Theory of War

by Joan Brady

  ‘Johnny’ – she drew herself up into a kneeling position beside him – ‘this cleaving: I’m not sure I’ve got it right. While it’s still dark, can you show me again?’

  So it was that she exposed in him a second flank. And it doesn’t take a student of military tactics to know that an army with two flanks exposed is going to have a rough time on the field.

  Two weeks later, despite the bitter March weather they rode by buggy to Hannaville, where the Methodists had arranged temporary living quarters for them – a room, so they understood, in the house of somebody by the name of Mrs Chawder. The trip took three hours; Sarah talked all the way and he listened to the cadences of her voice – its stops and starts and sudden enthusiasms – trying in vain to rearm himself against her.

  ‘Oh, Johnny, I’ll make the most beautiful house for you to live in – curtains, I’ll make the curtains myself – I know how – blue curtains with tassels and a draw-line – and a pelmet!’

  ‘What’s a pelmet?’ he said. But his mind was on the arch of her neck and the flecked-hazel color of her eyes.

  ‘It’s a thing that goes – didn’t you ever have curtains, Johnny? Of course you didn’t. I’ll teach you all about it. Oh, we must have curtains – the pelmet goes on top, and carpets and wallpaper, and a piano, too – and a potted Christmas cactus—’

  When they reached Hannaville the cedar trees that encircled the town were hung with ice and snow; they glistened in the winter sunlight.

  ‘Um,’ Sarah said, looking around her. ‘Just the place for blue curtains and a pelmet.’

  4

  Mrs Chawder’s face was papery yellow. Her head wobbled on a scrawny neck that jutted out from her shoulders, and her braids, piled into a crown, had slipped down over one ear. She sighed, shivering under a heavy stole and leaning on the doorknob as she peered out at Jonathan and Sarah. ‘You’re the preacher?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, and this is my—’

  ‘Where you been? We been holding up the wedding for two weeks now – how soon can you do it? Tomorrow?’

  ‘What wedding?’ he said. ‘Look, it’s very cold—’

  ‘People get married wintertime same as summer.’

  ‘Hadn’t we better come inside and talk about it?’

  Mrs Chawder turned away, and the jerky, dismissive shift of her body brought to his mind the jerking of a train about to stop. ‘We ain’t got no time to lose, Preacher.’ They stood in a small one-room area, the whole of the downstairs, half kitchen, half living room, partially warmed by a pot-bellied stove.

  ‘May we sit down, Missis Chawder?’ Jonathan said. ‘I understand—’

  ‘You don’t understand nothing,’ she said. ‘Can you do it tomorrow? You got all the right papers? You know how to do a wedding, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, I’ve never done one before—’ Jonathan began.

  ‘Oh, Jesus!’ Mrs Chawder leaned her body against the wall and buried her head in the crook of her elbow. ‘Lord God! What am I going to do?’

  ‘Who’s the bride, Missis Chawder?’ Sarah said. ‘Is it your daughter?’ Mrs Chawder nodded. ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Carma.’

  ‘Carma?’ Jonathan said. ‘I knew somebody named that once before.’

  ‘God be merciful. Who cares who you knew?’ Mrs Chawder kept her head averted.

  ‘I do,’ Sarah said brightly. ‘You never said anything about a Carma to me before, Johnny.’

  ‘She was just a little girl – Four little girls, and they had this glorious string of names: Cassa, Carma, Levada and Lynn—’

  ‘How do you know my girls?’ Mrs Chawder swung her head around to face him.

  Jonathan half rose out of his chair. ‘Do you remember a runaway named Johnny? I rode out to Denver with a woman called Eliza Gowdy – four little girls – a little boy, too – years and years ago—’

  Mrs Chawder’s eyes narrowed. ‘I done you a favor, eh?’

  ‘So you’re Eliza Gowdy. After all these years—’

  ‘So you owe me, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jonathan said. ‘Yes, I owe you. I certainly do.’

  ‘Then do this wedding. Tomorrow. Before – Just do it. I ain’t got much time.’ She eased herself down into a straight chair. ‘I got to get Carma settled before – I’m a sick woman, Preacher. I ain’t got long to live. You’ll do it, won’t you? Tomorrow?’

  Jonathan studied her a moment. ‘I gather’, he said as delicately as he could, ‘that the – uh – groom doesn’t know.’

  ‘’Course he knows. You can’t marry off a woman less of which the groom knows he’s marrying her. What’s the matter with your head, Preacher?’

  ‘What I’m saying, Mrs Chawder,’ he said, struggling now for patience instead of delicacy, ‘is that I gather he doesn’t know about her condition.’

  Eliza’s face froze. ‘What condition?’

  ‘When is the baby due, ma’am?’

  Eliza stared at him a moment, then laughed – a thin, high sound that she cut off by slapping one hand across her own mouth. ‘Ain’t nothing like that,’ she said. ‘My Carma’s a good girl. Carma! Carma! You come on in here. Preacher’s here. Wedding’s tomorrow. Carma!’

  Carma’s hair was like her mother’s had been, like Eliza Gowdy’s of years and years ago on the Midwest Pacific from Kansas to Denver. It was gathered at the base of her neck in a large bun – a luxury of hair, thick, blond – and her only appealing trait. She was large-boned with huge hands and heavy features.

  ‘Won’t you sit down, Carma?’ Sarah said. Carma shook her head and remained standing.

  The silence began to grow oppressive. ‘Do you want to get married tomorrow, Carma?’ Jonathan said at last.

  Carma said nothing.

  ‘She must speak for herself, Missis Chawder,’ he said.

  ‘What for?’ Eliza said. ‘What kind of question is that? I can see you ain’t done weddings before. She’s scary, that’s all. She ain’t met the man but once yet.’

  ‘Then how can she—?’ he began.

  ‘Now you look here, boy,’ Eliza said, ‘we ain’t rich folks up here. A woman marries or goes whoring – ain’t nothing else. Answered the ad in the paper, didn’t she? This old man got a farm west of here and he needs a woman on it. Carma needs a husband. Tomorrow she gets one. Leastways, she does if you can learn how to do a wedding between now and then.’

  Jonathan spread his hands, palm up, and shook his head.

  ‘You ain’t got no right to judge us, boy.’

  ‘Carma’ – Jonathan turned aside and addressed himself to her alone – ‘I want to know what you want. I won’t conduct a wedding unless you want me to.’

  Carma dropped abruptly to her knees in front of him. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘I do – I—’ Tears rolled down her face. ‘I got to – I mean, all the others is married – Cassa and Levada and Lynn. There’s only me. And if something happens – We ain’t got no money. None at all – Oh, I do. I do. I do.’

  Jonathan explained that she didn’t really know the man, that there would be other opportunities; Carma grabbed at his hands and wept over them. The wedding was set for four o’clock the following afternoon.

  There were eight families living in Hannaville; all of them pitched in to help. Eliza herself made coffee from dried carrots. Jonathan fetched the sheet from the bed he and Sarah had slept on the night before; under Eliza’s directions he hung it in one corner of the downstairs room and placed a bench so the engaged couple could sit behind it until the right moment. At a quarter to four he went upstairs to dress. When he came down again, he found the eight families and their baskets of food squeezed onto a couple of makeshift pews: men, women, children, all piled atop one another, basket atop child atop adult lap. Carma’s feet and the feet and knees of Elias Johannsen, the groom, poked out from beneath the sheet. The eight families sang ‘Here comes the bride’. Carma timidly lifted the sheet aside. Elias turned out to be a man of about seventy, bent and gray but a tough object s
till, and Jonathan, moved despite himself, performed for the first time the ceremony that seemed to him – three weeks into his own marriage – the most sacred and the most terrifying of all the ceremonies in the world.

  When he had spoken the final words, the newlyweds went out to Elias’s wagon only to find that his horse had dropped a shoe. They would have to wait until the following morning to leave. Over Eliza’s protests, Jonathan offered them his and Sarah’s tiny upstairs room for the night. There was a feast of fried pork and plum sauce; the party lasted into the evening. At ten the newlyweds retired upstairs. Jonathan and Sarah made up a bed for themselves on the downstairs floor. But just as they were wrapping themselves around each other in front of the pot-bellied stove, Elias Johannsen’s voice echoed throughout the house.

  ‘Gawddamn! You filthy – Jesus Christ! Hey, Preacher! You get your ass up here! Get away from me, filth! Go! Scat! Preacher!’

  Jonathan leapt up from his bedclothes. Elias stood at the doorway to his tiny room, red flannel nightgown over thin calves, face purple in the light of the oil lamp. Carma lay crumpled into the narrow alleyway between the bed and the wall opposite the door, her beautiful long hair hanging loose down over her gown.

  ‘You can’t stuff this kind of shit down my throat,’ Elias screeched at him. Think I’m a goddamned old fool, don’t you? Playing a trick like that – Well, I tell you, I ain’t taking this! I sure as hell—’

  Jonathan squeezed past him and into the room. He kneeled beside Carma, who was moaning softly. ‘Are you all right, Carma? What’s the matter?’ She rocked herself a little to one side and then the other, still moaning, but she said nothing and she didn’t look up.

  ‘Don’t you pretend you ain’t a party to this, you bastard,’ Elias shouted. ‘The whole goddamned town—’

  Jonathan wheeled on him. ‘Shut up and sit down,’ he said. ‘I have no idea what the trouble is. But I certainly mean to find out.’

  Elias studied him a moment, then laughed. ‘New, ain’t you? I forgot. They told me that.’ He laughed again. ‘So they took you in, too, eh? Just let me show you something. You just set yourself right here – over here – by the door a minute, eh?’ Jonathan got to his feet warily. Carma pulled herself toward the corner. ‘I ain’t gonna hurt nobody,’ Elias said, ‘just gonna show you – Come on, Preacher. You gotta let a man have his say, ain’t you?’

  Puzzled, Jonathan changed places in the tight space. While he was still off balance, Elias lifted Carma off the floor and threw her on the bed. Jonathan made a wild grab at him and caught hold of the sleeve of his nightgown.

  ‘Let go, Preacher! I can’t show you nothing less of which you let go.’

  Carma lay on her stomach with her face toward Jonathan. Her lips moved but no sound came. He bent nearer. ‘I always knew—’ She broke off, her eyes shut tight.

  ‘See? Even she knows, poor godforsaken beast. Only body what don’t know is you. So take a step back, man. Go on. Go.’ Jonathan stepped back. ‘Turn over, girl!’ She rolled over on her back and Elias threw her nightgown up above her waist, revealing heavy legs and narrow hips. He prised the legs apart. ‘Now take a squint there, Preacher,’ Elias shouted. ‘Enough to make a man puke, ain’t it?’

  From between Carma’s legs, embedded in her labia, protruded a small, partially erect penis.

  ‘There’s a ladyhole back in there somewheres,’ Elias said indignantly, ‘but it ain’t rightly big enough to stick a thumb in. There’s even a couple of wee-bit balls.’ He turned his furious face to Jonathan. ‘Jesus Christ, the only thing what’s right in this mess is the ass-hole.’

  Jonathan reached out and drew the gown down to cover Carma. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Just wait a minute. Let’s think this through—’

  ‘I been cheated – bamboozled – load of shit sold as woman. Ain’t nobody gonna—’

  Before he was even aware of the thought, Jonathan struck out open-handed and caught Elias full in the face. ‘Well, let’s have a look under your gown, old man.’ Jonathan’s voice was soft as it always was when he was angry, but there was no mistaking the menace in it. ‘Let’s see what you got under there that’s been cheated so bad.’ He pulled the red flannel gown up to Elias’s neck; elongated, flaccid genitals sagged down between bowed thighs. ‘Does that thing work? Can it do anything but piss? Doesn’t look like much of a tool to me. Come on. Show me. Make it work. Get it up.’

  ‘Well, it don’t rightly go up no more,’ Elias said, staring down at his naked body.

  ‘So what were you going to do with this young woman, huh? Tell me that. What excitements did you have in mind for her?’

  Elias glanced down again. ‘I’m cold,’ he said.

  Jonathan let the gown fall back. He sat on the bed beside Carma; the mattress squeaked as she rocked to and fro beside him.

  ‘Now you look here, Elias,’ Jonathan said, inhaling carefully, ‘you’re a farmer, and first of all a farmer needs a woman for milking. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘She ain’t a woman!’

  ‘Carma, can you milk? Carma? Answer me.’ A moaned assent issued from her. ‘So, Elias, she can milk. Can you keep chickens, Carma? Yes? You want her to keep chickens, Elias? She can do that. Can you cook? Yes? She cooks, too. You want her to keep house and do the weeding? She can do all those things.’

  ‘No! No! I want me a woman! I been cheated! I been—’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about cheating, you old fraud.’ Jonathan’s eyes glittered. His voice was so soft now that Carma had to stop her rocking to hear. ‘There’s no way you can say you’ve been cheated of anything you could rightly make use of. Where’s your common sense, man? Carma needs a home and you need somebody to do the woman’s work—’

  ‘I’ll be a laughing stock! Joke of the—’

  ‘For the love of God, think, Elias, think. A hundred miles west, nobody’s going to know about her. Nobody. She’ll keep you warm in your bed at night. She won’t mock you for not giving her children. You’ll know for sure she won’t be running around behind your back. If you don’t ask her for what she can’t give – and she doesn’t ask you for what you can’t give – you’ve got everything you came to Hannaville for. What more do you want?’

  Elias shook his head. ‘They flimflammed me.’

  ‘And you flimflammed them.’

  Outside, the wind blew. The panes in the casement window shuddered, and the room was cold enough for frost to form on the inside of the glass. Elias stared out into the dark for a moment; then he searched Jonathan’s face, sighed heavily and lowered himself on the bed. ‘She got right pretty hair,’ he said, reaching out a hand. She shrank away from him and his shoulders slumped. ‘Ain’t there no limits nowhere, Preacher?’ he said.

  Early the next morning Carma and Elias left Hannaville; he took her elbow to help her into the wagon and the whole town saw it. They’d heard voices in the night, too, and by evening they knew every word that had been spoken in the tiny room. Within a year, by which time Sarah was heavily pregnant, Jonathan’s reputation had spread for miles. You could talk to him, they said. He might hit you in the face but at least he wouldn’t go tossing the Bible at you and he always spoke so beautifully and in such a gentle voice. What these things showed for sure, they said, was that he was one of the few preachers anywhere who was a true representative of God on earth.

  5

  Jonathan was not an experienced man – sexually speaking – in the way we think of experience. There had been Fritzi and a few other whores while he was on the railroads (not so many as there would have been if College hadn’t died), but the thirteen years of his ‘idyll’ were years of celibacy. He was thirty-six when he met Sarah. For most of us the intensities that come with first love are well in the past by that time, something that happens at sixteen, seventeen – even younger. What you feel then is so powerful that it lays waste everything around it and, even in the midst of your transports, you come to realize that if you’re going to survive you’ll have to do without f
eelings like it. So you grow up a little. You lose your intensity. You learn to manage with dignity but with a more shadowy product altogether. In such matters Jonathan was an innocent. His emotions had lain in wait for years: the cork hits the ceiling and the captive passions bubble out all over the place, splashing on feet, floor, furniture; there’s the wild laughter and the scramble for glasses; the wine goes on spilling out over everything. But Jonathan was a person who valued his control above all. Each new rapture brought with it a hangover of bile and self-hatred. He looked into Sarah’s eyes and forgot where he was as all lovers do, but instead of enjoying it he feared he was going mad. He thought of the timber wolf whose cock swells after copulation so that he and the bitch are stuck together in nature’s ferocious anxiety to ensure the purity of the genes, both of them whimpering helplessly, at the mercy of the elements and of any enemy that might happen by.

  Because it was his profession – because it was the only way he could pay for the woman who aroused in him all these conflicts (and also because it gave him another of those pleasures he so much despised) – he held prayer meetings in houses and schools. He rode horseback from town to town through the great cedar forests of the northwest; he married, baptized, preached, buried and rode back to Sarah, held her in his arms in bed and railed against himself over the lies he told with every breath he took.

  But this wasn’t the sum of it. Nobody could cross the gulf of a past like his. Over everything, around everything, through everything – even Sarah’s warm, eager body – lay the battlefield symbolized by the newly come-to-life George. Jonathan’s mind prowled along old roads inch by inch, reeling at the stench, the never-to-be-staunched wounds, the injustices too great to be righted. There were skirmishes at outposts that made no sense to anybody, even to him: feints, parades, half and quarter thrusts, ineffectual, meaningless. A battle, says Clausewitz, resembles ‘a slow disturbance of equilibrium which commences almost imperceptibly and then with every moment becomes stronger and more visible’. Jonathan’s life after the idyll was like this. He saw himself again as Christ in the Garden at Gethsemane, alone, friendless, awaiting crucifixion. One night, looking down at Sarah (her head was turned away from him and the moonlight lit up the curve of her cheek on the pillow), he said to her very softly: ‘“Sleepest thou? Couldest thou not watch one hour?”’