Free Ancient of Days by Michael Bishop Page A

intelligence ain’t the issue, it’s the violation of your rights as a white person, not to mention our traditional community standards. You follow all this, don’t you?”
    “You’re not speaking for the community. You’re speaking for Craig Puddicombe, teenage redneck.”
    “He’s speakin’ for more than that.” E. L. smiled boyishly. The boyishness of this smile somehow heightened its menace.
    “We just dropped in to help you, Mr. Loyd. We’re not bigots. You’re a bigger bigot than E. L. or me ’cause you look down on your own kind who ain’t got as much as you do or who ain’t been to school as long. That’s bigotry, Mr. Loyd.”
    “I’m busy.” I turned to take care of my customers.
    E. L. Teavers grabbed my elbow—with an amiable deference at odds with the force of his grip. I could not shake him off because of the water pitcher in my hand. He had not stopped smiling his choirboy smile, and I found myself wanting to hear whatever he had to say next, no matter how addlepated or paranoiac.
    “There’s a hibber—a lousy subhuman—inheritin’ to stuff that doesn’t, that shouldn’t, belong to it. Since it used to be your stuff—your house, your land, your wife—we thought you’d like to know there’s people in and around Beulah Fork who appreciate other hardworkin’ folks and who try to keep an eye out for their rights.”
    “Craig and you?” Since finishing at Hothlepoya High last June, I reflected, they had been working full time at United Piedmont Mills on the outskirts of Tocqueville. In fact, E. L. was married to a girl who had waitressed for me briefly. “Knowing that, fellas, has just about made my day. I feel infinitely more secure.”
    “You never went to school with hibbers,” Craig Puddicombe said. “You’ve never had to be anything but their boss.”
    “Now you’ve got a prehistoric hibber gettin’ it on with your wife.”
    “My ex-wife,” I said automatically.
    “Yeah,” said E. L. Teavers. “Like you say.” He took a creased business card from his hip pocket and handed it to me. “This is the help you can count on if it begins to seem unfair to you. If it begins to, you know, make you angry.” He opened the restaurant door on the muggy July night. “Better am-scray, Craig, so’s Mr. Loyd can get back to feeding his bigwigs.”
    They were gone.
    I wandered to the service niche beside the kitchen and set down the water pitcher. I read the business card young Teavers had given me. Then I tore it lengthwise, collated the pieces, and tore them again—right down the middle. Ordinarily quite dependable, in this instance my memory fails me. All I can recall is the gist of the message on the card. But to preserve the fiction of my infallibility as narrator I will give here a reasonable facsimile of the message on that small, grimy document:

    E(lvis) L(amar) Teavers
    Zealous High Zygote
    KuKlos Klan—Kudzu Klavern
    Box 666
    Beulah Fork, Georgia

    Business had slackened noticeably by ten. At eleven we closed. I stayed in the kitchen after Hazel and Livia George had left to prepare my desserts for Sunday: a German chocolate cake, a carrot cake, and a strawberry icebox pie. The work—the attention to ingredients, measures, and mixing or baking times—kept my mind off the visit by the boys. In fact, I was striving purposefully not to think about it: a strategy that fell apart as soon as I went upstairs to my stuffy converted storage room.
    E. L. Teavers, a bright kid from a respectable lower-middle-class home, was a member of the Klan. Not merely a member, but an officer of a piddling local chapter of one of its semiautonomous splinter groups. What had the card said? Zealous High Zygote? Terrific Vice Tycoon? Puissant Grand Poltroon? Something rhetorically cyclopean or cyclonic. The title did not matter. What mattered was that this able-bodied, mentally keen young man, along with his somewhat less astute buddy, had kept abreast of the situation at Paradise Farm and