Theory of War Read online

  ‘Oh, Lord, I’m sorry—’

  ‘He wouldn’t even look at me. We didn’t know whether to stay sitting there or run or what.’ She laughed a little wildly. ‘What is the etiquette for wetting your pants during Barefoot in the Park?’

  ‘Probably nobody noticed,’ I said, not knowing what to say.

  ‘That’s not the point, is it?’

  This tumor of mine isn’t cancer. It’s benign. If it were anywhere in soft tissue – gut, legs – they could just cut it out, and that would be that. But it chose to grow within the strict confines of my spinal column; it chose to fight for a territory that it could not fail to win – and in winning, it’s going to kill us both. You might say it’s a bond between me and my grandfather. He didn’t die of slavery – not directly – any more than I’m going to die of this tumor – not directly. It’s the secret strangulation of the nerves that counts. In some cases like mine you can operate. My surgeon, Dr Abbott of the large belly and shiny pate, was in favor of a try. I walked into the hospital. He operated. Three months later, they wheeled me out in this chair, where I’ve been ever since, the tumor still more or less intact, still growing, albeit more slowly. Atlas never liked Dr Abbott. He said Abbott had no feel for the flesh. I guess he was right, but he never said anything until it was too late, until the operation was long over and the damage irrevocable.

  ‘Will you talk to him?’ Claire asked again.

  ‘He’s thirty years older than I am,’ I said evasively. ‘Why should he listen to me?’

  ‘Balances do change.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘You’re what? Forty-five? The peak of your powers. He knows that and respects it. I’m just an old bag who fusses over ovens and dinner parties.’

  ‘It’s not really any of my—’

  ‘Try, that’s all I ask. Won’t you at least try? If the opportunity presents itself? What harm can it do to try?’

  ‘Claire, I—’

  She got up angrily. ‘Is your self-absorption total? My husband’s killing himself, and all you can do is sit there. You’re so damned sorry for yourself you won’t even try to help.’ She slammed the door shut behind her.

  Well, what can I say? Benign tumors don’t run in the family, but suicide does. If fifty years of whiskey was Atlas’s approach to it, he wasn’t going to win any prizes among us Carricks. There is etiquette (to use Claire’s word) even to suicide: whiskey just isn’t up to snuff. On top of the two attempts Jonathan’s already made, he has one and a half to go, and while the half-attempt is not too impressive, the remaining full attempt is very much so – which is to say that Atlas comes into this legacy legitimately, even if he doesn’t show the family panache. My father Rayner did better. He swallowed 500 nembutals; he did it because my mother found an unfamiliar condom under the bed in his study, one of those raspberry-scented ones, and they had one of their wild fights over it. God help us, what a thing to die for: a raspberry-scented condom. In fact he didn’t die right away, though; the barbiturates destroyed his kidneys and raised his blood pressure: it was a stroke that got him in the end. There is no aim, no meaning, no purpose in life – no pattern, no divine plan. This is truth, but the healthy rarely bother with it. ‘The trouble with depres-sives’, as Atlas says, ‘is that they’re right.’

  The stakes are so high, though, that in the afterfog of an unsuccessful attempt, life sometimes reveals a simple-minded, day-to-day charm, a patternless pattern that went unnoticed before. So it was with Jonathan, my grandfather, who thought he could see a way to be happy in just such a simple-minded, day-to-day fashion. He took a train to Billings, Montana, signed on as a brakeman for the Northern Pacific run between Billings and Duluth and when he received his first paycheck, opened a savings account at the First National Bank in Duluth. He grew a mustache, a rich black affair that hung down a little to either side of his mouth and made him look older. The railroad promoted him to baggageman. For another six months, he drank nothing, lived cheaply and worked as many extra hours as he could persuade the railroad to hire him for. What time he had left over he spent as he’d spent left-over time since that day in San Francisco, searching for the father he was never to find. The moment his bank balance stood at $1200 he quit and took a train to the east coast.

  He arrived in Ellsworth, Maine, just before dawn on a June morning. It was a smaller town than he’d expected, neater: stores and houses clustered side by side, paved paths to walk on instead of boardwalks, cobbled streets, no smell of pig shit over the horse shit. But the wineglass elms lining the streets were precisely what he’d had in mind and so was the white clapboard church in the town square surrounded by flower beds. He caught up with a lamplighter snuffing out street lights and asked the way; Malloy’s Landing turned out to be fifteen miles to the east. He left his trunk at the station and set out on foot.

  The road out of Ellsworth was overhung with maple trees and the smell of pine. Cocks were crowing. Thinking about College, he found himself thinking about the chicken story again, too. He ran his eye over the worsted of his trousers. The frock coat he wore had come from the best tailor in Chicago. His bag had a change of linen in it and a hairbrush with a pearl handle. The chicken was probably scared half to death as it set out, he thought – never mind how many roads it had crossed beforehand – wings beating, feathers flying, all that squawking. Several miles out of Ellsworth, the trail-like road emerged from the trees for a few hundred yards. The Atlantic ocean stretched out in shades of blue to the horizon; waves broke against an outcropping of rock a hundred feet below him. He wiped his palms on his trouser legs. The trouble, he thought irritably, was that when you got to the other side you more than likely made a goddamned fool of yourself – man or chicken – and what was funny about that?

  It was nearly noon when he saw the house, a large structure made of three barns ballooning out from the rear of a tiny, two-story farmhouse. He circled it twice before he decided to try what looked like the front door. Nobody answered. Nobody answered at the first of the barn doors he tried either. Caught between relief and disappointment, he tried another door and heard footsteps inside. The door opened. A small, thin woman in bloomers peered out at him. Over her shoulders she wore a colorful scarf with a fringe that hung down past her waist, and her face was as pock-marked as College’s had been.

  ‘Yes?’ she said. Her fingers scurried to her temple and plucked a tuft of hair from the bun at the nape of her neck. Other tufts stuck out here and there all over her head like random feathers.

  ‘My name is Carrick, I—’

  ‘Carrick?’ She thrust her head toward him. ‘Carrick? Not Johnny Carrick by any chance?’

  ‘Yes, I—’

  ‘You are Johnny? Rayner’s Johnny?’ She turned away from him abruptly and shouted into the rooms beyond. ‘Seb! Seb! Come quick! It’s Johnny! He’s come to see us. Johnny’s here.’ She turned back and took him by the hand. ‘Oh, how good to see you, Johnny. How are—?’ she began, and then started on a second question before she’d got the first out: ‘Are you here for a—?’ Then on a third before the second was out: ‘How did you—?’ Broken sentences like the ones College had fallen into sometimes when he was upset.

  The room she drew him into was the whole ground floor of one of the barns; one end was the kitchen, where two aproned women stood beyond a high work table attending to the stove. Eight people sat at the dining table that occupied most of the middle section of the room. At the end of the table a fat man fought to free himself from his chair. ‘Don’t run on so, Helen,’ the fat man said, pushing at the chair, which fell backward and crashed to the floor, ‘a man can’t answer so many questions at one go. Besides, you haven’t actually asked them. Well, well, well. So this is Johnny: Johnny at last. I’m Sebastian.’

  Jonathan shook the outstretched hand and searched the large head and ruddy face for some familiar trait but saw none – no dimples, no elfish smile – only a waddle on splay-feet and a meshwork of tiny veins that made the nose purple.


  ‘Welcome, welcome, welcome. Detta, set a place for Johnny. You move along, Peewee,’ he said to a lanky figure folded into the chair beside his own. ‘Go. Away. Johnny’s going to sit here today. Detta, knives and forks. A plate.’ He turned to Jonathan. ‘Sit. Sit. Sit,’ he said. ‘A glass of wine? Meat? Potatoes? Helen, why haven’t you eaten anything?’ One of the aproned women put a plate in front of Jonathan, piled with food, and a tulip-shaped glass of red wine. Sebastian righted his chair and sat, too. ‘Now, Johnny,’ he said in the elegant English accent College had imitated so often, ‘how long can you stay? Let me introduce you to everybody.’ He smiled benignly around the table. ‘This is Peewee—’ He stopped, cast an eye over Helen’s plate and speared a piece of potato with his fork. ‘Why do I have to eat your food, Helen?’ he said, chewing the potato and reaching over again. ‘You really ought to eat it yourself.’

  Peewee wore an old army jacket with a sergeant’s stripes on the sleeve. There were two old men, twins, who spoke in unison: a remarkable, disconcerting feat that made Jonathan edgier than he felt already. There was a middle-aged lady in a severe shirt with stripes and a cravat, a heavily freckled young woman with red hair, and a black-haired boy with angry eyes and the skin and cheekbones of an Indian.

  ‘This is Josh,’ Sebastian said, gesturing at the boy. ‘He’s my star pupil, ready for university. Wonderful mind, haven’t you, Josh? Wonderful. But they won’t let Indians in American universities, did you know that? I can’t imagine why.’ Josh stopped chewing and looked Jonathan up and down. There’d been a dog on one of Jonathan’s runs, a tiny, fierce-eyed poodle, white and fluffy. Baggagemen hated dogs. Dogs fought and bit, and a baggageman got no more for carrying one than for carrying a saddle. Jonathan had tied the poodle not far from a bucket of lubricating oil; the train hit a sag; the dog fell in the bucket. For fifty miles Jonathan had scrubbed with a gunny sack while the dog got blacker and shinier and its eyes glittered more and more fiercely. The resemblance to Josh was startling.

  ‘Josh is just going on fifteen,’ Seb said indulgently. ‘A difficult age. Now, Johnny, tell us about yourself.’

  ‘I’m a railroadman,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Sebastian laughed. ‘Everybody here knows that. Everybody knows Ray’s Johnny and the railroads. Everybody.’

  ‘Seb,’ said Helen, her fingers fluttering over the tines of her fork, ‘he doesn’t – he couldn’t know that we – Don’t you see?’

  ‘Oh,’ Sebastian said. ‘Yes. There were many letters, Johnny. Ray wrote often, you know. Often. He wrote us about railroads and mountains and oceans and – about you.’

  ‘I didn’t know. He didn’t tell me.’

  Josh pushed his plate away from him. ‘He wrote about filth and violence as well,’ he said. Jonathan looked up. The Indians he’d seen spoke pidgin English; Josh’s accent was as British as Sebastian’s. ‘And prejudice.’

  ‘Down, Injun,’ Peewee said from the other end of the table.

  Josh’s eyes glittered, eyes as furious as the oiled poodle’s eyes: as furious as my grandfather’s. ‘Your servant, lieutenant,’ he said.

  Sebastian slapped the table and laughed again. ‘So why has it taken so long for you to come to us? Eh, Johnny? Are you on holiday? Perhaps you’re billeted here? That would be good fortune for us. Eh?’

  Jonathan looked at the faces around the table. ‘I never went to school,’ he said.

  ‘Really? Where were you brought up? Kansas? No schools nearby? So you’ve come to study? Is that it?’

  ‘If you will accept me,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘If we will accept – how can you even ask? We’re entranced, my boy, entranced. You’re almost related to us. We’ve known you for years, you know, years. Ah, Johnny, what a feast awaits you. Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Cervantes. Detta, is there any more of that pudding? Americans, too. Wonderful Americans:

  Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December

  And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the—’

  Detta put a second bowl in front of Sebastian; he stopped reciting instantly ‘It’s not quite right, you know, Detta,’ he went on, mouth full, shaking his head. ‘Butter – always use butter if you want a good pudding – and those windfall apples. But Johnny, Kansas is stuffed with subscription schools. Did your parents belong to one of these sects – you know – Helen, what do I mean? Mormons? Amish? They might have been Social Contract people, I suppose. Is that it? Or maybe Emersonians—’

  There, Jonathan thought, feeling a sudden warmth inside him that made him unsure how he was going to make his jaws chew or his throat swallow – there in Sebastian’s smooth, easy, largely meaningless babble lay the resemblance between father and son. He studied the remains of his wine. He’d never tasted anything like it before, but he was grateful for what little alcoholic support it afforded.

  ‘Seb, really,’ Helen interrupted, ‘he plainly doesn’t – I’ll take Johnny to—’ She scrambled out of her chair, plucking at Jonathan’s arm, and ushered him out of the room.

  She led him up some stairs and along a corridor to her study, a small, untidy, book-lined room, tucked up under the eaves of one of the barns. The moment she opened the door Jonathan could see that it was more than just a room, though as he thought of it he guessed the same could be said for the room he’d just left. He wasn’t sure why; maybe it was that somebody had plainly spent thought on the details of life. Looking around himself, he felt a homesickness for the railroads so abrupt and intense that he missed Helen’s first words.

  ‘– find out just precisely where we want to—’ she was saying, taking a book off the shelf behind her. She opened the book and handed it to him. ‘Will you—?’ Jonathan looked at her in terror. ‘Don’t be shy.’

  He ran his hand over the words, closed the book and handed it back to her.

  ‘Too hard?’ she said.

  He shook his head. ‘“A is for ax,”’ he said. ‘“B is for box.” “Do you not love to play a game of ball?”’

  They started part way through the McGuffey Third Reader, at just the point the Stoke children had reached when the plague of grasshoppers descended on the homestead and Benbow Wikin had struck his bargain with Alvah for the production of Wikin’s Sweetbrier: ‘Alvah Stoke to manufacture. George Stoke to sell around.’

  12

  This first reading lesson in Helen’s study left my grandfather drenched with sweat. After it she led him to a second-floor room in one of the barns. On the door outside there was a plaque that said STUDY-BEDROOM NO. 7 where everything smelled of wax polish, clean linen and of the pine trees outside the window. The bed had an embroidered coverlet over it. He peeked in the bureau drawers, discovered a lavender sachet, sniffed it, replaced it. He opened the closet door, took off his frock coat, hung it on a wooden hanger, stood back to survey it: the best tailor in Chicago. He folded down the coverlet on the bed, then the cover, the sheets, the underblanket; he’d seen such materials before only in the frocks of lady passengers. He took his coat off the hanger, put it on again, picked up the Reader, read a sentence: so it was that he caught his own eye in this mirror in this house where College had been brought up and educated, well educated, properly educated: so it was that he caught himself frock-coated and in the very act of his own education.

  Later that evening, at dinner, he puzzled over the two forks that lay beside each place and the napkin next to them. He hadn’t even noticed these things at noon. The men went to the library afterwards; books lined the walls, floor to ceiling, and Sebastian poured port from a crystal decanter. After dinner, Jonathan sought out what Helen had called the ‘bathroom’. This turned out to have a magnificent porcelain water closet in it with a pattern of roses and leaves. He tried it immediately, but he’d never worked a flush mechanism before, and the abrupt torrent of water left him trembling. There was a bathtub with two large taps – hot and cold water both, he decided, bending down to study the lion’s paw feet underneath.
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  A gong at six the next morning announced breakfast. At eight Jonathan had a lesson in Helen’s study. At four he had another. After the first day he added twenty words to his vocabulary cards each time he saw her. Back in his room he studied the cards, drew circles and loops on the writing pad and wrote out letters until his fingers refused to open or shut around the pen. He worked late into the night, and during the third month his head began to buzz from the inside as though he were drunk. He had not slept easily or well since his emancipation nearly seven years before, but now sleep often escaped him entirely. He seemed to float through a furious haze of words, words in formation, words in chaos, words brilliantly colored, words formless. If he did manage sleep, he dreamed his tobacco-worm nightmare with such intensity that his hands tore at the delicate material of the sheets when he woke; so he tied his hands together – which made sleeping more difficult still. During the fourth month his back began to ache in ways it had never ached on the railroad or even at the Stoke homestead; his eyes smarted. He sat at his desk, picked up his Reader, and found himself five minutes later staring through the window, out over fields, over the splashy colors of October foliage to a bank of pines and the tidal land beyond, where sometimes there was ocean and sometimes a sodden mud waste.

  On the last night of November, a cold hard sleet forced its way down through the snow. He undressed and blew out the candle. In the dark someone took hold of his wrist.

  He jerked his arm back. Heart pounding, he relit the candle and squinted into the corners of the room. It had been a gentle touch, more of a caress than a grasp, but he had no doubt that it was real. He got out of bed, searched under his desk, behind the chest of drawers, in the closet; he couldn’t find even a small night animal sheltering from the weather. He leaned out the window. Nobody. Nothing. Only when the candle began to gutter did he get back into bed. He sat up the rest of the night, back firm against the wall behind him, staring into the dark until a grizzling, wintery gray moved in over the tidal land outside.