Oxherding Tale Read online

  “Woman!” he barked. “You got to kill somethin’ if you gonna eat! That’s Nature! Don’t take four years of college to see somethin’ as simple as that!” Two weeks after she took George off his feed, they squared off in the cabin. It was quiet, rather like New Year’s dinner in a work camp. George held his spoon in his whole fist. Mattie, her hair divided into eight partings, kept her back to the woodstove. She sent me out to wash my hands and, returning, I saw her bite into a cathead biscuit sharply, as if it might be the end of George’s nose. She asked:

  “George, is something wrong? You’re eating your shirt collar again.”

  “That’s ’cause I’m hongry! I stay hongry enough to chew the ass out of a dead goat!” When he looked up, his forehead was tortuously wrinkled, then suddenly smooth when he sighed, “Sorry.”

  “Then be so good, George,” she sniffed—my stepmother hated it when he swore—“as to eat your dinner.”

  “You want me to eat these funnylookin’ roots and raw tubers, eh?”

  “Vegetables are good for you, George.”

  “Eat this paste, rice, and wood fibre without salt or syrup or anythin’, like I was a bird or an English poet, or,” his eyes shifted like a crab’s, “one of them big wotchermercallits—what’s the word, Mattie?”

  She pulled her blouse away from her body.

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “Bronchitis? Naw, it ain’t bronchitis. It’s on the tip of my tongue.” He scratched his neck. “Begins with b and has a neck two miles long.”

  “Brontosaurus?” I asked.

  “There you go, Hawk!” George looked at Mattie, his fingertips on the edge of the table. “Like that, huh? Honey, you know I ain’t askin’ for quail on toast. If I was to have Hawk run over to the henhouse, and if you was to fry an egg sunnyside-up for me, it wouldn’t be the end of Western Civilization, would it?”

  “Isn’t a fool a wonderful thing, Andrew?” Mattie glanced from George to me. “It would end the egg, dear.” (Was he about to choke her? I couldn’t tell.) “Science proves that if you thump one brown egg in a basket, all the other eggs panic. Life,” she said to turn him off, “is process, dear. We know that now.”

  “Which we you talkin’ about?” asked George. “Whitefolks-we or blackfolks-we?”

  She ignored him. Daisy was under the table, covering both eyes with her paws. The house was, just then, as quiet as a church on Monday. So quiet, I could hear Daisy—she had a touch of asthma—draw her little thimbleful of air. “You like soybean spread, don’t you?” said my stepmother. “I can fix that. It does no harm to eat soybeans.”

  “Soybeans ain’t hardly food!”

  It was then my father decided, I think, that these sophisticated shenanigans had gone about far enough. Night pressed against the cabin window. He stood up, chewing his cheek, then hauled his shotgun and a fifth of topshelf whiskey from the pantry. “Beans or vegetables are okay for extras, but I need somethin’ that’ll fill hup this emptiness and stick with me!”

  “George,” said my stepmother, “what Ezekiel thinks—and what I think, too, is that meat eating is evil.”

  “And that’s what wrong with him, Mattie!” Now his stomach grumbled. He broke off a toothpick from a broom in the pantry, then gnawed it. “He’s the biggest fool in Hodges, and he’s ruinin’ this boy! If he don’t wanna eat meat, okay, but I works hard for a livin’!” I could smell, as he stomped back to the table, the soap and starch in his collar. Now he’d begun to sweat. “He’d bring back the wolves! Naw,” said George, “eatin’ vegetables and walkin’ round the woods nekkid like I seen Ezekiel do—oh yeah, I seen him—is for white people. Colored folks got enough sense to stay in their clothes.” He stopped, pulling deeply for wind, then said, all righteousness, “Some things you got to kill for survival!”

  Mattie said, piously, “Our Lord Jesus Christ never ate meat.”

  “Right,” grumped George, “and His life wasn’t exactly one long hallelujah from start to finish either!” He examined two shotgun shells, snapped both triggers, checked the firing pins before loading both barrels, then closed the breech. Maybe you could outargue George Hawkins, but you couldn’t starve him. Daisy padded over. She put her black paws on my lap. After cocking both triggers, George placed the gunstock under his arm, against his side, the butt in his armpit, said, “Woman, I’m tired of talkin’,” then whipped open the back door. “And you best learn how to cook like a black woman before I gets back!”

  My stepmother shrank back. Guns terrified her. Her voice shot up two octaves. “George, where are you going with that?”

  “Get me some food,” he said. “Real food, y’hear?”

  It was the darkest night I could remember, seeing how my father, hopping mad, and I tramped for hours through crusty heaps of frozen snow, his finger rusted to the trigger, iced through as he railed against the helplessness of black men before masters and Modern Women. “They just a mouthful of grousin’ and a handful of Gimme.” He uncorked a bottle with his teeth. Veins stood out in his temples as he drank. When he finished the bottle, he blew a few sour notes off the top, and raged on: “Hawk, I’ve got to kill somethin’ tonight or I’ll go crazy!” For all the snow, and for all his drunkenness, Death in the form of George Hawkins tracked down a deer and dropped it—both barrels, which he steadied on my shoulders as I stooped, brought him crashing from a dead run into the bushes, but he kept on kicking, looking back at me, his voice leaping and pitching so loud I thought it was my own. The explosion of gunpowder echoed in my throat. I turned away, sick deep in my stomach (I’d seen George kill a hog once by leaping on its back, burying the knife between its shoulder blades, riding it round the yard until it dropped, then he hung it in the smokehouse, its belly slit like an envelope, so I knew—or thought I knew—what was coming next). Squatting on his hams, breathing heavily, my father said, “You skin him, Hawk. I ain’t got the wind left to do a decent job.”

  The knife he handed me sliced clean into its windpipe. I slid it sideways, severing the biggest arteries, then tied the buck’s legs to a tree to keep its belly up. It was hot work, I can tell you. The effort left me panting. Then it was as if someone ran a finger across my mind. What if all Ezekiel’s talk about how poleaxing preceded porkchops was saying that violence of the shotgun blast, the instant before the final explosion of dust, stayed sealed inside like a particle, trapped in the dying tissues, and wound up on the dinner table—as if everything was mysteriously blended into everything else, and somehow all the violence wars slavery crime and suffering in the world had, as Ezekiel suggested, its beginning in what went into our bellies? I screwed shut my eyes. An uneasy feeling came to me through my legs. Despite the cold, I was gulping air, my heart fluttering and unstable in my chest when I cut along the soft belly, pulling the blade from pelvic bone to chest, through tissue tough as rubber. My fist inside then, holding down the hot coils of intestines, I slid my sleeve in deep as I could, cutting loose the diaphragm, the windpipe—it felt like an old hose with wires on it—and then, against my will, I began crying softly into one hand as the other pulled free a handful of smoking heart, lungs, and intestines onto the snow-covered ground.

  “Ah now, look at you, Hawk,” George chuckled. “What’s all that rain in yo face for?”

  “You dress him,” I said meekly.

  “Go on.” Now he sounded cross. “You doin’ fine.”

  “It’s wrong,” I said. “It’s all wrong!”

  My father stared at me as if I had slapped him. In my refusal he saw everyone who had ever hurt him. Furious, he rode down on me, snatched away the knife, and finished skinning the deer himself. On the way home, with ice forming in his hair, he was touchy. He would not speak to me, nor for days thereafter. But sometimes in the middle of supper he would look up and hiss, “Y’all against me,” banging his big fist on the table. “You even turned this boy against me!” Then, sure as day, came paranoia. From his porch, George held mad conversations with someone. Nights, he whispered that he
was being followed by a man, perhaps a padderoll—a slave catcher, who rode an Andalusian with rags tied to its hooves, and who was assigned to murder him if he went too far, nurtured the flimsiest hopes, or forgot his place. “Hawk,” he said, shaking, “someday you’ll see him, too. No matter how edjoocated you git, he’ll be there.” He cracked his knuckles. His brow wrinkled, then went smooth, as if in astonishment. “Just when things git to goin’ good, you know, when you finally think you kin lift hup yo head a li’l, he’ll lay his hand on yo shoulder.” My father believed, rightly or wrongly, in this specter, he slept with his shotgun, never sat with his back to the cabin door, and started at every strange sound.

  George Hawkins and Jonathan Polkinghorne differed in ways doubtlessly important to them, but in my father’s cabin, in the family house I saw the same ancient war—or, more precisely, the same crisis in the male spirit. This frightened me, I confess, for in philosophy’s long history the heart was a mystery. Men had glimpsed, as my stepmother claimed, the algebra and alphabet of Nature, but knew nothing of feeling; men had charted Being and knew its mutations like the Periodic Table, but men were as children when it came to the heart. The emotions were not at issue here—each had its essence, but feeling was something else again: a process, plainly metaphysical, with its own grammar. What grammar was this? All the more urgent, then, was it for me to know, in this age of sexual warfare, my heart, make it my meditation, and be forever creating some meaning for what it meant to be male, though with what real satisfaction, and with how much resemblance to the promise of my gender, I did not know. During my third year with Ezekiel I began this exercise with etymology, tracing the heart’s genesis to the Sanskrit hrd, or kerd, which led to the Greek Kardia (kapδiα), and finally thumos, meaning soul or spirit, a sort of clearing, or aporia, or hollow carved primordially in the midst of things—it was planted (so we say) in the chest’s deep cavity, buried in Being like a stake, centered in popular terms (“To get to the heart of”) at precisely the point where Matter and Mind, spirit and flesh, heaven and earth, subject and object, Self and Other, locked like fingers. This theory was fine, as far as it went, but it hardly went far enough. Perhaps the narratives of Gustavus Vassa and Venture Smith are, as confessions, clearer about slavery and sexual politics, but I (alas) was lost in the ideas at Cripplegate, lost in the emotions, lost in others, and, as always, when I exhausted my wit, I turned to Ezekiel.

  There was no one like Ezekiel.

  What he did about women was anybody’s guess, but he never brought them to his cabin. His two, tiny eight-by-ten-foot rooms, with their three-decked stove, its sheet-iron stovepipe turned at a right angle, warped piano shipped from St. Louis, and large pine cupboard, were an extension of my tutor’s mind—namely, a catastrophe of books, periodicals, copies of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the only issue of Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher, Indian sculpture (The Dance of Shiva), and papers Ezekiel was writing—articles on Patanjali, the poet Shankara, and the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing that would someday be called “brilliant” by people who still cared about the life of the spirit, and “pretentious” by those who did not. Vulgarity he hated; and, after that, Vanity. There was something feminine in his tastes. Yet, he was the only man in Hodges who needed gin to lower his nervous system, gear down his ganglions to the level of general torpidity we called “normal.” Women frightened him. He was afraid also of cripples. He slept in his clothes—the one-button sack coat so ragged he could, when pacing, reach right into the lining and lock his hands behind his back, or rather he collapsed in his clothes at his writing desk after feverishly writing letters to confound his enemies, or pouring over the Pali texts, his shirt collar open, throat bare, and great Adam’s apple bobbing; but he never touched newspapers because the Press, Ezekiel said, trafficked in trivial froth about politicians, features about stage personalities with less wit than a toadstool, gossip, lies, and facts lumped together, page upon page, without analysis, without truth, without system or order, or even once asking, as any right-thinking man would, how the heart might find peace in a world where the spirit seemed exiled. He was awesome to me. He could not, it was clear, live without certainty. And then there were his looking glasses, dozens of them on his study door and wall. His room was all iridescence, a blinding shimmer to me when I tipped in with my black lesson book, for his lamplight was magnified a thousandfold, repeated across the room in every nook and cranny—as were Ezekiel and I—like a sound ricocheting into infinity. Everything inside looked like a vision. When he saw me squinting, he would stand, coughing—he seemed to keep a cold—and say, “Let us step into the next room, Andrew.” His eyes, redwebbed, puckered when he looked down at me. “In Missouri, before the accident, my family was very poor.” He took paper spill from a sheaf on the mantelpiece and began lighting an oil lamp in the front room. “I discovered that looking glasses open up a room, so I never feel confined—they are openings, I think, or doorways.” Ezekiel placed the cloudy lampglass over the flame, paused a moment, then turned up the wick.

  “Was it really an accident?” I was sitting now on a milkbench. “Your father?”

  “It was,” he said, “and it wasn’t.” Lamplight threw his shadow and mine high against the wall. His nose was lit by the glow of his pipe. “My father was no fool. He never wanted pity. He didn’t want to die, Andrew. When I found my parents dead, I wept, of course, but only briefly, because my grief, it struck me, was a ghastly pose—mere histrionics, clichéd outrage when the situation called for something else. Do you see?”

  “Yes,” I said, quietly, but I wasn’t sure.

  “My father’s need for consolation did not dawn on me, or anyone, until it was too late to console. This is the way with all suicides. Because we didn’t listen well, or Lord knows what, he shambled home after work and shot himself.” Ezekiel blew his nose. After a moment of silence, he said, “My father spent twelve, maybe fifteen hours a day in a brass foundry, where I was employed for a time when I was fifteen, and for a pitiful wage. If all he could expect was poverty—if, I say, Andrew, all he could see ahead was sixty years of bad news, the breakdown of his family, debts and disappointments, without hope of change, without consolation, wasn’t it better to be done once and for all with the person feeling, eh? It is not easy to be a full-grown man, Andrew. We are not like women.” He swung his eyes toward me. “We are weaker.”

  “Weaker?” It made no sense. “How are we weaker?”

  “Spiritually, I think. Perhaps all philosophy boils down to the simple fear that the universe has no need for us—men, I mean, because women are, in a strange sense, more essential to Being than we are. Have you never felt that? Don’t you feel oftentimes that we have been banished from the earth? That we approach the universe as an adversary because she turns her back upon us? In the East,” he said, “men believe themselves to be off-springs of the sun, creatures of light, made of the same stuff that powers stars. They worship Being as a female, the Mother. But we in Europe and the Americas have settled for something else. Something less, I daresay. We build machines, Andrew, create tribal languages in philosophy—like little boys with secret codes in their clubhouse—to get back at the universe because she has failed to give us a function. All our works, male works, will perish in history—history, a male concept of time, will vanish, too, but the culture of women goes on, the rhythms of birth and destruction, the Way of absorption, passivity, cycle and epicycle.” Ezekiel smiled, remote. “I haven’t put any of this very well, but this is the heart of my meditation, the reason for all these papers stacked around us. In India, near the town of Gaya, there is an illiterate man I know, a sannyasin named Trishanku, who believes that good is good, Andrew, and that evil is good, too. Not far from him, in a city, a couple is completing a love affair that began twenty-five centuries ago in Sparta….” His voice trailed off. His lips went white. Now he had forgotten me altogether. “Sometimes I feel so close to how he must have felt that day, and at other time…when I think of him with half his head blown a
way like that, sometimes I think….”

  Ezekiel didn’t explain what he thought.

  But my tutor and I often crossed the border of Jonathan Polkinghorne’s plantation to take solitary walks on springtide evenings along the shelfy beach of the river. Oddly like a sacrament, the sand was penciled with patterns by porridgy waters that came crashing in, carrying catfish to shore, eternally collapsing and reforming like—what?—vorticed, breaking in a fine spray of foam and ammonites on clusters of stone covered with weeds and great patches of slime. The blue haze of the salt-scented air, as I listened to Ezekiel, soaked into my white linen frock and lemon-colored breeches like a stain. He thought obliquely, in language reshaped like soft wax, the power of his arguments vivid, their precise meaning veiled. He made me feel, strangely, that each smell, each sound was sheer magic—that he and I, these frothy waves, this dust-seamed wind were somehow essential for the world to be, as if the twisted straw, clumps of driftwood gnarled and knobby like old human bones, upon which our boots fell, the heart-shaped stones and scree, very smooth, thought themselves in me and were full of some queer godstuff I could sense these nights in my blood, but could never, never grasp. Nor could I decide, before we returned to the quarters, if what I felt was, finally, an intimation of my freedom—my real freedom—ordering these objects now into love, now into beauty, or merely the fantasies a crackpot Anarchist had flowered in my thoughts. Unable to penetrate these things, seeking at that time only to be penetrated, I traipsed along with him at night, wondering over the objects thinging on the banks, studying the bright orb that mooned brilliantly above in a dark sky tinctured with vermeil. In the clutch of this calm intoxication I heard Ezekiel speak of his teacher in India, the strange, naked, nut-brown man named Trishanku, who (said Ezekiel) had worn out seventeen meditation cushions and, at age fifty, mastered the eight occult powers. If his tale can be believed, this Trishanku, living by the Ganges in a detoxified body, conversed often with Brahma, and on one such occasion Trishanku asked, “I have often heard holy men speak of something called Samsara. Can you tell me what this means?”