Oxherding Tale Read online

  My father negotiated the wide, straight staircase to Anna’s bedchamber, but stopped in the doorway. In candlelight like this, on her high bed with its pewterized nickel headboard, Anna Polkinghorne was a whole landscape of flesh, white as the moon, with rolling hills, mounds, and bottomless gorges. He sat down on a chair by her bed. He stood up. He sat down again—George had never seen the old woman so beautiful. Blurred by the violence of his feelings, or the gin, his eyes clamped shut and he swallowed. Wouldn’t a man rise new-made and cured of all his troubles after a night in this immense bed? And the Prayer Circle? Didn’t his wife say whatever happened was, in the end, the Lord’s will? George put his plate on the chair. He stared—and stared—as Anna turned in her sleep. He yanked off his shirt—wooden buttons flew everywhere, then his coarse Lowell breeches and, like a man listening to the voice of a mesmerist, slipped himself under the bedsheets. What happened next, he had not expected. Sleepily, Anna turned and soldered herself to George. She crushed him in a clinch so strong his spine cracked. Now he had fallen too far to stop. She talked to George, a wild stream of gibberish, which scared him plenty, but he was not a man to leave his chores half-finished, and plowed on. Springs in the mattress snapped, and Anna, gripping the headboard, groaned, “Oh gawd, Jonathan!”

  “No, ma’am. It ain’t Jonathan.”

  “Geo-o-orge?” Her voice pulled at the vowel like taffy. She yanked her sheet to her chin. “Is this George?”

  “Yo husband’s in the quarters.” George was on his feet. “He’s, uh, with my wife.” None of it made sense now. How in God’s name had he gotten himself into this? He went down on all fours, holding the plate for Mattie over his head, groping around the furniture for his trousers. “Mrs. Polkinghorne, I kin explain, I think. You know how a li’l corn kin confuse yo thinkin’? Well, we was downstairs on the porch, you know, drinkin’, Master Polkinghorne and me….”

  Anna let fly a scream.

  She was still howling, so he says, when George, hauling hips outside, fell, splattering himself from head to foot with mud deltaed in the yard, whooping too when he arrived flushed, naked, and fighting for breath at his own place, the plate of beef still miraculously covered. He heard from inside yet another scream, higher, and then Jonathan came flying like a chicken fleeing a hawk through the cabin door, carrying his boots, his shirt, his suspenders. For an instant, both men paused as they churned past each other in the night and shouted (stretto):

  “George, whose fat idea was this?”

  “Suh, it was you who told me….”

  This, I have been told, was my origin.

  It is, at least, my father’s version of the story; I would tell you Anna Polkinghorne’s, but I was never privileged to hear it. While Jonathan survived this incident, his reputation unblemished, George Hawkins was to be changed forever. Anna, of course, was never quite herself again. All this may seem comic to some, but from it we may date the end of tranquility at Cripplegate. Predictably, my birth played hob with George’s marriage (it didn’t help Master Polkinghorne’s much either) and, just as predictably, for twenty years whenever George or Jonathan entered the same room as Mattie, my stepmother found something to do elsewhere. She never forgave George, who never forgave Jonathan, who blamed Anna for letting things go too far, and she demanded a divorce but settled, finally, on living in a separate wing of the house. George, who looked astonished for the rest of his life, even when sleeping, was sent to work in the fields. This Fall, he decided, was the wage of false pride—he had long hours to ponder such things as Providence and Destiny now that he was a shepherd of oxen and sheep. It was God’s will, for hitherto he and Mattie—especially Mattie—had been sadditty and felt superior to the fieldhands who, George decided, had a world-historical mission. He had been a traitor. A tool. He refused Jonathan’s apologies and joked bleakly of shooting him or, late at night when he had me clean his eyes with cloth after a day of sacking wool, even more bleakly of spiritual and physical bondage, arguing his beliefs loudly, if ineffectively, on the ridiculously tangled subject Race. My father had a talent for ridiculing slaveholders in general and the Polkinghornes in particular—who knew them better than their butler?—that ultimately went over big in Cripplegate’s quarters. When I look back on my life, it seems that I belonged by error or accident—call it what you will—to both house and field, but I was popular in neither, because the war between these two families focused, as it were, on me, and I found myself caught from my fifth year forward in their crossfire.

  It started in 1843 when Jonathan realized he would have no children, what with Anna holed up with his flintlock and twenty-five rounds of ammunition in one half of the house. What had been a comfortable, cushiony marriage with only minor flare-ups, easily fixed by flowers or Anna’s favorite chocolates, was now a truce with his wife denying him access to the common room, top floors, and dining area (he slept in his study); what was once a beautiful woman whose voice sang as lovely as any in this world when she sat at the black, boatlike piano in the parlor, one foot gently vibrating on the sostenuto pedal, was now an irascible old woman who haunted the place like a dead man demanding justice, who left terrible notes on the kitchen table, under Jonathan’s cup, who, locked in her bedchamber like a prisoner, finished the plates the housemaid left outside her door, but would not throw the latch: a rotten business, in Jonathan’s opinion. He came half-asleep to her door night after night, night after night, night after night, and asked helplessly, “Can we talk about it?”

  She sat up and shouted, “No!”

  “We all make mistakes, Anna. For God’s sake, George and I meant no harm….” He paused. The inevitable question still nagged him. “Anna, you wanted George, not me, to be there, didn’t you?”

  Silence. After a second: “Is that boy still here?”

  “In the quarters,” he said. “He’s living with George, and he’s beautiful, Anna. He has your hair, your—”

  “You send him away!”

  The old man gulped. “He’s your son as much as George’s, isn’t he?” He rubbed the floor with the toe of his slipper. “We should do for him, you know, like he was ours….”

  “I know no such thing!” Her voice became flat and tired. “Go away.”

  “This is my house!” he barked, trembling with fury. “I live here, too!”

  “Go away!”

  Exactly five years to the day George sprang from Anna’s bed-sheets, Jonathan sat in his study until dawn, writing advertisements for a tutor, which he sent to the best schools. So September, October, and November passed; and on a cold morning in December a gloomy but gifted teacher—a graduate of William and Mary—arrived unannounced on foot from Hodges. By a riverboat, by a stagecoach, by a wagon, by a horse, by a rail—by traveling for five weeks he came with a stupendous headcold to Cripplegate, bearing letters of reference from Amos Bronson Alcott, Caleb Sprague Henry, and Noah Porter, who wrote, “This candidate knows as much about metaphysics as any man alive, and has traveled in India, but you must never leave him alone for long in a room with a little girl.”

  Porter wrote:

  “He is, let us say, born to Transcendentalism by virtue of a peculiar quirk of cognition that, like the Tibetan mystic, lets him perceive the interior of objects, why no one knows; whatever his faults, he is perhaps the only man in North America who truly understands the Mahàbhárata, and has a splendid future as an Orientalist ordained for him, provided he isn’t hanged, say, for high treason, or heresy. He is well suited for the tutorial position you advertise if, and only if, you do not set him off. Never,” wrote Porter, “mention his mother.”

  That winter, the worst in South Carolina’s history, five men froze to their horses. Up in the hills, they weren’t found until March thaw, their bodies white pap and bloated fingers inside the horses’ bellies for the bloodwarmth. In this bitter season, snow sat on the rooftops, where its weight cracked wooden beams like kindling; snow brought a silence like sleep to the quarters, where it frosted the great family house
and, like a glacial spell, sealed off the hills, the forests, and the fields in blue ice. This drowse of winter released a figure who evolved in pieces from the snowdrifts, first a patch of bloodless fingers and a prayerbook, then a black coat, a hatbrim dusted with ice crystals. Snow lay like a cloak on his shoulders and like spats on the tops of his boots. He sloshed, coughing, up a path made by the wagons to the paddocks—it was eight-thirty—and there he stamped his feet. Jonathan bounded outside in his housecoat, he picked up the stranger’s portmanteau, then pushed a tumbler of claret at him. My tutor brushed it aside. “I never drink before noon.”

  “Nor I,” chuckled Jonathan. “But it must be noon somewhere.” He threw down the tumbler, then took the stranger’s arm:

  “How are you called?”

  Dropping his gloves into his hat, he pulled back, did a heelclick in the hallway, and bowed. “My Christian name is Ezekiel William Sykes-Withers.”

  “Of course,” Jonathan said, blinking—he couldn’t stand people with two last names. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  They sat, these two, on straw chairs by the windows in the study. As Jonathan served hot cups of milk tea with honey, dickered over Ezekiel’s wages, and spelled out his chores, Anna must have whiffed trouble, because the slumbrous feel of the morning was broken by a crash from her bedchamber upstairs, then a groan; the plank-ribbed ceiling buckled, Jonathan spilled boiling tea on his lap, and yelped, “Pay no attention—we’re having some work done upstairs.” In the doorway, I listened; the interview did not seem to be edited for my benefit.

  “You’re welcome to the guestroom,” said Jonathan. “It’s right below my wife’s bedroom, so you can look in when she rings her bell.”

  “By your leave,” sniffed Ezekiel—he blew his nose into his handkerchief, looked inside to see what he’d got, and said, “I will sleep closer to the boy.”

  “My thought exactly.” Jonathan finished his tea, then placed his cup and saucer on a candlestand. Unconsciously, he swung his left foot. What he thought we shall never know, but this was clear: my tutor, he learned, was, as Porter hinted, an Anarchist and member of George Ripley’s Transcendental Club—a brilliant man, a mystic whose pockets bulged with letters, scraps of paper, news clippings, notes scribbled on his handkerchiefs, his shirtcuffs, and stuffed inside his hat. He looked in the study’s weak light like engravings I’d seen of Thomas Paine, or a Medieval scholar peering up from his scrolls, and at other times reminded me of a story-book preacher (Calvinist), and was, we learned, one of the two or three authorities on the Rhineland sermons of Meister Eckhart. He was thin as a line in Zeno, with a craglike face, wild goatish eyes, and blood pressure so staggeringly high that twice during the interview he ran outside to rub his wrists with snow. His tight, pale lips were the whole Jeffersonian idea of Insurrection. Whenever he pronounced the words “perceiver” and “perceived,” which he referred to often that morning, he smothered them in his long nose into “per-r-rceiver” and “per-r-rceived” with a kind of solemn quiver as he rolled them out. He smelled of laudanum. He smoked while he was eating, disdained comfort, and died, ten years later, under circumstances that left the exact cause of death a mystery. “You don’t drink heavily, do you, Ezekiel?” asked Jonathan. “No,” he said. “Or take opium?” “No.” “And you have no wife, no relations?” Ezekiel’s brow wrinkled and he shook his head violently. “I’ve stayed to myself since the death of my parents, Mr. Polkinghorne.”

  “I’m sorry.” Jonathan tapped the end of his broad, bell-shaped nose. “I lost my father not long ago, too-I know how you must feel.”

  “My father,” said Ezekiel, “deeply loved the things of this world, he held his family and work in the highest esteem. He was piously religious to his Creator, loyal to his country, faithful to his wife, a kind relation, a lasting friend, and charitable to the poor.” He sat stiffly on his chair, fists clenched tight. “He shot my mother and sister, and would have blown me to Kingdom Come, too, I assure you, had I not been away that evening. When I arrived home, they were all dead, over their apéritif, at the dinner table. Have you,” Ezekiel asked, “ever considered suicide?”

  “Why no!” Jonathan rubbed his nose. “Never!”

  Ezekiel said, “You should.”

  “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  “I only mean,” said Ezekiel, “that we do not think of death until we are well within her jaws.” What he meant by this, he did not say. From his pocket he withdrew a tobacco pouch and a big Nuremberg pipe, thumbed down a pinch of Latakia, and said, “This boy, you say, is a mulatto?”

  Jonathan nodded yes.

  “In his horoscope Mars confronts Mercury at three angles, and this is promising,” said Ezekiel. “It signifies the birth of a philosopher. Is he yours?”

  Witheringly, Jonathan glanced toward the door, wagged his head, and said, “No.” The reply and gesture nihilated each other. “What I mean to say is that Andrew is my property and that his value will increase with proper training.” He looked away, quickly, from the door, then sighed. And what was I thinking? What did I feel? Try as I might, I could not have told you what my body rested on, or what was under my feet—the hallway had the feel of pasteboard and papier-mâché. A new train of thoughts were made to live in my mind. Jonathan hung his head a little. He said to Ezekiel, without looking up from the floor, “Five dollars monthly, and board, are all I can offer. Are you still interested?”

  Ezekiel’s face wrinkled into an infernal, Faustian leer. “He isn’t your son?”

  “Are you,” Jonathan asked, crossly, “interested?”

  “I will teach the boy, yes, using a program modeled on that of James Mill for his son John Stuart, but I am never to be disturbed on Sundays, or during the evening. I never eat meat. Or eggs. I would like one wall of my room covered with mirrors. Don’t ask why—I live a bit to one side of things. Do you,” he asked, stretching out a hand soft and white as raw dough toward Jonathan, “agree to these conditions?”

  “Yes.” My Master blinked and pushed back his chair. “Agreed.”

  By the age of eight I began, with Ezekiel, learning Greek; by the time I was twelve I had read Xenophon and Plato. Next came Voice, Elocution, and Piano lessons. He gave George and Mattie orders that I was not to touch silver, gold, or paper currency; nor was I allowed to listen to the Mixed Lydian and Hyperlydian Modes in music, lest these melancholy strains foul Ezekiel’s plans for what was—in his view—a perfect moral education. By the age of fifteen I began to fare badly. I could ask to use the silver chamber pot in George’s cabin, where I slept curled up on a pallet, in Latin more perfect than my native tongue; I received lectures on monadology, classical philology, and Oriental thought—the better to fathom Schopenhauer, a favorite of Ezekiel, who often spent days in his cabin, reading Hegel and Thoreau, with whom he’d corresponded earlier, and Marx, who paid him a visit at Cripplegate in 1850. (Of Karl Marx’s social call more will be said later.) He taught me the 165 Considerations, Four Noble Truths, the Eight-Fold Path, the 3,000 Good Manners, and 80,000 Graceful Conducts; but I must confess that reading Chinese thought was a little like eating Chinese food: the more one read Lao tzu and Chaung tzu, or ate subgum chop suey, the emptier one’s head and stomach felt hours later. Too, I could never remember if it was before except after , or before except after , and always got the meanings confused. And there is also this to say:

  Soon all life left my studies—why I couldn’t say, but I had, at least, this theory: these vain studies of things moral, things transcendental, things metaphysical were, all in all, rich food for the soul, but in Cripplegate’s quarters all that was considered as making life worth living was utterly wanting. And so I became restless and unquiet. So restless, in fact, that on the eve of my twentieth birthday, a rainy Sunday evening, I rose from my pallet in George’s dreary, two-room cabin, and carried all my confusions to Master Polkinghorne.

  May 6 of the year of grace 1858.

  My clothes were soaking, my frock bunche
d up like a woman’s bustle in the back as I scaled a hillslope between the quarters and house. The yard, as wide as a playing field, was wet and slippery to my feet. Farther on, around the lee side and behind long chintz draperies, a chandelier glowed faintly with fumes of golden light like luminous gas in one ground-floor window. For an instant, I paused beside the broad bay window, watching an old woman, all wrinkled, nothing but pleats and folds, almost bedridden now, burnt down to eighty pounds, dying faster than Dr. Horace Crimshaw in Hodges could feed her pills for migraines, pills for stomach cramps, and potions (Veronal and chloral hydrate) for rest. Jonathan loved his old woman, I knew, and me as well, but could not live with us both. He would slip away some evenings, yes, riding his one-horse chaise off on the remains of old plank roads to tumble, it was rumored, the wives of farmers gone to market in Greenwood. He became, in fact, a hunter of women—a broken-down old man, perfumed, who wore powdered wigs and ribbons in his hair like a Creole dandy. The sort of man who told women, “My wife and I live like brother and sister,” or, “Older men make, of course, the best lovers.” So it was for years with my Master before sickness brought his wife back downstairs. His chest shrank, his stomach filled, and duty replaced his desire for Anna. But he never thought—he was too loyal to think—of abandoning her, although now she could only stare back at him through burnt-out eyes, coughing blood into her brass thunderpot, crepitations like the dry induviae of brittle leaves in the folds of her nightgown: a fragile mass of living jelly, and no more wife to Jonathan now than a stump of firewood.

  A thousand drubbing fingers of rain flew against my face as I leaned forward from my hips and climbed the six wooden steps of the dry-rotted porch. The nerves of my teeth reacted to the cold. Shivering, I lifted, then let fall once—twice—the long brass knocker on the door, waited, then stepped back quickly. For now the latch was thrown, and the huge door opened with a splinter of milkblue candlelight and a dragging sound. It opened, old hinges grating for want of oil. And in the doorway stood my Master, his back hooped like a horseshoe, breathing as if he’d been running for hours. His eyelids were puffy. He scuffed in his stiff, sliding walk onto the porch, lifted his candle higher, oblivious to hot wax trickling down his forearm into his sleeve, and winced when he saw me. A tic twitched in one of his eyes. He saddled his nose with wide spectacles, and asked, full of affection (for the old quop did, indeed, love me like a son), “Is this Andrew?”