God's Fool (28 page)

I could feel the blood rushing to my head, my heart beating indignantly against its cage. Barnum seemed to loom up behind his desk, red-faced and huge, his meaty hands spread on the wood before him as though to keep him from lunging at us. I resisted the instinctive desire—which I had always felt toward anything that frightened me—to throw myself at his throat.

My brother waited for him to finish, then looked him in the eye. We were retiring from public life, he said, quietly. We would be staying at the Spencer for two days, waiting to hear from him. And we took our leave.

An hour after we confronted him in his office, the papers were served, announcing our suit. Less than twenty-four hours later our lawyers had extracted the three thousand dollars we were owed as neatly as a tooth, along with a signed statement setting us free of any and all contractual obligations to Phineas T. Barnum, the American Museum, or any representatives or subsidiaries thereof, effective immediately.

We knew exactly where we were going. Six months earlier, on a tour through the South, we had stopped in the little town of Wilkesboro in the state of North Carolina and decided that someday we would return there to live. We would build a house. We would be farmers. The corn wouldn’t care if two men walked behind the plow instead of one; it would grow as it would for any man.

This thought, above all others, seemed like an opening window to us that last winter as we sat on our divan watching the snow blowing this way and that against the red brick facade of Matthew Brady’s gallery. We would outwork them all. Farmers from across the state would travel to see our fields. In time, our neighbors would learn to judge us as they judged each other—by the labor of our hands. And if they didn’t, we said, with fine, twenty-three-year-old bravado, well, then, there was no help for it, and our fate would have been the same wherever we chose to meet it.

IV.

I know in my mind there was a time when I had not yet seen the meadows that would become our fields, when the road, like a meandering stream, was nothing more than a brief pause in the thigh-high carpet of wildflowers and weeds that stretched, unbroken, all the way to Stoneman’s woods. I realize there was a time when there
was
no house, when the patch of deep, tangled grass between the chestnuts was empty of everything but the wind rubbing up against the stems and those invisible, scurrying things that people a place before we have come to it. I know this is true, but I can’t believe it. I can no more imagine a time when I didn’t know the view from our porch—the generous sweep of open land, the pond, gray with rain—than I can a time when I didn’t know my own son’s voice.

Looking back, it seems to me that certain places, like certain people, can rearrange our lives so utterly that even though we may still recall, as in a dream, the time before we knew them, we no longer quite recognize the person we were. The new life, piling year on year, overgrows the old. So it was with me.

On a wet April day, two boys stepped down from a wagon and walked up through a soaking field. Clouds rolled against the tops of the trees; a fine mist wet their faces. Reaching the top of the rise, they turned around to admire the view. And felt a sudden recognition. From
that moment on, everything speeded up: The wheel picked them up like a lost weed, pressed them into a crack in the rim, tamped down the dirt with each revolution. And the years passed. The rain fell, the crops grew. A slave died. A war came—like a storm over the land. His son and mine disappeared into that storm. And then the storm was over.

A lifetime later it seems to me as though the world that grew around us just happened, as though the months and years of labor had never been, as though we had waved our arm and said, “Let there be a house,” and in the shade between the chestnuts a house had appeared, a fine, two-story affair with a veranda on three sides, extra-wide staircases, and a chimney big enough to sit a bench in. Around it, the fields were suddenly mowed, turned under, rustling with corn. Stumps disappeared, leaving only a slight depression in the dirt, a slight quickening of the plow. Rocks, pulled from the ground on rollers and inclined planes, washed clean by the rain, turned overnight into walls spotted with blackberries in the open sun or patched with moss in the shade. They seemed to have been there always, marking our holdings, separating field from field.

Addy and I were married for thirty-one years. I never loved her, really, though when she went she left behind a well so dark, so full of her voice, that for a long time I wanted nothing more than to fall into it and be drowned. In my life I had loved someone else, and though I had no desire to sacrifice one woman on the altar of another, it could not be helped. Loss begat loss. I argued with myself, of course, but all I succeeded in doing—and that badly—was pushing the one out of my heart; the other did not take her place.

Not that she would have wanted to, necessarily. Very early on she had realized there had been someone before her and, not wishing to live in a house another had called her own, so to speak, had chosen to live her life outside it. It meant nothing to her. When, during the first year of our marriage, I asked her to be careful with the two English novels on the bookcase because they had once been important to me, she simply
smiled and left them undusted for twenty years. Which of course made me care for them all the more—and all the more conspicuously.

And so it was with everything: The less willing she was to acknowledge my past—to ask me about it, to admit its importance—the more I clung to it. The more ridiculous she made me feel, commenting—not without justice, I suppose—on the absurd figure I cut, or pointing out, ever so reasonably, my many shortcomings, the more devoutly I polished the memory that might otherwise have faded, and made sure to keep it in a place where she would see it. All I wanted was for her to acknowledge that someone might have loved me once; that I was worthy of that love. All she wanted, in turn, was to be told that the past was the past; that she was my wife and the mother of my children and that the other no longer ruled my thoughts. Each of us wanted the other to go first, saw the other’s admission as prerequisite to their own. After you. No, after
you
.

My God, how absurd it seems to me now! How useless. Eventually, as time went on, we forgot the original motivation behind our behavior—to gain the other’s respect, or love—and continued on as we were from force of habit. It was as though all we could remember was the last unkind word, the last weary smile, the last small act of generosity denied us. And yet there were good things in each of us. How easy it would have been to let them live. To break the spell. How little it would have taken to risk a kindness. After you. No, after you. I would go first now, if I could.

An old man’s regrets. Even I find them annoying—all the more so, perhaps, for being unavoidable, given my personality. “Enough, Bunker, enough,” Gideon would say on those nights we sat on his porch drinking his good whiskey: “Give it a rest, for the love of Christ.” Tipping his chair off the wall, he would point at me with the hand holding the bottle, one long finger unwrapped from around the neck: “Cast off your regrets, my son. Dwell not in the land of couldeth and shouldeth and mighteth. And if your tongue speaketh in the subjunctive tense, root it from thy mouth, for better it is to bray like the ass—or hith like
the athp, for that matter—than to traffic in things that were not.” And so forth. And I would for a time—cast off my regrets, I mean—hardly even noticing my offended brother sitting stiffly beside me, sober as a church.

But now Gideon’s gone too, damn him, and every year it feels more and more as though some great event were taking place outside in the churchyard and we were the only ones not invited. I miss them. I miss them all—Josephine and Catherine, gone with the scarlet fever in less than a week … And it’s hard, as the house grows quieter and everyone leaves, to keep back the regrets, to keep from looking back and trying to make sense of what happened while they were all still here. What the story told.

The rain fell, the children grew, the war came. One by one, the people and things I loved in this world were pulled from my grasp. All but one, that is. And even that one I didn’t save, but received instead as a gift, a morsel snatched from the jaws of God.

V.

My son was born on December 19, 1845, six days after the United States Congress, in its wisdom, annexed the territory of Texas. We named him Christopher. He was four months old when General Taylor reached the Rio Grande, a little over a year at the Battle of Buena Vista. By the time he was two the United States had gained a great deal of sand (although what we would do with it, precisely, was hardly clear), and my life had been transformed forever.

Let me say this: All of my children were dear to me. Every one. I had no shortage of love to give them. But Christopher—well, Christopher was the first. He was the one who broke the mold that had begun to harden around my heart, the one who (even as an infant) brought a rough kind of grace into my life, who made the world a negotiable place for me. Looking back now, I realize that Mount Airy was only a home as long as he was with us.

I remember the night he was born—a night not unlike this one. We had sent for the doctor, who had moved into a house two miles down the road, as soon as Addy’s pains began in earnest. Eng and I, unable to stay inside, had walked out to the road with a lantern, our steps crunching against the frozen dirt. The sky was all around us: huge, close, furious with stars. A thin paring of a moon hung to the east, sharp enough to draw blood. We had hardly reached the fence when we heard the
horse’s hooves and in the same instant saw the wagon emerge from the shadow of Stoneman’s woods. It came up the road like a child’s exercise in perspective, shrinking the world behind it.

Horse and wagon pulled up at our gate. A dignified-looking man, perhaps ten years older than ourselves, bareheaded but wrapped in a heavy coat, sat on the buckboard, smoking a cigar. “Easy, Sarah,” he said, and the horse was still. He took the cigar out of his mouth. “I prefer June deliveries,” he said.

My brother and I said nothing. He carefully tapped some ashes on the floor of the wagon. “You are the father, sir?” he said to me.

I nodded.

“I thought so. And this is your first?”

I nodded again.

“Mmm.” He took a meditative puff. “Cold for December,” he observed.

We agreed it was. Very cold.

He nodded. We were silent for a moment. “Well, gentlemen,” he said, “what do you say we go in and join the ladies?”

I had never thought of myself as one of those unfortunate souls condemned to stand, all observant, on the shore of the moment, but never take the leap. I bucked and snorted, plunged and sank. My brother, withdrawn inside himself, increasingly layered in reserve, was the one I would have chosen for that fate. He was the one whose temperament left him only half-present at any event, the one who ran the considerable risk of only knowing life at one remove.

And yet, in the months before, when I had tried to think about what it might mean to have a child, it had felt as though I were imagining it for someone else. The more I pinched myself, the less I felt it. I had been happy when Addy told me, of course. I had snatched her in my arms, even danced a few steps around the parlor (my brother sweeping along with us, grinning as though I had just won a foot race), but in my heart I had felt as though this thing had little to do with me. I was like a guest at a banquet given in honor of some distant acquaintance. Though pleased
for him, I saw no need to get exercised over it. It was good news. Everything was fine. But dinner was waiting.

It was no different now. Left alone downstairs (Sallie and the doctor having disappeared into the upstairs bedroom), Eng and I busied ourselves as best we could, walking out to the shed for more wood, stoking the fires, petting the dogs … When Addy’s cries began to grow harsh and raw, exploding from her like steam under pressure, my brother tried to reassure me, assuming, naturally enough, that I was suffering as he was. I thanked him, touched by his concern, reassured him in turn. If it hadn’t been for the fact that he obviously needed my help and support, I could have used the time for any number of tasks. To fix the door to the pantry, for example. Or replace the floorboard in the hall. “Should we get more wood?” I would ask, to keep him distracted, and “Why do you think Sam took so long getting back?” Every now and again, the realization of what was happening would flash across my mind like a pheasant bursting from cover—and be gone.

By three o’clock in the morning I couldn’t move. My brother tried to talk to me. I couldn’t answer. A profound despair—a gray November dusk—had settled over me. I had never felt so alone, so utterly orphaned. I knew now it could never be. Something would go wrong. The seed would turn. And suddenly I realized (as I never had before, in a flash of truth like steel on flesh) that the moment would come, inevitably, when I would cease to be. And for a moment—just one moment—this seemed like the saddest thing in the world to me.

And then we heard voices and the bedroom door was open and Gideon Weems was handing me a blanket wrapped around a face as small and blotched as a windfall fruit. “A son,” I heard him say, and, hardly breathing, I stroked his cheek with the back of my finger and he looked at me out of eyes as swollen and red as my own and wouldn’t look away. And in that moment the father was reborn in the image of his son. “You can look at him if you like,” I heard Gideon saying from somewhere far away, “it’s warm enough at the moment,” but by now I was crying ugly and sharp as a child, my body shaking with the kind of sobs that can look so much like laughter, and someone came to take him
from my arms—trying to help, I suppose—but I wouldn’t let them. I held him for a long time. Nor did I take him from his blanket. I had no need to see him, you see, to know that he was perfect.

And he grew, my boy. An independent and curious soul, precocious and straight, he seemed to emerge from the womb intent on making up his own mind about things, on quietly, and without any undue fuss, going his way. If the proffered finger suited his plans as he toddled, bow-legged, across the wooden floor, he took it; if not, nothing could induce him. It was a quality he never lost. When I whipped him (as I did often, those first few years until he was eight or so), we both understood that the exercise had nothing to do with changing his mind. He’d look at me sometimes, after I had carried out my fatherly duty and he was pulling up his britches, and it was as though he were saying, “I know you have to do this, because it’s written somewhere, but you and I both know it won’t make a bit of difference.” Indeed, at times, despite the tears he’d smear irritably across his cheek with the heel of his palm (tears that never failed to trouble me, despite my brother’s admonitions to be firm), I almost felt he was sorry for me. He loved me. And he knew I’d lose, eventually.