Oxherding Tale

by Charles Johnson

  “I don’t understand,” and I really didn’t, for my father’s death stood, like a screen, in front of all he’d just said. “The ring….”

  “Reb sold that in Kentucky,” said Bannon, “to git shed of anythin’ that’d identify him. Hawkins, you owe me thirty dollars, and me’n Mamie gonna need every penny—we gettin’ married—since Ah’m outta work. Ah always said Ah’d quit if Ah come across a Negro Ah couldn’t catch.” He threw his derringer into the weeds. “Only reason Ah couldn’t marry Mamie befo, get her outta that cathouse, is ’cause Ah stayed on the road so much.”

  My long flight from Cripplegate had made me, I fear, a slow and feeble thinker, the sort who needs to hear the argument twice, or see it in a Study Guide, for Bannon was saying—I gathered slowly—that as a bounty hunter he’d been bested by Reb, who was safely now in Chicago. My heart swung up. Then down. What of my father? Did even he deserve this end? I saw, in the weeds, the barrel of Bannon’s derringer. He would have placed it, that gun, at the base of George’s neck, tucking it under the loose skin where neckbone and shoulders met, locking his arm, then fired, the column of flame throwing George forward, Bannon back, while the pistol burning red on a black Carolina night went flying over his head, trailing smoke as my father fell into West Hell to precisely the reward all black revolutionaries feared: an eternity of waiting tables.

  “Did he speak of me?” I asked Bannon. “What I must know is if he died feeling I despised him, or if he,” I lowered my voice a little, “died hating me.”

  And then the Soulcatcher did a strange thing. His shirt had been opened to his navel (it puffed out, a poorly tied umbilicus, I thought), but hid his chest as we talked. Bannon undid the last three buttons, pulled off his shirt entirely, and bid me move closer.

  “He’s heah,” the Soulcatcher said. “Ask him yoself.”

  This pulled me up short. I waited for the Soulcatcher’s explanation, my gaze dropping from his face to his chest and forearms, where the intricately woven brown tattooes presented, in the brilliance of a silver-gray sky at dawn, an impossible flesh tapestry of a thousand individualities no longer static, mere drawings, but if you looked at them long enough, bodies moving like Lilliputians over the surface of his skin. Not tattooes at all, I saw, but forms sardined in his contour, creatures Bannon had killed since childhood: spineless insects, flies he’d dewinged; yet even the tiniest of these thrashing within the body mosaic was, clearly, a society as complex as the higher forms, a concrescence of molecules cells atoms in concert, for nothing in the necropolis he’d filled stood alone, wished to stand alone, had to stand alone, and the commonwealth of the dead shape-shifted on his chest, his full belly, his fat shoulders, traded hand for claw, feet for hooves, legs for wings, their metamorphosis having no purpose beyond the delight the universe took in diversity for its own sake, the proliferation of beauty, and yet all were conserved in this process of doubling, nothing was lost in the masquerade, the cosmic costume ball, where behind every different mask at the party—behind snout beak nose and blossom—the selfsame face was uncovered at midnight, and this was my father, appearing briefly in the dead boy Moon as he gave Flo Hatfield a goodly stroke and, at the instant of convulsive orgasm, opened his mouth as wide as that of the dying steer Bannon slew in his teens, was that steer, then several others, and I lost his figure in this field of energy, where the profound mystery of the One and the Many gave me back my father again and again, his love, in every being from grubworms to giant sumacs, for these too were my father and, in the final face I saw in the Soulcatcher, which shook tears from me—my own face, for he had duplicated portions of me during the early days of the hunt—I was my father’s father, and he my child.

  The Soulcatcher buttoned his shirt, covering the theater of tattooes. He helped me, a freeman, back to his wagon, then delivered me, dazed, to my wife’s doorstep. He and Mamie were not seen in Spartanburg again. On April 23, 1861, Wife bore a girl—six pounds, six ounces—delivered by Dr. Undercliff, who took leave of this life on the eve of Grant’s capture of Fort Henry. The Awakening of Eve Yoremop (1863) was overshadowed by the American edition of Trollope’s Framley Parsonage, and was only reviewed, with five other books, in the “Bookbin” column of the Press. According to rumor, Flo Hatfield did not marry again, but took the Vet as her final lover, and in Illinois—in 1865—Reb built his finest coffin, the one in which they laid Abraham Lincoln to rest. After the war, Fruity and I turned to the business of rebuilding, with our daughter Anna (all is conserved; all), the world.

  This is my tale.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DR. CHARLES JOHNSON, a 1998 MacArthur fellow, is the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Endowed Professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle. His fiction includes Faith and the Good Thing, Dreamer, and Middle Passage—for which he won the National Book Award—and two short story collections, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Soulcatcher and Other Stories. His nonfiction books include Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing, Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970, and two collections of comic art. In 2002 he received the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Seattle.

  1 He is fifteen in my account. In two years this boy—James Travis, Jr.—will be wounded at Fort Sumter, fighting with Major Robert Anderson; his nurse will be a black girl, Zelphy Thomas, and James, finding her with child on August 3, 1861, will choose love over bigotry, moving his new family to southern Illinois, where his great-granddaughter, Ellen, an early NAACP activist, will integrate a lunch counter on April 23, 1935. She will die five years later, on the Northeast Side of Carbondale, surrounded by admirers, white and black.