Oxherding Tale

by Charles Johnson

  I’d come to ask Reb how best to approach Flo Hatfield about my wages, but I did feel—and felt still—at Flo’s center something unhealthy, like hysteria.

  “Flo Hatfield been dead, oh, for goin’ on fifteen years now, Freshmeat.” Reb gave his lopsided smile. “I was buildin’ caskets before you was born, so can’t nobody tell me I doan know a dead person when I sees one. She had heart failure. She died in her sleep. We worked on her—her husband Earl and me—and when she woke up she never knowed she’d been dead. But you kin tell. You kin feel it. That’s why you heah.”

  He ate in a way I thought quite telling for his age—chewing, like a cow, on one side of his face, feeding himself with black fingers gnarled like gingerroots. Reb shucked off his boots, brought out whiskey, then talked as he struggled to capture a likeness of me with a knife and a piece of balsa wood. The Coffinmaker was, not Wazimba, as I first thought, but from the ancient clan-state of the Allmuseri, concealed for centuries in the bush between Cape Lopez and the Congo River. “I was from a good line of people.” He thumped his chest, “Me!” I tumbled down his voice into a clearing of circular houses built of clay, date groves dotting the countryside, and amrkets of watoto and viazi. The history of the Allmuseri, I learned, was intimately bound to the life of Reb’s great-grandfather, Rakhal, a powerful osuo, who was cheated out of half his land by Akbar, the village king who late in life became a Moslem and hated Rakhal because he held fast to the old religion. Seeking revenge, Rakhal told the king that within a week he would bring a rain that would produce madness. Naturally, Akbar collected and hived away all the jugs of fresh water he could find. When the storm of insanity came upon the Allmuseri, everyone went mad, including Rakhal, who, standing below the king’s window, laughing in the doorway, drank the waters of madness, too. But the king was untouched. He had saved himself from the shaman’s curse, though he could not understand why Rakhal chose madness with the others. Soon Akbar knew. His subjects, in their lunacy, were all the same—they took the fantastic world of their madness to be real, understood each other, and he, their king, could not speak a word to them that made sense. For weeks he wandered among them, lugging his jug of fresh water, shouting, “I’m sane, you’re not,” and everyone laughed, especially Rakhal, and pointed significantly at their temples as he passed, for the Real, if it was anything at all to the Allmuseri, was a matter of consent, a shared hallucination. So it was, said Reb, that King Akbar finally threw aside his stash of fresh water, drank the waters of insanity, and Rakhal’s revenge was complete. All was as it had been before, except that Akbar couldn’t have told you, at gunpoint, what a Moslem was.

  The Coffinmaker, being Rakhal’s great-grandson, was selected to follow him as the master of Yaka powders and Yohimby roots, rituals for rainmaking, rhymes for killing rats, and charms from the Ndembos tribe and Ekpe cults of the Cameroons. By dumbshow, he learned from Rakhal biting satires to blight an enemy’s crops and, more importantly, how to send his kra forth to dwell in oxen in the cattle kraals. It took up ten thousand hosts, this I, slipped into men, women, giraffes, gibbering monkeys, perished, pilgrimaged in the animal and spirit worlds, dwelled peacefully in baobab trees. He learned intimately the life of these objects and others, died their unrecorded deaths, and ever returned to himself richer, ready to assume a sorcerer’s role. Which did not come to pass. The hours passed quickly. Despite my duties the next day, I drank and listened. The Coffinmaker went on, softer now. Reb spoke of the slave clippers. Of the voyage of a hundred days into history. Washing with buckets of cold salt water. Squatting to sing still vivid Allmuseri melodies. Then he was called Agamemnon by the ship’s captain, he thumped tom-toms on the deck of The Fortunata. On the forecastle sailors drank and danced a double-shuffle to his music, because now he was not rainmaker and magician but the shaper of gentle songs. He conjured—as if his speech could enshrine these things for me—The Fortunata brooking wall-high waves that spun it like a casket and shattered its hull, of Saint Elmo’s fire shimmering like a silvery nimbus on the sails, and the ship anchoring under cover of darkness at a hidden cove in Cuba. Seasoning camps he recalled, and then his third name—Obadiah, yet still his kra remained the same, unspoiled, despite three masters in as many states before he was purchased by Earl Hatfield.

  “I know,” he said, “who’s dead and who will be.” Now it was midnight. He had not finished his carving of me, had, I realized, hardly cut a niche in the surface of the uncarved block.

  “It’s not like you said.” I walked to the door, looking west, toward Flo’s house. “I don’t want to replace Patrick.”

  “You tell that to my boy. If you don’t find him, he’ll find you.”

  I rode back at half-speed, the horse bounding forward at the touch of my heels. I had seen at Cripplegate none of this ugly struggle for supremacy, since I was, as I say, the privileged ward of Master Polkinghorne. I had not seen, except in George’s fear of padderolls and women, this warped and twisted profile of the black (male) spirit, where every other bondsman—everything not oneself—was perceived as an enemy. A threat. There were rumors of a coming war between the states. Sir, we were already in the midst of Civil War. Blacks and whites. Blacks and blacks. Women and men—I was in the thick of diversity, awash in the world’s rich density. But things were becoming too dense. Everything seemed to create its own cancellation. I wanted this movement to go no further if, as the Coffinmaker said, someone would wind up on a cooling board.

  From the stables I ran to the house, pressed my thumb on the latch to the back door, and pushed inside. You could tell by the way Patrick had swept, mopped the floors, and fixed the front rooms—the paintings in Flo’s boudoir framed and lined up precisely on the walls, her brushes cleaned, still smelling of turpentine, the lines in the paintings angling the eyes peacefully to the Y where corner and ceiling met, from the high ceiling to the chandelier, like logical implication in Spinoza’s Ethics—that Reb’s son had labored hard that day to outdistance me. He had even done my chores. In the house I heard no sound. Flo had not returned. Or had she? And where was Patrick? Dizziness crawled up from my stomach. I went upstairs to her bedroom, but felt even weaker, for the long hallway to Flo’s chamber swam with a smell so strong, so thick, my eyes began to water. It was at first a primal stench, raw and sharp; it hung in the air, like smoke or steam. Her door moved back on its hinges. My voice jumped, “Flo? This is Andrew.” Her door banged against the wall. To this day I cannot tell you how many steps I took when I entered, for time played tricks on my mind—I remember seeing the slanting floor, a laky fluid, smudgelike shadows, her stained throw rugs soaking in blood, her bedsheets, then her mattress where Patrick lay naked with his long legs twisted in the red blankets, both dark hands frozen on the shaft of the butcher knife buried deep in his belly.

  Trouble, I thought. This is real trouble.

  And no accident. Flo’s butler had pulled the knife, horizontally, in a crosscut from rib to rib. It was exactly my father’s method for disemboweling a deer.

  To keep from trembling, or fainting—my head was light—I squeezed my hands, then drug deeply for air; I sat down on the bedside. It was now twelve forty-five. Outside Flo’s window a tree branch banged on glass. The sound of a carriage, far away, drew closer. There was only the dull certainty, like an ache, that I had done this—I had killed Patrick, in a sense, by my presence, and now, as the carriage stopped outside, and Flo’s footman fumbled with her packages downstairs, I knew I would have to pay. All hands at Leviathan would agree that I should be hanged. I looked at him. His face even in rest, even in death was condemned to express desire. Standing up, slowly, I went down the long staircase, through the kitchen, and onto a back porch that bellied out, low, into the yard. Yellow moonlight pooled, as in a bowl, between the old gray walls of her garden. A fresh breeze herded leaves toward the stairs. Gripping the railing, weaving from the shock of cool air, I gazed up, up. My vision was porous. And was I through? Had the sick, dull feeling passed? As Ezekiel’s student I had
ever believed it was man’s destiny to achieve freedom from the polarities, to find the Ground, but years after Patrick’s death, after I lost Leviathan and Flo Hatfield, this deadening feeling that our particularities limited us, closed us in—created a ceiling low enough to break your neck—remained. Although nearly anything you said about slavery could be denied in the same breath, this much struck me as true: the wretchedness of being colonized was not that slavery created feelings of guilt and indebtedness, though I did feel guilt and debt; nor that it created a long, lurid dream of multiplicity and separateness, which it did indeed create, but the fact that men had epidermalized Being. The Negro—one Negro at Leviathan—was needed as a meaning. So it was; so it was. A mist dispelled. I pressed one hand to my forehead. In my will, my body, I slept. As for Flo….

  I had not yet confronted Flo Hatfield. The back door opened with a burst. Before I could turn, I felt small hands slide under my shirt, fingers spreading, palms down, on my chest. Warm breath rushed on the back of my neck. After several moments:

  “Andrew?”

  “Yes, ma’am?” I turned, sitting on the railing, my back to the yard, balanced like a crow on a clothesline. She looked up; I looked down. “There’s something I must tell you.”

  “Not now.”

  “It’s about Patrick.”

  “I’m not interested in Patrick.”

  In the moonlight, with her eyes wet, and brilliant, she was beautiful. And then, in spite of my terror, I touched her face with my fingertips, lightly, and Flo Hatfield held my hand there.

  “I want you to kiss me now.”

  She said again, because I could not respond, “Will you do that?” Flo walked her fingers along my chest, and in a voice soft-breathing, gently singsong, she whispered, “Remember what I told you about Venice? And my education? I’m going to teach you, Andrew. You have more promise than most men. But everything I do to please you, you must do to please me.” On the railing she crushed out her cigarette, then screwed up her eyes. “I haven’t embarrassed you, have I? Your ears are red.” Then Flo ran her tongue right down to the roots of my throat, moving her head as my fingers climbed her hair, and her mouth spilled water into mine. It was a longish kiss, and when I opened my eyes, I saw through the haze caused by the violence of my desire, saw on a lozenge of grass, between a sundial and an old hawthorne, a figure sewn from darkness, standing a bowshot away, looking like something transplanted from a Russian novel to her yard.

  “Just as I thought.” Flo pulled away. “You taste milky.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “Did I see who, dear?”

  He slipped away like a dream. My pulse was stampeding. My mind: a nest of worms. “You didn’t see him?”

  “It’s your imagination, Andrew.” The wind lifted her hair. Flo curled her arms round my waist. “There’s no one here but us.”

  She lay her chin on my chest, looking up, and I wondered if, really, there were two of us here, or—for each of us—only one. I asked her, “What do you feel when you touch me?”

  “Me.” Now her lips were on my fingertips. “I feel my own pulse. My own sensations.” She laughed. “I have a pulse everywhere.”

  “That’s all you feel?”

  “Yes.”

  IV

  IN THE SERVICE OF THE SENSES (2)

  On August 4, 1858, I became Flo Hatfield’s lover. That next morning her butler Patrick was buried.

  He was, of course, not in the house when my new services at Leviathan began (I will speak of them shortly), because the Coffinmaker came for his son the night of the suicide, saying not a word to me when he tramped upstairs, climbing to the top floor with his hands on his thighs, and nothing to Flo Hatfield, which I thought unfair, for the discovery of Patrick’s death nearly paralyzed her. When I told Flo she slapped me. Twice. “I can’t handle this, Andrew.” Before my eyes she became an old, old woman. Her back wishboned suddenly, tipping her head forward. I helped her inside, her hand light as a child’s on my arm. When she saw Reb drag his son outside, the last ember of life in Flo Hatfield winked out; she dropped in a heap to the floor.

  For two nights Flo slept in my room, though I had the uncanny feeling that her butler had settled, even there, like an oil stain. He was, if you will, worked into the texture of the house, he stained the things he’d touched like sweat, his fingertips, thoughts, and footprints clung to each object like an odor and left me with the feeling that, though dead, he had soaked, as I sat watching over Flo as she slept, into everything. She looked small and broken on the bed, aging fast-forward like a fairy-tale witch in the final scene. She was now eighty-three. That night of Patrick’s death I wrote to Master Polkinghorne, a desperate perambulation that explained all I had experienced since my arrival. The following day Leviathan’s veterinarian came by to visit and to ask Flo questions, which I answered—running interference, so she could rest. Flo did not rest. She had nightsweats. Spun dreams so terrible she sat up straight, like a starched collar, and insisted that I keep the lamp burning and sleep with her.

  Next morning when I awoke I heard voices moving toward Leviathan’s cemetery. My mistress rolled over, her face webbed with wrinkles, mumbling beneath the quilt—she always slept with the covers over her face to keep out the sunlight. “Andrew,” she licked her dry lips, “why did you let those things in here?”

  “There’s no one here.” I was up, wedging my knuckles in my eyesockets, looking for the boothooks to pull on my Bluchers. Her dreamwork after Patrick’s death often spilled over into morning, nightmares resurfacing in the first thing she said. I said, “Go back to sleep.”

  “They didn’t push me off the roof?”

  “You were dreaming.”

  As she slipped back to sleep, I gently pushed the door shut, took the stairs two at a time, then stepped into a morning too bright for a burial.

  The whole day was in bad taste. The air, I thought, had no business being so crisp, the sky so berylline, and Nature so indifferent to Patrick’s death when the voice of my education sang the earth as man’s home, Being as a vast feminine body, if poetic tradition was trustworthy. (Metaphors are fair.) These rolling hills, these timeless trees and vegetation we genderized—even as we racialized Being, giving them feminine attributes, without asking whether Being, like Anna Polkinghorne and my stepmother, bore an ancient grudge against men. Of course, William Sidney Mount painted her; Emerson sang her; Thoreau fled to her; Paine mystified her. But these were men. That morning I thought this vision contained the menacing idea that men, not Man in the abstract, but men were unessential, and in the deepest violation of everything we valued in Woman. What was said of Woman was no less true of World. She did not need us for satisfaction, or even reproduction—there were, after all, parthenogenones, all of which cast men as the comical exception in Nature, the luxury, the freak who fell back on thought in the absence of feeling, created history because he could not live Being’s timeless cycles. On my way to the hills, I entertained, nervously, pulling at my fingers, the possibility that the sexual war was a small skirmish—a proxy war, with women as the shock troops for a power that waited, mocking the thoroughly male anxiety for progress, ready to (s)mother the fragile male need to build temples to the moon; ready, as in Patrick’s case, to remind us, without hope of redemption, that though men were masters—even black men, in the sexual wars—we could not win.

  Clearly, I was in foul spirits.

  Through white gum trees into woods west of the quarters, the pallbearers traipsed, trailed by mourners carrying their wreaths of white flowers, Patrick’s pine box swinging so lightly it seemed filled with straw. They walked on through thick weeds and rough grass that crackled underfoot, alongside humpbacked cairns to the oldest part of the boneyard. Whitherward, I came through the trees, breaking cobwebs as I went, with branches whipping my face, in time to see them lower the bier onto the soft lip of the grave.

  Here, the light was poor, but numinous. In a few places cold sunlight shafting through leaves overh
ead broke into shifting patterns at their feet. Presently, Reb’s bald head and sunblistered neck separated from the crowd, the dark fingers of men and women, like fire-licked kindling, dropping away from his shoulders as the Coffinmaker shuffled closer. His voice was faint. A rustle of leaves. Then Reb lifted his head and began to croon in a tongue incomprehensible to me. Another mourner began to sing. Then another. The sound swelled, expanded, ate space, filled the woods like a splash of wind, blended with the air, turned and touched off, one by one, the different voices of the others, then Reb sang louder—or, better, bellowed like a steer. Abruptly, they stopped. My own face was hot and thick, the tears flew back into my nose when I sniffled and burned my throat. It was then, as Reb drove home the first nail to seal his son’s casket, as I felt the sound of metal ring on metal in the deepest coils of my ears, that a voice behind me, toadlike, said:

  “At least he was spared the mines, eh, Andrew?”

  By my guess, I jumped three feet. My heart pounded, for an instant, like the hoofbeats of a horse; I bit down so hard on my tongue that it bled for hours thereafter. The veterinarian, Hiram Groll, had peradventure come secretly, like me, to watch Patrick’s funeral from afar. A fat, pursy little man in his late sixties—a failed physician with a rich Old Country burr, and quick, incomplete gestures, he wore, without change, a clawhammer coat, highheel boots with mule-ear straps, and a chimneypot hat. He had two chins. A cyst on the tip of his nose. People said that before arriving at Leviathan, Dr. Groll had worked as an abortionist in Louisiana. As to that, I have no proof, but the Vet had funny ways (like looking at things sideways, as birds do) that made everyone uneasy. He stuck his nose right inside your clothes (almost) when talking to you, like an Arab, as if how you smelled was partly what you were. Damned peculiar. He was not deformed, but gave the impression of deformity, though with a good bath, he might, I thought, resemble Benjamin Franklin (on a bad day). But the Vet never bathed; he had vile habits like wiping his nose with his whole arm, and finished your sentences for you. Worse, he sold bogus funeral policies to slow-witted slaves in Leviathan’s quarters, giggled too much for a man of science, and smelled like Flo Hatfield’s barn, where he treated her servants and slept.