Michael Bishop: Ancient of Days

“You don’t have to do this, Paul.”

“I know I don’t. I want a set of those plates. My customers are going to enjoy eating off the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost—not to mention the nine different species of angel.”

“They’re not for dinner use, really. They’re for display.”

“A rank commercial enterprise?” I tweaked her. “Ready-made antiques for the spiritual cognoscenti who frown on bodily functions like eating and ummmm-ummmm-ummm? How about that? You may be catering to an airy crowd, Ruthie Cee, but we’re both in business, it looks like—business with a capital B.”

Amazingly she smiled, merely smiled.

“I can see you haven’t given up eating,” I pursued. “That’s quite a load you’ve got there.”

Her shopping basket contained six uncut frying chickens, four heads of cabbage, three tins of Planters party nuts, four or five bunches of bananas, and several packages of fresh fish, mostly mullet and red snapper. I ogled this bounty. RuthClaire had never fried a chicken in her life, and I knew that she despised bananas. The other stuff was also out of the finicky pale of her diet, for in hostile overreaction to my virtuosity as chef and restaurateur she—not long before the end—had ostentatiously limited her intake to wild rice, bean curd, black beans, fresh vegetables, fruit juice, and various milk products. This spiteful decision had not helped our marriage any, either. “I’m having some people down from Atlanta,” she explained, rather defensively. “Gallery people.”

“Oh,” I replied.

We looked at each other for a moment.

“They’re all invited guests, I take it,” I said at last. “You don’t want any uninvited drop-ins, do you?”

RuthClaire stiffened. “I don’t feed the uninvited. You know that. Good-bye, Paul. Thanks for taking out a subscription.”

She went her way, I mine. For somebody subsisting on rabbit food and artistic inspiration, I reflected, she looked damned good.

I learned later what had been going on at Paradise Farm. On the morning after my overnight stay on the downstairs sofa, RuthClaire had moved a rickety table into the pecan grove. Every evening she set it with paper plates and uncooked food items, including party nuts in a cut-glass dish that had once belonged to her mother. Further, on a folding deck chair she laid out one of my old leisure suits, altered for a figure smaller than mine, just in case the nippy autumn air prompted the trespasser to cover his nakedness. At first, though, the habiline did not rise to this bait. The dew-laden suit had to dry every day on the clothesline, and every evening RuthClaire had to replace the soggy paper dinnerware and the slug-slimed food items.

Around Halloween, when nighttime temperatures were dipping into the thirties, my ex awoke one morning to find the creature hunkering on the table on a brilliant cloth of frost. The grass looked sequined. So did the habiline’s feet. He was eating unpeeled bananas and shivering so violently that the table rocked back and forth. RuthClaire put on her dressing gown and hurried downstairs. She opened the sliding doors and beckoned the fellow inside, where he could warm his tootsies at the cast-iron Buck stove in the fireplace. Although he followed RuthClaire with his eyes, he did not move. RuthClaire, leaving the glass doors open, fetched a set of sun lamps from her loft. These she placed about the patio area so that they all shone directly into the house—runway lights to warmth and safety.

The sun began to burn away the frost. An hour or so later, watching from her bay window, RuthClaire saw the habiline leap down from the table. For a moment he seemed to consider fleeing through the pecan grove, but soon rejected this notion to stroll—head ducked, elbows out—through the gauntlet of lamps toward the house. A ballsy fellow, this one, and my ex was able to see quite clearly that this appraisal of him was no mere metaphor. A ballsy bantam in blackface.

Her heart pounding paradiddles, RuthClaire went downstairs to meet him. This was the beginning: the real beginning.

Although over time a few clues have come my way (some of which I will shortly set forth), I do not pretend to know exactly how RuthClaire domesticated this representative of a supposedly extinct hominid species ancestral to our own—but she was probably more alert to his feelings and needs than she had ever been to mine. In the dead of winter, for instance, she routinely left the patio doors open, never questioning his comings and goings, never surrendering to resentment because of them. She fed him whatever he liked, even if sparerib splinters ended up between the sofa cushions or half-eaten turnips sometimes turned up on the bottom of her shower stall looking like mushy polyhedral core tools. Ruthie Cee may have a bohemian soul, but during the six years of our marriage, she had also evinced a middle-class passion for tidiness; more than once she had given me hell for letting the end of the dental floss slip down into its flip-top container. For her prehistoric paramour, however, she made allowances—lots of them.

She also sang to him, I think. RuthClaire has a voice with the breathy delicacy of Garfunkel during his partnership with Simon, and I can easily imagine her soothing the savage breast of even a pit bull with a single stanza of “Feelin’ Groovy.” The habiline, however, she probably deluged with madrigals, hymns, and soft-drink ditties; and although she has always professed to hate commercial television, she has since publicly admitted using the idiot box—as well as song—to amuse and edify her live-in hominid. Apparently, he especially enjoyed game shows, situation comedies, sporting events, and nature studies. On the public broadcasting channels RuthClaire introduced him to such programs as Sesame Street, Organic Gardening , and Wall Street Week , while the anything-goes cable networks gave him a crash course in contemporary hominid bonding rituals. All these shows together were undoubtedly as crucial to the domestication process as my ex-wife’s lovely singing.

But only a week or so into the new year did I learn about any of this. RuthClaire drove to Tocqueville to do her shopping more often than she came to Beulah Fork; and our chance meeting in the A&P, despite resulting in my order for the first plate in the Celestial Hierarchy series, had made her wary of running into me again. She stayed away from town. I, in turn, could not go out to Paradise Farm without an invitation. The terms of our divorce expressly stipulated this last point, and my reference to uninvited guests during our brief tête-à-tête in October had stricken RuthClaire as contemptibly snide. Maybe I had meant it to be….

Anyway, on the day before Christmas Eve I telephoned RuthClaire and asked if I could come out to the farm to give her a present. Somewhat reluctantly (it seemed to me), she agreed. Although it was cold and dark when I rang the front doorbell, she stepped through the door to greet me, and we conferred on the porch. The Persian kitten in the cardboard box under my arm cowered away from Ruthie Cee, its wintry pearl-gray fur like a lion’s mane around its Edward G. Robinson face. My ex, emitting sympathetic coos, scratched the creature behind its ears until it began to purr.

Then she said, “I can’t accept him, Paul.”

“Why not? He’s got a pedigree that stretches from here to Isfahan.” (This was a lie. Nevertheless, the kitten looked it.) “Besides, he’ll make a damned good mouser. A farm needs a mouser.”

“I just can’t give him the attention he needs.” RuthClaire saw my irritation. “I didn’t think you’d be bringing an animal, Paul. A sweater, a necklace, a new horror novel—anything nonliving I’d’ve been happy to accept. But a kitten’s a different matter, and I just can’t be responsible for him, sweet and pretty as he is.”