Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  “The buddy I want is that little .22, Ruthie Cee.” She stood aside while I wrested the rifle out of the gun cabinet, and together we went back downstairs, through the living and dining rooms, and out the plate-glass doors opening onto the pecan grove. Beneath the intruder’s tree we paused to gape and take stock. The stock I took went into the cushion of flesh just above my right armpit, and I sighted along the barrel at a bearded black face like that of a living gargoyle.

  RuthClaire was right. The trespasser wasn’t a monkey. He more nearly resembled a medieval demon, with a small but noticeable ridge running fore and aft straight over the middle of his skull. He had been on the cusp of falling asleep, I think, and the apparition of two human beings at this inopportune moment startled him. Fear showed in his beady, obsidian eyes, which flashed between my ex-wife and me like sooty strobes. His upper lip moved away from his teeth.

  From above the mysterious creature, I shot down a dangling cluster of branches that would have eventually fallen anyway. The report echoed all the way to White Cow Creek, and hundreds of foraging sparrows scattered into the twilight like feathered buckshot.

  “I swear to goodness, Paul!” RuthClaire shouted, her most fiery oath. She was trying to take the rifle out of my hands. “You’ve always been a shoot-first-talk-later fool, but that poor fella’s no threat! Look!”

  I gave up the .22 as I had given up Paradise Farm, docilely, and I looked. RuthClaire’s visitor was terrified, almost catatonic. He could not go up, and he could not come down; his head was probably still reverberating from the rifle shot, the heart-stopping crash of the pecan limb. I wasn’t too sorry, though. He had no business haunting my ex.

  “Listen,” I said, “you asked me to come see about you. And you didn’t object when I brought that baby down from the loft.”

  Angrily, RuthClaire ejected the spent shell, removed the .22’s magazine, and threw the rifle on the ground. “I wanted moral support, Paulie, not a hit man. I thought the gun was your moral support, that’s all. I didn’t know you were going to try to murder the poor innocent wretch with it.”

  “‘Poor innocent wretch,’ ” I repeated incredulously. “‘Poor innocent wretch’?”

  This was not the first time we had found ourselves arguing in front of an audience. Toward the end, it had happened frequently at the West Bank, RuthClaire accusing me of insensitivity, neglect, and philandering with my female help (although she knew that Molly Kingsbury was having none of that nonsense), while I openly rued her blinkered drive for artistic recognition, her lack of regard of my inborn business instincts, and her sometimes maddeningly rigorous bouts of chastity. The West Bank is small—a converted doctor’s office wedged between Gloria’s Beauty Shop and Ogletree Plumbing & Electric, all in the same red-brick shell on Main Street—and even arguing in the kitchen we could give my customers a discomfiting earful. Only a few tolerant souls, mostly locals, thought these debates entertaining; and when my repeat business from out of town began falling off, well, that was the last straw. I made the West Bank off limits to RuthClaire. Soon thereafter she began divorce proceedings.

  Now a shivering black gnome, naked but for a see-through leotard of hair, was staring down at us as my ex compared me to Vlad the Impaler, Adolf Hitler, and the government of South Africa. I began to think that he could not be too much more bewildered and uncomfortable than I.

  “What the hell do you want me to do?” I finally blurted.

  “Leave me alone with him,” RuthClaire said. “Go back to the house.”

  “That’s crazy,” I began. “That’s—”

  “Hush, Paulie. Please do as I say, all right?”

  I retreated to the sliding doors, no farther. RuthClaire talked to the trespasser. In the gathering dark, she crooned reassurance. She consoled and coaxed. She even hummed a lullaby. Her one-sided talk with the intruder was interminable. I, because she did not seem to be at any real risk, went inside and poured myself a powerful scotch on the rocks. At last RuthClaire returned.

  “Paul,” she said, gazing into the pecan grove, “he’s a member of a human species—you know, a collateral human species—that doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “He told you that, did he?”

  “I deduced it. He doesn’t speak.”

  “Not English, anyway. What do you mean, ‘doesn’t exist anymore’? He’s up in that tree, isn’t he?”

  “Up in the air, more like,” RuthClaire said. “It reminds me of that Indian, Ishi.”

  “Who-shi?”

  “A Yahi Indian in northern California whose name was Ishi. Theodora Kroeber wrote a couple of books about him.” RuthClaire gestured at the shelves across the room from us; in addition to every contemporary best seller that came through the B. Dalton’s in Tocqueville Commons Mall, these shelves housed art books, popular-science volumes, and a “feminist” library of no small proportions, this being RuthClaire’s term for books either by or about women, no matter when or where they lived. (The Brontë sisters were next to Susan Brownmiller; Sappho was not far from Sontag.)

  I lifted my eyebrows: “?”

  “Last of his tribe,” RuthClaire explained. “Ishi was the last surviving member of the Yahi; he died around nineteen fifteen or so, in the Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco.” She mulled this bit of intelligence. “It’s my guess, though, that our poor wretch comes from a species that originated in East Africa two or three million years ago.” She mulled her guess. “That’s a little longer than Ishi’s people were supposed to have been extinct before Ishi himself turned up, I’m afraid.”

  “There goes your analogy.”

  “Well, it’s not perfect, Paul, but it’s suggestive. What do you think?”

  “That you’d be wiser calling the bugger in the tree a deranged dwarf instead of an Indian. You’d be wiser yet just calling the police.”

  RuthClaire went to the bookshelf and removed a volume by a well-known scientist and television personality. She had everything this flamboyant popularizer had ever written. After flipping through several well-thumbed pages, she found the passage pertinent to her argument:

  “‘Were we to encounter Homo habilis—dressed, let us say, in the latest fashion on the boulevards of some modern metropolis—we would probably give him only a passing glance, and that because of his relatively small stature.’” She closed the book. “There. The creature in the pecan tree is a habiline, a member of the species Homo habilis. He’s human, Paul, he’s one of us.”

  “That may or may not be the case, but I’d still feel obliged to wash up with soap and water after shaking his hand.”

  RuthClaire, giving me a look commingling pity and contempt, replaced the book on its shelf. I made up a song—which I had the good sense not to sing aloud to her—to the tune of an old country-and-western ditty entitled “Abilene”:

  Habiline, O habiline,

  Grungiest ghoul I’ve ever seen.

  Even Gillette won’t shave him clean,

  That habiline.

  I telephoned the West Bank to see how Molly was getting on with Hazel and Livia George (she said everything was going “swimmingly,” a word Molly had learned from a beau in Atlanta), then convinced my ex-wife to let me spend the night at Paradise Farm on the sofa downstairs. For safety’s sake. RuthClaire reluctantly consented. In her studio loft she worked through until morning. At dawn I heard her say, “It’s all right, Paul. He left while you were sleeping.” She handed me a cup of coffee. I sipped at it as she gazed out the sliding doors at the empty pecan grove.

  The following month—about three weeks later—I ran into RuthClaire in Beulah Fork’s ancient A&P, where I did almost all of my shopping for the West Bank: meats, produce, the works. October. Still sunny. The restaurant business only now beginning to tail off toward the inevitable winter slump. I had not thought of the Ishi Incident, or whatever you might choose to call it, more than three or four times since actually investigating it. Perhaps I did not believe that it had really happened. The whole episode had a d
reamlike texture that did not stick very well to the hard-edged banality of everyday life in Beulah Fork. Besides, no one else in Hothlepoya County had mentioned seeing a naked black gnome running around the countryside climbing trees and stealing pecans.

  My ex and I chatted, amicably at first. RuthClaire had just finished an original painting entitled Principalities for her porcelain-plate series, and AmeriCred Company of New York, New York, would begin taking subscription orders for this unusual Limoges ware at fifty-six dollars a plate in early December. The artist was going to receive an eight percent royalty for each plate sold, over and above the commission paid her in July for undertaking the work. She was very excited, not solely by the money she stood to make but also by the prospect of reaching a large and undoubtedly discerning audience. Ads for the subscription series, AmeriCred had told her, were going to appear in such classy periodicals as Smithsonian, Natural History, and Relic Collector. I wrote out a check for fifty-six dollars and told RuthClaire to sign me up at the first available opportunity; this was my deposit toward a subscription. Folding the check into her coin purse, she looked unfeignedly flustered. But grateful, too.

  “You don’t have to do this, Paul.”

  “I know I don’t. I want a set of those plates. My customers are going to enjoy eating off the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost—not to mention the nine different species of angel.”

  “They’re not for dinner use, really. They’re for display.”

  “A rank commercial enterprise?” I tweaked her. “Ready-made antiques for the spiritual cognoscenti who frown on bodily functions like eating and ummmm-ummmm-ummm? How about that? You may be catering to an airy crowd, Ruthie Cee, but we’re both in business, it looks like—business with a capital B.”

  Amazingly she smiled, merely smiled.

  “I can see you haven’t given up eating,” I pursued. “That’s quite a load you’ve got there.”

  Her shopping basket contained six uncut frying chickens, four heads of cabbage, three tins of Planters party nuts, four or five bunches of bananas, and several packages of fresh fish, mostly mullet and red snapper. I ogled this bounty. RuthClaire had never fried a chicken in her life, and I knew that she despised bananas. The other stuff was also out of the finicky pale of her diet, for in hostile overreaction to my virtuosity as chef and restaurateur she—not long before the end—had ostentatiously limited her intake to wild rice, bean curd, black beans, fresh vegetables, fruit juice, and various milk products. This spiteful decision had not helped our marriage any, either. “I’m having some people down from Atlanta,” she explained, rather defensively. “Gallery people.”

  “Oh,” I replied.

  We looked at each other for a moment.

  “They’re all invited guests, I take it,” I said at last. “You don’t want any uninvited drop-ins, do you?”

  RuthClaire stiffened. “I don’t feed the uninvited. You know that. Good-bye, Paul. Thanks for taking out a subscription.”

  She went her way, I mine. For somebody subsisting on rabbit food and artistic inspiration, I reflected, she looked damned good.

  I learned later what had been going on at Paradise Farm. On the morning after my overnight stay on the downstairs sofa, RuthClaire had moved a rickety table into the pecan grove. Every evening she set it with paper plates and uncooked food items, including party nuts in a cut-glass dish that had once belonged to her mother. Further, on a folding deck chair she laid out one of my old leisure suits, altered for a figure smaller than mine, just in case the nippy autumn air prompted the trespasser to cover his nakedness. At first, though, the habiline did not rise to this bait. The dew-laden suit had to dry every day on the clothesline, and every evening RuthClaire had to replace the soggy paper dinnerware and the slug-slimed food items.

  Around Halloween, when nighttime temperatures were dipping into the thirties, my ex awoke one morning to find the creature hunkering on the table on a brilliant cloth of frost. The grass looked sequined. So did the habiline’s feet. He was eating unpeeled bananas and shivering so violently that the table rocked back and forth. RuthClaire put on her dressing gown and hurried downstairs. She opened the sliding doors and beckoned the fellow inside, where he could warm his tootsies at the cast-iron Buck stove in the fireplace. Although he followed RuthClaire with his eyes, he did not move. RuthClaire, leaving the glass doors open, fetched a set of sun lamps from her loft. These she placed about the patio area so that they all shone directly into the house—runway lights to warmth and safety.

  The sun began to burn away the frost. An hour or so later, watching from her bay window, RuthClaire saw the habiline leap down from the table. For a moment he seemed to consider fleeing through the pecan grove, but soon rejected this notion to stroll—head ducked, elbows out—through the gauntlet of lamps toward the house. A ballsy fellow, this one, and my ex was able to see quite clearly that this appraisal of him was no mere metaphor. A ballsy bantam in blackface.

  Her heart pounding paradiddles, RuthClaire went downstairs to meet him. This was the beginning: the real beginning.

  Although over time a few clues have come my way (some of which I will shortly set forth), I do not pretend to know exactly how RuthClaire domesticated this representative of a supposedly extinct hominid species ancestral to our own—but she was probably more alert to his feelings and needs than she had ever been to mine. In the dead of winter, for instance, she routinely left the patio doors open, never questioning his comings and goings, never surrendering to resentment because of them. She fed him whatever he liked, even if sparerib splinters ended up between the sofa cushions or half-eaten turnips sometimes turned up on the bottom of her shower stall looking like mushy polyhedral core tools. Ruthie Cee may have a bohemian soul, but during the six years of our marriage, she had also evinced a middle-class passion for tidiness; more than once she had given me hell for letting the end of the dental floss slip down into its flip-top container. For her prehistoric paramour, however, she made allowances—lots of them.

  She also sang to him, I think. RuthClaire has a voice with the breathy delicacy of Garfunkel during his partnership with Simon, and I can easily imagine her soothing the savage breast of even a pit bull with a single stanza of “Feelin’ Groovy.” The habiline, however, she probably deluged with madrigals, hymns, and soft-drink ditties; and although she has always professed to hate commercial television, she has since publicly admitted using the idiot box—as well as song—to amuse and edify her live-in hominid. Apparently, he especially enjoyed game shows, situation comedies, sporting events, and nature studies. On the public broadcasting channels RuthClaire introduced him to such programs as Sesame Street, Organic Gardening, and Wall Street Week, while the anything-goes cable networks gave him a crash course in contemporary hominid bonding rituals. All these shows together were undoubtedly as crucial to the domestication process as my ex-wife’s lovely singing.

  But only a week or so into the new year did I learn about any of this. RuthClaire drove to Tocqueville to do her shopping more often than she came to Beulah Fork; and our chance meeting in the A&P, despite resulting in my order for the first plate in the Celestial Hierarchy series, had made her wary of running into me again. She stayed away from town. I, in turn, could not go out to Paradise Farm without an invitation. The terms of our divorce expressly stipulated this last point, and my reference to uninvited guests during our brief tête-à-tête in October had stricken RuthClaire as contemptibly snide. Maybe I had meant it to be. . . .

  Anyway, on the day before Christmas Eve I telephoned RuthClaire and asked if I could come out to the farm to give her a present. Somewhat reluctantly (it seemed to me), she agreed. Although it was cold and dark when I rang the front doorbell, she stepped through the door to greet me, and we conferred on the porch. The Persian kitten in the cardboard box under my arm cowered away from Ruthie Cee, its wintry pearl-gray fur like a lion’s mane around its Edward G. Robinson face. My ex, emitting sympathetic coos, scratched the creature behind its ears unti
l it began to purr.

  Then she said, “I can’t accept him, Paul.”

  “Why not? He’s got a pedigree that stretches from here to Isfahan.” (This was a lie. Nevertheless, the kitten looked it.) “Besides, he’ll make a damned good mouser. A farm needs a mouser.”

  “I just can’t give him the attention he needs.” RuthClaire saw my irritation. “I didn’t think you’d be bringing an animal, Paul. A sweater, a necklace, a new horror novel—anything nonliving I’d’ve been happy to accept. But a kitten’s a different matter, and I just can’t be responsible for him, sweet and pretty as he is.”

  I tacked about. “Can’t I come in for some eggnog? Come the holidays, this place used to reek of eggnog.”

  “I have a visitor.”

  “A man, huh?”

  Somewhat gravely, she nodded. “He’s . . . he’s allergic to cats.”

  “Why can’t I meet him?”

  “I don’t want you to. Anyway, he’s shy.”

  I looked toward the carport. Although RuthClaire’s navy-blue Honda Civic gleamed dully in the sheen of the yard’s security lights, I saw no other vehicle anywhere. Besides my own, of course.

  “Did he jog out here?”

  “Hiked.”

  “What’s his name?”

  RuthClaire smiled a crooked smile. “Adam,” she said.

  “Adam what?”

  “None of your bee’s wax, Paul. I’m tired of this interrogation. Here, hang on a sec.” She retreated into the house but came back a moment later carrying a piece of Limoges ware featuring her painting Angels. “This is the plate for January,” she explained. “Over the course of the year you’ll go from Angels to Archangels to Principalities—all the way up to The Father—and I’ve seen to it that you’ll receive the other eleven without paying for them. That’s my Christmas present to you, Paul.” She took the kitten’s shoebox from me so that I could look at the plate without endangering either the mystified animal or the fragile porcelain. “See the border. That’s twenty-four-karat gold, applied by hand.”