Oxherding Tale

by Charles Johnson

  Dr. Undercliff never felt comfortable.

  “That’s all,” he said. “You can leave now. Go! Get a second opinion! Many of your troubles will clear up, I believe, with a daily application of soap. You have heard of soap? A remarkable medical breakthrough. I suggest you experience its healing powers twice daily, upon rising and once before bed. And something else….” He pulled the curtains to his bookshelf, frowned at the titles, then brought down a volume, which he handed to me. “You will do well to study this, Mister Harris, beginning with the pages I’ve marked.” Then he galumphed from his lab, saying to his daughter as she plopped onto the chair behind his desk and picked up a pear, “Peggy, I will be in the garden. I leave it to you to determine this gentleman’s fee.”

  It was Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography that Undercliff gave me; he’d turned down the pages featuring Franklin’s famous Thirteen Virtues, had even, I noticed, filled out the chart to pinpoint his own shortcomings, marking each square with an X for a virtue consistently achieved during the week:

  Not much progress on Silence and Humility, it seemed to me, but who was I to judge?

  “You shouldn’t worry about my father, Mr. Harris,” said Peggy. “He enjoys snapping at strangers. He didn’t mean half of what he told you, it’s just that he dislikes anyone who associates with Horace Bannon.”

  “No more than I,” I said. “But must he be so…cranky.”

  “Bitter, not cranky.” She smiled; it was as if the window to a prison sprang open suddenly. She began peeling, then biting into an overripe banana. “And it’s because he never quite got over what happened to my mother. We moved here from New Orleans when I was three. Mother had her own business, you see, an art gallery; she was very independent, and would not leave until she sold it, and she wouldn’t do that unless she saw the purchaser. So Father and I went ahead by coach. He found this house, which was built for William Grayson, whose poem The Hireling and the Slave Mother much admired, so he knew she would love it here. He arranged everything just so to please her, set up his practice, then wired for Mother to come.” She licked her fingers. “Highwaymen raped, then murdered Mother in Georgia. My father lost the power of speech for a week. Nor did he eat. He did, however, telegraph my Aunt Olivia in Boston, who had instructions that, in the event of either of their deaths, they were to be cremated. This was done. Her urn was shipped to Spartanburg.” I looked round, feeling that one of the huge vases in the lab, or hallway outside, might be this poor girl’s mother. “Oh no,” Peggy said, “she’s not here.” Her lips puckered. “She was lost in the mails—Mother is now, as Mr. Melville would say, in the Dead Letter Office somewhere.”

  “Dreadful!” I began pulling on my shirt. “And your father? How did he take this?”

  “He loved it.”

  “Beg pardon—loved it, I heard you say?”

  “Oh, he took it badly, but he likes to take things badly. Pleasant experiences make him uncomfortable. They make him suspicious. He’s afraid they’re a fraud, a trick of some kind. If she had not died, or been lost, he’d have no excuse for being a curmudgeon. Disasters,” Peggy added, “confirm his belief that everything is disagreeable—except bullfights, he likes bullfights.”

  “A doctor and he enjoys violent sports?”

  “We all need a day off,” said Peggy.

  “Then I must pay him.” She offered me a pear. I polished it on the front of my shirt, then crunched through the skin; it was on the soft side, having been in the lab for perhaps a day too long. “But I have, as I’ve told you, only my manservant Reb. He will make for poor collateral.”

  “You have no job then, Mr. Harris?” asked Peggy.

  “Ah, there you have me, madam. As your very own Melville has put it, ‘Dollars damn me.’”

  “You’ve read him?”

  “I have met him, he is an old family acquaintance.”

  The pupils of her eyes, very gray with flecks of soft blue, enlarged a bit, as if she had only now come awake to my presence. Deep responded to deep. “I’ve wanted to talk about Pierre with someone for years! Father, you know, doesn’t approve of novels. A tissue of ostrobogulous lies, he calls them. With the writer laughing behind each page at the reader’s gullibility, and no one else in this dead, dead town reads, except for Mrs. Pomeroy, and all she reads is Anne Bradstreet!”

  I bowed graciously. “I am, if nothing else, a reader of dry, nerve-deadening books, and delight in circuitous, literary conversations.”

  Peggy Undercliff gave me what I have often read described in popular fiction as “the eye,” though I’ll not swear on it, never having seen “the eye” at such close range before—it was, at any rate, a fluttering of her lashes accompanied by a soft indentation in her left cheek, a startlingly plastic pocket of flesh that appeared suddenly, vanished just as suddenly, and made me think: gee whiz. “If you are such an avid book reader, Mr. Harris—”

  “Bill,” I said, “you must call me Bill.”

  “—a philologist” (Peggy Undercliff trained herself, by the way, to finish five books a week and memorize ten new words a day), “then you could teach. Have you taught? Evelyn Pomeroy, that refocillated old poopnoddy who teaches everyone from fivers to farmers, would like nothing better than a vacation, and I know her pupils need a vacation from her.”

  “Is this possible? I could repay your father then?”

  “And tell me about Herman Melville.”

  Although I am no expert on women (I didn’t have to tell you that), I must say that Peggy Undercliff did not compare to Flo Hatfield; she was (alas) physically as plain as a pike, having nothing distinctive about her hair (bisque) or eyes (like her father she wore bifocals, behind which her eyes ballooned), but she was, inly, energetic—an explosion of vitality, rather like a teapot set not to boil over but to bubble and steam, perhaps even beautiful in her vulnerability, candor, and openness. Sitting in her father’s chair, with early light (gold) slanting through his east window, dustmotes swirling like mites, and rhododendrons visible just over the edge, Peggy had a casualness, a social ease that I found disarming. She was, if French will help, déclassée by choice; she possessed in good measure what is possibly a compassionate, intelligent individual’s only defense in America: ironic distance. No wonder she found Spartanburg intolerable. Her speech, the way she reshaped language, which was (as with all women) primarily the way she affected the world, was oftentimes a meld of puns, graveyard humor, her father’s habit of posing the rhetorical question or ending her sentences with a stress, and dry wit so devastatingly irreverent, and lightning fast, that no one could match her line for line. Certainly not the town farmers. Showing me her sheet music for Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, after I complimented her playing, which I’d heard briefly from the porch, she asked, “Do you know what he’s doing now?”

  “Beethoven? He died over thirty years ago!”

  “Yes, I know. He’s de-composing.”

  “That’s depraved,” I said. “Sick, sick, sick!”

  Peggy glanced up at me, then down, was silent, for I had struck a nerve, then began writing my bill. “Everyone says that. I am sick, I suppose.” For half a minute the only sound in the lab was her pen. She folded the paper once, then handed it to me. “You owe my father four dollars and fifty cents.”

  “As much as that?”

  “You’re sick, too, William Harris.”

  “But you misunderstand me. I never meant….”

  “I know what you meant.” She picked another pear from the bowl, pushed her bifocals farther up on her nose with one finger, her father’s gesture, and looked toward the door. “I suppose your servant is tired of sitting on the steps. If you have time later this afternoon—I’m sure you have a lot to do now—then I’ll introduce you to Mrs. Pomeroy. Are you sure you don’t know her, Mr. Harris? She has a hairlip and is quite old—Daddy’s already filled out a certificate of death for her; she’s quite out of fuel now and running on the fumes, a real zombie, the Salem witch that got away, but perhaps you we
re one of her students years ago. Is that possible?”

  At the door I held up my hands. “You win.”

  Leaning against the architrave to the lab, she said, one cheek distended by a mouthful of pearmeat:

  “I always do.”

  Evelyn Pomeroy proved to be less a product of E. T. A. Hoffmann than Peggy Undercliff promised, and had, I discovered, the charm of a once beautiful woman—a novelist—quietly going mad. Now I understood Dr. Undercliff’s remarks. At twenty-six, Mrs. Pomeroy had published one book, a little-read but critically acclaimed roman à clef (“This must be hailed as one of the great novels of the nineteenth century,” said one giddy reviewer, who no doubt regretted his enthusiasm later) that cost her a husband (the protagonist) and brought one lawsuit (her cousin) that stuck. Her second book, on which Evelyn Pomeroy had written 12,000 pages, was, after thirty years, “almost finished, Mr. Harris, I’m fine-tuning it now.” You know what that means. Every day was a crucifixion. Every year past the publication date of her first book cemented her silence, confirmed the suspicions of critics—and Evelyn Pomeroy herself—that the magic had been a mistake that first time. A fluke. But she did not despair. In the meantime, to make ends meet, she decided to teach school. This was her twenty-fifth year of teaching. She slept on a bed behind her blackboard, kept her clothes in a trunk behind the world map, and took meals at her huge desk. Although not a novelist myself, I thought these reduced circumstances dreadful, this quiet, lonely fight to regain her former glory and say Ha! to her enemies; but Evelyn Pomeroy carried the burden of failure well. She held no grudges. She had grief without grievances, and this, dear reader, is an achievement beyond art. Unlike most one-shot, flash-in-the-pan, Johnny-one-note novelists (she described herself ruthlessly, using the remarks of her worst detractors), Evelyn still loved and lived for the joy of literature and music (she’d been Peggy’s piano teacher years before), and when this tiny, frail woman with a neck like a trumpet laughed, her whole face changed, her chin folded into her throat, her green eyes flashed, and no one—absolutely no one—in Spartanburg could not secretly admire her.

  However, none of this candies over the fact that Evelyn Pomeroy was crazy. She ironed her paper money. She oiled the leaves of plants along the schoolhouse window to make them, as she said, “presentable”; she broomswept the backyard, ankle-high with weeds. During my fifteen-minute interview with her, over milktea and a delicious meatpie, Evelyn Pomeroy carried the conversation.

  “Peggy Undercliff recommends you highly, Mr. Harris, and I do listen to the dear girl’s opinions. She’s turned out quite well, though none of us really expected much from her.”

  “No?” I sipped my tea. “May I ask why?”

  “Well, I suppose there’s no harm in telling you.” Her hands, I noticed, trembled faintly; she kept them under the table, or always held an object—a pen or spoon—to hide the shaking. It was now her napkin. “When Peggy’s mother left Gerald to run off with that terrible man, the traveling miracle-cure salesman—”

  “One moment. It was my understanding that Mrs. Undercliff’s ashes were misrouted in the U.S. mails.”

  The schoolteacher had heard this. She was, I learned, the historian of Spartanburg, the biographer of its five hundred citizens, though she wrote nothing.

  “Peggy prefers that story.” Evelyn now played with her fork. “She was quite a problem, I can tell you. She was never very popular with the other children, and what pleasure she found was mainly in reading books—romances—and telling her own stories. I did not discourage this. She wrote her first story, about a white girl who is unloved and wakes up one morning as a Negro boy, when she was six, with a big joke-quill twice her size, the kind used for advertising, resting it on her shoulder. No,” Evelyn whispered, leaning toward me, “she does not live entirely in the real world.”

  “Not in the White World, you mean?”

  That pulled Evelyn Pomeroy up short. “I suppose not. The Negro is a creature of romance, isn’t he? How perceptive of you, Mr. Harris.” She poured me more tea to the rim. “But let us hope her fascination with them goes no farther than fantasy.”

  In plain terms, the job was mine for the asking. Evelyn Pomeroy was eager for a month or two to finish her new novel, preferably miles from Spartanburg. She did administer a few tests that afternoon—plumbing my knowledge of philosophy and physics, listening as I read from the Bible, but this examination was nothing after the pansophical education provided me by Master Polkinghorne. Within two days she moved out, Reb and I moved in, and I began the thankless, mind-destroying, spirit-sucking duty of teaching fifteen adults (nights) and twenty-seven children (days) the inner mysteries of the Compound Sentence. Consider: At nine I knew the Platonic Worldview like a part of my body, but I was now correcting comma splices; at fifteen I had memorized the Ten Tropes of Sextus Empiricus, but now I spent each afternoon hunting for transitions in papers that did not justify the killing of a tree. I could not shake the feeling, those first few weeks, that teaching was, when you looked hard enough at it, the perfect racket, a real scam, the last refuge of respectability for idle, fugitive intellectuals and cashiered artists who, skidding on their faces toward middle age (or starvation), wanted both to appear productive and to loaf for a living. Perhaps I am too severe. It was mass education, this cattle-herding to enlightenment, not the special interpenetration of pupil and tutor, artist and apprentice, that brought out the unhappy conclusion that you couldn’t teach anything. Not anything vital, at least, for the heart was the only genuine schoolhouse, the only gymnasium where the spirit was tried.

  Nevertheless, I was pleased to be employed. I was no less pleased that my passage into the White World went unmarked. The ease with which I buried Andrew Hawkins forever and built a new life as William Harris was not peculiar. The Negro, if I may digress to develop my theme of teaching, is, as Reb told me, the finest student of the White World, the one pupil in the classroom who watches himself watching the others, absorbing the habits and body language of his teachers, his fellow students. Now, some tics don’t transfer to his world. You see this vividly in the black girl, very beautiful in her own terms, who tosses back her head to get the hair out of her eyes. There is no hair in her eyes. But she has seen, absorbed this gesture. So, too, had I picked up from the Polkinghornes, from Ezekiel and others the quirks that (now) proved so valuable in presenting a new identity to Evelyn Pomeroy and Dr. Undercliff, who provided me with small doses of laudanum, which cured me of chandoo; his daughter visited my classroom often to confound me with questions about Melville; Reb found work with Spartanburg’s mortician, for which he was paid handsomely, by slave standards. And the Soulcatcher?

  He was one of my night students, one of the fifteen adults, sharecroppers and shopkeepers in Spartanburg who hoped to get a better handle on the Good Book, maybe even to challenge the Reverend Wendell Blake on narrow matters of exegesis at the Anabaptist Church on Main Street, or wanted simply to keep abreast of their children, or to understand agricultural literature. Reading was a skill rarely seen in the Old South. Some brought the books they wished to work on. Reb hung up their coats as they came in. Bannon, seated in the front row, a bear crammed into a child’s seat, with his derringer bulging the soft leather of his boot, fingerread his way, after I insisted, through Aurelius’s Meditations, a work he found objectionable, but hearing him read aloud, tripping on each syllable like a man stepping down cellar stairs into the dark, sounding out words like a schoolboy, lessened my fear of him by a little. After class one evening, he hung back until the others filed out, then helped me stack primers on the bookshelf.

  “Wouldn’ta thought you’d do this well,” he admitted. “You should heah what they say ‘bout you in town. These people been tryin’ to git a teacher to replace Evelyn Pomeroy ever since she started taking off her clothes in class—she done that once to git their attention. Be a shame,” he bent to lift a book from the floor, “if you had to go.”

  “I’ve no intention of leaving.”

/>   Reb threw me a look of panic.

  “At least not until I’ve made a little money and paid my debts. I started this trip with a promise to prove…to someone that I was ready for independence. I can do that here.” With one hand I touched my chest. “I am doing that here.”

  “I meant,” put in Bannon, “that hit’d be a shame to disappoint these people. Hit’s happened befo’. They hired a sheriff who turned out to be Lorenzo Phillips, the fellah who run a prostitution ring fo’ kids in Chattanooga.” At the door he flicked his hatbrim with his fingers, head tilted. “He still in Spartanburg over to Two Hills. Yo man knows the place, he been there.” And he left.

  I asked Reb, “Where’s Two Hills?”

  “Mile from here.” He pinched out the lamplights with finger-tips so calloused he could not feel the flames, then looked across the room at me, invisible in the darkness, a disembodied voice. “It’s a cemetery, Andrew.”

  Toward the end of our first month I received a letter from Evelyn Pomeroy, postmarked in New York, where she had contacted a publisher interested in her second novel. He offered her the opportunity to work as a proofreader in his office until her book was finished. “Contemporary fiction is so sterile, William,” she wrote, “certainly the things I’ve been reading are empty. No one seems intellectually equipped to write with truth as their motive. A novel should be an experiential feast, a three-ring circus of humor, suspense, ideas and images, a whole world of people tied together by plot—I will not proofread it if there is no plot. Stylistically, these submissions are competent, most of them,” she continued, “but our writers apparently have nothing to say, nothing positive; they are more interested, once they’ve published, in staying published at any price, showboating in the spotlight, even if they have to cannabalize their first work, or resort to formulae. This is so dispiriting. It’s as if these books were written by Committee, or by the Sales Department here at Winters, Anderson, and Hoft. Reading these manuscripts has been an education for me—it is as if Publication were the (Slave) Auction of the mind. Yet, it gives me, personally, new hope,” she confided in her last paragraph. “In an age of mediocre artists, as the Japanese say, it is easy to distinguish yourself, and I know my new book, The Awakening of Eve Yoremop (my name backwards; I can only write from experience), will go swimmingly into the marketplace.”