Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  At last, I signaled to Caroline I was ready to go. To my shame, she had finished dressing at least ten minutes before me. Her knee-length white dress had bunched sleeves and a rectangle of blue-and-white English smocking across the bodice. She put her arm through mine, and we left the room together.

  “I could not have done this if RuthClaire had come,” she said.

  She was talking about spending the night with me in my former wife’s old house. It had seemed strange to me, too. Had RuthClaire accompanied Adam to Paradise Farm, I would have been no more able to share a bed with Caroline than Caroline with me. But my ex had not come to Beulah Fork. The very thought of a double funeral for her son and his murderer had appalled her. Therefore, she and Adam had had a private ceremony on Hurt Street. Afterward, she had flown to Charlotte to visit an octogenarian maiden aunt and to recuperate from an ordeal that would always haunt her. She was there now, boycotting Adam’s ostentatious show of generosity and forgiveness.

  In the back yard, Adam stood on the deck facing a crowd that pressed against the cedar platform and spread out into the pecan grove. In a grassy area cordoned off with red velvet ropes and brass posts, Caroline and I joined the Puddicombes. We stood right in front of the deck, and none of the Puddicombes looked at or spoke to us as we entered. I nodded at familiar faces outside the paddock, but to most of the mourners our arrival was a sign to shut up and stop jostling. Only the midges and a few frolicsome mockingbirds in the pecan trees refused to settle down.

  “Welcome to these sacred rites,” Adam said. Of all those present, only Caroline, Bilker, and I had ever heard him speak before, and the guttural aspect of his voice—its powerful growliness—seemed to startle some of those around us. Small as he was, Adam commanded attention. He had worn a silk top hat, a frock coat with tails, striped ambassadorial trousers, a white vest, a dove-gray tie, and spats. To his right was a pedestal draped with a piece of velvet reminiscent of the voodoo banners that David Blau had once shown in Abraxas. Atop the covered pedestal sat the burial urn containing Tiny Paul’s ashes. To Adam’s left, the bier upon which Craig Puddicombe’s casket rested. The casket also boasted a colorful, sequined banner. In the August sun, the sequins glittered like melting ice.

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” the habiline said. He gave everyone a painful grimace, almost a fear-grin. “For most of my last year in your strange country, it has worried me, the problem of what I am to you and how I must be standing spiritually in the scales of God. Longer, I will not worry. We all come from and go back to dust.”

  “Amen!” said Livia George behind us. She, Hazel Upchurch, and a small contingent of local blacks occupied an area between the trees and the sundeck.

  “My dead son had a soul, as did the young man who murdered him. And I, Adam Montaraz, citizen and exile, habiline and human, have a soul—as does the heartbroken mother of Craig Puddicombe. All God’s children, I say unto you, have souls.”

  “Praise the Lord,” said a man next to Hazel Upchurch.

  “All who suffer and know that they suffer, all who yearn for solace and know that they yearn, all who have heavenly expectations and know that they have them—all such, I emphatically say, have souls, for it is our souls that suffer, yearn, expect, and know, our souls that feel the pain, sorrow, and joys of each of these deeply feeling processes.”

  “Amen,” murmured many people approvingly.

  “My God,” I whispered, “he’s preaching a full-bore sermon.”

  Caroline shushed me.

  “The soul is what the body does, I say. It is also the perceptive self-knowledge of its doing what it does. Paulie, my dead son, was beginning to grow into such soulful awareness. His soul, I must tell you, was beginning to bloom. No one here today, I fear, can guess at the shape toward which it was tending, but in my heart—yes, my father’s proudness speaks now—I am almost sure it would have been beautiful, very beautiful.”

  “Praise God.”

  “The soul of Craig Puddicombe had already opened.” He gestured at the vevés-draped casket. “It had an unhappy shape because he was unhappy. He hated and knew that he hated. He killed and knew that he killed. He hurt and knew that he hurt. He knew that even by giving pieces of this hurt to others, he would never—not ever—uproot the hurt sickening him unto very death. His soul would never in this life acquire a happy spiritual handsomeness.”

  “Growing up, he was always a good boy!” shouted Craig Puddicombe’s mother. “His soul was as handsome as anybody’s!”

  This outburst embarrassed Mrs. Puddicombe. She folded her arms beneath her breasts and hunched her shoulders. Caroline reached as if to pat her on the arm, but the woman leaned into her father-in-law, a sickly man with glazed eyes, to avoid an outsider’s touch.

  “I am very sure that was so,” Adam told the woman, gazing at her with a puzzled expression. “He did as other children do, and his soul was what he did. Later, his doings—and thus his soul—fell under sway of older, more twisted souls, and so began to deform its youngling beauty toward these unhappy shapes. In children, my many friends from Beulah Fork, the soul is very plastic.”

  “The soul ain’t plastic, Mister Adam!” shouted a black man next to Livia George. Several people, including two devout fundamentalist whites, seconded this objection.

  “Never do I mean to imply the soul is what you would call, well, a synthetic polymer,” Adam said. “Please understand. The soul is immaterial. It has no location. But because it is what the body does and knows, it can be shaped. Metaphorically, I say. Likewise literally. All this, I have learned painfully in your great but strange country.”

  “The soul don’t have nothing to do with the body!” shouted Ruben Decker, my neighbor one farm to the south. “It’s spiritual and everlasting!” Adam, somewhat sadly, was shaking his head. Other people in the crowd, primarily men, loudly proclaimed both a rigorous body-soul dichotomy and the immortality of the soul in that transtemporal realm known as heaven. Their phraseology was country allegory—“The body die, but the soul rise up!” “Gonna live forever with Jesus!”—but the message, a kind of received Protestant consensus, set Adam back on his heels.

  My hands had begun to sweat. To Caroline, I whispered, “Can you believe this? A theological donnybrook in my own back yard.”

  Adam took off his top hat and peered into it as if searching for the proper reply to those whose ire he had aroused. As he readied to speak, the sounds of the rotary blades of a helicopter—thwup! thwup! thwup!—became audible over the treetops to the northeast. Then the copter’s wasplike body tilted into view. It swept over the highway, dropped toward my front lawn, and settled noisily to rest on the other side of the house. Three or four security guards went running that way with their pistols drawn, and many of the people facing the sundeck began pushing and side-stepping one another as if to follow the guards.

  Raising his hands, Adam called, “Please, everyone! Let the security persons do their work! No pretext here for rushings about and shovings!” These admonitions calmed many in the crowd, but the hubbub prompted by the helicopter’s arrival kept Adam from continuing the funeral rites. For reassurance, I took Caroline’s hand.

  Presently, an entourage of three men in expensive suits, flanked by guards, strode around my house’s corner. The leading figure in this procession was the Right Reverend Dwight “Happy” McElroy. With film-star winks, victorious-politico smiles, and aw-shucks-country-boy nods, he acknowledged the disbelieving delight of many of the mourners on hand. His son Duncan marched two or three steps behind him, while his other meticulously dressed lieutenant—a man with a blond flattop and a suspicious eye, the civilian equivalent of a Secret Service agent—stayed at McElroy’s elbow.

  McElroy escaped only by mounting the sundeck and walking toward Adam with his right hand extended. To cheers and applause, he and the habiline shook. My small friend appeared as perplexed as the tall evangelist looked amused and confident: Mutt and Jeff. The men were such physical contrasts that many people la
ughed.

  “What’s ‘Happy’ McElroy doing here?” the evangelist suddenly asked, as if about to launch his own homily. “Well, my son Duncan and I are just in from Louisiana, via Atlanta, to share the grief of two bereaved families; also, to honor Adam Montaraz for a saintly gesture worthy of Our Lord Himself. We could not stay away. Where the sorrow of others calls out for assuaging, there the ministry of Dwight McElroy, God’s consoling servant, must also be. Adam didn’t expressly invite us, no, but that’s because in his humility he feared to impose upon a man as busy about God’s undone work as I. His thoughtfulness is a light unto the nations.”

  “Amen!”

  “Tell it!”

  “But I come for another important reason, too, dear friends—to bring back to this noble man the bread that he and his equally noble wife cast upon the waters of faith, hoping thereby to save the life of the unbaptized infant whose ashes occupy this jar.” McElroy nodded at the urn. He withdrew from an inside jacket pocket (peacock-patterned silk) an official-looking envelope. “Duncan and I, not to mention my wife and Christ-proclaiming partner, Eugenia Lisbeth, are proud to return to the Montarazes the five thousand dollars that their son’s murderer extorted from them as an illicit ‘donation’ to the Greater Christian Constituency. Let no one say that ‘Happy’ McElroy accepted blood money—other than that consecrated in the blood of the Lamb—for God’s work. Let no one say that a life devoted to love chose to profit from the wages of bigotry and hate. Here, Adam, take this check, to put it to more fruitful work than it has thus far done.”

  A hush gripped the crowd. Even the mockingbirds had stopped calling and flitting about. McElroy’s offering—his refusal to profit by another’s misfortune—had paralyzed his sweating onlookers with holy wonder.

  Adam put his hands behind his back. “Thank you, but I cannot accept it.”

  McElroy beamed. “The saintliness of this man is going to be legendary,” he said, beginning to return the envelope to his jacket. “His very generosity cleanses this money of its taint. Cleansed, it can go to work for God. We’re blessed, my friends, to have among us in these evil days such a one.”

  Before the crowd could start amen-ing and hallelujah-ing, the mother of Craig Puddicombe spoke up: “That money ought to be guv to us. But for Craig, it wouldn’t’ve been made a donation at all.” She went to the front of the paddock and stuck her hand up at McElroy. “It’s ours by right. It ain’t any of the Greater Christian Constipuancy’s.”

  Everyone gawked, me with all the others, the evangelist and the habiline likewise visibly taken aback. The other Puddicombes, the woman’s in-laws and children, stumbled forward to uphold her demand.

  “Yes,” Adam finally managed. “Give it to her.”

  “But it’s made out to you,” McElroy said. “Not to this improvident person—who whelped the animal that killed your son and the frail woman that helped kidnap him.”

  Said Craig Puddicombe’s mother, “He had his bad pints, Craig did, but he never let no one stick his pitcher on a magazine ’thout his pants on. He never held up the poor for pennies on a TV church service.”

  Bilker Moody, slouching against a railing behind young Puddicombe’s casket, snickered.

  “Mrs. Puddicombe—” McElroy said, uncharacteristically at a loss for words.

  Said Adam, “I will, what do you call it, endorse? Yes, I will endorse for her the check you’ve brought.” He held out his hand to McElroy, who, as if drugged, passed the check over. Adam endorsed it with a borrowed pen and handed it to Mrs. Puddicombe, who folded it and slid it down the neck of her faded sun dress.

  “We’re awful hot,” she said. “You put Craig down decent, now. We’re gonna trust you to do it. Daddy’s too sick to stan’ and watch it. We’re goin’ on home.” With no more fuss, she led her family out of the roped paddock and around the house toward the distant front gate—five thousand dollars richer, beneficiary of a habiline saint.

  Caroline and I were now the only two people in the area set aside for Tiny Paul’s and Craig’s immediate families. I looked back to see if my neighbors were staring at us, only to catch a glimpse of Rudy Starnes, cameraman, and Brad Barrington, anchor-flake par excellence, sneaking through the crowd to record another event that was none of their business. They soon reached Livia George and her friends.

  Starnes videotaped the crowd, the sundeck, the departing Puddicombes. His sun-bronzed colleague held impromptu interviews with some of the startled people around him. When Barrington accosted Livia George with his mike, though, she shook her finger under his nose, but her apparent fear of further disrupting the ceremony made it hard to hear what she said. My attention shifted when McElroy began talking again:

  “Let’s pray for the immortal souls of these dead brothers, the murderer and his innocent victim,” he shouted, still recovering from the loss of his check. “The one seems hellbent by virtue of the virtues he sadly lacked, the other as a result of his parents’ failure to baptize him into the living community of Christ. And so, brothers and sisters, let’s pray for God’s great and redemptive mercy on their immortal souls. Bow your heads and observe with me a moment of loving, intercessory silence.”

  “Please leave this platform,” Adam said. “The usurping of my intention to preside does not become you.”

  McElroy replied, “Goodness, Adam, I’ve only come to help. You’re gettin’ sorta territorial about this, aren’t you?”

  “The soul,” Adam countered, “does not everlast. I am sorry to have to tell you so, but it is what its body did and also its unplaceable self-awareness of that doing. In death, Paulie and Craig are reconciled. Neither goes to hell, neither to heaven. The great pity I feel for them is my pity for the extinction of their souls, one before it could un-deform and one before it could bloom to beauty.”

  “Uh oh,” I said.

  “Soul is mind,” Adam said patiently. “Neither has location. Neither goes beyond the stoppage of body death except in the continued cherishing of the souls and minds that knew them. All of us have souls, as do I. Important, very important it is that all of us apprehend the other’s soul and value it as we do our own. That is why the ashes of my son I have brought to rest beside the body of his unhappy killer.”

  Rudy Starnes had been creeping slowly forward with his portable camera. Soon, he was shooting this scene from the southwestern corner of my sundeck. Barrington, his partner, had already escaped Livia George’s scolding to reach the same vantage and was leaning between two cedar railings to pick up the argument between Adam and McElroy with his hand-held microphone. I wanted to go after them, but Caroline stopped me.

  “Bastards think they’re getting a scoop.”

  “They are, Paul. Just forget it. Haven’t you been listening to Adam?”

  “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?”

  “Do unto others as they would be done by—insofar as it’s possible to know what they want and insofar as respect for your own sacred self permits you to do it.”

  “Is that what he said?”

  “Not in those words, no. In other words.”

  McElroy said, “The talk you’re talking, Adam, is devil’s talk.”

  “Maybe he’s a devil!” shouted a balding man with a string tie and acne-scarred jowls. I uncharitably identified him as a Puddicombe partisan, an unsheeted Klansman. It is possible that he was simply a Baptist.

  Adam had no care for the impact his words were making on people like the bald-headed man. “Craig Puddicombe and Tiny Paul live at this moment,” he explained, speaking to McElroy but loudly enough to be heard by all, “because in our respectful ceremony they even yet play with the living who care for them. They are playmates in the soulful system of our shared sorrow, our community remembering. In this way, they live, perfect elements of the ecology of our grief. So long as our self-knowing souls play with them in systems of heartbreak and memory, they live. They remain parts of a flowing system. Try hard as we might, none can fully comprehend such wholeness.
But that is okay, that is truly okay. It is only the healthy relationship of us, who live, to them, who have died, that gratifies and greatly blossoms meaning.”

  McElroy stared down at Adam like a schoolmaster eyeing a boy who has just wet his pants. “That’s very pretty, Adam. It’s also secular-humanistic buncombe.”

  “No!” Adam rejoined. “I spit on those who think they can know me by radiating my bones, weighing my brain, and seeing how many helical heredities I share with the orangutan. I spit on any such, but embrace those who seek to know me by embracing me, seeing my paintings, engaging me in furious Ping-Pong challenge, or praying beside me in midnights of mortal peril.”

  “‘Buncombe,’ ” said Mildred Garroway, an eighty-plus-year-old widow standing just outside our paddock. “‘Helical heredities.’ ” She smiled at Caroline. “Both those boys can talk, can’t they?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Caroline.

  Barrington, the Contact Cable News reporter, had climbed onto my sundeck, near Craig’s casket. Bilker, seeing him, stepped toward the man, but Barrington had already reached across the bier to shove his microphone into Adam’s face.

  “Repeat for our viewers what you’ve just said,” he demanded while Rudy Starnes, hunched below the platform, continued to video-tape.

  Swiftly breaking in, Bilker slapped the reporter’s mike into the crowd. Several people gasped. McElroy, a more prescient interpreter of danger signals than Barrington, cringed away from this blow and left the deck by the stairway he had earlier mounted. Then he, his son, and their bodyguard retreated around the corner of my house. During their strategic withdrawal, Bilker shook the Contact Cable newsman.