by Joan Brady
‘Jonathan! Jonathan!’
‘That’s all you can remember?’
‘Jonathan!’
‘See? You’re too little to know things like that, and – Remember how she coughed? Consumption, that’s—’
‘What’s consumption?’
‘It’s – well, it’s a sickness – sort of—’
‘My mama’s sick?’
‘Well, no, not exactly.’
Jonathan stared at the broken veins in Benbow’s cheeks. ‘Dead?’ was all he could whisper.
‘Ain’t you going to cry none?’ Benbow said. ‘I won’t tell.’
When Alvah returned, Jonathan was sitting on a barrel, holding himself as still as he’d held himself for George’s inspection. Alvah jerked his head in the direction of the door. Jonathan followed him out once more to the spring wagon, climbed up into it and sat there as still as he had sat before. Teeth and claws must learn patience.
5
Licorice and spices boiled in the iron pot over the fire all winter long. Tobacco hung on racks to dry. In the dank, damp half-light Alvah taught Jonathan to strip leaves, knead them into plugs for chewing, compact them in a screw press, and wrap them in blue paper: Sweetbrier Chewing Tobacco. Jonathan was too little to run away; the grass was too high: he’d learned this lesson. Every night, even though he didn’t have any gods to pray to, he prayed to grow bigger. Every day, his mind wrestled with the tactics of escape while his hands worked on tobacco. From time to time he looked up to see George’s round, shiny eyes on him.
When the snows melted in April, Alvah sowed seed and George threw himself exultantly into a war of attrition against this boughten boy. He leapt from behind bushes. He laid tripwires across paths. He teased, tweaked, scoffed, poked, giggled, punched, slandered. Jonathan marshaled what forces he had, a pitiful supply, no allies, no weapons but his wits; tiny as he was, he came quickly to the conclusion that in battle a loser must be seen to lose if a victor is to be seen as victorious. So began the first, tentative probings into what was to become his life’s strategy: absolute control over himself. He set out to stifle the chattering child he had been – to stifle any show of soft underbelly: that quick anger of his as well as his ingenuousness, his humor, his gaiety. Nothing was to go free, not the slightest errant thought, not the faintest twitch of an eye.
In May Alvah pricked out. George intensified his campaign; Jonathan hardened his resolve. In June Alvah constructed hills for the young tobacco. The children weeded the ground by hand, and at night their knees were so raw they couldn’t touch them with their fingers. In July the worms came – and with them Jonathan’s first dark hint that there were massed legions behind the spearhead of the Stokes.
In the evening the tobacco field was calm, silent, harmonious, blowing in the wind, profoundly vegetable: just as a field should be. The next day, without any warning whatsoever, the boundary between vegetable and animal was gone. Everything looked the same, and yet there was a grinding, discordant, intensely animal sound of chewing, as though the plants had sprouted jaws and were frantically eating away at their own insides. When a snake swallows its own tail, what happens in the end? When the eating’s over, who’s won? The paradox is old. How can the jaws eat the jaws? how can the stomach digest itself? But what was a tiny child to make of it except unadulterated terror?
Alvah knelt, opened the leaves of a tobacco plant, and beckoned to the children.
‘Tobacco worms are bigger than other worms,’ Atlas said into my tape recorder. ‘About like this’ – he held up his index finger. ‘Jesus, they’re ugly bastards, green, no real shape, no head, no eyes, insentient and insatiable. They’re digesting machines, efficient as hell: jaws at the near end, stomach in the middle, waste disposal unit at the far end.’ He curled and uncurled his finger, still holding it up to the light. ‘Kind of like my patients – you know, the ones in the Medicare rooms – Ever seen one of those places? no? They got four rooms set apart in the nursing home here, three beds each, awful smell, you can’t even tell the sex of the poor bastards: foetal positions, heads back, mouths open, faces gray, tubes in, tubes out, no brain: life reduced to its essentials. Makes a lot of rich guys an awful lot of money. Anyhow, tobacco worms curl up in the axils of the leaves and eat and crap, and that’s all they do.’
Alvah picked the worm off the plant and spurted it open between his fingers. Jonathan bolted.
‘They had no chemical insecticides, see?’ Atlas went on. ‘So what could you do? You had to pick them off by hand.’
‘How often?’ I asked.
‘Once a week. Wednesdays. Dad was always at his touchiest on Wednesdays – all his life – it never left him. The second time Alvah had to beat him to get him into the field.’
But later on that day, in the sod hut after supper, Jonathan proved what a valuable chattel he was. He hinged together two blocks of wood with a leather thong to be hooked over the thumb like a castanet. Alvah watched and did not interfere. He was no fool; he knew a good thing when he saw it. The Wednesday after that, Jonathan picked and squashed faster than any of the others.
‘Make one apiece of them,’ Alvah said that night.
‘What for?’ George said, glaring at Jonathan.
‘Works, don’t it?’ Alvah said, and he gave Jonathan the materials he needed.
George turned his shiny eyes on his father, only half taking in the meaning of this. ‘Ain’t no boughten boy gonna make me a squasher,’ he said. ‘I’ll make my own.’
‘Nope,’ said Alvah, the man who was no fool. ‘You ain’t no good at that.’
George kept vampires deep down in his soul; when they weren’t out seeking blood on the front lines, they ravened and drooled; so he set them to suck dry the people he loved with as much ferocity as they sucked dry his enemies. And George loved his father. Jonathan understood this – which is why, years later, sitting in the opulence of the senator’s living room, he knew that the silver-framed daguerreotype had to be Alvah: the bald head, the fringe of hair, red in life, black in the picture, the deeply lined face that despite its lines was as pure an American face as my aunt Claire’s: a face that expressed nothing, not age, not pain, not evil, not good, nothing at all. In the sod hut, the child George gawped at Alvah, his beloved father; the vampires clanked in their chains, stunned, hungering, adrift. How could this beloved father – how could the object of such unrestrained devotion tell him he wasn’t good at what a boughten boy was good at? He? George? Not as good—? He grabbed the pieces of board and leather out of Jonathan’s hands and hurled them at Alvah, then threw himself after them. Alvah fended him off. George fell to the ground in a faint.
He lay sick in bed for several days. Even when he was well enough to go back out to work he could not shake off his father’s betrayal. Alvah was quick and sure in everything he did, economical, and economy made him graceful. George was animated. He had shiny, black eyes. But he was clumsy like his mother. He was fat like her. Before his illness, he hadn’t noticed these things. Where did they leave him? He couldn’t figure it out. Who was he to be? From time to time he stopped in the middle of his weeding, sat back to study his father’s grace, far off in the field. Then slowly, deliberately, brow furrowed with puzzlement, he turned his gaze on Jonathan, already a slender, economical figure himself, even more graceful in his small size.
6
One evening in late August of Jonathan’s second summer at the homestead, a schoolteacher walked up to the door of the sod hut. Her name was Miss Emelina McClanahan and she came from Cincinnati, Ohio; she wore a wide-brimmed hat with a ribbon on it and leather shoes that buttoned up. She announced herself and waited for Wify or Alvah to ask her in.
Nobody said anything. The children stared.
‘I’m opening a school for boys and girls around Sweetbrier,’ Miss Emelina started off in a rush. ‘I’d like to talk to you about that.’
Nobody said a word.
Miss Emelina’s fingers fluttered nervously over the row of buttons that se
cured her bodice. She was very young, as pink-cheeked as a porcelain milkmaid, tiny rosebud of a mouth, wee little teeth inside, big eyes as unreflective as a teddy bear’s, but – plainly, plainly, Jonathan could see it, hear it, almost taste it – a spirit as pure as any Stoke spirit was besmirched. It was an impressive mound of bodice, too: whatever would Alvah have made of it? And of her petticoats? Jonathan couldn’t take his eyes off her. ‘Education is vital to your children’s advancement—’ she began.
‘I got to work ’em,’ Alvah said, eyes glued (I’m sure of it) to that bodice.
‘Oh, I quite understand,’ she said. ‘As soon as planting begins, school ends—’
‘You ain’t charging nothing, are you?’
‘Well, yes, I—’
‘We ain’t paying,’ Wify interrupted.
Alvah swung around. ‘Shut up,’ he said.
But Wify had no sense. ‘We ain’t even got a calf, Alvah,’ she whined.
‘Shut up!’ he said again. He often resented Wify. He wanted vengeance against her for all kinds of things, most of them wholly out of her control. So to spite her, he turned to Miss Emelina, to her impressive bodice and her clean petticoats and said (while Wify began to sob, huge shoulders ashudder like a washing machine with an unbalanced load), ‘How much?’
‘Well, for four children—’
‘Three. A boughten boy don’t need learning.’
Just as we reached this point in Jonathan’s life – it was about half past nine in the morning – Atlas’s one patient of the day showed up at the door. He’d put off all the others in my honor, but he hadn’t been able to reach this one. He wheeled me into the living room to meet her.
‘This is Malory Carrick, my niece,’ he said. ‘She’s come all the way from England to see me. Malory, this is Mrs—’ he began, scrambling around in his head for her name. ‘Oh, Christ, I’m sorry,’ he said then, ‘but I’ve forgotten – just read the damn thing, too. Begins with a “B”, doesn’t it? Mrs Blake? Am I right?’
‘Miss Pemberton, Dr Carrick,’ she said. She was frail and very thin; she wore a man’s watch that slid down over the bones of her wrist as she shook my hand.
‘I’m an old fool,’ he said to her. ‘I do apologize. We’ve known each other for years, haven’t we?’ Then he said to me, ‘Let me introduce Miss Peeberton.’
‘Pemberton,’ she said.
He didn’t spend long with her. ‘You ever get her name right?’ I asked him when he’d shown her out and taken me back into his office. He’d only spent a few minutes with her.
‘Happens all the time,’ he said. I said nothing, and he laughed. ‘Well, Christ, these guys are all so goddamned old they don’t rightly remember who I am, either. You could make out it’s a bond between us.’
But the fact is, it wasn’t age, or not just age: not in Atlas’s case, anyway. Even as a young man he drank too much; by the time I taped my day-long interview with him he’d been drinking for fifty years solid. He had holes in his head big enough to swallow up any misery he wanted to, any misery in his own life, that is. But he couldn’t seem to lose his father’s misery with such ease; talking about Miss Emelina hurt him. He went out to the living room, fetched an almost empty whiskey bottle and poured it out into the coffee left over from breakfast, now cold and forming a dark ring around the cup; but whiskey or no whiskey, his voice trembled. As for Jonathan, his version in the diaries is simple reportage. I came to see that when he was most upset, he was at his most straightforward, no adjectives, short sentences – the control pulled as tight (even though he was a grown man by the time he wrote this section) as Miss Emelina’s stays. He took the denial of school very hard.
After lessons started in November he spent the days in silence with Alvah and Wify and the drying tobacco leaves. In the evenings after dinner, while the others studied by candlelight, he wrapped tobacco plugs and watched the excitement of book-learning replace the sense of betrayal that had come to George with his illness.
‘“A is for ax.”’ George read out the line in early January and then handed the book to Cathern.
‘“B is”—’ Cathern began. She bent over the picture. Her red pigtails fell onto the page. ‘“B is for,” uh—’
‘“Box.” It’s “box”, you dummy,’ George said irritably.
Alyoshus took the book and squinted down at the page. ‘“C is for puss,”’ he announced.
George grabbed the book away. ‘“C is for cat. D is for dog. E is for—”’
By February he managed to read out a passage with all the words joined together. ‘“O Ned! Watch me toss my ball. See how high it goes! Do you not love to play a game of ball!”’
Jonathan felt a sudden chill. There is a moment when the tide stands still, just that one, and then reverses its direction. Stout Cortez stares out at the Pacific in wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien. Jonathan – strong-hearted, too – did not know what an ocean was but stared, too, in wild surmise, too, silent upon a dry goods box in Kansas. It doesn’t matter if it’s Chapman’s Homer or a McGuffey reader: it’s the clean cut of the salt air, that’s what counts.
‘Just grow up as fast as you can,’ Benbow had said to him. ‘Shut your eyes and grow.’
When Cathern’s turn came, Jonathan craned his neck to see over her shoulder.
‘Get that boy out of there,’ George cried.
She started to pull the book away, but George had not yet learned (as my father, who became a professor of economics, used to say in the stuffy, professorial way he sometimes played with) how ‘to affirm that the rewards of an endeavor are commensurate with the risk entailed’. George teased Cathern at school; he pulled her red pigtails; when she peed behind the fence, he poked at her from the other side with a twig. She scanned him, cocked her head, ruffled her shoulders and held the book so Jonathan could see. In the evenings after that, Jonathan followed her finger along the words. Working on tobacco plugs with Alvah and Wify, he reconstructed whole pages in his mind. Before the year was out, he was whispering answers in Cathern’s ear. School finished for the summer. The McGuffey reader – its purpose served – was thrown away, and so became Jonathan’s.
‘You don’t understand,’ my uncle Atlas said, eyes dry but red-rimmed, coffee cup of whiskey already empty. ‘This was the very first thing he ever owned.’ It is true. I don’t understand. I’m a child of the intellectual middle classes, who whimpered when my heap of presents under the Christmas tree looked smaller than the heaps coveted by either of my sisters. ‘He didn’t have his own bed,’ Atlas said. ‘He slept on the dirt floor like the pig. He didn’t have his own clothes. No mother. No father. No brothers and sisters. Nobody that was his. He had open sores on his legs. He didn’t have any shoes. He wasn’t even sure he had his own name. Then all of a sudden he’s the owner of McGuffey’s Eclectic First Reader, Progressive Lessons in Reading and Spelling Mostly in Easy Words of One and Two Syllables. Can you blame the poor bastard for what he became?’
7
As I say, the young are stupid. They think they can escape. Worse, they know it. They are immortal and in their essence, invulnerable: it’s enough to make you weep. One evening in the following year Alvah came back from Sweetbrier and jerked his head toward the west. ‘New town out there.’ As soon as it was dark everybody climbed up to the roof of the soddy. A faint line of light flickered below the evening star.
‘How far away is it?’ George said.
‘Mebbe fifteen miles.’
That very night my grandfather crept away. He’d grown big enough to see over the grass; it tickled his nose as he forced his way through it. But he couldn’t see the town from the ground, so – like some lone bearer of frankincense to the Christ child – he scrambled toward the evening star until it set. He slept the rest of the night by a stream. In the morning, the horizon showed nothing but grass, no town at all. He played all day in the water, a magical day for a child never allowed to play. That night again he followed the star. He spent another day playing
. On the third night he heard the tinkle of pianos, followed his ears, found a dozen dance halls and dashed through the swinging door of the nearest one. There were kerosene lamps and a haze of smoke. Hurdy girls danced with men in hats. A man pumped a player piano. People at the bar laughed. Dogs barked. Gamblers gambled. Jonathan burst into tears, and the love of whores he found that evening stayed with him all his life.
‘Look,’ one of them shouted, discovering him, ‘we got us a wee John!’
You couldn’t really call them whores, though. Most of them were farm girls running from work that would reduce them to hags at forty and kill them at fifty – big girls in dirty calico skirts like Wify’s, with strong backs, great shoulders and powerful arms. What passed for dancing among them wasn’t much more than clumping around in heavy boots, but they were young – and all the young (while stupid) are beautiful. The hurdy girl who discovered Jonathan had tiny, sequin-eyes that peeped out from above mountainous flanks of cheek. ‘How’d you get here, little johnny?’ she demanded. ‘You gonna be my johnny, ain’t you?’
‘Oh, yes,’ he cried.
She set him on her shoulders, hooked her skirt up under her belt, and galloped from one end of the room to the other. Jonathan bobbed up and down atop her in ecstasy. Toward morning everybody slept. Alvah found his boughten boy curled up in a chair like a house cat.
Until winter closed in that year, Jonathan’s hands stayed tied behind his back every night, an ankle tethered as before to the stake in the sod hut’s floor. As soon as spring came he ran away again. But Alvah had promised two dollars’ reward for the return of his boughten boy: Jonathan was bundled back to the homestead in handcuffs. The next year – the year of Alvah’s big crop – he stayed put. In October Alvah’s final shipment went overland to Kansas City, from there to St Louis and on down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where tobacco was selling at nine cents a pound. Nine cents a pound! the American dream come true! Alvah’s expressionless face showed the faintest hint, the most remote shadow of a smile. Wify’s vast hunch unhunched a quarter of an inch. Payment came back in the form of a wooden box with sixty gold pieces in it. Alvah bought a cow, two pigs and a piebald mare, and one April morning he and Jonathan hitched up the mare and drove into Sweetbrier. Time had come to build the wood house that was the capstone and the mighty fulfilment of the Stokes’ ambitions in life.
