Michael Bishop: Ancient of Days

Among his several published novel-length works, Michael considers Ancient of Days “probably my second favorite, although on some days it does come in first. I think it deserves to outlive me, but writers do not control the ultimate fate of their works, and so this opinion may be more interesting for what it says about my narcissistic prioritizing than for its insight into my critical acumen.”

This first new print edition of the novel in more than eighteen years strengthens my hope that a new generation of grateful readers will discover Ancient of Days and that it will live again in the hearts of all who have read it before.

RuthClaire Loyd, my ex-wife, first caught sight of the trespasser from the loft studio of her barn-sized house near Beulah Fork, Georgia. She was doing one of twelve paintings for a series of subscription-order porcelain plates that would feature her unique interpretations of the nine angelic orders and the Holy Trinity (this particular painting was entitled Thrones ), but she stepped away from the easel to look through her bay window at the intruder. His oddness had caught her eye.

Swart and gnomish, he was moving through the tall shadowy grass in the pecan grove. His movements combined an aggressive curiosity with a kind of placid caution, as if he had every right to be there but still expected someone—the property’s legal owner, a buttinsky neighbor—to call him to accounts. Passing from a dapple of September sunlight into a patch of shade, he resembled one of the black boys who had turned Cleve Snyder’s creek into the skinnydipping riviera of Hothlepoya County. He was a little far afield, though, and the light limning his upper body made him look too hairy for most ten-year-olds, whatever their color. Was the trespasser some kind of animal?

“He’s walking,” RuthClaire murmured to herself. “Hairy or not, only human beings walk like that.”

My ex is not given to panic, but this observation worried her. Her house (I had relinquished all claims to it back in January, to spare her the psychic upheaval of a move) sits in splendid-spooky isolation about a hundred yards from the state highway connecting Tocqueville and Beulah Fork. Cleve Snyder, meanwhile, leases his adjacent ninety acres to a cotton grower who does not live there. RuthClaire was beginning to feel alone and vulnerable.

Imperceptibly trembling, she set aside her brushes and paints to watch the trespasser. He was closer to the house now, and a rake that she had left leaning against one of the pecan trees enabled her to estimate his height at a diminutive four and a half feet. His sinewy arms bespoke his maturity, however, as did the massiveness of his underslung jaw and the dark gnarl of his sex. Maybe, she helplessly conjectured, he was a deranged dwarf recently escaped from an institution populated by violence-prone sexual deviates….

“Stop it,” RuthClaire advised herself. “Stop it.”

Suddenly the trespasser gripped the bole of a tree with his hands and the bottom of his feet; he shinnied to a swaying perch high above the ground. Here, for over an hour, he cracked pecans with his teeth and single-mindedly fed himself. My ex-wife’s worry subsided a little. The intruder seemed to be neither an outright carnivore nor a rapist. Come twilight, though, she was ready for him to leave, while he appeared perfectly content to occupy his perch until Judgment Day.

RuthClaire had no intention of going to bed with a skinnydipping dwarf in her pecan grove. She telephoned me.

“It’s probably someone’s pet monkey,” I said. “A rich Yankee matron broke down on the interstate, and her chimpanzee—you know how some of those old ladies from Connecticut are—wandered off while she was trying to flag down a farmer to unscrew her radiator cap.”

“Paul,” RuthClaire said, unamused.

“What?”

“First of all,” she said, evenly enough, “a chimpanzee isn’t a monkey, it’s an ape. Second, I know nothing at all about old ladies from Connecticut. And, third, the creature in my pecan tree isn’t a chimpanzee or a gibbon or an orangutan.”

“Boy, I’d forgotten what a Jane Goodall fan you are.” This riposte RuthClaire declined to volley.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked, somewhat exasperated. My ex-wife’s imagination is both her fortune and her folly; and at this point, to tell the truth, I was thinking that her visitor was indeed an out-of-season skinnydipper or maybe a raccoon. For an artist, RuthClaire is remarkably near-sighted, a fact that contributes to the almost abstract blurriness of some of her landscapes and backgrounds.

“Come see about me,” she said.

In Beulah Fork, I ran a small gourmet restaurant called the West Bank. Despite the incredulity of outsiders (as, for instance, Connecticut matrons with pet chimpanzees), who expect rural eating establishments in the South to serve nothing but catfish, barbecue, Brunswick stew, and turnip greens, the West Bank offered cosmopolitan fare and a sophisticated ambience. My clientele comprised professional people, wealthy retirees, and tourists. The proximity of a popular state park, the historic city of Tocqueville, and a recreational area known as Muscadine Gardens kept me in paying customers; and while RuthClaire and I were married, she exhibited and sold many of her best paintings right on the premises. Her work—only a few pieces of which still remain on the walls—gave the restaurant a kind of muted bohemian elegance, but, in turn, the West Bank gave my wife a unique and probably invaluable showcase for her talent. Until our split, I think, we both viewed the relationship between her success and mine as healthily symbiotic.

Art in the service of commerce. Commerce in the service of art.

RuthClaire had telephoned me just before the dinner hour on Friday. The West Bank had reservations from more than a dozen people from Tocqueville and the Gardens, and I did not really want to dump the whole of this formidable crowd into the lap of Molly Kingsbury, a bright young woman who did a better job hostessing than overseeing my occasionally high-strung cooks, Hazel Upchurch and Livia George Stephens. But dump it I did. I begged off my responsibilities at the West Bank with a story about a broken water pipe on Paradise Farm and drove out there lickety-split to see about my ex. Twelve miles in ten minutes.

RuthClaire led me to the studio loft and pointed through her window into the pecan grove. “He’s still sitting there,” she said.

I squinted. At this hour the figure in the tree was a mere smudge among the tangled branches, not much bigger than a squirrel’s nest. “Why didn’t you shoot off that .22 I gave you?” I asked RuthClaire, a little afraid that she was having me on. Even the spreading crimson sunset behind the pecan grove did not enable me to pick out the alleged trespasser.

“I wanted you to see him, too, Paul. I got to where I needed outside confirmation. Don’t you see?”

No, I didn’t see. That was the problem.

“Go out with me,” RuthClaire said. “The buddy system’s always recommended for dangerous enterprises.”

“The buddy I want is that little .22, Ruthie Cee.” She stood aside while I wrested the rifle out of the gun cabinet, and together we went back downstairs, through the living and dining rooms, and out the plate-glass doors opening onto the pecan grove. Beneath the intruder’s tree we paused to gape and take stock. The stock I took went into the cushion of flesh just above my right armpit, and I sighted along the barrel at a bearded black face like that of a living gargoyle.

RuthClaire was right. The trespasser wasn’t a monkey. He more nearly resembled a medieval demon, with a small but noticeable ridge running fore and aft straight over the middle of his skull. He had been on the cusp of falling asleep, I think, and the apparition of two human beings at this inopportune moment startled him. Fear showed in his beady, obsidian eyes, which flashed between my ex-wife and me like sooty strobes. His upper lip moved away from his teeth.