Oxherding Tale

by Charles Johnson

  “I see so much of this in my work.” He gave a leaky sigh. “When Captain Walters brings bodies back from the Yellowdog Mine, it’s me he wants to write a certificate for the cause of death.” He sat down against the tree, his heels pulled back, and took off his hat. “Do you know what I tell Captain Walters, Andrew? Do you know what I write on these certificates?” Leaning forward, looking up, he drubbed his thick fingertips together, then giggled, “No life-assurance.”

  “I do not take your meaning. You mean to say, no life insurance?”

  “I mean what I said.” The Vet made a weak, wheedling smile, but a smile for that: no front teeth. “It’s an idea I’ve been working on for some time, an improvement on the popular Burial Society. Not a year ago I sprang the idea on that boy, your predecessor in the house, Patrick, but he refused to think about his future. He thought he was secure, you see, until you arrived….”

  “Then you think I killed him?”

  “Dear me, no,” said the Vet. “It was the loss of life-assurance. Oh, I’ve seen it happen before! Some strapping, able-bodied young man strong as a bull decides there’s no future for him, and keels over. There’s no medical explanation, as far as I know, but I do know, or sometimes—when bodies pile up like cords of wood in the barn—I think I know the reason.” He touched the ground beside me, smoothing down grass for me to sit. “I’m not losing you, am I?”

  “A little,” I said. “But go on.”

  “Well,” he glanced below as each mourner dropped handfuls of dirt into Patrick’s grave. “The cause of death for these black men was, strictly speaking, not physical at all, not a material failure in the usual sense, though their affliction is perhaps the oldest disease in the world. It cannot be empirically measured, or even perceived through instrumentation—we know it through its symptoms, yet despite its mystery, it is invariably the cause of death. I am speaking,” he said, fanning himself with his hat, “of the belief in personal identity, the notion that what we are is somehow distinct from other things when this entity, this lie, this ancient stupidity has no foundation in scientific fact.”

  “But, sir!” I said, shocked and, I think, a little angry. “Civilization is founded on this belief! There must be absolute presuppositions, bedrock ideas—superstitions, if you like—or everything built upon these ideas collapses.”

  “Just so,” nodded the Vet, though not in agreement. “For the sake of the argument, suppose individuality is a fact. What do you feel just now? Foxglove on the wind? The solidity of stone beneath us? The bark at our backs? Now, be frank,” he said, spiraling in for the kill, “is it reasonable to say that, since these sensations appear, there must be a separate entity that perceives them? We do not have a sensation of solidity; we are the sensation, Andrew.”

  “Then you are calling identity a lie?”

  “Vanity.”

  He gave his crooked smile again. With his fingers and thumb he turned my chin toward the grave. “If not a vanity, then how comes it, Andrew, that the remains of Flo’s butler are but a handful of conflicting memories about the man?” Because I thought myself outdone and made no reply, Dr. Groll struggled to his feet—I had to help him stand—then put on his hat. He said, at length, “It’s way too early in the morning, I suppose, for ontology. We will continue this conversation later, and perhaps I will tell you about Frederick Mesmer’s work on Animal Magnetism.”

  Filled with these thoughts as the Vet wobbled east and the others shoveled moist soil over Patrick’s coffin, so filled that I could not untangle Groll’s mysterious—maybe crackpot—theory, I half-ran, half-walked back to the house. When I walked into Flo Hatfield’s kitchen, picking beggarticks off my pantsleg, she had breakfast steaming on the table.

  “You must be starving by now.” Flo’s age had dropped from eighty to fifty. She was wearing a pair of my trousers under her dress. Definitely a bad sign. “I couldn’t sleep so I thought I’d fix something.”

  Breakfast was a big production—grilled fowl, bricks of cheese, tea, eggs and ham. She’d spent the morning cooking, I suspected, to sidestep thinking of Patrick, which meant that if I didn’t eat, that awful night would be hugely present again. “Do you want coffee, too?” Flo was talking because she was afraid. “Andrew?” The sight of food, however, and my encounter with the Vet had tired me. I pushed away my plate. Flo looked wounded. So I expected. She began to blubber into her handkerchief. When that was wet, she wept into her hand:

  “You blame me for what he did, don’t you?” She stamped her foot. She put two fingers in her mouth, caught herself, then swung the hand behind her back.

  “They think I did this to Patrick, don’t they?”

  “They probably blame us both.”

  “It was Patrick who left me, Andrew!” She sat down in two movements at the table, speaking through hair swinging in her face. “If I could only stand you behind my eyes for one minute. People say a woman is nothing without a man! A kind of freak to be pitied! A failure—people tell you—in the grand social scheme of things! The bastards. Maybe you do know,” sniffed Flo. “Years ago I thought colored men were closer to seeing through this than anybody. Now,” said Flo, “I’m not so sure. You’ve suffered, but you’ve never been married to someone so stupid he felt threatened if you sat on top, had an opinion, or knew how to tell time. In six years of marriage I didn’t come once. Did you know that?” Flo sniffed again and pulled at her hair. “I used to ask Earl to explain things in the newspaper to me. I wanted so badly for him to love me and feel intelligent and share things with me and stay! He’d foul up the bookkeeping, and the furniture, when he called himself ‘fixing things,’ and I let him, Andrew, because if I said as much as boo about it, or forgot to act helpless, Earl would say, ‘Sometimes, Flo, you make me feel like a fool.’” She stroked one hand with the other, like an old spinster sitting before a fireplace. Above her upper lip: the slightest shadow of a moustache. “Even acting helpless doesn’t make a difference. You still get old. You get fat. Or too thin. You have female trouble. Your hair falls out and your husband starts fucking everything under the age of twenty-five.” Her face fell loose. With a wrench, she looked up. “I used to be beautiful….”

  I touched her hand. “You still are.”

  She was a little petted by this. Her face stretched into a smile. “You really think so?”

  I gave her a nod.

  “Then why am I always alone?”

  “Begging your pardon, Flo, but maybe you ask for too much.”

  She gave me a tight look.

  “Is wanting tenderness too much?” Flo snatched her hand away. “Or intelligence in a man?” Thoughtful, she munched her lower lip. “Of course, I also want sexual satisfaction compliments gifts fidelity a great body cleverness sophistication yet boyish exuberance a full head of hair good teeth and the ability to know my moods.” Flo gave me a side glance, cagey. “Is that too much?”

  “Oh no—if you’re going to dream,” I offered, “dream big.”

  “You’re the dream, Andrew.” She kissed me on both eyes. “You can handle it.”

  Insofar as possible, I tried to satisfy Flo Hatfield’s appetites. This was a job for twelve men. She relieved me of all my duties, except keeping her entertained. And here, let it be said, I devoted myself to becoming a good lover. As with any study, there were a thousand small things to master, skills foolish to a metaphysician, a man trained, as I’d been, in the severe discipline of the cogito, but the greatest of these skills was listening. Note well, a lover listens. Patiently, I nodded as Flo spoke about her small army of former lovers, her previous acts of sexual terrorism, which she regretted because, “Sometimes,” confessed my mistress, “I feel like a Public Utility.” My vocabulary, which at Cripplegate had turned on the phrases But and On the contrary and Do you mean to say…? was scaled down at Leviathan to Of course and Quite so and Any fool can see that. Philosophers may see this as facile, and that is their privilege, but I merely sought, from my station, to serve.

  Someti
mes this meant riding into Abbeville with Flo, where we shopped, fingers intertwined, and she made no effort to disguise her affection for me, sometimes it meant playing the most childish games when she felt silly and needed her silliness reaffirmed, at other times she raged and pulled down the books in her boudoir, took a knife to the curtains and irons to the furniture, and broke dishes—on these days she wanted not a playmate, or a lover, but a father—and still other times Flo felt her age—she often feared she had cancer (it was, in fact, indigestion, according to the Vet)—but I played toothless old hubby, both of us sitting beneath quilts on flatbottomed roundabouts, reading the National Intelligencer with magnifying glasses, fingering our gums for loose teeth, a hand behind our ear as we asked, “Eh?” The lover of Flo Hatfield’s fantasy was polymorphous: husband, ravager, teacher, Galahad, eunuch, swashbuckler, student, priest, and, above all else, always there.

  It would have been easier to pick cotton.

  It made me feel, if I may speak freely, that the Vet had everything backwards. No Self, he said. But insofar as I satisfied Flo Hatfield—and for a year I did keep her satisfied—I was, or felt myself to be, several selves, like the Coffinmaker’s polyhedral kra, which suffered all possible forms. Absorbed sin in all its subtle variations. And sojourned still. “That was sorcery,” was what Reb said when I told him about this queer business.

  “You don’t understand women,” was what he said when Flo napped and I returned to his shed. “And you sho don’t understand a woman like Flo Hatfield.” I feared that Reb blamed me for Patrick’s death. He did not. He seemed, in a way, to have known it was coming, was now unyoked from his son, and often said, “I put his casket in the ground a month ago. You the one still carryin’ it around, Freshmeat.” Something else he often said was this:

  “You act like you ain’t never been chased by a woman before.”

  “It shows that much?” I asked.

  The Coffinmaker laughed.

  “You know, I once worked for a man named Fitzhugh in West Virginia.” Scowling down at powder on my face, he pulled the pipe of animal bone from his mouth, wet the tip of his shirt, and, like my stepmother, scrubbed my cheek. “I knew that man better’n he knew hisself. Had to. He had the whip. If I couldn’t guess what was in his heart before he thought of it, I was hup river without a paddle.”

  “I don’t understand. What’s that got to do with Flo Hatfield?”

  Reb sighed.

  “She ain’t free,” he said. “Some women learn, like slaves, to study men. They learn to think like men. They knows what men want, how they look at women when they think nobody’s watchin’, they know what men are afraid of, what they dream about—just like I knew Fitzhugh. They have to keep one step ahead. If you got no power,” said Reb, “you have to think like people who do so you kin make y’self over into what they want. She’s a slave like you’n me, Freshmeat.” Reb’s eyebrows speared in toward his nose. “And you best be ’fraid of someone who’s ’fraid of you.”

  “Stop.” I organized myself to leave. “All this talk about sex and slavery….It’s scaring me. Besides, I’ll be going home soon. I’ll have my papers. She hasn’t paid me yet, but when she does….”

  Reb looked around in wonder.

  “Boy, can’t nobody be as dumb as you let on! Flo Hatfield ain’t studyin’ about payin’ you! And she ain’t gonna let you go.” He showered me with laughter. “Without you, she don’t know who she is. Without her,” he showed his teeth in a terrible grin, “you ain’t nothin’ without somethin’—or somebody—to serve, Freshmeat.”

  That was, obviously, a cheap shot, but I figured I deserved it. While Flo and I luxuriated in the Big House, the sad pattern of slave life at Leviathan remained unchanged. Ginning. Sorting and moting cotton in January. Winter passed with her bondsmen making brooms, mats, and horse collars. There was the bedding of cotton and ridging of soil in March. In April there was splitting the ridges with plows. Planting seeds. Mending fences. May through August evaporated in endless hoeing. Come September: more picking. Through all this I devoted my year, you’d have to say, to mint tea and clever conversation.

  Not that I made love to my mistress the week of Patrick’s burial, but I did pork Flo Hatfield (her phrase, not mine) two weeks later. This is a delicate matter; I will try to describe that night with discretion. Flo Hatfield belonged, I should say (since these things interest modern historians who report drearily on every affair, every tedious slip in a man’s social life), to the class of women called Screamers. Unlike Minty—a girl who was silent when lovemaking—unlike Minty, Flo, a Screamer, could not truly experience her feelings, appreciate her own pleasure, until she whooped, “Oh there!” or “Andrew, don’t you dare do that!” which meant, of course, that this was precisely what I should do, and then, as our first night of lovemaking dissolved into daybreak—all the servants kept awake by her screams—she clamped shut her eyes in what was more narcosis than sleep.

  I was in pretty bad shape myself.

  The bedsheets (and Flo) were slick with my sweat. By afternoon I was able to crawl a little, then stand; stand a while, then walk. Have I said that Flo Hatfield needed chemicals to feel? Correction: Opium, which the Vet brought from Abbeville, lowered the senses, slowed them down and, in doing so, expanded the skin’s sensitivity to the point where the body’s edge vanished and blended into other bodies, objects. For men, opium speeded up the heart and slowed sexual response; for women it intensified sex, but made the heart serene. Our portion was four pipes of chandoo in the morning (before breakfast), two in the afternoon (with tea), and three at night (before bed), the effect of each pipe on Flo immediate, on me—well, it is with opium as with Scotch: you build up slowly, rubbing it on your gums, or drinking it, say, after soaking the paper in whiskey, suffering nausea for weeks before the nerves regulated. Slowly, I learned. Gradually, pain gave way to something like clairvoyance—I could see, like Ezekiel who lived on laudanum and perpetually smelled like licorice, the interior of objects. During the day my attention was on the noises that came from outside—the rooms in Flo Hatfield’s great house felt hyalescent, but with the rising of night, I began to notice the rooms themselves, the density of the walls, the strange finality of her furniture, and had the feeling there was nothing outside, that only her tiny boudoir, shadow-heavy, close and soundless, was real. By and by, I found a place where there was neither cold nor heat, thought nor memory, time nor motion, house nor field. All this, I remind you, was but preparation—Sensuality 101, Section A—for my real work, as a voluptuarian, at Leviathan.

  Strange to say, I learned from Flo Hatfield that lovemaking was magic; was, if properly understood, a Way. There were, I had heard, many Ways, but if you wished to experience pleasure, you must—she taught me—give pleasure, and to do this unfailingly the lover must get the feel of sacrifice and the ideal of service into his head, which sounded odd when she first said it, sitting naked on her sofa in the boudoir, her tangled laphair soaking, one hand on her smooth-muscled belly, for I’d always regarded sexuality as nothing if not self-gratifying, yet (said Flo) to learn her rhythms and responses—to play her well, like a finely tuned instrument, I, Andrew Hawkins, had to transform myself. I speak, sir, of what I know. Lovemaking at Leviathan, after Flo Hatfield closed her shutters, locked her doors, and spread herself in an X on the sofa, was exactly the inverse of my training—all thought and cognition—at Cripplegate. She brought me pleasure in places I didn’t even know I had places. Older women, I decided in this daze of feeling, knew things.

  Caresses that stripped the skin of movement. Silenced it. She guided my hands. My hips. Flo Hatfield went through the Kama Sutra page by page, improving, in her own small way, on each position. She was, as she said, a genius at love. The body (for Flo) was the touchable part of the spirit; the spirit the untouchable part of the body. Could thirst and hunger fit into American Transcendentalism? Could desire and the body be accepted, contrary to the texts I’d studied, as Ways to celebrate man’s incarnation?—w
e used them so those long fall evenings in Abbeville. For those interested in ways to improve their sexual performance, I suggest the following:

  1. Extinguish the ego.

  2. Eat well.

  3. Exercise regularly.

  To tell in short what happened, we made love like monkeys all that winter, then spring. In the liquor of an evening late in April, 1859, Flo Hatfield rolled a cigarette and said:

  “La, Andrew, you are the best servant I have ever had.” Lamplight clung to her lashes above eyes bright, incendiary. She made circles around my mouth with her tongue. “You are the most willing to learn, the most promising.”

  “You are,” I sighed, “too kind.”

  She stood up, picking up hair behind her head in two huge handfuls, and stretched.

  “Would you like a sandwich?”

  Grudgingly, I agreed. My stomach growled. The aftertaste on my tongue (of Flo) was briny. After five rounds of slow humping all evening I felt numb from the waist down, raw, and needed to replenish my tissues. What talent I’d had for going without food or, for that matter, riding a thought longer than required for after-dinner conversation, was gone. My memory failed me frequently. My palms stayed wet, even when I slept. At least, I told myself, you can still control your heart, Hawkins, and read.

  She brought me, as it turned out, a letter addressed to me on a plate, under my sandwich. It was from Hodges.