Meanwhile, in the absence of hard facts, speculation and controversy raged. Alistair Patrick Blair, the eminent Zarakali paleoanthropologist, published a paper in Nature denouncing the notion of a surviving Early Pleistocene hominid as “sheer unadulterated grandstanding piffle.” Shrewdly, he did not mention Brian Nollinger by name, not so much to avoid libeling the man, I think, as to deprive him of the satisfaction of seeing his name in print—even in a disparaging context. Blair cited the notorious Piltdown hoax as a model of competent flimflammery next to this tottery ruse, and he argued vigorously that the few available photographs of Adam were of a rather hairy black man in a molded latex mask like those designed for his PBS television series, Beginnings. Nollinger rebutted Blair, or tried to, with a semicoherent essay in Atlanta Fortnightly summarizing the extraordinary diplomatic career of Louis Rutherford and condemning the artist RuthClaire Loyd for her tyrannical imprisonment of the bemused and friendless hominid. She was a female Simon Legree with a mystical bias against both evolutionary theory and the scientific method.
Sermons were preached for and against my ex-wife. Initially, fundamentalists did not know which side to come down on because anyone opposed to the scientific method could not be all bad, while anyone cohabiting with a quasi-human creature not her lawfully wedded husband must certainly be enmeshed in the snares of Satan. By the second week of this controversy, most fundamentalist ministers, led by the Right Rev. Dwight “Happy” McElroy of the Greater Christian Constituency of America, Inc., of Rehoboth, Louisiana, had determined that the crimson sin of bestiality far outweighed the tepid virtue of a passive antievolutionary sentiment. Their sermons began to deride RuthClaire for her sexual waywardness (this was an irony that perhaps only I could appreciate) and to pity her as the quintessential victim of a society whose scientific establishment brazenly proclaimed that human beings were nothing more than glorified monkeys (a thesis that their own behavior seemed to substantiate). Happy McElroy, in particular, was having his cake and eating it too. I audited a few of his TV sermons, but almost always ended by turning down the sound and watching the eloquent hand signals of the woman providing simultaneous translation for the deaf.
Sales of RuthClaire’s Celestial Hierarchy porcelain-plate series boomed. In fact, AmeriCred reversed a long-standing subscription policy to permit back orders of the first few plates in the series and announced to thousands of disappointed collectors that this limited edition of Limoges porcelain had sold out. It would violate the company’s covenant with its subscribers to issue a second edition of the plates. But in response to the overwhelming demand for RuthClaire’s exquisite work, AmeriCred, in conjunction with Porcelaine Jacques Javet of Limoges, France, had just commissioned from this world-acclaimed Georgia artist a second series of paintings, Footsteps on the Path to Man, which would feature imaginative but anthropologically sound portraits of many of our evolutionary forebears and several contemporary human visages besides; eighteen plates in all, the larger number being a concession to the growing public appetite for my ex-wife’s distinctive art. Further, this limited edition would not be quite so limited as the previous one. More people would be able to subscribe.
“Congratulations,” I told RuthClaire one evening by telephone.
“It’s phenomenally tacky, isn’t it?”
“I think it’s called striking while the iron’s hot.”
“I needed the money. Having a wall built around two thirds of this place didn’t come cheap, nor did the arc lights or the P.A. system. I have to recoup my investment.”
“You think I don’t know?”
“Besides, I want to do this Footsteps on the Path to Man series. The australopithecines I’ll have to reconstruct from fossil evidence and some semi-inspired guesswork, but for Homo habilis I’ll have a living model. It’s going to be fun putting Adam’s homely-handsome kisser on a dinner plate.”
“Maybe I could order five or six place settings of that one for the West Bank.”
RuthClaire laughed delightedly.
Of course, the sermons following hard upon the new AmeriCred announcement were all condemnatory. The depths to which my ex-wife had fallen defied even Happy McElroy’s bombastic oratorical skills. He tried, though. The title of his message on the first Sunday in July was “From Angels to Apes: The Second Fall.” Whereas the celestial hierarchy was an ascent to pure spirit, the blind worship of evolutionary theory—“Theory, mind you!” McElroy roared. “Unsupported theory!”—was a footstep on the downward path to Mammon, debauchery, and hell. At the end of his remarks, McElroy asked his congregation to join with his loyal television audience in a silent prayer of redemption for paleoanthropologists everywhere and their avaricious minion in Beulah Fork, Georgia, may God have mercy, RuthClaire Loyd.
I am not a complete pagan: I joined in.
The attitude of my own townspeople toward RuthClaire during this period was hard to judge. Many had resented the spring’s unruly influx of visitors and the inconvenience of the highway patrol roadblocks and spot identity checks. Still, most did not hold my former wife accountable for these problems, recognizing that she, too, was a victim of the publicity mill generating the crowds and the clumsy security measures finally obviated by the wall. Now the residents of Beulah Fork wondered about the relationship between RuthClaire and Adam. This preoccupation, depending on their ultimate view of the matter, dictated the way they spoke about and dealt with their unorthodox neighbor. Or would have, I’m sure, if RuthClaire had come into town more often.
One sweltering July day, for instance, I went into the Greyhound Depot Laundry to reclaim the tablecloths I had left to be dry-cleaned. Ben Sadler, a courtly man nearly six and a half feet tall, stooped toward me over his garment-strewn counter and in the blast-furnace heat of that tiny establishment trapped me in a perplexing conversation about the present occupants of Paradise Farm. Sweat beaded on his forehead, ran down his ash-blond temples, and gathered in his eyebrows as if they were thin, ragged sponges not quite thirsty enough to handle the unending flow.
“Listen, Paul, what kind of, uh, creature is this Adam fella, anyway?”
I summarized all the most likely, and all the most asinine, speculations. I used the terms Australopithecus zarakalensis, Homo zarakalensis, and Homo habilis. I used the words ape-man, hominid, primate, and dwarf. I confessed that not even the so-called experts agreed on the genus or species to which Adam belonged.
“Do they say he’s human?” Ben wanted to know.
“Some do. That’s what Homo means, although lots of people seem to think it means something else. Anyway, RuthClaire thinks he’s human, Ben.”
“And he’s black, isn’t he? I mean, I’ve read where the whole human race—even the Gabor sisters and the Osmond family—I’ve read where we’re all descended from tiny black people. Originally, that is.”
“He’s as black as Hershey’s syrup,” I conceded.
“Do you think we’re descended from Adam, Paul? RuthClaire’s Adam, I mean.”
“Not Adam personally. Prehistoric hominids like him, maybe. Adam’s a kind of hominid coelacanth.” I explained that a coelacanth was an ancient fish known only in fossil form and presumed extinct until a specimen was taken from waters off South Africa in 1938. That particular fish had been five feet long. Adam, on the other hand, was about six inches shy of five feet. Therefore, I did not think it absolutely impossible for a retiring, intelligent creature of Adam’s general dimensions to elude the scrutiny of Homo sapiens sapiens for the past few thousand years of recorded human history. Of course, I also believed in the Sasquatch and the yeti. . . .
“That’s a funny idea, Paul—all of us comin’ from creatures two thirds our size and black as Hershey’s syrup.”
“Don’t run for office on it.”
Ben wiped his brow with a glistening forearm. “How does RuthClaire, uh, look upon Adam?” He feared that he had violated propriety. “I mean, does she see him as a brother? Some folks say she treats him like a house nigger from pla
ntation days—which I can’t believe of her, not under no circumstances—and others say he’s more like a two-legged poodle gettin’ the favorite-pet treatment from its lady. I ask because I’m not sure how I’d greet the little fella if he was to walk in here tomorrow.”
“I think she treats him like a houseguest, Ben.” (I hope that’s how she treats him, I thought. The ubiquitous spokesman for the Greater Christian Constituency of America, Inc., had planted a nefarious doubt in my mind.)
Ben Sadler grunted conditional agreement, and I toted my clean tablecloths back across the street to the restaurant.
That evening, a Saturday, the West Bank was packed. Molly Kingsbury was hostessing, Livia George and Hazel were on duty in the kitchen, and two college kids from Tocqueville were waiting tables. I roamed from corner to corner giving assistance wherever needed, functioning not only as greeter, maître d’, and wine steward, but also as busboy, cashier, and commander in chef (ha ha).
My regular patrons demand personal attention—from me, not staff members: a squib of gossip, a silly joke, occasionally a free appetizer or dessert. I try to oblige most of these demands. But this Saturday I was having trouble balancing hospitality and hustle. Although grateful for the crowd, by nine o’clock I was growling at my college kids and nodding perfunctorily at even my most stalwart customers. The muggy summer dusk and the heat from my kitchen had pretty much neutralized the efforts of my ceiling fan and my one laboring air conditioner. In my Haggar slacks and lemon-colored Izod shirt, I was sweating just like Ben Sadler in the Greyhound Depot Laundry.
The door opened. Two teenage boys in jeans, T-shirts, and perforated baseball caps strolled in. Even in the evening, the West Bank did not require coats and ties of its male clientele (shoot, I often worked in the kitchen in shorts and sneakers), but something about these two—Craig Puddicombe and E. L. Teavers—made my teeth grind. I could have seen them in their string-tie Sunday best (as I sometimes did) without feeling any more kindly toward them, and tonight their flat blue eyes and sweat-curled sideburns incited only my annoyance. For one thing, they had left the door open. For another, I had no table for them. What were they doing here? They usually ate at the Deep South Truck Stop on the road to Tocqueville.
“Shut the door,” I told Craig Puddicombe, tonging ice into somebody’s water glass. “You’re letting in insects.”
Craig shut the door as if it were a pane of wraparound glass on an antique china cabinet. E. L. took off his hat. They stood on my interior threshold staring at the art on the walls and the open umbrellas suspended from the ceiling as atmosphere-evoking ornament. They either could not or would not look at the people eating. I approached them because Molly Kingsbury clearly did not want to.
“You don’t have reservations,” I told Puddicombe. “It’s going to be another fifteen or twenty minutes before we can seat you.”
Craig looked at me without quite looking. “That’s okay. You got a minute?”
“Only if it lasts about twelve seconds.”
“We just want to talk to you a bit,” E. L. Teavers said, almost ingratiatingly. “We think your rights are being violated.”
Craig Puddicombe added, “More than your rights, maybe.”
“Fellas,” I said, indicating the crowd, “don’t choose a battle zone for a friendly little chat about human rights.”
“It was now, Mr. Loyd, because we happened to be ridin’ by,” Craig said. “For something this important, hey, you can spare a minute.”
Before I could dispute this point, E. L. Teavers, surveying the interior, said, “My mother remembers when this was Dr. Kearby’s office. This was the waitin’ room, out here. Whites sat over here, the others over that way. People came out of the examination room painted with a purple medicine Dr. Kearby liked to daub around.”
“Gentian violet,” I told him, exasperated. “It’s a bactericide. Quick, now, as quickly as you can, tell me how my rights are being violated.”
“Your wife—” Craig Puddicombe began.
“My ex-wife,” I said.
“Okay, your ex-wife. She’s got a hibber livin’ with her on premises that used to belong to you, Mr. Loyd. How do you feel about that?”
“A what living with her?”
“Hibber,” E. L. Teavers enunciated, lowering his voice. “It’s a word I invented. Anyone can say it, but I invented it. It means habiline nigger, see?”
“Clever. You must be the one who was graduated from high school. Craig just went for gym class and shop.”
“I’ve got a diploma too, Mr. Loyd. Our intelligence ain’t the issue, it’s the violation of your rights as a white person, not to mention our traditional community standards. You follow all this, don’t you?”
“You’re not speaking for the community. You’re speaking for Craig Puddicombe, teenage redneck.”
“He’s speakin’ for more than that.” E. L. smiled boyishly. The boyishness of this smile somehow heightened its menace.
“We just dropped in to help you, Mr. Loyd. We’re not bigots. You’re a bigger bigot than E. L. or me ’cause you look down on your own kind who ain’t got as much as you do or who ain’t been to school as long. That’s bigotry, Mr. Loyd.”
“I’m busy.” I turned to take care of my customers.
E. L. Teavers grabbed my elbow—with an amiable deference at odds with the force of his grip. I could not shake him off because of the water pitcher in my hand. He had not stopped smiling his choirboy smile, and I found myself wanting to hear whatever he had to say next, no matter how addlepated or paranoiac.
“There’s a hibber—a lousy subhuman—inheritin’ to stuff that doesn’t, that shouldn’t, belong to it. Since it used to be your stuff—your house, your land, your wife—we thought you’d like to know there’s people in and around Beulah Fork who appreciate other hardworkin’ folks and who try to keep an eye out for their rights.”
“Craig and you?” Since finishing at Hothlepoya High last June, I reflected, they had been working full time at United Piedmont Mills on the outskirts of Tocqueville. In fact, E. L. was married to a girl who had waitressed for me briefly. “Knowing that, fellas, has just about made my day. I feel infinitely more secure.”
“You never went to school with hibbers,” Craig Puddicombe said. “You’ve never had to be anything but their boss.”
“Now you’ve got a prehistoric hibber gettin’ it on with your wife.”
“My ex-wife,” I said automatically.
“Yeah,” said E. L. Teavers. “Like you say.” He took a creased business card from his hip pocket and handed it to me. “This is the help you can count on if it begins to seem unfair to you. If it begins to, you know, make you angry.” He opened the restaurant door on the muggy July night. “Better am-scray, Craig, so’s Mr. Loyd can get back to feeding his bigwigs.”
They were gone.
I wandered to the service niche beside the kitchen and set down the water pitcher. I read the business card young Teavers had given me. Then I tore it lengthwise, collated the pieces, and tore them again—right down the middle. Ordinarily quite dependable, in this instance my memory fails me. All I can recall is the gist of the message on the card. But to preserve the fiction of my infallibility as narrator I will give here a reasonable facsimile of the message on that small, grimy document:
E(lvis) L(amar) Teavers
Zealous High Zygote
KuKlos Klan—Kudzu Klavern
Box 666
Beulah Fork, Georgia
Business had slackened noticeably by ten. At eleven we closed. I stayed in the kitchen after Hazel and Livia George had left to prepare my desserts for Sunday: a German chocolate cake, a carrot cake, and a strawberry icebox pie. The work—the attention to ingredients, measures, and mixing or baking times—kept my mind off the visit by the boys. In fact, I was striving purposefully not to think about it: a strategy that fell apart as soon as I went upstairs to my stuffy converted storage room.
E. L. Teavers, a bright kid from a respectable
lower-middle-class home, was a member of the Klan. Not merely a member, but an officer of a piddling local chapter of one of its semiautonomous splinter groups. What had the card said? Zealous High Zygote? Terrific Vice Tycoon? Puissant Grand Poltroon? Something rhetorically cyclopean or cyclonic. The title did not matter. What mattered was that this able-bodied, mentally keen young man, along with his somewhat less astute buddy, had kept abreast of the situation at Paradise Farm and regarded it as an affront to all the values he had been taught as a child. That was scary. I was frightened for RuthClaire, and I was frightened for myself for having rebuffed the High Zygote’s offer to help.
What kind of “help” did he and Craig have in mind? Some sort of house-cleaning operation? A petition campaign? A nightriding incident? An appeal to other Klan organizations for reinforcements?
In all my forty-six years, I’d never come face to face with a danger of this precise human sort, and I found it hard to believe that it had descended upon me—upon RuthClaire, Adam, and Beulah Fork—in the form of two acne-scarred bucks whom, only a season or two ago, I had seen playing (poor) high school football. It was like finding a scorpion in a familiar potted geranium. It was worse than the pious verbal assaults of a dozen different fundamentalist ministers and far, far worse than the frustrated carping of Brian Nollinger in Atlanta. As for those anonymous souls who had actually leaped the barricades at Paradise Farm, they were mere sportive shadows, easily routed by light and the echoing reports of my old .22.
Ancient of Days Page 6
