Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  “Your ass is grass, fella.”

  “What was that?” Miss Mildred asked Caroline. “What did he say?”

  “Let him go,” Adam commanded Bilker. “No hair on his head should you even breathe on.” He dropped his top hat and began to remove his coat. “No more memory rite today,” he told the rest of the mourners in the pecan grove. “You are everybody free to go now. If you stay, I must warn you, you may turn out to act unhappily in something for which you did not bargain.” He folded his coat and placed it on the casket. “Very sorry that bad behavior of Mr. McElroy should prove so deadly to the graceful remembering planned by me for this double funeral.”

  “What about the buttin’ in of that fella there?” Livia George shouted, waving her liver-colored palm at Barrington.

  “Him, too,” Adam agreed. “Now, everybody, please go.”

  I asked Caroline to see Miss Mildred safely to the front gate, where she would have no doubt parked the monstrous Lincoln Continental that her failing eyesight had not yet convinced her to give up driving. Reluctantly, then, the mourners began to straggle along in Caroline and Miss Mildred’s wake, a process not unaccompanied by peeved looks and audible grumbling. Starnes, the cameraman, recorded this withdrawal from my back yard, but not without several glances away from the viewfinder to note how inexorably it was leaving him and Barrington beached on a hostile shore. At last he stopped taping altogether.

  Adam had removed his tie and vest. He started to unbutton his shirt. “Once, you barged onto Paradise Farm to film my son’s birth,” he told Barrington. “Today you have barged again, to make unauthorized tape of his burial. True?” He dropped his shirt on the cedar planking.

  “It’s our job,” Barrington said. “Getting the news.”

  “A sleazy tactic, such sneakery. Do you remember, Brad Barrington, how such provocation stirred me in December?”

  “Just let us get our stuff together and we’ll go, Mr. Montaraz.”

  Adam, hopping on one foot and then the other, yanked off his shoes. Then he shed his striped ambassadorial trousers. As naked as the day he’d first come to Paradise Farm, he crouched and gave the reporter an alarming threat-grin. Barrington turned, vaulted the deck rail, and landed on the grass beside his cameraman. With no apparent regard for what might become of Starnes, he sprinted through the pecan grove toward Cleve Snyder’s property. Adam jumped to the top of the deck rail, sprang forward ten or twelve feet, and ran Barrington to ground almost effortlessly. He toppled the reporter by leaping on his back, wrapping his legs around the man’s midriff, and applying a half nelson to the nape of his neck. The newsman staggered and fell. A squirrel scampered off through the grass, and the full-throated snarling of the habiline soon had the terrified Brad Barrington crying for mercy.

  Bilker came down from the deck, disengaged Starnes from his camera, and threw it against the nearest tree trunk. Its casing shattered, and the sound of its impact echoed away through the pecan grove. “No sweat,” Starnes said, lifting his hands. “I ain’t gonna get testy with you, man. Ain’t my way.”

  I hurried out of the paddock to make sure Adam didn’t kill Barrington. Squatting beside the two wrestling men, I tried to grip Adam by the shoulders and pull him away. But where Adam was one moment, Barrington was the next, and their ever-revolving entanglement stymied my efforts to play peacemaker.

  Soon, though, I realized Adam was mauling his enemy with saliva and sudden unpredictable shifts of weight. Barrington would be black and blue for a couple of weeks, but he’d survive this noisy struggle—just as he’d survived the one in December. That he had doubts on this score perfectly suited Adam’s purpose. Finally, Barrington curled in upon himself like a fetus, whimpering, and Adam rolled clear of the man.

  “Can’t say that I blame you,” I told Adam, above his victim’s caterwauling, “but you’ve used this poor jerk for a scapegoat. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I am not a God-damnable saint,” Adam growled. “I am only human.”

  He got up and strode toward the house, his swarthy buttocks moving in elegant synchrony, the muscles in his back agleam. “I am only human.” This admission rang in my ears with the unmistakable tenor of bitterness and regret. “I am only human.” An odd feeling came over me. It pained him that he was one of us.

  I found myself patting Brad Barrington’s shoulder. “It’s okay, fella. Listen, it’s okay.” But I really had no idea what I was saying.

  On Thursday morning, Adam, Caroline, and I attended Nancy Teavers’s funeral at the First Baptist Church in Beulah Fork. It was not as well attended as the fiasco at Paradise Farm, but the pastor eulogized Nancy in a way that actually enabled me to call up her face—not the wan, black-eyed visage of the murder victim in the orangutan costume, but the lively, often mystified features of the young woman who had worked for me at the West Bank. The organ played, and people cried. I wasn’t one of them, though. It was hot, and I was numb.

  Craig and Tiny Paul were decently buried. During the relative cool of twilight, long after the inconclusive rites of Wednesday afternoon, we had laid them to rest. Bilker and five members of our security force had played pallbearer for the casket, while Adam had marched behind them with the burial urn in his arms. Both the casket and the urn had gone into the ground in a lovely section of the pecan grove bordering Ruben Decker’s farm. Nancy, of course, was buried next to E. L.’s grave in the cemetery near the school, and it finally seemed that we had all reached a place in our lives where, radically transfigured, we could begin again.

  RuthClaire was still in North Carolina and would stay there through the weekend. She and Adam had talked last night on the telephone, but what they had said to each other—how they’d resolved or failed to resolve their quarrel over the double funeral—only they knew. RuthClaire had not asked to speak to Caroline, and Adam was saying nothing about the present state of their relationship. Still, his silence and his listlessness suggested a debilitating melancholy.

  Back from Nancy’s funeral, Adam asked me to drive him to the abandoned brick kilns where the young woman’s husband had died. “Why?” I asked him.

  “I wish to meditate. And to fast.”

  Caroline said, “Couldn’t you do that here?”

  “It requires, I think, solitude. And a chance to feel the earth enfolding me as it enfolds my son.”

  “But the brick kilns?”

  Adam insisted. We could not argue him out of his desire to visit that forbidding place. Finally, Caroline and I drove him there by a county-maintained road. While we sat in the car, he walked along the lips of the crumbling vats. Blackberry vines and poke weed filigreed the red-clay mounds into which these shafts descended, and mockingbirds warbled dark songs. At one opening, Adam knelt and peered downward. Then he eased a leg over and lowered himself into the vat.

  I shouted his name.

  “Come back for me Sunday morning,” he called. “Until then, never worry.”

  “Sunday morning?”

  “It is fine, Mister Paul. It is what I need. Water aplenty down there, and in three days no habiline has ever hungered to death.”

  “Caroline, tell him to come back to his senses.”

  “There’s nothing I can do. He’s made up his mind.”

  And so he went down, stayed in the depths of those bottomless kilns until Sunday morning, and greeted us then with a song that spiraled up like a chant through the frozen prayer of a cathedral. Then he emerged into the sunlight physically weaker but spiritually fortified. That afternoon, Caroline drove him back to Atlanta, where he was reunited with RuthClaire on Hurt Street.

  And I?

  From my position as restaurant owner, gentleman farmer, bachelor, and pagan, I contemplated these matters and decided it was time for me to become . . . something else, something new, something other.

  PART THREE:

  Heritor’s Home

  Montaraz Island, Haiti

  On the first anniversary of Tiny Paul’s birth, Caroline and I were married
in Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church on the Emory University campus. Over the autumn, I had prepared for this event by divesting myself of both Paradise Farm and the West Bank. My house and grounds (excluding only the burial plot near Ruben Decker’s place) I sold to a pecan-growing cooperative based in Americus, Georgia.

  The restaurant, of course, went to Livia George. With a lawyer’s help, I arranged to receive a small percentage of her monthly profit for the next ten years, but conveyed full title to her and dissociated myself from the West Bank’s operation. If Livia George contracted any debts, a possibility that her experience and managerial skills greatly minimized, I had no responsibility for them. I wanted only to be free of Beulah Fork, its people, and my past there.

  RuthClaire and Adam did not attend the wedding. In September, they had moved out of their house on Hurt Street to begin a month-long tour of England and mainland Europe. From October through December, they lived on a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. Both were working, but no specimen of their art or word of its character got back to the States. By the middle of January, they had returned to the Western Hemisphere, as a postcard from Mexico City attested. By late February, as another hasty card told us, they were living in a stucco beach cottage near Rutherford’s Port on the island of Montaraz, Adam’s birthplace. Neither Caroline nor I knew what to make of this last development, which took us wholly by surprise.

  For a while, I had toyed with the idea of opening a restaurant in Atlanta. I dropped it not only because the city has eating places the way the Sahara has sand, but also because I was tired of the restrictive lifestyle. I had kept the West Bank going for nearly ten years, and the thought of resurrecting that routine for another decade turned my brains to tepid Creole gumbo. So, with David Blau’s consent and encouragement, I approached several of the artists at Abraxas to offer my services as business manager and artist’s representative. Six of these young people accepted, and I recruited other clients from Atlanta’s talented art students and independent craftspeople. By building rapport with art dealers, gallery directors, museum curators, and department-store buyers (ordinarily, a casual reference to my past association with RuthClaire turned doubtful frowns to expectant smiles), I was soon earning money for my clients. Although I had a small office near Emory Village, I liked my new work primarily because I was not shackled to a desk.

  Caroline continued to teach her classes and to conduct periodic interviews with the Cuban refugees still in detention in Atlanta’s aging federal prison. Like an armada of doomed mariners sailing toward the edge of the world, the Freedom Flotilla of 1980 kept receding into the past; and most of the prison’s current detainees had paperwork identifying them as hard-core criminals. Caroline had no wish to put these people out on the streets, but the cases of three or four young men deeply troubled her. She saw these prisoners as captives of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy and feared they would remain wards of the state forever.

  Our marriage was working. Caroline never scolded me for letting the dental floss slip down into its plastic container, although I did that a lot. More important, neither of us currently wanted children. Later, T. P. having softened my objection to parenthood, we might consider adoption, but not now. There was too much to learn about each other and too much to do. We were learning. We were doing.

  Montaraz is a Spanish word meaning wild, primitive, or uncivilized. As a masculine noun, it means forester. On the island by that name (a hand-shaped volcanic jut occupying about twenty-eight square miles in Manzanillo Bay), coffee plantations now compose the bulk of its accessible “forest.” A backpacker avoiding these industry-owned plantations might stumble upon a stand of mahogany or rosewood, but, for the most part, the island’s poor people have denuded the slopes to plant subsistence crops like cassava, yams, and beans. Today, then, a resident of Montaraz might fairly be called a farmer or a coffee-company employee, but none warrants the name of forester. A few who scrounge livings from neither private land nor industry jobs, however, do warrant labels such as wild and uncivilized, and many of these few included—at least until the early 1960s—the retiring descendants of the habiline slaves whom Louis Rutherford brought to Montaraz from Zanzibar in 1838. But their history is obscure, and many people alive today on Montaraz do not believe in them at all.

  Most of the island’s population lives in the only noteworthy town, Rutherford’s Port, or in various fishing villages or tourist resorts along the many miles of twisty coast. In terms of health and economics, the native human population may be slightly better off than their counterparts on Haiti proper, but that assertion invites debate. Even a poverty-level citizen of Atlanta would incur envy in the waste archipelago of “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s rule.

  Until 1822, Montaraz had belonged to Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic), but with Jean-Pierre Boyer’s subjugation of the Spanish-speaking sections of Hispaniola in that year, it became the property of Haiti. The Dominicans expelled the Haitians from their country in 1844, but by this time Louis Rutherford, an eminent American citizen, had acquired Montaraz by outright purchase. Therefore, although equidistant between Haiti and Santo Domingo, it was legally (albeit quite irregularly) another Caribbean territory of the United States. Rutherford died during the Dominican uprising against the Haitians, and followers of Pedro Santana quickly reclaimed the island as their own. Rutherford’s widow and grown sons protested to the new Democratic administration of James K. Polk, who had campaigned as an ardent expansionist, and Polk threatened the Dominicans with an invasion of marines. Judiciously, the Dominicans heeded the threat.

  For another thirty years, then, the heirs of the late U.S. ambassador to Haiti ruled like kings on Montaraz. In 1874, however, Peter Martin Rutherford, the oldest grandson of the clan’s patriarch, negotiated an agreement with President Nissage Saget returning the island to Haitian sovereignty. This agreement gave the Rutherfords two important guarantees: (1) nonrescindable ownership of an estate occupying one fifth of the island, and (2) nonrevocable use of the English name Rutherford’s Port for the island’s only real town. Saget was able to conclude this agreement, where other Haitian leaders, notably Faustin Soulouque, had failed, because he was a sensible man with no major vices or reason-crippling ambitions. Peter Martin Rutherford liked him. The transfer was a fait accompli before the Dominicans had time to register the fact, and Montaraz has remained an unquestioned part of Haiti’s political sphere until the present day.

  Montaraz appears on very few maps of the Caribbean. Early maps by Spanish cartographers feature it clearly enough, but maps drawn and printed during the twenty-year dictatorship of Boyer omit it completely. Although inescapable common knowledge to locals, the island’s presence in Manzanillo Bay remained obscure to outsiders through the 1870s because the Rutherfords did not wish to advertise it. After the negotiated Haitian takeover, however, Saget and his successors discouraged its appearance on maps as a peculiar kind of sop to Dominican pride. The Haitians apparently believed that if both sides pretended that Montaraz wasn’t there, their Spanish-speaking neighbors would shelve any strategies to reconquer it. You can’t plant a flag on invisible real estate. That the island was visible from the mid-northern coast of Hispaniola, if not on maps, both sides contentedly ignored.

  Few Americans—few civilized people anywhere—had heard of Montaraz until Brian Nollinger broke the story of Adam’s presence on Paradise Farm to a reporter from the Atlanta Constitution. The notion that a habiline remnant might yet exist on the little island sent media people, anthropologists, professional adventurers, and scam artists scurrying for permission to visit Montaraz. Although American and Canadian citizens do not need passports to go to Haiti for thirty days or fewer, the Duvalier government—abetted by the Austin-Antilles Corporation, the licensed proprietor of most of the country’s coffee plantations—restricts travel to Montaraz to those who have made special application. In the wake of the story headlined REKNOWNED BEULAH FORK ARTIST / HARBORING PREHISTORIC HUMAN, these applications began arriving in Port-au-Pr
ince by the bagful.

  Very little came of this goal-oriented flurry of tourism, however, because the first eager visitors to Montaraz could find no habilines. They found blacks, mulattos, Spanish-Arawak survivors, jaded white Europeans, and affluent Japanese in polite, businesslike tour groups. They even found a puzzled party of middle-aged Kansans wearing Bermuda shorts, Italian sandals, and jaunty straw hats with green plastic visors. What they could not find, no matter how hard they searched, was anything remotely resembling a habiline. By this time, the government had placed a moratorium on issuing visitor permits to Montaraz, and word of the first arrivals’ lack of success began to migrate stateside. When Alistair Patrick Blair published his paper in Nature debunking Nollinger’s extravagant tale, interest in locating Adam’s relatives waned markedly. Pretty soon, applications to the Haitian Ministry of Tourism for special permits dwindled to the previous steady, but modest, level.

  After the deluge, silence. More or less.

  Anthropologists who accepted Dr. Nollinger’s contention that Adam was a living representative of Homo habilis, a manlike species presumed extinct for two million years, argued either that the Rutherford Remnant on Montaraz had been absorbed into the general population or that anti-Duvalier gunrunners and revolutionaries had press-ganged the habilines into service and scattered them across the Caribbean. (Anthropologists supporting Brian Nollinger, by the way, could be counted on one hand; the popular press canonized them as flamboyant idiot savants, good for human-interest copy but not for any reliable word on Adam’s origins.) Scientists opposed to Nollinger’s point of view declared that RuthClaire’s unusual husband was a small black man with certain archaic bone structures for which the processes of genetic atavism could easily account. No one could find other “habilines” on Montaraz because there were none. Adam was unique in many respects, but he did not depart so drastically from the human “norm,” whatever that might be, to require Linnaean pigeonholing as a protohuman. Besides, his intellectual capacity—his development of art, language, and a personal metaphysics—made nonsense of the idea that he was an evolutionary primitive.