Oxherding Tale

by Charles Johnson

  “Sure.” She frowned. “Then maybe I’ll swim the English Channel.”

  On the porch, Undercliff, puffing, head down, paused on the stairs, his right foot planted on the porch, his left on the last step but one and, wheezing, had both hands on his right knee.

  “William….”

  “Don’t tell me.” I helped him into the sitting room. “I have been redefined from the simply Annoying to the Very Annoying.”

  “You flatter yourself,” said Undercliff. “I am working on a special category for you, the social equivalent to Cerebral Hemorrhage.” Standing behind him, Wife helped the doctor remove his coat, then brought the teapot to the kitchen table. Undercliff stood, facing the fireplace, warming himself. He looked back at me over his shoulder. “Peggy has told me about this girl, William. You wish for me to pay for her freedom?”

  “I will be in your debt forever, Father-in-law.”

  Undercliff winced, his face wrinkling.

  “You are already in my debt forever.” He walked to the table and poured himself tea. “And do not call me that, I’ve just eaten a fine meal at the Club, and I should like to keep it down.” Wife gave a groan, which her father ignored. “I am not in the habit of buying pigs in pokes. If she is as wonderful a young woman as you say, the best thing since indoor plumbing, then perhaps—I only say perhaps—I will help you.” He finished his tea, set his cup on the hob, and pulled down his vest. “May I see her now?”

  The doctor spent the better part of an hour with Minty, the guestroom door locked. Wife and I waited in the yard. Now and again, Minty let fly a muffled scream. I took a step toward the door.

  “I know he wouldn’t deliberately hurt her, but the way he pulls weeds….”

  Wife slipped her arm around me, shifted her weight, and steered me behind the house. “Walk with me,” she said. “You’ll feel better.” And so I did. But, for my part, the examination worried me. Minty had not eaten all day. She smelled sour. Sweat. A seaweed odor, as if her cells were breaking down into more basic elements. Wife and I walked in silence, the moon above us high, the air clean, the perennial red dust settling. Feeling her warmth, the mystery that she was to me now—being within being—I walked, saying nothing. Then Wife stopped, struck by a thought. She could write her Aunt Olivia in Boston. There, Minty could find work. Make her way as a freewoman. She’d grow rich, given all she knew. Wife’s decision so pleased me I lifted her into the air, my arms snugly nestled under her small, hard buttocks, then twirled her dizzily until we both dropped, lips locked, in the high dry grass. Everything, friend, was winged. Covered with grass, I turned her back, eager to tell Minty immediately. Yet, with each stride we took nearer the cabin, she brushing dirt from my hair, the screams increased in volume. Undercliff appeared briefly outside on the porch, then hurried back in.

  “William,” said Wife. “You’d better go ahead.”

  I broke into a run, thinking, “Not now,” ran, fell up the stairs, turning my ankle, then limped into the cabin. Undercliff stood outside the guestroom, blood spattered on his vest, his trousers. My pulse sped up. Blood was at his feet. On the bottom rail of the door, as if Minty had tried to walk and had fallen. I could not control my voice. “How is she?”

  Dr. Undercliff started; he had not been conscious of me until I spoke. “William….” He rubbed his eyes. “She has suffered this affliction longer than most….”

  “You can’t help her?”

  He stepped back from the door, making room for me. “There is still time to speak to her, if you have anything to say.”

  I advanced into the guestroom with one foot always forward, not wanting to face this, afraid, aye, of what I thought I would see: so many profiles of Minty spun before me, like flashcards—a frightened girl condemned to stay forever in the shopwindow, on the Block; a servant whose laughter affected me like straight gin, so gay it was at times, so Galilean in its goodness; and another Minty I did not recognize, reduced to rotting flesh. He face was dark, her mouth hopeless. “Minty?” Seeing her shook a low, queer, animal sound out of me. She was disintegrating. Sugar in water. Form into formlessness. Her left leg had separated from her knee, flowed away like that of a paper doll left in the rain. Frail light from the lantern nearby etched checkered shadows on her blanket. Shadows were deep in the swales of her skin. She had bitten off her middle finger. Undercliff had torn her sheets and bound it. Her untied hair splashed behind her on the bed. The envelope of her skin expanded, stretched, parted at the seams.

  “Minty?” I pressed my lips to her cheek. Warm. “You’re going to Boston.” The room was spinning. She began to rouse slowly, lifting her head. Fire like spiraling flame shot through my heart, and all of me strained toward her. “You hear me, don’t you?” Her eyelids quivered, showing white surfaces gone gray. Milky pupils large as dimes. Her face was distant and strained and incomplete. Cracked lips sucked back against her gums, she focused dimly on my face. “Andrew?”

  “Yes! I’m here.”

  “Tell me,” she said, “that you love me.”

  “I do,” I said. “I do!”

  “Very much?” she asked.

  “Very much.”

  Her right hand reached out, tentatively, touching my face. She licked her lips. Something in Minty relaxed.

  “You said Boston….”

  “Peggy knows someone there.”

  My chest, I felt, was on fire. “We’re leaving tonight.” Undercliff, Wife, and, I thought, a third figure, stood in the doorway; I knew that without turning, felt their pressure shift the room’s pressure. “As soon as you can travel….” I remembered, at that moment, how Wife spoke of eastern beaches, their colors, which I knew had been planned at the instant of Creation to complement Minty, blues and browns to contrast the warm hues of her skin; and I saw her there, washing herself clean of the petroleum stench of the marketplace. She would have children—I’d never approve of their father, no man was good enough, and I’d nag whomever she chose—children all stamped with her strange beauty; I saw her stand a freewoman, washing her hair, then she stepped lazily back….It was gone. A gush of black vomit bubbled from her mouth onto my hand. The Devil came and sat on Minty, his weight pressing open the valve to her bladder and bowels. I raved, all my eloquence empty, refusing to release her hand. In my chest there commingled feelings of guilt I could not coax into cognition.

  Over my shoulder fingers moved to close Minty’s eyes, then settled firmly on my shoulder: Undercliff, I thought, yet it felt like my father’s hand. Or Reb’s. I let it lift me to my feet. The doctor had not moved from the doorway. Nor Peggy. And the voice that belonged to the fingers upon me was made from the offscum of other voices.

  “Andrew,” said the Soulcatcher, “We got business.”

  XIII

  MOKSHA

  Fluid, a crazyquilt of other’s features, the Soulcatcher’s face, his fingers on my shoulder, beat with the pulsethrob of countless bondsmen in his bloodstream, women and children murdered with pistols knives tramped by his warhorse strangled whipped suffocated lynched beheaded burned to death starved stoned bombed thrown from heights pushed into machinery drowned clubbed impaled killed by flame tortured. Could only I see this? These others in Bannon’s eyes, exposed in the ironic tilt of his head, flashed to me in the halting, slow way he spoke, were invisible to Peggy and Gerald Undercliff. They saw Bannon, not the tics, the familiar quirks of my friend, nor could they see that only the Soulcatcher knew the secrets of my history and heart. So this was how it worked. Paranoia come to stay. Unpacking its bag, propping its feet on your table: the slayer of souls in a balandranas and kneeboots. The Negro’s private flask of hemlock.

  “You will excuse us?” he asked Peggy. “This won’t take long.”

  “No!” She put herself between Bannon and me, caught a whiff of him and just as quickly stepped back. “Why do you keep bothering us?”

  Bannon smiled a million smiles: a cartoonist’s composite face of fifty figures—his beard the hair of a black woman; hi
s nose a Wazimba child curled up, knees to chin; his lips an Ibo lying spread-eagled on the deck of a slave clipper, the sea beneath him churned by the storm into foam, breakers roaring.

  “Shall Ah leave?” he asked me.

  I answered, “No.”

  If I could have reached Peggy then, if she had not been worlds away, I would have clung to her, but glancing at the Soulcatcher, I realized the futility of resistance. He would eventually speak, now or tomorrow, spilling my checkered history at her feet. Even if she did not care—even if love conquered the illusion of race, this life-long hallucination that Thou and That differed—I was still bound to him, had produced him from myself, as Peggy was producing a living thing. “This concerns neither of you,” I followed Bannon to the door. “He is right—we have business.”

  Peggy whooped, “Where are you going?”

  “And at this hour?” Undercliff hooked his arm around her; I stared, deliberately, to drive them deep into my memory, together like that, a portrait I planned to conjure the moment before Bannon….“That woman,” said Undercliff, “there are preparations to make. You must go now?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Now.”

  Stepping outside, into his shadow, I heard the Soulcatcher say, “Been a long chase from Hodges, Andrew.” He climbed stiffly onto his canvas-covered wagon. “And Ah got a surprise fo’ you.” When he did not elaborate, I guessed Bannon meant some new break-through in scientific genocide—he prided himself on being a “scientific killer,” as pugilists call themselves “scientific boxers”—and, strange to say, this thought brought to me the sort of comfort known only to suicides. But I was more fortunate. Bannon did the work, the loathsome specifics, for you. When the heart broke under pressure, failed, losing the strength to revive hope, the Soulcatcher stepped in to perform the most merciful of services. He steadied the dark, nerveless hand on the knife. Jerked the trigger, knowing you would quail, go soft, and grab again at the chimera of a world beyond color; and in that one hesitation, you’d blow two-quarters of your head away without finishing the job. Messy. Bannon was not a servant to botch the job. He offered, and for this I thanked God, the clean, quick kill.

  He asked as we gained the road, “No second thoughts?”

  “No.” I could not face him, but I had to know one thing: “You are Death?”

  He touched his hatbrim, very humble.

  “The promised death, yes, sweetah even than the poetry of liberation. The death that defines everythin’ befo’ hit. Gives it form, as Ah did for yo father. Ah keeps mah tools ready. The blade clean. The powdah dry. No dreamah should suffah’ lockjaw from a rusty knife, hit seem to me, at the end. This,” he added in a self-distancing tone I did not understand, “has been mah trade fo’ as long as Ah kin remembah.”

  The air was sharp, stimulating to my senses down this last road we traveled together. There were no words between us for a time, and thus no truth or falsity, only the feeling that I had betrayed all the bondsmen I’d ever known: my father, by passing; Patrick, by not risking Flo Hatfield’s displeasure; Minty, who’d trusted me; Reb, by failing to leave Spartanburg….

  “Where,” I asked, “is Reb?”

  The Soulcatcher held his reins with one hand. Unbuttoning his shirt with the other, he exposed a barrel chest trellised with tattooes. The designs on his body were elaborately drawn, and almost seemed to move against the flow of his powerful muscles in the moonlight, more figures than I could take in at the moment, and I looked back at the road when he touched the naked skin between the knot of skin stitchings, and said, “Heah, Ah guess—what Ah was able to git.”

  “Then you have killed him?”

  “Did Ah?” He squeezed his lower lip between thumb and forefinger, remembering. Then laughed. “You know how Ah works? In order to become a Negro, to slip under his skin, Ah have to open mahself to some mighty peculiar things. Reb was harder to git into than climbin’ a peeled saplin’, heels upwards. Ah was in pain most of the time ’cause he was. Did you know if yo friend passed a butcher shop, and if somebody was sledgehammering a shorthorn, the back of Reb’s neck bruised?” He chortled and rubbed his own neck. “Did you git the ring?”

  I drew in my head and nodded.

  “Knew you’d want to have that.”

  For another few minutes we rode on, and I realized that Bannon had turned his wagon off the road. Now his wheels rumbled over stones into a field. The moon dispensed a diffused light, distorting everything, throwing long shadows (our own) in front of us. My stomach shook. The field, at night, looked infinite, unending. In my entire life I had seen nothing so—not even the hills behind Cripplegate—nothing so stunning; never….The nearness of death did this, I thought. Seated beside me, talking of his hideous techniques, the Soulcatcher’s presence drove out every false possibility, stripped perception clean as whalebone, freed it from the private, egoistic interests that normally colored my vision; I could hear—was—the sound of a raincrow’s song ringing in the tree we approached, the bird’s voice disclosing it limitlessly as a swallow, a wren; I saw below the tree bluets unable to know, seeking only to be known, and then the double-trunked tree itself, which dreamed of becoming a man again, climbing the chain—form after form—until it attained the species capable of the highest sacrifices: man. Against my will, I wept. Not because I was to die; I wanted the kill. Nor again because I was returned to slavery; I had never escaped it—it was a way of seeing, my inheritance from George Hawkins: seeing distinctions. No, I cried because the woman I had sought in so many before—Flo Hatfield, Minty, Peggy—was, as Ezekiel hinted, Being, and she, bountiful without end, was so extravagantly plentiful the everyday mind closed to this explosion, this efflorescence of sense, sight frosted over, and we—I speak of myself; you will not make my mistake—became unworthy of her, having squandered to a thousand forms of bondage the only station, that of man, from which she might truly be served.

  “A guinea,” said the Soulcatcher, “fo’ yo thoughts.”

  I could tell him my thoughts, only him.

  “Is it…” pausing to pull phrases together, “possible that a man may love the Good, pledge his life to it and, in spite of his best efforts, still be the steward of suffering and evil?”

  He fastened his reins to the wagon, under the tree. This, I presumed, was where the execution would take place. Climbing down, Bannon moved like the Coffinmaker, as if Time were fiction, all that was and would be held suspended in this single moment, which was forever, using every part of his foot as he walked, like an animal. First the heel falling gently, then the ball of his foot, not slamming down (as I walked), but firmly taking hold of the planet, pushing down as the ground pushed back in perfect balance: a slow, frightening tread, the way, I thought, an Ubermensch would walk. Then he answered me: “Ah have kilt many Negroes with this,” pulling out his pearl-handled derringer, “whose every good action led to evil.”

  “Is that fair!” I touched him, then pulled back my hand; it was like grabbing a boa constrictor seconds after it swallowed a family of rats. “Your duty is to destroy, I understand that! There must be destroyers. But you sound like a philosopher! A modern philosopher—the mechanic who analyzes the propositions of madmen and sages with the same impartiality, refusing to pass judgment!” I shouted again, “Is it fair that you destroyed my friend—‘only following orders,’ you’ll plead, and I can appreciate that, the dancing of Shiva from birth to death, the cosmic drama where all creatures are sacrificed, regardless of their personal dreams, to a God moving mysteriously, struggling to spin a well-made story, making some of us walk-ons, or extras—maybe Negroes in the New World were only hired for the crowd scenes—but I ask you, Horace, you, the holy torpedo, the mercenary of Brama, I put it to you, do you approve?”

  “You still don’t see hit,” he said. “Ah approves everythin’. Ah approves nothin’.”

  Under the tree, which was weighted with fruit, the lower plum-heavy branches of the tree doming round us, like a sermon on regeneration, the Soulcatcher, sti
ll holding his derringer, asked me to sit. “Mebbe Ah should finish tellin’ you ’bout Reb. For me to capture a Negro the right way, as Ah told you, Ah have to feel what he feels, want what he wants, ’fore Ah knows him good enough to hep him finish hisself.”

  “And what,” my voice flindered, “did Reb want?”

  The Soulcatcher laughed.

  “Nothin’! That’s hit right there—what threw me off, why hit took so long to run him down: yo friend didn’t want nothin’. How the hell you gonna catch a Negro like that? He can’t be caught, he’s already free. Not legally, but you know what Ah’m sayin’. Well suh, Ah had to think a spell about strategy. Ah’s always worked on the principle that the thing what destroys a man, what finally unstrings him, starts off first as an appetite. Yo friend had no appetites. There wasn’t no way Ah could git a handhold on the nigguh, he was like smoke. So Ah went back to Square One, so to speak: Ah studied him, lookin’ fo’ a weakness, a flaw somewheres so Ah could squiggle inside and take root, like Ah did with yo daddy—now he was an easy kill, oh yeah, Ah did indeed snuff George Hawkins after the Cripplegate uprisin’, but he was carryin’ fifty-’leven pockets of death in him anyways, li’l pools of corruption that kept him so miserable he begged me, when Ah caught up with him in Calhoun Falls, to blow out his lights—”

  (There is a Gentlemen’s Psychic Powder Room, I discovered, across the hallway from the one used by Minty; upon hearing of my father’s death, I excused myself, went into the first booth I found, bolted the door, dropped onto the toilet seat, and cried. When I returned, weaker, to the cafe table, as it were, Bannon was still talking.)

  “—yo friend, as Ah was sayin’, didn’t have no place inside him fo’ me to settle. He wasn’t positioned nowhere.” Scratching his head, the Soulcatcher chuckled. “Befo’, afterwards, and in between didn’t mean nothin’ to him. He had no home. No permanent home. He didn’t care ’bout merit or evil. What Ah’m sayin’,” his fist struck the tree behind us, “is that Ah couldn’t entirely become the nigguh because you got to have somethin’ dead or static already inside you—an image of yoself—fo’ a real slave catcher to latch onto.”