North-northwest of Flo Hatfield’s estate, the land was blackened by the sites of old shafts and heaps of slate, the air was fouled by carbonic gas and smoke from blasting. Red dust, like plague, settled filmy on the ribcages of workhorses burned in ditches by the road. From five miles off, riding back-to-back in a canvas-covered wagon drawn by four horses, we could see smoke mounting in columns against the sky. The rest of the mine’s history we were told by Flo Hatfield’s coachman, Sam Plunkett. Dozens of gangs, grimy with dust and from farms as far away as Greenwood, went regularly into the Yellowdog Mine. Trinitrotoluene, dualin, gunpowder, and mica followed on caravans. They poured in—shovelers and wheelers, borers and slave teams—to replace those who perished from consumption. Silicosis. From dust particles in their lungs. Or, above, from camp brawls that broke out over women. A misplaced bottle. An impolitic word. From murder, more often than not.
Josiah Dabner (said Plunkett) was in charge of blasting; Henry Shea handled cuts, embankments, and coal shipments; Captain Noah Walters, a fat, fretful man with a withered hand and dirt in his neckseams, was Chief Engineer. “You come this way just ten years earlier,” said Plunkett, talking like a tour guide—afraid no doubt because we were five, the flotsam from Leviathan, the unruly, the lazy, the rejected lovers, and he, Plunkett, a whiskery old man with so little skin on his leathery face he had to shut his eyes to speak or chew, equipped with only an owlhead pistol—Plunkett wondered if he’d ever see his family again. His fears were unfounded. These men, I saw, were shattered—they had the unseeing gazes I’d glimpsed on birds my father had shot, just before he finished them, and Reb, even he, had no fight left in him—“you wouldn’ta seen nothin’. Sprawlin’ wilderness. Forests fulla deer. Rabbits. Skunks. Maybe a lynx or two.” Plunkett forced a laugh. “Wild country so tough the hootowls all sang bass.” No one thought this funny. Two miles west (said Plunkett, squirming) the Savannah roared with currents so swift, so treacherous that navigation across was impossible. Not even sturdy lumber rafts withstood its waves. When the mining company’s surveying team commenced work two years before, they found no bottomland. No flat shores whatsoever between boiling springs and falls. Twisting through the dark valley between the plantation and the Mine was a path so steep and nookshotten that the surveying team took measurements and calculated levels by suspending themselves from the escarpments by ropes. It would not be an easy place to escape from—I was thinking already of flight. Work (said Plunkett) began January, 1850. Twelve of Flo Hatfield’s slaves were the first on the site. Six months later, after some fifteen deaths, the first deep shafts were in.
“There,” said Plunkett, looking back again, “that’s where y’all goin’.”
“You finished?” asked Reb.
“Why, yeah.” Plunkett blinked. “’Course, I don’t approve of what goes on there! Oh, it’s terrible, treating men like animals! Or machines! I’m a Socialist,” he blurted, “I’m on your side! You men should pull together. I mean, we oughta pull together.” Plunkett tugged at his collar for air.
Reb asked, “How come?”
“Because….” Plunkett was silent a spell. “Because all property is theft.” He pulled the phrase around him for protection. “You’re stolen property,” improving a little on it now. “And me, I’m sorta on rental terms, like a cabin.” He looked at Reb. “That doesn’t work, does it?”
“Not really,” said Reb.
“Well,” snorted Plunkett, “you get the idea. The people on the bottom belongs on top.”
“Sam?” said Reb.
“Yeah?”
“Watch the road.”
On the ridingboard, Reb put his chin on his fist and, like the others, fell silent. We were prisoners. Condemned men with a fool steering the ferryboat, the Underworld but four hours away. “Anybody want a chew?” Plunkett fumbled through his pockets, cackled, “I stole it,” and peered back at his passengers. He placed his tobacco on the seat. “You’re welcome to it all, if you want any.”
Reb broke off a mouthful, handing the rest to me. “You mighty quiet, Hawkins. You ain’t gonna be sick are you?”
“Trust me,” I whispered. “I’ve got a plan.”
The last thing the Coffinmaker cared to hear was one of my plans; he looked back at Plunkett. The old man tucked his head like a turtle. “I hate slavery! Nobody’s free, ’specially a workin’ man like myself. We’re brothers,” said Plunkett. “Underneath. Don’t let nobody tell you Sam Plunkett ain’t for Revolution….”
Plunkett defended himself in vain. Flo Hatfield’s work-ruined bondsmen had never heard of Socialism, and Sam Plunkett no more understood this movement than did my tutor Ezekiel before the weekend he entertained Karl Marx at Cripplegate. Reaching back, I remembered Ezekiel planning for weeks in advance—I can see him now, asking Mattie to cook, rereading his underlinings in The Holy Family, purchasing Marx’s favorite dishes and cigars. On the day of his arrival—a hot June morning in 1850—my tutor nearly collapsed from nervous exhaustion.
Marx arrived at Cripplegate dazed by a dizzying cycle of banishment that bounced his family from Belgium to Cologne and, finally, to a two-bedroom firetrap at 1 Leicester Street in London. These were hard years, those of his London exile. His ratio of false starts to finished copy was twenty to one. He thought of suicide. He wrote poems, his first poems since his days at the Gymnasium at Trier, plunged into mathematics for moral consolation against the police, the indifference of bourgeois publishers, and bill collectors, who threw his furniture into the street. The landlord bullied Jenny, his wife, for the preposterous rent of forty-two thalers a month. She was, that May, bleeding at the breast, forced to sell her silver—a family treasure—and, as Marx did algebra at his desk, brought her disappointments to their housekeeper Hélène Demuth. This troubled Marx all the more, though he said nothing—Hélène had been with Jenny for years; he watched the breakdown quietly, took long walks on Hampstead Heath, and wrote to his American friends Jonathan Streitburgher, a printer of an Abolitionist paper in Abbeville, Bob Abrams, an authority on Hawthorne, and Ezekiel Sykes-Withers. “My children are dying,” he wrote. “My work meets silence.”
Engels, whom Marx’s daughter Eleanor called “The General,” in regards to his obsession with the history of military operations (“A silly way,” wrote Marx, “for a grown man to spend his time, but I humor him.”), was reduced, after the romance of Left Hegelianism, to clerking again in the same Manchester sweatshop where he’d toiled as a child. His checks were slow. As of late, political affairs affected Marx physically. When he felt a headcold coming on, a toothache, he looked immediately for its social cause. A new tax law had cost Marx a molar. Nearby at a button factory a strike that failed brought on an attack of asthma. These things were dialectical. As the political world declined, so did Marx’s health. As for Jenny, she wrote friends in Germany, sparing no detail of their destitution to bring in charity, another humiliation for Marx, especially since editor Charles Dana at the New York Daily Tribune had written “We’ll see” to Marx’s offer to work as a European stringer. “You will readily understand my despair,” Marx wrote Ezekiel in May, “at being destitute after so many books. We are very, very low. Jenny has been shoplifting our meat; I wouldn’t blame her if she left me. I would give almost anything now to see America.” My tutor mailed him the price of a boat ticket to New York and back, provided that after seeing Dana he visit Master Polkinghorne’s estate in South Carolina.
His stagecoach was delayed, having thrown a wheel outside Charlotte. Like any traveler, Marx descended disheveled from his coach with trenchmouth, his collar wilted and overcoat lopped over one shoulder, his eyes unfocused as he backsheeshed his driver, and peered round at Hodges in bewilderment. Stepping forward, Ezekiel said, “Professor Marx, we’re over here,” and steered him toward our rented carriage.
“Streitburgher, too?” asked Marx.
Ezekiel staggered a little.
“I’m afraid I’ve never met him. The locals aren’t very interesting—a little dull,” Ezekiel laughed. “There are fewer spots in the civilized world more bleak than Hodges.”
“You don’t know Streitburgher?” He and Ezekiel walked out of step for a second and, for two or three steps, Marx walked sideways.
“No, sir.”
Marx pulled one of Ezekiel’s letters from his coat and held it up. “Is that you?”
“Yes—yes, you’ve been corresponding with me.”
We walked on for some paces in silence. Our guest stepped into the carriage, settled himself, and asked—it sounded like a challenge—“How long you lived here?”
“Seven years now,” said Ezekiel. “Come November.”
“As long as that? And you’ve never met Streitburgher?”
“No.”
Our guest was disappointed. That was plain. “Hodges is out of the way. Yes?” he said. “You should maybe stand a mirror at both ends to make it bigger.” And he roared. It was Marx’s effort to put Ezekiel at ease. Abruptly, I saw my tutor through his eyes: a lonely, unsocial creature unused to visitors, as awkward with people as a recluse. Not a Socialist, as he fancied himself. No, his rejection of society, his radicalism, was not, as he thought, due to some subtle rareness of soul. It was stinginess. Resentment for the richness of things. A smoke screen for his own social shortcomings. Regardless, Marx’s spirits remained high. Dana had promised him a series on conditions in Germany. Ezekiel replied, recklessly, that he never read newspapers. “Nor I,” lied Marx, politely. His smile flashed. Fell away. If you watched him closely, you noticed a certain discomfiture in his crossing and recrossing his legs, the unease of a visitor at pains to find something in common with his host.
Of this curious visit, Master Polkinghorne knew nothing, and it passed unnoticed in Hodges—as well as world history—because Marx came to South Carolina simply to unwind and see an old friend. At thirty-two, he was half a head shorter than Ezekiel, with crushed-down shoulders, and dark skin (he preferred the nickname Mohr), quick, Jewish gestures, and a tangled beard that would be rabbinical, if he let it go. Mainly, he spoke with his larynx, like most Germans. His hands were cold, thick-fingered, and stabbed the air when he spoke. Soon he would be stout. He was working over notes that summer for Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, a task he dreaded, Marx confessed, since he knew no more about the East than the errors in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History; Engels, for his part, was studying Persian, and Marx had found a bit on India in Mill’s Principles. Also, he had recently taught himself Japanese so he could read Kwanzan; spent months at it, too, then decided Kwanzan—or maybe all Oriental thought—wasn’t worth a footnote, but couldn’t figure what to do with all the Japanese. All the same, his knowledge in June, 1850, was piecemeal on prehistory, shamefully thin on primitive communal societies, and weak on Africa. What Ezekiel Sykes-Withers didn’t know about India could be written on a postcard, and his guest, though he found the subject tedious, listened humbly, eager to learn, holding his head at attention, his knees bumping Ezekiel’s in the carriage as we rode back to Cripplegate.
It should have been a wonderful weekend.
Marx was a charming guest, excited by everything American; he lavishly complimented Mattie on her cooking, kissed her hand, which made my stepmother giggle, asked for recipes, and was bored by nothing said by the bondsmen. But he was short with Ezekiel; he treated him like the most outstanding brickhead and donzel as ever broke a biscuit. My tutor had badly mistaken this man. Marx did not, like Ezekiel, live for ideas, political or otherwise; he was, in the old sense—the Sanskrit sense—a householder. The Marx of Ezekiel’s fancy, the humorless student radical of the 1830s, was—you cannot guess—a citizen devoted first, and foremost, to his family: a droll, Dickensian husband who, going fat—he would not exercise—unfastened the buttons on his vest when he ate, called his wife “Mohme,” and loved her dearly, but was not above diddling Hélène when he cornered her in the pantry. His reverence for Truth took (for Ezekiel) a strange form. When in their discussion it became clear to Ezekiel that Marx was right, Marx would at once shift to another subject—he took no pleasure in the fact that he was right. It rather embarrassed him. To be sure, what he saw of American slavery made him sore. But most often Marx diverted Ezekiel’s conversation from social evil and deep-ploughing philosophy to the few pockets of well-being made possible by capital. And capital alone. My tutor was badly disappointed. He thought Marx dull. And now it came to him that Marx, the materialist, would frown upon his association with the Transcendental Club, dismiss as alienation—species-being projected into the Absolute—any discussion of the spirit.
After dinner our guest said nothing about Revolution, preferring to talk about African customs with me, or fiction—Cervantes and Balzac, Fielding and Dumas (père)—when not humoring Ezekiel. Against his better judgment, Ezekiel hauled out his latest articles, spreading them around grease-coated plates, jugs of whiskey, and makeshift ashtrays on the table; he talked, waving a slice of bread, about his recent work (ontology), on the Theologia Germanica, which had a sedative effect on Marx: a twelve-page sleeping pill. Listening, Marx beat one hand on the arm of his chair 224 times. He began a yawn, which failed and left him sitting like someone in a dentist’s chair. His beard trembled—you would have thought he was chewing; he was, in fact, grinding his teeth. Finally he remarked that Ezekiel’s paper had one error. Ezekiel looked from Marx to me. “Does it?”
“Ja.” He gave his tight, in-bitten smile. “You chose to be miserable. Why?”
Ezekiel twitched back from the table.
“Can your Mama understand all this noise about the Transcendental Ego?”
“My mother?”
My tutor was divided—he later told me, though I saw it for myself—between sharing what he had written and fear of severe criticism: he was a graduate student (again) standing with his dissertation (fifth draft) outside the Great Man’s door. “I wrote it,” Ezekiel said, “for you.” His voice fluttered. “I had hoped a thoughtful reader, someone who loved truth….”
“Truth?” Marx raised his eyebrows. “Truth is someone.”
“Well, of course….” Ezekiel scratched through his beard; at that moment Marx scratched through his beard. It was as if a third person, a puppeteer, had pulled identical strings on two wooden dolls. “All scholarship is about and for people, I agree….” His fingers disappeared into his hair when he swept it back off his forehead. And then he said one word too many: “But certain lower, less polished classes of people simply don’t….”
The Great Man boomed, “Vhat?” He stood and began to roll up one shirtsleeve. “Young Andrew,” said Marx, “please hold my coat and step behind me.”
Eyes seeled, Ezekiel said, “Sorry.”
For a moment they pulled in different directions. Marx sat, rolling down his sleeve. My tutor’s forehead wrinkled with the effort of thought. “I know your position on these matters, Professor Marx. I didn’t expect you to completely agree….”
“Oh, I do agree,” said Marx.
“You do?”
“Ja.” Marx began unlacing his boots. “Is about the Self’s ontogenesis, this paper?” He examined now a hole in his stocking. “You vant to say that the Transcendental Ego is empty—correct?—and exists only through vhat it is conscious of, vhich means, as in Hegel, that alienation in the Other is necessary in every act of perception?”
“Yes!” Ezekiel sat up. “Exactly! The point—”
The Great Man touched his arm. “Ezekiel?”
“Yes?”
“Is wrong,” said Marx. “A mistake. Oh, your thesis is groβartig, technically, but you are, by your own argument, dead.”
Ezekiel did not move.
“Ja, dead.” His fingertips pushed the paper toward Ezekiel. “You argue that to exist is to exist through an Other. So far so good. But, as you say, someone must therefore be central to your existence, Ezekiel. Vhen two subjects come together, they realize in their reciprocal intersubjective life a common vorld. Yes? Compared to this, all other vays of being are fragmentary. Partial. Hollow. No matter how passionately you pursue them. The universal name for this final, ontological achievement, this liberation—Occidental or Oriental—in vhich each subject finds another essential is love.” The Great Man stood. He put his hand on Ezekiel’s shoulder. “Ja, love. Do you haf a lover?”
The word “love” entangled with Ezekiel’s tongue and teeth. He got no farther than the luh-sound.
Marx smiled sympathetically. “Then do you live if no Other’s gaze intends you as the beloved?”
In his softest voice, Ezekiel, his hands tightly locked in his lap, whispered, “Suppose you’ve never been loved. What if whenever you try, the Others…look away?”
“Then love someone.” Marx chuckled and shook his head. “On the stagecoach to Hodges there vas this voman….” He kissed his fingers, then looked, white-eyeballed, at the ceiling. “Vunderful! Hair to her vaist. A voice like a girl. I am grateful to her for being beautiful. For her sake, Ezekiel, I vill finish this book Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations.” He sighed and gave the air a little sweep with his hand. “Everything I’ve vritten has been for a voman—is one vay to view Socialism, no?”
Now the cabin was silent. I could hear wind wheel outside the windows and slam into the cabin walls like seaswell. I looked from Ezekiel to Marx and found them deadlocked, Ezekiel deeply disappointed, Marx twirling his wineglass, sipping carefully so not to wet his moustache. My tutor poured himself Scotch, slammed his palm down on the cap, and brought out:
“You say it’s reciprocal! What if the Others don’t love back? That girl—she doesn’t know what you felt! She’ll never read your goddamn book!”
“Temper,” said Marx, “temper!” He smoked and thought for a moment. “If they didn’t, how vould you feel?”
“It would kill me.” Ezekiel’s voice had no body, no center as he spoke. “I would perceive them as beautiful, and I would obliterate myself to let be their beauty, which only I can do, but on their side they wouldn’t know I existed—denying me love, they would, strictly speaking, deny me life.”
The Great Man pulled out his pocketwatch. Yawning, stripping down to his longjohns, he rubbed his stomach with both hands, then lay on the pallet we’d prepared for him.
Ezekiel said, from the table:
“We haven’t finished!” Watching Marx’s eyelids lower, he asked, “What would you do?”
Marx said, perhaps in a half-sleep, the thing Ezekiel was not prepared to hear:
“Rejoice.”
But you have not heard the worst.
Though Marx turned in at ten-thirty, Ezekiel did not sleep. That next morning he sat leaning into the carriage doorway, saying little as mud flew in a soft, wild rush from the wheels. Marx was ferociously polite. Waving off the stagecoach in Hodges, Ezekiel returned, weakly, to his cabin, took a hammer to the looking glasses in his study, and then fed one by one his papers into the fireplace. The Great Man, Ezekiel decided, had been talking through the back of his neck—his advice sounded like the lyrics of popular songs, which were no better than greeting cards set to music, but the most abstruse philosophy—real philosophy—doorwayed, after a process of infinite complexity, into exactly that stark, simple experience of which philosophers never (or seldom) spoke: love. By his own confession, he was prepared for suffering. That was no problem. And he was no less prepared for ruthlessly comparing the actual to the ideal (the actual always lost). But joy? No Revolutionary was prepared for joy. It seemed, when he thought about it, indecent to rejoice when, as any fool knew, so much of the world had gone wrong. Was not the spirit enslaved everywhere? The planet raped? The government in the hands of criminals? War prophesied? Where in the particulars of daily life, the flaws and imperfections, was there reason to rejoice?
For two days Ezekiel sat in his study, or lay in bed like a tree stump, his head in his hands. This is the accepted position for those suffering heartbreak. Days ran into days. No matter how he sliced it—so he confided in me—Spirit was love, and the triumph of the Spirit exiled in World was in our age, or any age, to embrace things in their haeceittias, their thisness, to perceive—mad as this seemed—Matter as holy. And when at last he went through all the homebrewed beer at Cripplegate, he walked bareheaded past unpainted board buildings to a Hodges dancehall, his coat collar up, and sat behind four men playing poker under a newly lit kerosene lamp, drinking until flame forked through his chest. Bootheels stamped. A tinny piano to his left played an unidentifiable tune. Ezekiel laid his head on the table. In this place, in air shaking with flies, and logy heat, Shem Moses, a hired man on the Greenwood farm of Colonel Richard Hart, bowled over beside him. There was something marshy about Shem Moses. He was huge, spider-bellied, smelled like a farmer’s shoe, cared for no one, believed in nothing, a swindler and whorechaser. He stood with a slight stoop. His voice was terrible. He had thin, hair-frizzed arms, his nails were nubgnawed. Also, he had syphilis—this Ezekiel could tell by the way he cursed and wept when passing water behind the dancehall. Ezekiel’s first thought was to change tables. Fatigue kept him in his chair. Shem Moses brought a bottle to the table. He ticked off his troubles, as drunken men often do to perfect strangers, and his greatest burden was his daughter, Althea. “Transverse myelitis,” Moses slid his yellow eyes at Ezekiel—he sounded the syllables slowly, the way laymen (or church people) pronounce terms from the mysterious realms of doctors and priests. “She’s paralyzed from the waist down. It come over her in a week. There weren’t no signs.” He blew his nose into his hand, squeezed off strands of mucus with his fingers, then wiped his hand on the side of his chair. Through all this, Ezekiel only nodded, lips pursed, suspending judgment, giving a little noncommital headshake as Shem Moses detailed the disease, explaining how the girl had been through an operation that destroyed his savings. And then he produced from his coat a daguerreotype of his daughter, an underexposed print, sfumato, smudged by fingerprints. It was cracked, wine-stained. Moses kept it just out of the lamplight, which forced Ezekiel to crane his neck forward to see.
My tutor squinted. “How old is she?”
“Fifteen.”
Moses tucked the portrait back into his shirt pocket. He scratched under one arm, then made a toothpick from wood splintered on the tabletop. “She be sixteen in a month, but I don’t ’spect she gonna see sixteen.” He slipped both thumbs into his beltless trousers. “Y’know, it sounds funny to say this but, as God is my secret judge, she might as well be planted right now. I can’t do for her—Colonel Hart don’t pay me enough to feed a chicken. Won’t nobody marry her, being crippled, and….”
“May I see her picture again?”
Moses waited before bringing out the daguerreotype. He put a finger in his mouth to adjust his teeth. “You ain’t gonna muss it up or nothing’?”
“No,” said Ezekiel.
He wiped both hands on his trousers. Moses handed him the portrait. And what did my tutor think? It is perhaps best to say that he did not think. Althea’s image was, by any standard, beautiful—a bit pale maybe, suffering from vitamin starvation, but lovely: a freckled, blackcherry-eyed girl with heaps of golden hair. Yet, she might have been, for all he knew, Zachary Taylor’s sister; Moses might have stolen the daguerreotype, or picked it up on the street. All this Ezekiel knew. And this: He could not stomach the idea that the future of such a girl—if the portrait was indeed hers—lay in the hands of a grimy, incendiary-breathed scorpion like Shem Moses, who’d drink anything. Stove fuel. Cleaning fluid. In every particle of the man he read: parasite. One hand pulled out his wallet, the other withdrew his whole month’s wages. He said, “I hope this will help.”
“You givin’ me that?” Moses wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His boulderlike face beamed. Without counting the bills, he stuffed the money into his boot. His clothes gave a thin, dry crack as he leaned forward, dislodging dirt. “I can’t pay you back….”
“I don’t want it back,” said Ezekiel. “And it’s for the girl, not you. If you spend it on drink, I’ll see that your daughter is placed in someone else’s custody.”
The hired man bobbed his head, “Thank you.”
“No, thank you.” He picked up the girl’s portrait again. “Can I keep this for a day or two?”
“You ain’t with the law, are you?”
“No, I’m a teacher. Why did you ask?”
Moses released air in relief. He began to pick at his nose. “You a real Christian, Mr. Sykes. And we will pay you back, Lord willin’. And he had one boot out the door before Ezekiel could reply.
It was, of course, neither Christian nor charitable, from Ezekiel’s point of view, to give his July wages to the hired man. It could be, he thought, after Moses left and he again sat alone, staring at the girl’s portrait, seen as the most self-righteous and, therefore, suspect thing he’d ever done. There was in every gift the feeling that you had overpowered another, performed a service that—in the gaudiest sense—displayed your superiority, or used their suffering to assuage your guilt, or to buy yourself a seat in the sweet by-and-by. But Ezekiel didn’t believe in the sweet by-and-by. And he certainly didn’t believe in the ego. What he did believe, strange as it sounds, was that if he took this business about the Good seriously, if he faced squarely his weariness with having and getting, he had to admit that the world seemed to fall into two halves. Not proletariat and bourgeoisie. Not black and white. Not even into wise and foolish. Granted, there were two halves, but the first, which was by far the greatest, was known simply by its single utterance, I need, I want, and the second by its quiet reply: All right. That made him reflect upon himself. What sort of self was it? Well, in popular terms, it was solipsistic; it was emotionally bankrupt; it was empty. He had a weak heart. Even Cripplegate’s bondsmen possessed, it struck Ezekiel, a greater sense of purpose than he, though they hated it, waited for the hour they would escape it, the thing Marx had hinted at, the thing that, once the furor over freedom died down, made real freedom intelligible:
Something to serve.
In his gift to Moses’ daughter—there would be more in the months that followed—there was a sense of right proportion, a clean asymmetry: a renunciation of the fruit of his works at Cripplegate, of reward, which created, in Ezekiel’s view, no further action. No evil. No stain. This fat idea (like all ideas) tugged long at my tutor. He returned each payday and inquired about Althea’s health. Her hobbies. Her friends. Did she have enough to eat? In what was she interested? Could he help in other ways? The numbers in his bankbook spooled backwards. After four such meetings with Shem Moses, whom he now hated—his oily manner, his whining and self-pity, the way he leveled everything to the coarsest common denominator—after five months of tolerating this man, who always spoke in a stupendous voice, as though each dialogue was a dispute, Ezekiel knew Althea’s history perfectly. On their fifth meeting, after the girl had received nearly fifty dollars from Ezekiel, the farmer brought him a letter. And a proposition.
“She’s doing way better.” A thin smile. “She wanted you to have this.”
Ezekiel slit the small envelope, scented and sealed with candlewax, with his thumbnail, filled his mouth with whiskey, which he sloshed around until it became warm, and, after wiping off Moses’ thumbprints, read:
Mr. Sykes,
You must forgive me for not writing sooner. I owe you letters and letters. I can never repay you for what you have done. I should like to meet you more than anything in this world, but I am afraid you would find me poor company. You are in my prayers. Do believe me when I say that I love you, shall always love you, that you have been like a father to me, and that without your aid I should be lost; I remain, Honored Sir,
Your Servant,
Althea
Now, I must call your attention to Eastern texts that Ezekiel himself made me read, works that said Samsara (the world of appearance) was Nirvana (the world to be attained), which implied, outrageously, that man’s highest achievements were won in the realm of Matter. The girl’s letter, though brief, made Ezekiel’s brow go blank. Was he not obliged to give in greater measure? Was he not, after all, incomplete in his efforts to serve? Men saddled with obligations, like Moses—like Master Polkinghorne—would scoff at this, no doubt, seeing how they’d blundered into duty—the quiet, dull triumph of devoting themselves to everyday things, placing children and wife, colleagues and acquaintances in a widening circle that soon enveloped the entire community, before all else. But it kept them honest. It brought out, begrudgingly, the best qualities in the bulk of humanity, whether humanity appreciated it or not.
Ezekiel stuffed the girl’s letter in his coat. “What is your proposal?”
“You’ve read Althea’s letter?”
“Yes.”
“That part where she says you been like a father?” Moses paused with his glass midway between his mouth and the table. He put one finger in his ear and jiggled it. “You read that?”
“Yes.”
The hired man took a deep breath.
“She’s for sale. You kin have her. Now, put down that bottle!” His voice jumped. “It’s plain I can’t do for her like you kin, poor as I am. Without a wife. Mr. Sykes, you lifted the bottle again….” Moses waited as Ezekiel put the flask down. “You might’s well do for her directly. Without me in the way.” Quickly, taking another drink, Moses kept his eyes on Ezekiel’s hands. “Does four hundred dollars sound fair?”
Ezekiel looked at him in astonishment; he filled his cheeks, then his chest, with air, but held himself still; if he moved he would hang for second-degree murder.
“Four hundred,” said Moses, “and you’ll never see me again.”
“If I do, you’re a dead man.”
Moses laughed.
“The girl….” He cleared his throat. “When do I see her?”
“After I see the money.”
Never in his life had he hated anyone as deeply as Shem Moses. “Next Wednesday week—is that soon enough?”
“I kin wait.”
Now began a terrible period in Ezekiel’s life. The payment was difficult to come by. What credit he had at Cripplegate was exhausted; he was forced to wire friends in Missouri for the money, explaining that he was engaged, soon to be married. This Ezekiel came to believe. There rose in him, starting at about the fifth button on his vest, a vague feeling of purpose. And order. For the first time in years he had the courage to make plans and prelive the future. A month passed. Two months before the money arrived. While he waited, Ezekiel notified Jonathan of his resignation—he would find other work, work with his hands, perhaps even build his own house outside Hodges—you could do that, couldn’t you? Find a center? And ever he fixed his mind on the girl, who was the radix for this revolution in his life, ever his hatred for the hired man increased. By this time, it should be mentioned, my tutor lived only for the promise of this new life. He thought he would be transformed by taking her from Moses; he would enter, he believed, into a life of clarity and law. From his cabin, where crates of books waited for moving, there drifted from the quarters to the Big House the sobbing and broken song of a lonely man desperately in love. This luminary, the object of his new hope—Althea—seemed all the more beautiful for her bondage to Shem Moses, a creature so ashamed of the transaction he failed to show on the day Ezekiel, dressed to the nines, delivered the money to the dance-hall. He sent a slave, a messenger boy named Jeff Peters, who trousered the money for Moses, and gave Ezekiel a map to the Greenwood Farm.
This is what happened now:
He hitched wagons to Greenwood, bought a bouquet of flowers, then hiked six miles to the farm, and this wearied him, for the wind was strong and stirred (red) dust, the path was uneven, the footing poor, with night coming on, and he, painted and powdered as he was, wearing his highhat, his tight, square-toed shoes, and carrying a walking stick, was not dressed for hiking. First he saw a porch sharking onto the yard. A wild pig scrambled down the steps, cutting dirt across the fields. Something clicked in his throat. His stomach turned. He took off his hat and stepped inside to the shock of rooms emptying into rooms. Each step on the old floor was like the crack of a coffin shrinking. The farmhouse had not been inhabited for years. Ezekiel looked in the kitchen, the study, the sitting room; no Althea. Only this toadstool smell floating over black-dark furniture. Broken lanterns. Roots bursting through the floor. Birds nesting on the chimneypiece. Curtains moved behind him and he turned around. Rats. He sobbed—his first sound—dropped the flowers, then his cane, and crumpled at the room’s center, his back against a barrel, the shadowy house quiet now, a bony ruin where the only movement was blood pounding in his temples, his heart overheating—searing pain in his chest, and then even the work of this bloody, tired motor went whispering to rest, his spirit changed houses, and he dropped into the solitary darkness like stone.
You will object, and rightly, that I cannot know what Ezekiel Sykes-Withers felt when he died, for this work is first-person, the most limited form. But even this philosophical problem of viewpoint—the autobiographical I—will be answered, I assure you, and I confess, for now, that this account is a tale woven partly from fact, partly from fancy.
I will confess even more:
A quarter mile from the Yellowdog Mine I still had no plan for escape, only a feeling that, if given a moment out of Plunkett’s sight, I could wing a way to liberation. The Lord, as my stepmother would say, provided the moment when we cleared the last hill and Captain Walter’s shed came into view. “We can walk from here,” I told Plunkett.
His head went back. “You can what?”
“You can leave us here,” I said. “It’s a long ride back.” The coachman bit and moistened his lips. “You’re up to something, ain’t you?”
“No.”
“If you are,” he screwed up his eyebrows, “it won’t work. There’s nothing around here but woods.” He stopped the horses and, when we’d piled out, said, “They know you’re coming.”
I assured Plunkett that we would report to Captain Walters—I gave him my word, but the coachman waited as we walked, both relieved to be free of us and suspicious. Reb and I pushed a few paces ahead of the others as Plunkett watched from the wagon. When we reached the shed, the others were several rods behind us. Reb pulled at my arm. I pushed him ahead—timing was important—then, praying he was inside, knocked on the Chief Engineer’s door. My knees gave a little; I had gone a day without chandoo. My chest felt like a furnace; my teeth ached. Dragging for air, I pushed his door, which opened onto an unvarnished desk littered with surveying maps, a bevy of mining equipment, bottles containing coal and sand samples, and, behind it, the Chief Engineer. Walters lifted his head—he’d been sleeping—and came to his feet: “Yes?” He smoothed down his shirt. “Can I do something for you?”
Stepping back, I let Walters fill the doorway, and said, “I’ve brought these men from Abbeville.”
Looking south, we saw Sam Plunkett wave, then turn round his wagon. Walters threw up his hand.
“You work for Flo Hatfield?”
“The same.”
He returned to his desk, sweating, nodding at no one in particular at first, then at me to pull a calf-bottom chair closer to his desk. Reb stood close by me, silent as a wall. Now it took all my effort not to moan; the pain moved, experimentally, in my legs—a light green pain speckled with particles of blue. From his drawer Walters removed a bottle of peach-colored whiskey, which he offered me. It eased the ache of withdrawal by a little.
“It’d be a blessing for a man to break his neck in times like these.” Walters laughed, all gloom. “You and your man there must be tired. We’ll fix a place for you tonight—”
“We be leaving now,” I said. “Mrs. Hatfield expects us back by morning.”
Noah Walters nodded.
“You say hello to Flo for me.” He reached into his pocket, dragging keys, dust-sprinkled coins, then a gold watch, which played nicely when he opened it, onto his desk. “She always liked this. You give it to her for me, Mister…you musta told me your name, but I forget. My memory,” he touched his left temple, “ain’t what it used to be.”
“It’s Harris,”
Reb exhaled and rubbed his face.
“He has bronchial trouble,” I told Walters. “The dust up here….”
The Chief Engineer gave a headshake.
“She’s a fine woman, you know that. I never met nobody quite like her. It ain’t every woman can keep a farm going like Flo Hatfield. She used to tell me….” He cracked the knuckles on his right hand slowly. His left. His sad, watery eyes skimmed over me. He said, to draw me out, “She’s good in bed, too.”
“I know.”
His mouth fell open. “You do?”
As it often happens in the world, especially the tiny southern communities of South Carolina, Noah Walters and I had a third person in common: His fifteen year marriage ended, six years before, in Flo Hatfield’s bedsheets. He was not free of her yet. Would, I realized as he pumped me for the kind of information only shared by men who have slept in the same places, never be free of her. Did Flo still eat candy for breakfast? Dress her lovers like gigolos?—he still had a suit she’d given him. Did she still blather on and on about her Continental education? The Chief Engineer relaxed and let his hair down and looked at me with the preposterous, intimate, slightly embarrassed love of men who have survived—are trying to survive—the same war. It goes without saying that I had found in Noah Walters a friend; it was almost (I thought, stunned) as if I’d slept with him by proxy.
At dusk, Reb said, “Sar, we got to go.”
“I know, I know how she is,” said Walters. “I was late once and….” He laughed and put his arm round me as I looked, weakly, to the door. “Can I get you a pair of horses for the ride back? You can bring’em back when you come through again.”
“That,” I said, “would be fine.”
“And provisions?” Outside, Walters grabbed my shoulders, held me at arm’s length, and, like a great, wise uncle, said, “Bill, you be careful now. If you get in trouble, come down here. You can stay overnight. We’ll talk about it.” His hug lifted me a foot off the ground. “It wasn’t until now that I talked about this to anybody. Maybe,” he said, turning back to his shed, “I can get on with my life now….”
The coffinmaker and I got on, thanks to Noah Walters, with our lives—about forty miles’ worth, which was the distance we put between ourselves and the Yellowdog Mine; we rode northeast, skirting Anderson, then stopped to rest the horses. You must remember that I rode sick, with quicksilver down my spine, bowels burning, fastened sometimes to my saddle because, every few miles, I fell off. Reb tethered my wrists to the pommel, pulled my horse at times by its reins through heavily wooded country near Greenville.
“He can’t die now.” He was talking toward Heaven by the time we stopped by a dry riverbed for the night. “You listen to me….” Reb built a fire behind a rock, stretched me out on a blanket, and prayed, “Lord, you brought us out of Abbeville, so You better not quit on us now.”
“I got us out,” I said. “It was me—”
“You, You!” howled Reb. He hated personal pronouns; the Allmuseri had no words for I, you, mine, yours. They had, consequently, no experience of these things, either, only proper names that were variations on the Absolute. You might say, in Allmuseri, all is A. One person was A1, the next A2. (These are Western analogues. Don’t make too much of them.) “You ain’t strong enough to even ride, Freshmeat!”
It was so. I was reeling, vomiting and voiding waste, by midnight. His voice and lips were out of sync. Words hung in the air seconds after he spoke. Between the thought Move your arms and my body there was no connection, an abyss between will and word, and I sank: the last thing I remember of the Black World was Reb tending the fire, twirling a sliver of kindling; sank: a circle of flame; sank: a brilliant firewheel of inexpressible beauty.