Ancient of Days Read Free Page A

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”:

    Habiline, O habiline,
    Grungiest ghoul I’ve ever seen.
    Even Gillette won’t shave him clean,
    That habiline.

    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