‘Some consistency. Some meaning.’
‘Oh, Jesus – life’s not like that, for Christ’s sake. It’s a whirlpool, a vortex. Sure it spirals downward, and when the water runs out the vortex collapses. You were born and then you die. If that’s tragedy, life is tragic. But what’s important is the rotating center. Where’s your sense of wonder? The pattern is alive. Infinitely complex. Full of strands that weave in and out. It replenishes itself from surrounding waters again and again and again. Peel off the layers – grab at the veils – and there’s nothing at all inside – not a smidgen. Well, why should there be anything? Truth’s a convention, a fashion: it changes every year.’
‘Wheel me back to the car, Atlas.’
‘Look, goddamn you. You’re trying so hard for a hemline that you’re missing a miracle!’
We drove back to Atlas’s house without speaking. When I got home to England (I’ve always felt like an alien; living abroad more or less institutionalizes the feeling), I wrote the Hannaville Cemetery Committee and enclosed payment for an appropriate memorial to Jonathan – granite to match Sarah’s, but somewhat more tasteful, I hope. I won’t ever see it myself. There’s no point in going back now: Atlas died of leukemia a week ago. Radium seeds have a tendency to do that. Radium is a poorly understood, unstable atom, and the seeds of it in his belly managed to hold off his cancer only at the price of producing their own.
As Jonathan himself said, faith will serve as well as anything.
Author’s Note
My grandfather was a slave. This isn’t an uncommon claim for an American to make if the American is black. But I’m not black. I’m white. My grandfather was white, too. And he was sold into slavery not in some barbaric third world country: he was sold in the United States of America. A midwestern tobacco farmer bought him for $15 when he was four years old; not many people know about such sales, although they were common just after the Civil War. The slave’s life my grandfather led until he ran away at sixteen so scarred him that no one who came near him afterwards could escape the effects of it; four of his seven children – including my father – ended up as suicides. My sister’s therapist said to her, ‘You have all the hallmarks of an alcoholic’s daughter.’ But alcohol has no part in it: it’s the emotional skids and the dark anger that taint anybody, black or white, even at the distance of two generations away from slavery. Theory of War is an attempt to understand what my grandfather might have felt about what he’d gone through, and what we – his descendants – still have to cope with because of it.
Acknowledgement
This book has been in the works so long that I have lost track of most of the sources found for me by the resourceful and endlessly patient staff of the Totnes Library. I do remember Percy French’s memoir Railroadman, though; I couldn’t have written the book without it. Nor could I have managed without Dr J. Morrison Brady and Mrs Esther Arnold, both of whom answered all my questions about their father more fully than any interviewer could dare to hope. I also owe a great deal to Ruth Mathewson, Michael Wood and Alexander Masters for early readings and suggestions. As for Al and Jo Hart, who gave me courage to go on, the simple thanks I have to offer could never repay the debt I feel. Nor can I ever repay James Hale and Mary Siepmann, without whose generosity of spirit this novel would still be a manuscript. And then there’s Dexter Masters, who taught me all I know about writing, who encouraged, debated, suggested, edited – all to the immeasurable benefit of these and other pages – and who himself supplied what is, in my opinion, the best line in the book.