Oxherding Tale

by Charles Johnson

  The Prayer Circle would meet at Addie’s cabin, fifteen women seated in a circle of chairs, an article of Nate’s clothing in the center, and their combined thoughts and common prayer—a power like electromagnetism—were aimed at pulling him home. It was then I first saw Minty, and I thought: unfair! She was thin, skinny enough then to fall right through a flute and never strike a single note. And shy. A beautiful girl who, I saw, deserved much better than the man who days later returned home with the smell of strange women in his clothing.

  They stayed clear of Nate McKay, his children, until the odor was gone. Addie did not. She wept. She hid his meals in the woods. Many a night, Nate came home asking, “What’d you do with my dinner?” to which Addie replied, “You can’t have it!” She’d cooked that day—her children had to eat; but his portion she put where he couldn’t find it. His children watched him spend his first hours home smelling it, searching in the outhouse for it, rummaging through Master Polkinghorne’s toolshed in a perverse game of hide-and-seek, his stomach growling, and then he’d whale Addie, pound her with both fists, and squeeze her throat until she clawed at his eyes or kneed his testicles. His son Jerome (sixteen), daughters Ann (twelve) and Minty (six) would join in, swinging, trying to unlock his fingers from Addie’s hair—the whole family spilled like a creature with ten legs into Nate McKay’s yard. It was not a pleasant household, those nights. For hours Addie cried. Jerome cursed and threatened to kill him. Minty and Ann cowered like chickens in one corner of the cabin. Meanwhile, Nate kept looking for his dinner. Often he would find it, cold and fouled by farm animals in the barn. Finger-feeding himself in the darkness, hunched over his plate, he swore each woman’s hand was a glove that concealed Satan’s claw.

  They had this in common, George and Nate: a bewilderment about black women, but there all similarities stopped. Nate treated his wife as a prize Weimaraner would treat the mongrel he’d mated with. He was straightforward with George about his feelings: “I’m a physical man, you understand, with powerful drives. It’s only natural that when the wife’s bleeding I should have somebody on the side.” And then he told George about a woman named Delphine, whom he’d been seeing for years; how one winter after not sleeping with her for months he went for a visit when Addie was sick, and found Delphine hemorrhaging in her cabin on a plantation not far away, the softheaded fetus spilling onto the floor in a splash of placenta and blood: a fish, Nate called it, some monster halfway between being a steelhead and his son, and, without saying a word to Delphine, he went outside, threw a torch into her master’s window, then placed the matchbox on her porch. Within the week she was sold.

  “You did that?” asked George. “Why?”

  “I don’t need another mouth to feed. Besides,” said Nate McKay, “she shoulda known better’n to try an old trick like that to trap me into stayin’ with her.”

  My father quoted the Bible, chapter and verse to him and the blacksmith, shaking his head, cut him off:

  “Master Polkinghorne give you that book, didn’t he? It’s wrong for us, George. Ain’t a thing the same between us—we been treated different, so we gotta have different rules. You oughta know that! You did everythin’ they tol’ you, and looka where it got you.”

  “Was only tryin’ to do right,” said George.

  “Uh huh.”

  Nate McKay smiled triumphantly.

  My father gazed up from under his brow, a little afraid of the blacksmith, but thankful for his company. After a moment, he asked, “Then how do we do hit? Hold our families together when they kin sell us any minute, when it ain’t clear what’s right or wrong, and one li’l mistake’ll destroy everythin’ you been workin’ fo?” He licked his lips, thoughtful. “Mattie, she don’t understand none of this. I feel like a daid man gettin’ hup ever’ mawnin’—there ain’t nothin’ to hope for, work toward. How kin you go on, knowin’ that?”

  Nate McKay nodded, sympathetic.

  “You gonna feel daid,” he said, “until you back in the Big House and Master Polkinghorne is down heah—permanently.”

  That made sense to my father. He toyed with the idea, frightening as it was, during the first year of his exile. The problem was that, like so many other ideas a man desperately needed to believe, it came from the mouth of a person everyone at Cripplegate wanted to shoot. It came, to be precise, from the only bondsman who told him his expulsion wasn’t fatal, that it was perhaps a period of purification of all things European. This kept George steady. It saved his life, to be frank. Before and after my birth in the Big House, Nate McKay shouldered my father through the worst years of his life, and George comforted him. He fixed Nate a pallet when his wife kicked him out after his wanderings to other women, and shared whatever problems he had with Mattie. The blacksmith laughed easily, and somehow—said Mattie—his humor relaxed George a little. For this reason she tolerated him for as long as five years because he kept George from self-destruction. Also, he brought Minty by to play with me in the yard.

  “You like her, don’t you?” George would ask me. I was only four then, going on five, but already he was thinking of cementing our families through marriage. My stepmother began to have doubts.

  “George, I don’t think I want that man in our family.”

  Nate’s my best friend!” said George. “He’s the only person said as much as boo to me when I come back!”

  “He isn’t safe,” she said.

  George stamped his foot. “You just like everybody else! Nobody unnerstands him! Just like you don’t unnerstand me! We balances each other! Is that hard to see? There’s some things a man can’t talk about to a woman, or white people! I kin see that now. If it wasn’t for him, you wouldn’t have a husband now.”

  “And if you weren’t so stuck on Nate McKay,” said Mattie, “maybe you’d see why he really comes around here.”

  “Come again?” My father fell silent. He looked at her for what seemed a full minute. “What’re you tryin’ to say? Has he been…?”

  “He isn’t safe, that’s all.”

  George boomed, “I’m kill him!”

  Mattie sighed, “Just leave it alone, George.” Then she went from the kitchen outside.

  Naturally, George had nothing to do after that with the blacksmith. But Minty? She had, I thought, no choice. She was stuck with him, though, as I say, I knew she deserved better. And I had failed her utterly, since she and her family had been sold to Heaven knew where, and Reb and I were in flight.

  After such recollections, spun from my sickness, the withdrawal from chandoo and Leviathan, you will understand me when I say that we made but little progress during the night, for often I had to dismount and lie down, leaving the world frequently for fifteen or twenty minutes, and even as I rested I realized how treacherous was the road before us, the reward that would be offered, the bloodhounds, and the feeling that I had betrayed the Race, my father’s dream of freedom, and now had the greater problem of reconstructing my life from scratch. By all rights, we should not have gotten this far.

  At dawn of the third day we continued north on foot, through briars and thorns, hoping to reach Spartanburg, where we were not known. The sun rose quickly. Within minutes it was daylight and we were again in danger of being discovered. Not far from our hiding place was a small cottage and curb-roofed barn. It being now entirely daylight, we slipped inside the barn, the hayloft providing a comfortable bed after our night under the bridge. It was Wednesday morning, a workday. Fifteen minutes after Reb fell asleep a shirtless man, very thin, stumbled from the cottage to pass water in the weeds, survey his land, then wash himself at an old rust-surfaced pump. He lumbered into the barn, found two pails, then drew fine milk from his cows. From the house his wife held up his shirt and called—a good, fat, beautiful woman, broad as a wine barrel, with red-brown hair and a lovely singing voice, clear and controlled. Behind her: two walleyed children, a boy and a girl. Milk! shouted the boy, and the farmer pulled, below us, harder on his Holstein. Milk! he demanded again, and his face
expanded like a blowfish. Biscuits! added the girl. With strawberries! There are no strawberries, said the mother. You’ll have to eat them plain. No! said the boy, Biscuits and strawberries! Where’s Nigger? demanded the girl. As if summoned, a black dog crept from the cottage, sniffed at the barn—we had walked close to the windows—then thought investigating not worth its trouble, and pushed his head against the hand of the girl, who regained her thought: Biscuits! Coming, said the mother, weary, herding them inside. Soon the air filled with food smells. Her husband hauled milkpails inside, spilling some in an accident so suggestive of casual abundance and unconscious prosperity, of surplus and generosity, that I cannot now, with pen or tongue, make you feel the wretchedness and envy that descended upon me, the fugitive, as I watched this white family dine. Beyond this, I thought, there was nothing of lasting value. Nothing in books compared. It was this warm, dumb domesticity that destroyed Ezekiel—so sophisticated, so urbane—that we dismissed as beneath our sensitivity: the quiet, dull, heroic life of the property holder too busy making biscuits, feeding the pigs out back, to ask the tedious question “Why am I here?” As I was thinking about setting their barn on fire, I first heard, then saw four men on horseback. The father, who was now busy chopping wood, addressed the leader as Will McCracken. McCracken asked, “You’ve seen no runaway blacks today, have you, John? A big man and a light-skinned boy?”

  “No.” The father rested his weight on his axe. “They from around here?”

  “South. They stole two horses.”

  The wife came to the door, drying her hands on an old dress. Her husband said, not to his wife, who went inside, then brought the men a plate of warm biscuits, but to the leader, “Are they worth looking for?”

  “Hundred dollars for the boy, half that for the big man,” said McCracken. “His mistress says she don’t care if you bring them back in a sack, long as you bring them back.”

  They talked lower now, then the husband kissed his wife, went inside the cottage, came out with a 44-caliber percussion plains rifle, and led a horse from the barn. His wife watched this group, as I did, until they disappeared down the road. When she turned inside, I woke Reb, and we stayed in the woods until night.

  These woods, I should say, were no place for a man “drying out,” cold turkey, from chandoo. We waded through marshy ground and over ditches, vast and interwoven roots, through thick undergrowth soaked thoroughly by late-afternoon rain. Trees above us loosed a whirlwind of leaves. The dripping forest echoed with the clack and chirrup of insects, and now we were out of food. None of this bothered Reb, but my stomach rumbled. Whenever I bent forward I felt dizzy. Mushrooms I found at the fringe of the woods, but I was afraid to eat them. Finally, I demanded that he leave me behind. “I’m ballast,” I said, “deadweight. I’ll only slow you down.” The Coffinmaker dismissed this suggestion with a scowl:

  “If I’m alone, how far you think I’ll git? I never thought I’d be beholden to somebody ’cause he could pass, but I ain’t choosey. If you kin get us to Canada or Chicago—if that’s what the Lord wants—I sho won’t kick none.”

  “Reb,” I said. “You were sleeping. You didn’t see those people back there. No one is going to knock on their door and demand identification, or feel resentful—not too resentful—if the pleasures of their table increase. Do you see what I’m saying? I can’t fake that kind of belongingness, that blithe, numbed belief that the world is an extension of my sitting room. Or myself. I’ll make mistakes, slips; I’ll say or do something wrong, and we’ll cook little chicken wings.” He left a silence; I looked round to make certain he was still there. “The only reason I don’t kill myself is because it doesn’t seem worth the effort.”

  Now Reb was confused.

  “You should try Hog’s Hoof Tea.”

  “What?”

  “Old medicine,” he explained. “Very powerful.”

  Why I wasted my confession on a man like Reb, a man who slept dreamlessly, I didn’t know. This kind of talk made him uncomfortable. In silence, we pushed on for another quarter mile and found ourselves at the tollgate of a public turnpike. At the far end an excited little guard—a boy about fifteen—flapped his arms. Said: “Can’t no cullud men, Injuns, or Anabaptists come ’cross this heah bridge without a pass or freedom papers.” He shook his finger at Reb’s face. “Suh, you got papers for this man?”

  Since leaving the Mine, this was our most difficult moment. However, I had prepared. During the last quarter mile I had given thought to reinventing my biography by providing myself with comfortable parents, landowners like the couple in the cottage, but wealthy, having made their fortune in American shipping, then lost it, leaving their children penniless; but despite my ill-fortune, I still retained one loyal servant (Reb) and could trade on being the grandson of Edwin Harris, a man who distinguished himself in the Revolutionary War. Harrisburg (any Harrisburg) was named after my Grandpapa. A portly Englishman, generous to a fault, he favored me over my older sister Sarah, my brother James, who was definitely a bad hat, and could trace his (our) tree through fifteen generations. A wonderful biography, you will agree, and I say “reinvent” unflinchingly, for we all rearrange our past to sweeten it a little. Memory, as the metaphysicians say, is imagination.

  I gave, in part, this history to the toll guard. And this:

  “What money I had, and horses, were taken by two runaway Negroes from Abbeville, near Calhoun Falls.”

  The guard spit in rage. After remarking that all Negroes, in his opinion, were two-faced liars and thieves, lazy and without the wit of a toadstool, to which I agreed, he asked, “And you was travelin’ to Spartanburg to see yo sister Sarah?”

  “Just so,” I said.

  I’m hardly being fair to this fellow; he was not a bad sort, considering the day.1 He not only let us pass, but provided the intelligence that not half an hour before our arrival a buckboard heading for Spartanburg had rumbled through his gate, and that we might overtake this traveler, for he had spoken of making camp nearby for the night. I cannot recall the rest. Vaguely, I remember seeing objects on either side of the road change not in space but serially: trees became fields; an orchard, as I squinted, melted into a log bridge, gave way to intervals of night, and became the glow and crackle of a campfire. Feeling my way, with Reb, through low-hanging limbs, I saw—or perhaps hallucinated—a hazy figure six-feet-four leveling a rifle our way. Whatever the Coffinmaker said—words bubbling under water—assured this traveler that we were not runaways. He lowered his firearm, moved Reb aside, and made a place for me close to his fire. For a time I could not focus distances, or identify our new companion, who threw his cloak over me, and said:

  “Yo man says you lost yo horses.” His face, inches from mine, angled into view. “Ah know the Negroes who took them, Ah just lost their trail fifteen miles outside Latimer.” His laugh had a lot of ironic topspin. “They be in Virginia by now.”

  Weakly, I said, “Your name, sir?”

  Uncorking a jug with his teeth, the traveler took a drink, handed it to me, then moved to his fire, where he began frying eggs for us in a long-handled spider supported on a tripod.

  “It’s Bannon,” said Reb.

  Away to the right, the Coffinmaker sat, eating, on a moss-covered log; I looked his way. His eyes went down. The Soul-catcher, for it was he, brought a wooden bowl from his wagon, then scuffed back to tend his fire. He stoked it, spat a wheylike serum that made the flames flare up, then spent a few seconds firegazing before looking back at me as if we were conspirators. “Ah’m more’n glad to have company.” He ladled out hefty portions of reheated meat for me from a battered pot. “You don’t mind ridin’ to Spartanburg with a bounty hunter, do you?”

  It could not, to be frank, have been worse for us. Bannon knew me at first glance from Leviathan. Then why this kindness, this cruel pretending—and poorly—that he had not seen through me? It favored the way George’s dog Daisy toyed with her prey before tearing out its throat. Was he preparing a trap? If so, then it
was perfectly invisible. Was he simply a tormentor? If so, then he was the best in South Carolina. But I could appreciate the grim comedy of this collision as much as he. “We are thankful for your help,” I smiled cautiously. “And I’ve often wondered what sort of man it takes to gun down women and children like game.”

  “Ah’ll bet you have.”

  Reb, I saw, had positioned his legs to sprint. I asked “What do you mean?”

  “Only,” said Bannon, “that gentlemen like yoself, with liberal educations,” his smile snapped, “think the work Ah do is criminal, which it is not. But they admit it’s necessary. Ah, too, performs a service to Gawd, and Ah performs it well.”

  I stared.

  “That last statement again, if you don’t mind.”

  He paused, like a stage actor waiting for his audience to relax and settle so he could deliver his next line against silence. “Between ourselves, Master Harris, the thought of servin’ Gawd through murder usta bother me, like it’s botherin’ you now, but Ah knows mah nature. It ain’t an easy thing to accept yo nature, the nature you born with. Am Ah right or wrong?” Again, his conspiratorial smile. His sense of timing was faultless.

  “No, it’s not easy. But….”

  He raised one hand to interrupt me. “When Ah was a boy Ah believed every word of the Gospel, ’specially that First Commandment ’bout not killin’. Mah father was a preacher. Methodist. He’d whale tar outta me if Ah even looked like Ah was thinkin’ about women. An awful man, mah daddy. You know what happens when you grow hup in a house like that?” He paused again, bleakly. “If there’s a stain on yo mattress in the mawnin’, you might’s well walk right to the woodshed, drop yo drawers, wait for the old man to wake hup, then hand him the strop. Me, Ah couldn’t afford to have no stained mattress. Whenever gism started buildin’ in my groin, Ah’d get me a candle, sneak out to the henhouse, and strangle a chicken. During my teens we lost fifty chickens. A whole lot of livestock. Papa wrote it off to poachers. But Ah didn’t get beat. No suh. Pretty soon, Ah enjoyed killin’ more’n pullin’ my pud.” Horace Bannon gave me seconds on his stew, though I’d hardly touched my plate. “Now, Ah hated myself at first—you kin understand that, and Ah prayed to Gawd to make me a peaceful man. Ah prayed the most after Ah moved to bigger things—dogs and horses, then this girl Ah was goin’ with named Rebecca, who was pretty horsey her damnself.” He blew saliva. Swallowed. Then chuffed on: “But you know one thing? Gawd didn’t want me to be a peaceful man. You kin always tell yo vocation by the weight it has inside you, Master Harris. If you go ’gainst it, you do yoself harm and defy Gawd. Yessuh. It all come clear to me the night…well,” he said, looking suddenly at me, “the night Ah poleaxed mah family. I couldn’t change. It wasn’t mah business to change, if everythin’ is Gawd’s will, but to git better at hit, ’cause one thing Papa usta always say was hit’s more Christian to do a half-assed job at the work ordained fo’ you than to do another man’s work perfectly.”