Theory of War

by Joan Brady

  ‘Always wanting something more, aren’t you, George?’ Jonathan put his glass down on the table in front of him. ‘Now I know what you want, perhaps I won’t oblige you after all. This apple juice is fermenting.’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘Yes, I do. I can smell it. I don’t even—’

  ‘I don’t mean the goddamned apple juice. Shit! Have a whiskey instead. Then do it. I hurt like hell but I can wait through another drink.’ He scanned Jonathan’s face. ‘Don’t kid me, Johnny. I hurt too much for kidding—’

  ‘What is truth?’ Jonathan interrupted. ‘I am much interested in truth, George.’

  George’s contempt disappeared as suddenly as it had come. ‘How the fuck would I know about something like that?’ he said. ‘I’m a politician. Why don’t you drink some whiskey?’

  After my Columbia professor got so angry at me for refusing to accept truth as no more than a function on a computer: after he’d shouted at me, ‘Listen! What I’m telling you is first-year stuff! Elementary!’ After this, he said to me wearily, ‘What do you want, anyway?’ ‘Some explanation of things,’ I said. He sighed in disgust. ‘Then for Christ’s sake, forget truth. Try coinage instead. You can feel it, spend it, and it sure as sweet Jesus tells you who you are.’

  ‘Why are you asking me questions like this?’ George said to my grandfather.

  Jonathan spread his hands.

  ‘You want a map? Answers?’

  ‘No. Only a theory.’

  ‘You don’t work power with theories,’ George said. ‘Nor elections neither.’

  ‘I most particularly want your opinion – and on one particular theory.’ The heat in the room was so great that the smoke of George’s cigar hung motionless as though encapsulated in steam. ‘According to this theory, truth itself can’t be separated from a person’s search for it. A process of elimination goes on. If you clear away enough of the underbrush, what’s left has got to be truth. The question is, is it possible that you determine this thing not by what it is in itself but by what you discard to get at it?’

  ‘Don’t know what that means,’ George said. ‘“By what you discard”: that got a meaning?’

  Claire took over the driving; it was miles before she could right Atlas’s mistake – miles – and we ended up on a road neither of them knew at all. ‘After mother’s death,’ Atlas said from the back seat, ‘my sister Hope disappeared. Search parties went out to look for her, but it was dad who found her, snuggled away under a bush. When he pulled her out, she snapped at him, teeth bared – like that horse Jenny that had snapped at him when he was at Malloy’s Landing. There was blood caked all around her mouth. She’d bitten the flesh away from the fingers of both her hands – never heard of anything like that before or since: literally bitten it away – right down to the bone. There were ants feeding on the ragged remains of skin.’

  In George’s splendid room, Jonathan turned his own hands palm up and then palm down in the gesture he did not understand but had become familiar with in himself; he studied the dry, work-hardened skin. ‘Right from the beginning you discard things,’ he said, ‘extraneous things, things that are too painful, things you haven’t time for, little things, big things: what you end up with is certainly a judgment on you. The question is, is it truth? What do you think?’

  ‘Don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,’ George said irritably. ‘What I’m left with is you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jonathan said. ‘Yes, that’s it. Precisely. Thank you. Now tell me what’s the matter with you.’

  ‘The matter?’

  ‘This sickness of yours. What is it?’

  George spread his massive thighs; his testicles nestled inside his left pant leg like a dead ferret, bloated and elongated, reaching down as far as his knee. ‘A mess, ain’t it?’ George said, looking down. ‘Christ, what I’d give to hear my pee hit the side of a barn from three paces again. I ain’t got no pleasures left. Can’t eat. Can’t sleep. Can’t screw. Hurt all the time. “Discomfort”, these bastards call it. Discomfort, shit: agony – Get this over fast, will you, Johnny?’

  ‘I think I’ll go now,’ Jonathan said, rising from his chair. ‘Let you get some rest.’

  George started so abruptly that he knocked over his drink and cried out from the pain of it. ‘You got to kill me first. You said – Settle old wrongs. Two birds with one stone – efficient – you were always efficient. Come on. Do it. I never hated you, Johnny, you got to believe that. You’re the one did the hating. I never – You must have known it, too. Sometimes.’

  ‘No,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘I walked around the parlor in that godforsaken little wooden house,’ George rushed on, ‘wearing that frock coat from Sears & Roebuck, and all I could think of was, “Hey, my Johnny’s watching.” Always called you “Johnny” to myself. Know that? Shit, I used to feel your eyes on me, weighing me up. You had beautiful eyes, Johnny. Still do – blue eyes with black hair. Look at me: piece of meat waiting for an abattoir – “Tonight Johnny comes,” I says to myself, “and maybe the whiskey will taste like whiskey again.” You must of known I really loved you, Johnny, back then. For Christ’s sake – it was so goddamned obvious. I couldn’t keep away from you. Loved your backside and your belly and – How the fuck could you not know?’ George’s eyes stayed fixed on Jonathan. ‘I remember times,’ George said, then stopped and began again. ‘Good times—’

  ‘You’d better get some rest, George,’ Jonathan said again.

  ‘No! Don’t go! No!’ George tried to get up but failed. ‘You can’t leave me to die like this. Have another drink. We never drank liquor together before, you and me, did we?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jonathan said. ‘We did. Once. It was my first taste of whiskey. You came calling at the soddy.’

  ‘Oh, Christ, yes – I didn’t mean—’

  ‘Didn’t you? You let me put on your frock coat. Remember?’

  ‘It wasn’t hate, Johnny. It was love. Can’t you see that? It was love!’

  Jonathan said nothing.

  ‘It was a shitty thing to do,’ George said, half sobbing now, plainly in such pain that he could hardly control his voice – or anything else. ‘I never should have – I’ve always regretted—’

  ‘A bit late for apologies, isn’t it?’

  ‘The point is, that ain’t got nothing to do with now. Now’s different. You got to help me. You got to. Ain’t you a preacher?’

  ‘Not anymore.’

  ‘Once a preacher, always a preacher. You bastards are supposed to look after the dying.’

  ‘Not to the extent of mercy killing.’

  ‘What the hell did you come here for then?’

  Jonathan who rarely smiled, smiled. ‘To hear you beg,’ he said.

  The satin pants on the central figure – the dead man – in George’s painting of the Revolution were the same pale cream color Jonathan had remembered. The man’s eyes were shut, face in calm repose. This is not death. This is Disneyland, a soft, plastic event suited to Bugs Bunny and a traveling salesman’s inflatable doll. George was real. His pants were serge; the thick ferret-like testicles were half alive inside the cloth of the leg that darkened now with urine. ‘If begging’s what you want, then I’ll beg,’ George sobbed, ‘if that’s what it takes—’

  He maneuvered his massive posterior to the edge of the chair he sat in and then fell to his knees so hard that the glasses on the table slopped their contents. He let out an agonized groan at the shock.

  ‘Get up, George,’ Jonathan said, standing so abruptly himself that he knocked over the chair he’d been sitting in. ‘Get up!’

  George crawled on his knees, a clumsy, leaden crawl, toward my grandfather, who backed away but found himself trapped between George and the fallen chair. ‘Please, Johnny. Please, please. You’re my only hope, only hope I got left. I seen guys die of this – this—’

  ‘I have no purpose here. Get up.’

  ‘You ain’t fighting fair. You always we
re a shit – I’m begging you, Johnny. Can’t you see? I’m begging—’

  Jonathan looked at him in a rage of triumph and disgust. ‘Aren’t you going to wink at me, George?’ he whispered.

  George reached out and grabbed hold of Jonathan’s frock coat – oh, frock coat! – ‘How the fuck can I wink at you?’ George wept. ‘You ain’t said a fucking thing a man can get his hands on.’

  4

  Jonathan was hardly aware of the gun in his hand: George’s head seemed to blossom into that shapeless red mass all of its own accord. My grandfather thought of the grapes Sarah used to hang in a muslin pouch above the sink; the jelly that came from them was a deep red, and the dregs when she spread them on a tart were the color of what remained of George’s face. The ceiling fan creak-creaked slowly round and round overhead, as helpless against the heat as ever; a grandfather clock tock-ticked off to one side. It was only when the weather broke that Jonathan moved, startled out of his trance by raindrops thudding down on the roof as locusts had thudded down on the roof of the Stokes’ wooden house all those years ago. He walked out of the senator’s mansion, leaving the door open behind him.

  The assassination of Senator George Stoke is one of the great unsolved crimes of the century. Everybody knows this. Everybody has a theory. There were a number of arrests at the time. One of the suspects died in circumstances never explained and so came to the center of the stage; many were satisfied, but by no means all. I remember the precise position of my hand on the page when I read the last paragraphs of my computer-translated edition of Jonathan’s diaries. So this is why he’d coded them. From the moment he purchased a leather-bound ledger from Benbow Wikin way back before the turn of the century he’d been planning to kill George, do what he’d failed to do as a boy, give his life the meaning it lost when he lost God and gained back George all in one fell swoop. There I sat sixty years and six thousand miles away from the murder, and watched my grandfather whom I’d feared as a child for his implacable justice and the rigidity of his adherence to moral precepts: I watched this man become the most famous murderer of his age.

  He says he had little recollection of starting up the car. He set off toward Topeka, racing down the road, lurching from side to side, water running in sheets over the windshield. When he was about halfway there, he jerked the car to a stop in the middle of the road; and with the downpour making him blind, he saw that it was with him just as it is with us. He’d lost. He’d lost absolutely. Just as we have. We’ve harnessed the power of the sun; we can fuse atomic nuclei, and what has it brought us? Twenty-eight levels of war. Twenty-eight levels! This idea is Herman Kahn’s – a brilliant man, a modern Clausewitz. At this twenty-eighth level we and our enemies end in ‘spasm war’: total mutual annihilation. Jonathan died before I was born, when nuclear fission was only a dream, fusion not yet even that, but sitting in his Saxon in the middle of the road all those years ago, he was right up there at that twenty-eighth level, and he knew it.

  ‘Ain’t nobody here at all,’ George had said. ‘Just us chickens.’

  Chickens, Jonathan said to himself, thinking of College and long ago. That goddamn chicken. Then in spite of himself he began to laugh. Why did it cross the road? To get to the other side. Just to get – why didn’t I see it before? It’s so obvious . . . He laughed until tears ran down his cheeks and his chest hurt. Just to get to the other side! No more reason than that. He held his breath to stop the laughter, failed, and laughed again.

  He was back in Topeka by ten, in time for the morning’s meeting on the last day of that year’s congress. That evening the paper carried the headline, SENATOR STOKE ASSASSINATED! INSANE FANATIC SOUGHT! The story mentioned a state-wide alert, police searches, roadblocks, but Jonathan could not work up enough interest to finish the article. The next day he set out on the trip back to the northwest.

  As he approached the Kansas border he saw a police car across the road and slowed down.

  ‘Roadblock. Where you going?’ the officer said.

  ‘Washington state.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘I live there.’

  ‘What you doing in Kansas?’

  ‘Attending the Methodist Congress in Topeka.’

  ‘You a preacher?’

  Jonathan nodded.

  ‘Gee, I’m sorry, Reverend. You just drive on through.’

  ‘I take it you’re here because of the senator’s death?’

  ‘Yeah. We’ll get the guy. Don’t you worry.’

  ‘And you don’t think I’m responsible?’ Jonathan said.

  ‘Well,’ said the cop, smiling, ‘if you’re going to get through life at all, your faith’s got to start somewhere, don’t it?’

  Behind Jonathan lay the cornfields of Kansas, ahead of him the cornfields of Colorado, the boundary between the two marked only – and only for today and maybe tomorrow – by this solitary policeman with faith. ‘I don’t know,’ Jonathan said at last. ‘Faith will probably serve as well as anything else. Is the road ahead clear?’

  5

  The Hannaville cemetery is simple but pleasant-looking and not badly kept. Jonathan’s grave lies near one edge of it under a cedar tree; he would have liked that, I think. But we had difficulty finding it. Claire stayed in the car, and Atlas had quite a struggle pushing my wheelchair over the grass. Sarah’s gravestone stood up brave and strong, a solid slab of granite with her name and dates on it and a fond, if somewhat sentimental, message.

  ‘Where’s Jonathan’s grave?’ I said.

  ‘I dunno,’ Atlas said, peering down at the ground. ‘Gotta be here somewhere.’

  ‘He starved himself to death, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah. Old Irish custom. Awful.’

  There was no stone to be seen. I leaned down over my chair and ran my hands through the grass; the edge of a concrete brick showed just above the ground. I looked up at Atlas.

  ‘Well, yeah, you see—’ he began, embarrassed. Then he broke a twig off the cedar, lowered himself to the ground and began to scrape. The ground gave way after a bit, and as it did it revealed a succession of eroded letters that spelled out JONATHAN.

  ‘Wouldn’t even drink water,’ Atlas said, continuing to scrape. ‘Every couple of days I brought down four, five liters of saline and the tubing. Jesus, he looked miserable. Old Mundt didn’t believe in any of it, and I was only a pre-med student – Damndest thing, right at the end, dad started plucking at the sheets. I said to Mundt, “What’s he doing?” Mundt said, “Dying.” But I never saw anybody else pluck at the sheets like that – like he was picking up bugs off them.’ Atlas sighed. ‘But at least the poor bastard died hydrated.’

  Squinting from the height of my chair, I could see something on the concrete brick that might once have passed for CARRICK. No inscription, no dates.

  ‘Good God, Atlas—’ I began.

  And my uncle, who had so patiently spoken into my tape machine all day the day before, who had given me the memoirs he valued so much even though he could not read them – my uncle who had never before said a harsh word to me – suddenly grew angry.

  ‘You think you understand everything, but you understand nothing at all,’ he said. ‘Look, I’ll tell you. The human body is a wonderful thing. Just because you sit in a wheelchair doesn’t change that. I’m a drunk: that doesn’t change it, either. Life clings tight to its shape. Look in the mirror. Day after day, year after year, there’s hardly any change at all. That’s you: wrinkles, gray hair, what the hell – you can see it’s you. I can see it. And yet every bone, every muscle, every patch of skin, tendon, blood vessel – every single particle – is being destroyed and replaced right as you look. Surface calm – and a mad scramble of activity underneath. So dad suffered. But think of the performance! Incredible! The shape, the form, the pattern – all unchanged and yet not one single molecule of what was you seven years ago is part of you now. What do you want? Eternal permanence?’

  ‘Some consistency. Some meaning.’

  ‘Oh,
Jesus – life’s not like that, for Christ’s sake. It’s a whirlpool, a vortex. Sure it spirals downward, and when the water runs out the vortex collapses. You were born and then you die. If that’s tragedy, life is tragic. But what’s important is the rotating center. Where’s your sense of wonder? The pattern is alive. Infinitely complex. Full of strands that weave in and out. It replenishes itself from surrounding waters again and again and again. Peel off the layers – grab at the veils – and there’s nothing at all inside – not a smidgen. Well, why should there be anything? Truth’s a convention, a fashion: it changes every year.’

  ‘Wheel me back to the car, Atlas.’

  ‘Look, goddamn you. You’re trying so hard for a hemline that you’re missing a miracle!’

  We drove back to Atlas’s house without speaking. When I got home to England (I’ve always felt like an alien; living abroad more or less institutionalizes the feeling), I wrote the Hannaville Cemetery Committee and enclosed payment for an appropriate memorial to Jonathan – granite to match Sarah’s, but somewhat more tasteful, I hope. I won’t ever see it myself. There’s no point in going back now: Atlas died of leukemia a week ago. Radium seeds have a tendency to do that. Radium is a poorly understood, unstable atom, and the seeds of it in his belly managed to hold off his cancer only at the price of producing their own.

  As Jonathan himself said, faith will serve as well as anything.

  Author’s Note

  My grandfather was a slave. This isn’t an uncommon claim for an American to make if the American is black. But I’m not black. I’m white. My grandfather was white, too. And he was sold into slavery not in some barbaric third world country: he was sold in the United States of America. A midwestern tobacco farmer bought him for $15 when he was four years old; not many people know about such sales, although they were common just after the Civil War. The slave’s life my grandfather led until he ran away at sixteen so scarred him that no one who came near him afterwards could escape the effects of it; four of his seven children – including my father – ended up as suicides. My sister’s therapist said to her, ‘You have all the hallmarks of an alcoholic’s daughter.’ But alcohol has no part in it: it’s the emotional skids and the dark anger that taint anybody, black or white, even at the distance of two generations away from slavery. Theory of War is an attempt to understand what my grandfather might have felt about what he’d gone through, and what we – his descendants – still have to cope with because of it.