Theory of War Read online

  Youth is merciless, feral, but age? There aren’t words terrible enough. Look at the fat old grotesque perched on that top step. Whatever happened to the shiny-eyed boy? Look at the mountainous thighs that touch even though the stance is splay-footed. When George got his first frock coat, frock coats were fashionable. He’d got it to sell in, because a drummer has to dress well or the suckers won’t buy. It had come from Sears Roebuck; it had a buckram lining and shell buttons. Thinking of these things, Jonathan swayed and caught himself, the look of anguish appearing on his face as it did in Hannaville when some weakness opened up in the war-torn principality of his mind.

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’

  He peered down at the owner of one of those billowing skirts and bobbing hats.

  ‘You don’t look well,’ she said. There were bows on her shoes. ‘Would it help to get out of the sun? You’re a stranger here, aren’t you?’

  Why the hell do people interfere? By what right? He was unaware that this sudden gust of anger flickered in his eyes, but he knew it would show in his voice, so he gestured with those beautiful hands of his that he was fine, that he didn’t want to cause her any trouble.

  ‘Oh!’ she cried in delight (intrigued, too, as people always are by evidence of emotion suppressed). ‘You don’t need words at all, do you? How did you learn to do that?’ But then she rushed on. ‘It’s no trouble. Really. I live here.’

  He stared down at her, unbelieving, unable to believe – which made him even more uncertain of his voice. He used his hands again, and his meaning was so clear that she laughed out loud with pleasure.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’re right. The senator’s my father. Come on, let me help you.’

  She guided him around the crowd toward the back of the mansion. The grass crunched dreamlike under his shoes as though it were still frozen in mid-winter while the rest of the world had moved on to this summery day. She urged him through a door and along a hallway. Black and white squares of marble on the floor: then carpet, then wood, then another carpet.

  ‘Sit down here,’ she said. ‘I’ll get you a glass of water.’

  Books lined three walls. On the fourth, eaglehead candelabra stood on either side of a battle scene from the Revolution where flags flew, horses reared, mud everywhere, except near the dead man in the center, immaculate in cream-colored tights and satin coat, a pretty trickle of blood at his throat. Jonathan eyed the dead man in disgust; he had a puritanical aversion to sham. People crap their cream-colored tights when they die. Their mouths yawn; you have to tie the lower jaw up as Ichabod Crane tied his or it stays gaped wide, a detail missing from the actors who play dead people on television screens every night just as it’s missing from elegiac pictures of war like this one of George Stoke’s.

  The young woman appeared with a glass of water. Beyond her, Jonathan could see an ornate desk. On its surface stood a silver-framed daguerreotype. He knew at once what the picture would show: what it had to be.

  ‘You go to college, I suppose,’ he said abruptly.

  She plumped herself down next to him with enthusiasm. ‘You can speak. I thought you were mute. Wellesley. I go to Wellesley. I major in French. I’m leaving for Paris next week. Paris! Isn’t that wonderful? Do you suppose they talk any English there?’

  ‘With your father?’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she laughed, misunderstanding. She had the shiny, black eyes her father had once had (but had, so it seemed, no more). ‘He wouldn’t let Sweetbrier down in its hour of need. Anyhow, Europe is bad for the image.’ She laughed again. ‘Daddy’s image is the most important thing in American civilization. No, mother’s taking me. He’s going to be all on his own for two whole months.’

  When she left him she told him to rest indoors as long as he liked.

  Usually a spy’s job is slow and tedious, but in all professions there are windfalls. Sometimes God bestirs Himself in His majestic boredom and smiles. So it was with Jonathan; the answers dropped into his lap without the slightest effort on his part. He knew the layout of the house. He knew George was going to be in it. So he approached the silver-framed picture on the desk. He shut his eyes as he sat down. When he opened them again he was staring, as he’d known he would be, into the face of Alvah Stoke himself.

  TWO

  Wednesday morning

  REVOLUTION

  1

  It was painfully apt, that painting of the American Revolution on George’s wall. Immaculate cream-colored tights and a fairytale battlefield: these don’t matter, not really. What does matter is that Jonathan Carrick’s first war in life, like his country’s, was revolutionary. Alvah Stoke was a major force in the ancien régime he fought; the infantry, you might say, if not the Republican Guard. Alvah was one of Sweetbrier’s first settlers, not the very first – an honor that rests with Benbow Wikin, whose store lies moldering alongside the road to this very day. There was a time, starting just before 1850, when ‘Benbow Wikin’s General Store & Post Office’ was all there was to Sweetbrier. My story begins fifteen years later, just months after the Civil War ended. By this time, the town had grown into a proper town – saloons, undertaker, lawyer’s office, barber, and rival grocery that imported cheese from New York. The Overland Sentinel, the same old grab-bag that proposed a party on Senator Stoke’s lawn, opened its offices then. Farmers and their wives came to town every Saturday morning. The boardwalk bustled: calico dresses, pigs, horses, chickens, and even some of the Indians who managed to survive the massacres going on in the countryside nearby.

  One Saturday in September of 1865, Alvah Stoke sought out Benbow Wikin in the backroom of his General Store & Post Office.

  ‘I want to buy a boy,’ Alvah said.

  This is the beginning of all that follows.

  ‘What for?’ Benbow asked.

  ‘Want to work him.’

  Benbow, who sold practically anything anyone might want, shifted some goods around on his counter. ‘That’ll cost you money,’ he said.

  Alvah said nothing.

  ‘Prices for boys ain’t strictly official,’ Benbow went on. ‘No harm in starting low.’

  Alvah said nothing.

  ‘You got to let people know, though,’ Benbow said, nodding. ‘I’ll give you a hand with the ad.’

  The Overland Sentinel was already the typical small-town newspaper that it remained for its entire lifetime: crude type, cheap paper, headlines that scream the resolutions of ladies’ clubs and the nuptials of local clods, she with heavy jaw and dull eyes, he with pimples and sloping brow. When gossip was slim, only then, only to plump itself out in a bad week, the Overland Sentinel touched on the Indian wars and sometimes on the spread of the railroads, although this was long before the Midwest Pacific even planned its route through Sweetbrier.

  Here is the advertisement it carried:

  WANTED – Boy, age six to eight years old. Good home till twenty-one years old. Payment twenty dollars depending. Apply B. Wikin’s General Store & Post Office at 3 o’clock this Saturday afternoon.

  Black slaves were out of the question: the Civil War was over. Besides, black slaves had been expensive – a thousand dollars for no more than a little girl. But all wars leave dead soldiers, poor widows and hungry children; wars tend to leave out-of-work soldiers, too, who can’t feed the children they have and, in those days, didn’t know how to keep from fathering more. The result after the Civil War was a crop of kids nobody wanted. A farmer could pick one up cheap, and a boy at that, as long as the boy wasn’t black. Lots of people did it. They called it ‘bounding out’. Alvah didn’t really think he could find a boy for twenty dollars. He was figuring on thirty at least – and a saddle probably, when (and if, of course, if) the kid finally made it to twenty-one.

  ‘But deals are possible,’ Benbow said, rubbing his hands together. ‘Deals are always possible.’

  2

  I’d flown the northern route over the Pole from London to Washington state, over thousands of miles of dead white lands
cape, to take down what my uncle Atlas could tell me about Jonathan, my grandfather. It was all very spur-of-the-moment. I’d been reading a book about paradoxes and run across this one of Lichtenberg’s: ‘The thing that astonished him was that cats should have two holes cut in their coat exactly at the place where their eyes are.’ The moment I read this, I could hardly believe I hadn’t thought of talking to Atlas before, and having thought of it, couldn’t bear to wait any longer. Atlas was dangerously old: if I wasn’t quick I might never find out where the holes in that cat’s coat belonged. Suppose he died on me: who else was there? The rest were already dead. There’s an attachment for a portable phone on my wheelchair, which was made for me by the very same man in Cambridge who built the great Professor Hawking his chair. I punched in Atlas’s number, forgetting in my excitement about such details as time changes; it turned out to be one o’clock in the morning on the west coast of the United States, some six thousand miles away from my little Devon village, where the morning was just beginning – milkman, postman, newspaper. At first Atlas was less than pleased; as we talked, though, he began to seem as anxious to tell me about Jonathan as I was to hear about him – or almost anyway.

  ‘I got to go into the hospital Friday,’ he said and then rushed on, ‘nothing much, but you wouldn’t be able to get here for a month or more, anyway, would you? I’ll be in good shape again by then. When were you thinking of coming?’

  I didn’t ask about the hospital – some sort of surgery, I gathered – but his mention of it put the fear of God into me. ‘It’s Tuesday,’ I said. ‘I think I can be in Washington this very evening, maybe eight, maybe ten o’clock your time. Can you pick me up?’ Within hours, I was aloft over that frozen wasteland. The airlines are superb with wheelchair cases like me, especially when you excite them with the thought of some miraculous new medical treatment. A pity Atlas had none to offer me.

  We’d always been close, Atlas and I, despite the separation two continents enforce on two lousy letter writers. When I was small he used to say I was ‘astute’. It was his warmth I liked. He met me at the airport in one of those huge, soft, American cars that drive as though they were negotiating bowls of Jell-o. It was late, dark by the time I got through passport control; on the ride to his house – mile upon mile of the stippled two-stripe that makes up highways at night, red tail-lights on one side, white headlights on the other, a pretty sight – on that ride, we decided to spend a day taping and the next day looking at Hannaville, my grandfather’s town, which was a hundred miles upstate from Atlas’s house.

  It seemed a hard schedule for somebody who was pushing eighty, as Atlas was, especially somebody preparing to be carved up in a few days, but what choice was there? Besides, he was still hale, solid, hairy, still big enough and strong enough to lift me in and out of the car all on his own, and still practicing medicine. He’d been various kinds of doctor in his life, usually with a whiff of the shady about it: Medical Director to the Tobacco Research Institute in New York, for example. In his dotage he’d manipulated himself into the post of geriatrician to one of those American old age ghettos, all coarse grass and motel architecture, no dogs, no children, this one run by somebody who had the impudence to call himself Dr Youngblood. On the bedside table in the room where I slept – arrangements for the old serve me very well – lay a magazine called Senior Society: on the cover, a piece of elderly cheesecake showing off pulpy thighs and hoisted bosom in a one-piece suit from years ago.

  I’d never met Atlas’s present wife. She was a fiercely efficient woman, not as old as Atlas but not so far from it, either. Atlas introduced us over cornflakes.

  ‘This is Claire,’ he said to me.

  ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t able to greet you last night,’ Claire said, fetching milk from the refrigerator. She had one of those faces that are purely American. Even at whatever ancient age she’d reached (and plainly she’d been around quite a while), there was nothing in the skin, nothing in the eyes, nothing around the mouth to betray a single thought or a single experience; all was as hygienic as an unwrapped roll of toilet paper, no hint whatever that anybody had ever lived there: a safe house rather than a face. ‘I’ve got such a heavy day ahead of me. Did he tell you?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Well, it’s my French dinner party. We have a club. It’s to spread culture. Sounds silly, I know, provincial and all that, but it isn’t, at least it isn’t necessarily silly, and it’s my turn—’

  ‘I didn’t know. I’m afraid it’s an awful imposition I’m putting on you.’

  ‘I’ll manage,’ she said, a trifle sourly. ‘Seven around the table is the problem.’

  ‘What problem?’ Atlas said.

  ‘We only have six chairs—’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Claire. You think a mess like that –’ he indicated me ‘– could make use of a dining-room chair even if we had one?’ Some able-bodied people, Atlas is one, can say things worse even than this without offense – quite the contrary: it’s as though you’re in it together somehow, no longer an outsider.

  Claire sniffed. ‘This party is just the thing for you, Nate,’ she said. Atlas is a family name for my uncle. The brass plate outside his house reads DR NATHANIEL CARRICK in elegant Times Roman. Claire doesn’t like the sound of Atlas; she says sibilants at the end of a name are ugly. Myself, I think Nate sounds kind of ugly. Anyhow, she turned all her attention, mischievous now, girlish, in his direction. ‘We’re going to have five wines.’

  ‘Five? What do you want five for?’

  ‘It’s French.’

  ‘What’s French? Having five wines?’

  ‘It says so in the book. Right here. Reader’s Digest International Cookbook. Five wines.’

  ‘Jesus, Claire, these stupid bastards don’t know wine from hog piss,’ he said. ‘What the hell are they going to make of five of the fucking things?’

  ‘Precisely,’ she said.

  She urged us off into his study soon after breakfast. We took our coffee with us, settled ourselves and began to record on tape what Atlas could remember about his father.

  My father was Atlas’s brother, Jonathan Carrick’s oldest son. When I was small, he told me stories about Jonathan, frightening stories, and I came to fear my grandfather the way other children fear the bogeyman. I could see him, can see him now as I saw him then, clothed (for some unknown, childhood reason) in black – black hat, black coat – bringing with him a cloud of black that engulfed anybody and anything who got close enough, swallowed them up, never to be seen again. It wasn’t his anger that frightened me then; I knew nothing of his anger until Atlas told me about it, nothing of the fire in him, nothing of his resemblance to the steelworks outside Cardiff. I’d always seen him through my father’s eyes, and my father saw him as icy cold – how could two brothers see their own father so differently? – the embodiment of a meaningless and yet implacable justice: whatever sin you sinned was to be rooted out and punished without mercy, whether you sinned knowing or not knowing. I am a born, bred and wholly convinced atheist – an orthodox atheist, you might say – and yet I have, I think, a religious temperament: I fear my sins, all of them, known and unknown. My father called my grandfather ‘the old man’. If a stair creaked in the dark, it was the old man come to get me. If I awoke suddenly in the night, it was the old man come to get me. If there was a rustle at the window . . .

  Atlas began my introduction to my grandfather’s fire by telling me what he knew about Alvah Stoke.

  Alvah was weeding full-time on a tobacco farm in New Hampshire when he was only eight years old. At twenty-six he was pulling in two dollars a day for dawn-to-dusk hard labor on the same farm. He’d have tried practically anything, and he listened carefully to Jason Yoxall, a traveling medicine man with a large daughter: Jason was newly married to a rich widow who wanted no part of her husband’s offspring.

  ‘You ever think about going west?’ Jason said.

  ‘Why should I?’ Alvah said.

  ‘You know, Alvah
, my Dotter cooks and spins and keeps chickens – a fine woman, Alvah. What a wife she’d make. Eh?’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Name’s Dotter. Like I said.’

  ‘That ain’t a name,’ Alvah said in disgust.

  ‘Well, what else am I going to call her? When she gets married, she gets called Wife. Ain’t that enough?’

  ‘She can’t read,’ Alvah said. Alvah had no education to speak of, but even he could read a little.

  ‘What does a woman want with reading, you ass? Her mother left her three hundred dollars. You marry her, it’s yours.’

  Alvah and Jason fashioned themselves on the he-man of the 1850s. Take away Hollywood’s sanitized version and this much-loved hero was as brutish a creature as the pit of hell ever spewed forth: a humorless, ruthless, benumbed halfwit, at home with dogs, cows, horses, rifles and rotgut liquor: proud of feeding habits that belonged in a zoo, of a face as expressionless as his backside, of an unrivalled imbecility at conversation, friendship, love, courtship, copulation, family life, all art, all music, all learning, all words. Reading was for women: you despised the accomplishment in yourself, but you wanted it for your wife. Besides, Dotter’s lumpen inertia oppressed Alvah. Her face was glutinous, like uncooked rolls on a baking tin; she smoked a clay pipe. The money was real enough, but a man needed something like $500 to set up in the west: plows, tools, animals, that kind of thing. Where was a man like Alvah to get the $200 extra?