Ancient of Days by Michael Bishop Page B

George, who, in high dudgeon, asked me if I’d seen the piece in the Constitution and wondered aloud how my devious Atlanta relative had managed to take a photograph of RuthClaire’s mute friend Adam in her very own bathroom. “You got a spill-the-beans Peepin’ Tom for a nephew,” she said. “’F he ever comes back to visit you, Mr. Paul, I ain’ gonna do his cookin’, let me tell you now.” I agreed Nollinger was a contemptible sneak and promised she’d never have to wait on the man again.
    Then, in rapid succession, I received calls from a reporter on the Tocqueville Telegraph , a representative of The Today Show on NBC, an art dealer in Atlanta with a small stake in RuthClaire’s professional reputation, and two of my fellow merchants in Beulah Fork, Ben Sadler and grocer Clarence Tidings, both of whom expressed the hope that my ex-wife would not suffer disruptive public attention because of my nephew’s outrageous blather to the Atlanta media. An artist, they said, required her privacy. I put their commiseration on hold by agreeing and pleading other business. The reporter, the TV flack, and the art dealer I had sidestepped with terse pleasantries and an unshakable refusal to comment.
    Then I took my phone off the hook, dressed, and went shopping. My neighbors greeted me cheerily the first time our carts crossed paths, but studied me sidelong as I picked out meats, cheeses, and produce. Every housewife in the A&P seemed to look at me as she might a cuckolded male who pretends a debonair indifference to his ignominy. It gave me the heebie-jeebies, this surreptitious surveillance.
    Back at the West Bank my uncradled receiver was emitting a strident buzz, a warning to hang up or to forfeit continuous service. I replaced the receiver. A moment later, the telephone rang, and Edna Twiggs said that RuthClaire was trying to reach me.
    “Give me her new number,” I said. “I’ll call her.”
    But Edna replied, “Hang up again, Mr. Loyd. I’ll let her know you’re home. I’m not permitted to divulge an unlisted number.”
    Although angry, I obeyed Beulah Fork’s inescapable sedentary gadfly, and when next the telephone rang, RuthClaire’s voice sounded soft and weary in my ear: “We’re under siege. There’s an Eleven Alive news van from Atlanta on the lawn, and several other vehicles—one a staff car from the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer —are parked in the drive or along the roadway behind the hollies. It looks like a gathering for a Fourth of July picnic, Paul.”
    “Have you talked to any of those people?”
    “The knocking started a little over an hour ago. I wouldn’t answer it. Now there’s a man on the lawn taking pictures of the house with a video camera and a stylish young woman in front of him with a microphone talking about the ‘deliberate inaccessibility of artist RuthClaire Loyd.’ She’s said that four or five times, as if practicing. Anyway, I can hear her all the way up here in the loft. They’re not subtle, these people, they’re loud and persistent.”
    “Call the police, RuthClaire. Call the Hothlepoya County Sheriff’s Patrol.”
    “I hate to do that.”
    “They’re trespassing and making nuisances of themselves. Call Davie Hutton here in town and Sheriff Crutchfield in Tocqueville.”
    “What if I just poke my .22 out of the window and tell everyone to beat it?”
    “It’d make great viewing on the evening news.”
    “Yeah, wouldn’t it?” RuthClaire chuckled wryly. “May the seraphim forgive me, but maybe such a display would boost subscription sales for my Celestial Hierarchy series. AmeriCred has been a little disappointed in the way they’re going.”
    “We live in a secular age, RuthClaire.” Then: “How’s Adam taking all this?”
    “It’s made him restless and reclusive. He’s pacing the downstairs bathroom with the exhaust fan running—to drown out the clamor from the lawn.”
    “Well, I hope you closed the curtains on the upper half of the window