Ancient of Days (2 page)

PART ONE:
Her Habiline Husband

Beulah Fork, Georgia

R
uthClaire Loyd, my ex-wife, first caught sight of the trespasser from the loft studio of her barn-sized house near Beulah Fork, Georgia. She was doing one of twelve paintings for a series of subscription-order porcelain plates that would feature her unique interpretations of the nine angelic orders and the Holy Trinity (this particular painting was entitled
Thrones
), but she stepped away from the easel to look through her bay window at the intruder. His oddness had caught her eye.

Swart and gnomish, he was moving through the tall shadowy grass in the pecan grove. His movements combined an aggressive curiosity with a kind of placid caution, as if he had every right to be there but still expected someone—the property’s legal owner, a buttinsky neighbor—to call him to accounts. Passing from a dapple of September sunlight into a patch of shade, he resembled one of the black boys who had turned Cleve Snyder’s creek into the skinnydipping riviera of Hothlepoya County. He was a little far afield, though, and the light limning his upper body made him look too
hairy
for most ten-year-olds, whatever their color. Was the trespasser some kind of animal?

“He’s walking,” RuthClaire murmured to herself. “Hairy or not, only human beings walk like that.”

My ex is not given to panic, but this observation worried her. Her house (I had relinquished all claims to it back in January, to spare her the psychic upheaval of a move) sits in splendid-spooky isolation about a hundred yards from the state highway connecting Tocqueville and Beulah Fork. Cleve Snyder, meanwhile, leases his adjacent ninety acres to a cotton grower who does not live there. RuthClaire was beginning to feel alone and vulnerable.

Imperceptibly trembling, she set aside her brushes and paints to watch the trespasser. He was closer to the house now, and a rake that she had left leaning against one of the pecan trees enabled her to estimate his height at a diminutive four and a half feet. His sinewy arms bespoke his maturity, however, as did the massiveness of his underslung jaw and the dark gnarl of his sex. Maybe, she helplessly conjectured, he was a deranged dwarf recently escaped from an institution populated by violence-prone sexual deviates. . . .

“Stop it,” RuthClaire advised herself. “Stop it.”

Suddenly the trespasser gripped the bole of a tree with his hands and the bottom of his feet; he shinnied to a swaying perch high above the ground. Here, for over an hour, he cracked pecans with his teeth and single-mindedly fed himself. My ex-wife’s worry subsided a little. The intruder seemed to be neither an outright carnivore nor a rapist. Come twilight, though, she was ready for him to leave, while he appeared perfectly content to occupy his perch until Judgment Day.

RuthClaire had no intention of going to bed with a skinnydipping dwarf in her pecan grove. She telephoned me.

“It’s probably someone’s pet monkey,” I said. “A rich Yankee matron broke down on the interstate, and her chimpanzee—you know how some of those old ladies from Connecticut are—wandered off while she was trying to flag down a farmer to unscrew her radiator cap.”

“Paul,” RuthClaire said, unamused.

“What?”

“First of all,” she said, evenly enough, “a chimpanzee isn’t a monkey, it’s an ape. Second, I know nothing at all about old ladies from Connecticut. And, third, the creature in my pecan tree
isn’t
a chimpanzee or a gibbon or an orangutan.”

“Boy, I’d forgotten what a Jane Goodall fan you are.” This riposte RuthClaire declined to volley.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked, somewhat exasperated. My ex-wife’s imagination is both her fortune and her folly; and at this point, to tell the truth, I was thinking that her visitor was indeed an out-of-season skinnydipper or maybe a raccoon. For an artist, RuthClaire is remarkably near-sighted, a fact that contributes to the almost abstract blurriness of some of her landscapes and backgrounds.

“Come see about me,” she said.

*

In Beulah Fork, I ran a small gourmet restaurant called the West Bank. Despite the incredulity of outsiders (as, for instance, Connecticut matrons with pet chimpanzees), who expect rural eating establishments in the South to serve nothing but catfish, barbecue, Brunswick stew, and turnip greens, the West Bank offered cosmopolitan fare and a sophisticated ambience. My clientele comprised professional people, wealthy retirees, and tourists. The proximity of a popular state park, the historic city of Tocqueville, and a recreational area known as Muscadine Gardens kept me in paying customers; and while RuthClaire and I were married, she exhibited and sold many of her best paintings right on the premises. Her work—only a few pieces of which still remain on the walls—gave the restaurant a kind of muted bohemian elegance, but, in turn, the West Bank gave my wife a unique and probably invaluable showcase for her talent. Until our split, I think, we both viewed the relationship between her success and mine as healthily symbiotic.

Art in the service of commerce. Commerce in the service of art.

RuthClaire had telephoned me just before the dinner hour on Friday. The West Bank had reservations from more than a dozen people from Tocqueville and the Gardens, and I did not really want to dump the whole of this formidable crowd into the lap of Molly Kingsbury, a bright young woman who did a better job hostessing than overseeing my occasionally high-strung cooks, Hazel Upchurch and Livia George Stephens. But dump it I did. I begged off my responsibilities at the West Bank with a story about a broken water pipe on Paradise Farm and drove out there lickety-split to see about my ex. Twelve miles in ten minutes.

RuthClaire led me to the studio loft and pointed through her window into the pecan grove. “He’s still sitting there,” she said.

I squinted. At this hour the figure in the tree was a mere smudge among the tangled branches, not much bigger than a squirrel’s nest. “Why didn’t you shoot off that .22 I gave you?” I asked RuthClaire, a little afraid that she was having me on. Even the spreading crimson sunset behind the pecan grove did not enable me to pick out the alleged trespasser.

“I wanted you to see him, too, Paul. I got to where I needed outside confirmation. Don’t you see?”

No, I didn’t see. That was the problem.

“Go out with me,” RuthClaire said. “The buddy system’s always recommended for dangerous enterprises.”

“The buddy I want is that little .22, Ruthie Cee.” She stood aside while I wrested the rifle out of the gun cabinet, and together we went back downstairs, through the living and dining rooms, and out the plate-glass doors opening onto the pecan grove. Beneath the intruder’s tree we paused to gape and take stock. The stock I took went into the cushion of flesh just above my right armpit, and I sighted along the barrel at a bearded black face like that of a living gargoyle.

RuthClaire was right. The trespasser wasn’t a monkey. He more nearly resembled a medieval demon, with a small but noticeable ridge running fore and aft straight over the middle of his skull. He had been on the cusp of falling asleep, I think, and the apparition of two human beings at this inopportune moment startled him. Fear showed in his beady, obsidian eyes, which flashed between my ex-wife and me like sooty strobes. His upper lip moved away from his teeth.

From above the mysterious creature, I shot down a dangling cluster of branches that would have eventually fallen anyway. The report echoed all the way to White Cow Creek, and hundreds of foraging sparrows scattered into the twilight like feathered buckshot.

“I swear to goodness, Paul!” RuthClaire shouted, her most fiery oath. She was trying to take the rifle out of my hands. “You’ve always been a shoot-first-talk-later fool, but that poor fella’s no threat! Look!”

I gave up the .22 as I had given up Paradise Farm, docilely, and I looked. RuthClaire’s visitor was terrified, almost catatonic. He could not go up, and he could not come down; his head was probably still reverberating from the rifle shot, the heart-stopping crash of the pecan limb. I wasn’t too sorry, though. He had no business haunting my ex.

“Listen,” I said, “you asked me to come see about you. And you didn’t object when I brought that baby down from the loft.”

Angrily, RuthClaire ejected the spent shell, removed the .22’s magazine, and threw the rifle on the ground. “I wanted moral support, Paulie, not a hit man. I thought the gun was your moral support, that’s all. I didn’t know you were going to
try to murder
the poor innocent wretch with it.”

“‘Poor innocent wretch,’ ” I repeated incredulously. “
‘Poor innocent wretch’
?”

This was not the first time we had found ourselves arguing in front of an audience. Toward the end, it had happened frequently at the West Bank, RuthClaire accusing me of insensitivity, neglect, and philandering with my female help (although she knew that Molly Kingsbury was having none of that nonsense), while I openly rued her blinkered drive for artistic recognition, her lack of regard of my inborn business instincts, and her sometimes maddeningly rigorous bouts of chastity. The West Bank is small—a converted doctor’s office wedged between Gloria’s Beauty Shop and Ogletree Plumbing & Electric, all in the same red-brick shell on Main Street—and even arguing in the kitchen we could give my customers a discomfiting earful. Only a few tolerant souls, mostly locals, thought these debates entertaining; and when my repeat business from out of town began falling off, well, that was the last straw. I made the West Bank off limits to RuthClaire. Soon thereafter she began divorce proceedings.

Now a shivering black gnome, naked but for a see-through leotard of hair, was staring down at us as my ex compared me to Vlad the Impaler, Adolf Hitler, and the government of South Africa. I began to think that he could not be too much more bewildered and uncomfortable than I.

“What the hell do you want me to do?” I finally blurted.

“Leave me alone with him,” RuthClaire said. “Go back to the house.”

“That’s crazy,” I began. “That’s—”

“Hush, Paulie. Please do as I say, all right?”

I retreated to the sliding doors, no farther. RuthClaire talked to the trespasser. In the gathering dark, she crooned reassurance. She consoled and coaxed. She even hummed a lullaby. Her one-sided talk with the intruder was interminable. I, because she did not seem to be at any real risk, went inside and poured myself a powerful scotch on the rocks. At last RuthClaire returned.

“Paul,” she said, gazing into the pecan grove, “he’s a member of a human species—you know, a
collateral
human species—that doesn’t exist anymore.”

“He told you that, did he?”

“I deduced it. He doesn’t speak.”

“Not English, anyway. What do you mean, ‘doesn’t exist anymore’? He’s up in that tree, isn’t he?”

“Up in the air, more like,” RuthClaire said. “It reminds me of that Indian, Ishi.”

“Who-shi?”

“A Yahi Indian in northern California whose name was Ishi. Theodora Kroeber wrote a couple of books about him.” RuthClaire gestured at the shelves across the room from us; in addition to every contemporary best seller that came through the B. Dalton’s in Tocqueville Commons Mall, these shelves housed art books, popular-science volumes, and a “feminist” library of no small proportions, this being RuthClaire’s term for books either by or about women, no matter when or where they lived. (The Brontë sisters were next to Susan Brownmiller; Sappho was not far from Sontag.)

I lifted my eyebrows: “?”

“Last of his tribe,” RuthClaire explained. “Ishi was the last surviving member of the Yahi; he died around nineteen fifteen or so, in the Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco.” She mulled this bit of intelligence. “It’s my guess, though, that our poor wretch comes from a species that originated in East Africa two or three million years ago.” She mulled her guess. “That’s a little longer than Ishi’s people were supposed to have been extinct before Ishi himself turned up, I’m afraid.”

“There goes your analogy.”

“Well, it’s not
perfect,
Paul, but it’s
suggestive
. What do you think?”

“That you’d be wiser calling the bugger in the tree a deranged dwarf instead of an Indian. You’d be wiser yet just calling the police.”

RuthClaire went to the bookshelf and removed a volume by a well-known scientist and television personality. She had everything this flamboyant popularizer had ever written. After flipping through several well-thumbed pages, she found the passage pertinent to her argument:

“‘Were we to encounter
Homo habilis
—dressed, let us say, in the latest fashion on the boulevards of some modern metropolis—we would probably give him only a passing glance, and that because of his relatively small stature.’” She closed the book. “There. The creature in the pecan tree is a habiline, a member of the species
Homo habilis
. He’s human, Paul, he’s one of us.”

“That may or may not be the case, but I’d still feel obliged to wash up with soap and water after shaking his hand.”

RuthClaire, giving me a look commingling pity and contempt, replaced the book on its shelf. I made up a song—which I had the good sense not to sing aloud to her—to the tune of an old country-and-western ditty entitled “Abilene”:

Habiline, O habiline,

Grungiest ghoul I’ve ever seen.

Even Gillette won’t shave him clean,

That habiline.

I telephoned the West Bank to see how Molly was getting on with Hazel and Livia George (she said everything was going “swimmingly,” a word Molly had learned from a beau in Atlanta), then convinced my ex-wife to let me spend the night at Paradise Farm on the sofa downstairs. For safety’s sake. RuthClaire reluctantly consented. In her studio loft she worked through until morning. At dawn I heard her say, “It’s all right, Paul. He left while you were sleeping.” She handed me a cup of coffee. I sipped at it as she gazed out the sliding doors at the empty pecan grove.

The following month—about three weeks later—I ran into RuthClaire in Beulah Fork’s ancient A&P, where I did almost all of my shopping for the West Bank: meats, produce, the works. October. Still sunny. The restaurant business only now beginning to tail off toward the inevitable winter slump. I had not thought of the Ishi Incident, or whatever you might choose to call it, more than three or four times since actually investigating it. Perhaps I did not believe that it had really happened. The whole episode had a dreamlike texture that did not stick very well to the hard-edged banality of everyday life in Beulah Fork. Besides, no one else in Hothlepoya County had mentioned seeing a naked black gnome running around the countryside climbing trees and stealing pecans.