Oxherding Tale

by Charles Johnson

  Now that she had been sold, Minty was uncertain; she had not truly looked at me until he eased her off the wagon, and had only one question to ask him:

  “What’s he gonna use me for?”

  “That,” said the auctioneer, “is between you, the Holy Ghost, and Master Harris.”

  I helped her onto my horse, letting her use my hands as a stirrup (the ones on my saddle were too high), then pulled myself up behind her, leading the horse west of town and toward home, but slowly, for it was not clear to me that I could sally into the bedroom and shake Wife from her beauty rest with news that I’d bought a Negro servant, adding, “And will you pay for her, dear?” But if she, or Dr. Undercliff, did not pay, then Minty would be reclaimed. Outside Spartanburg, I spread my cloak over her shoulders. She remained silent, suspicious of me, and we rode twenty or thirty rods more into a field as dark as the ocean floor, where I dismounted, and walked a few yards away from her to think: If I could not raise the money, what then? Her only option would be flight. And would I have to go with her? Did I have a choice? Was loss of Wife and home what I had purchased? Behind me, I heard her feet fall softly off the horse, and turned.

  “Master Harris—is that your name?’

  ‘Yes.”

  “I wanna say thank you, and God bless you, sir, for picking me.” A prepared speech, this. Said so often, and to so many owners, its meaning dissolved into mere sound. “And I promise I will work, if you don’t sell me. I been sold three times since I left Hodges.”

  “After Anna Polkinghorne took charge of the estate?” I led her back to the horse. “Was my father sold? And my stepmother? Do you know what happened to Mattie?”

  “Your stepmother?”

  She made the sort of face Jocasta reportedly gave Oedipus after his interview with the Herdsman. I understood her confusion. (The Old South bred reversals almost as severe as anything in Greek tragedy: the brother and sister, I’d heard, sold to different plantations; fifteen years later, they meet again, fall in love, feeling an inexplicable tug, a partial anamnesis, and produce a brood of Bleeders.) Minty kept me at arm’s length. “It ain’t right to play with me….”

  I moved forward; she moved back.

  “Minty, I am Andrew.”

  You are familiar with the way travelers, trapped at the train depot, listen to people peddling The Watch Tower? So Minty listened to me.

  “Master Polkinghorne, if you remember, apprenticed me to Flo Hatfield’s farm in Abbeville, from which I barely escaped with my cullions (excuse me), after which I, and a coffinmaker—you do not know him—fled north, well, only this far north, where I have reestablished myself, taken a new identity, and live nearby with my wife—I have a wife now,” Minty’s mouth pressed in, “and I’ve purchased you not to put you to work but, as I promised years before, to buy your freedom….”

  There is a place where southern women retire when their nervous systems short-circuit, a pleasant region much like a sanitorium, or a Writer’s Colony, and I have often heard it referred to as a swoon; I can describe it no further, having never been there: Men pass out, a few faint, others are knocked out, but men do not swoon, and I thought it improper to trouble Minty about details of the Ladies’ Psychic Powder Room after she checked back in. We rode slowly. Slowly, I say, for I wanted word of Cripplegate. As it happened, Minty knew nothing of my parents’ whereabouts after Anna put them up for sale. My father had bolted for the Georgia border. And Jonathan? It was now he who was bedridden, paralyzed after a particularly vicious crack to the skull from George (the clivus and anterior edge of the occipital bone were pushed permanently against the upper anterior surface of the medulla oblongata), and Anna, the long-suffering spouse who changed his bedsheets and sponged his backside, grew inversely in vitality (said Minty) as the old man weakened. More than this Minty did not know; and she only spoke sketchily of her masters (all men) who sprang up in her life, one by one, like principals in a gang rape.

  “I am free then, Andrew?” she asked. “I did hear you say that?”

  “No,” I sighed. “Not yet. There is the problem of two hundred dollars….”

  “You do not have it?”

  “My wife does, or,” I averted my eyes, “her father will provide the money, I’d swear on it. He’s the best physician in town.”

  At mention of Dr. Undercliff, Minty stopped the horse, began to speak, then failed, her face tumbling into a fresh spate of tears. “Andrew, I need a doctor. People with what I got—pellagra—just rot away, unless they get treatment. I’ve had it a year. Colonel Woofter didn’t care. And no one knows what causes it. It’s like something you do to yourself, make a space for it inside, like, a year ago, when they sold me to Colonel Woofter and I couldn’t stand how he touched me, what he made me do, I stopped caring. I hated being alive that much. It’s like the way you feel turns into something solid and grows and kills you.” She pulled her dress to her lap. “Look at my legs.”

  As I live and breathe, her bare legs, as I peered over her shoulder and down, were hideous. Hideous! Incredible, the clarity with which I remember those pustules and bleeding sores like spots of flame. Above and below her knee, the skin was scaly, reptilian, peeling like old house paint, seamed with festering fever blisters, a few of which had burst, and secreted down her thighs a green and yellow fluid so clayey, and protoplasmic, it made my stomach clench. Lumpy veins crisscrossed her legs. Old boils had left black places where they’d dried. Despite myself, I felt dizzy. She would die soon. Who could doubt this? I shuddered to think of it. Cells in me, corpuscles in my blood, spoke before I could reason out a reply:

  “I will see you through this.”

  This made Minty cry all the more. “I’ve always done for myself, Andrew. You know that. I don’t like being trouble.”

  She was more trouble than she knew. She talked nonstop of the new life she would start, with my help, once she reached a free state, giving little thought to logistics, the long and perilous flight—I speak of running—if I could not buy her freedom. I would not stay. How could I? I had blundered into manumission, milked the Self’s polymorphy to elude, like Trickster John in the folktales my father told, springtraps that killed Patrick, crippled my father, destroyed (probably) Reb, and now—as we neared the cabin—would, I feared, take Minty. That failure would be final. It would finish me, for, if nothing else, I had learned that the heart could survive anything by becoming everything. Opening itself to others. And if the others, in whom you lived, died? Slowly, you died. Gradually, it wore you down. In this I saw the hand of Horace Bannon. He waited. He watched. I could let Minty be taken, or move on, forever trudging north, hope like the horizon, Canada a spiritual landscape as unattainable as Ultima Thule, and either way everything was lost but this: the important promise, the essential promise—the act of mercy—that the Soulcatcher offered. In weariness, I would welcome the kill as a wish. Could the trap be tighter?

  Minty I told to wait on the porch after we arrived, and what composure I could muster, stepping inside, smoothing back my hair with both hands, disappeared in a sitting room that was no longer the room I remembered—my toe sent a wigstand clattering to the floor—but, in the darkness, a cabin that hurled back no reflection of my presence. Had I really lived here? Minty whispered, “Andrew, did you hurt yourself?” and, in her speaking the name I was called in the quarters, she gave me a nature that broke my mastery over the cabin forever. I stood stock-still: the sweaty fieldhand, a machete between his teeth, who has crawled through his master’s window. Minty’s scent was still on me. The smell of the quarters. An old, earthy odor of dirt floors. Woods. The cabin smelled different. Its darkness trembled with foreign sounds. An old grandfather clock tocking. A crack as the cabin floor settled. The furnishings no longer felt familiar. I touched things hesitantly like a guest, uncertain if this was the broken chair we propped against the wall and never used: a room of tables that threw out wooden legs to trip me, hanging plants that bent lower to bump my head, tools that rolled suddenly under
my boots, bumped me from behind, and felt, I swear, as if they’d been shaped for an alien form—creatures built differently than I, with more (or fewer) fingers, no thumbs, or body parts I did not possess. Into this Martian parlor dropped Peggy, also a Martian. “William?” She had wrapped the topsheet from the bed around her. “You scared me! It’s almost morning.” Knuckling her eyes, she stumbled back to bed, and I followed: the first Earthman on the Red Planet, craning my neck in astonishment.

  “Did you talk with Horace Bannon?”

  Bannon’s name snapped the cabin briefly back into focus, but threw me farther from Peggy than Mars. To an image of myself fleeing hell-hounds in the forest. Of the two terrors, I preferred, to tell the truth, being the only Earthman stranded on a strange world.

  “No, I went to an auction. There was an auction tonight, in Sullivan’s storeroom.”

  Her legs drew up; she assumed the position (fetal) of sleep to hasten it. “It must have been awful.”

  “Fruity,” I said, standing away from the bed, afraid to sit (why were Martian beds rectangular?), “you must ask your father to loan us money. There was a girl there, someone I knew years ago, and she is sick, and I have brought her home….”

  Wife sat up in bed. She was instantly awake.

  “You brought her home, William?”

  “Yes—she is outside now. I have a month to make good on the sale.”

  Wife’s hand fumbled on the night table for her bifocals, slipped them on, and this one item—glasses are peculiar like this—made her seem fully dressed. “You have to take her back! You say she is sick? And you still bought her? William….”

  “I am indebted to her,” I tested the bed with my fingertips, then sat, “the way I am indebted to you, and your father, and Reb, and to my father, whom I shall probably never see again, though I would give anything for him to know and love you—I know that cannot be!—but there are duties I must discharge, if I am ever to be free.” I was fast losing her, stabbing at making sense, hoping the sounds would string themselves together on their own natural rhythms, creating order in front of me, for there was little within. “We are born, even slaves, into such richness, and if I cannot somehow repay them, my predecessors and that girl outside, then I am unworthy of any happiness whatsoever, here with you, or anywhere.”

  “Really?” If Wife understood this explanation, which confused even me, she gave no sign. “Maybe I’d better go outside and see this grand person.”

  Slipping into her housecoat, she walked from the room. Coward that I was, I could not rise until I heard the Martian Wife and Earthwoman talking in the kitchen, and even then I was too timid to join them. After ten minutes, Wife, very pale, her lips still twisted by what she’d seen, returned and crawled back into bed. “She is sick, isn’t she?” She blew her nose on a corner of the sheet, and asked point-blank:

  “Did you make love to her? Before, I mean.”

  I needed time to lie. She gave me none.

  “William, you can tell me. Was she your lover?”

  “Yes.”

  If I had not lost the chandoo-induced ability to see the interior of objects, I might have glimpsed in Wife what did not show on the surface: the wound I’d inflicted. For a longer time than I thought bearable, Wife was significantly quiet, and if this quiet occurred in fiction, if she were a character in William Wells Brown’s Clotel, Delaney’s Blake, or Frank Webb’s Garies and Their Friends (all books Wife read), it would have been the lull before a cheap emotional outburst, an embarrassing scene: the horror-stricken belle pulls out her tresses like chicken feathers, she throws her husband, the beast, out on his behind. But Peggy Undercliff was no character in a novel. Her freckled hand smoothed a spot on the Martian mattress; here she told me to sit. Quietly, she said, “I don’t know what she means to you, William, but if you care, I care, and I will ask Daddy for the money.”

  “You don’t want to know under what circumstances I knew her? Or why she calls me Andrew?”

  She shook her head.

  “If you decide, later, that you prefer her, and that she can make you happy, I will, of course, throw myself under the nearest train—”

  “No trains in Spartanburg,” I said. “Remember?”

  “—but I will throw myself happily under the train, because I want what you want, even if your pleasure means I experience pain. I had a long time to think about it after you took off.” She slipped her glasses down, cleaned them on the pillowcase, and smiled. “We will need help around here, I shall be doing less and, if she can work, she will be a godsend.”

  I did not understand; I said so.

  “Oh, William!” Wife grabbed my shirtcollar like a longshoreman, pulling down my chin. “You’re so clever at seeing invisible things—ideas—you can never see the obvious until it draws back and dropkicks you: I’m pregnant, dummy!” She let my shirt go and pulled her covers over her middle. “And I want you to know I don’t like it one bit!”

  “You’ll survive,” I said.

  Wife gave me a side-glance, then smiled and moved closer to kiss me. “We always do.”

  This was hardly the turn of events I’d expected; I had prepared myself for oppression by preliving episodes of disappointment, obstacles, and violent death; I felt a shade disappointed that everyone in the White World wasn’t out to get me. (The truth, brothers, is that it was pretty vain to think oneself that important: hubris, thinking, I, one fragile thread, made that much difference in the fabric of things.) With no self-induced racial paranoia as an excuse for being irresponsible, I turned—and Wife turned—to the business of Minty’s recovery. For someone who suffered so, and still felt stupendous pain, she was cheerful, and this made her optimism in me—her faith in us—all the more difficult. Wife and I prepared an extra bed (not a pallet) for her in the guestroom. The first week after her arrival we insisted she stay in bed until Dr. Undercliff, off to see his patients in Greenville, returned. “I don’t take charity!” Minty told me. “You know that. If I can’t work, then I will go back to Colonel Woofter.” Wife and I stood to one side, watching her pull out the sofa, pointing triumphantly at lint and whore’s wool in the corners. “See! It’s filthy in here! Andrew, you never could clean.” She winked at Wife. “He just wipes in front of things.” She sailed into a soap-and-water campaign that shamed our earlier efforts to clean the cabin. Her meals were no less meticulous. Minty, like a mobile library, carried hundreds of recipes from Cripplegate’s quarters, dishes I’d not had in years. Patiently, as if she were talking to a child, she explained to Wife, “You never fixed him Salt Fish Cakes? He loves Salt Fish Cakes! But you got to go easy on the hot pepper. They give him the hot squirts and running shits.”

  Soon enough we learned that the best way to handle Minty was to keep out of her way. And what else did she know? Needlework was a sealed book to Wife (our lopsided coverlets testified to that), but Minty, on the other hand, could conjure hoop-dresses from old cleaning rags. She took over Wife’s education. And mine. Told me how to landscape my postage-stamp-sized property, how certain chemicals—and in what combination—would coax grass from the bald patches, where to plant cherokee-rose hedges to hide the cabin’s bad features. Minty, as you may have guessed, would never implement these ideas. They would be done. But….

  Bear with me.

  When the pellagra, a wasting disease, worsened, spreading to her lungs, Minty never quite caught her breath again, which made her angry at herself, and anger stole what wind she could draw. Midway through her first week with us she began, though she hated this, sleeping ten hours to build enough strength to work three. Wife stayed at Minty’s bedside, reading to her, while I taught. We watched her in shifts. Perhaps you don’t understand. When Minty complained (which was rare), when she said the new sores on her legs burned, when some nights she experienced roaring headaches that became screaming fits, uncontrollable crying (her head under her pillow so we could not hear), when her hands had, finally, to be tied lest she bite off her fingers, I would come in, anxiou
s and afraid to see her, toss my books on the table, then, entering the guestroom in my stocking feet, press my cheek firmly against hers. Nay, I said nothing. I made no sound. Minty would smile—I smiled right back. She knew what I meant: We were old, cashiered warriors, Minty and me, romantics who knew the risks. But, remarkably, we were not alone. With Peggy, whose fear of sharing love was tested, then transcended, we made it through more bad nights than I care to recall. Take my word on this: I believed, as I believed nothing else, that together we could see her safely to a world where no soul catchers, no driver’s pistol-cracking whip, would ever caa her into darkness again.

  “Minty,” I said to her the second week. “The doctor is back from Greenville. He will be here this evening.”

  “Help me dress, Andrew.”

  She turned her head toward me, weaker than I’d seen her in days. Blanket creases were impressed on both sides of her face. All day she had screeched like a madwoman—sometimes she was a madwoman, wan and hollow-eyed. Often, she clawed her covers, so sensitive was her skin to the coarse nap. Life in her was low, but a smile played across Minty’s lips when I sat beside her.

  “Peggy ain’t here, is she, Andrew?”

  The heat from her hands, in mine, worried me. “She’s gone to get her father. They’ll be here shortly.”

  Her eyes shuttered, she squeezed my hands tightly, and my throat grew thick. “She’s no slouch. When you told me you was married, I thought, what? Can’t nobody spoil this silly nigguh as good as me.” She had to rest a moment. Wait for wind. “Now, she ain’t no rose garden. She can’t see nothin’ unless it bites her nose, but, well, I approve.” She patted my hand. Then Minty opened her eyes in surprise. She sat up a little and looked at me. “Why you cryin’? What’d I say?”

  “Nothing….” I left my head, for a moment, on her side, her hand on my hair. Then I heard Undercliff’s carriage. My voice was shaky, strange to me. “They’re outside now. You make yourself pretty.”