Ancient of Days (7 page)

Despite the early hour, I telephoned Paradise Farm to apologize for what had happened and to offer my shoulder either to cry on or to cudgel. A recorded message informed me that RuthClaire’s previous number was no longer functioning. I understood immediately that she had applied for and received an unlisted number. This unforeseen development hit me harder than the newspaper article. Paradise Farm now seemed as far away as Hispaniola or the court of Sayyid Sa’īd.

Before the hour was out, my own telephone began ringing. The first caller was Livia George, who, in high dudgeon, asked me if I’d seen the piece in the
Constitution
and wondered aloud how my devious Atlanta relative had managed to take a photograph of RuthClaire’s mute friend Adam in her very own bathroom. “You got a spill-the-beans Peepin’ Tom for a nephew,” she said. “’F he ever comes back to visit you, Mr. Paul, I ain’ gonna do his cookin’, let me tell you now.” I agreed Nollinger was a contemptible sneak and promised she’d never have to wait on the man again.

Then, in rapid succession, I received calls from a reporter on the
Tocqueville Telegraph
, a representative of
The Today Show
on NBC, an art dealer in Atlanta with a small stake in RuthClaire’s professional reputation, and two of my fellow merchants in Beulah Fork, Ben Sadler and grocer Clarence Tidings, both of whom expressed the hope that my ex-wife would not suffer disruptive public attention because of my nephew’s outrageous blather to the Atlanta media. An artist, they said, required her privacy. I put their commiseration on hold by agreeing and pleading other business. The reporter, the TV flack, and the art dealer I had sidestepped with terse pleasantries and an unshakable refusal to comment.

Then I took my phone off the hook, dressed, and went shopping. My neighbors greeted me cheerily the first time our carts crossed paths, but studied me sidelong as I picked out meats, cheeses, and produce. Every housewife in the A&P seemed to look at me as she might a cuckolded male who pretends a debonair indifference to his ignominy. It gave me the heebie-jeebies, this surreptitious surveillance.

Back at the West Bank my uncradled receiver was emitting a strident buzz, a warning to hang up or to forfeit continuous service. I replaced the receiver. A moment later, the telephone rang, and Edna Twiggs said that RuthClaire was trying to reach me.

“Give me her new number,” I said. “I’ll call her.”

But Edna replied, “Hang up again, Mr. Loyd. I’ll let her know you’re home. I’m not permitted to divulge an unlisted number.”

Although angry, I obeyed Beulah Fork’s inescapable sedentary gadfly, and when next the telephone rang, RuthClaire’s voice sounded soft and weary in my ear: “We’re under siege. There’s an Eleven Alive news van from Atlanta on the lawn, and several other vehicles—one a staff car from the
Columbus Ledger-Enquirer
—are parked in the drive or along the roadway behind the hollies. It looks like a gathering for a Fourth of July picnic, Paul.”

“Have you talked to any of those people?”

“The knocking started a little over an hour ago. I wouldn’t answer it. Now there’s a man on the lawn taking pictures of the house with a video camera and a stylish young woman in front of him with a microphone talking about the ‘deliberate inaccessibility of artist RuthClaire Loyd.’ She’s said that four or five times, as if practicing. Anyway, I can hear her all the way up here in the loft. They’re not subtle, these people, they’re loud and persistent.”

“Call the police, RuthClaire. Call the Hothlepoya County Sheriff’s Patrol.”

“I hate to do that.”

“They’re trespassing and making nuisances of themselves. Call Davie Hutton here in town and Sheriff Crutchfield in Tocqueville.”

“What if I just poke my .22 out of the window and tell everyone to beat it?”

“It’d make great viewing on the evening news.”

“Yeah, wouldn’t it?” RuthClaire chuckled wryly. “May the seraphim forgive me, but maybe such a display would boost subscription sales for my
Celestial Hierarchy
series. AmeriCred has been a little disappointed in the way they’re going.”

“We live in a secular age, RuthClaire.” Then: “How’s Adam taking all this?”

“It’s made him restless and reclusive. He’s pacing the downstairs bathroom with the exhaust fan running—to drown out the clamor from the lawn.”

“Well, I hope you closed the curtains on the upper half of the window in there. Reporters can climb trees, too, you know.”

“Adam and I installed some blinds. No worry there. The worry’s how long this stupid encirclement will last. I can’t work. Adam’s going to develop a nervous disorder.”

“Let the law run them off. That’s what the law’s for.”

“All right.”

“You could have figured that out for yourself. Why call me for advice?”

“To let you know how much trouble you’ve caused us, you dinkhead.” (But her tone was bantering rather than bitter.) “And another thing besides, Paul.”

“Okay, I’ll bite.”

“Adam’s one failing as a companion is that he can’t talk. Maybe I wanted to hear the silver-throated con man of Beulah Fork do his stuff again.” She let me ruminate on this left-handed compliment for a second or two, then gave me her new telephone number and bade me a peremptory goodbye.

I sat awhile holding the receiver, but finally hung up before Edna Twiggs could break in to tell me I was on the verge of forfeiting continuous service.

International media attention converged on Paradise Farm. Neither the Beulah Fork police department nor the sheriff’s patrol from Tocqueville could handle the journalists, TV people, curiosity seekers, and scientists who descended on Hothlepoya County for a peek at RuthClaire’s habiline paramour. For a time, the Georgia Highway Patrol intervened, rerouting the gate-crashers back toward the interstate and issuing tickets to those who ignored the detour signs; but Ruben Decker and a few of the other residents along the road linking Paradise Farm with town protested that they’d been singled out for citations as often as had the journalists and pesky outsiders plaguing the area, many of whom, when stopped, gave false ID’s to prove their claims of being locals. At last, even the highway patrol threatened to retreat from the scene; this wasn’t their fight.

In desperation RuthClaire contracted with an Atlanta firm to erect a beige brick wall around the exposed sections of her property’s perimeter; and this barricade, upon its completion in May, proved an effective psychological as well as physical deterrent to most of those stopping by for a casual, rather than a mercenary or a malevolent, look-see. Pale arc lights on tall poles illuminated every corner of the vast front and back yards and portions of the shadowy pecan grove behind the house. Twice, RuthClaire broadcast stentorian warnings over a P.A. system installed for that purpose and once fired her rifle above the heads of the trespassers creeping like animated stick figures across the lawn. Word got around that it was
dangerous
to try to breach the elaborate fortifications of Paradise Farm. I liked that.

Meanwhile, in the absence of hard facts, speculation and controversy raged. Alistair Patrick Blair, the eminent Zarakali paleoanthropologist, published a paper in
Nature
denouncing the notion of a surviving Early Pleistocene hominid as “sheer unadulterated grandstanding piffle.” Shrewdly, he did not mention Brian Nollinger by name, not so much to avoid libeling the man, I think, as to deprive him of the satisfaction of seeing his name in print—even in a disparaging context. Blair cited the notorious Piltdown hoax as a model of competent flimflammery next to this tottery ruse, and he argued vigorously that the few available photographs of Adam were of a rather hairy black man in a molded latex mask like those designed for his PBS television series,
Beginnings
. Nollinger rebutted Blair, or tried to, with a semicoherent essay in
Atlanta Fortnightly
summarizing the extraordinary diplomatic career of Louis Rutherford and condemning the artist RuthClaire Loyd for her tyrannical imprisonment of the bemused and friendless hominid. She was a female Simon Legree with a mystical bias against both evolutionary theory and the scientific method.

Sermons were preached for and against my ex-wife. Initially, fundamentalists did not know which side to come down on because anyone opposed to the scientific method could not be all bad, while anyone cohabiting with a quasi-human creature not her lawfully wedded husband must certainly be enmeshed in the snares of Satan. By the second week of this controversy, most fundamentalist ministers, led by the Right Rev. Dwight “Happy” McElroy of the Greater Christian Constituency of America, Inc., of Rehoboth, Louisiana, had determined that the crimson sin of bestiality far outweighed the tepid virtue of a passive antievolutionary sentiment. Their sermons began to deride RuthClaire for her sexual waywardness (this was an irony that perhaps only I could appreciate) and to pity her as the quintessential victim of a society whose scientific establishment brazenly proclaimed that human beings were nothing more than glorified monkeys (a thesis that their own behavior seemed to substantiate). Happy McElroy, in particular, was having his cake and eating it too. I audited a few of his TV sermons, but almost always ended by turning down the sound and watching the eloquent hand signals of the woman providing simultaneous translation for the deaf.

Sales of RuthClaire’s
Celestial Hierarchy
porcelain-plate series boomed. In fact, AmeriCred reversed a long-standing subscription policy to permit back orders of the first few plates in the series and announced to thousands of disappointed collectors that
this
limited edition of Limoges porcelain had sold out. It would violate the company’s covenant with its subscribers to issue a second edition of the plates. But in response to the overwhelming demand for RuthClaire’s exquisite work, AmeriCred, in conjunction with Porcelaine Jacques Javet of Limoges, France, had just commissioned from this world-acclaimed Georgia artist a second series of paintings,
Footsteps on the Path to Man
, which would feature imaginative but anthropologically sound portraits of many of our evolutionary forebears and several contemporary human visages besides; eighteen plates in all, the larger number being a concession to the growing public appetite for my ex-wife’s distinctive art. Further, this limited edition would not be quite so limited as the previous one. More people would be able to subscribe.

“Congratulations,” I told RuthClaire one evening by telephone.

“It’s phenomenally tacky, isn’t it?”

“I think it’s called striking while the iron’s hot.”

“I needed the money. Having a wall built around two thirds of this place didn’t come cheap, nor did the arc lights or the P.A. system. I have to recoup my investment.”

“You think I don’t know?”

“Besides, I
want
to do this
Footsteps on the Path to Man
series. The australopithecines I’ll have to reconstruct from fossil evidence and some semi-inspired guesswork, but for
Homo habilis
I’ll have a living model. It’s going to be fun putting Adam’s homely-handsome kisser on a dinner plate.”

“Maybe I could order five or six place settings of that one for the West Bank.”

RuthClaire laughed delightedly.

Of course, the sermons following hard upon the new AmeriCred announcement were all condemnatory. The depths to which my ex-wife had fallen defied even Happy McElroy’s bombastic oratorical skills. He tried, though. The title of his message on the first Sunday in July was “From Angels to Apes: The Second Fall.” Whereas the celestial hierarchy was an ascent to pure spirit, the blind worship of evolutionary theory—“Theory, mind you!” McElroy roared. “Unsupported
theory
!”—was a footstep on the downward path to Mammon, debauchery, and hell. At the end of his remarks, McElroy asked his congregation to join with his loyal television audience in a silent prayer of redemption for paleoanthropologists everywhere and their avaricious minion in Beulah Fork, Georgia, may God have mercy, RuthClaire Loyd.

I am not a complete pagan: I joined in.

The attitude of my own townspeople toward RuthClaire during this period was hard to judge. Many had resented the spring’s unruly influx of visitors and the inconvenience of the highway patrol roadblocks and spot identity checks. Still, most did not hold my former wife accountable for these problems, recognizing that she, too, was a victim of the publicity mill generating the crowds and the clumsy security measures finally obviated by the wall. Now the residents of Beulah Fork wondered about the
relationship
between RuthClaire and Adam. This preoccupation, depending on their ultimate view of the matter, dictated the way they spoke about and dealt with their unorthodox neighbor. Or would have, I’m sure, if RuthClaire had come into town more often.

One sweltering July day, for instance, I went into the Greyhound Depot Laundry to reclaim the tablecloths I had left to be dry-cleaned. Ben Sadler, a courtly man nearly six and a half feet tall, stooped toward me over his garment-strewn counter and in the blast-furnace heat of that tiny establishment trapped me in a perplexing conversation about the present occupants of Paradise Farm. Sweat beaded on his forehead, ran down his ash-blond temples, and gathered in his eyebrows as if they were thin, ragged sponges not quite thirsty enough to handle the unending flow.

“Listen, Paul, what kind of, uh, creature is this Adam fella, anyway?”

I summarized all the most likely, and all the most asinine, speculations. I used the terms
Australopithecus zarakalensis, Homo zarakalensis
, and
Homo habilis
. I used the words
ape-man, hominid, primate
, and
dwarf
. I confessed that not even the so-called experts agreed on the genus or species to which Adam belonged.

“Do they say he’s human?” Ben wanted to know.

“Some do. That’s what
Homo
means, although lots of people seem to think it means something else. Anyway, RuthClaire thinks he’s human, Ben.”

“And he’s black, isn’t he? I mean, I’ve read where the whole human race—even the Gabor sisters and the Osmond family—I’ve read where we’re all descended from tiny black people. Originally, that is.”