Michael Bishop: Ancient of Days

From above the mysterious creature, I shot down a dangling cluster of branches that would have eventually fallen anyway. The report echoed all the way to White Cow Creek, and hundreds of foraging sparrows scattered into the twilight like feathered buckshot.

“I swear to goodness, Paul!” RuthClaire shouted, her most fiery oath. She was trying to take the rifle out of my hands. “You’ve always been a shoot-first-talk-later fool, but that poor fella’s no threat! Look!”

I gave up the .22 as I had given up Paradise Farm, docilely, and I looked. RuthClaire’s visitor was terrified, almost catatonic. He could not go up, and he could not come down; his head was probably still reverberating from the rifle shot, the heart-stopping crash of the pecan limb. I wasn’t too sorry, though. He had no business haunting my ex.

“Listen,” I said, “you asked me to come see about you. And you didn’t object when I brought that baby down from the loft.”

Angrily, RuthClaire ejected the spent shell, removed the .22’s magazine, and threw the rifle on the ground. “I wanted moral support, Paulie, not a hit man. I thought the gun was your moral support, that’s all. I didn’t know you were going to try to murder the poor innocent wretch with it.”

“‘Poor innocent wretch,’” I repeated incredulously. “ ‘Poor innocent wretch’ ?”

This was not the first time we had found ourselves arguing in front of an audience. Toward the end, it had happened frequently at the West Bank, RuthClaire accusing me of insensitivity, neglect, and philandering with my female help (although she knew that Molly Kingsbury was having none of that nonsense), while I openly rued her blinkered drive for artistic recognition, her lack of regard of my inborn business instincts, and her sometimes maddeningly rigorous bouts of chastity. The West Bank is small—a converted doctor’s office wedged between Gloria’s Beauty Shop and Ogletree Plumbing & Electric, all in the same red-brick shell on Main Street—and even arguing in the kitchen we could give my customers a discomfiting earful. Only a few tolerant souls, mostly locals, thought these debates entertaining; and when my repeat business from out of town began falling off, well, that was the last straw. I made the West Bank off limits to RuthClaire. Soon thereafter she began divorce proceedings.

Now a shivering black gnome, naked but for a see-through leotard of hair, was staring down at us as my ex compared me to Vlad the Impaler, Adolf Hitler, and the government of South Africa. I began to think that he could not be too much more bewildered and uncomfortable than I.

“What the hell do you want me to do?” I finally blurted.

“Leave me alone with him,” RuthClaire said. “Go back to the house.”

“That’s crazy,” I began. “That’s—”

“Hush, Paulie. Please do as I say, all right?”

I retreated to the sliding doors, no farther. RuthClaire talked to the trespasser. In the gathering dark, she crooned reassurance. She consoled and coaxed. She even hummed a lullaby. Her one-sided talk with the intruder was interminable. I, because she did not seem to be at any real risk, went inside and poured myself a powerful scotch on the rocks. At last RuthClaire returned.

“Paul,” she said, gazing into the pecan grove, “he’s a member of a human species—you know, a collateral human species—that doesn’t exist anymore.”

“He told you that, did he?”

“I deduced it. He doesn’t speak.”

“Not English, anyway. What do you mean, ‘doesn’t exist anymore’? He’s up in that tree, isn’t he?”

“Up in the air, more like,” RuthClaire said. “It reminds me of that Indian, Ishi.”

“Who-shi?”

“A Yahi Indian in northern California whose name was Ishi. Theodora Kroeber wrote a couple of books about him.” RuthClaire gestured at the shelves across the room from us; in addition to every contemporary best seller that came through the B. Dalton’s in Tocqueville Commons Mall, these shelves housed art books, popular-science volumes, and a “feminist” library of no small proportions, this being RuthClaire’s term for books either by or about women, no matter when or where they lived. (The Brontë sisters were next to Susan Brownmiller; Sappho was not far from Sontag.)

I lifted my eyebrows: “?”

“Last of his tribe,” RuthClaire explained. “Ishi was the last surviving member of the Yahi; he died around nineteen fifteen or so, in the Museum of Anthropology in San Francisco.” She mulled this bit of intelligence. “It’s my guess, though, that our poor wretch comes from a species that originated in East Africa two or three million years ago.” She mulled her guess. “That’s a little longer than Ishi’s people were supposed to have been extinct before Ishi himself turned up, I’m afraid.”

“There goes your analogy.”

“Well, it’s not perfect, Paul, but it’s suggestive . What do you think?”

“That you’d be wiser calling the bugger in the tree a deranged dwarf instead of an Indian. You’d be wiser yet just calling the police.”

RuthClaire went to the bookshelf and removed a volume by a well-known scientist and television personality. She had everything this flamboyant popularizer had ever written. After flipping through several well-thumbed pages, she found the passage pertinent to her argument:

“‘Were we to encounter Homo habilis —dressed, let us say, in the latest fashion on the boulevards of some modern metropolis—we would probably give him only a passing glance, and that because of his relatively small stature.’” She closed the book. “There. The creature in the pecan tree is a habiline, a member of the species Homo habilis . He’s human, Paul, he’s one of us.”

“That may or may not be the case, but I’d still feel obliged to wash up with soap and water after shaking his hand.”

RuthClaire, giving me a look commingling pity and contempt, replaced the book on its shelf. I made up a song—which I had the good sense not to sing aloud to her—to the tune of an old country-and-western ditty entitled “Abilene”:

I telephoned the West Bank to see how Molly was getting on with Hazel and Livia George (she said everything was going “swimmingly,” a word Molly had learned from a beau in Atlanta), then convinced my ex-wife to let me spend the night at Paradise Farm on the sofa downstairs. For safety’s sake. RuthClaire reluctantly consented. In her studio loft she worked through until morning. At dawn I heard her say, “It’s all right, Paul. He left while you were sleeping.” She handed me a cup of coffee. I sipped at it as she gazed out the sliding doors at the empty pecan grove.

The following month—about three weeks later—I ran into RuthClaire in Beulah Fork’s ancient A&P, where I did almost all of my shopping for the West Bank: meats, produce, the works. October. Still sunny. The restaurant business only now beginning to tail off toward the inevitable winter slump. I had not thought of the Ishi Incident, or whatever you might choose to call it, more than three or four times since actually investigating it. Perhaps I did not believe that it had really happened. The whole episode had a dreamlike texture that did not stick very well to the hard-edged banality of everyday life in Beulah Fork. Besides, no one else in Hothlepoya County had mentioned seeing a naked black gnome running around the countryside climbing trees and stealing pecans.

My ex and I chatted, amicably at first. RuthClaire had just finished an original painting entitled Principalities for her porcelain-plate series, and AmeriCred Company of New York, New York, would begin taking subscription orders for this unusual Limoges ware at fifty-six dollars a plate in early December. The artist was going to receive an eight percent royalty for each plate sold, over and above the commission paid her in July for undertaking the work. She was very excited, not solely by the money she stood to make but also by the prospect of reaching a large and undoubtedly discerning audience. Ads for the subscription series, AmeriCred had told her, were going to appear in such classy periodicals as Smithsonian , Natural History , and Relic Collector . I wrote out a check for fifty-six dollars and told RuthClaire to sign me up at the first available opportunity; this was my deposit toward a subscription. Folding the check into her coin purse, she looked unfeignedly flustered. But grateful, too.