Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

Starnes videotaped the crowd, the sundeck, the departing Puddicombes. His sun-bronzed colleague held impromptu interviews with some of the startled people around him. When Barrington accosted Livia George with his mike, though, she shook her finger under his nose, but her apparent fear of further disrupting the ceremony made it hard to hear what she said. My attention shifted when McElroy began talking again:

“Let’s pray for the immortal souls of these dead brothers, the murderer and his innocent victim,” he shouted, still recovering from the loss of his check. “The one seems hellbent by virtue of the virtues he sadly lacked, the other as a result of his parents’ failure to baptize him into the living community of Christ. And so, brothers and sisters, let’s pray for God’s great and redemptive mercy on their immortal souls. Bow your heads and observe with me a moment of loving, intercessory silence.”

“Please leave this platform,” Adam said. “The usurping of my intention to preside does not become you.”

McElroy replied, “Goodness, Adam, I’ve only come to help. You’re gettin’ sorta territorial about this, aren’t you?”

“The soul,” Adam countered, “does not everlast. I am sorry to have to tell you so, but it is what its body did and also its unplaceable self-awareness of that doing. In death, Paulie and Craig are reconciled. Neither goes to hell, neither to heaven. The great pity I feel for them is my pity for the extinction of their souls, one before it could un-deform and one before it could bloom to beauty.”

“Uh oh,” I said.

“Soul is mind,” Adam said patiently. “Neither has location. Neither goes beyond the stoppage of body death except in the continued cherishing of the souls and minds that knew them. All of us have souls, as do I. Important, very important it is that all of us apprehend the other’s soul and value it as we do our own. That is why the ashes of my son I have brought to rest beside the body of his unhappy killer.”

Rudy Starnes had been creeping slowly forward with his portable camera. Soon, he was shooting this scene from the southwestern corner of my sundeck. Barrington, his partner, had already escaped Livia George’s scolding to reach the same vantage and was leaning between two cedar railings to pick up the argument between Adam and McElroy with his hand-held microphone. I wanted to go after them, but Caroline stopped me.

“Bastards think they’re getting a scoop.”

“They are, Paul. Just forget it. Haven’t you been listening to Adam?”

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?”

“Do unto others as they would be done by—insofar as it’s possible to know what they want and insofar as respect for your own sacred self permits you to do it.”

“Is that what he said?”

“Not in those words, no. In other words.”

McElroy said, “The talk you’re talking, Adam, is devil’s talk.”

“Maybe he’s a devil!” shouted a balding man with a string tie and acne-scarred jowls. I uncharitably identified him as a Puddicombe partisan, an unsheeted Klansman. It is possible that he was simply a Baptist.

Adam had no care for the impact his words were making on people like the bald-headed man. “Craig Puddicombe and Tiny Paul live at this moment,” he explained, speaking to McElroy but loudly enough to be heard by all, “because in our respectful ceremony they even yet play with the living who care for them. They are playmates in the soulful system of our shared sorrow, our community remembering. In this way, they live, perfect elements of the ecology of our grief. So long as our self-knowing souls play with them in systems of heartbreak and memory, they live. They remain parts of a flowing system. Try hard as we might, none can fully comprehend such wholeness. But that is okay, that is truly okay. It is only the healthy relationship of us, who live, to them, who have died, that gratifies and greatly blossoms meaning.”

McElroy stared down at Adam like a schoolmaster eyeing a boy who has just wet his pants. “That’s very pretty, Adam. It’s also secular-humanistic buncombe.”

“ No! ” Adam rejoined. “I spit on those who think they can know me by radiating my bones, weighing my brain, and seeing how many helical heredities I share with the orangutan. I spit on any such, but embrace those who seek to know me by embracing me, seeing my paintings, engaging me in furious Ping-Pong challenge, or praying beside me in midnights of mortal peril.”

“ ‘Buncombe,’” said Mildred Garroway, an eighty-plus-year-old widow standing just outside our paddock. “ ‘Helical heredities.’” She smiled at Caroline. “Both those boys can talk, can’t they?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Caroline.

Barrington, the Contact Cable News reporter, had climbed onto my sundeck, near Craig’s casket. Bilker, seeing him, stepped toward the man, but Barrington had already reached across the bier to shove his microphone into Adam’s face.

“Repeat for our viewers what you’ve just said,” he demanded while Rudy Starnes, hunched below the platform, continued to video-tape.

Swiftly breaking in, Bilker slapped the reporter’s mike into the crowd. Several people gasped. McElroy, a more prescient interpreter of danger signals than Barrington, cringed away from this blow and left the deck by the stairway he had earlier mounted. Then he, his son, and their bodyguard retreated around the corner of my house. During their strategic withdrawal, Bilker shook the Contact Cable newsman.

“Your ass is grass, fella.”

“What was that?” Miss Mildred asked Caroline. “What did he say?”

“Let him go,” Adam commanded Bilker. “No hair on his head should you even breathe on.” He dropped his top hat and began to remove his coat. “No more memory rite today,” he told the rest of the mourners in the pecan grove. “You are everybody free to go now. If you stay, I must warn you, you may turn out to act unhappily in something for which you did not bargain.” He folded his coat and placed it on the casket. “Very sorry that bad behavior of Mr. McElroy should prove so deadly to the graceful remembering planned by me for this double funeral.”

“What about the buttin’ in of that fella there?” Livia George shouted, waving her liver-colored palm at Barrington.

“Him, too,” Adam agreed. “Now, everybody, please go.”

I asked Caroline to see Miss Mildred safely to the front gate, where she would have no doubt parked the monstrous Lincoln Continental that her failing eyesight had not yet convinced her to give up driving. Reluctantly, then, the mourners began to straggle along in Caroline and Miss Mildred’s wake, a process not unaccompanied by peeved looks and audible grumbling. Starnes, the cameraman, recorded this withdrawal from my back yard, but not without several glances away from the viewfinder to note how inexorably it was leaving him and Barrington beached on a hostile shore. At last he stopped taping altogether.

Adam had removed his tie and vest. He started to unbutton his shirt. “Once, you barged onto Paradise Farm to film my son’s birth,” he told Barrington. “Today you have barged again, to make unauthorized tape of his burial. True?” He dropped his shirt on the cedar planking.

“It’s our job,” Barrington said. “Getting the news.”

“A sleazy tactic, such sneakery. Do you remember, Brad Barrington, how such provocation stirred me in December?”

“Just let us get our stuff together and we’ll go, Mr. Montaraz.”

Adam, hopping on one foot and then the other, yanked off his shoes. Then he shed his striped ambassadorial trousers. As naked as the day he’d first come to Paradise Farm, he crouched and gave the reporter an alarming threat-grin. Barrington turned, vaulted the deck rail, and landed on the grass beside his cameraman. With no apparent regard for what might become of Starnes, he sprinted through the pecan grove toward Cleve Snyder’s property. Adam jumped to the top of the deck rail, sprang forward ten or twelve feet, and ran Barrington to ground almost effortlessly. He toppled the reporter by leaping on his back, wrapping his legs around the man’s midriff, and applying a half nelson to the nape of his neck. The newsman staggered and fell. A squirrel scampered off through the grass, and the full-throated snarling of the habiline soon had the terrified Brad Barrington crying for mercy.