Theory of War Read online

  West was the way everything went. Jonathan’s father went west; ‘probably gone to California,’ Benbow had said. Where else would he go? Where else would anybody go? The hurdy girls and the dance hall owner: ‘probably gone west.’ Where else? The locusts were no different. When the swarm took to flight, even the wingless, the sexless, the legless – the dregs that could not fly – straggled westward on the ground until they died in their tracks. And while the devastated ground around Sweetbrier caked and cracked once more, the Overland Sentinel ran a special edition:

  BEHOLD! WE, TOO, ARE GOING WEST!

  The Future Arrives in Sweetbrier This Winter! Work on the Railroad to Begin!

  An advance workforce of the St. Jo, Hannibal & Denver starts work in November on the west-bound line that will go straight through town and link us with California.

  There were elegiac descriptions of the advantages to come, but once the magic word ‘west’ was in print, nobody needed them. Even in the Stokes’ wooden house there was a frisson of real excitement. My grandfather thought of the grass that had billowed around him on his first attempt at escape, when he was too small to see his way through it, and knew that nothing could stop him this time.

  On the back page of that same special edition of the Sentinel a small item caught Miss Emelina McClanahan’s eye.

  ANNOUNCEMENT

  The Everett Elias Madison Scholarship for Farm Bred Boys from Kansas will choose its first scholar for entrance in the freshman class of 1876 at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Applicants must be Kansas born and bred. They must be from local farms, and they must have received their schooling from local teachers.

  Miss Emelina never doubted that this first scholar was going to be George. During the years she’d been teaching, she’d gained confidence and prestige; that mound of bodice had grown more formidable, her petticoats whiter and starchier; she talked firmly to Alvah. As a result, George had private lessons when he wasn’t out selling.

  One hot night in September, George visited Jonathan in the sod hut. ‘I saw your light,’ he said; Jonathan had no light, nor any means of fueling one. Despite the heat George wore his frock coat; he carried the satchel he took with him when he was out on his rounds. ‘Thought I’d come calling.’

  Jonathan gestured non-committally and stood aside. The roof of the soddy hung low over their heads; the turf that made up the ceiling trailed with dead weeds that dangled down over ears and into eyes. The night was the kind of night that even middle-westerners dread, hot enough to drown in; without air-conditioning, the only way of getting to sleep is to lie under a damp sheet in the draft from the doorway. The soddy’s one window didn’t open; there was no draft. There had never been a bed; and as for a sheet, Jonathan knew the word from the McGuffey readers but, as he says in his diaries, he had not been able to figure out precisely what purpose such a large square of cloth was supposed to serve.

  ‘Bought us light and drink,’ George said. He took a candle out of his pocket, lit it, stuck it into the soddy floor; then he took out a bottle and a couple of tin cups. ‘Thought we ought to drink to better times.’ He filled the cups and handed one to Jonathan. ‘Come on, drink up,’ he said, ‘here’s to you,’ and tossed back the contents of his own cup.

  Jonathan studied the liquid, sniffed it. He’d stolen milk straight from the cow; he’d drunk water.

  ‘Ain’t going to bite you,’ George said. ‘It’s a peace offering. Come on, drink up.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘You ain’t here to make peace with me.’

  ‘You afraid to drink this stuff? Huh?’ It was probably 110-proof red, an evil bathtub brew of bourbon touched up with turpentine and lye, enough to take rust off metal, enough to skin cats alive. But Jonathan was only fourteen or so, and young males are among the stupidest of the stupid young, competitive where the prize is worthless and fiercely proud where pride is meaningless: he drank, shuddered, gasped, choked and recovered, eyes watering, throat aflame. ‘Another?’ George said, refilling the cup.

  ‘I was kind of ornery before sometimes,’ George went on. ‘Can’t deny it.’ George was fat like Wify, powerful like her, but soft rather than chunky even so, despite his farm-boy muscle; a roll of suet, white and pulpy, showed at the meeting between shirt and pants beneath the glorious coat. But when he smiled there was charm in the curling mouth, not a familiar trait, new to Jonathan and almost as unexpected as the wink. In the candlelight, the shadows around the shiny, round eyes flickered large and small, lengthening and foreshortening over the plump cheeks, as though they were breathing vents into the dungeon that Jonathan knew lay behind them. ‘But I made up for it, didn’t I? You still got that old McGuffey?’

  ‘What do you care?’

  ‘You know, I remember those pages word for word practically. Bet you do, too, huh?’ Jonathan could already feel the effect of that one great gulp of alcohol; it was not unpleasing. He sipped from the cup, holding the liquor in his mouth before swallowing it, closing his throat as best he could against the burn. ‘But you don’t learn much from that crap, do you? I mean, what good is reading about a boy goes skating, a girl plays with a hoop? What’s that got to do with anything? Ain’t you gonna answer me?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘You got to talk to me, Jonathan. I mean it. Drink up.’

  ‘I got nothing to say to you.’

  ‘Sure you do. We’re more alike than any of them others. You’re the only one can read as well as me. Come on, drink with me. You’re the only one anywhere near as smart.’

  ‘What do you want, George?’ Jonathan said. The sweat was running down his back, yet in the heat George sat there in his frock coat, and Jonathan knew with all the passion of his soul if the coat were his, he’d keep it on, too: to hell with heat, to hell with everything. He tore his eyes away and pinned them to the dank dirt wall beyond, where ants marched in neat, military lines, carrying on the orderly, ordinary business of life. He drank deep from the tin cup.

  ‘I want us to be friends,’ George said.

  ‘No you don’t.’

  ‘I know I was a shit. Ain’t I said as much?’

  ‘I ain’t arguing with you about that.’

  ‘Then argue with me about something else.’

  ‘No.’

  George sighed, again refilled Jonathan’s cup. He leaned back then and talked about the countryside he rode through on his rounds. He told about some of the men he’d met; he was a good story-teller. He talked about weather and horses. He told a joke.

  Jonathan frowned. ‘What do you want, George?’ he said again. He felt an edge of nausea – the 110-proof red probably, but he didn’t know that, and so he drank again – and realized suddenly that despite his iron control, his eyes were wandering in the direction of the coat. He gritted his jaw and turned his head away.

  ‘It bother you much, not going to school?’ George said.

  ‘That ain’t what you came for.’

  ‘Look at it this way: you learn good on your own. What do you need school for? Besides, you’re a good worker and workers don’t need no schooling at all. What are you looking at the wall for? Why don’t you look at me? I ain’t ugly.’

  Jonathan got to his feet, steeled himself and looked at George, at the changeable shadows around his eyes – and at the coat. ‘Get out,’ he said.

  ‘Listen, Jonathan. Why can’t we be friends? I say to myself, “Do the kid a favor. He don’t see what’s going on.” I owe you. I admit it. So I want to pay you back. You got to listen to me.’

  ‘Get out of here.’

  ‘Jonathan, listen! I got lots to say to you.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear it. Get out.’

  ‘Listen,’ George cried. ‘Give me a chance. Listen!’

  After I’d been studying truth at Columbia for nearly four years without avail, one of my professors shouted at me, ‘Listen!’ – to this day I have no idea what made him so angry – ‘Listen to me: what I’m telling you i
s elementary. First-year stuff. Listen!’

  ‘Listen!’ George cried again, so anxious to tie Jonathan’s attention to him and to the coat that he knocked the candle over, righted it, hot wax running down his fingers, and didn’t even notice the burn. The light guttered, almost dying, then gained strength again. ‘Listen to me,’ George said. ‘You work hard, don’t you? So tell me now, where do you think all this work’s taking you? Where—’

  ‘Get out of here, goddamn you. Get out!’

  They’d said to George – the older drummers had, the ones who knew – they said, ‘The fight is for the sucker’s attention in the first place. Don’t matter how you go about getting it. Liquor him. Needle him. Flatter him. Bribe him. But get his attention. When you do, your sale’s in the bag.’ It wasn’t quite that easy – nothing ever is – so in this most important of sales (testing the sucker’s reactions according to his hard-learned lessons), George slipped off his coat, threw it down, and smiled to himself to see Jonathan make the hoped-for, almost instinctive grab to rescue it from the dirt.

  ‘You’re right,’ George said, ‘we shouldn’t let it get dirty. A good-looking coat, ain’t it?’

  ‘It’s yours,’ Jonathan said. The words were out before he could stop the revulsion they betrayed.

  ‘Want one like it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Get out of here, George. I’m telling you—’

  ‘You got kind of a boring line there, Jonathan. “Get out, George.” Can’t sell nothing with a single boring line. This here’s a nice coat. I like wearing it. Makes me feel good.’ He held the coat toward the candlelight and turned it this way and that. ‘We got no quarrel, Jonathan. Not you and me. Not no more. That’s all over with. We ought to be friends. Come on, what do you say?’

  Then George reached out and grasped Jonathan’s shoulder, a gentle grasp, shook him gently, too – a friendly gesture. As far back as Jonathan could remember, the hurdy girl at the dance hall was the only person who had ever touched him like that, the only person whose touch had not been a threat or a blow. I visited my brother-in-law when he was dying right here in Atlas’s town (he and Atlas had grown up together, and he died six months or so after this day of my tape recorder). We held hands for a long time, my brother-in-law and I, and a nurse said to me afterwards, ‘It’s nice to see a family member who isn’t afraid to touch them.’ ‘Them?’ I said. ‘The dying,’ she said. The same is true of cripples. Atlas was one of the few people who would touch me. This has nothing to do with sex. It’s just human warmth. Elementary to most people. First-year stuff, as my angry professor put it. There’s no defense it cannot breach if skillfully employed, and George was skillful; he’d planned long and hard. Why am I so weak? Jonathan asks again and again in these coded diaries of his. He felt a tightness spread across his chest; the spot where George’s hand had touched felt the touch still.

  ‘Let’s have another drink,’ George said. ‘Hey, kid, want to feel the material? Of this here coat? This is serge. Go ahead. Touch it. Ain’t gonna bite you.’

  Years later Jonathan wrote that at that moment, despite the alcohol, despite the fact that he was, in fact, quite drunk, his mind was clear, painfully so, so clear that he missed nothing at all, not the creases in the skirt of the coat as George held it out to him nor the small spot on the sleeve, nor the elongated shadows from the candlelight. These very details somehow seemed to bring on an abrupt sense of misery, an uncertainty and indecision in him that grew with every word George said. Unable to stop himself he reached out, the hand at the end of his own arm seeming a foreign object, some lump of alien flesh, not his, not even related to him: with this hand, he reached out and touched the cloth, and the cloth touched his finger, real cloth from a real frock coat.

  ‘Great, ain’t it?’ George said. ‘Look at this. See here? This is the lining. Called buckram. See how the shoulder part is made? That’s padding. Right? And the buttonholes, look. Want to try it on? It’s okay. Try it on. Here, let me help you. That’s it. Right arm.’ Half in a trance, Jonathan felt the coat slip over his right arm, then over his left, onto his back, serge and buckram, the wonder of buttonholes and tiny stitches. George brushed the material on his shoulders as a tailor might, or a wife, then stood back to survey the effect. ‘Well, well, well,’ George said, ‘will you look at that? A bit big for you, ain’t it?’

  The coat smelled of George. Even in the reek of the sod hut, Jonathan could smell the steam-sweat of George rising from his own armpits.

  George watched carefully. Then he unbuttoned his shirt and took it off. ‘Look at me,’ he said, ‘I’m built like a girl, ain’t I? Want to feel? Come on, give me your hand. They’re soft, like me, girls are. Come here. Come on—’

  Jonathan hardly noticed George taking hold of his hand until he felt one of the girlish breasts beneath his fingers. The sense of physical shock was terrible; he yanked his hand back, suddenly at sea with his hatreds, awash in them, unable to find reason or direction. The skin of his cheeks went numb; his scalp shrank over his skull; he tried to expand his lungs. Nothing happened.

  ‘You have to know, my friend,’ George’s voice went on, ‘there ain’t anybody but me got a frock coat in mind for you. This is your one and only chance. Now. Here. With me. My coat: mine. No girls neither. Only boy’s tits. My tits. You see’ – the voice went on relentlessly – ‘this here hole in the ground where the animals shit – it’s where people keep tools and – well, things like you.’ Jonathan looked into the shiny, black eyes. ‘You wouldn’t get it in your head that somebody’s going to buy a frock coat for this here’ – George turned and slapped the cow on its hindquarters – ‘for this dung-maker? Now would you? What about this ox? A night with a pretty girl?’ He reached over and slapped Jonathan exactly as he’d slapped the cow. ‘You got to understand me. A man? Shit, you ain’t even human. Never will be. Your pa sold you. My pa bought you. You’re a commodity. Like a cow. Or a shipment of tobacco.’

  The spirit of an army – that unity that reaches its peak in the migrations of insects – is no match for sheer weight of artillery: not on the human battlefield, nor on the insect battlefield, either, not even when the soldiers are the most experienced of fighters. Artillery blows soldiers to bits, and the bits, the heads, arms, legs, torsos, these themselves become cannonballs that explode on impact and kill whatever is in their path. Often the minced and scattered remains on a battlefield aren’t even recognizable as human. Jonathan did not remember George leaving. He had no idea how George got him out of the frock coat. He knew only that the coat was gone, that he was sitting on the ground unfrocked, alone, shivering in the heat, his face sticky with sweat – and with the certain knowledge in his heart that everything George said was true. Elementary. First-year stuff.

  The cow lowed behind him.

  He leapt up and flung himself at her; he beat her lumpen, hairy flesh with his fists. Then he swung around and beat the mare. Then the pigs. Then he picked up a stick and, tears streaming down his face, weeping for the first time in his life as a slave (and for the last time in his life for nearly half a century to come), he beat them all again. The animals bucked and kicked and bellowed. He went on beating at them until he fell exhausted to the ground.

  Early the next morning, Cathern opened the door of the soddy as she did every morning, milking bucket in hand. She sat herself down by the cow and began to draw on the teats; the cow bellowed. Cathern sniffed the driblet of milk, frowned and ran her hand over the cow’s hindquarters. She glanced at Jonathan. Then she picked up her bucket and ran. Alvah appeared almost at once. He examined the animals quickly, picked up the stick that had done the beating, and brought it down on his boughten boy. While Jonathan lay stunned, Alvah fetched the horsewhip. By the time he finished, my grandfather lay unconscious in a pool of his own blood.

  10

  The next morning when Alvah came to check the boy’s condition, Jonathan turned his face to the wall – which indicated to Alvah that t
he beating had been properly gauged: it had done no permanent damage. But by evening he was worried; the boy would drink nothing. Animals died when they didn’t drink. The following morning was the same; Alvah tried without success to force water down him. Wify tried, too. Both failed. At about noon, when Alvah was of half a mind to fetch the druggist from Sweetbrier, the black wagon of the Peaslee Traveling Medicine Service appeared in front of the wooden house. The Peaslee man cured all ills, mental and physical, animal, human, and vegetable: cure guaranteed was part of the bargain. The lettering on the outside walls was bright red outlined in yellow. Inside were bottles with heavy glass stoppers in them, just as there had been in the wagon Wify’s father drove.

  ‘What good is this stuff to me?’ Alvah growled, his mind on the boy in the sod hut.

  ‘Why, Mister Stoke,’ the Peaslee man began – nobody else called Alvah anything but Alvah – ‘your horse got a hoof wound? Just put this on it—’ Peaslee’s Iodine and Resublimated Tincture, said the label. ‘And a drop of this—’ He added a drop from another bottle. Then he lifted his arm, bottle in hand.

  ‘So what?’ Alvah said.

  A sudden burst of smoke, dense and red, formed as if by magic and floated upwards; I doubt it did anything for hoof wounds but it was certainly good for catching an ignorant farmer’s attention, even Alvah’s, whose father-in-law, the great salesman of the east, had been a quack of the first order himself. Alvah took the salesman to see Jonathan.

  ‘It’s his teeth, Mister Stoke,’ the salesman said; he had a mustache of drooping streamers that swayed in the wind. ‘I’ve seen it happen before. They’ve turned septic.’

  ‘He’s a lot of trouble to me. Years of trouble.’

  ‘With teeth like that he can’t help it, Mister Stoke. Ain’t rightly his fault,’ the salesman said. The salesman could sometimes get a dollar apiece for real teeth, although the market wasn’t what it had been in its heyday during the Civil War. In those days, in a single night, anybody with a pair of pliers could make enough money to last a lifetime: you waited quietly at the edge of a battlefield, any battlefield, anywhere from Pennsylvania to Texas; when the shooting stopped and the living retired to base camp, you yanked your way through every dead mouth you could get to. Competition was fierce and sometimes ended in a set of molars not strictly military in origin, but think of it! Two dollars a tooth on the London markets, where ladies and gentlemen in silk were scrambling over each other to chew with the teeth of American soldiers. The Peaslee man had moral support, too. Respectable medical journals said that natural teeth caused cancer and pleurisy; they could drive men mad. Who was a mere Peaslee man to argue with respectable journals? Alvah fetched Alyoshus and George. The four of them tackled Jonathan, knocked him out, laid him down. Alvah held his head steady while the salesman pulled out all of his teeth with a copper-plated wrench.