Oxherding Tale

by Charles Johnson

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”

  “And does she love you?”

  For a moment I struggled. Time and again, I’d told myself that it only mattered if I loved Minty. Now the thought bothered me. I buried it. I said, “She does—she does love me.”

  “Does she really?” Flo put back her head. “And is she pretty?”

  I bobbed my head: yes, yes, yes.

  “We shall see, then, about this—what is the girl’s name? Does she have a name, Andrew?”

  “Minty….”

  “Yes, Minty.” Flo made the name sound like root medicine. Her high bosom heaved. “We will see how you feel about all this in a year. Now, if you will please disrobe, Patrick can take your measurements.”

  That threw me off stroke. I asked in a tight voice that had no tie to my mind, “Ma’am?”

  “Your trousers.” The stones of her eyes, very blue with shades of brown as if spring water rushed over bright riverbottom pebbles, ranged over me. “We do not stand on ceremony here, Andrew, but if you wish, I will leave the room.”

  To this hour, sir, I wonder how in Heaven’s name I had brought this upon myself. Flo glided to the door, passing Patrick, shutting it behind her, and left me with her butler, who gave me the kind of look I had seen Conjure Doctors use to paralyze birds. Irritably, he waited beside my chair, pins in his mouth, holding a bolt of brown cloth. The air around me, tight. Despite my schoolboy shyness, and despite the weakness in my knees, I pulled the cord around my waist and my trousers sprang open. At this point, Flo Hatfield bounded back into the room. “I have forgotten something.” As this was said, she walked to the sofa, found her lorgnette, and, turning toward me, drew breath suddenly. Her mouth snapped shut. Then it slipped sideways. She stretched her neck toward me, blinking through her glasses, then hurried back out the door with the tray of Bordeaux. In the hallway, she said, “Do hurry, Patrick”—her voice quavered—“We haven’t all day.” I heard her pour herself a goodly measure of wine, knocking glass and bottle—clink!—nervously as the butler, finishing, called, “We’s finished now, Flo.”

  “You call her Flo?” I asked.

  “Just me.” His lips curled back, he said, like a thug, with his mouth wrenched to one side, “Think you somethin’, don’t you, comin’ in heah with all them books.”

  “Huh?”

  “Why doan you go back to Hodges,” he said. “Doan nobody want you heah.”

  “Has Andrew,” asked Flo, “covered himself?”

  “Yeah.”

  Exhaling deeply, Flo Hatfield eased back into the room and onto her sofa, slowly, like someone on stage. Her mouth fell back into place, relaxed. There was, just then, a half-wistful, half-perverse look in her eyes as she glanced from Patrick to me, like a woman comparing chunks of pork at Public Market.

  “Well,” she said, “you are most welcome, as Jonathan Polkinghorne’s servant, in my house. But,” her nose wrinkled, “don’t you dare get fat, Andrew.”

  I assured her I would not.

  She told Patrick to take me to a tiny, topfloor room down the hall from her bedchamber—the room was a kind of catchall space, full of luggage, round-topped leather trunks, but it looked lived in. Showing me inside, he tossed my portmanteau and books like so much trash onto the bed, then slammed shut the door. He cuffed me hard behind my ear and pushed me into a chair. His knuckles, five black knots of wood, slammed into my chest.

  “You and me best get one thing straight from the get-go, Chief.” He was panting a little now, spitting in anger. “There ain’t room enough for two splibs in this house. You understand?” He began gathering up clothes and shoes in the room, talking to me over his shoulder. “I’ve put up with a whole lot since I left my Papa’s shed—I worked like hell to make somethin’ of myself. Is that clear, Chief?”

  “Is this your room, Patrick?”

  “Nigguh, nobody told you to talk! This ain’t nobody’s room. Look at them walls. Hundreds of nigguhs been in heah. You know where they all went?”

  “Can I talk now?”

  “No!”

  Clothes crushed under his right arm, he stamped to the door, threw it open, and said, “They went to the mines, Chief, and that’s where you’re goin’—I’ll see to it—if you mess hup this thing for me.”

  “By my heart, Patrick,” I said, “I’m only here to work with you.” I lifted my hand toward him. “We can work together, can’t we?”

  And then, incredibly, Patrick’s lips released a rippling volley of laughter so sudden that his head tilted back, tears hopped from his eyes, and, doubled over, he strangled. I slapped his back; he struck down my hand, and said, “Don’t you ever touch me, Chief.” Slowly, he wiped his eyes. “How people gonna work together heah? You tell me that!” He hoisted his bundle higher, turned in the doorway, said, “You ain’t gonna last a week,” then closed it behind him with a click.

  Needless to say, I did not entirely trust Flo Hatfield’s butler, or even Flo for that matter—they seemed, now that it’s out in the open, more than half-crazy, and I thank God, sir, that you ain’t a lunatic, too. Nor was I happy sleeping in Patrick’s former room. (Flo sent him to sleep in the quarters.) The house was huge, with sliding panels, I discovered, and rooms into which Flo and Patrick often disappeared, and which, strange to relate, I was forbidden to enter. My bedroom had thin walls. The door did not close properly, the piece of looking-glass on its back was held there by three rusty nails, but slowly I slipped into the rhythms of life at Leviathan. Lavish meals were served twice a day. There were so many courses I could not finish what was on my plate. Since the catfight between George and Mattie over eating flesh, I took no meat. Flo, who ate no more than a child, and mainly candy at that, was ill pleased with my vegetarianism. “There is something lowbred in self-denial, Andrew,” she announced over breakfast. And this saying, too: “Eating a good piece of meat is like making love,” swinging her eyes toward Patrick, as if he might be a six-foot chicken quiche. This observation, I daresay, was narrowly true, but the phrase bothered me because her words laundered a much larger problem, concealed something in me I could not unkey. Let me explain.

  I don’t want to wrong this woman, who treated Patrick and me like family, so I won’t go so far as to say her appetites were well known to the county sheriff, although this was possible. Self-denial was, however, the only sin for our mistress. She put tremendous pressure on my masculinity. Don’t get me wrong—I am not, nor have I ever been, a prude; I love making love. But if you scratch a man deeply enough, particularly one with Pico’s Oration, or my father’s vision of the black future in his bloodstream, you’ll find him suspicious of pleasure as a Final Cause. For the men of my period the dream of contributing to the Race, of Great Sacrifice and glory, drew us back from desire. We wanted to do something difficult—see?—like tame the West, spearhead a Revolution, or pin the universe down like a butterfly on the pages of a book. We wanted trials. Tests of faith. We could not live, the men of my age, without a cause. A principle. Something greater than merely living from day to day, and to which we could devote ourselves entirely. And pleasure? It was hard to square pleasure with having a world-historical mission. Sex was subhistoric. Plutarch’s Lives of Great Men didn’t portray—if memory serves—anyone who simply had a good time. I knew, as Flo knew, my weakness for heroic visions; it was dangerous, I knew that, too. But it was me. These, as I say, were things that troubled me about Flo Hatfield’s philosophy.

  And one other thing:

  Despite her plain talk about pleasure, she was not sensual. My mistress was too obsessive to be sensual. The erotic difference between my Minty and Flo, it seemed to me—though I could have been wrong, fooled by first impressions—was the difference between growth and decay, the spirit flowering in efflorescence and the spirit so paralyzed by past pleasures, impoverished by desire, that now it needed the most violent stimulants to register sensation. Long ago she had ruptured the capillaries inside her nose, but with what chemicals I cannot tell you. If
you looked carefully, light passed through her nostrils. Her awareness of sounds, of colors, even her paintings, seemed anchored less in passion than—how shall I put this?—in mechanical response. And what more? She was trigger-happy with snap judgments, vengeful, so cunning the act of crossing her knees was equivalent to a frontal attack in a military operation, and, like Aristotle, couldn’t stomach children. And yet how lovely she was, and gentle with everyone generally, except her ex-husbands, whom she considered subhuman.

  But I would do wrong, and I would lie, if I left you with the impression that she was, in any sense, anything but fair my first few months at Leviathan. Flo Hatfield bought me gifts. Two months after my arrival, she gave me a silver bracelet, a beautiful dog collar (Patrick had one identical to it). From the start, Flo took it upon herself to make me more worldly. I did not resist. One must, I reasoned, make allowances for a woman who lives on candy and at any hour of the day only had a few ounces of chocolate in her. So I followed Flo everywhere. To horse races. Cockfights. (She’d gamble on anything—the weather, which way a cockroach would turn next on the wall.) After finishing my chores—helping Patrick clean the dishes, scrubbing her cabinets, made in Flanders and Germany, or tidying up her huge bedchamber (once I saw Flo, wearing one of Patrick’s shirts, stumble out to bathe, with wheezing, whistlelike breath, and insomnia, her skin mottled from sleeplessness; but mostly our mistress stepped from her bedroom at ten each morning, incredibly put-together after her toilet, yet if you tipped in behind her, as I had to do, peering round her dark bedroom, you saw a disaster, as if, magically, her bedroom’s disorder—an order I reestablished daily—passed through osmosis into Flo, who blithely left behind a disheveled chrysalis of broken jars, her paintings atilt, clothes, stockings, haircombs, and pillows tossed everywhere)—after these chores she called me into her boudoir to play Rummy or Coon-can.

  Yet, despite Flo Hatfield’s noisy eroticism, or because of it, she was lonely. At her easel, where she mixed paint on the palm of her hand, or in her fields beneath a straw bonnet, Flo Hatfield looked lonely. Waxing her eyelashes, or pulling a comb through her hair before her immense mirror, her right leg crossed over her left, and Patrick standing nearby to fetch, his back straight, holding a tray as he gazed at her reflection, she looked lonely. There was something wrong, something she’d done to herself, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. At any rate, I pitied my new mistress being so successfully independent, so liberated from convention, that no one in Abbeville would touch her with a barge pole, except—it seemed—Patrick, who was no Don Juan. Little wonder then that as the days became months I began, I think, to love her thereness, the beauty and spiritual brilliance that was Flo Hatfield.

  She would have me read Sir Walter Scott while she painted, then suddenly place her hand over my book—this, during afternoons on her lawn in late summer, when she wore a paint-splattered tunic, and said, “Tell me about philosophy, Andrew.”

  “Whose philosophy did you want to hear, ma’ma?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” That afternoon her eyes were strained and pointed as though she’d been chewing some controlled substance. “You have a way,” Flo fanned herself with a scrap of sketching paper, “of pitching your voice just so that it runs in my head and gives me gooseflesh.” She lowered her eyelids a little. “I wonder what you’d taste like.”

  Patrick bit down on the side of his finger.

  I told her all I knew of Gnosticism, taking each question of Theodotus singly. Her eyes became quiet; she blurred the sense of my lecture, listening only to the stream of my speech. She seemed, I thought, unnecessarily harsh that afternoon on Patrick. “Men,” Flo said, more to him than to me, “don’t enjoy sex at all. They’re afraid to experiment. Things are so one-sided. Men don’t know how to relax. They make love as a task. They don’t know how to imaginatively use pain.”

  I closed a finger on my book to keep my place. Patrick looked away, sadly, toward the mines, and with such melancholy I could hear, faintly, a whimper rise, then die in his right ventricle. I turned to Flo, and asked, “Pain?”

  “The artful use of pain, Andrew.” She talked on like this. “Men orgasm too quickly. You must learn to indefinitely prolong tension, longing, thirst, discomfort, desire, the burning sensation of the genitalia just before they sneeze. I came of age in Venice, Andrew,” said Flo, as if this explained everything. “I was educated there, and I discovered techniques of maximizing pleasure seldom permitted in a country as backward as this one, except maybe in New Orleans. Pain,” she said, “is the precondition for pleasure. Have you ever been licked unconscious by four naked women?”

  “No.” My voice broke. “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, if you had, you’d remember it, Andrew. I mean you’d hardly forget a thing as delicious as that, would you?”

  “You’ve done this?” I asked.

  Flo Hatfield only smiled and pushed my nose.

  Whoever is wise, and will observe these things, will see that this woman had no equal on earth, that only a fool would not open himself to her, though, yes, the races at Leviathan, as elsewhere, only lived alongside each other in an uneasy truce. Example: Reb the Coffinmaker avoided Flo Hatfield at all costs. My mistress bothered him a whole lot. Everything about Flo raised his Ebenezer: her laughter, her clothes, every order she gave, orders she didn’t give. Was Reb, I wondered, as scarred by slavery as my father? As unfirm in his gender as Ezekiel? Clearly, it was Flo Hatfield’s air we breathed, her clothes dispensed to the quarters once a year (hard leather clogs, one blanket, Lowell pants, one mackinaw hat, five yards of coarse homespun cotton), but Reb’s feelings of discomfort sprang, I discovered, from a different source, a deeper outrage. Permit me, then, in a plain way, to backpedal a bit and speak of the Coffinmaker’s life in Africa.

  There were days, whole weeks, when my duties kept me close to the house (Flo managed, however, to dodge all discussion of my wages), but on the day when my struggle with Patrick for male preeminence in the house ended in murder—I will speak of it in a minute—I descended on a gray medley, leisurely, at a handgallop to the quarters and found the Coffinmaker grimly sealing cracks and seams in a casket with wood putty, painting the top and interior with tar, his trousers and the front of his shirt covered with pinewood powder. It was a hot afternoon, and the sky was clear and deep and the road to Reb’s shack was dusty. For a long time he ignored me. He was, as everyone knew, the most disagreeable man in South Carolina. His face naturally relaxed into a frown. You would know him in a crowd of thousands. He was the man, at country market, who looked at the stands and rejoiced at what he didn’t need; the man who, when most vigorously at work, seemed resting. Reb did not believe in getting sick or tired and, therefore, never was. It was said that when he first arrived at Leviathan he found himself confronted by two white hunters on a backroad. They’d caught no game that day. They leveled their shotguns at Reb. When he failed to run, one hunter said, “Nigguh, you lookin’ at somebody who kin blow off yo head without battin’ an eye.” It is said the Coffinmaker blinked, pushed aside both shotguns like treelimbs in his path, and, passing on, replied, “You lookin’ at somebody who can be shot without blinkin’ an eyelash.” I did not, therefore, wish to upset him. He was building—so it seemed to me—his most elaborate coffin, but no one had died at Leviathan since my arrival. I said, to start him talking:

  “It’s a beautiful casket. You do fine work.”

  “I didn’t do anythin’,” said Reb. He looked up for an instant, straight ahead, scowling at something I couldn’t see in his mind. “Things are done, that’s all.”

  Often he had this way of talking, which baffled me.

  “Each casket you do is different, though,” I said. “There must be some technique….”

  “Technique?” Reb laughed. “You wanna know what I do? I don’t do nothin’, Freshmeat, leastways, nothing you’d understand. Before I even open my toolbox I go off by myself into them woods yonder for a week. I try to forget about every casket I’v
e made. After a day I can’t remember none of ’em. After two days, I forget whatever instructions the family of the dead person give me, and whether they gonna like it or not. After five days, I forget the fact that I makes coffins. Seven days go by, and I forget all about myself, and that’s when I start looking round for a tree that wants to be a coffin.”

  “Is it,” I asked, “for someone in town?”

  “You know who it’s for, Freshmeat.”

  His hacksaw cut harshly against woodgrain, and he swore. “My boy Patrick was down heah this mawnin’. He ain’t been right since you got heah.” Dusting his hands, he came slowly to his feet. “This heah box is for you. Or Flo Hatfield.”

  Reb had said nothing before about Patrick being his son. Knowing Flo’s butler, it was, I supposed, the sort of thing you tried to keep quiet. “But,” I said, “I haven’t done anything! And if he does anything to Flo….”

  “You still don’t git it, do you?” Reb’s voice was rusty. He spoke softly, picking his words as if placing his feet on the swaying logs of a suspension bridge. “There can’t be two of you at the top, boy. Is that hard to see? Before my boy moved into the house there was a li’l nigguh go by the name of Moon who stayed as close to that woman as a pimple. Then she saw Patrick was growed-hup. You see what I’m sayin’? He’s gonna close somebody’s account—yo’s,” said Reb, “or that woman’s.”

  “What,” I asked, “happened to Moon?”

  “You really want to know?”

  I did not.

  After fastening up my horse for me, Reb waved me inside. “You might as well stay for supper.” His place was unpainted, a two-room shed with a lean-to kitchen. For light and air he pushed open one of the boards. Sacks of feed and mash were stacked in the corners beside a tub and washing stick, and carvings—when not shaping caskets he made figures of wood for Leviathan’s children. “It ain’t right,” he said, “to eat ’less you feed at least one other person.” From the peck of cornmeal, brackish messpork, and quart of molasses Flo rationed, Reb prepared a meal—sucamagrowl and sowbelly—which he placed in front of me. “She’s dead,” he said, without warning. “That’s what you came down heah to ask, ain’t it?”