Ancient of Days (12 page)

RuthClaire vetoed this idea. Nollinger must sit in the other car while the agent who’d driven him out here took Adam’s role. Niedrach accepted the substitution, and under a cloud cover fissuring like the crust of an oven-bound blueberry pie, we rehearsed in minute detail what had already happened. “Teavers” and “Adam” were careful not to get too near the open vat, but RuthClaire began quietly crying, anyway. She shook off Niedrach’s offer of a break or a postponement, and we concluded the exercise in twenty minutes, with pauses for photographs and ratiocinative conjecture. Sunshine, suddenly, lay on the wet red clay like a coat of shellac. We milled around, unwilling to leave. The spot had a queer attraction, like a graveyard or the ruins of a Roman aqueduct.

Then, from some distance off, we heard a wordless crooning, a cappella. The melody was that of a church hymn, one I remembered from long-ago Sundays wedged in a Congregationalist pew between my mother and an older brother with a case of fidgets as acute as my own: “This Is My Father’s World.” The crooning had a reverberant quality that sent chills through my system—in spite of the stifling July mugginess. RuthClaire, Nollinger, the GBI agents, and I froze in our places. Bewildered, we looked from face to face. The crooning ceased, giving way to a half dozen or more sharp expulsions of breath, then resumed again with an eeriness that unnerved me.

“
Adam
!” RuthClaire cried. She ran to the top of the mound. “Adam, we’re here!”

“Watch it!” Niedrach cautioned her.

The crooning stopped. Everyone waited. A sound like pebbles falling down a well. Another series of high-pitched grunts and wheezes. And then, six or seven mounds away, above the rim of the vat piercing that little hill to an unknowable depth, Adam’s head appeared! A gash gleamed on his hint of sagittal crest. His bottom lip protruded like a semicircular slice of eggplant. Numerous nicks and punctures marked him.

A beat. Two beats.

Adam’s head popped out of view again.

“
Adam
!” RuthClaire wailed.

Descending the first mound, she ran on tip-toes toward the one concealing her husband. But Adam pulled himself out of the ground before she could reach it. He was wearing, as everyone could now see, the shiny purple robe in which E. L. Teavers had plunged to his death. It hung on Adam’s wiry body in crimps and volutes. It fit him no better than a jousting-tournament tent, but shone with a monarchical fire, torn and sodden as it was. At the bottom of the interconnected vats, he had no doubt put on the robe to keep warm during the rain and darkness, but now seemed to wear it as a concession to West Georgia mores. He had the look of a sewer rat emerging from its chthonic habitations: the King of the Sewer Rats.

RuthClaire hugged him. He returned the embrace, and Nollinger, the GBI agents, and I saw nothing of him but his black, bleeding hands patting RuthClaire consolingly in the small of her back.

“It’s not so surprising he got out,” Nollinger said sotto voce, addressing me sidelong. “His ancestors—the ones the Kikembu warriors sold to Sayyid Sa’īd’s agents in Bravanumbi—well, they lived in caves in the Lolitabu Hills. That’s how they stayed hidden from modern man for so many thousands of years. Adam may have grown up on Montaraz, Louis Rutherford’s little island off Hispaniola, but he clearly retained some of the subterranean instincts acquired by his latter-day habiline forebears in East Africa. I mean, how many of us denatured
Homo sapiens
could have survived an ordeal so—”

“Why don’t you just shut up?” I said.

Nollinger shrugged and fell silent, rocking contentedly in his boots, hands in pockets. My initial joy at Adam’s return from the dead had gone off its groove, like a stereo stylus that refuses to track. My rival had reappeared.

And my rival triumphed utterly. Not long after the episode with the Zealous High Zygote & Co., RuthClaire sold Paradise Farm back to me and moved to Atlanta. Although convinced that most of her neighbors did not share the extremist sentiments of the Klan, she no longer felt comfortable in Hothlepoya County. Also, she wished to establish closer contacts with the galleries exhibiting her work or making offers to exhibit it, and the rural life-style no longer suited. As for Adam, he adapted to an urban environment as quickly as he had adapted to the bucolic delights of Paradise Farm, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service ceased trying to deport him to the Caribbean.

Adam painted. RuthClaire taught him. His paintings, true novelties, sold for almost as much as her own paintings of similar size. Two of Adam’s works—colorful pieces of habiline expressionism—still hang in the West Bank, gifts of no little value and aesthetic appeal. They elicit many compliments, even from people ignorant of the artist’s identity, and RuthClaire contended from the first that Adam had real talent.

Before the Montarazes left Beulah Fork, I threw them a going-away party in the West Bank. Livia George, Hazel Upchurch, Molly Kingsbury, Davie Hutton, Clarence and Eileen Tidings, Ruben and Elizabeth Decker, Mayor Ted Noles and his wife, and even Nancy Teavers were among the guests. I served everyone on Limoges porcelain plates from both the
Celestial Hierarchy
and the
Footsteps on the Path to Man
series. The latter was still incomplete, but AmeriCred had sent me a dozen place settings of the most recent issue, “
Homo habilis
,” with my ex-wife’s compliments. I gave each of my guests this plate as a remembrance of the evening.

Although I had prepared her a vegetable dinner, RuthClaire ate very little. Her pregnancy had deprived her of appetite. She nursed her meal along until she at last felt easy setting it aside for a dessert cup of rainbow sherbet—and then announced to all and sundry that although few contemporary divorces were civil or even tastefully barbarous, she and I were still fast friends. When the baby came, Adam and she had agreed that I would act as its godfather. Indeed, if it were a boy, they intended to name it after me.

“Hear, hear!” everyone cried.

I stood to propose a toast: “You’re a better man than I am, Adam M.” For a time, anyway, I actually meant it. It is not always possible, I’m afraid, to be as good as you should be.

PART TWO:
His Heroic Heart

Beulah Fork and Atlanta, Georgia

M
arriage domesticates. Divorce disrupts. Bachelorhood palls. And work—not time—heals all heartbreaks.

Business was booming at the West Bank. I slept soundly for the first time in two years. Funny, in fact, how the booming of a business can sometimes soothe you even better than a lullaby.

I had finally managed to convince myself that RuthClaire and I were through—as man and wife, if not as wistfully wary friends. After all, she was with child by her habiline husband, Adam Montaraz, and no one could gainsay her devotion to the little man. He had impregnated her where I had failed to. He had moved with her to Atlanta. He had become a successful artist, and his private evolution toward a kind of genteel Southern sophistication was, well, efficiently evolving. The
Atlanta Constitution
would occasionally report that the Montarazes had attended a gallery opening, or a play, or a sporting event. Three times I’d seen Adam’s photograph in the paper, and twice he had been wearing a tuxedo.

RuthClaire, on the other hand, had been wearing designer maternity clothes.

Encountering such items, I would mumble, “I’m glad they’re doing well. I’m glad they’re happy together.” Then I’d set the paper aside and busy myself revising a weekend menu.

As I say, business was booming.

*

In early December, I began to decorate the West Bank for Christmas. One day, with Livia George’s help, I was putting a sprig of mistletoe on an archway of wrapped plastic tubing facing the Greyhound Depot Laundry. A steady dristle—dristle is Livia George’s original portmanteau term for
mist
and
drizzle
—sifted down on us like a weatherman’s curse. Suddenly, out of this gloom, a silver hatchback pulled into a diagonal parking spot just below my stepladder.

“Hey,” Livia George said, “that’s the fella Miss RuthClaire brung in here las’ January. You know, the one done upchuck all ovah the table.”

“Adam!” I exclaimed.

“Now he’s got so uptown ’n’ pretty he drivin’ a silver bullet. An’ jes’ look who’s with him, too!”

“RuthClaire!” I cried. Even in the mist-cloaked street, the syllables of her name reverberated like bell notes.

We embraced all around. I even hugged Adam, who, in returning my hug, gave my back such a wrench that for a moment I thought a vertebra had snapped. He was gentler with Livia George, probably out of inbred habiline chivalry. When RuthClaire and I came together, though, we bumped bellies. She laughed self-consciously, and I knew that her baby wasn’t long for the womb. In defiance of the real possibility of her going into labor along the way, she and Adam had made the two-hour trip from Atlanta. That struck me as crazy. Angrily, I told them so.

“Relax, Paul. Even if I had, it wouldn’t have been a catastrophe.”

“On the expressway shoulder? Like a savage? You’ve got to be kidding!”

I turned to Adam. Although still far from a giant, he was taller than I remembered, maybe because he was wearing hand-tooled leather boots with elevator heels. I was going to rebuke him for making the drive with his wife so close to delivery, but RuthClaire had launched a spirited mini lecture: “Only a tiny fraction of all the babies born to our species have been born in hospitals, Paul. And that fact has
not
led to our extinction.”

I whirled on her. “What if you’d had trouble?”

She patted the opaque ball turret of her pregnancy. “Gunner here’s not going to cause any trouble. I’ll have him—or her—the way a birddog bitch drops her puppies.
Thwup
! Like that.”

“When is it due?” I asked, shaking my head.

“They don’t quite know. I’ve been pregnant since June at least. That puts me early in my seventh month.”

“She safe enough, then,” Livia George assured me.

Fresh-faced in the December mist, RuthClaire said, “That’s not altogether certain, Livia George. No one has any real idea what the habiline gestation period is. Or
was
. Adam says that as a kid on Montaraz he witnessed a couple of births, but he doesn’t have any memory of his people trying to reckon the length of a woman’s term.”

“Surely, one of those hotshots up at Emory has an opinion on the matter.”

“I’m sure they do, Paul, but we haven’t asked them. We
think
I’m close. Habilines may carry their offspring no more than five or six months, maybe even less. They’re small, you know.”

“Yeah. Even when they’re wearing platform heels.”

“That’s to help him reach the brake and accelerator pedals, not to pamper his vanity. Even so, we had those pedals lifted about four inches from the floorboard.”

“Jesus.” I gazed into the glowering pewter sky. “A thirty-six-year-old madonna on the brink of water-burst and an East African Richard Petty who can barely touch his brakes!”

“You gonna keep ’em out here all afternoon, Mistah Paul, or can they go inside to field your cuss-’em-outs.”

I waved everyone inside and sent Livia George to the kitchen for coffee and hot chocolate. It was still a couple of hours before my dinner crowd would descend.

“Why didn’t you telephone? I might not’ve even been here.”

“You’re always here, Paul. The West Bank’s what you do.”

“Yeah, but why didn’t you phone?”

“I always see Edna Twiggs sitting at the switchboard when I dial a Beulah Fork number, AT&T reorganization and all. I don’t trust the phones—not after last summer.”

“So you’d risk turning Adam into your obstetrician?”

“Absolutely. Adam and I have decided: I’m not having this baby in a hospital.”

Unable to help myself, I rolled my eyes.

“Stop it. You belittle everything you don’t understand.”

“You planning a hot-tub delivery? That’s one of the latest crazes. Mama pretends she’s a porpoise in Marineland.”

“Paul—”

“Birthing stools. That’s big, too. You have the kid squatting, like a football center pulling the pigskin out from under his jersey.”

Adam looked at his crooked hands on my new mint-green tablecloth. RuthClaire spoke through clenched teeth: “I’ll never understand how we got married. Never.”

Knowing I had gone too far, I apologized.

“Neither of those methods is as absurd as you make them out to be. Underwater delivery is nonstressful for mother and child, and a birthing stool gives a woman a degree of control over a process that’s rightfully her own, anyway. If your consciousness is ever raised, Paul Loyd, it’s going to have to be with a block and tackle.”

Livia George came back from the kitchen with our hot drinks. “Had six babies ’thout a doctor ’round,” she told us. “In a feather bed in my own house. Oldest done hit six-foot-four. Youngest ain’ been sick a day.”

Adam made a series of gestures with his hands, which RuthClaire translated: “Adam says to tell you that we want our baby born at Paradise Farm. We’ll even pay for the privilege. It’s important to us.”

“But why?” I asked, almost—but not quite—dumbstruck.

“As soon as I check into a hospital, the media will descend. It’s understandable, I guess, but I can’t let them turn the birth of our baby into an international circus. Paradise Farm’s already got a good security system, and it’s far enough from Atlanta to thwart a few of the inevitable busybodies.”

“RuthClaire, why not fly to some remote Caribbean island? You can afford it. It’s going to be butt-bruising cold here in Beulah Fork—not like in Zarakal or Haiti, kid.”

“Don’t you see? I’ll be
comfortable
out there. And what more fitting place to have Adam’s child than the place where we first met?” She turned an admiring—a
loving
—gaze on the habiline, and he responded with one of intelligent steadfastness.

Discomfited, I said, “You can stay out there, Ruthie Cee, on two conditions.”

“
Two
!”

I stood. “Just listen. They’re easy. First, you don’t pay me a dime.” Adam and RuthClaire exchanged a look, the meaning of which was obviously both gratitude and acceptance. “Second, let me find a discreet, reputable doctor to help with the delivery.”

“No! An outsider would needlessly complicate things, and I’m going to be fine.”

I told her there was still a
possibility
she might need help. How could I live with myself if anything went wrong? She replied that for the past six months Adam had been reading—yes,
reading
—every tome on childbirth he could find. It was also his opinion that the unborn infant’s gracile body—
gracile
, for God’s sake!—would ease its journey through the birth canal. Ruthie Cee, a birddog bitch dropping puppies.

My forefinger made a stabbing motion at Adam. “It’s hard for me to credit his coming so far in six months. Forgive me if I’m skeptical of his medical expertise.”

“He’s brighter than most, Paul, and he had a head start on Montaraz that nobody chooses to acknowledge.”

“But he’s not a doctor. And that’s my second condition.” RuthClaire stood. Adam stood. For a moment, I feared they’d leave, and I cursed my show of intractability. I was about to rescind my second condition when Livia George gave me a face-saving out:

“S’pose I midwife Miss RuthClaire’s little ’un? How that be?” She fluttered her hands before her. “I got
lots
of s’perience birthin’ babies.”

Hallelujah. RuthClaire, Adam, and I all did double takes. We all liked Livia George’s proposal. There was something about her turn of phrase, her cunning self-mockery. Our conflict thus resolved, we four took turns embracing as we had earlier done on the sidewalk.

I sent the Montarazes out to Paradise Farm with a set of keys. Livia George and I finished decorating and greeted the dinner crowd. Hazel Upchurch and Nancy Teavers came in at 4:30. By recent standards, business was slow and the evening dragged. At 11:30 I roared up the highway to see how my new lodgers were doing.

They had not yet gone to bed. I found them in RuthClaire’s old studio.

Often over the past few months, I had entered the untenanted loft to stand in its memory-haunted emptiness imagining just such a reunion. Now she was really back, my lost RuthClaire.

Adam, of course, was with her, sitting cross-legged on the drafting table opposite RuthClaire’s Naugahyde sofa, a book between his legs and gold-framed granny glasses clamped on the end of his broad, flat nose. The sleeves of his baby-blue velour shirt were rolled up, and he’d unzipped it to the midpoint of his sternum, revealing a flannel-y nest of reddish-black chest hair. He saw me before RuthClaire did.

“Still reading up on childbirth?” I asked him.

He bared his teeth—a smile, not a threat or an expression of fear—and lifted the book so I could see it. RuthClaire pulled herself to a sitting position with my nappy beige rearing-bear blanket around her shoulders. By the door, I leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. Then I crossed to the drafting table to find out what Adam was reading. A small, slick paperback:
The Problem of Pain
by C. S. Lewis.

“C. S. Lewis?” I said incredulously, turning to RuthClaire. “A habiline holdover from the Pleistocene’s reading C. S. Lewis?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

I took the book from Adam. “Your husband—the living descendant of a bunch of East African mole people—is busily ingesting a work of theology?”

“Do you believe he can read?”

I glanced sidelong at Adam. I knew he’d mastered sign language, I had seen him driving a car, and his eyes were appraising me with a pause-prompting keenness.

“Sure,” I grudgingly admitted. “Why not?”

“Then why find it hard to believe he’s reading C. S. Lewis? The man wrote for children, you know. He even wrote
science fiction
.”

I changed tacks. “He ought to be reading, uh,
Midwifery Made Easy
, or Benjamin Spock, or something like that.”

“He’s done that already. Don’t you understand? His consciousness is emerging from a kind of mental Upper Paleolithic. Adam’s trying to find out who he is.”

“More birthing-stool psychobabble?”

“Only if you choose to belittle it as such.”

Adam made signs with both hands. I could not interpret them. The irony of his knowing a system of communication of which I was ignorant underscored the foolishness of my doubting his interest in theology. (If he could sign, he could just as easily genuflect.)

“He wants to know if he has a soul,” RuthClaire translated.

“So do I. Want to know if
I
have a soul, that is.”

“Your lack of a heart may imply something equally discouraging about your spiritual equipment, Paul.”

“It’s after midnight, kid. I can’t believe we’re discussing this.”

“What about it? Do you think Adam has a soul?”

“What kind of soul, for God’s sake? An animal soul? A rational soul? An immortal soul? All this sort of adolescent head game will get you is a migraine and a reputation as a philosophical nitpicker.”

RuthClaire flapped her nappy blanket. “Skip it. You’ve got all the sensitivity of a tire iron.” Dog-tired, I shuffled to the sofa and plopped down opposite her. She took pity and flapped an end of her blanket at me. I pulled it over my knees. “Almost like old times, hey, Paul?”

“I can’t recall having a chaperone before.”

“Livia George.”

“Livia George’s a chaperone the way Colonel Sanders is a spokesman for the Save-the-Chickens Fund.”

RuthClaire laughed, and we began to talk. Somehow, owing in part to Adam’s absorption in his book, it was almost as if we were alone in the wide, chilly room. RuthClaire told me that downstairs she had seen my growing collection of plates in her
Footsteps on the Path to Man
series. I had arranged the eight titles issued to date on hinged brass stands in a glass-fronted maple hutch. The plates included
Ramapithecus, Australopithecus afarensis, A. africanus, A. boisei, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo sapiens
, and
Homo neanderthalensis
. The habiline, first issued back in August, bore an undeniable resemblance to the gargoyle perched on my drafting table.

“Look,” I said, “you’ve still got ten unissued plates in this series. The eight main hominids on the road to
Homo sapiens sapiens
are already out. What’s next?”