by Joan Brady
Jonathan was ten or eleven by this time, still small, fine-boned and narrow-faced; his hair was black and his eyes were blue. He’d designed the new barn and worked out a ventilating system that could be adjusted according to the weather: this is why Alvah took him along to town to look at houses even though the blue-eyed face, young as it was, already glowed with hate; and Alvah knew in his bones that the boy wasn’t to be trusted.
‘Which one?’ Jonathan asked.
Alvah pointed at a narrow, two-story structure with a porch out in front. A woman of about twenty-five in a crisp, clean apron answered Alvah’s knock. She wore a tea towel over her shoulder.
‘Who sold you them roof tiles, Bessie?’ Alvah said.
‘Mister Finster made them,’ she said.
‘Then I’ll make mine. Who made the stairs?’
‘Mister Finster.’ Alvah nodded. ‘So you’re going to make your house like this one, are you?’ Alvah nodded again. ‘Well then, you start with the foundation.’ She told them how much cement Mr Finster had used, how much gravel, how many buckets per cubic foot.
Jonathan paced off the walls. ‘You got it?’ Alvah asked.
‘Enough for now,’ Jonathan said.
Alvah turned to leave. There was tisk-tisking in Sweetbrier about the Stokes and their boughten boy: ‘suffer the little children,’ they said and shook their heads; ‘poor little mite,’ they said. Bessie put her hands on her hips. ‘You let this Jonathan of yours have a biscuit or you can’t look at my house anymore.’
In the kitchen sat a man with muttonchops. ‘Mister Conductor Finster of the Pennsylvania Railroad,’ she said, ‘this here’s Alvah Stoke.’
‘Good morning, Alvah Stoke,’ said Mr Finster, rising from his chair. ‘It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.’
‘How’d you make them shingles?’ Alvah said.
That night, while George, Cathern and Alyoshus studied, Alvah cleared a space on the dirt floor and Jonathan began to draw lines with a stick.
‘What’s that?’ George said.
‘House,’ Alvah said. ‘Foundation.’
‘Our house?’ George said. Alvah nodded. ‘You letting that boy design—’
‘Shut up.’
‘Ain’t you got no shame, pa? You can’t let no boughten boy—’
Alvah raised his hand in threat.
By this time George knew that school provided the wherewithal of something important; he didn’t know just what, but he knew – he knew – that there was real power there. He says so in his autobiography; everybody remembers the endearing modesty of his sentence, ‘One dirt-poor, barefoot kid felt the future stirring in him.’ He’s understandably vague about Jonathan, ‘an orphan’, as he says, ‘whom my parents were kind enough to take in’; most people don’t remember even this mention. Why should they? He gives it no importance. ‘Hey, boughten boy,’ George said.
‘I told you—’ Alvah began, swinging around.
‘I just want to read him a story. Ain’t nothing wrong in that, is there? “Once upon a time there was a boy named Johnny, and when he was ten he went to work for a merchant.”’ There was no such story in the Third Reader, or in any of the other readers. Jonathan knew that. He could read as well as George. Alyoshus began to giggle. ‘“This boy worked very hard, and by the time he was grown up he wore a frock coat and—”’
Alyoshus hooted and doubled up laughing. So did George. Alvah glowered. Jonathan trembled with the indignation that was always so near the surface of him; but no word, no sign, not even the flicker of an eye escaped his iron control. He rubbed out a line with his foot and redrew it.
The next afternoon George cornered Jonathan in the curing shed. ‘There warn’t no story about Johnny in my book,’ he said. ‘There ain’t no Johnnys in any books. Not a single, solitary one. You just got to make up Johnnys.’
Jonathan waited; he could hear rats scramble across the floor of George’s dungeon-like personality.
‘You get in my way, know that?’ George’s voice slid into rage. ‘You’re a tobacco worm in my field, see? A man got to squash worms. I don’t care how long it takes, or what it takes, but I’m bigger than you and I’m better than you – every which way you look at it – and I’m going to destroy you. Get me?’
The work on the house continued. They cleared a piece of land upstream. They dug the cellar, mixed and poured the concrete. They split shingles and tiled the roof. They built the staircase. Early the following summer, they piled pots, pans, blankets and bedding straw into the old crate that served them as a table, lugged it over the ground, and installed themselves in the new house.
It was understood that Jonathan was no part of this ceremony. A slave is a slave: when the gentry becomes gentry, a slave lives in slave quarters. Jonathan ate supper at the wooden house, worked there afterwards on tobacco plugs, sitting beside Cathern to study with her; but when the Stokes went to bed, he went out to the old sod hut alone. He tried to make out to himself that he had become the owner of a house, but he couldn’t hang on to the idea for long – not sharing the dirt floor with the animals like that. The animals lowed, chewed, farted, shat and let loose sudden, hot torrents of urine. He made himself a bed of hay and carved a small box to keep the McGuffey First Reader safe from the filth around him, and doubtless to keep it safe from the intensity of his own hatreds, too. He himself was thin – the Stokes didn’t feed him enough – but his hatreds were fat; without gods to back him, he fed his prayers on these hatreds: prayers of stature, dark, forbidding, encrusted with the power of a powerful imagination that had no other outlet. Night after night he prayed as fervently as Moses in Egypt for a plague; his own plague this time, not worms, something new, some horror so great that the very thought of it would blister the skin – a plague to come and wipe out the lot of them. He would bear it himself, and joyfully, just to hear the Stokes scream in agony.
8
Why bother with a special plague? Life itself is a plague – ‘a sexually transmitted disease with a hundred percent mortality,’ as R. D. Laing put it in a television interview not long before his own death. All Jonathan had to do was wait, and he’d have had the pleasure of watching Alvah and Wify suffer the tortures of the damned: this is what old age and the far edges of life are all about. But what could he have known of things like this? What do any of the young know? Death for them – when they think of it at all – is a box-office hit of a tragedy, elegantly plotted, somberly choreographed, with the world weeping in the stalls. No wonder we worship them; they’re so magically blind. My uncle Atlas’s telephone rang periodically throughout our morning’s taping; a geriatrician gets more calls than any other kind of specialist. I forgot to turn off the recorder once. ‘Jesus H. Christ,’ Atlas is saying into the receiver, ‘that poor bitch. Yesterday I cleaned fecal matter out of her clear up to the cervix. Why don’t we stitch her up entirely? What use has she got for a vagina? The damn thing’s hanging out on the sheets.’
‘I can’t figure the anatomy of that,’ I say to him after he hangs up.
‘That woman was quite a lady once,’ he says, ‘owned her own string of stables, had a couple of winners in the Kentucky Derby.’ There’s a queer iciness to doctors dealing with medicine just as there’s a queer iciness to philosophers with propositions; it’s just professionalism, but it sure as hell grates on the non-professional ear, especially when the owner of the ear – us – is the subject in question. ‘I remember when she first came to me,’ Atlas went on, ‘this was, oh, four, five years ago – and I said in the course of the examination, “When was the last time you had sexual intercourse?” And she said, “Young man” – I was well over seventy at the time – “young man, I can answer that precisely: October the fifth, nineteen hundred and thirty-two.”’
But Jonathan prayed for his own special plague, and years later it amused him to think that just like Moses he had called down the plague that devastated the Stokes. Moses said to the pharaoh, ‘If thou refuse to let my people go, behold, tomorrow
will I bring the locusts into thy coast.’ In September of the year after the wooden house was built, just as the harvest began, the daylight dimmed one sunny afternoon. The tobacco plants stopped blowing. The Stokes and Jonathan dropped their tools and stared. At first sight a swarm of locusts is a glittering cloud. Locusts aren’t tiny things as I’d always thought; they’re sometimes as big as humming-birds. When they’re near, their wings rustle, which is queer because it’s a loud sound and a rustle shouldn’t be loud. The largest count of anything in the Old Testament is thirty thousand, but there can be as many as eighty billion locusts in a swarm; Moses had no way of describing what he’d brought down on Egypt. Nor did Jonathan. Locusts dropped out of the sky like giant hailstones.
They fell into the necks of shirts and pinafores, crawled up the legs of pants and skirts, clung to faces, hair, fingers, ears. Everybody – all six of them at once – broke into a run. Inside the wooden house, they listened to locusts thudding down on the roof. But they couldn’t stay there. They went back out. They had to. They hitched the insect-covered mare to an insect-covered wagon and loaded insect-covered hay into it. Between the tobacco hills they set hay piles afire. By late afternoon, locusts were four inches deep on the ground from horizon to horizon. In a swarm there are so many locusts that if they’re pink, the entire landscape is pink; if they’re gray, the landscape is gray. There’s a sort of palsy everywhere. Everything jiggles with bugs. They writhe in clumps from trees. Potatoes, carrots, beets, beans, whole fields of sorghum and timothy sink to the ground under their weight. When you walk through them, they organize themselves in waves and take off in succession – wave after wave roaring as it breaks into flight like a squadron of bombers setting out on a mission.
By bedtime, underneath the shroud of smoke not a single tobacco plant stood – nor did any other green thing.
All night the writhing went on, the rustle of carapace and wings, the milling, meaningless activity. The next morning – as abrupt as a slap in the face – it stopped. The bugs sat upright, all of them at once. This is the genetic clock at work, a unity of timing we humans can only dream of: this is how locusts lay their eggs. Then they die. Hatching doesn’t come until spring, which is to say that next year’s crop was destroyed as surely as this year’s, and even before the seed was sown. Alvah went out in the wagon. When he got back he tossed a piece of paper on the table.
‘What’s that?’ Wify said. Alvah shook his head. ‘What’s it say, George?’
‘“This document says”,’ George read, ‘“that Alvah Stoke and Benbow Wikin are partners in Wikin’s Sweetbrier: A Good Chew. Benbow Wikin to supply three hogsheads of Ohio White Burley, Alvah Stoke to manufacture. George Stoke to sell around. Signed Alvah Stoke and Benbow Wikin.”’
George looked up. ‘What’s that mean – “George Stoke to sell around”?’
‘Wify’ll teach you,’ Alvah said.
The Bible doesn’t say what effect Moses’ plague of locusts had on Moses himself and on the Jews, who had to suffer it just as Pharaoh and the Egyptians did, but Jonathan’s agonies were far greater than anyone else’s. His plague brought about a critical phase in the formal education of the future Senator Stoke. Every evening after supper, Wify taught George the techniques that had earned her father the title of ‘Best Salesman in New Hampshire’ from the Barghest Traveling Medicine Show.
‘Heels first when you walk, George,’ she’d say. ‘Clomp. Clomp. Right up to the sucker. Look him in the eye and don’t let him go.’ She taught him to smile with his eyebrows raised, lean his elbow against a storekeeper’s counter and open with ‘Howya keeping?’ She chose clothes for him from the Sears Roebuck catalogue; he was going to ride the mare and sell Wikin’s Sweetbrier in towns up to fifty miles away. A drummer needs spats and a bowler hat.
A drummer needs a frock coat.
‘You got to think what a frock coat meant to people like that,’ Atlas said to me. We got to this part of the story in mid-morning. There was a brackish mixture in his coffee cup by this time, half gin and half brandy. ‘Looks kinda like whiskey, wouldn’t you say?’ he said to me. The whiskey was gone. Claire didn’t nag at him, so he said, if he drank only whiskey. ‘She thinks she can – what’s the word she uses? – “monitor” my intake that way.’ Atlas’s fourth wife – Claire’s immediate predecessor (I’d liked number four) – had thought she could ‘monitor’ his intake, too. Such self-deception is standard, I’m told. Number three drank with him. I was too little for number one, and all I remember about number two was that I didn’t like her; her name was Matilda and when I was only six she laughed at my jokes, the silly cow. Even at the time – especially then – I could see what a fool she was.
‘A frock coat! Jesus, these were the kind of people who usually wore nothing but home-spun flax. You know what that is? Wify grew it. She reaped it, carded it, spun it, wove it, cut the cloth and sewed it. They were so fucking poor, they slept in those clothes. They wore them night and day until the goddamned things fell off their backs.’ Sometimes I used to catch glimpses of Clark Gable’s rubbery ogle on Atlas’s face and then, a moment later, a hint of my own father’s pewter-polished academic manner. But talking like this, Atlas’s face became his own; you could see the man he might have been. ‘A guy like Alvah never even dreamed of wearing a frock coat,’ he went on. ‘Preachers wore frock coats. Doctors wore them. You know, rich people – you, me – people who undressed for bed and had running water. The audacity of it. A frock coat! To hell with locusts. With a frock coat in the offing, anything can be borne.’
After the locusts laid their eggs and died, no green things grew again, not even a weed. The land was a desert of dirt that cracked and split. The well went dry; what water there was came from a night-drip in the stream. There was not enough food. The Stokes’ home-spun hung loose on them and Wify’s great bones stuck up through her flesh like the tent poles of a circus big top. All efforts went on Wikin’s Sweetbrier: A Good Chew. In late winter, by the time they’d manufactured several hundred pounds of it, George’s frock coat arrived.
‘It was serge, black, satin-lined,’ my uncle Atlas said, ‘double-breasted, two rows of mother-of-pearl buttons. Dad described it to me once, every detail, down to the price tag.’
George unfolded the coat, spread it out, surveyed it, held it up and put it on with a swing of its skirt just as Wify’s father, the great salesman, might have done. Jonathan’s hands went on kneading sticky tobacco into plugs, but he could not look away. George stepped over to the crate that still served the family as a dining-table; he bent from the waist and rested one elbow next to Jonathan’s pile of tobacco.
‘Howya keeping, boughten boy?’
Jonathan said nothing.
George straightened and, with his eyes on Jonathan, ran his hands down the front panels of the coat that was the promised land.
Then he winked.
9
‘An army with all its physical powers, inured to privations and fatigue by exercise, like the muscles of an athlete’ – these are the words of Karl von Clausewitz again, the great philosopher of war – an army like this is an army that can win battles even when the odds are very much against it.
For nearly ten years, ever since George had declared the war between them that first day in the sod hut, Jonathan’s hatred had held the balance. Hatred had exercised his physical powers, inured his mind to privations and fatigue, kept his spirit in fighting trim. But this wink – this was new, altogether new. He found himself off balance. Surprise allows the surpriser, says Clausewitz, ‘to gain a march upon the enemy, and thereby a position, a road, a point of country.’
That night Jonathan made his third attempt to run away to the town that lay below the evening star.
None of the old inhabitants remained. Not one. Even the dance hall he’d remembered had disappeared. The new people had no idea what had happened to it or its owner or the girls who had danced there. ‘Probably gone west,’ they said. The one thing they did know was that there
was a reward for the return of a boughten boy; as before, a bartender waylaid him and returned him to the homestead where Alvah beat him. Alvah’s patience was wearing thin; this time the beating was no ordinary beating. This time Alvah used the horsewhip. Then he chained my grandfather and set him a diet of bread and water for two weeks.
During the days of punishment, Jonathan was almost less aware of his pain and hunger than he was of the shift in battle-lines. George brought him food. George! Beans and bacon plainly stolen from the cold store. Jonathan was profoundly disconcerted. George won him release a day before the two weeks were up. The swagger was gone from George’s voice; he addressed Jonathan by name. My grandfather waited tensely. A month went by. Nothing happened. There was going to be hell to pay.
In April the snows melted and the prairies began to bloom. On the first hot morning in May, the locusts hatched. They’re always green at first, wingless and sexless; they move like the surface of a pond, sudden ripples in sudden gusts of wind. They grow, shed a carapace, grow again, shed again, five times in all; with the fifth come wings and sex. Then one day, in as abrupt a change as came over their parents the year before, there’s a hush, a wait, a changing of the tide: an army forms – no shoddy human imitation of an army, either – and begins to move, its lock-step so absolute that it marches up over anything that stands in its way, houses, fences, animals; it marches into creeks, where millions drown, and more and more march in and drown until there are so many dead ones that they make up a bridge for live ones to cross on.