Ancient of Days (8 page)

“He’s as black as Hershey’s syrup,” I conceded.

“Do
you
think we’re descended from Adam, Paul? RuthClaire’s Adam, I mean.”

“Not Adam personally. Prehistoric hominids like him, maybe. Adam’s a kind of hominid coelacanth.” I explained that a coelacanth was an ancient fish known only in fossil form and presumed extinct until a specimen was taken from waters off South Africa in 1938. That particular fish had been five feet long. Adam, on the other hand, was about six inches shy of five feet. Therefore, I did not think it absolutely impossible for a retiring, intelligent creature of Adam’s general dimensions to elude the scrutiny of
Homo sapiens sapiens
for the past few thousand years of recorded human history. Of course, I also believed in the Sasquatch and the yeti. . . .

“That’s a funny idea, Paul—all of us comin’ from creatures two thirds our size and black as Hershey’s syrup.”

“Don’t run for office on it.”

Ben wiped his brow with a glistening forearm. “How does RuthClaire, uh, look upon Adam?” He feared that he had violated propriety. “I mean, does she see him as a brother? Some folks say she treats him like a house nigger from plantation days—which I can’t believe of her, not under no circumstances—and others say he’s more like a two-legged poodle gettin’ the favorite-pet treatment from its lady. I ask because I’m not sure how I’d greet the little fella if he was to walk in here tomorrow.”

“I think she treats him like a houseguest, Ben.” (I
hope
that’s how she treats him, I thought. The ubiquitous spokesman for the Greater Christian Constituency of America, Inc., had planted a nefarious doubt in my mind.)

Ben Sadler grunted conditional agreement, and I toted my clean tablecloths back across the street to the restaurant.

That evening, a Saturday, the West Bank was packed. Molly Kingsbury was hostessing, Livia George and Hazel were on duty in the kitchen, and two college kids from Tocqueville were waiting tables. I roamed from corner to corner giving assistance wherever needed, functioning not only as greeter, maître d’, and wine steward, but also as busboy, cashier, and commander in chef (ha ha).

My regular patrons demand personal attention—from me, not staff members: a squib of gossip, a silly joke, occasionally a free appetizer or dessert. I try to oblige most of these demands. But this Saturday I was having trouble balancing hospitality and hustle. Although grateful for the crowd, by nine o’clock I was growling at my college kids and nodding perfunctorily at even my most stalwart customers. The muggy summer dusk and the heat from my kitchen had pretty much neutralized the efforts of my ceiling fan and my one laboring air conditioner. In my Haggar slacks and lemon-colored Izod shirt, I was sweating just like Ben Sadler in the Greyhound Depot Laundry.

The door opened. Two teenage boys in jeans, T-shirts, and perforated baseball caps strolled in. Even in the evening, the West Bank did not require coats and ties of its male clientele (shoot,
I
often worked in the kitchen in shorts and sneakers), but something about these two—Craig Puddicombe and E. L. Teavers—made my teeth grind. I could have seen them in their string-tie Sunday best (as I sometimes did) without feeling any more kindly toward them, and tonight their flat blue eyes and sweat-curled sideburns incited only my annoyance. For one thing, they had left the door open. For another, I had no table for them. What were they doing here? They usually ate at the Deep South Truck Stop on the road to Tocqueville.

“Shut the door,” I told Craig Puddicombe, tonging ice into somebody’s water glass. “You’re letting in insects.”

Craig shut the door as if it were a pane of wraparound glass on an antique china cabinet. E. L. took off his hat. They stood on my interior threshold staring at the art on the walls and the open umbrellas suspended from the ceiling as atmosphere-evoking ornament. They either could not or would not look at the people eating. I approached them because Molly Kingsbury clearly did not want to.

“You don’t have reservations,” I told Puddicombe. “It’s going to be another fifteen or twenty minutes before we can seat you.”

Craig looked at me without quite looking. “That’s okay. You got a minute?”

“Only if it lasts about twelve seconds.”

“We just want to talk to you a bit,” E. L. Teavers said, almost ingratiatingly. “We think your rights are being violated.”

Craig Puddicombe added, “More than your rights, maybe.”

“Fellas,” I said, indicating the crowd, “don’t choose a battle zone for a friendly little chat about human rights.”

“It was now, Mr. Loyd, because we happened to be ridin’ by,” Craig said. “For something this important, hey, you can spare a minute.”

Before I could dispute this point, E. L. Teavers, surveying the interior, said, “My mother remembers when this was Dr. Kearby’s office. This was the waitin’ room, out here. Whites sat over here, the others over that way. People came out of the examination room painted with a purple medicine Dr. Kearby liked to daub around.”

“Gentian violet,” I told him, exasperated. “It’s a bactericide. Quick, now, as quickly as you can, tell me how my rights are being violated.”

“Your wife—” Craig Puddicombe began.

“My ex-wife,” I said.

“Okay, your ex-wife. She’s got a hibber livin’ with her on premises that used to belong to you, Mr. Loyd. How do you feel about that?”

“A what living with her?”

“Hibber,” E. L. Teavers enunciated, lowering his voice. “It’s a word I invented. Anyone can say it, but I invented it. It means habiline nigger, see?”

“Clever. You must be the one who was graduated from high school. Craig just went for gym class and shop.”

“I’ve got a diploma too, Mr. Loyd. Our intelligence ain’t the issue, it’s the violation of your rights as a white person, not to mention our traditional community standards. You follow all this, don’t you?”

“You’re not speaking for the community. You’re speaking for Craig Puddicombe, teenage redneck.”

“He’s speakin’ for more than that.” E. L. smiled boyishly. The boyishness of this smile somehow heightened its menace.

“We just dropped in to
help
you, Mr. Loyd. We’re not bigots. You’re a bigger bigot than E. L. or me ’cause you look down on your own kind who ain’t got as much as you do or who ain’t been to school as long. That’s bigotry, Mr. Loyd.”

“I’m busy.” I turned to take care of my customers.

E. L. Teavers grabbed my elbow—with an amiable deference at odds with the force of his grip. I could not shake him off because of the water pitcher in my hand. He had not stopped smiling his choirboy smile, and I found myself wanting to hear whatever he had to say next, no matter how addlepated or paranoiac.

“There’s a hibber—a lousy subhuman—inheritin’ to stuff that doesn’t, that shouldn’t, belong to it. Since it used to be your stuff—your house, your land, your wife—we thought you’d like to know there’s people in and around Beulah Fork who appreciate other hardworkin’ folks and who try to keep an eye out for their rights.”

“Craig and you?” Since finishing at Hothlepoya High last June, I reflected, they had been working full time at United Piedmont Mills on the outskirts of Tocqueville. In fact, E. L. was married to a girl who had waitressed for me briefly. “Knowing that, fellas, has just about made my day. I feel infinitely more secure.”

“You never went to school with hibbers,” Craig Puddicombe said. “You’ve never had to be anything but their boss.”

“Now you’ve got a prehistoric hibber gettin’ it on with your wife.”

“My ex-wife,” I said automatically.

“Yeah,” said E. L. Teavers. “Like you say.” He took a creased business card from his hip pocket and handed it to me. “This is the help you can count on if it begins to seem unfair to you. If it begins to, you know, make you angry.” He opened the restaurant door on the muggy July night. “Better am-scray, Craig, so’s Mr. Loyd can get back to feeding his bigwigs.”

They were gone.

I wandered to the service niche beside the kitchen and set down the water pitcher. I read the business card young Teavers had given me. Then I tore it lengthwise, collated the pieces, and tore them again—right down the middle. Ordinarily quite dependable, in this instance my memory fails me. All I can recall is the gist of the message on the card. But to preserve the fiction of my infallibility as narrator I will give here a reasonable
facsimile
of the message on that small, grimy document:

E(lvis) L(amar) Teavers

Zealous High Zygote

KuKlos Klan—Kudzu Klavern

Box 666

Beulah Fork, Georgia

Business had slackened noticeably by ten. At eleven we closed. I stayed in the kitchen after Hazel and Livia George had left to prepare my desserts for Sunday: a German chocolate cake, a carrot cake, and a strawberry icebox pie. The work—the attention to ingredients, measures, and mixing or baking times—kept my mind off the visit by the boys. In fact, I was striving purposefully not to think about it: a strategy that fell apart as soon as I went upstairs to my stuffy converted storage room.

E. L. Teavers, a bright kid from a respectable lower-middle-class home, was a member of the Klan. Not merely a member, but an officer of a piddling local chapter of one of its semiautonomous splinter groups. What had the card said? Zealous High Zygote? Terrific Vice Tycoon? Puissant Grand Poltroon? Something rhetorically cyclopean or cyclonic. The title did not matter. What mattered was that this able-bodied, mentally keen young man, along with his somewhat less astute buddy, had kept abreast of the situation at Paradise Farm and regarded it as an affront to all the values he had been taught as a child. That was scary. I was frightened for RuthClaire, and I was frightened for myself for having rebuffed the High Zygote’s offer to help.

What kind of “help” did he and Craig have in mind? Some sort of house-cleaning operation? A petition campaign? A nightriding incident? An appeal to other Klan organizations for reinforcements?

In all my forty-six years, I’d never come face to face with a danger of this precise human sort, and I found it hard to believe that it had descended upon me—upon RuthClaire, Adam, and Beulah Fork—in the form of two acne-scarred bucks whom, only a season or two ago, I had seen playing (poor) high school football. It was like finding a scorpion in a familiar potted geranium. It was worse than the pious verbal assaults of a dozen different fundamentalist ministers and far, far worse than the frustrated carping of Brian Nollinger in Atlanta. As for those anonymous souls who had actually leaped the barricades at Paradise Farm, they were mere sportive shadows, easily routed by light and the echoing reports of my old .22.

That’s the problem, I thought. How do you immunize yourself against the evil in the unprepossessing face of a neighbor?

Despite the hour—lately, it was always “despite the hour”—I telephoned RuthClaire. She was slow picking up, but she did not rebuke me for calling. I told her about the teen Ku Klutz Klanners who’d pickpocketed my peace of mind.

“Elvis Teavers?” RuthClaire asked. “Craig Puddicombe?”

“Maybe I should report this to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, huh? Sometimes I get GBI agents in the West Bank. Usually they’re dressed like hippies pretending to be potheads. I could put those guys on to the Zealous High Zygote and his string-along lieutenant gamete—just for safety’s sake.”

“Klanners?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“Were they wearing sheets?” Hearing my put-upon sigh, RuthClaire withdrew the question. “No, Paul, don’t sic anybody on them. Let’s not provoke them any further than they’ve already been provoked. Besides, I’m safe enough out here. Or so I like to think. Do you know what’s funny?”

“Not at this hour, no.”

“The day before yesterday I got a call from a representative of a group called RAJA—Racial Amity and Justice in America. It’s a black organization headquartered in Baltimore. The caller wouldn’t tell me how he’d managed to get my unlisted number, just that he’d managed. He hoped I’d answer a few questions.”

“Did you?”

“What else could an art-school liberal from Charlotte do?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“He had a copy of Nollinger’s article in
Atlanta Fortnightly
. He wanted to know if I had enslaved Adam, if I had Adam doing menial tasks against his inclination or will. It sounded as if he had the questions written down on a notepad and was ticking them off each time he asked one and got an answer. I kept saying ‘No.’ They were that sort of question. The last one asked if I would allow an on-sight inspection to verify my denials and to ascertain the mental and emotional health of my guest. I said ‘No’ to that one, too. ‘In that case,’ the RAJA man said, ‘get set for more phone calls and a racial solidarity march right in front of your sacred Paradise Farm.’ And then he hung up. When the phone rang just now, Paul, I was a little afraid it was him again.”

“Nope,” I said glumly, “just me.”

“I’m catching it from all sides.” The receiver clunked as RuthClaire apparently shifted hands. “You see, Paul, I’ve offended the scientific establishment by refusing to let their high priests examine Adam, and I’ve offended organized religion by trying to make a comfortable home for him. Now, I’ve got Klansmen coming at me from another direction and civil rights advocates from yet another. I’m at the center of a collapsing compass rose waiting for the direction points to impale me. That’s pretty funny, isn’t it? There’s no way for me to escape. I’m everybody’s enemy.”

“The public still loves you. Just ask AmeriCred.”

“That’s a consolation—but kind of a cold one, tonight.”

“Hey, you’re selling more platters than a Rolling Stone. Pretty soon you’ll go platinum. Cheer up, Ruthie Cee.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t sound all that cheery yourself.”

She was right. I didn’t. The scare inflicted upon me by Teavers and Puddicombe had worn off a little, but in its place was nervousness, an empty energy, an icy spiritual dynamo that spun paralyzing chills down my spine to the very tip of my vestigial tailbone. Even in the oven of the storage room, I was cold. RuthClaire and I were linked in a strange way by our private chills. Each of us seemed to wait for the other to speak.