God's Fool

by Mark Slouka

  And we got used to it. Month by month, as we went along, we grew accustomed to the new dispensation, adjusted ourselves to its demands. Habit took hold, as it will. The furrow grew deeper. Whereas at the beginning a good quarrel might still conceivably have wrenched us out of our path, now it just confirmed our course. We would argue, accuse each other of mendacity and all manner of crimes, and in the morning resume precisely where we had left off. The year came and went. Another began. Nothing anyone said could sway us.

  Not that they didn’t try. Addy and Sallie, singly and together, wept and begged us to be reasonable. The Reverend Seward, having gotten wind from some conjugal quarter of our situation, preached a repetitive sermon on tolerance and brotherly love, taking as his inspiration the First Epistle of John 2:9–11: “He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in darkness even until now. He that loveth his brother abideth in the light, and there is none occasion of stumbling in him. But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath blinded his eyes.” And so on. I let it pass. We hardly spoke now except to convey the most essential information, and when speaking to a third person, would communicate through them. Tell your uncle Chang she’ll need a second dose of Cook’s pills. Ask your father if he’s hungry.

  That particular Sunday morning in 1859, if I recall correctly, we had not spoken directly for days. Which may explain why, at first, I didn’t realize he was speaking to me.

  We had just settled ourselves behind the table for our Bible-reading session (it being my turn to wear the ball and chain) when, opening one of Sophia’s English novels, which I was rereading at the time, I thought I heard my brother say, “I really wish you wouldn’t.” It took me a moment to realize he wasn’t talking to one of the boys.

  “I’m sorry, brother,” I said, confused. “Did you say something?”

  “I said I wish you wouldn’t,” he repeated.

  “I beg your pardon, brother, but ‘wouldn’t’ what?”

  “Read that book.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but I still managed to remain calm. “Why on earth not?”

  “You know why,” he said, going back to his book. “Don’t make me say it.”

  I could feel myself trembling. “Why not, if it gives you pleasure.”

  “It doesn’t. It gives me no pleasure whatsoever.”

  “Why don’t you just say it,” I said.

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Go ahead. Say it.”

  “I don’t have to say anything. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “You coward,” I said.

  “Because it was hers,” he said, almost hissing it. “There’s something unseemly about it. Something weak. Like stroking a piece of her clothing or … or fondling a lock of her hair.”

  “It’s none of your goddamn business,” I said.

  “Oh, but it is my business. This is my house.”

  I opened the book. “Go to hell, brother. I’ll read what I want.”

  He jumped up, wrenching me to my feet. I had forgotten how strong he was. “There will be no more reading today,” he whispered, his jaw clenched and his face almost disfigured with rage. “And don’t you dare, ever, tell me to go to hell when it’s because of you that I …”

  “Because of me that you what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That you what? That you’ll—” Hearing footsteps in the hall behind us, I paused, shaking like a blade of grass in the wind.

  “Daddy?” Nannie appeared behind the screen mesh. “What are you doing?” she said, seeing us standing there behind the table.

  “What is it, Nannie?” I said.

  “Have you seen Aunt Grace?”

  “She’s probably out back by the oven,” I said.

  “Aren’t you reading today?”

  “No,” I said. And then, after a pause: “Your uncle Eng and I have a few things to talk about. We’re going for a walk.”

  We didn’t get far. “So that’s what’s keeping you up at night, brother?” I whispered when we were halfway across the yard. I could see Lester pouring a bucket of slops for the pigs. The sound of excited grunting rose in the still, hot air. “That you’ll go to hell because of me? Is that it?” I leaned closer. “Are you worried that God won’t bother to cut us free? Hmmm? That he’ll just toss us out like a half-rotten apple?”

  We had passed out of the shade of the locusts. We were walking faster and faster, jerking and wrenching each other about. Aunt Grace was out back by the brick oven. I remember seeing Frank rolling a wheelbarrow full of wood toward the shed. He called something out to us, but neither of us heard him.

  “The lake of fire, brother,” I whispered, wanting to hurt him, to run him down to the ground like a winded animal. “Is that what’s worrying you? That your name won’t be written in the book of life because of me?” We were plunging across the tobacco field now, oblivious to the plants being trampled underfoot. “Well it’s too late, brother. Do you hear me? It’s too late.” I leaned closer. “ ‘He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, he is in darkness even now.’ ” We were almost running. “Are you listening, brother? ‘He that hateth his brother, he is—in—darkness. He that—’ ”

  The first blow broke my nose. A great gout of blood gushed across my shirt and I fell into the furrows with him on top of me, my hands around his throat. I could hear him strangling even as I felt a dull hammering on the side of my face and wondered what it could be. We rolled and wrenched, punched and gouged. He was my brother—as boys in Siam, we had wrapped our arms around each other and rolled down the hills, laughing and screaming—and yet at that moment I swear to God I would have left him dead in that tobacco field, cut him loose like a piece of cloth, and walked back to the house alone. But I did not have a knife. He did. At some point, I remember, he rammed a handful of dirt into my face, grinding it up into my nose and eyes with the heel of his palm. Choking and thrashing, I managed to raise a knee between his legs. I heard him grunt and felt him curl toward his middle, the strength draining out of him, just as a searing pain flashed through my side—once, twice—and I heard him scream and wondered, for one mad instant, if someone else had hurt him, but by then my hand had closed on something hard and I was swinging it wildly, not knowing what was happening, dimly aware of voices yelling something somewhere, and then a huge weight was on my chest and my arms were pinned to the ground and I was crying and spitting dirt and that, as they say, was that.

  VIII.

  It took six men to carry us back to the house and up the stairs, where they laid us on the bed from which we would not get up again that year. We bled through everything they put under us. My brother couldn’t move his neck. I had two broken ribs. I would learn, in time, that I had very nearly smashed in his skull with a rock, and that for four days he had drifted in and out of consciousness and I with him; that for a time it had looked as though I might lose my right eye; that my nose had grown so horribly infected that Addy and Sallie had had to cover it up before letting the children come into the room. Eng’s knife, we found, had cut almost a full third of the way through the fleshy bottom of our bridge. Only the fact that he had been unable to get the blade in his right hand, but had been forced to slash, awkwardly, with his left, had saved us.

  It was Gideon, of course, who sewed us up like a torn sheet, who came galloping up as he had fourteen years ago when Christopher had been born, and delivered us from ourselves. Not that he was happy about it. I still have a vague, dreamlike memory of hearing his voice as we drifted in and out of the world those first few weeks, speaking to someone sobbing out in the hallway. I could hear the rain dribbling off the eaves. “Not a thing,” I heard him say. “Men will do what they will, my dear, and until they find a cure for idiocy, or the kingdom of heaven comes down to us at last, I’m afraid there’s not a blessed thing I can do about it.”

  To us, he was more forthr
ight. “Ah, you’re awake,” he said one afternoon, noticing us stir. He threw a soaking yellowed bandage into a bucket by the window. “That’s good. I’ve been wanting to say something to you.” Coming around the bed, he sat, none too gently, by my side. There was no one else in the room. “Are we listening?” he said, and I could tell he was furious by the economy of his movements, the way he slapped tight a crease in the sheets with a single backhanded sweep. I couldn’t see my brother at all. I couldn’t move. My entire face felt as if it was on fire. I closed and opened my eyes. “Good,” he said. “I want to make sure you can both hear me.”

  He went on: “For two weeks now, I’ve been ministering to a house of crying women and terrified children. I take no pleasure in this. It annoys me, particularly as they are silly, emotional creatures who can’t understand why their fathers and husbands would want to kill each other, and who insist on carrying on even after I’ve explained it to them. So this is my point.” He leaned closer to us now, not smiling. “First, if you ever try something like this again, I will kill you myself. Second, since, in the current situation, I have sixteen patients, I have decided to charge you accordingly. If you fail to remit in a timely manner—I am reasonable enough to wait until you are able to move about—then so help me God I will haul you into debtor’s court and squeeze you like a lemon in a vice. Stupidity, gentlemen, must be paid for. Take my word for it: When you see my bill, you will wish you had either finished the job you began or refrained altogether.” He stood up to leave. “Oh, and one more thing. The longer you convalesce, the larger my bill. I have no one else to talk to in this godforsaken county, and I’m too old to start drinking alone.” And he turned and walked out of the room, closing the door quietly behind him.

  I don’t remember much of those four months of my life. I remember waking up once at dusk (no lamp had been lit) and seeing Addy sleeping in a chair beside the bed. I remember opening my eyes another time (it could have been the next day, or the next month), and finding the whole family standing around the bed like pickets around a garden plot and Nannie asking me how I felt. I remember the sudden gust of shame that traveled through me at that moment, and how, unable to speak, I simply nodded. I remember Frank and Charles struggling to get the bedpans under us, their black arms hard and warm around our waist, saying, “All right, Mistah Chang, Mistah Eng, you can set down easy now.” And I remember a certain breezy fall afternoon when I woke to find Christopher sitting in a chair, knees to his chest, looking out the window. Now and again the curtains would billow gently, spreading sunlight over the wooden floor, then drawing it back, and I looked at his face a long time, wondering what he was thinking. Eventually he turned and we just looked at each other—not smiling, not anything—and I knew that he had already forgiven me, and worried about this, knowing that it was not good for eleven-year-old boys to forgive their fathers so easily, to know them so well. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He nodded—so much a man already, expectations cut to size. “It’s all right,” he said.

  My brother, his head still heavily bandaged, stirred, tasting something in his sleep, and was still. “How is everybody?” I asked, unable to think of anything else to say.

  He nodded again. “They’re all right.”

  The curtain billowed; a tide of sunlight rose to the top of his frayed overalls, then fell back like a wave. He turned to look out the window, his left hand picking at the loosening seam on his pant leg, thinking.

  “What’s new in the world?” I said.

  He smiled then, not the way most young men would have, but quietly, almost shyly, as though he were about to tell me he’d fallen in love.

  “Looks like we’re gonna have us a war,” he said.

  That January, bundled against the wind like old men, my brother and I climbed the steps to Gideon’s porch with our first monthly payment of three dollars and fifty cents. Nineteen months later—the Yankees’ gold on the one hand and our own Congress on the other having succeeded in making the exercise absurd—we delivered our last. By that time, a single bar of soap cost seventy cents, nearly four times what it had, and we were drinking a vile liquid made from chicory and acorns, and calling it coffee.

  It was an evening in late August, as I recall, four months after Shiloh. We had not yet heard of a muddy little creek called the Antietam. Certain cornfields, rustling quietly in the sun, had not yet been tapped into history. Sunken country roads, bent cowlicks of grass falling over their banks, had not yet been chosen over others. Others had: Gaine’s Mill, Frayser’s Farm. Malvern Hill.

  Rolling the three faded bills into a long taper, Gideon held them to the lamp’s flame, then brought them to his pipe. “Consider your debt paid, gentlemen,” he said. Dropping them on the boards of the porch, he slowly, thoughtfully ground them out with the toe of his boot. “We’ll all have debts enough, before this is through.”

  Around us, the clamp tightened slowly—relentless as frost. Stoneman’s sons were suddenly gone—all except Billy, who was still too young—leaving him to manage as best he could. We could see him moving about the place sometimes, wrenching on a mule, or pulling two-handed on a rope attached to a pulley in the oak. From a distance he looked like a man stabbing himself in the stomach. In town, the stores began to empty, the streets grew quieter. Benjamin McCullough’s son Tommy had been killed at Shiloh, Thaddeus Stark’s boy, Tad, at Seven Pines.

  Richmond was being evacuated. We heard of streams of refugees crowding the roads; of ransacked stores and burning farms; of baggage wagons—heaped with trunks and boxes—creaking and rattling through the night so endlessly they seemed, one man said, to form a giant, wheeling circle (here the little girl on the buckboard again, crowded into her father’s coat, there the kid with the bristle-brush hair, legs dangling over the wagon’s end, shaving down that stick) revolving around some unknown hub.

  Eng and I lived, those first few years of the war, in a republic of our own. We didn’t speak. We didn’t fight. We received the news of the dead in silence, and went about our work. There was nothing to be done about it. I had known that since October of ’59. We had been lying beside each other for over two months at that time when I awoke one afternoon to find us alone. The room was empty and still. High up on the window, a yellow jacket tapped and crawled about the pane, too foolish to know the glass was open just below. I remember being surprised that the trees had turned so suddenly.

  I knew he was awake without having to look at him. “Think he’ll find it?” I said, knowing he had noticed it too. It was the first thing I had said to him since that day in the tobacco field.

  There was no answer. The yellow jacket tapped against the glass, buzzing furiously. Someone said something downstairs. I thought perhaps he hadn’t heard me. “You think he’ll find it?” I said again.

  “I want you to know something,” he said, speaking steadily, and even without looking at him I could tell that he was crying. “Even though God has apparently decided that we should live out our lives together, you’re not my brother anymore. I just want you to know that.”

  IX.

  For a time, as I remember it, everything held. The war, though all around us, was still elsewhere. Pope, we heard, was looting farms in Virginia, threatening to hang anyone suspected of aiding the Confederacy. There was no dye to be had in town. No rope. One day—it could have been in ’61, or even ’62—we came upon Aunt Grace using a hawthorn for a needle, and knew that the war was coming closer. We were like children looking at a volcano through a wheat straw: we could see the part—the trembling blade, the rising spark—but the whole escaped us. Or we escaped it.

  When we heard, in early ’62, that the Congress had extended all enlistments for the duration, we walked over to Stoneman’s and offered him whatever help we could spare, then went on with our planting. There was nothing else to do. It was so with everything else. The Conscription Act had nothing to do with us. Though fully recovered (and willing as any other man to fight for independence) we were who we were
—no regimental commander, we knew, would give us a second look, and Christopher, our oldest, was not yet fourteen. Besides, there was work to be done: sheds to fix, cotton to scrape, tobacco to top and sucker and worm …

  Then Moses ran away, and our world—slowly, almost imperceptibly—began to tilt. He left in August 1862, removing himself from our lives as neatly as if, like his namesake, he had simply parted the fields and forests and let them close behind him. We were so inept, so trusting—and yes, so preoccupied with not paying attention to what was happening around us—that by the time we realized he was gone it was nearly noon of the next day, and there was little to be done. He left nothing of himself behind: a stripped bed, a neatly swept floor. I remember joining a halfhearted search party that blundered about for a time, sweating and cursing, crashing through the briars behind McCullough’s blue tick hounds, but nothing came of it. The trail, such as it was, simply disappeared into the river, and though we waded across, carrying the dogs in our arms, then tracked a full mile up and downstream (working our way around the backwater sloughs through thickets of thorns as tough as wire), we never found it again. When it started to rain, we allowed ourselves to be talked out of going on, and turned for home.