Theory of War Read online

  Mr Finster watched him come into view. ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘You’re covered with blood, and Missis Finster would never forgive me if I did not bend all efforts to make you appear respectable.’

  An hour later the train going west appeared. Mr Finster said, ‘I’ll survey the land.’ The land surveyed, he said, ‘Third car from the caboose. Charming woman. Just talk politely.’ He took Jonathan’s hand in both of his, shook it, pulled the boy into his arms, embraced him, shook his hand again – and only then turned away. The door to the car was open. A woman stood inside cooking at her stove; a small boy clung to her dress and four small girls of various sizes sat sewing or playing at sewing in a far corner. The boxcar held furniture, the lumber to build a cabin, a cow, two pigs and a goat.

  Jonathan drew in his breath. ‘May I ride with you, ma’am?’ he said.

  She had a round, ruddy face and braids wrapped up in a crown on her head. She turned to look at him. ‘Whatcha got to offer, boy?’

  13

  How can a boy make sense of things like this? Even as bright a boy as my grandfather? Even as fiercely determined a boy – a slave no longer a slave but a Spartacus in mid-rebellion and a murderer, too? Even if they caught him, they couldn’t bring George to life again. But they weren’t going to catch him. How could they catch him? The faint hiss as the train pulled out of the station: was that the pistons all the way from the engine? The clanking: that was the link-and-pin coupling, wasn’t it? He turned abruptly to the woman next to him, the years of control over his face momentarily lost: triumph, delight and dread chased each other across it despite him.

  She was cradling a small boy in her arms. ‘Runnin’ away, ain’t you?’ she said, smiling. ‘How old?’

  Jonathan gestured that he was about sixteen.

  ‘Train don’t stop again ’til afternoon,’ she said. ‘My name’s Eliza Gowdy. This is Nathan Gowdy Junior – Netty. And over there,’ she looked at the four little girls, ‘Cassa, Carma, Levada and Lynn.’ The little girls lowered their eyes. ‘They don’t have much to keep them occupied,’ Eliza said. He sat down beside them, drew out a handful of hay from the pile that served the animals and began to twist the strands together, a few at a time. The little girls watched, peeping out at him over the small swatches of calico they held.

  ‘It’s a dolly,’ the littlest girl whispered.

  He told them with his hands that if he could make dolls at all, he would make one for each. They giggled.

  ‘What’s your name?’ the littlest whispered then.

  Beyond the door, red-tinged grass surged away in billows. Jonathan reached into his mouth to hold his teeth. ‘Johnny,’ he said gently. He had a very gentle way to him sometimes. ‘I’m called Johnny.’

  THREE

  Wednesday noon

  DÉTENTE

  1

  Railroads across Kansas and Colorado head into the Rockies at right angles. For three hundred miles, looking through the boxcar door, Jonathan would have seen only the prairies he’d known all his life. But then came Denver.

  I have tried to bear in mind that George’s memoirs are the memoirs of a politician, that my grandfather, Jonathan, was talking about himself, and that by the time I taped my uncle Atlas telling this story, he had holes in his head from too much liquor. But all three of these men agree that Jonathan lured George down to the railroad track and left him there for dead. So when the train stopped in Denver and Jonathan saw the Rockies for the first time, it was as though the tumult in him – the rage that had at last conquered George –had ripped right on through the land and hurled chunks of Kansas into a heap at the edge of Colorado. It was early morning, and morning in the Rockies, they tell me, is a study in red: red sky, red clouds, red light on the granite rock faces. What wasn’t possible in such a place? Was it real at all? Eliza Gowdy’s train began to pull out of the station before he realized what was happening. Staring after the caboose, feeling the mountains at his back, he knew only that this was where he wanted to be.

  After a time of war comes a time of peace. But peace, after all, is only war carried on by other means (I misquote Clausewitz a little but in a good cause). Peace is a time of bread and circuses, when gladiators tear each other apart to amuse the idle and the bored. We Americans are market-leaders in such things. But a circus Eden, even when you pick it yourself, can be hard to take at first. Denver was a boom-town, ugly, crass, brutal, awash with money and blood. My mother used to say that if you whispered ‘Money, money, money’ when you saw a falling star, you would get rich. She used to add, seeing my eager eyes, that anybody who could manage to think of money when a star was falling probably would get rich in the end anyway. There were the trappers in buckskin that you’d expect from the movies, maybe a little dirtier but not much, the mountain men, the ladies of pleasure in silk, gamblers, Indians in feathered headdresses, conmen, gunmen, thieves, murderers: all standard Hollywood fare, and in fact much of it was show even at the time – a nineteenth-century Disneyland laid on to entertain European aristocrats who crossed the ocean to pay out in gold for staged thrills in the mountains and at the gambling tables. The surprising thing, though, is the international flavor of a place so deeply buried in the entrails of a continent. Mexicans, Germans, French, Chinese, Englishmen, Hungarians, Russians, Poles, every nationality you can think of, all on the street at the same time and many of them in national dress. Natives spoke bits and pieces of all kinds of languages, much like the Swiss today, and much like the Swiss today, they welcomed any currency. Banks, gambling houses, even grocery stores could make change in marks or pounds or francs.

  Jonathan walked and stared for hours. For a kid off the prairies like him, just the number of people and the height of the buildings were awesome. But what does a person eat in fairyland? He took in his breath and tried a store with a wooden Indian outside it. A fat man stood behind a counter of cigars. ‘Yep?’ he said.

  My grandfather asked for a job. He asked with his hands, but hand-talking, so familiar to the residents of Sweetbrier, was not one of Denver’s many languages. The fat man bristled. ‘I ain’t having no mutes working in here,’ he said, already out from behind the counter, fist raised. ‘Get out. Go. Get out!’

  Jonathan tried a greengrocer’s – and fared no better. He tried a hotel where there was no clerk, only a black woman on her knees scrubbing at the raw wooden floor. ‘There ain’t many jobs in town’ – she lifted her eyes just far enough from her work to see his bare feet. ‘Leastways not for the likes of you. If you was a girl now—’ She sighed, and Jonathan turned to leave. ‘Hey,’ she called after him. ‘I hear they can use a yardman down at the Hannibal & Denver – I heard the yardmaster—’

  He ran all the way back to the station and threw open the door to the yardmaster’s office much as eight years before he’d thrown open the door to the saloon in the town that lay beneath the evening star.

  The yardmaster’s legs were propped up on his desk. He had only one foot. He glanced at Jonathan, squirted a stream of tobacco juice at a sawdust-filled box across the room, hit it square in the middle and let out a roar of pleasure. ‘Pretty good, eh, kid?’ he said. ‘Whaddya want?’

  ‘Yardman’s job,’ Jonathan said, finger in mouth to hold his teeth.

  ‘G’wan. Come back when you’re weaned off thumb-suckin’.’ Jonathan glared. ‘Where’d you get them God-awful choppers? Can you chew with a set of teeth like that?’

  ‘I made them.’

  ‘No kiddin’?’ The yardmaster stopped chewing. ‘Listen, kid, I can’t put you to work. Y’ain’t old enough. How old are you?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘Yeah – seventeen – going on fifteen. Christ. And no teeth to boot. Know what a yardman does? See this?’ He lifted up the footless leg. ‘Switchman’s foot – that’s what they call it. Hey, somebody been beating up on you? You look like shit. What makes you think you got the balls for this job?’

  Jonathan opened his mouth to answer; his teeth slipped and clacke
d together.

  ‘Ah, sweet Jesus!’ The yardmaster took his legs off his desk. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Johnny Carrick.’

  ‘Carrick? You don’t say? Your pa wasn’t a Reb, was he? Well, I’ll be goddamned. I knew practically every goddamned Irish bastard in the whole goddamned Union Army. I knew your pa – probably did, anyhow. Died, did he? Well, I’ll be goddamned.’ He chewed noisily. ‘Know the signals, kid?’

  Some of them, Jonathan gestured.

  ‘Here, catch!’ The yardmaster picked up an ink bottle and threw it at the door; Jonathan leaped, arm outstretched. Ink splattered his face and the wall behind him, but he caught the bottle. ‘You got good reflexes,’ the yard-master said, throwing his legs back on the desk. ‘Well, what the hell, come around Monday morning. I’ll put your name on the board.’

  The story’s fantastic. Of course it is. Yokels didn’t get jobs like that, not even Irish yokels. I think to myself, is my grandfather lying? In those mysteriously coded diaries of his? To me? And yet – There’s a picture taken of him not long after this. I’ve never seen a picture like it, or a face like his, anywhere else. He did look young – that’s true – but the anger in him was luminous, it really was, and even in that photograph, even all these years later, it glows, shifts, glistens – not a face that smiles often, though it must have lit up then. The yardmaster laughed.

  ‘Hey, kid—’ He took fifty cents out of his pocket and tossed it over. ‘Go around to Mother O’Neill. Fifteenth Street. Tell her Frank Fleming sent you. She’ll give you a bed and sommat to eat.’

  Across town, Mother O’Neill peered near-sightedly at the coin in Jonathan’s hand: a small, round woman, round blue eyes, little round mouth, little round nose, sixtyish maybe, soft flesh at the jowls jiggling with indignation, hair pulled fiercely away from her face and fastened in a tiny black bun at the top of her head. ‘Frank give you that, did he? He’s a damn fool. Don’t know what he said to you, but that’ll only take care of one night, and I don’t take no transients.’

  ‘I got a job,’ Jonathan cried. (He was, after all, still only a boy.)

  She stuck her face into his. ‘You? Down the railroad? Yardman?’ Their noses were almost touching. He held his ground. ‘You an Irish boy? Well, that’s different, ain’t it? Follow me.’ She handed him a boiled potato. ‘I’m gonna have to use kerosene on your hair – can’t have lice in my kitchen.’ She led him to the side of the house. ‘Take off your clothes; water’s hot from the washing. How old are you? Sixteen? Tell Frank eighteen. Take out those teeth. I’ll wash them with the plates. What’s your name? Carrick? I got people in Carrick, I been told.’ She scrubbed Jonathan with a laundry brush in a tin bath. She washed his hair with kerosene and fed him another potato. ‘You can’t put on those clothes. I’ll burn them. Wear these instead. Belonged to a yardman – got squashed yesterday. That’s how come you got a job, know that? Here’s his shoes. Hole in his chest you could throw a frying pan through.’

  2

  My uncle Atlas’s wife Claire had begun preparations for her French dinner party days before. The pace had been frantic from the beginning, so Atlas told me, and was frantic still. Just before lunch, she ran out of oven cleaner; we were sent to fetch some more. Out in the garage, various pieces of yellow oven interior lay spread out on newspapers. ‘What the hell are you doing, Claire?’ Atlas said as he folded me into the car.

  ‘I won’t have those women saying I keep a dirty house,’ she said.

  ‘Tonight? Ah, Jesus – Youngblood’s dopey wife? What’s she going to peep in your oven for?’

  I took my tape recorder with us. In the car, Atlas is saying, ‘Now you tell me, how do you explain getting a job in a railroad yard to a woman like Claire? Or a bath in a tin tub: scrubbed by an old hag? How can you explain what magical and terrifying experiences these were? And afterwards: a bed to sleep on, sheets, shoes, clothes—’

  ‘And you’re different from Claire, are you?’

  ‘Don’t bitch at me,’ he said. ‘I’m no kid of privilege like you. I don’t know how the hell dad slept at all those first few nights. In fact I’ll bet he didn’t.’

  Liquor turned out to be only two aisles from oven cleaners. Outside in the parking lot, Atlas tucked a half bottle of whiskey into each of his back pockets, well hidden by the hang of his coat. This was plainly standard procedure – though it says something for his delicacy that he didn’t suggest by so much as a gesture that I might smuggle a bottle past Claire for him. ‘But what the hell,’ he went on then, ‘I guess you got a point. Slavery was just a bedtime story to me when I was little. So was Emancipation. You can’t understand something like that unless you’ve been through it yourself. I remember—’ He broke off.

  ‘What?’ I pressed.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I guess it’s not relevant.’

  ‘Tell me anyway.’

  ‘There was this black guy – I couldn’t have been more than six or seven at the time. I don’t know how he got to Hannaville. We had Swedes and Norwegians all over the place, but nobody black. Not then. Anyhow, this guy – his name was Nero – he had a wife and several children, and they all just appeared one day out of nowhere. Nobody knew what to do with them. They had no money. Nothing at all. A couple of kind-hearted locals hired him for small jobs, but he didn’t seem to be able to do anything right and he was so slow at what he did do that nobody could bear it. So the question was, what do you do with them? Run them out of town? There was a meeting about it – all the town worthies – and dad took me with him. I don’t remember why. The argument got pretty heated and then out of the blue dad said, “I’ll hire him. Where is he?”

  ‘Jesus, we didn’t have enough to keep ourselves, much less a family of six or so on top. Everybody knew that. They all said the guy was so stupid he ought to be locked up. All you had to do was look at the way he rolled his eyes, they said. Dad wouldn’t budge. So they sent for the guy. They kind of roughed him along and brought him up to dad, and dad said, as polite as if he was talking to the mayor, “Will you work for me, Nero?”

  ‘Nero wasn’t young. Must have been ten, fifteen years older than dad – the wife was much younger – grizzled old guy. He said to dad, “Sure enough, boss.” ‘Dad said, “Not ‘boss’. My name’s Johnny.” ‘We all went in the buggy together right there and then – Nero, Nero’s wife and kids and dad and me. Nero kept eyeing dad, gape-mouthed, and finally dad said, “You want to know why I’m doing this, don’t you?”

  ‘Nero said, “Yeah, boss, if’n you want to tell me.” His voice was a monotone, no inflection at all. ‘Dad said, “We’re brothers, you and I.” ‘Nero rolled his eyes some and said, “Yeah, boss.” ‘Dad drove on a mile or so, then he said, “They paid fifteen bucks flat for me. I was about four years old. Tobacco farm. Ran away when I was sixteen. I bet you cost more.”

  ‘“What you all telling me, boss?”

  ‘“I was” – dad seemed to have trouble getting the word out – “a slave. Just like you. We are the same.”

  ‘“Well, I’ll be,” Nero said in that monotone of his.

  ‘“The education came later. Much later.”

  ‘Nero didn’t look like he took it in, much less believed it. He said, “Yeah, boss,” again.

  ‘“I slept in the barn. With the animals.”

  ‘That seemed to surprise Nero some, but he didn’t say anything. Then I’ll be damned if dad didn’t rein in the horse; and right there in front of Nero and his wife and me, he got down, took off his coat, folded it, laid it on the seat. Then he took off his shirt. Everybody else – all the other farmers – stripped down in hot weather. Not dad. He always wore a shirt, always wore the sleeves rolled down. I’d never seen his back or arms bare – not that I ever thought about it much – but all over them was a crisscross of long white scars. Even I could see he’d been beaten bad at some time in his life. Maybe lots of times. That was the first hint I got of what had really happened to him. Then he put his shirt on again, still not
a word, put on his coat, climbed into the wagon and off we went. Nero still didn’t say anything, so dad said, “Nero is the name of an emperor. It’s a proud name.”

  ‘Another mile went by, and suddenly Nero laughed out loud. “Where I come from they call dogs Nero,” he said. I turned to look at him because the voice wasn’t a monotone anymore; it was sharp and sort of musical. And – Jesus, I’ll never forget it – he just wasn’t the same man. He’d shed the stupidity somehow. The mouth was shut; the eyes weren’t rolling around, and there was some real shrewdness in them. “No, siree, Johnny,” he said then. “I didn’t cost nobody a penny. I was born to the trade. They got me for free.”

  ‘And dad laughed. You can’t imagine how odd that was: dad laughing. I could hardly believe it: this was the only time I ever saw him laugh in all my life. He and Nero laughed and laughed. I thought they’d gone nuts – the two of them – laughing like that. They built a house together for Nero to live in with his wife and his children, and Nero worked for nothing when nothing came in, and for whatever dad could afford when there was a little profit. He worked harder and better than anybody except dad himself. Whenever dad wasn’t around, Nero went back to rolling his eyes, and whenever they were together there was this ease to dad; he wasn’t so demanding; he seemed to tolerate us better – almost to enjoy us like a normal father. It was never like that before, and after Nero died – he didn’t live all that long: somebody in town set his house alight, and his whole family burned to death – after Nero died, it was never like that again.’