2

My grandfather knew George Stoke well. They grew up together, but there couldn’t be any two men less alike, at least to look at. Where George was suet, my grandfather was fire. He reminds me of the steelworks at Cardiff that lie alongside the major artery from Wales into England, where I live the life of a resident alien. They’re a vast landscape of foundries, furnaces, rolling mills, chimneys. At night the area for miles around glows red from the fires inside. This is hell on earth, where there’s a shroud of fiery smoke, a lowering, breathing, glowing miasma that pollutes the night as surely as it pollutes the air and the waters of the Bristol Channel – as surely as my grandfather’s fury pollutes my life, even though the man was dead before I was born. He was all teeth and claws, as the uncrowned king of Arabia said of himself. This is why I went to Columbia to seek truth: to find out what my grandfather’s life means. I have a right to know; I bear his curse.

My father told me stories about him when I was small. But it was Atlas’s stories I remembered: Atlas’s stories that I felt, that I dreamed about while I was growing up. ‘When dad first laid eyes on George Stoke—’ and I could feel myself straining to get the focus clear, straining to see that first sight of George as my grandfather’s eyes took it in; not to reproduce the memory, not just that: I coveted my grandfather’s memories in the Biblical sense, sinfully, secretly, and I strained to do the actual remembering itself, to colonize these fleeting intimacies inside my mind, steal them from him wholesale with all the rights to ownership that go with them. Atlas once said, ‘He rode that first train across the Rockies—’ And the clackety-clack: do I remember it? do I? dare I? If you turn your head quick enough you can kiss your own lips. Sometimes when I’m alone, I can – well, almost anyway, just for a second. My head buzzes with the effort, but when the horizon clears, I’m back where I started, just plain old me again. Of course the idea’s absurd. How could I remember my grandfather’s life? I never even met him.

This man, my grandfather, was called Jonathan Carrick. He was about two years younger than the senator. My uncle Atlas said nobody ever did find out precisely how much younger. There isn’t a record of his birth anywhere. At the time of the senator’s party he was somewhere in the region of sixty, which is one age in a greasy old senator and quite another in such as Jonathan. There’s kinship here even so; not only a shared past, deeper than that: the kinship of old enemies, the kinship of war.

A war between two people is not all that different from a war between two countries. To begin with the surface of things, the troops must have a flag, a banner, colors, and so they do in the war between my grandfather and the senator. Jonathan Carrick wore a frock coat, just as the senator did; his was out-of-date, too, just like the senator’s – the frock coat a cockade, and no sillier than the roses, ribbons, feathers that make up national cockades, either. My grandfather looked good in his frock coat with a velvet collar, but then the good-looking look good in anything; there’s an ease to the body, a sureness to the gestures that ordinary-looking people never show. My grandfather’s gestures were remarkable. Sometimes he answered with his hands alone, and you were left in no doubt as to what he was saying. Atlas explained this to me. It was a captivating talent, discordant, unexpected in so permanently angry a person, yet so graceful, so magical in its accuracy, so oddly moving that it aroused maternal feelings in women for miles around in the county where he lived – just as the boiling undercurrent in him aroused feelings of a less respectable nature. There is always much speculation after a man like this becomes a widower.