “Do you see the problem?”

  “Husband,” she gripped my arm weakly with both hands, “if we don’t go home I’m going to get sick on everyone.”

  Out of doors, the air was chilly when we slipped away from the party, the wind playing under Peggy’s wedding dress, molding it to her legs. Away from the guests, in her father’s wagon, I felt a silence filling the space between us on the riding board. She closed her eyes, leaned back, and my thoughts flew, as they often flew since I left Cripplegate, to my father. What would he have thought of my wedding? Of my new bride? I knew the answer: “Hawk, you gonna sleep beside her after what they done to us? You ain’t no better’n Nate McKay! Why don’t you marry a cullud girl and lift her up?” Some nights, I remembered, he prayed, “Oh Lord, kill all the whitefolks and leave all the nigguhs,” and Mattie, miffed, slapped him from behind, which made George yelp, “Lord! Don’t you know a white man from a nigguh?” He would reject me, claiming I had rejected him, and this was partly true: I rejected (in George) the need to be an Untouchable. Despite the fears of Undercliff’s guest, the rituals of caste would, regardless of law, live centuries after the plantations died. My father kept the pain alive. He needed to rekindle r
acial horrors, revive old pains, review disappointments like a sick man fingering his sores. Like my tutor, he chose misery. Grief was the grillwork—the emotional grid—through which George Hawkins sifted and sorted events, simplified a world so overrich in sense it outstripped him, and all that was necessary to break this spell of hatred, this self-inflicted segregation from the Whole, was to acknowledge, once and for all, that what he allowed to be determinant for his life depended on himself and no one else.

  But I loved my father. What would I not have given for him to be at the wedding? Proud of me. To know he approved of Peggy. Was what I’d done so wrong? So contrary to his cracked vision that, if George lived, he would not forgive me?

  “Husband?”

  Wife’s glasses were steamed by tears.

  “I’ve done something?” I asked.

  “No…no.” She shook open my handkerchief to dry her glasses. “I’ve never been happier.”

  “If I were a priest and saw you and your father at these moments of hysterical joy, I’d administer Last Rites and lower coins onto your eyelids.”

  “It’s just,” Peggy watched me, myopically, over glasses hooked low on her nose, “that I’m not supposed to be happy. Does that sound crazy? It’s so hard to say this….” She gnawed her underlip. “The wedding was ridiculous and unnecessary and a flagrant betrayal of the Protestant Reformation, and everybody wants one, I don’t care what they say! But….” Groping again for words, she found none, and settled on an anecdote: “It resembles a story Evelyn Pomeroy told me once about meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe in Charlotte. About how she read her novel and loved it—and loved her—and thought, ‘I have to do that.’ Evelyn is not, as you know, a crusader. She is, constitutionally, a romatic writer. Not a journalist-muckraker. Nothing she has written will equal the influence of Stowe. When she saw that, after writing a hundred pages of a protest novel, she also discovered that she hated Stowe’s book. She found faults, first with her novel, then turned on the Novel itself. She dismissed it as dead. She wrote a parody of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a clever, sneering lampoon that was, after the first few laughs, ugly—ugly and spiteful because it burlesqued something it couldn’t be, and all because Evelyn did love Harriet Beecher Stowe. She told me she couldn’t admit that for years—that she belonged in the audience, cheering. Not on stage. It was tantamount to confessing she was beneath the beauty of fiction. Maybe even beneath Stowe. Can you,” Peggy asked herself, not me, “still love and believe in something when it’s so beautiful it blinds you, and you know you can’t have it?” Because she had not asked me, I did not answer. “You start feeling that goodness and beauty are for other people. For men, if you’re a woman. Whites, if your nonwhite. Even the simple things—especially the simple things—like being wanted for yourself. To keep from feeling like waste, or destroying yourself, you have to destroy them. Deny them here.” She touched my chest. “And I did that. Does that sound awful?”

  “And you still feel that way?” Near the front we stopped, both Fruity and I a little uneasy about climbing the stairs and crossing the front rooms to the bedroom. “That we must deny beauty because, for whatever reason, we fear we cannot have it?”

  “No.” She lifted, then kissed my hand. “I have it all now.”

  As you well know, I had never seen a marriage that “worked,” as we like to put it. For on my word, I’d seen no evidence that cohabitation didn’t end in conflict. At Cripplegate Anna and Jonathan Polkinghorne lived in, at most, “peaceful coexistence,” and in the quarters, for George, who once claimed that marriage should be outlawed forever, and for Mattie, for whom men were a necessary evil, matrimony amounted—after the first few months—to a war of nerves. So that I brought no images of prior success into my marriage to Peggy; I felt during the first few weeks off-center, my footing unsure, and without a map of this new territory. As for my wife:

  She was not troubled, as I was—as most people are—by the “quality” of marriage (as if marriage were a thing, not a relation, and possessed Cartesian properties), and drew no lines except one: the only act forbidden me was infidelity, and to this I agreed, remembering that (for Ezekiel) there was no anguish greater than others turning away, denying you the energy that seemed to beacon from their eyes. Beyond these game rules, she asked for nothing. Peggy did not probe into my past. She did not ask about other women; she even suggested that anything I had experienced earlier with another woman—even in fantasy—should be pursued con brio in our bedroom. Needless to say, applying what Flo Hatfield had taught me occupied our nights for a month; and our days, after I dragged home from school, were devoted to restoring the cabin.

  It had been built in 1809 by a Finn named Immomen, with leaded windows and wedges in the ends of each log so that they interlocked tighter than bonded cells. The family that preceded us left damages in excess of two hundred dollars. Rats and nests of squirrels I found inside, unverifiable eggs in the chimney. They left broken windows. A bad pump. And gossipy neighbors. “Your neighbor to the left,” said our Neighbor-to-the-Right, “is Will Smythe, and he’s the queer one out this way; he makes totem poles.” “Tom Warren, over to the right,” said our Neighbor-to-the-Left, “won’t call the sheriff if you put up a fence a quarter-inch into his property, and he won’t say nothing about it, but he’ll probably lob a fifty-nine caliber ball at you, over your heads, until you pull it back.” That first week our neighbors, and two of my students, helped us patch the roof of handsplit shakes, replace rotting stairs, and repair the pump. Meanwhile, Peggy devoted her time to knitting dag-wain coverlets for the bed and tables, a fine dodge as Fate spoiled a fine dialectician to make a poor, hod-carting carpenter: me. Perhaps a half-dozen small problems inside the house created for Peggy and me common tasks that eased the clumsiness we felt when, after dinner, facing the fireplace in a furnitureless room, she resting against me, her hair smelling faintly of paint, we felt—or at least I felt—the strange faith involved in being with another, the audacity behind placing oneself, desires and defects, at another’s doorstep like muddy boots, knowing they must take you in, but wondering if they should. After all, knowing yourself as well as you do, would you marry you? And since Peggy had taken me in, wasn’t that proof of there being something wrong with her? Had I married a loser? Had she? Suspecting these questions were poison—perhaps not even real questions—we did not give them voice; the house, hammering and scrubbing, kept us focused not on each other but on a spot between and just ahead of us both. Not, in other words, on what she wanted, or I. But on what we built in the interstices. Which was both of us. And neither. But a house can be repaired for only so long, like a novel, which must be abandoned before it is overpolished (a few defects in the house, as in novels, said Evelyn Pomeroy in her letters, were desirable), and we settled into something like second nature.

  “Husband,” Peggy would say, sitting in the inglenook, her lap (and floor around her) littered with applecores, skimming the Spartanburg Plain-Dealer, her bifocals so low on her nose, pressing down her nostrils, that she must breathe through her mouth; at the Queen Anne table, gnawing my thumbnail, at my elbow a mug of cold coffee-soup (it has been in the pot all day over the fire and has the burnt, Balzacian consistency of syrup), I grade midterm papers that make me, after the fifteenth essay, uncertain I understand English at all. I work in my shorts (more comfortable that way), my trousers on the breeches hook in the bedroom. Light from the fire throws a triangle of gray shadow from Fruity’s nose to the line of her chin. “It says here that the Alabama legislature’s formally resolved to secede if Lincoln is elected. Can they do that? Secede, I mean. William?”

  “Eh?”

  “You’re biting your nails again, dear. You always do that when you grade Gilbert Finney’s papers.” She holds the front page over her head. “Can the country break up like that, if it wants to?”

  “Dunno,” I say, distantly. Gilbert Finney has spelled tranquilaty at least four ways; I cannot for the life of me remember how it goes.

  “I w
ouldn’t chew my fingers if I were you….William?”

  “Ah?”

  “What happens to us if the country breaks down?”

  I look up. Tranquillity?

  “Wife, you’re thinking essences again. Giving nouns the value of existence. People endure. Not names. There are no ‘Negroes.’ Or ‘women.’ There are no ‘nations.’ We tear down one shop sign, America; we put another, Atlantis. And we blunder along as usual. Patching up the house. Misspelling trannquility.” I push back my chair. “Where the hell’s that Webster’s I brought from school?”

  “In the cupboard, behind the canned peaches.”

  “The cupboard? Wife….”

  “You haven’t finished the bookcase.” She finds a wormhole in her apple and winces. “It’s been on the porch for a month, William. I put all the reference books in the cupboard.”

  The bookcase: more domestic slippage, like the on-again, off-again pump, which I’d put aside for a Saturday morning. I stack jars on the counter, then return to the table with Webster’s, only to discover the bad joke of all dictionaries: In order to find a word’s correct spelling (or learn something new), you must know how it is spelled in the first place. Or have a good hunch. The ignorant stayed in the cave. The seeker sought, not knowledge, but what he already knew. Nothing changed.

  “William?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, what?”

  She folds her paper, puts it on the kitchen table, under the fruitbowl, steps over the apples at her feet, and, standing barefoot behind my chair, affectionately squeezes me round the neck. “Come to bed.”

  Tranquility?

  In all respects truly being-with was so pleasant I almost felt unworthy of it. Marriage was a little choppy in spots, I grant you, but generally, like Donald McKay’s fast new clipper, Flying Cloud, a sleek, stripped-down beauty which, on waters smooth as isinglass, whipped by older ships freighted with useless cargo; but I must keep to the point, which is this: I had seen so many Ways since leaving Hodges—the student in Ezekiel, the senses in Flo Hatfield, the holy murderer in Bannon (Shiva’s hitman), and Reb, who was surely a Never-Returner; but in all these well-worn trails—none better than another—I discovered that my dharma, such as it was, was that of the householder. I wanted, though good fortune made me feel guilty, nothing more than forty years of crawling home from the classroom, my suitcoat lightly dusted with chalk, nerves humming with the peculiar blend of fatigue and exhilaration that follows an inspired lecture, the sort where you scrub your notes (yellowed, obsolete), and sing the Simple Sentence—that, too, was a springboard for speculative thought, the way it warped the world toward Western ontology; having tossed, like birdseed, these linguistic-epistemological gems to baffled farmers, their children ten years later, and their grandchildren, I would drop to the kitchen table, the U-shape handle of my walnut cane hooked on the back of my chair; hands dithering on the tablecloth, I would watch Wife carry food, as slow as Satan’s ascent to Paradise, to the table (it takes her half an hour to scuff from the counter), serving something unnameable that twitches, bubbles, and backstrokes in a bowl of tepid water (in forty years Fruity would still be a poor cook), which I praise, “Wonderful! Boiled tuna, you say?” then eat dutifully, lifting my bowl, licking it dry, even if Wife serves meat, for it is more righteous to approve than stand on lofty principles: a quiet life. With the bird flutter of children throughout the house, all as blind as Peggy. But what came to pass, as you’ve probably guessed, was quite another story.