People said he’d taken his wife’s death too hard. They said he should get on with life. But what is there to get on with? What is the point? When he went shopping he stopped sometimes mid-stride in the streets with a look of anguish on his face. ‘His heart,’ said the gossips. But it was his war, not his heart that caught at him: that look came over him when he suddenly realized that some flank lay exposed. At night, he paced back and forth in the dark of his empty house, studying the psychology of the enemy. ‘Does it have meaning?’ he would say. ‘Or is this meaningless, too? If this is meaningless, then – But it can’t be. Because if it is – No, goddamn you! No, you go too far. I won’t have it. Do you hear? No!’
To go a little deeper into the subject of war, it is a cardinal rule of strategy, an axiom set forth by that great philosopher of the subject, Karl von Clausewitz, that whoever really knows what he wants has the edge. Jonathan tested for fixed points. How about this? Did he really want it? No, damnit. How about that? No! It looked like the options were down to one: George Stoke. My grandfather read about the lawn party in the Seattle Intelligencer; he worked a farm near a tiny town called Hannaville up in the mud and pine trees of Washington state, half a continent away from Sweetbrier and the senator’s party. He read about the party on the same day – the very same day – that he read about the annual Methodist Congress, which that year was to be held in Topeka. Topeka is only fifty miles from Senator Stoke’s mansion. Clausewitz says war is a wonderful trinity of emotion, reason and chance, and here in the Seattle Intelligencer, a paper as relentlessly dull as the Overland Sentinel of Sweetbrier, my grandfather finds himself on the right side of ‘that play of probabilities’ – these are Clausewitz’s very words – ‘which make war a free activity of the soul’.
My grandfather didn’t finish reading about the lawn party. He threw the paper down, ran out into the yard and began overhauling his elderly Saxon to make it ready for the trip. A week later he was nursing it over the dirt roads that wound through the northwest, over the rutted tracks of the Rockies, out onto the straight gravel runs across the cornfields of Colorado and Kansas.
3
When my grandfather parked his car on the sweeping curve of the driveway into the senator’s property, he couldn’t see George. I know that. I went to Sweetbrier and surveyed the land myself. He would have seen only the crowd with the ladies’ skirts billowing and their hats bobbing. He couldn’t even hear George until he was halfway across the lawn. All the national papers ran George’s speech. It wasn’t anything special, but because of what happened afterwards, it got the kind of coverage few senators manage even when they pay out in hard cash.