Theory of War

by Joan Brady

  But despite Atlas, Jonathan’s diaries say he did sleep the first few nights in Denver. Jonathan says he slept the deep, dreamless sleep of an anesthetized patient for whom time simply doesn’t exist; each morning he awoke to this queer fairyland around him with a sense of bubbling, almost uncontrollable exhilaration. Mountain air isn’t like prairie air. In the summer, air in the middle west steams and lowers: at the base of the Rockies it’s zesty like the water. There’s an excitement just to breathing, and there’s a glint to the sun and the way it lights things that middle westerners see only in winter. Then there are the magnificent, soaring piles of rock, a beauty so intense it’s oppressive: oppression, exhilaration, oppression, exhilaration, a masturbation of soul that makes reasoned behavior difficult for any beginner – and far, far more than that for somebody like Jonathan, whose whole life was as new to him as the landscape. The dreamless sleep didn’t last. On the fourth night he awoke in a state of abject terror – he didn’t know from what – and lay there all night, shaking with fear, drenched in sweat, unable to sleep at all.

  This night was Sunday night. Monday morning he showed up at Frank Fleming’s office to be taken out to the tangle of tracks that made up the St Joe, Hannibal & Denver railroad yard beneath the mountains. Here, in the early morning light, he began his life on the trains – the man-made miracles of steel and steam, the huge, panting engines, the cars full of zinc, gold, longhorns, hides of buffalo and lion – these glorious instruments of his own freedom that ran along lines that drive onward and shift, drive onward and cross, drive onward and meet, mate up and lead to God knows where: to wonders beyond the reach of imagination. Frank introduced him to one of the men in the yard.

  ‘This here’s College,’ Frank said. ‘Ask him anything, but he’ll talk the bleedin’ bejesus out of you.’

  ‘Talk the bleedin’ bejesus out of you’ was right: this is College’s opening speech to my grandfather: to Jonathan Carrick, boughten boy, whom Alvah had instructed for years on end with grunts and shoves. ‘The soul of a railroad car is a sad, broken thing,’ said College, ‘just like the soul of a man. Here’s all this power lying powerless, man alone, aimless, meaningless. Then out of the dark – lo and behold – a god appears. And with him: aim, meaning, power.’

  He was no beauty – College – pug nose and pock-marked skin; but the romance of the railroads pervaded everything and everyone, and College was the only man for miles around who knew how to manipulate his thoughts about it into words. Jonathan stared at this flesh-and-blood miracle in this place of miracles and was more awed than by all the others put together; he had no idea what the words might mean or even if they had meaning, but the sound of them had the sound of fate. As for College, in the circus that was Denver he played his circus trick with a clown’s delight. He had a clown’s perverse vanity, too; he worked to make his usual audience of silent, dour men laugh out loud and figured that later on, when half-asleep at night, at least one of them was going to fret inwardly at the edge behind the clowning – and yet as everybody knows, it’s only the clown who gives his act a second thought. None of College’s audiences had ever seemed so wholly captivated as this thin recruit, whom he’d watched crossing the yard only moments before with real dismay: so young, so underfed, so unbelievably raw. He laughed, delighted at his own surprise as well as at the boy’s enchanted response. ‘Link and pin must match like husband and wife,’ he went on, swinging on the words now, soaring with them, as though he’d climbed off the floor of the big top and taken to the high-wires above. ‘There’s no room for careless promiscuity here. As always, it’s the gods – in this case, you and I – who will pay the price.’

  Twenty years afterwards, Jonathan recorded this speech in his diaries word for word for my computer to grind out, not a single word forgotten in all that time. And catching the words ‘link and pin’ out of this extraordinary medley, he formed link and pin with his hands and rehearsed for College the switchman’s job of coupling one railroad car to another, a technique Mr Finster had demonstrated to him and which he had rehearsed alone night after night with his hands in the darkness of the sod hut, dreaming of this very day but never, not in his wildest imaginings, not ever dreaming of it in such glory as this.

  College could hardly believe his luck, too: not only an audience, but a fellow performer at that. He laughed again and clapped his hand on the raw recruit’s shoulder. ‘You’re a great man,’ he said to Jonathan, who had never before in his life had a compliment of any sort. ‘Now I’ll do what I can to teach you: to teach you is to protect you, because the very first lesson of all is that this is dangerous work. When it rains or when the mists come off the mountains in the early morning, one slip of the foot and you’re down beneath the wheels.’

  The link-and-pin coupling was an absurd system, as absurd as outside brakes, even more so maybe, cumbersome, unreliable, not just dangerous – College was undercutting it – but ferociously dangerous, stupidly, insanely dangerous. Too many unknowns figure in the equation, just as too many unknowns figure in what’s expected of a newly-freed slave. There were forty different species of couplers – species, not varieties; the varieties were endless. Pins were bent, straight, skewed; all weights, thicknesses, lengths, angles. The fit depended on the load of the train, the grade of the track, the relationship between the two cars – never of the same manufacture, never the same design – an intensely mathematical problem to be solved at breakneck speed without any tools but experience and intuition.

  The similarity between his new life and his new job was so pointed that Jonathan remarks on it again and again in his diaries, half-intrigued, half-repelled by it. Choose your pin, step between the cars, set the pin in the link, cock it, signal the engineer. There’s silence for a moment. A hiss of steam. Then slowly, slowly the huge, immeasurably heavy wheels begin to turn. The cars inch together, touch, shudder – and the pin shakes into place. Often it didn’t work, though. Of course it didn’t. The slightest miscalculation and the man had to pound the pin in with his hammer; if his calculations were further off than the tolerances allowed – and all too often they were – and if he wasn’t fast enough getting out of the way, he got smashed between the cars or crushed beneath them. There were designs for universal couplers, lots of them, but they cost money. The romance of the railways (just like the romance of freedom), this will-o’-the-wisp of power all muddled up with death: this romance that College expressed so well to the delight of so many (many of whom had already died because of it and many more who would): this same romance refurbished the ranks of switchmen so fast that the railroad barons, at war with one another as we all love to be, were free to invest their huge fortunes elsewhere while wives of switchmen kept aside one special linen sheet, embroidered, clean, ironed, folded, ready at a moment’s notice to wrap up the mangled remains for burial.

  At six o’clock the day’s work was over. College clapped Jonathan on the shoulder just as he had at the beginning of the day, with all the warmth of a long-lost brother, of a fellow professional discovered by accident in a desertland of amateurs, and arranged to meet him in a saloon for a drink after supper. And Jonathan, my grandfather, turned and ran across the railroad yard, jumping the tracks as he came to them.

  3

  The saloon was the Home Rule Bar, named for the Irish Republican movement – for home rule in Ireland – and so as Irish as everything else around the railroads. It was plainly a wicked place: night inside, even with the sun still shining in the streets – night inside because the windows were plastered over with Wanted posters. Jonathan’s heart fluttered in his chest. There were layer upon layer of Wanted posters on the windows, year after year of them. Why hadn’t he had the sense to call himself Kelly? or Brady? Anybody but Carrick, the murderer.

  One of the modern-day hostages – one of the men held in Lebanon – wrote that the life of a hostage is a kind of quarter life; a hostage, like any prisoner, is a species of slave: ‘The mind forming and informing itself in patterns of maniacal e
xuberance and mind-wrenching despair: the hostage is a convoluted man, a man pushed so far and so deep into himself that he can do little but experience a kind of mental narcosis like a diver in rarefied air.’ Then comes release: the sudden freedom, the multiplicity of it, the dazzling, dizzying disorder of it. And when the maelstrom settles a little, when there’s time to draw in a breath, the ex-hostage finds himself left with what others who delve too deep are left with: this pretty but brittle surface of ours, cheap, artificial, irrelevant. What once fit – what once was life itself – no longer fits, could never be made to fit again. Normality becomes another kind of bondage.

  The comparison with what Jonathan says in his diaries is striking. But Lebanon’s Western hostages were men with pasts – men who had something to try to fit back into, men whose old lives welcomed them home rapturously when they returned – while Jonathan . . . Well, here’s somebody who had no past. Free at last, he faced a nihilist’s dream at a nightmare’s extremity: no foundation, no family, no friends, nobody at all to welcome him, no home town, no background, no education, not even a childhood he could call his own – nothing to return to. Like God Himself, he had to build his world from scratch.

  He says in his diaries that he spent his first weeks in Denver in a strange, heightened state. Sudden noises caused sudden spasms of anxiety in his chest. There were sudden memories so vivid and so painful that they took his breath away. His body had a robotic feel, remote, alien, controlled, or so it seemed to him, by knobs and levers operated in some distant place; his head felt watery on top of his neck as though it were afloat in an amniotic sac. The new things seemed to glut him – the goose force-fed so its liver will fetch a higher price on the market – and having glutted him, kept coming. He hesitated just outside the door to the Home Rule Bar, considered making a dash for it, realized there was no place to go (and besides it was probably too soon after the event for a Wanted poster to have been printed in Denver), so steeled himself and entered, half in a dream.

  Heavy smoke, kerosene lamps, brass, mahogany, mirrors, bottles: so far, pure Hollywood again. But the people, these heroes of the railroad, and heroes most assuredly if you run to that sort of thing – these weren’t Hollywood at all, an unwashed, unkempt, hog-like lot who drank so hard and so fast that mustaches, beards, vests, eyebrows, draggle-locks of hair on their heads or straggle-ringed bald pates: all glistened with whiskey and bubbled with suds from their beer. Towels hung along the bar to wipe away any splashings that got sucked up their noses or slopped down their backs; it was a matter of pride to wipe away with the towel nearest no matter how filthy the towel was, and filthy meant filthy: nobody washed the towels. They hung on their hooks until they rotted off and fell to the floor to mix with the tobacco-spit and dog shit that made up a permanent slurry there. Honky-tonk thumped at full volume. Dogs barked. Men shouted; they vied with each other – who could shout loudest? who longest? – they guffawed, snorted, choked on the fierce brew the Home Rule served, stamped, pounded the bar, clanked their spurs if they had them and their icons from the railway if they had those – brakemen’s light, switchman’s hammer, fireman’s stoke, whatever.

  College stood at the bar, a bottle and glasses in front of him. ‘Pour yourself a drink, Johnny,’ he shouted. Speaking in a normal voice was out of the question.

  Jonathan had not drunk a single drink of alcohol in his life except for that terrible night in the sod hut when he put on George’s frock coat; he knew the effect of the whiskey on him had contributed to what happened then, and he did have – or had developed –rigidities of spirit that wouldn’t always serve him well as a freeman (however well they’d served him as a slave). Furthermore, he felt surrounded, under threat; some of the threats were vague, as ill-defined as shadows, others were right out in front: the Wanted posters, for example, that just might rip him away from this world of things so fresh that even the air he breathed was different. But the lure of eating out the heart of a defeated enemy was the strongest element of all – of drinking his drink while he lies dead – so Jonathan my grandfather lifted his glass, remembering to hold the stuff, which if anything was wickeder than George’s 110-proof red, in his mouth for a while, remembering to close his throat before swallowing; and so he showed a sophistication that College, who was watching him with the glee of the already-initiated at a particularly fierce initiation, most certainly had not expected.

  ‘Well, I’ll be goddamned,’ College said, ‘you are indeed a great man. Where’d a wild-eyed savage like you learn to drink this brew?’

  The men in the bar had developed a special version of half-shout, half-speak that penetrated the din while adding to it. Jonathan would have liked to explain a little to this fascinating person who had worked with him all day without a single word of abuse and seemed to take pleasure in what Jonathan already knew – as well as pleasure in telling him what he didn’t. But despite bone and a new design, the teeth hadn’t really succeeded; speaking was difficult and shouting impossible. He made a self-deprecatory gesture instead.

  College tried to imitate but gave up almost immediately and launched instead into a discussion of railroad lore while Jonathan wrestled with the anxieties, the promises, the threats – as well as the noise, the commotion, the smoke, the smell – that surrounded him and so missed some connection that he might otherwise have caught.

  ‘– the simplicity of it that fills the soul with pleasure,’ College was shouting, ‘simple as a goose girl, goose girl, maybe chicken girl: Why did the chicken cross the road? Am I making myself clear?’ He searched Jonathan’s face. ‘You must know that rare old joke. Don’t you? Yes? No? Ah, glory be to God, what an opportunity. I’ll educate you: Why did the chicken cross the road? Will you make a guess, sir? No? To get to the other side,’ College laughed merrily. ‘Don’t you see? The chicken crossed the road to get to the other side.’

  The phosphorescence in Jonathan’s head shimmered. All that crossed his mind on the subject of chickens was that he hated them. The Stokes had a cock that serviced all the hens twice a day, even the dead ones. The live ones used to run like hell to get away.

  ‘You’re supposed to laugh,’ College said, affronted; and it suddenly occurred to him that the boy had in fact not spoken a single word, not one, not even when they’d been introduced to each other. ‘Do you ever laugh?’ College asked, irritable now. ‘Look, Johnny, I don’t want to make trouble or anything—’ He shifted uneasily at the bar. ‘Johnny, old boy, I’d really like to hear you say something. Speak to me of the rain, of winter, of summer on the oceans. Tell me about your dreams. Tell me about anything at all.’

  What was Jonathan to do? He was painfully aware of the change in atmosphere. But control it? make a shift in it? He was half-drowning, half-scorching in it. Even so, even in his desperation, he did say something; but he spoke gently as the teeth dictated: a crash of honky-tonk drowned him out and College saw only that the lips moved and no sound came.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ College said then. ‘You did seem too good to be true. I speak. All other people on the railroad speak, albeit none of them so beautifully as I. Everybody who can speak, speaks at least sometimes. You do not speak. Ergo, you cannot speak.’ His voice now had an unvarnished edge; Jonathan opened his mouth to protest, but the teeth clattered down and while he struggled to right them College rushed on, aware only that the charge had not been denied. ‘This is not what Frank said to me. Which is to say that Frank tidied up the truth a little. You said nothing, but then how could you? Look, old friend, I know this is a weakness in me, but I cannot help it. I mean no offense. I’m sorry, but I cannot work with you.’

  Jonathan’s rage was as full-blown as it was abrupt. There was a moment of quiet in the room, as though the din itself were shocked by the intensity of this one young customer at the bar. He set down his glass and said in a measured tone, ‘I got no money for the drink.’ Then he turned to leave: the silence collapsed back into clamor.

  ‘Well, will the saints be blessed,’ College
shouted after him. ‘Don’t go away. Come back! Don’t get mad. Hey!’

  Jonathan stopped but did not turn.

  ‘Look, you’re the smartest kid I’ve run across yet,’ College went on. ‘You’re a natural: a joy – Come back, goddamnit. It’s just that I thought – Talking’s all I care about. Why the hell didn’t you—?’ Broken sentences from College sounded so odd that Jonathan turned. There was warmth and a childlike uncertainty: he was touched despite his anger and despite the fact that he’d rarely been touched in his life. ‘I couldn’t work with a mute. I just – I’m sorry. I didn’t want to offend you, but – Have another drink. Why don’t we sit down somewhere? No? Why don’t you speak? Is there a reason? I mean, if you can speak, why don’t you?’

  ‘You mean this? Or what you said before?’ Jonathan said, checking now for exposed flanks, for tricks and traps, like the untamed creature he was on what was yet another piece of ground new to him: a small flurry, but a flurry apparently won, and won –apparently – out in front for all to see. This also was new. Radically new.

  ‘I mean this,’ College said. ‘Of course I mean it. It’s just—’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. It’s just – Just answer me from time to time. Silence scares the shit out of me. I can’t – Why don’t you talk?’

  Across the bar, one man grabbed another by the beard. Glasses smashed on the floor. Beer flew. Dogs scrambled to get out of the way. The bearded man had a high, penetrating voice and a fine line in swear words. ‘Fungus prick! Draw-balled cream pisser!’ he screamed.

  ‘Teeth,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘Goose-turd! Slug-fucker! Bottle-assed—’

  ‘What?’ College shouted. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Piddle prong!’ And the beard was free.

  ‘Teeth,’ Jonathan repeated. The anger left him; an abrupt exhaustion replaced it, and he took hold of the bar, body trembling.