The euphoria had not returned, and hardly any of the food had been eaten over the last five months. Soon after his supermarket spree, he had started closing down the shop. He had the phone stopped after two irritating calls in a single day, one from a firm in Hyannis offering to manage his money, and one offering more life insurance. He had paid his electricity bill for six months, made a further down payment for regular visits of the oil truck to the fuel line out on the road for his pathetic boiler, and then stopped paying anything else, and stopped going out to shop. The mail would all be sent to their apartment in New York, which they had kept; his former graduate assistant lived there now and knew better than to disturb him. It began to seem too difficult to engage with the practical world at all. He could not now see past the images crowding in on him, or fathom the forms of any outside world, and he certainly could not move at its pace.
Bear down, he told himself: make an inventory. Looking through the cabinets he found he still had plenty of food left, staples as well as luxuries—perhaps enough for four weeks. He reckoned that would take him into the third week of March. Perhaps spring would come early after all. He made an inventory of everything that was left under the various categories of food, and was now in a position to add a second rule to old Rule Four: Plan, cook, and eat balanced and nutritious meals once a day. He drew up sequences of menus that he thought might conform to this rule, though waffles, bacon, maple syrup, and orange juice reappeared many times in the week.
Now he had to answer the question of what sort of work he would do. There was a path beckoning him, but it took him a while to see it straight. Eventually he was able to write: “On the few occasions when you come to yourself, and are not seeing visions or dreaming dreams, you are forced to realize that you are clenched tight as a fist. The rage seems to be threefold—at the incompleteness of things, that however hard you take stock, nothing tallies to a total; and at the fact that you are no longer your own person, thinking your own thoughts, but increasingly the prey of random images that assault you; and at the fact, most important, that you were robbed long before the end of people you loved, and powers you had, and always pointlessly. The work you do should respond to all these furies: Tell a story to its end.
“The first thing is to get yourself in shape to stop unbidden pictures—call them hallucinations—from coursing through your mind. Eat more, and make yourself stronger, and perhaps you’ll have more control over the direction your thoughts take. (Bless me, Father, for I have sinned: my mind teems with siren thoughts. Do you entertain them, my son? No, but by God, they entertain me.) This will not do. Steal a march on the random images that invade you, by choosing and filling the mind with the pictures you will attend to; drive them together with strong connections into a story you can’t take your mind off. Teller of tales, do not wait to be possessed; start building a seamless construction, impregnable to daydreams. When you go to bed, of course, you’ll have to take whatever dreams are sent, and maybe some will be of use. The theme doesn’t matter much, though you should avoid the morose, half-lit, underworld scenes, which sap your vitals. Pick something that offers you a quick line into action that will possess you.”
MacIver thought he saw his way clearer and drafted a companion for Rule Seven: “Work to consist of telling a story to the end, not just shards, but the whole pot.”
Now he read the revised rules over. He did not particularly like what he termed “their pissy, hectoring tone,” but he had to admit he had it coming to him. Now he would take hold, nudging the words, the thoughts, the pictures into necessary connections; the undisciplined storm of images, which had bludgeoned him into a helpless spectator, would now, he hoped, be channeled aside by the advancing wedge of his coherent story.
On the whole he felt he had brought some order and resolve to his abject life. These were tough, good rules—tough but fair. He went back to the original draft and inserted his new subsets as separate rules on burning, eating, and working in the appropriate places. He retabulated them all and found that he now had a list of ten. The number pleased him, and he went back to the top of the page, and under its heading squeezed in another subtitle—Ten Commandments for Old Men Waiting. Play up and play the game.
CHAPTER 2
Hatching the Plot
For the first time in a long while, MacIver went to bed that night in some anticipation of the next day. He kept thinking about what he should write. His mind was drawn back to the mental film he had stored of the athletic soldiers making their way with such dash across the open terrain: perhaps he should just follow them and see where they led him. But he was wary of them for his theme, for various reasons. The first, of course, was that he had just resolved to keep a lid on the unbidden dreams and visions, by actually taking hold and shaping and choosing the images that he would attend to by himself; to hell with all this feverish suggestibility. But there were two other reasons that the soldiers did not ring exactly true for him—one was the scale of their operation, all movements concerted, all participants anonymous, the corps de ballet in khaki. His sense was that he should choose a smaller cast, and make particular characters, sharply individual, that he could be interested in. The other false note, from where he stood, in the running and cutting soldiers was an arrogant, triumphalist tone pervading the whole: MacIver, given where he was now headed, was not at all sure he would tell a tale of victory. In his professional life, he had been a historian of World War I, and had achieved some success with his first book, Voices Through the Smoke, which had examined the policy background, the production in Britain and Canada, and the long-term effects of the use of poison gas. There had been a lot of detail in the book, but from the public’s point of view the most compelling part had been the interviews he had conducted with 137 victims of poison gas lingering in hospitals and nursing homes around the country some fourteen years after the event. The book was considered one of the earliest and most powerful uses of oral history, and was correctly read as an angry young man’s work; in a series of ugly vignettes it tore strips off the false sentiment, and false optimism, attending that starchy, fumbling, brutal war.
But the book contained, as always, only a sample of all he had heard and seen while researching it. Over time, the rage had banked down to a slow burn, yet his mind was still well stocked with images and voices: he thought he would use some of them to write a story about a particular sector of the front in a short span of time. (He did not expect to have too much time himself.) He would assemble a small cast of characters, pop them into a trench in Flanders, and describe how they worked on each other, and how the large events worked on them. He could not see the end right now, but it would come to him.
He woke several times in the night, with the curious mix of chills and night sweats that had beset him recently, and after turning the pillow over to find a dry spot, lay there thinking with some excitement about what he would write. As the night wore on, he thought he had found a quiet way into his story. But he stayed awake, now relaxedly and comfortably, and found himself playing, for the first time in quite a long time, with his memories of his father. There was not, actually, a whole lot to remember. He had vivid memories of Loch Affric and his boyhood there in the highlands of Scotland, but most of the detailed pictures of his father were of his departures from the place.
His father had moved the two of them, his mother and himself, there from London in 1915, while he went off to fly for the Royal Flying Corps in France, imposing a wonderful idyll on his young son, and the bleakest isolation on his wife; it also lengthened his own travel time home on leave by several hours. MacIver wondered afterwards why he had done it. Certainly there was no risk for them in London in that war. He was inclined to think that his father was positioning them at this critical juncture in his life to indulge his own romantic streak: Alastair MacIver was every inch a highlander himself, and as he put his life at risk up in the air in those flimsy machines, he wanted to think of his loved ones up in those sparsely peopled glens—it achieved a
concentration of sentiment, as it were. Lately his son wondered whether the punitive action to remove his mother from harm’s way had been prompted by his father’s anxiety to keep her faithful. He was perhaps an unreasonably possessive man, and she certainly did love London; they moved back there very soon after he was killed, when the war was still mired in the trenches. But by then the boy was a dyed-in-the-tartan Scot himself, and that was probably what his father had intended.
So most of his wartime memories of his father were of his leaving—their good-byes, never of course with any thought that one of them would be the last (“Will you get killed, Father?” “No, Robert, I’m very lucky—I get to fly in the good clean air, while all the poor soldiers have to slog it out in horrible mud”), and somehow more memorable, the stagy farewells to his mother at the front door on Sunday nights, observed from the landing on the stairs after bedtime. The tall figure in the bulky service coat enveloping his quiet wife; the door closing, the sound of the station Daimler purring away to silence down the track behind the house, and then the distracted sounds of his mother’s tidying up downstairs, living room being straightened, sherry glasses into the sink.
And then there was the last farewell. For the funeral they got to ride in the Daimler themselves. The service and burial were at the little stone church at the end of the lake on a raw, clear day in April. They were well attended, with many of his own friends, the sons of gillies and crofters, there straight from school, and the airmen of his father’s squadron strongly represented in uniform, looking seasoned warriors to Robert, but, as the local newspaper photograph showed, just boys themselves. At the burial in the churchyard overlooking the loch, there was an RFC bugler for the Last Post, and at the end up on the hill behind them a piper from Captain MacIver’s clan played one of the dark highland laments. While it was still in the air around them, the sergeant in charge of the honor guard brought him his father’s fleece-lined flying jacket, a voluminous, weighty thing, beautifully made.
“Your father would want you to have this—you’ll grow into it in no time, son, ” he said kindly.
“Thank you, sir,” said Robert. “Do you know if he came down in the mud, when they shot his plane down?”
The man looked startled, but gathered himself. “Yes, I’m afraid he did,” he said evenly.
“He would have hated that,” Robert said sadly.
But in the car going back to the house with his mother, he burst out angrily, “He said he wouldn’t get killed!” She was looking out the window, watching the lake go by, but he thought he heard a sigh. “Yes, darling, he said that to me, too,” she said. After that, he played all the schoolboy games, both out in the wild and on the playing fields between the chalk-marked lines, with such fierce abandon that even his teammates feared him.
MacIver finally dropped into two hours of undisturbed sleep, but was up at six-fifteen, before dawn on another freezing February day. He made toast and tea for breakfast, shaved, and made his bed. He was at his desk as the pale morning light started to explore the pictures on the far wall, his legal pad and old Waterman pen in front of him. He had decided he would begin in longhand, and then move to his trusty Smith Corona if he felt he had a run going. He sat for a few moments composing himself, slightly hunched under his faded Wasps rugby cap, dressing gown tied over his blue fisherman’s sweater and baggy crap-catcher corduroys, tartan rug over his knees, arthritic old feet stuffed into two pairs of Wigwam sweat socks and down-at-heel slippers. He had tried to honor his Australian tutor’s “Helpful hints for Sydney ex-servicemen, on successful exam-taking”—head cool, feet warm, bowels clear. Well, at least his head was cool, even under the cap. Little by little, he brought himself to focus, his hands resting on the oak in front of him, still strong despite the knobby knuckles and the archipelago of liver spots running across the back of them. Then he picked up his pen, and wrote out the invocation he had composed during the night. The idea was to put some words on the page straight off, so the storyteller would not be intimidated by its bareness.
“I said to my soul, Be still, and watch the small trickling beginnings ease towards flood. Let the story declare itself, and the characters and events take me down among them and draw the words out of me. I have tried to possess my soul in patience, I have gathered all the hungers of my past in readiness, to spell out all the missing syllables of my life. In the morning watch I shall wait, and the quick, brown, wordy fox will come out of his hole, sniff the air, and begin his narration. It is only natural. Sooner or later, if I watch, it is bound to happen. Then I shall fill my book with profitable wonders.”
But he didn’t have forever. He had decided he would begin populating his Flanders trench with a baddie, to whom he had given the name of Braddis. He took his legal pad and wrote at the top: “Sergeant Braddis cleans his nails.” Here is what he wrote the first day:
Tuesday afternoon after tea. As always at this time, Reggie Braddis sat on the fire-step cleaning his nails, before a few interested and sycophantic observers. Actually, the ritual began with the filing and oiling of his bayonet, whose top three inches he kept razor sharp on both sides, and about half the regulation width. Sometimes it was just a matter of a few loving strokes with the file, and testing its edge by slicing the oily cloth with which he anointed it; but on other occasions, the week’s work had broken the point, and he would have to start to replicate the edge lower down. Even when this had happened, Braddis would always wait until Tuesday before repairing his bayonet: he liked conveying the impression of military ritual and order. No one had ever witnessed the work which had damaged the bayonet, because it was always done in no-man’s-land in the middle of the night. Sergeant Braddis would earlier lead out the regular patrols and wire parties, but after he had brought them back he would go out again on his own. He seemed to need no sleep at all. There was enough excitement in the regular business of war, and in the license it gave him for irregular business of his own, to keep his adrenaline pumped at all times. On these later, solitary sallies, he would not take his rifle with him—only the bayonet in its sheath, and a couple of booby-trap bombs he prepared from mortar shells on Friday afternoons at the same time. There were many unsavory legends, which he did nothing to discourage, about his solitary exploits in no-man’s-land, or Braddis Land, as he liked to call it.
After attending to the bayonet, he would turn to his nails, specifically the thumbnail and middle fingernail of both hands. All four of these nails were grown to a length of a fairly precise three quarters of an inch from the end of the finger, and all shaped to a point very close to the lines of the bayonet, though unlike the bayonet, they seemed to be preternaturally strong, and no one had ever seen one of them broken. The sergeant manicured them fastidiously in two stages, first using the point of the bayonet to remove the smallest trace of dirt, then its razor side to pare the nails back to standard length, and then a small nail file to restore the sharpness all around. Groups of men in his platoon would watch this intimate process in the hopes of seeing one of the periodic demonstrations Braddis gave of his nails in action. Once, for example, just after he had completed the manicure to his satisfaction, he noticed a large rat scurrying along one of the few dry parts of the trench, sticking close to the wall. He moved well for such a powerful man, and in a moment had leapt and landed with his full weight on the rat’s back, behind its front legs. The rat’s spine had been broken and its back legs crushed by Braddis’s weight. In one easy motion, he stooped and picked up the broken animal, not much shorter than his boot. A thin squeal emerged with blood from its thrashing mouth. Braddis drove the middle fingernail and thumbnail of his left hand into the small bright eyes and on into the brain. One more spasm and the rat hung limp. Braddis lobbed it over the wall of the trench, and said quietly, “You see—they work for rats and they work for Huns, too.” The men were not inclined to doubt him. Images of those nails closing like the teeth of a trap on some German jugular in the dark, and then ripping it out without a sound, colored all their th
oughts of their sergeant.
But the nails were capable of more delicate work. Once when Private Tim Callum, whom he hated for his quiet detachment, was working on a sketch farther down the trench, paying no attention to the Tuesday manicure, Braddis noticed him and walked slowly down and stood behind him, looking over his shoulder. Callum never looked up, but Braddis leant forward and tore the drawing off the sketch pad, and held it up in his right hand. “I never let anyone draw me without permission,” he said, and proceeded to slice it into strips, using only the outside edge of his left thumbnail. “I wasn’t drawing you, Sergeant,” said Callum quietly, looking straight ahead into the wall of the trench. “Could have fooled me,” said Braddis with a short laugh. “You can’t be too careful.”
As with many of his type, Braddis enjoyed the fear and fascination that his dangerous unpredictability instilled in his men. Soon after the Callum incident, perhaps because he had thought there might be some secret sympathy for the private, he turned the Tuesday ritual against himself. When everything had been done as meticulously as ever, he stood up dramatically, his eyes shut in an expression of great concentration, his fists clenched tightly in front of him. Soon blood started dripping quite steadily off the closed hands. He stood there perfectly still until someone said urgently, to break the spell, “You’re bleeding, Sarge,” at which Braddis slowly spread his arms wide, and then opened his hands, so that they could all see the deep incisions his middle fingernails had made in both palms. The blood streamed off them, onto the duckboards and into the mud for another half-minute or so, and then Braddis opened his eyes and said: “You see, I have the Christ-wounds. I am a holy man, a crazy fucking barbarian saint, doing the Lord’s work for my country.”
Rules for Old Men Waiting Page 3
