Theory of War Read online

  ‘I see a hundred guys like that every week,’ people said.

  This was only the beginning of my grandfather’s search. He scoured the country for his father, for my great-grandfather, for somebody to give him an anchor somewhere, in time, in blood-line, in almost anything at all – somebody whose existence would call a halt to the random meaninglessness of his life. He failed; my great-grandfather was not to be found. Jonathan himself is the beginning. He who had no past is our past, our unmoved mover, our foundation stone: the one we all rely on. But as his train pulled out of San Francisco he stood atop the cars with the steam abillow up around him, that salacious rhythmic pounding of wheels under him, and in his heart, the full and certain knowledge that if he worked at it he could reconstruct a picture of his father so complete that finding him would be no trick at all.

  6

  Over the hills of California – this is how Jonathan goes – back over the desert and the flatlands, up into the tense beauty of the Rockies again. My own father, Rayner Carrick – Jonathan’s eldest son and my uncle Atlas’s brother – used to fly into rages. My sisters and I cowered behind our bedroom doors while he and my mama screamed at each other. Dishes crashed. The Rockies look to me like that. Up there you can actually see the howling. The earth boils up, flames spurt – then you’re across them and suddenly, abruptly, there’s calm. That’s the way it was with my father, too. The land just lays itself down and sleeps all the way across the plains where little towns glitter at night.

  My father’s anger never left him entirely. In this more than in anything else he resembled his own father, my grandfather, Jonathan Carrick. We children learned about this anger the hard way. It dissipated. Then it gathered again slowly, imperceptibly, just like the grasslands of the middle west gather together slowly, imperceptibly across Indiana and Ohio. A haze from the Great Smokies appears in the air, and then these eastern mountains . . . Sometimes the rages carried on into the parental bed at night. What an education for little girls then! The violence of the Smokies is lush where the Rockies are imperial. Then morning and breakfast, down again and on to the daily noise in New York City. From the freight yards Jonathan and College hitched a ride on a passenger train into the wonders of Pennsylvania station.

  College led my grandfather out onto Broadway and walked him between the walls of buildings and up to the ponds and hillocks of Central Park. Then downtown again. They hung onto the straps of a horse-drawn streetcar, bought hot chestnuts from a sidewalk vendor, watched the traffic of ships from a bench in the Battery. There were barks and barkentines, steeply raked schooner clippers designed for the Gold Rushes in Australia and California – even a whaler on its way back to New Bedford. Jonathan stood up and sat in abrupt movements, twisting to catch sight of the ships, and of the passers-by, too, any one of whom might be a man with a black beard and no lashes on one eye. After all, this is America. Everybody’s on the move.

  So here he is in New York, seeking a father never to be found and knowing himself a murderer, which he is not, when all of a sudden he sees George. Right there in the Battery. There he is – plump, dark-haired, a frock coat. Of course it’s George. Jonathan makes a dash at him, grabs him by the shoulder, swings him around –

  And it isn’t George at all.

  That night Jonathan dreamed again the nightmare that had spurred him on to run away from Denver. Again he awoke to find himself plucking imaginary tobacco worms from his covers. But three days later the multi-colored Mogul pulled out of New York carrying the makings of an entire town, and as everybody knows – Jonathan better than most – when you move you can stop thinking: maybe even stop dreaming. They carried every nail with them, every scrap of timber, every tin of beans: every citizen, too, school teacher, preacher, saloon keeper, men, women, children. Secret reports revealed stibnite in a remote area of Nevada. Out of stibnite you can make explosives. Provided you get there first, that is. A company called Metals & Minerals of New York was getting there first.

  When they reached the site of the town, they christened it Mogul in the engine’s honor, and a month after the raw materials were dumped in the desert, Jonathan and College passed through the area again, this time going east with redwood trunks from California chained to flatcars and bound for Chicago. Balancing on the trunks, they looked down on the population of the town – men, women, children – everybody sawing and hammering, fetching and carrying, a busyness as busy from the top of a train as a plague of locusts from the window of a wooden farmhouse. The hotel was already complete. So was the general store. So was the boardwalk. A saloon without walls was in business. Struts for a church spire rose up not far from struts that would become a train station. The foundations of a dozen houses clustered beyond the boardwalk.

  Jonathan had plainly been a charming small child once, chattering nonsense and dancing around cracker barrels in Benbow Wikin’s store; he’d smothered this gaiety to survive, killed it, he thought, as surely as he’d killed George. He was as wrong about the one as about the other (as most people are about the certainties in their lives). The gaiety was rare, but it shows itself in the diaries sometimes, a complete surprise when it happens, as pleasurable as dashing through a sprinkler on a hot day. ‘Hey,’ he shouted in delight to College over the roar of the engine, looking down on the doings of this boom-town-to-be, ‘hey! I helped build that.’ What would such a place be in two years’ time? In ten? Could you contain it at all?

  The mountains beyond were bitterly cold. The night they reached the continental divide was foggy. The Mogul rested there to prepare for descent in the morning. Lying awake in the caboose, Jonathan played with the color of his father’s eyes, but he found his mind on the town of Mogul instead, his engine’s town, and on himself visiting there in two years’ time maybe, maybe in ten: Johnny the railroadman. Suddenly the realization came to him that he had enough money to buy a frock coat.

  The town of Lenssen lay at the bottom of the mountain. On the very next day, he swore, he would buy the coat right there. Tomorrow. No matter what. Serge with a silk lining – to hell with George’s buckram – pearl buttons, velvet collar.

  At dawn, the train began to ease its way downhill. Icicles hung from the redwoods and from the chains that held them. The wind was so sharp it froze eyelashes together. A change in the locomotive’s exhaust is the only warning of a break-in-two a railroadman gets. Hear that? That easing of the sound? That’s your reference point. That’s what measures you – tells you who you are. If you’re quick you can catch the mistake before it’s actually made. But nobody was quick enough on those icy redwoods in that icy, whistling wind – not Jonathan, not College, either, not Hecox the bear of a conductor himself. The train quaked. The redwoods swung in their chains. The back half of the train pulled away from the front, paused, then cannoned forward. Well, what can you expect? You’ve got to die sometime. Fire sprouted from the wheels: this really happens, fire from metal on metal, and it catches the brush on either side of the track as though the train itself has melted, become molten like lava that ignites whatever it touches along its path. The redwoods tore loose. Jonathan, my grandfather, inched toward the engine, setting each of his brakes as hard as he dared. The engineer, a pinch-faced Scot whose nose had been chewed off in a bar-room fight, jerked his head toward the corner of the cab. The bear of a conductor sat there, eyes staring ahead, beard clotted with blood.

  When the wheels hiss, a train is sliding free, and there’s nothing God or man can do to stop it. In front, the foothills leveled off. The engine hurtled on toward the solid brick walls of Lenssen stationhouse. Without a backward glance at the Scot, Jonathan scrambled out of the cab window and climbed up behind the engine’s brass sand dome.

  And jumped.

  My aunt Claire supplied bologna sandwiches and milk for Atlas, her already tiddly husband, and for his gate-crashing niece: me. She’d made them days before and frozen them, because she’d known that on this day, at just about this hour, twelve-thirty, she’d be on the point of c
reating an aioli for the French dinner party to come. Claire hated garlic, and making anything like an aioli caused her agony.

  ‘Why do you do it?’ I said. ‘Couldn’t you make a soup or something?’

  ‘It’s a matter of self-discipline,’ she said.

  Atlas and I ate the sandwiches in his office. ‘Dad should have been dead,’ Atlas said. ‘There was no reason at all for him to be alive – scares me everytime I think about it.’ He poured whiskey into the milk Claire had brought him. ‘But he was a funny guy. He thought – he really thought he ought to be able to control things people just plain can’t control. Maybe it worked sometimes just because he thought it so hard. Jesus, he wanted that coat. He wanted it as much as he’d wanted to kill George, and nothing was going to get in his way – absolutely nothing – not even death. So he lived. Just like that.’ But he couldn’t even get to his knees. Beyond him, a hundred yards away, lay a tangled mountain of metal and logs that seethed and stank like Sunday dinner at the workhouse. He tried to get up again and managed this time, but only with the help of the stationmaster who had rushed to his side.

  ‘Let go of me,’ my grandfather said.

  He had the money on him. He could hardly walk, but he made his way along the Lenssen boardwalk and found a men’s tailor. There was no frock coat with pearl buttons, but he found one with a silk lining. For two dollars extra, the tailor added a velvet collar. Jonathan took a room in the town’s one hotel, bathed, dressed, shaved and put on the coat.

  This is what revelation is all about.

  7

  Downstairs, he found College leaning up against the bar, and it was only then that he even remembered his friend’s existence, which the crash had rendered as unlikely as his own. He was so stricken, so shocked, by what he’d forgot and what he’d remembered that he could hardly speak; it was such an extraordinary tactical win for George, alive or dead – this buying of a coat instead of remembering a friend – that it overwhelmed everything else. Jonathan received College’s embrace mechanically, tearing at himself for his own mad priorities, but tearing at himself even more so for letting George prevail on such private territory.

  ‘Well, you are a cold bastard, bound for hell, aren’t you?’ College said. ‘How’d you get out of that mess?’

  ‘I jumped.’

  ‘You didn’t! From the cab? What about Hecox?’ The bar was small, dark, tatty, but it was a family hotel – a place where the occasional man might bring his wife – so it lacked the filth and noise of most such places. Jonathan and College were, in fact, the only customers present. The bartender hovered, listening, fascinated; news of the crash dominated the town.

  ‘Hecox’s dead.’

  ‘The Scot, too?’

  Jonathan nodded.

  ‘The others?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Why aren’t you dead? God, I’m glad you aren’t. But why aren’t you? You didn’t really jump, did you?’

  Jonathan nodded again.

  ‘You shouldn’t have got away with that, you know.’

  Jonathan nodded once more. ‘What about you?’ He still held himself rigid against George’s unexpected win, and his voice showed it.

  But College laughed happily, anyway: happy to be alive, happy Jonathan was alive, happy to have so fascinated an audience as the bartender. ‘If it wasn’t the damndest thing: when that coupling snapped, I – the bravest man on the railroad—’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, tell the truth for once!’

  ‘I always tell the truth—’

  ‘You say the first thing that comes into your head.’

  ‘That’s always truth.’

  ‘It’s never truth.’

  ‘Don’t quibble, Johnny. Have another drink. Now listen: I grabbed at the brake wheel with one hand.’ The bartender’s ears were dangling down on the bar and College’s voice soared. ‘One hand! I made a complete revolution with the wheel, swung all the way around, up and over. The momentum threw me clear.’ He paused. The bartender stood riveted to the spot. ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

  Jonathan sighed.

  ‘And I the only man who knows and sees all—’

  ‘Then why don’t you say something about my coat?’

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘My coat, damnit.’

  College stepped back from the bar. ‘Coat?’ he said, puzzled, trying to focus on this thing that seemed to him to bear no relevance to anything at all. Then he bowed, seeing the object at last but not even remotely understanding what it could mean. ‘My dear sir, I know it might be thought an imposition between gentlemen, but would you be good enough to give me the name of your tailor – such style – such craftsmanship – such—’

  Jonathan’s irritation swung into anger; he turned away abruptly.

  ‘But you are wrong,’ College said, at ease with my grandfather’s sticky temperament. My grandfather knew his anger was dangerous to him; he fought to hide it from his enemies, but he let his allies see it – an odd way to show trust. That’s what it was, though: a tribute of sorts. Not that Jonathan figured it that way. The way he saw it, he himself was only half the audience tonight; College had the bartender as well, and it was against a clown’s code to bow to the ill-temper of one customer when there was still another in sight. ‘I know all about tailors,’ College went on, ‘they are part of any gentleman’s past, and I, my good sir, am a gentleman. May I introduce myself? My name (since you have always been too polite to ask) is Rayner Hogg Malloy, and I am a member of the great middle classes. The, uh, pardon me, upper middle classes. What I don’t know about frock coats is more than a clod like you – I ran away to be a railroadman when I was eighteen. Just about your age right now, I’ll bet.’

  Jonathan shrugged.

  ‘My father’s name is Sebastian,’ College ran on. ‘Sebastian Malloy. He’s just like his name – round, fat, soft in the underbelly. He was born in Devon – over in England – and he went to Peterhouse at Cambridge because his mama wanted him to be an English gentleman like his daddy before him. He was going to eat mutton chops and walk down country lanes in a bowler hat. But he had asthma and went to America instead.’

  Jonathan had listened to College babble for two years. Listening, he’d picked up some ease with speech himself; even so he sensed more than heard a new strain in this oddly personal spiel – and realized that a shift had taken place, that the interweave of tinsel had lessened, that the bartender was forgotten, that what he was hearing was meant for him alone. His anger disappeared. ‘Why did you run away?’ he said. ‘What was the point?’

  College gulped at his whiskey. ‘Lo and behold!’ he went on. ‘In the fair city of Boston papa Sebastian ran across Helen Andrews Hogg. Sixteen years old, tiny, thin, lively – she’s still like that – and she wrote poems in Latin and Greek. Ghastly poems. But poems are poems after all. And her poems came with an independent income of $2000 a year. Imagine it: $2000 a year. Sebastian fell in love at once. She fell in love, too. Marriage ensued, as it will. They were going to open a lyceum and be to Boston what Aristotle was to Athens. If you can’t be a gentleman in England – well, what the hell – a gentleman can breed a gentleman even in Boston.’ College poured whiskey into his glass until the liquor slopped out over the bar. ‘Troubles, troubles. They couldn’t afford Boston. $2000 a year and they couldn’t afford Boston. So they bought a piece of land off the coast of Maine not far from a town called Ellsworth – nice town – whitewashed clapboard buildings, streets lined with wineglass elms, little church with spire in a grassy square. Very nice. And there they established—’

  ‘You ran away from there? For Christ’s sake, from a place like that?’

  College beat out a fanfare on the table with the fingers of one hand. ‘Malloy’s Landing! Culture for all! There they bred me – Rayner Hogg, son of a gentleman – and enrolled me at the tender age of twelve months. Oh, what a good boy was I. Mama and papa published my poems in ads in the Boston Globe: Malloy’s Landing grew and pr
ospered. When I was eighteen there were eighteen pupils to celebrate my birthday.’

  The bar room was hot. ‘But why did you run away?’ Jonathan pressed. ‘Tell me why.’

  College swallowed down what remained of the bottle, then dropped it onto the floor. ‘Better sit down,’ he said. Jonathan helped him to a table. ‘When I was bad they wouldn’t talk to me – silence – terrible silence – You know what, Johnny?’ he interrupted himself. ‘I’ll tell you something important: You smell. Now don’t get offended. All men smell. I smell. It’s a fact of life. Women smell. Isn’t it? Fact of life. Get me a drink, will you?’

  Jonathan fetched a second bottle.

  ‘But not at Malloy’s Landing. Nobody smells at Malloy’s Landing. Nobody shits there. Nobody sweats. Nobody – Know where I come from?’ He nodded gravely at Jonathan. ‘Little Rayner came out of a water lily.’

  ‘You ran away – just – just—’ Jonathan stuttered. ‘Just because some other people and you didn’t exactly agree—?’

  ‘What’s truth, Johnny?’

  ‘Well, it ain’t’ – the pause was only fractional: the two years of fascination with College’s educated syntax had taught him so many things – ‘isn’t floating around up in the trees like that.’ There were already the beginnings of some music in the way Jonathan spoke, but even with the grammar correct, his words seemed to him to clatter onto the table. ‘Playing at babies being water lilies – what’s so awful about that? She never meant you any harm. You got to get a lot lower down: you got to grub where it hurts.’ He could see from College’s drunkenly blank face that not one word he said meant anything. ‘Oh, what the hell,’ he went on, giving up, ‘maybe you were just trying to get to the other side.’

  College frowned. ‘“Come on, pretty biscuit” – that’s what my mother called me. “Come on, pretty biscuit, turn over on your left side so you can go to sleep.”’