Then he would be dead. He knew what that meant. Endless years of lying still in a coffin. … And what was he doing now but that? What was he doing now but rehearsing for that time? …
And when the body fell apart at last—whenever that was, however long that took—then the animal inside him would find endless doors opening on echoing corridors, wind-swept walks, ultimate distances. It would be timid at first, like all animals raised in a cage. It had been sheltered by his body so long, it wouldn’t go far or stay long. At first. But soon it would venture farther and farther, and return less and less frequently. And then it wouldn’t come at all any more. It wouldn’t come back to the dust and the bones; it would be gone running around the world, living in grasses and under hedges, cowering in the roots of trees, frightened by birds and hawks and other animals, hiding and running, free, sunlight and dark.
That was the way it would be, the Old Man thought.
HIS NAME WAS THOMAS Henry Oliver, but nobody called him that. His mother called him Oliver, and everybody else called him the Old Man. They’d done that ever since he was thirty. He supposed it was because he’d gotten bald then, almost completely bald, just a small fringe of hair around his ears.
He was born in 1870, in Edwardsville, Ohio, and it was there he’d made his deal with God. It came of being afraid during the long nights in the tiny house with his mother. (He was her only child, his father dead the year he was born.) She always fell asleep immediately after putting out the lamp, while the smell of kerosene hung in the still air. He was left alone in a black empty world, with only the rustle of rats across the floor boards inside and the chuckle of wind and the sounds of owls and roving animals outside. Moonless nights, things walked abroad; long-legged beasties, his mother called them. “They’re not something you can tell about,” she said. “No words for them, no way to describe their image or shape. They’re like all the things you’ve never seen, the inside of graves, or the center of the earth, or the dark side of the moon. If you see them, you’ll know; and if you got straight hair, it will turn kinky, and if you got curly hair, it will go straight as a poker; if you got a nigger’s skin, it will turn white.”
He himself closed the shutters every night—making a special check to see that the bolts were drawn securely—and his mother dropped the bar across the front door. He still sweated with fright, even in winter when water in the kitchen bucket froze solid and all night long you could hear the groan and pop of ice on the Ohio River half a mile away. Until he found the stone.
That happened in the middle of summer, on a Wednesday when his mother called for him to take her pies into town. He always delivered pies to her customers on Wednesday and bread on Saturday. This one time he hid behind the springhouse until he was sure she’d gone, then he sauntered off across the pasture, no special place to go, just moving, feeling the warmth of sun through his shirt, imagining himself a general on a white stallion, or an engineer with the rails whizzing by. He climbed the rail fence into Mr. Winslow’s wood lot. He saw a squirrel and wished he’d brought his slingshot—that was supper chattering at him. He scrambled down into a dry creek bed to hunt for pools left from the spring freshening.
The pools were long gone, but on the crackled mud bottom he found the stone. Smooth and white, flat on one side, exactly the size of his foot. He tried it over and over again to be sure. A perfect fit. He laid it on the ground, stood on it, then hopped off. His stone print stayed there, frozen by the folds of the earth, memorial to his passing. He crouched down beside it, studied it carefully. Overhead blue jays screeched and squabbled and their feathers drifted through the leaves. A rabbit sat on the top of the bank and stared at him, nose twitching. After a while Oliver took out his pocket-knife and cut into the tip of his thumb. He squeezed until the blood flowed freely, and then, using his thumb as a brush, he outlined the shape of his toes on the white stone. He waited while the blood turned brown and dry, and then he carried the stone up to the top of the bank—the rabbit raced away at his approach—and buried it there. He had no shovel; he dug with his knife, with a tree limb, with his hands. When it was deep enough, he put in his white stone, stepped on it one more time to make sure, then covered it. In the loose soil, he made a small cross with his sore thumb.
When he was done, he looked at the shadowy wood lot, at the sunny smooth fields beyond, at the scattered farmhouses, fence-fringed, and he felt secure.
That night, while rats rustled across the floor and stray dogs howled in the distance, Oliver slept peacefully. He had made an arrangement.
He was no longer afraid of anything, not even the spirits of drowned men in the river. He discovered that one day as he walked home after work. (He peeled willows for old Mr. Anderson at the store and got a nickel a day for doing it. Mr. Anderson’s Irish hired girl made baskets and things and sold them in Louisville.) The Ohio was past its flood, but it was still fairly high. He stopped to watch, hoping to see a log shot into the air by a hidden whirlpool. If you were patient, you were sure to see it—the heavy water-soaked log flying like an arrow. While he waited, he noticed a skiff pulling into the shallows among the sawyers and garbage. He recognized the two men: Charlie Healey and Tim McVay. Healey was poling; McVay hauled a line attached to a tangle of driftwood. The brown branches broke away and a body turned slowly and lazily in the warm spring sun, one arm swinging straight up. Healey grunted and cursed as he poled. McVay, who was also the Baptist preacher, whistled cheerfully.
Oliver’s bare feet squished and slipped in the yellow Ohio slime. He had never dared come this close before: drowned men’s ghosts walked the banks and glided across the water at the place they came ashore. He stood and stared, his head sticking out with concentration. He saw how the shirt had split across the back, and black flesh bulged in the cloudy sun.
Healey said, leaning on his pole: “Ain’t you afraid of ghosties?”
Oliver stared into the thin sunburned face. Healey, he knew, lived with his wife on a houseboat at Crawley’s landing. He did all sorts of odd jobs along the river.
“Come on, Charlie,” McVay said from the stern. “Let’s get it ashore.”
“You know who it is?” Oliver asked.
“Nope,” Healey said.
McVay said, taking another hitch on his line, “Fourth one this month, we are plain getting tired burying.”
“Wasn’t so bad last year.” Charlie spat yellow tobacco juice into the water.
“Christian thing to do, bury ’em,” McVay said to the boy. “You understand that? Most times we never seen them before. They come from up beyond.”
“As far as Pittsburgh?” Oliver asked.
“Maybe. Up a way, for sure, beyond where we know people.”
They pulled the skiff ashore. The body slid through the shallows, turning and twisting and making a little sucking sound over the mud bottom.
McVay said: “You sure are brave, most kids been long gone by now.”
“Take off,” Healey said. “You too god damn curious.”
“But I want to see,” Oliver said, “and it’s only a nigger.”
“It ain’t no nigger,” Charlie said. “That’s the way their skins look. Now get the hell out of here.”
Oliver didn’t move until Charlie Healey took a couple of steps toward him. Then he fled back into the willows. Charlie yelled after him: “You hang around and I’ll come get you! We’ll see how brave you are.”
Oliver hid in the yellow-green shade and thought about that. Then he turned around and trotted over the riverbank and down the road home. He had coal to carry, and kindling to split, and the cow to bring to his mother for milking. “Ma,” he said, “they just pulled a nigger out the river and they’re going to bury him.”
She shook her head. “Not a nigger. Now get along.” Years later he realized that if it had been a Negro, McVay and Healey would simply have towed the body out into the middle of the river, where the current ran fastest, and released it to travel farther downstream. They didn’t bother burying Ne
groes at all.
OLIVER SAW Charlie Healey again, months later, in November. He had delivered some of his mother’s pies to Anderson’s store, and he was warming by the stove, nibbling the parched crackers and corn kept in a pan on top, when Healey staggered in, blood caked and oozing from a cut on the back of his head. (Oliver immediately disappeared behind the molasses kegs.)
“Skillet did that.” Healey was laughing, but his lips were bluish white and William Anderson immediately began edging him toward the door. “Bitch caught me when I wasn’t looking.” Healey touched the back of his head, looked at his blood-smeared fingers, smelled them carefully. “Knocked her in the river,” he said and drifted out the store, forgetting what had brought him there. William Anderson stood in the doorway for a while, his breath rising straight up in the cold air, scratching under his chin where his beard always itched. “Dead drunk and mean,” he said softly to Oliver. “Kill you as soon as not in that mood, boy.” He walked to the back of the store and talked quietly to his son William, a big strapping sixteen-year-old. Young William put on his coat and his cap and his heavy boots, and went out, walking in his slow steady way, like his father, shoulders hunched a little against the cold.
“You going to see if he killed his old lady this time?” Oliver trotted along behind the broad muffled shape, not really expecting an answer. His feet thudded hard on the frozen ground, his ears began stinging with cold, his nose dripped down his lip and into his mouth.
The houseboat was in its usual place at the landing. There was a thin curl of smoke from the chimney, a skinny bone-like plume against the gray sky and the bare gray-brown willows. Inside, Oliver and William Anderson hesitated, surprised by the warm eye-twitching air. The odor of whiskey hung faintly in the room, mixing with the sour smell of the Ohio. Mrs. Healey sat in a kitchen chair, almost behind the stove.
William Anderson said: “My pa wondered how you were doing.”
The woman was dripping wet—he had indeed knocked her in the river. Water had run all the way across the cabin, forming puddles on the uneven floor.
“That river must be mighty cold,” William Anderson said politely. Mud from his heavy boots filtered into the big pool by the door, spreading yellow stain across the boards.
She was shaking all over, holding her jaw.
“You ought maybe to put on some dry clothes,” William Anderson said. When she still didn’t answer, he asked: “He bust your jaw?”
She kept both hands clamped to the left side of her face as she turned and looked at them—the hulking Anderson and the younger boy crouched behind him. She blinked, three, four times, focusing. “You come to see?” her voice was husky. “Bastard musta gone to town.”
“Pa wanted to see if you was all right.”
A tiny trickle of blood twisted from the corner of her mouth. “I shoulda killed him that first time, when I had a chance. Fish wouldn’t even touch him, and he’d had to float down to New Orleans.”
The boys backed out, bumping into each other, closing the door carefully behind them. The sun was almost gone and the air was colder than usual.
“I sure wouldn’t like to go in that river,” Oliver said.
William Anderson began his steady even walk. “Leastways he didn’t break her jaw.”
The boy was so surprised at being answered that he tripped over his own feet and almost fell. “You sure?”
“She’s talking too good. Didn’t you hear her?”
I am learning, Oliver thought, about the way things are. I am learning.
AT THIRTEEN HE DECIDED he’d learned enough. He was over six feet tall, very broad and muscular. He still went to school—his mother insisted—and he was beginning to feel restless and bored with the smooth fields, with the farm animals and the endless cycle of chores, with the constant talk of the river. The river was high, the river was low, the river was near flood. People even counted time by the river: old Mr. Anderson died at low water.
Oliver knew he had to leave Edwardsville, especially after that business with Jesse Harper. For no particular reason Oliver and three other boys waited for Jesse Harper one day after school, hidden behind a little rise in Mason’s apple orchard. They’d collected a small pile of stones there. When Jesse Harper walked past, as they knew he would, they waited until his back was toward them, and then they began throwing—slowly at first for accuracy, faster when he screamed. He ran and stumbled and rolled and crawled down the road away from them. They didn’t follow because there were men working in the fields just the other side of the orchard. Anyway, their stones were almost gone.
After Jesse Harper disappeared around the turn of the road, and only his whimpering drifted back on the late-afternoon air, the four boys walked up and down the road, looking at the blood spots in the dust. Oliver, luckiest of all, found a tooth, dust-covered but recognizable. The boys offered to trade him a knife for it, but he refused. “I’m going to put it on my watch chain.”
(And he did. He carried it in his pocket until, one day in Manila, he had it attached to a watch chain. He wore it for years, losing it finally somewhere in the German Solomon Islands. He was mate on an old sailing schooner, trading a little but mostly dealing in contract labor for the big copra plantations. And they’d had trouble. Natives, looking for heads, managed to slip on board one night. After the fight—the Portuguese trader was killed—when they were safely at sea again, Oliver realized that his watch was still in his pocket but his watch chain was gone. And what did a Solomon Islander make of an Ohio tooth set in gold? He probably hung it outside by his line of skulls. …)
When Oliver stood in the dusty Ohio road and listened to the fading screams, he felt a chill run through his body, all the way to the tips of his fingers. He almost stained his pants right then and there. The desire was so urgent that he barely had time to slip into the shadow of the orchard and relieve himself there. His whole stomach was burning and his hands were almost without control.
HE LEFT within the week. His mother did not argue. “Take care of yourself,” she said.
“I’ll send you some money, Ma.” He felt bad for an instant. She’d so very much wanted him to take up farming. “Then you can hire somebody to work the place.”
“You won’t have extra money soon. It isn’t that easy.”
“I will,” he said firmly. “I promise I will.”
He got a job on the only showboat that passed this stretch of river, and left it at Louisville. He stayed there for a year, working first as a pickpocket and then as a burglar. He was successful because he worked alone and because he had a red farm boy’s face, with shining black eyes and full cheeks. For safety, he decided to move on. He bought a train ticket to Chicago, because he was curious about that city. But he did so well on that train—an inattentive conductor, a sleeping drunk, a homosexual who paid for favors in advance, a foolish old woman with a roll of bills in her purse—Oliver jumped off the train when it slowed for an uneven stretch of track, and never got to Chicago at all. He went back to Edwardsville, to surprise his mother.
“You look thin,” she said. And: “How long will you be gone next time?”
“Longer.” He looked her directly in the eye, daring her to ask where the money came from. She did not. “Whenever I can, I will send you more, Ma.”
He was almost fifteen then. He took only enough money for his ticket, and left the rest with her. This time he went to Pittsburgh. Within a week he was living with a prostitute: his broad fresh face had attracted her, his ability in bed held her, his changing moods frightened her. He became her pimp; he added another girl, more to his taste, with red hair and a delicate figure; then still others. He managed them dispassionately, at times marking them with his fists, other times treating them like schoolgirls. He calculated his effects coolly. Sex itself meant little or nothing to him.
Only sometimes when he was methodically beating them, he found himself stirred. And then he would immediately stop, before he lost control.
He was seventeen when
he reached the West Coast. He’d decided to go to sea; he liked the vastness and the emptiness. For the next ten years he crisscrossed the Pacific, north and south, in every kind of ship, leaking old-fashioned schooners and new cargo steamers. At first he worked his way as seaman or cook; later he traveled as a passenger. He even became very selective, preferring freighters of over twenty-five hundred tons. He liked comfort. He wasn’t a young man looking for adventure; he was a businessman looking for opportunities. He dealt in everything that could be smuggled: quinine, opium, women, guns. He learned a smattering of Chinese— enough for his purposes. He acquired fluent Spanish and grew a mustache to look older. His face thinned out, but its high color remained. He had four or five different fevers; in the Malay Straits he even survived the blackwater. He grew more and more successful. He sent a quarter of his profits to his mother, he himself managed the rest from San Francisco. He gave her no advice—she needed none. She had bought two farms and was negotiating for a third. Her detailed letters amused him—she ran her affairs carefully and with great profit. He wondered what the people in Edwardsville thought of that.
When he was twenty-seven, he met Sara Chapman in San Francisco. He had handled a particularly large shipment of guns, and been paid in gold. But he had gotten careless in Mexico and was almost killed. He returned to San Francisco with a large, painful, slow-healing wound in his left side and a violent simmering anger at his own stupidity.
One morning he went into a pharmacy—he had developed a cough—saw a young woman with a starched white blouse and high-piled dark hair. He snapped out his order. She simply turned her back and began rearranging the lines of bottles. “Haven’t you got it?” She still did not answer, she did not appear to hear.
He stood for a moment chewing his lower lip, staring at the little scraggly curl that twisted down the back of her neck. “Your hair is coming down,” he said, hardly above a whisper.
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