by Joan Brady
A few nights later as he lay under his embroidered coverlet watching, he felt the touch again, and this time, eyes open, searching the room, the window, the desk, the mirror, he knew there was nothing at all to be seen. He waited tensely for several nights more. When the third touch came it was lighter than before and accompanied by the sense – he swore to it in his diaries, though he too thought it insane by the time he wrote about it – accompanied by the sense of a spectral presence. This presence – the word is his, not mine – had shape, form, mass, integrity, and yet there was nothing to be seen and after that first night, nothing to be felt. The next time, a week or so later, he could not say what told him the presence was there. It moved toward him and stood beside him, no more than a foot away from his bed. He coiled his body against attack. But the presence was already gone.
After that, it became a regular visitor. Jonathan never saw a shape, not even a shadow, never felt its touch again, nothing at all to give it the physical substance he felt in it. He found himself thinking of the locusts, how after they’d laid their eggs – after the sun had beat down for weeks and the ground was caked, cracked and brown – how the rain had come and how, on the morning after, a fine green haze had appeared over the whole landscape. He could almost smell the freshness inside himself. But the locusts had rehatched. Devastation followed. His mood shifted up and down during the day, even during the hour. His ability to memorize seemed to jam somewhere. Then he was sick one night and, leaning over the beautiful toilet basin, felt the words he had fought so hard to cram into his head vomit out of him into that captive pool of water to be flushed away and lost forever.
13
Atlas and I didn’t agree about what happened next. Oh, not the facts. It’s the heart of the matter, the truth, you might call it. But who can trust Atlas? Doctors spend so much time playing God themselves that they make lousy witnesses when it comes to the heart of things. Atlas wasn’t even a very good doctor; he told me himself that he had to pay $10,000 for his license to practice in Washington because he failed the exam. ‘I’m a yard bird,’ he said, back from his emergency call. ‘If it’s lying there, I’ll pick it up. If not, to hell with it.
‘People like dad, people with backgrounds like that, slavery, violence of one kind or another,’ he went on, ‘these people usually have minds as brute-like as their pasts. Usually they’re inarticulate, confused, slow to everything but blows. That’s what’s amazing about dad. How could anybody so enraged accept a God? or any other abstract concept?’ My attempts to explain away Jonathan’s conversion to Christianity annoyed Atlas. ‘Truth? Don’t give me that crap. He didn’t want truth. He wanted judgment: revenge. Just like you. What’d you major in philosophy for? A waste of time, if you ask me. You should have gone into law. You belong on the bench of the Inquisition—’
‘Let’s get back to Jonathan,’ I said, annoyed myself.
‘Okay. Okay. Now, look, his conversion embarrasses you. Why? One way or another it was almost inevitable. Slavery destroys the soul. It’s a narcotic: it does what narcotic addiction does, kills pride, subtlety, initiative—’
‘Yes, yes,’ I said, still annoyed.
‘So here’s a guy who never had anything that belonged to him, no home, no mother, father sold him – a piece of human shit – not even his own socks. Think of him there in that goddamned place, doilies and fish forks and roses on the crapper – Christ almighty, how does a slave go about learning to live on equal terms with people like that? What right has he even to attempt such a thing? The effrontery – Jesus, the arrogance of it. That’s what’s marvelous. Not the dull detail of a conversion. Anyhow, he wants to do this impossible thing – more than that, he’s going to do this impossible thing, and obviously he can’t do it all on his own. So he finds himself a God to help him. It’s as simple as that.’
This is how it happened:
In the middle of one frozen February night Jonathan, my grandfather, woke abruptly. ‘Sleepest thou?’ a voice said to him. ‘Couldest thou not watch one hour?’
Hearing these words come to him out of the darkness, he did not for one minute doubt that the voice he heard was the voice of Jesus Christ Himself.
14
It will probably turn out in the end – when the cosmologists finish and the computers grind to a halt – that nobody can find a beginning for this disorder around us, for this universe that refuses to behave, simply because it has no beginning. We probably live inside some cosmic snake that has swallowed its tail, some tobacco worm that has eaten out its own insides just like Jonathan’s nightmare. Not a nice thought. God is so much tidier. Things begin. Things end. There’s peace of mind, an end to aimlessness, no need for tinsel and sham. Control is possible in such a life. So is meaning. Despite Atlas’s interpretation, this is what lies behind my grandfather’s enchantment with divinity. I’m sure of it. With God, he escaped the tobacco worms; he says so himself: with his conversion, his recurrent nightmare stopped.
His father? He had a heavenly father. He gave up searching for an earthly one. George? George was the routed enemy of his youth, now dead, now past. Within a year Jonathan read well. In three more years, he took and passed examinations in philosophy, mathematics and Greek; he became assistant to the Reverend Garson Walter Grayberg of Ellsworth, Maine: a difficult time.
The Reverend Grayberg was not anybody’s image of an East coast parson: short, irascible, coarse-textured, soup slopped on his shirt front, gravy on his trousers. He shouted and wept when he preached; he stamped, thumped, shook his fists; he ranted on against the depraved elegance he saw around him – and managed to flatter it at the same time. To Jonathan he said, ‘Of course I ain’t educated so fancy as you.’ And he said, ‘I learned me my trade on the hard side of life: what a kid like you don’t know from fuck about.’ Jonathan prayed for Christian forbearance (a virtue God was stingy with in his case), and his heart sang when, at twenty-eight, he took examinations on Wesley’s Explanatory Notes and the Forty-Four Sermons, entered the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and escaped.
Today’s PR material for Moody shows dull eyes and foolishness in the faces of staff and students alike. And the courses they study! Hermeneutics and Homiletics, Techniques of Evangelism, Apologetics, Church History, Old and New Testaments, Principles of Discipleship: you can see the dull eyes grow duller as you read the list. But in Jonathan’s day, God was still lively enough to give a fizz to the air. In the excitement of it all, he began to do a little writing of his own. He even wrote a few verses.
When he was thirty-two, the District Synod granted him permission to set up a tabernacle in the wilderness on the south side of the Columbia River, not too far from Cathalamet, Washington. I find charm in this, that I should have sought truth at Columbia University while my grandfather sought it on the Columbia River. Rayner my father used to sing
Hail Columbia, happy land:
Baby shit in papa’s hand.
Surely this conjunction of Columbias means something.
With several other probationer ministers (a carpenter, a stone mason, a mathematician among them) my grandfather homesteaded fourteen acres there. They built a house for themselves. They built a chapel. They prayed, studied, farmed, exchanged techniques; they shared out among them the probationer’s circuit on the other side of the river and four years later were ordained together in Portland, Oregon, by the laying on of hands. After that they returned to Cathlamet, and the only change they made in their lives was to wear black broadcloth and dog collars when they went for supplies on the other side of the Columbia. When my grandfather was thirty-six years old and only two months into his ordination – he’d never even administered the Sacraments – this part of his life came to an end. Ever afterwards, he referred to it with grim contempt as ‘the idyll’.
A trip across the Columbia to Cathlamet, the standard trip except that he was alone this time: the grocer in Cathlamet (who wrapped the groceries in an old newspaper), the story (wrapped around his bacon, staring up at hi
m): this is how it happened – the first word of George since he’d left him for dead beside the railroad tracks a lifetime ago. My grandfather saw the story – no more than an item – just as he took the last bite of the bread he was eating for his lunch. It was a misty mid-fall day. Almost before the meaning of the words registered on him, he felt the blood rush from his face. He stopped chewing and reread:
SEN. STOKE SPEAKS TO FARM WORKERS
There is reassurance for agrarian and urban workers from Senator George Stoke (Dem. Kan.) in a speech yesterday to the Farm Workers Union. Referring to next year’s presidential election and the Republican fight for a gold standard, Sen. Stoke said, ‘Not even an Eastern banker can eat gold. He eats wheat and labor like everybody else. And for that he needs silver, just like you do. Join us. If you do, we’ll win. This I swear to you.’
Jonathan spat out his bread to keep himself from choking.
In a daze he cast off. In a daze he rowed his small boat back out into the river. He was lucky to make it almost to the south shore before the fog closed in. One moment he could see the trees lining the bank; the next moment they were gone and there was nothing but featureless gray on all sides of him. Even the tips of his oars disappeared into it. The river lapped at the wooden boat like the water of a pond, all points of reference gone. A log rushed past and disappeared into the murk without a trace. When Pilate said, ‘What is truth?’, why didn’t Jesus answer? Was it because He didn’t know?
Jonathan had hardly been able to contain his excitement when he’d run across this question in the Bible, the first time in print, the first time since College had asked it that night in Lenssen. He’d been sitting at his desk in his pretty, pine-smelling study at Malloy’s Landing, reading calmly, a man at ease with his God: and there it was: no warning, either. His heart raced; his hands trembled; and the intensity of his disappointment at Jesus’s silence had been so great that he’d thrown his Bible into the corner of the room and broken its back. He stared into the gray mist of the present and sought for some sense of justice in things – some meaning – something—
Stoke is not all that uncommon a name. That was a dead man – boy – that he’d left by the side of the railroad tracks. He’d certainly looked dead. He didn’t seem – Why weaken at that critical moment? Why fail to establish for certain that he was dead? Could he have been alive after all? Was it just carelessness? Is that why there had never been a Wanted poster? A clump of twigs swept past, this time going bow to stern; the boat had swung back to front since the log had gone by a few minutes before. Heaven is a conception for people who die young: if you live long enough you want no part of it. I need to be dead, Jonathan said. He tried to pray. He kneeled down, the boat swaying and rocking, and tried. But he could not. ‘Oh, You Bastard,’ he whispered urgently to the figure who had refused to answer Pilate about truth. He squinted into the gray that surrounded him, face tingling.
‘Okay, goddamn you,’ he shouted then. ‘You win this one! Hands down! Do you hear me? George?’
‘Hallo! Hallo!’ came the answering call from the shore beyond.
It’s always the absurdity of things that gets you. Marching to your own execution, you slip on a banana peel and break your neck. Laughter surged through Jonathan, the man who never laughed.
‘Hello! Hello! Call again! Hello!’
What difference does it make? he thought, pulling on the oars. You hear a cry and you row toward it, isn’t that enough? Who are you to demand answers anyway? Of God or George—
But that night for the first time in thirteen years, for the first time since his conversion had supplied him with the clean borders of an orderly universe with orderly beginnings and endings, where a thing and its opposite stayed properly separated: for the first time he woke to find his hands plucking imaginary tobacco worms from the covers of the bed he lay in. He knew what the dream meant: he knew his God was dead and buried – the idyll over – and he was again as forsaken as he’d been that night so long ago when he’d tried to shoot himself outside Bowie Jack’s in Cheyenne, as forsaken as Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.
FOUR
Wednesday afternoon and evening
REARMAMENT
1
Undertakers make regular calls on geriatricians like Atlas. I don’t really know why; I wasn’t allowed to accompany him into the living room for his talk with them. Morticians: what an inane word. I did meet them, though; Claire brought them to Atlas’s office when they first arrived: two plump young men, very young men – painfully young – aglow with health and money.
‘Hi,’ they said.
‘Are they old enough to be doing that sort of thing?’ I asked Atlas after the secret talk was over. It was mid-afternoon. Claire brought us tea, convinced that because I lived in England I couldn’t get through the afternoon without a tea bag. She did not set the tray down graciously; I feared I was in for a rough French dinner party to come. She made a second reference to seven being a difficult number around a table.
‘I don’t know,’ Atlas said. ‘All of them are young. They look like they suck blood out of the corpses, don’t they? There aren’t any old ones anymore. Maybe they eat the old ones.’
‘What do they want?’
‘Business.’ And then he goes back to his father’s religious passion as though the bridge from undertakers to epistemology were perfectly natural. Nobody can trust a man like this. ‘Politics, music, drugs, mathematics, God,’ he says, ‘what’s the difference? They all come to the same thing in the end. People think math is dull because they’ve never experienced what hooks mathematicians. Get the generality, get the pattern right and it’s like orgasm – like what happens when you inject heroin – like when Mozart gets just the right mix of keys.’
The joke of it is that Atlas knew nothing about his father’s loss of faith. Nor did my father – or any of Jonathan’s other children. All assumed he was a profound believer throughout his life. Which is to say they didn’t know him at all. My information comes direct from the diaries, and as you will see, it fits. Without it, nothing that follows makes sense. Pulling out of Portland my grandfather felt only outrage. What right did God have to go and die on him like that? Who did He think He was anyway? A neighborhood dog, to be run down by the first dirty driver that comes along? Karl von Clausewitz, the philosopher of war, says of an army that if it is a peacetime affair, inexperienced in battle, held together merely by the glue of service regulations, it may look impressive but ‘as with a glass too quickly cooled, a single crack breaks the whole mass’. So it was with Jonathan’s God. South on the California & Oregon, past the great cedars, past – who cares? Into California. Over the hills. Plot the route with care, negotiate it meticulously and even so – bang! – the world it is the old world yet and nothing he’d done meant anything at all. There was nothing he wanted from this world anymore or could ever see himself wanting. In San Francisco he booked a ticket on the Western Pacific to Salt Lake City, the route that ran through Mogul. But Mogul was no longer listed as a stop. It was a sign, he thought, wearily now, but then so was everything else. The train jostled its way across the desert until it met a westbound goods carrier on the single line of track that spanned this reach of the continent. The two trains faced each other cow-catcher to cow-catcher. Jonathan’s crept forward, the other crept back, and so they inched into Mogul’s station to pass one another on the siding there.
From the train window Mogul was as aggressively dead now as it had been aggressively alive before. It had been sixteen years since College got himself impaled there on a thousand tons of stibnite, and sixteen years is an eternity in the mayfly-like lives of those old boom-towns. No buildings remained, only skeletons – naked roof struts, half-collapsed walls, sun-bleached clapboard. Rusty tin cans lay scattered here and there, escapees from the heaps of rubbish cached between buildings. The silence was absolute – everything shrouded in the drab, gray sand made from stibnite, quartz and the pulverized shells of creatures that had lived here mill
ennia before when the area was the bed of an inland sea. Those must have been the great days, Jonathan thought, staring out. A heavy damp hung in the air, not right for the place or the wintery time of year.
When the conductor announced a delay to take on water, Jonathan stepped down onto the rotting platform and into the streets of the town he’d helped ferry out into the desert. No trace of Olympia LeCleve’s – not even a hollow shell. All that wild scurrying, building, buying, selling – all for nothing. Only a few sluggish mosquitoes remained, hatched in the strange wet weather.
He thought of suicide – third time lucky, as the saying goes – but laid the thought aside, carefully, gingerly, like the family heirloom it was to become. He had to know about George first. He’d never felt any guilt for killing George. He’d thought about it from time to time during the idyll, but commandments or not, it seemed to him, as it always had, an act of war – and a victory at that, something worthy of a brass band and a ticker-tape parade. Besides, not many wars are fought without God. But sitting here in the barren street of Mogul, he felt guilt enough to drown in. His victory over George was as much sham as Mogul’s victory over the desert. He’d botched the foundation on which all of his adult life had been built. Reparation must be made. And because it must, he hints at an answer to the question of why he bothered coding his diaries. What he says is that his long-range plans make it ‘probably a good idea’ to use ‘some simple code’. Apparently his whoring and the prudery of the times had little to do with it.
Malaria was common in America in those days. Cases appeared as far north as the Great Lakes. In the final accounting, so my books tell me, malaria will take the credit for killing off half of the entire human race. But it wouldn’t have done Jonathan much good to have identified the mosquito that bit him now; by the time he was aware of her, she’d done her biting, he’d slapped her off and was making his way back to the train. It was cold when he got as far as the mountains, late November. The snows began, and because of them there was a week’s delay in Salt Lake City. Over the Wasatch Range to – it hardly matters. Another week’s delay. Then the Midwest Pacific out of Denver heading into Kansas. Despite the warmth of the train, he was cold. The car’s pot-bellied stove poured out heat; he shivered while the rest of the passengers stripped off jackets. His hands, clutching his frock coat around him, seemed loathsome and remote. Hope and faith. What a joke. Maybe chickens crossing roads aren’t funny, but hope and faith – that’s enough to burst your sides!