by Joan Brady
And so it was the teeth were pulled from the boy who was all teeth and claws like the uncrowned king of Arabia.
11
‘There’s just so much of this I can take,’ I said to Atlas, although at the time I didn’t have all the details I’ve put down here simply because Atlas didn’t know them all, not by any means. Jonathan’s coded diaries are my primary source. Back in England, when this day at Atlas’s old age ghetto in Washington state was well over, I typed hundreds of pages of the diaries into my computer, which ground out for me letter by letter (in electronic green, accompanied by electronic bleeps) a life of nightmare that makes me feel ill just to think about it: a life decoded onto fanfold listing paper with micro-perforations, printer chuffing through its paces as indifferently as though it were producing a tax assessment. But why were the diaries in code? What was the point of it? As a child I’d known the crude outlines – the bounding out, the tobacco farm – although in my family the hatred of Jonathan was so great that my father seemed to lay claim to these things for himself, as though they had been lived through for the sole purpose of terrorizing him. But Jonathan was efficient. He wouldn’t have wasted his energy on coding diaries just because the tale they told was ugly. It made no sense to me.
‘You got to keep in mind,’ Atlas said, ‘that Alvah Stoke had his virtues as a slavemaster.’
‘How can you say that, Atlas? This is the most terrible—’
‘It’s just old-fashioned slavery. Nothing special.’
‘—and as for George – How much more stuff like this is there?’
‘Not all that much. It gets better soon.’
‘Promise?’
He laughed. ‘See, this guy, Alvah, he wasn’t cruel for no reason at all; he took good care of his animals, and the way he saw it, dad wasn’t much different from the mare and the pigs. A hell of a lot more trouble, though; and he’d have killed any animal that hurt the others. Besides, the operation seemed to work – which would have justified it entirely in any slavemaster’s book.’
Jonathan was sick for weeks afterwards. They kept him in the wooden house and tended him just as Atlas said, like a feeble calf in winter. The pain he suffered must have been dreadful to watch, and he drank only water. But at least he drank. When he began to get better, Alvah knew there would be no more running away – not for a while, anyhow. ‘In a lost battle,’ says Clausewitz, ‘it is the moral power of an army that is broken to a greater degree than the physical.’ Alvah said to Benbow Wikin with some satisfaction, ‘You get you an animal, you got to break him.’ For just over a year, Alvah’s satisfaction remained intact.
In his autobiography, George says he went out selling tobacco during this winter of Jonathan’s defeat, in Sullen Springs and Frying Pan, in Whiskey, First Chance and Cow. Miss Emelina’s pressure on Alvah had got him back to school; she’d started him to work on an essay called ‘A Drummer Looks at Kansas’ which they both hoped would win him the Farm Boys’ scholarship, written up in the Overland Sentinel, alongside stories about the St Joe, Hannibal & Denver Railroad that was to run through Sweetbrier. But he says nothing about his state of mind, and what a state it must have been! How much he’d learned! Play by the rules: you lose. Hold back: you lose. Consider any consequence other than winning: you lose. But lie, scheme, cheat – break every rule you’ve ever been taught, cross every line that’s ever been drawn – and what happens? You win. This is the secret of war. This is the secret of life. What greater secret can anybody possess? The laughter in him must have threatened to boil up out of control.
But Jonathan still had that grace, like Alvah’s. This shared grace must have troubled George; he loved his father more than ever with that blood-sucking, jealous love he practiced on his intimates. In his autobiography he refers to Alvah as most public people might refer to the spirit of the country they serve. Perhaps he was right. There was much in Alvah of the basic American soul – the independence, the drive, the ruthlessness – but there was still something in the way Jonathan held his head that disturbed George’s sleep. George worked harder at his lessons and his essay. When he caught sight of Jonathan, he was careful to let his eyes register no more interest than they did when he caught sight of the mare.
As for Jonathan, he kept his mind to the cubic shape of the tobacco cubes that the Stokes produced, the landscape inside his head as baked and barren as the landscape the locusts had left behind them. Before the snow had melted Alvah was entrusting him with the weekly trips to Sweetbrier to bargain for staples in exchange for Wikin’s Chewing Tobacco. Without teeth my grandfather couldn’t speak properly, so he didn’t speak at all. He pointed and shook his head if the price was too high. To deal with the sometimes complicated haggling, he developed those extraordinary gestures that remained with him for the rest of his life. Usually little kids are merciless to people like this (I have personal experience of such matters), but they didn’t harass Jonathan. Perhaps they were afraid. I don’t know what he looked like at the time – there are no photographs – but probably his face showed something of the fury that his mind denied. Whatever the reason, local children followed him down the street and into Benbow Wikin’s, where most of the haggling went on, as though he were the Pied Piper; they laughed delightedly when he got across some unexpected thought, and after he’d left, they squatted outside and tried to talk to each other with their own hands.
Jonathan paid no attention to them – which may have been part of his secret – nor did he pay attention to the gang of railway workers that appeared at the eastern horizon to bed the ground and lay the track that was to skirt the Stoke homestead on its way west through Sweetbrier. He hardly noticed them working throughout the bitter winter weather. He hardly noticed them disappear over the western horizon in May at just about the time George received a letter from the University of Kansas at Lawrence telling him he’d won the scholarship for 1876.
The week after George left for the University in September, the first train was scheduled to pass through Sweetbrier. Everybody from miles around came to look. It was night-time – one of those dark, moonless nights when the stars look garish. Beside the track, Jonathan stood a little back from the Stokes, waiting like the rest of them. Twenty years ago – or was it thirty? – I watched the first moon landing and was bored to death. We have a glut of wonders. But those people in Sweetbrier lived much as their fathers had lived and their fathers before them. No industry. No electricity. No running water. Trains didn’t yet play the liquid melodies of Casey-blow-your-horn; they had a high-pitched, single-note whistle, and here out of nowhere comes this disembodied sound, like no sound these people had ever heard. You have to envy them: what joy to be struck dumb by something altogether new. First the sound, then the headlight; this, too, was altogether new, a never-before-seen break in the darkness. Then the chuff-chuff-a-chuff of steam and heavy metal wheels; then the rumble. And at last a sight of the engine itself. A steam engine is a magnificent thing even to modern eyes, but for these dirt-poor farmers it’s the first man-made miracle they’ve ever seen. Here is a huge, clanking, shaking, hissing monstrosity out of the Apocalypse: and this time the miracle is ours – theirs – human, not divine.
If people can make trains, people can do anything they want.
Jonathan didn’t sleep that night. The next morning he stole candle leavings from Wify’s cupboard and a piece of seasoned wood from Alvah’s store. The method came to him whole, as God-given as the great train itself. He searched out a clump of clayey earth, bit into it to make a mold of his gums and filled the mold with wax to make a template. He whittled jaws and teeth to size and joined the jaws together with leather thongs. He had to hold the upper plate with his index finger when he spoke, but he could make himself understood again.
Teeth and claws were back in business.
During the first winter George was away at college, Alvah forbade Jonathan to go down to the edge of the homestead where the railway tracks ran. Jonathan went anyway, watched the trains go by and
stared after them, heart pounding. Back at the homestead, he looked straight into Alvah’s eyes without a blink and even – or so it seemed to Alvah – without awareness that Alvah’s eyes were eyes, too. As before, Alvah forbade him this, forbade him that, but now hesitated to beat him, was afraid somehow to beat him. Jonathan went to the train station every Saturday after he’d bargained for flour and bacon at Wikin’s store. Mr Finster, late of the Pennsylvania Railroad and builder of the house that had served as model for Alvah’s house, was stationmaster, a talkative man and a warm one, with the strong feelings most of Sweetbrier’s inhabitants shared about the treatment of this boughten boy. He told Jonathan about Wooten fireboxes, equalizing beams and link-and-pin couplers. He explained the signals. He talked about bridges that spanned valleys hundreds of feet deep and trains that crossed the Mississippi in winter on cross-ties laid right over the ice.
Trains weren’t scheduled for Saturdays, but one day at the end of winter, a train came through while Jonathan was at the station. His diaries say it was an American Standard, a great, brass-bound beast by the sound of it with a balloon stack and box-shaped lights two feet square. People scurried this way and that, dogs barked, children screamed, Mr Finster carried bags and checked tickets. Trainmen bawled out orders. The engine built up a second head of steam, the whistle blew, the massive wheels began to turn.
Despite their beauty, these trains were crude pieces of machinery: they didn’t even have real brakes: men stood astride the tops of the cars and leapt from moving car to moving car to set brakes that worked only from the outside: astonishing acrobatics of courage, foolishness and grace that made bystanders gasp. Jonathan kept his eyes on one man in particular; when this one leapt, in his heart Jonathan leapt, too – and was still leaping when the man staggered and fell between the cars. Mr Finster broke into a run. The brakeman’s body bounced beneath the wheels. A flash of arm shot out from the tracks. The body bounced again, and the head flew out to rest some twenty yards beyond the arm. For a moment Jonathan stopped breathing altogether. Then he scrambled back to Alvah’s wagon, jerked the reins, and whipped the mare into a gallop.
Two miles out of town, he reined in, clung to the side of the spring wagon and held his breath until there were spots in front of his eyes. First the inertia breaks, and there’s a faint sign of movement, a faint stirring of the soul. Things build slowly, then a little quicker, then quicker still. Hear that beat? It builds and builds, spurred on by some hidden, internal rhythm. There’s a hidden, internal trigger, too, its mechanism many times witnessed but not at all well understood: at some moment known only to the nuclei themselves, at this precise moment – bang! – the atomic pile goes critical all at once. ‘Jonathan’s going west,’ my grandfather cried to the open fields all around him, where the grass blew gently in the wind as it had blown for centuries before. ‘Going west – no, not Jonathan – Johnny. Johnny the brakeman. I’ll buy me a frock coat – Johnny’s frock coat – and I’ll ride and ride and never stop, go on forever, never stop. Never, never—’
For the next few weeks, while he and the family stripped, flavored, kneaded, prized and wrapped tobacco, he watched, body taut with concentration, to see just how upper teeth fit onto lower teeth. His next set was to be carved out of bone.
12
Power is gained and maintained by violence. This is as true of individuals as it is of nations. Both are born in violence, relate to others through violence, and die in violence. This is not cynicism. Nobody who has witnessed a birth can ever forget the tearing of the flesh and the screams. As to our relationships with other people, we play at manners and morals, but we only play, just as states do; the veneer is dangerously thin and what lurks beneath is murderous. As to death, it is the ultimate violation, so it’s by nature violent, no matter how it looks on the surface. People who deny such truths are foolish or dangerous or both, and yet the only thinkers who speak about such things without hypocrisy or sentimentality are the philosophers of war.
Jonathan completed this second set of teeth before George was due home from the University for the summer. Alvah sent him to the station to pick George up; he waited there, artillery well concealed for the ambush to come, and from the once-again-impregnable fortress of hatred, he watched George climb down the steps of the railroad car.
At eighteen George’s face had developed genuine attraction. Only a week ago, at the University in Lawrence, he had met Georgina Shockton, and he was not unaware of the impression he’d made on her. Her father was Shockton Beef – worth a king’s ransom. She’d gone to Italy the summer before; an English guide there had dragged her party from one lapidary museum to another. Somewhere in Tuscany, casting a bored eye over the stone statues, most without legs or arms, Georgina had seen one – ‘unidentified Roman general,’ the guide translated for her – to which she had turned her mind every night since. George’s face, caught at an angle and in just the right light, had something of that general’s force and a great deal of his rude sensuality. And George, watching Georgina watching him from across the library one afternoon, felt the decisive tide turn in him: he was going to marry her and go into politics. As he used to say in later years, ‘The future’ll spread her legs if you grab her by the tits.’
He approached the spring wagon, holding out his hand. He wore pants and a shirt; in the warm summer weather a ring of white flesh slopped out above his belt, just as it had that hot night in the soddy when he’d defeated Jonathan. ‘Hello, Jonathan,’ he said. His voice was deeper, more confident. ‘Nice of you to pick me up. How are you keeping?’
Jonathan scanned the soft flesh and the belly. And then – oh, how long had he planned this tantara of the victory to come – how many nights had he seen it, tasted it—
He winked.
‘A surprise’, Clausewitz says, ‘can only be effected by that party which gives the law to the other.’ Like Jonathan after George’s wink of two years before, George now found himself off-balance. What could this wink mean? What law could this slave dictate to this freeman? Where was the risk? He was George, soon to be betrothed to Shockton Beef: George, the future senator. And yet – He grew restless in the days that followed. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ he said several times, seeing danger, personal danger to him, to George, Georgina’s George: seeing it flicker across Jonathan’s face like phosphorescence on water. Jonathan turned away without speaking.
Then one afternoon, Jonathan sought him out. He cocked his head toward the railroad tracks at the edge of the Stokes’ land.
‘How come you’ve decided to talk to me?’ George said. ‘You got something to show me? That it?’
Jonathan nodded.
George studied him a moment. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Why not?’
When they reached the stream by the cottonwoods, Jonathan again cocked his head toward the tracks, then splashed into the stream. George followed.
‘What is this that’s so special—?’ George began, coming closer.
Jonathan snapped his body around and threw both fists into George’s genitals.
Before the French Revolution, European generals worked for whatever prince offered the best salary, much like corporate executives today. Soldiers were mercenaries, expensive to train, hard to replace; they had no stake in the outcome of their fight, often no idea even of what the campaign was about. So war was very different: death to be avoided, battles to be fought as games of maneuver, like chess. True patriotism, true hatred of the enemy – Clausewitz calls it military virtue – is a phenomenon that doesn’t appear until the French Revolution. But when it does, it is as formidable an innovation as nuclear fission. Battlefields ever after have been slaughterhouses, and Jonathan had the Rights of Man spilling over in his heart as recklessly as any French Revolutionary. He beat on long after George had collapsed to the ground.
Standing victorious over the body – bloody, bruised, torn, panting, but victorious – he knew he should consolidate this victory: establish the defeat, establish death. He knelt do
wn and reached out his hand, having it in mind to feel George’s pulse at the neck; but when it came to it, he could not force himself to touch that flesh. Pounding at the sodden whale of George’s being was one thing: touching him after the fact was different altogether. The girlish breasts showed themselves through the torn and bloody cloth of the shirt. Jonathan swallowed back disgust, wavered, reached out his hand once more, but still could not do it. George looked dead: Jonathan had seen dead animals and had some idea what death looks like. So it was that he excused himself from his duty; just this once, and to his eternal regret, he excused himself. He gave the head one final, not very enthusiastic kick: there was no sign of life whatever, no sound, not even a trickle of blood.
‘There ain’t no Johnnys in books.’ This is what George had said out in the curing shed four years earlier, just before the building on the wooden house began. Then George had said, ‘You just got to make up Johnnys.’ Ever since then, Jonathan had known just precisely what he was going to say at just precisely this minute: ‘From now on’ – and his voice betrayed none of the unexpected weakness his flesh had shown – ‘from now on,’ he said, ‘it’s Georges that got to be made up.’ Then he set off down the tracks toward Sweetbrier station.
