Oxherding Tale Page 4

  “It is, Master Polkinghorne.” He pressed his cold lips in a moist kiss against my forehead, and I, in return, affectionately squeezed his arm. “May I come in, sir?”

  “You can’t stay,” he said. “My wife is up and about, you see.”

  “This won’t take long.” I coughed into my right hand to clear my throat. “You’ll not be troubled by me again.”

  “You’re not in any trouble, are you? You haven’t murdered someone, have you?” Jonathan signed. “If so, I hope it wasn’t anybody white, Andrew.”

  “No, sir. Nothing like that.” At that moment I decided to tell him nothing, and confide only in you of my brief but unsettling encounter earlier that afternoon. Near the southern hills, close to the backroad, just where the plantation approaches a dark stretch of woods, I had been herding my father’s Brown Swiss calves, his Leicester sheep, when the girl—this was Minty—appeared in an osnaburg skirt and white blouse, beneath an old Leghorn hat, with a blue satin ribbon, toting a washtub of clothes. I had known her since childhood—whenever she saw me, her lips made a kissing-sound and she called me away. To Master Polkinghorne’s big twelve-stanchion barn. There, beside bins of old oats going bad, in a loft of straw and musty hay, I think I saw her—really saw her for the first time. Not, I say, as the wild daughter of Jonathan’s maid, who teased me when I traipsed off for my sessions with Ezekiel, hid my books, and mocked my speech, but as all the highbreasted women in calico and taffeta, in lace-trimmed gingham poke bonnets and black net hose, that I had ever wanted and secretly, hopelessly loved. What seemed physical shortcomings, defects in her childhood—eyes too heavy for a child’s small head, a shower of sienna hair always entangling itself in farm machinery—seemed (to me) that afternoon to be purified features in a Whole, where no particular facet was striking because all fused together to offer a flawed, haunting beauty the likes of which you have never seen. Do not laugh, sir: I was stung sorely, riveted to the spot, relieved, Lord knows, of my reason. How much of her beauty lay in Minty, and how much in my head, was a mystery to me. Was beauty truly in things? Was touch in me or in the things I touched? These things so ensorceled me and baffled my wits that I prayed mightily, Give me Minty. And, God’s own truth, I promised in that evanescent instant that she and I, George and Mattie—all the bondsmen in Cripplegate’s quarters and abroad—would grow old in the skins of free man. (Perhaps I was not too clear in the head at that moment.) But how long would this take? Forty years? Fifty years? My heart knocked violently for manumission. Especially when, as we straightened our garments, I saw her eyes—eyes green as icy mountain meltwater, with a hint of blue shadow and a drowse of sensuality that made her seem voluptuously sleepy, distant, as though she had been lifted long ago from a melancholy African landscape overrich with the colors and warm smells of autumn—a sad, out-of-season beauty suddenly precious to me because it was imperfect and perhaps illusory like moonlight on pond water, sensuously alive, but delivering itself over, as if in sacrifice, to inevitable slow death in the fields. Her name, now that I think on it, might have been Zeudi—Ethiopian, ancient, as remote and strange, now that something in me had awoken, as Inca ruins or shards of pottery from the long-buried cities of Mu. But this is not what I said to Master Polkinghorne. I said:

  “She has never liked me, has she?”

  “Perhaps you will find forgiveness in your heart for her, Andrew.” Now we entered his study. “Our relations are somewhat on the stiff side.” There was a bureau with swinging brass handles, a diamond-paned bookcase, and a soft calf-bound set of Hawthorne. On an elbow-chair near the fireplace my Master lowered his weight, then looked up. “Would you rub me along the shoulders, Andrew—the pain is there again.” As I did so, Jonathan talked on, as if to himself. “My Anna is mad, gloriously mad, and it’s all my doing.” He forced a laugh, full of gloom. “And I’ll tell you true, I hate her sometimes. Many a night I stand by her door, listening to Anna breathe—it’s horrible. Just horrible!” His voice began to shake. “I pray that her lungs will fail, and when they do stop, faltering sometimes in a hideous rattle, I pray just as desperately for her to breathe again, and when this happens…ah, Andrew, I’m sorry once again.” He rubbed his face with both hands as I crossed to the fireplace and stood with my back to the flames, facing him, opening my palms to catch the heat, closing them. The next time he looked up there were tears in his eyes. “What business brings you here tonight?”

  “With your permission,” I said, “I have come to tell you that Minty, your seamstress, and I plan to be married. That, however, is not all, sir.”

  “Oh?” He squinted suspiciously.

  “Meaning no disrespect to you, sir, I want you to draw up my deed of manumission.”

  My Master was silent so long I could hear rain patter, lightly, against the windowpanes. Make no mistake. That night I trembled. A pulse began to throb in my temple. Beneath the sausage-tight skin of slavery I could be, depending on the roll of the dice, the swerve of the indifferent atom, forever poised between two worlds, or—with a little luck—a wealthy man who had made his way in the world and married the woman he loved. All right—be realistic, I thought. Consider the facts: Like a man who had fallen or been rudely flung into the world, I owned nothing. My knowledge, my clothes, my language, even, were shamefully second-hand, made by, and perhaps for, other men. I was a living lie, that was the heart of it. My argument was: Whatever my origin, I would be wholly responsible for the shape I gave myself in the future, for shirting myself handsomely with a new life that called me like a siren to possibilities that were real but forever out of reach. My Master sat, blinking into the fire, then up at me, the corners of his mouth tucked in, his expression exactly that of a man who has come suddenly across cat fur in a bowl of soup. I walked to the study window. Air outside still smelled of rain. Breezes flew over the grass like shadows or grandfather spirits—so I imagined—in search of their graves. Clearly, I remember the night sky as applegreen, the chirring of grasshoppers in a crazy sort of chorus. Abruptly, Jonathan Polkinghorne brought out:

  “You haven’t been smoking rabbit tobacco again, have you, Andrew?”

  “No, sir.”

  His eyebrows drew inward.

  “Touch your thumb to your nose.”

  I did so.

  “Now say, ‘The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.’”

  I assured him I was sober.

  “Then, Andrew,” he said, “you will understand that you are too young for these freedom papers. All our bondsmen will be released after Anna and I close our eyes. This is in our will. You haven’t long, I suppose, to wait.” His face was pale and strained and vague—Jonathan rather hated all discussions of death, especially his own. Moving toward the door, his shoe knocked a chair, and he swore irritably. Massaging his toe, he turned to ask, “Is there anything else?”

  “Sir,” I said, struggling, the reflections of the balls of my eyes so utterly without depth in the window that even I could not tell what I was thinking. “Long ago, you would not have me, and you turned me out to the quarters, then over to a teacher….”

  “Ezekiel Sykes-Withers.” He drew his mouth down. “That was a mistake. The man was crazy as a mouse in a milkcan. Should’ve been a monk. He was hired to teach you useful skills, Andrew—things like book-keeping, and market research, and furniture repair, and what have we to show for his time here?”

  “He taught me to read,” I said.

  “Well, that’s some consolation.”

  “He taught me to control my heart and, when I walk, leave no footprints.”

  “Are these what they call metaphors, Andrew?” As always when facing figurative language, my Master was a little flummoxed. “I think I’m a pretty clear-witted man,” he said, “but this outdoes me, Andrew.” It’s only about once in a lifetime that you stumble upon a first-rate philosophical metaphor, and when you do, people are bound to say, “Huh?” and take all the starch out of it. “You got out of bed to tell me all this?” He scratched his hea
d. “Manumission and marriage?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And what shall you do if I sign these papers?”

  “Work for myself,” I said, too loudly. “Within a year I’ll be back to buy Minty, then George and Mattie from you.” Our eyes met—mine squinted, small as sewing needles, like a murderer’s; my Master’s cold and critical, the eyes of an eagle, infinitely wise.

  Softly, the clock in the corner chimed twice.

  “I see.”

  He did not, I knew, see it at all.

  “Then I tell you what, you will have an opportunity to work for yourself—or at least work this foolishness out of your system.” He went to his bureau, taking out paper, ink, and a quill, but his jaw was set—that meant something. “However, as I say, I will sign no freedom papers until you return, as promised, with the money for the others.”

  “You will have it,” I said. “Every penny.”

  Glasses clamped on his nose, he wrote quietly while I paced, and in a cramped, arthritic script that made his letter resemble a cross between cuneiform, Arabic, and Morse code. When he finished this tortured message, he folded the paper, and pressed it into my hand.

  “This letter will see that you get work with one of my old acquaintances in Abbeville. We have not corresponded in years, but I believe she will put you to work.” He said this woman—Flo Hatfield—would see to all my needs (he didn’t say what needs), and would keep me busy (he didn’t say how). Standing, he rumpled my hair, which I hated, and said, “Now go and tell George and Mattie where you’re off to.”

  I started to hug him, then thought better of it, and ran down the hallway, though I had no reason, and leaped from the porch. The beauty of the night made me shout a cry that set sleeping dogs to barking and hummed for minutes afterwards in my ears. A fine rain fell. I sang out, now to trees that nodded respectfully in return, now to invisible blackbirds that called back from the bushes. Then I hurried on through foamy mud to the quarters, the letter tucked inside my shirt, sank slowly to sleep, and, dreaming, saw myself counting coins at the end of the week.

  But first I had to work for Flo Hatfield.

  II

  HOMELEAVING

  Traveling with me to Abbeville, George told a story, very strange, of Flo Hatfield’s appetites. A widow, and forty if a day, she lived on a five-hundred-acre farm—she called it Leviathan—and often picked a slave, preferably male, from her fields. Him she bathed, rested, then washed in cassia and tamarind, massaged with castor oil, which relaxes the muscles, tied his hair in bright ribbons, added cologne, then placed him in her late husband Henry’s clothes before a platform of banquet proportions—all the good things of the earth baked, basted, broiled. He’d died and gone to Heaven, you might say. No other servants were permitted near the house. She kept her door barricaded. The shutters were closed. For days, whole weeks, Flo Hatfield entertained him—how George couldn’t figure, but eventually a black Maria eased in from town, and a veterinarian examined the body. Then a mortician dragged a pine casket down her front steps, hauled it away, and her bondsman was listed among slaves who’d fled to Canada.

  “Hawk,” George said, grim, “I don’t ’spect to see you again ’til Judgment Day.”

  “Stop joking,” I studied his face. “You are joking, aren’t you?”

  “I just know what I hear.”

  We rode on, the sunlight ripening from blonde to brick-red at our backs, sweat trickling down my belly, George very quiet now, thinking his own thoughts, tired, and weakly cracking his short-handled whip over the horses across backcountry that smelled mucilaginous and faintly sweet. He was old now, with pyorrhea of the gums, big waxy hands, and a broken hip. Talking wearied him, so he said nothing as we rumbled through dreary villages and tobacco fields, the wagon listing like a great ship on its broken springs. And then, without warning, he reached over and gently pressed my hand. “Mattie and me gonna miss you, Hawk.” A stronger pressure. “’Specially me. I know we ain’t been the best parents to you, fightin’ and all,” he frowned, “but you know one thing, son?”

  “What?”

  Another squeeze.

  “No matter what anybody tells you, ’specially Master Polkinghorne, you Mattie’s son, and mine. We had some rough spots, you know, Mattie and me. But you blood. You belong with us.” Chewing his lower lip, he glanced at me quickly, then away. “You wouldn’t never pass for white, would you?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You know ain’t nothin’ as beautiful as yo own people?”

  “Yessir.”

  “You know Africa will rise again someday, Hawk, with her own queens and kings and a court bigger’n anythin’ in Europe?”

  “Yessir.” I’d heard this so often before; my father spoke of it the way the Prayer Circle sang Christ’s resurrection. “I hope it will.”

  “And that you belong there?”

  “Yessir.”

  “You could pass,” he said, “if you wanted to. But if you did, it’d be like turnin’ your back on me and everythin’ I believes in.”

  “I’d never do that.”

  “Don’t” he said. “Whatever you do, Hawk—it pushes the Race forward, or pulls us back. You know what I’ve always told you: If you fail, everything we been fightin’ for fails with you. Be y’self.”

  “I will,” I said. “I promise.”

  No sooner than I said this I felt wrong. More than anything else, I wanted my father’s approval—I did, in fact, clomp along in his boots when I was a child, but he was so bitter. And his obsession with the world-historical mission of Africa? I didn’t want this obligation! How strange that my father, the skillful, shrewd, funny, and wisest butler at Cripplegate—so faithful, on the surface, that he was even permitted to keep a shotgun before the Fall, and still had it—was beneath his mask of good humor and harmlessness a flinty old Race Man who wouldn’t cook, wouldn’t clean, who left his bedpans unemptied, who loosened his belt after my stepmother’s meals, broke wind loudly, and, as often as not, fell asleep in the middle of her conversations. He nearly killed Mattie. The skin on his face was as thick as the callouses on his palm. But Mattie was, according to her lights, soft and deeply religious. A tall, thick-waisted woman, she attacked dirt in his cabin with a vengeance, singing “My God Is a Rock in a Weary Land” as she scrubbed tobacco stains off his porch, her crisp hair in a bright headscarf, shampooed his filthy rugs, which threw up biscuit crumbs, dust bunnies, and pips of calcified bone when George, tramping in each evening, stomped from room to room in his stockingfeet and nightshirts (Mattie kept the fireplace smoking, even in summer, and George, tight as an owl some nights, rocked around the cabin in nothing but his boots and Beardbox—he was absolutely the last man at Cripplegate to sleep in a Beardbox), but my stepmother stayed cold, very cold, after the incident with Jonathan. She bundled up in George’s big workshirts and woolen scarves, grabbed the seat of her dress, threw it out behind her, then rested, a kitten on her lap, in George’s favorite chair—she did not so much sit as bend the space around her. God only knew where she got her voice. It resonated, I remember, deep and clear like a belljar, but a bit of Cambridge clung to her vowels: when she said “dear” it always came out “dare.” They argued. They fought. They paced circles round each other like cats. Mattie made him fix broken floorboards, then the front steps—this was no work, George argued, for one of the avant-garde of the African Revolution. It was (he said) a sin to Moses the way she made him finish his vegetables and, later, live only on herbs and roots. Or wipe his feet. Or smoke outdoors. (He pinched out his handmade, black-tobacco cigarettes when she caught him, dropping them still smoldering into his shirt pocket.) Or say grace above his usual mumbles: “Gawd,” groaned George, hands squeezed together under the table, “forwhatweareabouttoreceivethankyouAmen!” Crying shame too (said George) to be put out like this in your own place. (They fought, for example, over soup each Sunday, what with George drinking twice as fast as my stepmother and, ready for more, shoving his cup at he
r for a refill before she finished. Mattie took to bolting down her soup to beat him to the last cup—they looked rather like two huge, boiled lobsters by the end of the meal.) She made him comb his hair, which George never did, because once unkinked, he could not wear his hat, but it was not until a December evening in 1846, a bone-chilling Christmas eve, that their differences exploded in violence.

  We were eating in his cabin, the table enhaloed by soft yellow lamplight, when I bit into my huge sandwich of split cornpone, with a thick slice of fat bacon inserted between the halves, and the Lord made it fall apart (so Mattie claimed), then a dollop of meat dropped to the floor, and George’s hunting dog Daisy, a hound my father swore was the best friend he ever had (“You kin make a damn fool of yoself with a good huntin’ dog and she won’t rag you,” he’d say, “she’ll even make a fool of herself, too”)—well, Daisy snapped up that scrap. She took one gulp, gagged, showed her blue-black gums, spat the meat straight across the cabin, then fainted with her legs in the air like an upended chair. “She’s just playin’,” said George, but Daisy fainting dead away like that was, for my stepmother, an actus Dei.

  She went on a liquid fast for a week. She borrowed cookbooks, then biology texts from Ezekiel, and, each evening, made me read them to untangle for her whether animals or plants had souls and if eating them was evil. (True enough, I discovered, theologians of our time had weighed the soul in at eight-tenths of an ounce, and even one-celled chlamydosauria have (I read) a refined taste and a respect for beauty, but I found no proof that, say, a mushroom’s got a scientific mind like you or me.) Mattie suffered, so to speak, from bad conscience. She claimed, contrary to reason, that men were so god-awful cruel, unchristian, and lowbrow (maybe she was trying to tell my father something) because meat eating—the essence of it, you might say—violated every civilized value since Saint Paul; and all that suffering could be overcome, if my stepmother was right, by doing away with corned Willie. “Well, Hawk,” George told me, “yo Mama’s gone off her pegs for sho this time. Next thing you know, she’ll be talkin’ with spirits and studyin’ phrenology.” The more George thought about this, the less he liked it. Too much imagination, he decided, was unwholesome. And white. If you were George Hawkins, you were coldly courteous to a Master who banished you to the bleakest life possible, a life spent among animals, away from the center of culture at Cripplegate; but wasn’t this exile a blessing? Didn’t it prove that whites were not, morally, Nature’s last word on Man? They were, George swore after three fingers worth of stump liquor—his eyes like torches—Devils or, worse, derived in some way he couldn’t explain from Africans, who were a practical, down-to-earth people. He hated, really hated, Ezekiel. Logic was not, I’m afraid, my father’s strong point. “If they say hup, Hawk, it’s gotta be down.” He stood Jonathan’s world on its head, to speak plainly, inverting Big House values at every turn. As for Mattie, well, this: She made her discovery, she was ready to expand on and explore this thing, to experiment with recipes, fried milk, to talk ethics all day with Ezekiel—I think all they did was talk—and revolutionize George’s meals.