Oxherding Tale

by Charles Johnson

  Naturally, I did not show this letter to the Coffinmaker. Reb counted the days we tarried here. True, we had escaped the brutality of Leviathan, eluded like Brer Rabbit certain death in the Mine, and here in Spartanburg life went ahead—or didn’t go ahead—in ways that did not offend reason. But there was, I admit, more freedom for me in this town than for my friend. Furthermore, I had taken an interest in Peggy Undercliff that Reb thought a flirtation with the noose. After work, when he returned home with his tools, after the little schoolhouse emptied, and I sat behind my desk, grading papers, he would pace the rows of seats, and then—to occupy his mind—begin ironing our clothes with rocks heated in the fireplace.

  “Freshmeat, you know yo business, but….”

  “Never,” I say, “address me as Freshmeat, especially when anyone is within earshot. Don’t even call me Andrew. It’s William. Master William, at that.” Hunched over my book, I swing my eyes left. “And you’re burning that shirt!”

  “Well, EXCUSE ME, Master William!”

  He lifts the hot stone, burns the inner, uncalloused part of his hand, then whoops, “Will that be all, sar, or will you be wantin’ yo milkbath, as usual, before retirin’?”

  “No need to get ugly,” I say. “You should relax and fix yourself a cup of tea. And, Reb, while you’re up, will you be a good fellow, and bring me one, too?”

  The Coffinmaker smashed, in order:

  two desks;

  four potted plants (begonias, carnations);

  one window;

  three glasses;

  one trestle table.

  He was glaring at me, as if selecting the organs he intended to remove when I (standing on my desk) said, “I was only kidding! My God, if it means that much to you, we’ll leave at the end of the week!”

  Still breathing raggedly, standing in the middle of bookshelves busted to flinderjigs, Reb shook his fist at me. “We’d better! This place is bad, Freshmeat, I kin feel it. If you ain’t ready in two days, I’m goin’ without you, even if I do get caught!”

  I thought it best to stay on my desk.

  “Fair enough,” I said. “We leave Sunday evening.”

  Plainly, it was not a good idea to show Evelyn Pomeroy’s letter to Reb. In all Spartanburg, it seemed the only person with whom I could discuss my possibly extended employment, now that Evelyn was working in New York, was Peggy Undercliff. The occasion presented itself on Sunday afternoon at a dinner she twisted her father’s arm (literally) to arrange. “You sit here,” Peggy pulled a chair out for me at a table of meadhouse proportions, then the seat next to it, “and, Daddy, you sit here.”

  “You want me to sit beside Mr. Harris?”

  “So you can talk.”

  “Eat and digest my food beside Mr. Harris?”

  “Daddy, I’m going to hit you as soon as I find something.”

  The doctor lowered himself to the chair, like someone slipping into a hot bath, both hands on the chairarms, dropping his rear slowly to the cushion. “I am pleased,” he finally looked at me, “that you have discovered soap.” His daughter placed a bowl of steaming clam chowder under his nose, which Undercliff watched as if looking for signs of life beneath the surface. “Have you also dusted off Edwin Harris’ flintlock?”

  I was tying a napkin round my neck. “Whose flintlock?”

  “Your grandfather’s,” he said. “Didn’t you tell us your grandfather fought in the Revolutionary War?”

  “Oh him!” My soupspoon clattered to the floor. “Why should I dust that off, sir?”

  “There’s a war coming,” said Undercliff, “a greater war than anything seen in this country, and all on account of the Negro. I rather thought,” he tasted his soup cautiously, “a man with your background—war heroes and whatnot—would leap at the opportunity to prove himself as good as his predecessors.”

  You are wondering, I imagine, about differences in the White and Black worlds. Well, here is the first: this feeling in both that the past is threatening; in the Black World a threat because there is no history worth mentioning, only family scenarios of deprivation and a bitter struggle—and failure—against slavery, which leads to despair, the dread in later generations that they are the first truly historical members of their clan; and in the White World the past is also a threat, but here because, in many cases, the triumphs of predecessors are suffocating, a legend to live up to, or to reject (with a good deal of guilt), the anxiety that these ghosts watch you at all times, tsk-tsking because you have let them down: a feeling that everything significant has been done, the world is finished. An especially painful form of despair, I thought, and I admit to suddenly despising Edwin Harris for placing this burden upon me, although I had spun him from my imagination. No matter; I felt uneasy.

  “I am not, like my Grandpapa, a fighting man, Dr. Undercliff.”

  The doctor said, “I can see that.”

  “Can’t you two talk nice!” wailed Peggy. She had seated herself across the table; there was, if I was not mistaken, a watery glint in her eyes. “I asked you to dinner because I wanted you to get along! I wanted you to like William!”

  “But I do like William.” Undercliff forced himself to smile—it resembled the effort a paralyzed man puts into his first steps. “If he had not rejected his grandfather’s bloody history, I would have shown him to the door. He has graduated in that one instant from the Very Annoying to the Annoying.”

  Both Peggy Undercliff and I registered shock. Beyond this recategorization no man could aspire. “Thank you,” my voice nearly failed me. “Peggy, I am afraid that I am too moved at this moment to do your meal justice.”

  The doctor placed his napkin on the table.

  “William, let us step into the laboratory for a moment. There is a problem I wish to discuss with you. A matter of great importance to me. And to Peggy. Will you excuse us?”

  “No,” she said, “but you’re going off even if I don’t.”

  In Dr. Undercliff’s lab, he brought forth cigars. Then bade me sit. He poured us both brandy. “You enjoy my daughter’s company, don’t you, William?”

  “Yes, she has been a true friend.”

  “Only that?” he asked. “A friend?”

  Anger flashed through my chest. “If you’re suggesting, sir, that I have taken indecent liberties with your—”

  “No, no….” The doctor reddened. “Nothing like that. I am simply saying that you are the only man who has held Peggy’s interest for more than a day. I cannot escape her references to what you have said, William, or the way you have improved education at Evelyn Pomeroy’s school….”

  “Your daughter is too kind.”

  “Yes, she is too kind for a golden-throated tramp who has lied about his past!” Undercliff’s features, the tightening of his eyes, were ferocious in the half-lit lab. “I have inquired into your family, William Harris, or whatever your name is. There was no Edwin Harris decorated during the war. Not any war!” He stabbed his cigar out in the fruitbowl. “You have lied about your background, but the feeling my daughter has for you is not false. I, therefore, am going to make you an offer.”

  In my chair I was scattered. “I am all ears.”

  “Well should you be, young man, because if you do anything to disappoint Peggy, if I see her so much as in tears once, I will inform the sheriff of my suspicions. I have no idea what you are hiding—wife desertion or theft (you do not have the stomach for serious crimes). It matters not a whit to me. But I will surely dig yet deeper, and see you hang, if the only thing of value to me is hurt by her association with you. That includes, when the time comes, a failure to propose marriage.”

  “I understand fully, sir.”

  Undercliff opened his laboratory door. “Pray you do, William.”

  The dinner became much like the Last Supper for me. Dr. Undercliff’s appetite was hearty. He even joked with his daughter. But Peggy sensed the change in me. She asked, “What happened to you two in there?” Her father said, between mouthfuls, “We have fina
lly come to terms.” This pleased her greatly. After dessert, I excused myself and dragged home to the schoolhouse. Reb met me outside. With a stick and satchel he had made a traveling bag, which lay inside the door. I could not meet his eyes, passed him without a word, and slumped behind my desk.

  “Freshmeat,” said Reb. “It’s Sunday evening. You can see the North Star, if you look up.” He came and stood above me, a black giant whose body contained enough violence to take a wagon apart nail by nail, but who chose gentleness. Most of the time. “Can’t go north without you, nigguh.”

  “You have to. Undercliff peeped my game; I can’t go.”

  He took a breath. He was counting, I could tell, to five. At the end of three seconds, Reb put his hand on the back of my neck and squeezed. He exhaled, “If you get up to Chicago, look for the only colored casketshop in town. That’ll be me, Andrew.” And then, without looking back, the Coffinmaker stepped outside.

  X

  THE CALL

  Horace Bannon left Spartanburg on Monday morning. Not twelve hours after Reb struck north, the bounty hunter, I was told, turned his war-horse, with enough firepower to exterminate all the timberwolves in South Carolina, in that direction. Two weeks passed. Weeks when I could not prepare lectures properly; I checked each evening at the taverns, the hotels, and the brothels (Bannon’s second home) for any news of the Soulcatcher’s return. His favorite whore, a great-breasted gorgon named Mamie, who wasn’t bad, if you liked deep-sixing in flesh, drowning in a bog of waxy meat, said, “Godamercy, sugah, he don’t tell me nothin’! He’s a strange one. Did you know Horace gets erections at funerals—his emotions get crossed all the time.” My heart sank. If he had overtaken Reb, would he return him to Flo Hatfield? Worse, would Bannon—or Leviathan’s overseers—come for me? The Soulcatcher, to be sure, would be tight-lipped as a Sioux; he would not lift a finger if they held matches to Reb’s face, or fooled with his testicles, or amputated—I remembered the Vet—until he cracked. Bigger men had been whittled down to kindling. For the first time in Spartanburg, for the first time in twenty years, I felt utterly alone. And afraid. If Reb was recaptured, my life as William Harris would not be worth a guinea.

  And then Peggy Undercliff proposed.

  No, she didn’t exactly propose. What Peggy did was plant mines on every path except one, then, looking at me over her shoulder, asked, “Coming?”

  We sat in a tavern called the Motley Cow, beneath lanterns lining walls pictured with crude paintings of wagons, wild forests, the L-shaped room softly dark, a little too warm, in late-afternoon light. Peggy was not drinking, legally. House rules forbade women buying liquor. They could sit, however, if accompanied by a man, in a special section adjacent to the bar. This practice put Peggy in bad temper. She boldly slugged whiskey from my glass, she crossed her eyes at Gene Sullivan, the saloonkeeper. How could he object? If you crossed her in this town, Gerald Undercliff might mistake your chart for someone else’s and give you the wrong operation. (Phlebotomy, Undercliff said, was his favorite cure for the Very Annoying.) I stared, gloomily, into my glass, swirling the contents in a counter-clockwise motion, my mind on the road to Chicago.

  “William!” Peggy’s fist made the table jump. “If you don’t ask me to marry you this very minute, I’m going to tell everyone you’re ‘funny’!”

  “Marriage? Fruity,” I often called her Fruity, an affectionate sobriquet, given her diet of pears, bananas, and apples, “I’d marry you tomorrow, if my life was in order. Should Mrs. Pomeroy return….”

  “She won’t be back any sooner than that man of yours who ran away, William, and you know it!”

  “Fruity,” I lowered my voice, “there are things about Reb and I that I haven’t told you.”

  “You are funny?”

  “Disgustingly heterosexual, a Benedict Arnold in the war between the sexes—”

  “William, if you don’t get down on your knees right now, I’ll throw myself under a train. Wait. We don’t have trains here. A stagecoach, then.”

  On the floor I spread my handkerchief, planted my right knee thereon, pressed my hands together, and proposed. As this was said, the other customers cheered. Sullivan offered drinks on the house.

  “Good.” She yanked on a pair of butter-colored gloves. “Now you can tell Daddy.”

  Dr. Undercliff, as was his habit, spent late afternoons in the garden behind his house; we found him removing weeds with a technique—swearing and hacking—that did not bode well for his performance of surgery. Puffing, wearing his ex-wife’s flowered bonnet, he gouged around artichokes with an old, rusted scalpel. The doctor was an even color of pink. He was breathing like a locomotive. “Let no one tell you,” he huffed, “that gardening, helping things grow, is Christian. It’s conceit, William!” Cautiously, we followed him into the sitting room. Peggy served lemonade and, after a moment, her father said, “Creation doesn’t care! Is a rutabaga grateful? Can a carrot lick your hand? Head back, he drained his glass. Then belched. “The only things we cultivate, plants or people, are the things we plan to eat.”

  Peggy gave him a moment to catch his wind. “William has proposed marriage. He would like your blessing.”

  “Is this April first, Peggy?” he asked. “If you’re serious, you’d better have him analyzed first.”

  She drew back her arm to peg a candlesnuffer. The doctor threw up his hand. “Blessings, my dear, are as plentiful as green peas. Take all you wish.” He poured more lemonade. “I would wish you, as they say, happiness, too, but I fear there is no happiness; it is an invention of the poets. Vitae nomen quidem est vita, opus autem mors.” Slumped halfway down in his chair, he thought a moment, the glass on his belly. “I wish you what the Greeks called arete, ‘doing beautifully what needs to be done.’ Not much to dance the turkey buzzard about in that, I daresay, but a man sleeps well at night, with arete, develops no digestive trouble, or spiritual afflictions, and demanding more than this ataraxia—another Greek notion—is tempting God’s patience.” Undercliff poured enough lemonade to toast our engagement. “Tomorrow I will talk to Wendell Blake. Now, he’s a fool, I agree. All ministers are fools. For most people, William, the spinal cord is quite enough; the brain is redundant. But the problem is that even fools have their place in the Grand Design, bumblers hurled down from Central Casting just to hand Brunhilde her shield.”

  Peggy exhaled, shaking her head. “You’re in rare form this afternoon.”

  “I’m almost happy.” He smiled, painfully: a warlock with a full tummy. “Can’t you tell?”

  My prospective father-in-law was, as he claims, almost happy. At least as happy as a man can be when he frequently said, “When you have had as many patients as I have, William, and performed as many deliveries, it’s not unlike seeing a magician’s trick one time too many. You know the damned rabbit’s inside the top hat. The trick,” Undercliff told me the night he invited me to his Club, whose members included the mayor, town sheriff, and two landowners born with half of Spartanburg in their hip pockets—“the trick, young William, was only meant to be seen once.” To do him justice, Dr. Undercliff was, for all his irritability, a generous man. He promised to contribute as a wedding present the downpayment on a cabin west of town, which, he added, in a stroke of understatement, “needs work.” “Sir,” I reached for his cold, liver-spotted hands, “Heaven be praised….” He said, “Not a word more, William. I would do this for anyone my daughter married.” Perhaps he meant this. Or perhaps he thought, given the obscurity of my origins, that property—the very obligation of property—would keep my nose clean. Be not mistaken. He still didn’t trust me. All the papers were in Peggy’s name. Then why this gift?

  After our engagement was announced, as the wedding approached, and we talked more of the ceremony, I think I saw the reason for Undercliff’s generosity, for Peggy’s anxiety about marriage. I will not dwell on this, only long enough to say that women were dying for young, eligible men in the slaveholding South. Not any man would do, of course. Southern
custom blinked at, or openly approved in places, the practice of mail-order brides, the men involved being, on the whole, workers flung into New World wastelands. But what of widows? Or women who refused to stop thinking in order to get a husband? Or took a profession? Certain it was that Spartanburg offered no eligible men to satisfy a woman of culture, except Reverend Blake, who was fifty-six going on eighty: the last Pelagian. Peggy’s prerequisites for a husband, although drawn from the heroes of pathos-ridden novels by Wilkie Collins, whose formula was “Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em wait,” were not so outlandish as Flo Hatfield’s. Yet, again I found myself facing, in my fiancée, the ancient track upon which the spirit endlessly traversed: loneliness—love, exacerbated in her case by the fear that all her early advantages, her privileges, her father’s power in Spartanburg, narrowed her future to (a) homosexuality, the sympathy and sure touch of another woman, which few men can fake, or (b) the bitter life of singularity (a metaphysical outrage) of the intelligent, talented woman living in something like house arrest, haunting dustwebbed rooms she played in five decades before.