by Joan Brady
‘Dad really was lousy with animals,’ Atlas said. ‘He said it again and again: “The bastards just won’t do what you tell them to.” Christ, the worst tool you can use with a bull is a pitchfork. He jabbed at that exposed rump – jabbed – Bull kept backing toward him: backing, swaying, backing: then with a sudden, deft flip, he tossed the pitchfork right out of dad’s hands.’ Carried away, demonstrating with his knife, Atlas tweaked the beef pastry that lay on his plate: it arced through the air and landed amid Claire’s chrysanthemums. In the silence that followed, we, the guests – and our fascination with Atlas’s story – grew manic.
‘His name,’ Dr Youngblood croaked, ‘he did have a name, didn’t he, this bull?’
‘Yeah,’ Atlas said. ‘That was the joke of it. He was called Sir George.’
The moment seemed to Jonathan, as he wrote about it in his diaries afterwards, to have been the moment in which he first caught sight of the truth stripped bare. But it went by so fast that he was flat on the ground underneath the bull’s horns before he could make sense of what he saw. The bull rolled him along like a log, and the grass whipped at his face just like the Kansas grass of so long ago. He struggled to his knees. The bull knocked him down, leapt over him and rolled him from the other side all the way to the fence some forty feet beyond. Once there the bull began to play, butting Jonathan against the fence, retreating, butting again, blood from the torn nostrils pouring down over grass and man both.
Claire realized she’d forgotten the burgundy only when she was clearing the beef to make way for the salad with walnut oil – too late, way too late: there was no remedy at all.
‘So what happened then?’ Mrs Youngblood asked, elbow on table, eyes glued to Atlas. ‘Did he die? Was he dead?’
‘No. But he was hurt bad – not really conscious. Rayner crept up behind the bull to get the pitchfork, and Jesus if he didn’t pick the damn thing up and stab it into the bull’s neck. The bull woofed and backed away, pitchfork stuck in his neck like a bull at a bullfight – which bought Rayner the time to get hold of dad, get him out. Don’t know how much of this dad understood. Old Mundt couldn’t find an unbroken rib in the poor bastard’s chest. Nothing’s as painful as broken ribs: childbirth, cancer, forget it.’
World War One was a year old. The newspapers carried almost as many stories about opposition to it as about the war itself. George Stoke’s anti-war stand was vocal and, as usual, well publicized. He had no belief whatever, he said, that war, this or any other war, was going to make the world safe for democracy. He and a number of other prominent liberals hoped the war might stimulate agitation for peace; meantime, though, it stagnated in the trenches of Europe. Jonathan, lying on his bed in agony, pushed toward death, pulled away again, pushed, pulled, pushed, pulled, just as the bull had butted him toward the fence and away again. In this state, he thought of George, knew that he agreed with what George had said – that again he agreed, again! – and the agreement pained him so greatly that it seemed to him, so he wrote in his diaries, that the walls screamed all night long, a desperate sobbing scream like a child’s. How was he to know that it was not his own pain he was hearing but his youngest daughter’s? Hope’s pain? Hope, given her name because Sarah had no hope.
‘Couldest thou not watch one hour?’ he whispered to Burgess Mundt some ten days later.
Burgess frowned. ‘Just try to get some rest.’
‘Send me the boy.’
Rayner stared down at him, his face expressionless except for a slight movement of one eyebrow that he seemed to be struggling to control.
‘The bull?’ Jonathan said, watching that eyebrow. He’d meant to thank him – wanted to thank him – but the words wouldn’t come. If he could have used his hands, perhaps he could have gestured but – Why did the damn boy always have that look of contempt on his face?
‘I called Mister Wade. Like you said.’
‘Do you want him?’ Rayner had said to the itinerant butcher who peddled meat to houses and farms around Hannaville. ‘Will you pay me for him?’
‘Depends. We’ll see.’
The bull had wandered around in the field all afternoon with the pitchfork sticking out of his back. ‘Toward evening Rayner went to the barn and got a pretty young heifer,’ Atlas said (the French dinner party, to the great relief of all its partakers, had reached the firmer ground of Roquefort and sourdough bread from San Francisco), ‘he put her on a leash, took her out into the field to tempt the bull. There’s an irony for poor old dad, huh? Jesus, the number of times he quoted to us: “And I find more bitter than death the woman whose heart is traps and snares.” Anyhow, Rayner slammed the door behind them. By the time Mr Wade arrived next morning, all was calm. Mr Wade shot the bull, paid twenty-five dollars for him, ground him up and sold him to neighborhood housewives as hamburger.’
Atlas toyed idly with a crumb of Roquefort. ‘They found buckshot in the rump,’ he said, as though puzzled by the blue veins in the cheese. ‘Somebody’d mistreated that animal once.’
Jonathan didn’t notice when Rayner left him. He just knew that the boy was gone and that he had not managed to thank him.
12
All we guests at Claire’s dinner table put on a brave face for the pièce de résistance, the magnificent gâteau au noix de coco, which turned out to be chocolate as well as coconut. Claire poured out a lovely chilled Château Yquem to go with it. The glasses were a wedding present from her mother – her first marriage, not her marriage to Atlas; they had gold-leaf rims on them. Atlas fell silent and picked idly at his cake, just as he’d picked at his cheese, lifting and dropping forkfuls without putting them near his mouth. The conversation was desultory when I noticed that Dr Youngblood, on Atlas’s left, had sidled so far down in his chair that only shoulders showed above his plate; he had one leg stretched out, probing under the plate glass table. (I am helpless, an innocent bystander: I can’t move my legs at all.) The dining-room carpet was white. Next to Atlas’s foot lay a dark glob of gâteau au noix de coco. If Dr Youngblood could get to it before Atlas lifted his foot and ground it into the rug, perhaps all wouldn’t be lost. Success at hand (or rather at foot), and suddenly Atlas stands up. ‘Got to take a piss,’ he says, lurching away from the table: behind him on the carpet, a squash of gâteau au noix de coco.
One morning in early August, two months after the bull was dead, my grandfather maneuvered himself downstairs. Sarah and the older children were out in the fields; he sat in the parlor where Hope was playing with a piece of toweling. Hope was three years old, a pretty child with her mother’s red-blond hair.
‘Speak to me, Hope,’ he said.
She got to her feet, picked up the hem of her dress, spun around once, skirt billowing, and fell back down again.
He watched her a moment, then said, ‘Hasn’t Hope anything to say to me?’
She slapped at the toweling but said nothing.
There are times when you know something’s askew in a person, but nobody ever knows quite what to do about it. Jonathan made an abrupt move toward the little girl, to touch, to reassure. Such movements are ill-advised with broken ribs; his recoil was just as abrupt. She caught the abruptness – or so he thought – but not the concern behind it. She began to beat the towel into the floor with her fists. It occurred to him, as he battled the pain in his chest, that he hadn’t heard her voice among the others for some time, and there were still no words – no crying – not even grunts. Her frenzy increased: she tore at the piece of cloth with her teeth. He watched helplessly. When Sarah came in from the fields a few minutes later, Hope was flailing the towel against the edge of the table with such violence that the table rocked back and forth and her own small frame shuddered.
Sarah dropped to her knees beside the child. She spat on her hands and rubbed saliva on the child’s skin, much as a stable lad might rub liniment into the joints of a horse after a race. ‘She started crying one night,’ Sarah said while she stroked, ‘not long after you – it was just a couple of days
after we killed the bull. She cried and cried. All night long. Perhaps you didn’t hear – no, how could you? You weren’t hearing much of anything.’
‘What does Burgess say? What can he say? Is this permanent?’
‘He doesn’t know. A fever maybe. Maybe some kind of infection. He doesn’t know.’
Jonathan dragged himself into the kitchen for lunch. Sarah had burned the potatoes just as Wify had so often burned them before her. There was no meat. Nobody spoke. Across the table Hope tore at her food just as she’d torn at the piece of toweling. She prodded potatoes into her mouth with her fingers, eyes scanning right to left and back again as though on the lookout for predators. The kitchen with its dirty stove and morning’s porridge still aboil was more or less the kitchen of the Stokes’ wooden house. Sarah hoisted herself up from her chair; she wasn’t as heavy as Wify but she was getting there.
Jonathan grappled his way to his feet and left the kitchen, his chair falling over in his wake.
My aunt Claire’s dinner party didn’t end in disaster for the simple reason that the Murphys and the Youngbloods left as early as they dared. Claire retired under the table with carpet cleaner and scrub brush.
‘Could you talk a little more? Or are you too tired?’ I asked Atlas.
‘Never tired. Let’s talk.’
‘Here?’ I said, trying to be diplomatic. I didn’t see how he could get himself anywhere else.
‘Nope. Office.’ He held onto my wheelchair for balance and together we staggered away from Claire’s scrubbing and toward my tape recorder, a shut door and yet another secret drink, poured out into a dosage glass from the remainder of the whiskey he’d bought that afternoon. ‘God knows what dad had in mind,’ Atlas was saying. ‘He got his shotgun from the parlor: 110-gauge single-shot: carries small pellets – you use it for short range – a good little gun. He sat out there near the barn. I just kept out of range: I knew how far the thing would shoot: I was ten years old. It went on for about three hours; he just lay there up against the rail fence. Cleanest farm in the community, dad’s farm was, straightest fences – made of cedar rails. He told us to get the hell out, leave him alone, he had something to do. Jesus, we were scared. In the end it was Rayner – You know, your dad, Rayner, he had a real warmth and gentleness to him that my dad never saw. Anyhow, Rayner went out to him and about five minutes later they came back together. Don’t know what happened. Nobody ever said another word about it. Lay you a bet that if you ever figure out how to read those diaries, you won’t find any mention of it in them, neither.’
Atlas was wrong. It’s there. Jonathan had his own fierce standards. Rayner walked up to him, right through the full range of that shotgun, not flinching at all (the auto-destruct bravado that is our family legacy), and he said, ‘You selfish bastard. What’s going to happen to mama? What’s going to happen to Hope?’ And so Jonathan gave him the gun. This isn’t the way Rayner told the story to me when I was little. He told only of the siege itself; and hearing it, I felt myself at the edge of whole landscapes of nightmare that lived in Jonathan and that threatened me through him. But I’ve never quite made out, not even now, grown up, with his diaries in front of me, precisely what it is that frightens me so much – and yet I know that somewhere here lies the secret bond between him and me.
13
For the next six years (owing more to the boom time wars bring with them than to any increase in my grandfather’s Herculean efforts), strawberries moved out of the Carrick farm over the Northern Pacific railroad eastward to elegant restaurants in Chicago where such luminaries as George Stoke ate and entertained. Strawberries paid part of Rayner’s tuition at Reed College and most of Gwendolyn’s nursing school in Seattle; in three years’ time strawberries were going to pay some of Atlas’s pre-med at the University of Washington. But there was little left over – and neither the will nor the energy to spend that little on pleasantries. The occasional stories about George that appeared in the paper – his power, his family, his good works and, in one story, his ‘fabled love of strawberries’ – penetrated my grandfather’s head like whisperings from hell.
One morning in August, Sarah collapsed in the fields. ‘Will Gwendolyn come and stay?’ Burgess Mundt said. ‘She’s going to need a nurse, you know.’
Gwendolyn had grown into a fierce-faced young woman in strong shoes and a starched uniform. She drove into Seattle and bought wallpaper, carpet and curtain materials. ‘Let Rayner pay all his tuition next year,’ she said. She hired a man to put up the wallpaper; she made and hung the curtains, spread the carpet on the floor and bought a special bed that cranked up and down. Jonathan carried Sarah downstairs and laid her on the new bed. She looked around at the room, eyes alight. ‘Am I dying, Johnny?’ There was excitement in her voice, a delighted anticipation as though she’d been invited to a party. ‘Is that what it is? Is it over? Really? Oh, what a relief! What a – But there’s no pelmet. I want a pelmet, Johnny—’ She looked up at him, and a shadow of the old concern crossed her face. ‘Oh, don’t take it like that,’ she went on. ‘I’m so tired—’ She broke off, shut her eyes and lay back against the pillows.
During the fall she lost the weight she’d put on; in spring she shrank and grew yellow. The following June, tiny, wizened and brown, she died.
‘What was his reaction?’ I asked Atlas. ‘Did he show any?’
‘I found him out in the barn,’ Atlas said. ‘He was crying. I’d never seen him cry before, so I put my arm around him, and—’ Tears came to Atlas’s eyes. He looked down into his drink. The tears flowed faster. He was very, very drunk.
‘And what?’
‘He beat the shit out of me,’ Atlas said.
FIVE
Thursday
WAR
1
Judging by Atlas’s condition after the French dinner party, I wasn’t at all sure he could manage the trip we’d planned for the following day all the way to Hannaville and Jonathan’s grave. It was Claire who had to help me to bed – and him, too. In the morning, it was she who helped me up, she who maneuvered him out of bed at about ten, she who organized the trip, and she who sat at the wheel to begin with, while he snored, open-mouthed, drooling a little, looking not just old but ancient: eyelids papery behind slope-sided trifocals askew, body splayed out at the mercy of us all as vulnerably as it was splayed out across the back seat of the car. He must have taken valium or barbiturates to make him so calmly groggy – no sign of jitters at all. He’d said at the end of the evening that he didn’t really know what his father had done after his mother’s death: ‘Something happened,’ he said. ‘Not for a year or so, but then – I don’t know: something.’ Most of my details come from Jonathan’s diaries; a few come from newspapers; the rest is guesswork. But then what’s truth without a bit of guesswork thrown in?
After Sarah’s death, the only thing my grandfather did with passion is wait. At night he waited for morning to come. In the morning, he waited for noon. In the evening he waited for eight o’clock, then for nine o’clock, then – Even lifting a spoonful of porridge came to seem an intrusion. This waiting went on, as Atlas said, for a year or so: seventeen months, to be exact. What point was there in it? What point was there in anything? Why not just sink into the grave? There must be answers to questions like these that buzzed across Jonathan’s mind like bluebottles in an outdoor crapper, and then buzzed back again, back and forth, back and forth, bodies thumping against the walls to mark the end of each passage: the Biblical questions, the fundamental ones, the ones rejected these days by philosophy departments. His old nightmare was constant; no night went by without it. Weeds encroached on his land. His once-pristine fences, made of cedar rails, once the straightest fences for miles around, bowed and sagged under the weight of snow.
Then came the story about the Methodist Conference – and at the same moment his decision to go to the source itself: to go to George, to settle the affair between them that had ruled his life and beggared his spirit. This decision changed ev
erything: it led him beside the still waters; it restored his soul. It gave him aim, purpose, meaning. Most important, it stopped the questions and the nightmare, just as God had stopped them during the period of the idyll.
The principle that rules modern philosophy departments has always ruled in war: as Clausewitz says, war is easy. In war, if a question can’t be answered, it must be ignored: a question posed is a question with an answer – exactly what linguistic philosophy teaches. What a wonderful conjunction of purpose! The philosophic and the military wedded at last, united in this neatly closed interval of thought which is the metaphysic of battle. Jonathan was ready – had been ready for years – supplies depoted, troops on standby, strategy planned, tactics worked out. The trip to Sweetbrier pleased him as nothing had pleased him in years: over the mountains, across the deserts and plains he’d crossed and recrossed so many years ago on the railroad, and straight on to Sweetbrier itself. His glimpse of George from across the lawn left him exhilarated; his talk with George’s daughter brought him the kind of taut excitement known only to military professionals on the eve of action. Jonathan’s generals conferred in camera; his troops massed along the border. He kept these preparations secret by spending two weeks at the Methodist Conference in Topeka where he attended lectures and meetings and where, professional that he was, he even heard his own voice speaking from time to time.
‘Yes, yes, of course.’
‘No, no. That would never do.’
‘You must forgive me. I really can’t venture an opinion.’
He strained against the days that stood between him and George, between him and the answer, between him and truth, precisely as all those years ago he had strained against the weeks that stood between him and the moment he’d left George for dead beside the railroad and run away to the west, to Denver and a peacetime circus of a life, where the air was clean and the mountains glistened. But when he slept now, even with the tension on him, he slept the sleep of angels, quiet, unperturbed, undreaming, his nightmare as far away from him as such things are from any of us who know the justice of what we’re doing, and feel easy with it.
