Theory of War

by Joan Brady

  On the last day of the conference, he excused himself from the celebratory dinner; he said he felt a touch of flu coming on.

  ‘I will get a doctor,’ said the Reverend Jeffcoat, who was in charge of the Celebratory Dinner Committee.

  ‘That’s not necessary,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘But my dear fellow, you are plainly—’

  Jonathan struggled to control his irritation – and failed. ‘Leave me alone,’ he said and turned his back on his tormentor, who watched him walk away, admiring his fortitude if not his manners.

  At the hotel, my grandfather told the clerk he was not to be disturbed. Half an hour later, he put on his frock coat. This frock coat may have been twenty years out-of-date by this time, and in its way an absurdity, but then so is any cockade. How foolish they all look when looked at cold: epaulets, rows of decorations, army helmets, panaches – and yet how glorious, too. A man in a frock coat hasn’t failed. Of course he hasn’t. Who could possibly suggest it? Jonathan my grandfather walked quietly down the back stairs, cranked up his ancient black Saxon and rattled down the roads toward George’s mansion.

  On our modern-day trip to Hannaville, in Atlas’s squashy bathtub of a car, Claire drove for the first hour or so. Atlas was proud of her driving. ‘She’s as good as any man,’ he’d said. ‘She nips in and out of traffic just like me.’ Despite her fluffy white curls and pink pants suit, there was no timidity, no indecision; she was fast, firm, controlled. The road she drove us along, out of Dr Youngblood’s old age ghetto and up the Washington coast, was one of those roads that look as though they could be anywhere in the United States, east coast just as well as west, north, south, middle west, anywhere at all: a smooth, meaningless highway from nowhere to nowhere, heavy traffic in both directions. But it was a pretty day, clear and cool, not at all like the awful midwestern summer night Jonathan describes in his diaries: ‘hot enough to drown in,’ he says, the very same words he used to describe that terrible night half a century before when George had come calling at the soddy door.

  Jonathan parked the Saxon a mile from George’s mansion. He walked the rest of the way. Not until he reached the outskirts of George’s land did he sense the full power of the ordered ranks around him: old hatreds and animosities in battle formation, indestructible as only blind instincts can be. He listened to the dark night as he crossed the lawn and heard echoes from the picnic of two weeks before: George’s voice mid-stride in a platitude, the giggled whispers of children, the rustling skirts of George’s pretty daughter, his own footsteps on the grass as he walked toward the big house.

  2

  ‘Here on this spot, in this very hour,’ writes Clausewitz on the eve of battle, ‘to conquer the enemy is the purpose in which the plan of the War with all its threads converges, in which all distant hopes, all dim glimmerings of the future meet.’ Jonathan’s strategy followed the age-old principle: seek the simplest solution. His tactics were complex but clean-lined, classical; he managed things so that he saw George before George saw him. ‘Good evening, Senator,’ he said. His voice was mild.

  George stood on his grand portico in the light from the doorway behind him, as black and featureless as his shadow which zig-zagged down over the stairs; he started a little at Jonathan’s voice, just a little, but just enough for Jonathan to see.

  ‘Hey, listen at you, boy. Who’d ever think you could sound so fancy? Welcome, Jonathan. Welcome. Watch the step there. Not lit good from where you are, is it?’

  George shifted back into the light, which threw shadows over the contours of his face much as the candlelight in the soddy fifty years ago had thrown shadows over him that lengthened and shortened as though the shiny, round eyes were breathing vents into the dungeon of a soul that lay behind them. Jonathan took the steps slowly. Midway up he could see that the cheeks were puffy now, edematous rather than plump. Near the top of the stairs, and the round eyes were dull and lashless behind round spectacles; they peered out above swells of flesh greasy with sweat. There was wariness where the contempt used to be. The lines around the mouth and beyond the smile were lines of serious pain. Jonathan had seen enough of death to know that this was a dying man, and not a man dying easily. How could he have missed something so evident? And only two weeks ago? Christ, he thought (asweat himself now, with relief as well as the suffocating heat), a month more and I’d have been too late.

  George laughed. ‘Look at that face: just exactly the same. What are you doing in this part of the country, huh? God, it’s good to see you again.’

  Jonathan heard his own voice in response but could not make out the words.

  ‘Come on in,’ George said. ‘It’s cooler inside – a little, anyhow.’ He clapped an arm around Jonathan’s shoulder and led him through the hallway into the study beyond. There are wounds to be suffered in the first encounter of any battle; that arm, full of memories and portent, lay heavy on Jonathan’s shoulders. He bore stoically the nausea it brought with it – here’s the virtue of well-drilled troops – but the sense of release when George removed his arm as they entered the living room was enough to make him giddy.

  ‘Take a seat,’ George said, waving him toward the sofa where only ten days before he had sat, talked to the pretty daughter and drunk a glass of water. ‘Sit down. Drink? Or do you reverend guys abstain? Apple juice?’

  Jonathan said something. It didn’t matter what.

  ‘You had a long drive?’ George said. He poured liquid into two glasses. ‘Come to see me special, didn’t you?’

  ‘Of course.’ Since George made no response to this, Jonathan wasn’t entirely sure he’d managed to get it out: perhaps he’d only thought it. The richness of the room shimmered around him – colors too strong, shapes too highly delineated. Crass, ugly, vulgar, and yet powerful even so – so much money, so much certainty – book-lined walls, marble fireplace, eaglehead candelabra, elegiac painting of the American Revolution. The painting was not quite as big as Jonathan had remembered it: he scanned the soldiers in satin pants, the flags snapping in the wind, the dead man at the center, with a pretty trickle of blood over the lace at his throat. Beads of sweat trembled on the wattles under George’s chin; he had on the frock coat he’d been wearing at the picnic. Why doesn’t he take it off? Jonathan thought. Velvet collar. Why don’t I take off mine? But he’d known all those years ago that if he’d had a frock coat he’d have kept it on for such a fight as this with George. At the edge of his thoughts he caught sight of the town that lay beneath the evening star as he’d first seen it from the roof of the sod hut – a dozen saloons and all the promise of the future.

  George handed Jonathan a drink and lowered his massive thighs into an overstuffed chair. ‘’Course a frock coat don’t look so funny on a reverend gentleman as it does on an old senator. So—’ he said, lifting his glass and smiling.

  Jonathan lifted his glass, too: smiled, too, into George’s smile and took a sip of the drink. What was it? Apple juice? Whiskey?

  George slapped one fat leg. ‘My daughter says to me, this guy looks kind of peaked, so she brings you inside and she likes you. A preacher, she says. Then she shows me how you use your hands. I near to dropped dead. “Only one guy uses his hands like that,” I say to myself, “and that’s Jonathan Carrick.”’

  Jonathan tilted his head to squint at George.

  ‘I says to her,’ George went on, ‘“Victoria,” I says, “this preacher of yours: was he wearing a frock coat like me?” And she says, “Daddy, you’re a genius.”’

  George’s laugh split in the middle, and Jonathan – noting the split and the vulnerability it implied – nodded, knew he had gained a point of country and felt calm determination edge its way through the tension of his battle-lines.

  ‘You got to know how much this means to me, Jonathan – your coming here to see me. Answer to my prayers, kind of. Jesus, when I think of that lousy hovel—’

  ‘Which hovel?’ Jonathan said. ‘Yours or the one I – what’s the right word? – occupied?�
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  ‘What difference does it make? They both stank.’

  ‘It makes a difference to me.’

  George laughed. ‘Yeah, you’re right. Of course you’re right.’ He shifted in his chair, an awkward shift that made him wince. ‘Shit, I spent so many years trimming I don’t hardly notice when I’m doing it anymore. How’d you get to be a preacher? Funny thing for a guy like you to do. Of all the things I’d have thought – Hey, you married? Got any children?’

  A fan creaked around in the ceiling but failed to stir the sodden air.

  ‘I have tried to do no harm,’ Jonathan said and was so surprised at his own words and at the anger so evident in them that he barely heard George’s response.

  ‘Yeah,’ George said. ‘What a waste.’

  One weekend during Jonathan’s first year in Denver, College had taken him into the mountains. They spent the night up on a ridge about a hundred yards above one of those mountain springs that rush and gush through the rocks below. The next morning, about halfway down the mountain, working their way toward the stream, they saw a whistling marmot. I’ve never seen one of these creatures myself, but Jonathan says in his diaries that they live in rocks; they make nests there, and they call to each other from rock to rock, a moaning, sad note. Jonathan was carrying College’s little single shot .22 rifle; he aimed at the marmot, just for fun, carried away by the beauty of the place and the freedom of the mountains, never thinking of firing at it. College said, ‘You can’t hit that thing.’ Jonathan said, ‘The hell I can’t,’ and shot the marmot through the head.

  Atlas was the only one of us Carricks who had any idea where Jonathan was buried. My father Rayner had made a point of not knowing. What few Carrick stragglers remained – other than myself, that is – did the same. After an hour or so on the road toward Hannaville, Claire stopped for coffee. She managed the wheelchair and me both; Atlas snored on in the car. We’d hardly spoken during the morning, Claire and I, but as soon as she’d fetched coffee for us and settled herself opposite me, she reached out and put her hand over mine.

  ‘I’m sorry I was so irritable yesterday,’ she said, ‘I shouldn’t have asked you to talk to Nate. It wouldn’t do any good.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘No, you don’t. Nate doesn’t know what day it is anymore. I mean really: Is it Tuesday? He doesn’t know. Is it July? He doesn’t know. He can’t even remember what year it is. He loses his way when he goes out, gets fuddled on the way to the hospital, turns right when he should turn left. Sometimes he can’t remember the way home.’

  ‘Really? He sounded fine all day yesterday—’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘Well, not at the table,’ I said unhappily. ‘That was – But what about his practice? I can see there are some difficulties, but – he seems to manage pretty well still.’

  ‘There isn’t too much he can do to harm these poor old folk. He reassures them. They need it; he’s good at it, and most doctors don’t bother. If anything important comes up, he usually has the sense to send them to someone else. Not always, though. There have been, uh, mistakes, and Dr Youngblood’s terrified of a suit. And now this cancer business—’

  ‘What cancer business?’

  ‘They’re implanting radium seeds tomorrow: that’s what the operation’s about. Prostate cancer. Didn’t he say?’

  I shook my head. ‘What do radium seeds do?’

  ‘I don’t know. They set off alarm bells when you go through those metal detector things in an airport: that’s what Nate says, and it’s about all I know about them. I guess they buy a little time.’

  In George’s ornate living room all those years ago, when only inventors and daredevils traveled by air, before there ever were such things as airports with metal detectors: in the steaming opulence of that room, the relentless ceiling fan creaked round and round, creak, creak, creak. It was as ineffectual as an airport alarm that reveals only radium seeds. The air hung as heavily as before.

  ‘You really ain’t changed at all, know that?’ George said to Jonathan, my grandfather. ‘Not a bit. The voice is fancy and the way you walk and all, but the face: just the same. Inside, too, I bet. I can feel it. Well, what the hell, I can’t offer you anything to eat. Wife off. Kids off. Gone to fucking Europe. Too hot to eat anyway. Servants off, too. Not a soul around.’

  Jonathan nodded as he had before.

  ‘Knew that, did you? I’m glad you wanted us to be private. Well, ain’t nobody here but you and me. Just us chickens. Want a cigar? Here, take one.’ Jonathan shook his head. ‘Come on, come on: they’re Corona Coronas. The best.’ Jonathan shook his head again. The first picture he’d seen of George alive, in the Chicago Tribune on the way from Hannaville to Ellsworth, Maine, where he’d buried the Malloys: in that first picture George had been smoking a Corona Corona. George lit one now and grimaced as the taste hit him. How the hell can he keep it up? Jonathan thought. The pain – whatever it’s from – is plainly terrible. And so goddamn fat, too. What’s he on? Laudanum? Morphine?

  ‘Ah, Johnny,’ George said. ‘Beautiful Johnny. You were my first foray into politics. Know that? Sure you do. Practically every fucking day I think to myself, shit, I’m one of the best there is at this politics business – used to be anyhow – and how did I learn my trade? Did my damndest to squash you – and you a defenseless little kid. So what happened? The defenseless little kid defended himself. Wonderful! By God, I learned from that—’

  ‘Have you been happy, George?’ Jonathan interrupted.

  George drank from his glass and grimaced at the taste of the whiskey just as he’d grimaced at the taste of the cigar. ‘I married a stupid bitch for her money, raped her a dozen times to get kids for election purposes – I wish I could get this liquor to taste like it used to. How come that happens, huh? You’re getting old and you feel lousy. What do you need? Liquor. And what does the liquor do? Tastes like hog’s piss. Cigars taste like turds. There’s justice for you.’ He put the glass back on the table with a sigh. ‘I’m a whore, my old friend. I sell to the highest bidder, and the bidding’s getting lower these days—’

  ‘Cut the crap. You were a great senator.’

  ‘Yeah. But in politics you ain’t happy less of which there’s a pack baying for your blood. Ain’t nobody interested like that in old George anymore.’ George put the cigar to his mouth, hesitated and took it away again. ‘You were the first one wanted to kill me maybe, but there was plenty after you. And now? Nobody gives a fuck. Not a soul.’

  ‘Oh, come on, George,’ Jonathan said, letting his amusement show. ‘You know I came here tonight to kill you. Just in time, too, wouldn’t you say?’

  3

  By the time Claire had maneuvered me into the car again, folded my wheelchair and got it back into the trunk, Atlas was awake. He insisted on taking the wheel, and he did not drive anywhere near as well as Claire. ‘Look at this country,’ he said, waving at the endless highway, ‘we’re not far from Walla Walla. Beautiful, isn’t it? One year when I was still in pre-med I worked in the wheatfields near here. And one day they let me drive an old Hayward combine. Know what that is? No? I always wanted to drive one – wonderful machine, drove a twenty-one-foot sickle, cut the wheat, shook the grains loose, blew them out to separate the chaff. It took thirty-three horses to pull the thing—’

  ‘We go out at the next exit, isn’t that right, Nate?’ Claire said. ‘A mile further on.’

  ‘Thirty-three horses!’ The car wavered a little as Atlas overrode Claire’s instructions. ‘They used what you call a Shenandoah hitch for them. You look out over them – over the backs of them – sea of horseflesh. Six abreast, five rows, three leaders for the team. Line goes back from those three – all the way back to the guy with the reins – me—’

  ‘You want the next junction, Nate,’ Claire said.

  ‘Think of the swath you’re running – you got the whole world in your hands, like the song says. You got to start a turn way ahead so the ripple effect hits the whe
el horses just right—’

  ‘This is the junction coming up.’ Claire’s voice was sharp this time. ‘Five hundred yards ahead.’

  ‘The sickle swings into the wheat. Out again. See? If you’re good enough – if you signal at just precisely the right moment – you can make a right-angle turn. Think of it: thirty-three horses, and a perfect right angle!’

  ‘Now, Nate! Now,’ Claire shouted. But we had shot past the junction.

  Atlas knew nothing – nothing at all – of this meeting between George and his father that I’m describing, nothing of the plans for it, nothing of what followed the plans. My father Rayner knew nothing about it, either. I alone know. George showed no surprise at the announcement that Jonathan had come to kill him. He picked up his glass and stared into it. ‘You never was like the others,’ he said to my grandfather. ‘How you going to do it?’

  Jonathan opened his coat and displayed the Smith & Wesson that nestled there in a pool of sweat: College’s Smith & Wesson – College who had not shot the whistling marmot, who was impaled on a railroad coupling and died with his face turned toward the silence and the dark.

  ‘Well, I’m damned. Seems a good way for the eminent senator to go, don’t it?’ He stuck his fur-covered tongue into the whiskey. ‘Suicide’s out. For me anyways. I’m a fucking federal institution and federal institutions don’t – Assassination, though – that’s beautiful.’ He put the glass down and leaned forward. ‘The question is why? See, like I been saying, for all this show I ain’t—’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Motive, Johnny old friend. Public likes a motive for the murder of a federal institution.’ He laughed once more, and a shadow of the old contempt suddenly appeared in his eyes. ‘Holy shit, it’s good to see that hatred in your face: makes a man feel alive, being hated – specially by you.’