Fluid, a crazyquilt of other’s features, the Soulcatcher’s face, his fingers on my shoulder, beat with the pulsethrob of countless bondsmen in his bloodstream, women and children murdered with pistols knives tramped by his warhorse strangled whipped suffocated lynched beheaded burned to death starved stoned bombed thrown from heights pushed into machinery drowned clubbed impaled killed by flame tortured. Could only I see this? These others in Bannon’s eyes, exposed in the ironic tilt of his head, flashed to me in the halting, slow way he spoke, were invisible to Peggy and Gerald Undercliff. They saw Bannon, not the tics, the familiar quirks of my friend, nor could they see that only the Soulcatcher knew the secrets of my history and heart. So this was how it worked. Paranoia come to stay. Unpacking its bag, propping its feet on your table: the slayer of souls in a balandranas and kneeboots. The Negro’s private flask of hemlock.
“You will excuse us?” he asked Peggy. “This won’t take long.”
“No!” She put herself between Bannon and me, caught a whiff of him and just as quickly stepped back. “Why do you keep bothering us?”
Bannon smiled a million smiles: a cartoonist’s composite face of fifty figures—his beard the hair of a black woman; his nose a Wazimba child curled up, knees to chin; his lips an Ibo lying spread-eagled on the deck of a slave clipper, the sea beneath him churned by the storm into foam, breakers roaring.
“Shall Ah leave?” he asked me.
I answered, “No.”
If I could have reached Peggy then, if she had not been worlds away, I would have clung to her, but glancing at the Soulcatcher, I realized the futility of resistance. He would eventually speak, now or tomorrow, spilling my checkered history at her feet. Even if she did not care—even if love conquered the illusion of race, this life-long hallucination that Thou and That differed—I was still bound to him, had produced him from myself, as Peggy was producing a living thing. “This concerns neither of you,” I followed Bannon to the door. “He is right—we have business.”
Peggy whooped, “Where are you going?”
“And at this hour?” Undercliff hooked his arm around her; I stared, deliberately, to drive them deep into my memory, together like that, a portrait I planned to conjure the moment before Bannon….“That woman,” said Undercliff, “there are preparations to make. You must go now?”
“Yes,” I said. “Now.”
Stepping outside, into his shadow, I heard the Soulcatcher say, “Been a long chase from Hodges, Andrew.” He climbed stiffly onto his canvas-covered wagon. “And Ah got a surprise fo’ you.” When he did not elaborate, I guessed Bannon meant some new break-through in scientific genocide—he prided himself on being a “scientific killer,” as pugilists call themselves “scientific boxers”—and, strange to say, this thought brought to me the sort of comfort known only to suicides. But I was more fortunate. Bannon did the work, the loathsome specifics, for you. When the heart broke under pressure, failed, losing the strength to revive hope, the Soulcatcher stepped in to perform the most merciful of services. He steadied the dark, nerveless hand on the knife. Jerked the trigger, knowing you would quail, go soft, and grab again at the chimera of a world beyond color; and in that one hesitation, you’d blow two-quarters of your head away without finishing the job. Messy. Bannon was not a servant to botch the job. He offered, and for this I thanked God, the clean, quick kill.
He asked as we gained the road, “No second thoughts?”
“No.” I could not face him, but I had to know one thing: “You are Death?”
He touched his hatbrim, very humble.
“The promised death, yes, sweetah even than the poetry of liberation. The death that defines everythin’ befo’ hit. Gives it form, as Ah did for yo father. Ah keeps mah tools ready. The blade clean. The powdah dry. No dreamah should suffah’ lockjaw from a rusty knife, hit seem to me, at the end. This,” he added in a self-distancing tone I did not understand, “has been mah trade fo’ as long as Ah kin remembah.”
The air was sharp, stimulating to my senses down this last road we traveled together. There were no words between us for a time, and thus no truth or falsity, only the feeling that I had betrayed all the bondsmen I’d ever known: my father, by passing; Patrick, by not risking Flo Hatfield’s displeasure; Minty, who’d trusted me; Reb, by failing to leave Spartanburg….
“Where,” I asked, “is Reb?”
The Soulcatcher held his reins with one hand. Unbuttoning his shirt with the other, he exposed a barrel chest trellised with tattooes. The designs on his body were elaborately drawn, and almost seemed to move against the flow of his powerful muscles in the moonlight, more figures than I could take in at the moment, and I looked back at the road when he touched the naked skin between the knot of skin stitchings, and said, “Heah, Ah guess—what Ah was able to git.”
“Then you have killed him?”
“Did Ah?” He squeezed his lower lip between thumb and forefinger, remembering. Then laughed. “You know how Ah works? In order to become a Negro, to slip under his skin, Ah have to open mahself to some mighty peculiar things. Reb was harder to git into than climbin’ a peeled saplin’, heels upwards. Ah was in pain most of the time ’cause he was. Did you know if yo friend passed a butcher shop, and if somebody was sledgehammering a shorthorn, the back of Reb’s neck bruised?” He chortled and rubbed his own neck. “Did you git the ring?”
I drew in my head and nodded.
“Knew you’d want to have that.”
For another few minutes we rode on, and I realized that Bannon had turned his wagon off the road. Now his wheels rumbled over stones into a field. The moon dispensed a diffused light, distorting everything, throwing long shadows (our own) in front of us. My stomach shook. The field, at night, looked infinite, unending. In my entire life I had seen nothing so—not even the hills behind Cripplegate—nothing so stunning; never….The nearness of death did this, I thought. Seated beside me, talking of his hideous techniques, the Soulcatcher’s presence drove out every false possibility, stripped perception clean as whalebone, freed it from the private, egoistic interests that normally colored my vision; I could hear—was—the sound of a raincrow’s song ringing in the tree we approached, the bird’s voice disclosing it limitlessly as a swallow, a wren; I saw below the tree bluets unable to know, seeking only to be known, and then the double-trunked tree itself, which dreamed of becoming a man again, climbing the chain—form after form—until it attained the species capable of the highest sacrifices: man. Against my will, I wept. Not because I was to die; I wanted the kill. Nor again because I was returned to slavery; I had never escaped it—it was a way of seeing, my inheritance from George Hawkins: seeing distinctions. No, I cried because the woman I had sought in so many before—Flo Hatfield, Minty, Peggy—was, as Ezekiel hinted, Being, and she, bountiful without end, was so extravagantly plentiful the everyday mind closed to this explosion, this efflorescence of sense, sight frosted over, and we—I speak of myself; you will not make my mistake—became unworthy of her, having squandered to a thousand forms of bondage the only station, that of man, from which she might truly be served.
“A guinea,” said the Soulcatcher, “fo’ yo thoughts.”
I could tell him my thoughts, only him.
“Is it…” pausing to pull phrases together, “possible that a man may love the Good, pledge his life to it and, in spite of his best efforts, still be the steward of suffering and evil?”
He fastened his reins to the wagon, under the tree. This, I presumed, was where the execution would take place. Climbing down, Bannon moved like the Coffinmaker, as if Time were fiction, all that was and would be held suspended in this single moment, which was forever, using every part of his foot as he walked, like an animal. First the heel falling gently, then the ball of his foot, not slamming down (as I walked), but firmly taking hold of the planet, pushing down as the ground pushed back in perfect balance: a slow, frightening tread, the way, I thought, an Ubermensch would walk. Then he answered me: “Ah have kilt many Negroes with this,” pulling out his pearl-handled derringer, “whose every good action led to evil.”
“Is that fair!” I touched him, then pulled back my hand; it was like grabbing a boa constrictor seconds after it swallowed a family of rats. “Your duty is to destroy, I understand that! There must be destroyers. But you sound like a philosopher! A modern philosopher—the mechanic who analyzes the propositions of madmen and sages with the same impartiality, refusing to pass judgment!” I shouted again, “Is it fair that you destroyed my friend—‘only following orders,’ you’ll plead, and I can appreciate that, the dancing of Shiva from birth to death, the cosmic drama where all creatures are sacrificed, regardless of their personal dreams, to a God moving mysteriously, struggling to spin a well-made story, making some of us walk-ons, or extras—maybe Negroes in the New World were only hired for the crowd scenes—but I ask you, Horace, you, the holy torpedo, the mercenary of Brama, I put it to you, do you approve?”
“You still don’t see hit,” he said. “Ah approves everythin’. Ah approves nothin’.”
Under the tree, which was weighted with fruit, the lower plum-heavy branches of the tree doming round us, like a sermon on regeneration, the Soulcatcher, still holding his derringer, asked me to sit. “Mebbe Ah should finish tellin’ you ’bout Reb. For me to capture a Negro the right way, as Ah told you, Ah have to feel what he feels, want what he wants, ’fore Ah knows him good enough to hep him finish hisself.”
“And what,” my voice flindered, “did Reb want?”
The Soulcatcher laughed.
“Nothin’! That’s hit right there—what threw me off, why hit took so long to run him down: yo friend didn’t want nothin’. How the hell you gonna catch a Negro like that? He can’t be caught, he’s already free. Not legally, but you know what Ah’m sayin’. Well suh, Ah had to think a spell about strategy. Ah’s always worked on the principle that the thing what destroys a man, what finally unstrings him, starts off first as an appetite. Yo friend had no appetites. There wasn’t no way Ah could git a handhold on the nigguh, he was like smoke. So Ah went back to Square One, so to speak: Ah studied him, lookin’ fo’ a weakness, a flaw somewheres so Ah could squiggle inside and take root, like Ah did with yo daddy—now he was an easy kill, oh yeah, Ah did indeed snuff George Hawkins after the Cripplegate uprisin’, but he was carryin’ fifty-’leven pockets of death in him anyways, li’l pools of corruption that kept him so miserable he begged me, when Ah caught up with him in Calhoun Falls, to blow out his lights—”
(There is a Gentlemen’s Psychic Powder Room, I discovered, across the hallway from the one used by Minty; upon hearing of my father’s death, I excused myself, went into the first booth I found, bolted the door, dropped onto the toilet seat, and cried. When I returned, weaker, to the cafe table, as it were, Bannon was still talking.)
“—yo friend, as Ah was sayin’, didn’t have no place inside him fo’ me to settle. He wasn’t positioned nowhere.” Scratching his head, the Soulcatcher chuckled. “Befo’, afterwards, and in between didn’t mean nothin’ to him. He had no home. No permanent home. He didn’t care ’bout merit or evil. What Ah’m sayin’,” his fist struck the tree behind us, “is that Ah couldn’t entirely become the nigguh because you got to have somethin’ dead or static already inside you—an image of yoself—fo’ a real slave catcher to latch onto.”
“I don’t understand,” and I really didn’t, for my father’s death stood, like a screen, in front of all he’d just said. “The ring….”
“Reb sold that in Kentucky,” said Bannon, “to git shed of anythin’ that’d identify him. Hawkins, you owe me thirty dollars, and me’n Mamie gonna need every penny—we gettin’ married—since Ah’m outta work. Ah always said Ah’d quit if Ah come across a Negro Ah couldn’t catch.” He threw his derringer into the weeds. “Only reason Ah couldn’t marry Mamie befo, get her outta that cathouse, is ’cause Ah stayed on the road so much.”
My long flight from Cripplegate had made me, I fear, a slow and feeble thinker, the sort who needs to hear the argument twice, or see it in a Study Guide, for Bannon was saying—I gathered slowly—that as a bounty hunter he’d been bested by Reb, who was safely now in Chicago. My heart swung up. Then down. What of my father? Did even he deserve this end? I saw, in the weeds, the barrel of Bannon’s derringer. He would have placed it, that gun, at the base of George’s neck, tucking it under the loose skin where neckbone and shoulders met, locking his arm, then fired, the column of flame throwing George forward, Bannon back, while the pistol burning red on a black Carolina night went flying over his head, trailing smoke as my father fell into West Hell to precisely the reward all black revolutionaries feared: an eternity of waiting tables.
“Did he speak of me?” I asked Bannon. “What I must know is if he died feeling I despised him, or if he,” I lowered my voice a little, “died hating me.”
And then the Soulcatcher did a strange thing. His shirt had been opened to his navel (it puffed out, a poorly tied umbilicus, I thought), but hid his chest as we talked. Bannon undid the last three buttons, pulled off his shirt entirely, and bid me move closer.
“He’s heah,” the Soulcatcher said. “Ask him yoself.”
This pulled me up short. I waited for the Soulcatcher’s explanation, my gaze dropping from his face to his chest and forearms, where the intricately woven brown tattooes presented, in the brilliance of a silver-gray sky at dawn, an impossible flesh tapestry of a thousand individualities no longer static, mere drawings, but if you looked at them long enough, bodies moving like Lilliputians over the surface of his skin. Not tattooes at all, I saw, but forms sardined in his contour, creatures Bannon had killed since childhood: spineless insects, flies he’d dewinged; yet even the tiniest of these thrashing within the body mosaic was, clearly, a society as complex as the higher forms, a concrescence of molecules cells atoms in concert, for nothing in the necropolis he’d filled stood alone, wished to stand alone, had to stand alone, and the commonwealth of the dead shape-shifted on his chest, his full belly, his fat shoulders, traded hand for claw, feet for hooves, legs for wings, their metamorphosis having no purpose beyond the delight the universe took in diversity for its own sake, the proliferation of beauty, and yet all were conserved in this process of doubling, nothing was lost in the masquerade, the cosmic costume ball, where behind every different mask at the party—behind snout beak nose and blossom—the selfsame face was uncovered at midnight, and this was my father, appearing briefly in the dead boy Moon as he gave Flo Hatfield a goodly stroke and, at the instant of convulsive orgasm, opened his mouth as wide as that of the dying steer Bannon slew in his teens, was that steer, then several others, and I lost his figure in this field of energy, where the profound mystery of the One and the Many gave me back my father again and again, his love, in every being from grubworms to giant sumacs, for these too were my father and, in the final face I saw in the Soulcatcher, which shook tears from me—my own face, for he had duplicated portions of me during the early days of the hunt—I was my father’s father, and he my child.
The Soulcatcher buttoned his shirt, covering the theater of tattooes. He helped me, a freeman, back to his wagon, then delivered me, dazed, to my wife’s doorstep. He and Mamie were not seen in Spartanburg again. On April 23, 1861, Wife bore a girl—six pounds, six ounces—delivered by Dr. Undercliff, who took leave of this life on the eve of Grant’s capture of Fort Henry. The Awakening of Eve Yoremop (1863) was overshadowed by the American edition of Trollope’s Framley Parsonage, and was only reviewed, with five other books, in the “Bookbin” column of the Press. According to rumor, Flo Hatfield did not marry again, but took the Vet as her final lover, and in Illinois—in 1865—Reb built his finest coffin, the one in which they laid Abraham Lincoln to rest. After the war, Fruity and I turned to the business of rebuilding, with our daughter Anna (all is conserved; all), the world.
This is my tale.