Ancient of Days Read Free Page B

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.
    “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