Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  LOCAL ARTIST AND HER HABILINE HUSBAND

  DISAPPEAR LATE IN HER HISTORIC PREGNANCY

  In the afternoon paper, the Journal, this:

  FOUL PLAY NOT SUSPECTED IN ABSENCE OF LOCAL ARTISTS

  BUT ABRAXAS CHIEF ANXIOUS ABOUT FAMOUS PAIR

  The story under this last headline reported an interview with David Blau, director of the Abraxas Gallery. Blau thought that the Montarazes were okay, but still believed they should contact him or one of his associates to confirm the fact.

  “Is this guy one of the avant-garde bigwigs who think you’ve sold out?” I asked RuthClaire.

  “David’s more charitable than most. He credits me with practicing a deliberate serious-commercial split.”

  “Sounds like a decent enough Joe.”

  “He is. That’s why I’ve got to give him a call.”

  “Don’t,” I blurted. My newfound, but still tepid, regard for Edna Twiggs did not permit me to trust her totally. “Write a note. Put no return address on the envelope. I’ll mail it from Tocqueville tomorrow morning. He’ll have it the day after.”

  That’s what we did. While I was in Tocqueville to mail the note, I hired a trio of private guards from a security agency in the Tocqueville Commons Mall. The first man came on duty that same afternoon.

  Once the guards began their shifts, my taut nerves loosened. The likelihood of anyone’s circling the farm and coming at us by way of White Cow Creek seemed remote. It must have seemed remote to RuthClaire, too. She made up her mind to have her baby in a peaked canvas tent that she and Adam pitched beneath a pecan tree. The tent was lavender, reminiscent of the floppy conical hoods worn by Teavers, Puddicombe, and their anonymous Klan-mates on the night they came to kill Adam. I told RuthClaire so the morning after their tent first went up, its lavender surfaces sparkling with frost.

  “You’re right,” she said, startled. “We bought it at a sporting-goods store in Atlanta and I never once thought of that. Maybe Adam did, though. Teavers’s robe may have kept him from coming down with pneumonia.”

  “This tent won’t keep you warm. The temp today is in the twenties, RuthClaire.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “What about the baby?”

  “The kid’s half habiline. Habilines are traditionally, and altogether naturally, born out of doors. The tent’s a compromise.”

  “Out of doors in Africa or Haiti!”

  “If it’s cold, Livia George can wrap the baby in a blanket and take it inside.”

  “Then what’s the point of the stupid purple tent?”

  “I’ve already told you. Don’t you listen?” She turned on her heel and stalked toward the plate-glass doors glittering above my patio deck. I followed her, shaking my head and mumbling.

  Adam continued to read The Problem of Pain. Too, from the library in Tocqueville—a side trip I made on the same day I hired the security guards and mailed my ex’s note—he had me check out some other basic books on religious or spiritual topics: The Screwtape Letters by Lewis, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a young person’s guide to understanding the great world religions, an English translation of the Koran, a biography of Gandhi, Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, something called The Alphabet of Grace by Frederick Buechner, The Way of the Sufi by Idries Shah, a primer on the Talmud, and Mortimer Adler’s How to Think About God. Heady stuff for a habiline. I had to carry the whole lot home in a Gilman No-Tare grocery bag from our local A&P.

  Adam painted during the days, read in the evenings. Ruthie Cee, on the other hand, neither painted nor read. She usually slept while Adam worked. Sometimes she watched him. (He was putting the finishing touches on a huge, semiabstract landscape featuring a tangerine-red tree that reminded me of an African baobab.) She may have occasionally prepared a meal, but if she did, she wasn’t regular about it. She had no need to be. Livia George and I scrupulously brought them at least one hot gourmet meal a day.

  Saturday night at the West Bank: six or seven people standing cheerful but also mildly impatient just inside the door, waiting to be seated. Fur jackets or chic leather car coats on the ladies. The men bundled in herringbone or expensive brushed sheepskin. Cold air swirling around the newcomers like the vapor in a frozen-food bin. The phone next to the cash register rang. I looked over at the flocked divider concealing the phone. A second ring was not forthcoming.

  Oh no, I thought, not tonight!

  I smiled at a woman with a magazine-cover death mask for a face and put one hand reassuringly on the shoulder of her escort. Mentally, though, I counted to thirty. The telephone rang again.

  “That’s it!” I cried. “That’s it!”

  Livia George scurried in from the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron. Her heavy upper arms were bare, but she made no move to find her coat. “Gotta get goin’, Mistah Paul.” She pushed through the astonished people at the door. “Gotta he’p Miss RuthClaire birth that beautiful baby.” She hustled out the door, down the sidewalk, and into the front seat of my Mercedes, driver’s side. Helplessly, I followed, already resigned to the role of passenger.

  The trip took maybe nine minutes.

  Our security guard automatically passed us through the gate, and my car’s steel-belted radials flung gravel back at him as Livia George fishtailed us up the drive to the house. I was taking two steps at a time toward the front door when Livvy, at the corner of the house, shouted,

  “Not that way, Mistah Paul! She in that purple pup tent out back!”

  “Go on!” I urged her. “I’ve got to grab a coat!”

  The warmth of the house hit me like a Gulf Coast wind. I took a jacket from the shoulders of the baby-satyr statue on which I’d draped it several days ago, pulled it on, and strode into the living room looking for a shawl or sweater for Livia George. From the back of a chair, I grabbed a peach-toned afghan. But on the way to the sliding doors I hesitated. Did I really want to see the woman I loved in the throes of childbirth? Sure. Of course I did. Wasn’t that what every sensitive with-it male wanted nowadays? Men attended classes to learn how to provide support at the Moment of Truth. Some even scrubbed and put on surgical gowns to participate in the event. If their partners were back-to-nature advocates, they might build birthing stools or prepare for underwater delivery by buying scuba-diving gear. All I had to do was slide open a plate-glass door and trip across my deck to a tent in a pecan grove.

  I was no longer RuthClaire’s husband. The child in her womb owed me no genetic debt. It instead owed this paternal debt to a mute, sinewy creature right out of the early Paleolithic. Was the arrival of this squalling relic really an event I wanted to witness? My concern should have been for RuthClaire’s safety, for the health and well-being of her child—but baser impulses had me in their grip and I hesitated.

  Taking a breath, I went out onto my deck. The cold hit me like an Arctic hammer stroke, but I staggered through the pillars of my silhouetted pecan trees to RuthClaire’s lavender tent. Inside the translucent smudge of the sailcloth, shadowy shapes stooped, straightened, gesticulated. Adam, I was glad to see, had taken my PowerLite into the tent. He’d even thought to tote one of the studio’s sun lamps out there, an extension cord from the deck down into the pecan grove giving me a trail to follow.

  A hundred yards or so beyond the tent, a quick flash of light. I halted, blinked, looked again—but now the corridor of sentinel pecans was empty of any intruder but the keening wind.

  “Mistah Paul, you better move your fanny fas’ if you wanna see this!” I moved my fanny fast. After skidding in the frost-rimed mulch, I whipped aside the tent flap, edged inside, and found RuthClaire flat on her back on a mound of blankets and ancient bed sheets spread out on a plastic drop cloth. Adam knelt to one side of his wife, but Livvy squatted between her legs—legs bundled in a pair of those ugly knit calf-warmers worn by women in aerobic-dancing classes—guiding from her womb the mocha-cream-colored product of her pregnancy.

  “I told you it’d be easy!” RuthClaire cried, letti
ng her head fall back and laughing.

  Livvy did something sure-handed to the umbilical cord, then lifted the minuscule infant by its ankles, bracing its back with one hand and showing it first to Adam and then me. It was a boy, but a wizened and fragile-looking one. When Livvy slapped him on his angular buttocks, he sucked in air and wailed. Surprisingly, the sound lasted only a few brief seconds. Evolution on the Serengeti grasslands, I later came to realize, had selected for habilines whose newborns shut up in a hurry.

  “Ain’ he a dandy!”

  I put the afghan around Livia George’s shoulders. Adam reached into the wings of the towel swaddling the baby to touch his son’s head. Something like a smile flickered around Adam’s lips.

  “Okay,” I said. “Ruthie’s proved she’s game enough to bear her child in the back yard. Now let’s get inside.”

  “Got a little bidness to take care of yet.” Livvy handed the baby to its father. She knelt and massaged the undersides of RuthClaire’s thighs. Then she began to push gently on her slack, exposed abdomen, to encourage the expulsion of the placenta. “Y’all go on in. Nothin’ else for you to do out here.”

  But before Adam and I could exit, two strangers shoved their way into the tent.

  First, a blond man in a double-breasted safari jacket confronted us. Behind him, balancing a portable video unit on his denim-clad shoulder, was a slender black man. These intruders were so businesslike about deploying their equipment and their persons in the cramped interior that I considered the possibility that Adam and RuthClaire had hired them to video-tape their baby’s delivery. If so, they were late.

  “I’m Brad Barrington of Contact Cable News,” announced the blond intruder. “My cameraman, Rudy Starnes.” The black man gave a perfunctory nod. “Well, well, well. Is this little fellow the Montaraz baby?” He chucked the newborn under the chin with a gloved finger. “Looks like we underestimated the time it’d take us to get through the woods, Rudy. The big show’s already come off.”

  “Sun lamp’s giving us plenty of light to shoot by, Brad. Maybe I can do some reenactment footage to save the situation.”

  “Yeah,” said Barrington. “And on-the-scene interviews.”

  Grimacing, RuthClaire raised up on her elbows. “What in pity’s name do you guys think you’re doing?”

  “You’re trespassing,” I told them. “You sneaked onto Paradise Farm from Cleve Snyder’s property.”

  A microphone in his fist, Barrington duck-walked beneath the tilted sun lamp to RuthClaire’s shoulder, where he asked if it had been a difficult delivery. Leaning into the mike, RuthClaire emitted a piercing scream. Barrington recoiled, almost doing a pratfall. Livia George, meanwhile, had slid the glistening placenta into a piece of torn sheet. Her manner implied that the appearance of the two-man Contact Cable News crew was none of her affair. If nothing else, it was preferable to a hurricane.

  “Who’s doing security tonight?” I asked. (I always forgot the guards’ names.)

  “Chalmers,” RuthClaire replied, spitting out the word.

  Barrington, looking more annoyed than abashed, approached her again with the microphone. “Don’t you think this landmark event deserves a permanent video record? Don’t you feel any sense of obligation to history?”

  RuthClaire, her breath ballooning, said, “Don’t you feel any sense of shame, hanging over a half-naked woman with that instrument of psychic rape in your fist?”

  A thin veil of confusion fell across the newsman’s face.

  “Get out of here,” I told him. “My first and last warning.”

  “Let’s go, Brad,” the black man said. “This ain’t working out.” Almost certainly at his partner’s bidding, Starnes had just hauled a ton of equipment across five or six hundred yards of wintry darkness, and nothing was going as planned.

  “Keep shooting,” the blond man told him.

  “Brad—”

  “This is a scoop! You see anyone down here from Channel Five or Eleven Alive? You know anybody else who staked out this place for three ass-freezing days?”

  “Nobody else that dumb.”

  I slipped outside and called for Chalmers, the guard. That did it for Starnes. He decamped, abandoning his associate to whatever fate he chose to fashion for himself. He was hiking speedily off through the pecan grove, his equipment banging, when Chalmers came trotting around the corner of the house with his pistol drawn. The guard started to pursue the cameraman.

  “Let him go,” I said. “It’s the talking head in the tent who needs his butt run in.”

  Matters unraveled confusedly after that. RuthClaire was yelling at Barrington to go away, go away, and Livia George came out into the cold with the infant, nodding once at the house to show us that she was taking him indoors. Chalmers, a tall young man in an official-looking parka, started to go into the tent after Barrington when Barrington fell backward through the tent flap with Adam’s head in his stomach and his arms pinioned to his sides. In a rapid-fire falsetto utterly unlike his on-the-air baritone, he was pleading for mercy—but he landed on his back with a loud expulsion of breath and immediately fell silent. Adam was all over him like a pit bull, leaping from flank to flank over the reporter’s prostrate form, baring his teeth and growling as if rabid. RuthClaire emerged from the tent, too. Her blood-stained dressing gown hung to her ankles, her incongruous maroon leg-warmers visible just beneath its hem. She grasped one of the tent’s guy ropes for support.

  In a tone of rational admonishment, she said, “Adam, I’m okay. That’s enough.”

  Through the fog of his rage, Adam still heard her. He stopped, Barrington’s body rigid beneath him, and looked up sightlessly at Chalmers and me. Slowly—almost shockingly—sanity returned to his eyes, and he pushed himself off the reporter with his knuckles and stepped away from his whimpering victim.

  “I want to hold my baby,” RuthClaire told him. “Take me in.”

  Still trying to compose himself, Adam escorted her to the house. Chalmers and I remained outside with Barrington, the guard pointing his pistol at the newsman’s head. What now? Were we within our rights to shoot the trespasser?

  Barrington stopped whimpering. Seeing me upside-down, he asked if he could have a cup of coffee before he called his station for a ride back to Atlanta. “That damned Starnes. He’s probably to Newnan by now.”

  Chalmers said, “If Mr. Loyd presses charges, you won’t be going back to Atlanta tonight. I’ll turn you over to the sheriff in Tocqueville for a little quiet cell time.”

  Barrington got off the ground, groaning elaborately, and we argued the matter. If he gave his word that Contact Cable News would never air the least snippet of tape taken tonight on Paradise Farm, I told him, I would forgo the pleasure of pressing charges. I’d be damned, though, if I’d serve him a cup of coffee or let him use the bathroom. Barrington grumped about the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press, but verbally accepted my terms.

  Then Chalmers and I escorted him to the front gate. There, with a display of loyalty totally undeserved, Rudy Starnes picked up Barrington in the Contact Cable News van in which the two had been camping for the past three ass-freezing days, presumably to drive him back up the lonely highway to Atlanta.

  Upstairs, in a tiny bedroom next to the studio, I found Livia George with the new parents. In one corner was a white wicker bassinet, but RuthClaire was sitting in an upholstered chair nursing her baby, whom someone had bagged up in a yellow terrycloth sleeper. A newt, I thought. A salamander. I reported what had happened with Barrington and told Livvy that I needed to get back to the West Bank to oversee the restaurant’s closing—assuming, that is, that my hires had not long since walked off the job in bootless anger and frustration.

  “They’ll be back,” RuthClaire said.

  “I hope so,” I said. “It’s hard finding good help.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean help. I’m talking about those jerks from Contact Cable.”

  Adam stalked out of the room. Lights clicked on in the studio, and
a wash of yellow lambency unrolled past the nursery.

  “I don’t think he remembers the last time he let himself go like that,” RuthClaire said by way of explanation.

  “The time he wrestled E. L. Teavers into the brick kiln?”

  “That was self-defense, Paul, a matter of life and death. Tonight, the only thing that was truly at stake was the sanctity of our baby’s birth.”

  “Adam be awright tomorrow,” Livia George said. “It’s jes’ too much ’citement for one evening.”

  “He didn’t even bite the bastard,” I said. “Just knocked him down and growled.”

  “He went wild.”

  “Everybody goes wild now and then.” I grinned. “Why, Ruthie Cee, even you went a little wild this evening.”

  She shifted her hold on the baby. “We discussed naming this little character for you. Keep that up, though, and you can forget it.” Gently, she began to jog the suckling infant in her arms. “Adam sets standards for himself, high ones. They’re high because the general expectation is that he’ll comport himself like an animal. Well, his sense of self-respect demands that he never—ever—fulfill that cynical expectation.”

  “Then his standards are higher than nine tenths of the world’s human population.”

  “Adam’s human.”

  “You know what I mean. I was trying to compliment him.”

  The baby—Paul Montaraz, I realized with sudden humbling insight—had fallen asleep nursing. He was small. Even asleep, his mouth tugged at RuthClaire’s nipple with desperate infantile greed. Livia George lifted him, coaxed a burp from him, and lay him on a quilted coverlet in the bassinet. RuthClaire told me that tomorrow morning the Montaraz family would return to Atlanta and my own life could go back to normal.

  “Whoever said I wanted a normal life?”