Theory of War

by Joan Brady

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

  Grayberg leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling. ‘Life’s a bore,’ he said. ‘East, west, anywhere at all. People want to shiver a little, cry, tremble, feel their hearts thump. You and that Baptist out there are the only entertainment they got, and if your act don’t pick up you’re gonna lose that circuit of yours. Hear me?’

  7

  Before going to Grayberg’s, Jonathan had arranged to rent a horse from a stable in Ellsworth. When he arrived there the horse wasn’t ready, and he took out his rage at Grayberg on the stable, the horses and the stable owner, Lemon Pinnock, who scuttled around him, stuttering apologies. ‘I’m right s-sorry, Reverend. My help didn’t sh-show up this m-morning. Don’t carry on so, Reverend, you’ll do yourself an injury.’ When Lemon turned over to him a chestnut mare called Jenny, he said, ‘She’s a b-biter, Reverend. Don’t take it p-personal. She bites everybody except the Injun what does the mucking out. Keep your hands c-clear, Reverend.’

  Snow covered the ground. Jenny clattered into streams and out of them, snorting and farting as horses do, hooves slipping on the stones of the banks, tail swishing. The air was cold and sea-scented. Jonathan pressed into a gallop, still railing at Grayberg and now also at the Indian who mucked out Lemon Pinnock’s stables – and at anything that came to mind. He hadn’t seen Helen and Sebastian since he’d left Maine for Chicago and the Moody Institute some twelve years before; he’d written regularly, though, and received regular letters in reply. By the time he arrived in Malloy’s Landing it was dark; not even an outline of the rambling structure he remembered was visible.

  At his knock the door opened a crack, and an aged man poked his head out. ‘Who—?’ a voice began. Skin drooped down over the bones of the man’s face like sodden gauze. ‘Johnny? Is that really—? Helen! Helen! Johnny’s here.’ Sebastian pushed the door open and took hold of Jonathan’s arm. ‘Johnny, how wonderful to – Helen!’ There was nothing left of the Sebastian Jonathan had known. This new Sebastian was skeletal, bent, atremble – his sentences as fragmented as his wife’s had once been.

  Inside, the only light came from a fire in the fireplace. Two people sat at a table, one of them in shadow, the other a hugely fat old woman who fought to pull herself out of her chair, just as Sebastian had fought to pull himself out of his chair when Jonathan first arrived in Malloy’s Landing all those years ago. When power shifts in a marriage – so my uncle Atlas says (and a man married as many times as be should know) – sometimes all the trappings of power, however queer, shift as well.

  ‘Welcome, Johnny. Welcome,’ Helen said, and her voice had all the volume and authority that Sebastian’s had once had. ‘Come in. Sit down.’ Her enormous belly slopped up over the edge of the table. Only her face and arms were still thin enough for him to recognize her. ‘Josh, find Johnny a chair.’

  ‘Let him find his own chair,’ Josh said, drawing out of the shadows. In the firelight his eyes were angrier than ever. Jonathan held out his hand. Josh eyed it, got up from the table and left the room without a word.

  ‘Oh, Johnny –’ Sebastian began again, ‘I’m so – he doesn’t mean—’

  ‘Forget it, Seb,’ Helen said. ‘Give us a kiss, Johnny. Have you come to stay awhile?’ Jonathan bent over her brow. ‘You still look like Josh’s blue-eyed twin from hell,’ she went on. ‘Married life hasn’t changed you a bit. Tell us about Sarah. How’s the—’

  ‘Helen—’ Jonathan began.

  ‘No, no, about you! Tell us about the baby.’

  ‘A baby’s a baby,’ he said. ‘He’s a little shriveled thing with an ugly, screwed-up face – fists that pump back and forth – We named him Rayner,’ Jonathan said. ‘Is that all right? I thought College would be pleased.’ He stopped short; tears were running down Sebastian’s crumpled cheeks. How can a field of tobacco, wholly vegetable, turn into something animal with mouths that feed on its own insides? How can one thing turn into another? one person turn into another? Helen into Sebastian? Sebastian into Helen? What happens in the end when the snake swallows its tail?

  ‘What is all this?’ Jonathan said, his throat dry, his voice catching somewhere in his chest. ‘Where are your pupils? You both look ill. I had no idea. Your letters are so vague.’

  ‘If it weren’t for Josh—’ Sebastian began.

  ‘He stays on because of the money, Seb. Don’t be such a fool. I’ve got dropsy, Johnny. Seb has consumption. Or something. We made Josh our heir in exchange for taking care of us. He’s remarkably competent, but he hates our guts. Tell us what Sarah—’

  ‘Helen, you must tell me what’s going on here.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

  ‘Plainly there is. Tell it.’

  ‘What you see is what there is, no more,’ Helen said.

  ‘Helen – ’ Sebastian began tremulously, ‘can’t we—? He’s almost our—’

  ‘No, Seb, we can’t.’

  ‘Come and live with me,’ Jonathan interrupted them both. ‘You’ve never seen the Pacific, have you? You can see it from the top of the hill outside Hannaville. Hannaville’s a pretty little town. I’ll build you a house there myself. I’m a carpenter by inclination, if not by trade. We’ll start a farm together.’

  Jonathan hated farming. It was the world of the Stokes. He hated it for its own sake, too: the fearful labor, the dependence on weather, pests, market forces, public whim, government fiddling. But he knew farming, and he realized as he spoke that the idea had been growing on him for some time simply because, however much he hated farms, he hated preaching more. He was a puritan at heart, and like all puritans he mistrusted pleasure. He had no background for it, didn’t understand it, knew only that it loosened his grip somehow – somehow made him vulnerable where he hadn’t been vulnerable before. Preaching gave him pleasure. His position in the community gave him pleasure. The sway he held over his parishioners gave him pleasure. His gift for oratory gave him pleasure. So (being a puritan at heart) he’d come to despise even the resonance of his own voice sounding as sure as sin while it spoke out what he knew were lies.

  Besides, the old fool Grayberg had said it himself: the role of preacher is at best the role of entertainer, actor, barker: a shadowland even when practiced by a believer. For a non-believer like Jonathan it was a shadow of a shadowland. There wasn’t any money in it, either. As for farms, whatever else can be said of them, they’re real. All a farmer needs to set up, as my grandfather said to Helen and Sebastian (while the light of the fire weakened and the room grew chilly), is money, strength and experience. They had the money. He had the strength and the experience. The solution seemed so simple as he talked about it that he found himself dwelling on the beauty of the northwest and the opportunities out there with an enthusiasm he hadn’t felt for anything in years. ‘We can try for some new crop: soft fruit maybe. Why not? Nobody grows soft fruit out there. There’s no fixed market, and a lot of the land is pure peatbog.’

  He slept that night in a tiny attic room. He hadn’t been able to get a clear understanding of the arrangement between the Malloys and Josh, though by the end of the evening Sebastian was as open in his resentment as Helen; they were anxious to break away, go west with Jonathan, see the Pacific, buy a farm, live with him and Sarah, do something new – something never done before. Jonathan had seen enough of illness and death to know the Malloys were both seriously sick, that they wouldn’t live long – couldn’t live long – but he saw no reason why their last months should be eked out so sadly and so hopelessly. They gave him the name of the lawyer in Ellsworth who had drawn up the contract with Josh. Jonathan was sure he could find some common ground, some way to make his plan workable; they were sure of it, too.

  He got up early the next morning to go into town and see what he could do. The barns stretched beyond the farmhouse as before but there were no beds in any of the bedrooms, no desks, no polished candlesticks, no pans in the kitchen, no books on the library shelves. Mold lined the t
hroat of the rose-patterned water closet and one of the paws of the bathtub had broken loose. The walls were damp; the upstairs ceilings showed that the roofs had not been looked after.

  Out in the animal barn, keeping a wary eye on Jenny’s bared teeth, he hung a bag of oats over her face and found Josh standing beside him.

  ‘You’re poaching on my ground, white man,’ Josh said.

  ‘You don’t know how to take care of your ground,’ Jonathan said, instantly furious. ‘When you don’t take care of things, you don’t deserve to keep them.’ He took a brush out of the saddle-bag and began to groom Jenny’s flank with angry strokes. She eyed him suspiciously over her oat-bag.

  ‘Seb’s on laudanum,’ Josh said. ‘Bungs up the bowels. Tell me, have you ever relieved an impacted bowel?’

  ‘Turns you into a saint, does it?’

  ‘I’ve been looking after these people for six, seven years,’ Josh went on. ‘They’re dying, both of them.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘They won’t last until summer—’

  ‘You’re in my light. Move!’

  ‘—and you come in and try to scoop off the cream.’

  Jonathan scanned the high cheekbones and immobile face. ‘It would be more seemly’, he said, ‘for you to wait until they’re dead before you scoop off that cream of yours.’

  ‘What fine untarnished sentiments you bring, gentle pulpiter. So where have you and your – uh – noble sentiments been hiding all these years?’

  Until a week before, the stories Jonathan had read in newspapers about Senator George Stoke had been only text. In Chicago, on his way east to Maine and his interview with Grayberg, Jonathan had bought a Tribune; George stood there on page two, lower left, grainy black and white, smoking a cigar. Jonathan recognized him immediately; he was plump but not yet fat and sodden, not yet the grotesque he was to become; the shiny black eyes and curly mouth still resembled George the boy’s shiny black eyes and curly mouth. You can believe anything you like until you see a photograph. Looking at this one, Jonathan had felt a nausea so abrupt that he’d hardly made it to the car door in time. George, the ‘fighting liberal’, the senator adored by people of good will all over the nation, was campaigning in Washington, DC; he was promoting a plan to dam the waters of the Tennessee River and its tributaries and so develop the whole of the Tennessee Valley basin – a plan that many years later resulted in the Tennessee Valley Authority: a plan that Jonathan, stomach and mind in turmoil, could not stop himself thinking was a first-rate idea, as maddeningly sound as most of what George fought for. Why did he have to take Jonathan’s side of the issues? Why couldn’t he look out for the rich? Why couldn’t he back the gold standard? the eastern bankers? the railroad barons? almost anything Jonathan abominated? Jonathan studied the cigar in the curly mouth. A Corona Corona, he’d decided at last. Expensive. Very expensive.

  ‘Why haven’t you repaired the barns?’ he said furiously to Josh. ‘Not much of a businessman, are you? You’re going to ruin your own investments.’ He bent down and began to brush Jenny’s forelegs.

  ‘Well, well, well. I’ll try and make it easy for you, Vicar. Ready?’ Josh followed the movements of the brush on Jenny’s legs. ‘These poor bastards: they’ve just about mastered the art of eking out the little time that’s left to them. One day, then the next, then the next. Never look forward. Never look back. And along comes a reverend gentleman to witter on about hope and future. There isn’t—’

  ‘The great scholar’s taken on medicine, has he? And psychology?’

  ‘—isn’t any future for these people. None. There’s no—’

  ‘Or is it just high finance you’ve spent your time on?’

  ‘—no west for them to go to. Have you no pity?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, can’t you fix the roof? Can’t you do at least that?’

  Without warning, the mare whipped her head around to lunge at Jonathan; Josh grabbed the bridle. The horse snorted and stamped. ‘Hey, Jenny, hey girl,’ Josh crooned, reaching to stroke her nose. The mare dipped her head under his hand like a cat.

  Jonathan felt a sudden unreality take hold of him. ‘You’re working for Lemon Pinnock, aren’t you? What for? You’re the Indian who mucks out his stables.’

  Josh dropped Jenny’s bridle. ‘You blab at them about it and I’ll kill you. You hear?’

  ‘You wouldn’t know how,’ Jonathan said contemptuously.

  Josh snorted, turned to stroke Jenny, paused, then whipped back much as she had only a moment before. ‘Hammer is marteau,’ he shouted. ‘Nail is clou. Roof is toit. Canute was born in 995. Hume said, “I look inside myself and find David Hume’s experiences but I cannot find David Hume.”’ The tendons stood out in his cheeks and neck. ‘You’re right, you motherfucker, I wouldn’t know how to kill you. I don’t know how to mend a roof, either. Where do you think I’d have learned skills like that? At this place? Hie, haec, hoc, huius, huius, huius – All I’m fit for is clearing out horse shit.’ He stopped, shook his head and covered his face with his hands. ‘They don’t have a dollar left. Not a dime or a nickel. Not a penny. Not a sou, not a centime—’

  ‘Don’t shit me,’ Jonathan said. ‘There was money. Lots of it. You know that, and I know it. What’d you throw it away on? Horses? Women? Gambling?’

  Josh laughed. ‘Oh, I’d have liked that, Cardinal. Why didn’t I think of it myself? Trouble is, I just didn’t get the chance—’

  Jonathan grabbed hold of Josh’s shirt lapels and yanked him forward so that their faces almost met. ‘Who did then?’

  ‘Dear me, what a violent man of God—’

  ‘Speak!’

  Josh let himself hang loose in Jonathan’s grip. ‘You know these good people, oh, pastor mine, as well as I do. A whimpering story and their hearts melt all over the floor. The money just drops out of their pockets of its own weight.’

  Jonathan let go of him abruptly. Then abruptly he turned, took the saddle from the rack, threw it over Jenny, settled it, fastened the cinch around her middle with an angry jerk. He wasn’t good with animals. He used to say they never did what you told them to. ‘Which one was it this time? Bonds for the Utopia of Idaho? Shares in an orphanage in China? Pregnant cats? Stray dogs?’

  ‘All those and dozens more,’ Josh said. ‘Sharks flocked to Malloy’s Landing – covered every inch of the shore.’

  ‘Soft-bellied liberal miasma,’ Jonathan muttered furiously, giving the cinch another jerk. Jenny lunged at him again, but in his rage he avoided her easily. ‘Oozing sentimentality – rotten, pestilent – Where the hell were you while this was going on?’

  Josh shrugged. ‘Me? The tame Injun? What good am I? Where the hell were you, white man?’

  My grandfather mounted and rode off without another word, forcing Jenny into a gallop in the direction of Hannaville. But after he’d gone no more than a quarter of a mile he turned back. Josh was still standing at the door of the barn. ‘They think you stole the money from them,’ Jonathan said to him.

  ‘They don’t know what they think,’ Josh said. ‘Never needed to figure it out. They dream a little, trim a bit here, add a bit there until what they see is what they want to see – like good people everywhere.’

  ‘While living off your pay from Pinnock?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Sure,’ Jonathan said. ‘Why not?’ He took twenty dollars – all he had – from his wallet and handed it to Josh, who received it without comment. ‘What else can I do while I’m here?’

  ‘Mend the roof,’ Josh said. Then he turned and walked away.

  8

  Jonathan spent a month repairing the roofs in Malloy’s Landing and watching the fearful spectacle of the Malloys’ disintegration. Sebastian died the week he planned to leave. Jonathan stayed on, organized the funeral and preached the oration, which was to be – he swore it – his final sermon; when Helen died a week later, the Reverend Grayberg buried her. But why didn’t Sarah write to him? This he could not unders
tand. He spent two months in Malloy’s Landing. He wrote her almost every day, but no letters came back – not one.

  ‘I’m not a very good letter-writer’ was all she said, playing with little Rayner, who was by now eighteen months old and babbling happily on her lap, ‘letter-writer, writer-lighter,’ and such like, very much as Jonathan himself had babbled when he was a little boy, before Alvah Stoke bought him. It was the first evening of Jonathan’s return. ‘I told you that before you left, didn’t I? Now what’s this decision you’ve come to?’

  ‘I’m going to buy a farm,’ my grandfather said to her.

  ‘What?’ she said laughing. ‘You? Don’t make such jokes.’

  The baby laughed with her. ‘Joke smoke,’ he cried.

  ‘It’s no joke.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Johnny—’ She broke off when he said nothing. ‘This is ridiculous. You can’t mean it. Don’t say—’

  ‘Mother hated farming as much as dad did,’ Atlas shouted at me from the bathroom. The Youngbloods and the Murphys were due for Claire’s French dinner party at six; it was five already and I was beginning to feel pressed for time. I figured there was more than an hour of the story left to go, and I wasn’t sure Atlas would be in any condition to tell the rest of it when the party was over. He had wheeled me into the bedroom so he could talk on while he bathed and dressed. ‘Hating farms was kind of a bond between them in the early days – the Stokes, George, all that unadulterated misery. Why the hell he was throwing away something he believed in for a way of life he hated, I have no idea. Never could figure it out. Money probably.’