Alternate Generals (17 page)

No warning shot heralded the moment when the world spun itself out from under him, papers scattering, pen tumbling from a hand suddenly gone slack. His every anchor was sucked away, chains slipping through limp fingers, pulled inexorably far and farther from his grasp in the great outrunning tide. He'd held on then for as long as he could, fought the damned thing, called for aid only when he realized there was no wise choice but to summon other souls to back him against this strongest, strangest, subtlest of foes. His secretary Ann Whitman hurried in, stood there stunned for just a moment when she saw him collapsed in his chair, gabbling, half-formed words sliding off his tongue. Ann, who could share the bounty of his laughter, bear the eruption of his rages . . . to have her see him like this! But what choice did he have? What choice?

Ann, the good soldier: Loyal as any man in his command, she put aside her shock, snapped back into full capability, as always ready to serve him, save him. She got Goodpaster from the next office, he was the one who got the old man to bed. There was no pain, then. As he lay where Goodpaster had left him, still smarting from the shame of Ann having been the first to see him brought low, he heard the call go out for a medic. Dr. Snyder came at once, summoned other doctors, a council of war that promptly shut its doors against him while they conferred, just as if he were only a stretch of disputed terrain.

By God, let them try it!

His anger is as fresh now as it was the instant he realized they'd changed him from their President to their ward. Time finds no place to hook its ordered days into his mind. All times are one to him, events a tumble of bright crystals in the barrel of a brass kaleidoscope, unchanged themselves, changing only in the falling out of their eternally disordered patterns. He sits on the glassed-in porch at Gettysburg and lies in the White House bedroom and it is
then
for him just as it is
now
. His hands are in his lap, resting palms upward, the fingers slightly curled, but at the fierceness of his indignant memory he almost calls up enough power to force them closed. Almost. They tremble and release and that is all.

It was different then, when the doctors and their private confabulations were more than just shards of memory careening through his jumbled thoughts.
Then
he found his strength again soon enough to get up from the bed where they'd beached him, present himself in robe and slippers before the startled eyes of the doctors and Mamie and their son John, and grin to see the look of horror on their faces to see him standing there just as if nothing had happened at all.

Nothing. There was the joke of it, the laughter that crumbled to cold ash in his throat. When he tried to speak, to tell them that he was well, that he had a state dinner to attend, that there was no need to send Nixon in his place, nothing came out of his mouth but gibberish, a scramble of sound that finally choked to a halt in silence. And in the red rage that flamed up inside him at the body's treason, that flung itself against the cold bars of his mind's captivity, something happened, something as small as the snap of a twig. Something stole past the sentries of his senses without the honest, piercing pain of the heart attack that had struck him just over a year ago. It whispered softly in his ear:
Enough. Rest.
Anger and indignation stood with him only for a breath as his body swayed crazily in a black wind no one but himself could feel, then they were torn away into the gale's shrieking heart and he fell into the dark.

Now here he sits, a bead on a wire, a little counter marking off his place in the strands of hours and days and weeks. They pass over him as they will, differing only as far as their patterns of light and shadow, heat and cold, the austere white of winter sometimes spattered with the clownish colors of Christmastime, the gold of summer stained with the gray of rain. How many years? How many lost?

If I cannot attend to my duties, I am simply going to give up this job. Now that is all there is to it.

Whose words were those and where had they come from? Are they his? Yes, his. But they were words that were more than thoughts, words spoken aloud, strong and clear, before the second stroke cut off his command of speech.
Aloud!

Aloud? He tries to speak. He cannot even whisper. He's been so long without the sound of his own voice that it's become no more to him than a doubtful memory. Did he ever truly hand down that calm, well-considered decision between the attack of one stroke and the next? Or had his assailant even given him that much time to speak? Were those words uttered only in a dream—waking or sleeping, no difference there for him any more, no matter—afterwards?

I should have resigned.

The thought is there with a frightful clarity, bright as any light from heaven on the Damascus road. It is almost like a revelation of the old days, when there were no ghosts or winding paths or cold and empty places in his skull. Its vigor dismays him; he is not used to the vitality of his thoughts as they were before.

He lets his head bow forward, looks down at his hands. Shadows from the tree outside the porch pour through the glass, stain the palms with unmoving shadows. There is no wind, not even the prayer of a breeze to stir the branches, shift the shadows, and yet he hears the rush of air across a great water and sees the chop of Channel whitecaps cupped in his hands. The sky rumbles with planes, earth creaks and moans like an old house under the burden of falling shells, bursts into a bitter roar of grief where they strike. Men's eyes surround him, waiting for a word, and he gives it, and they go out across the water to take the beach because he says it must be so.

Beyond the walls of glass the bees are hovering above the flowerbeds Mamie planted, little dots of black and gold diving into the scented, honeyed heart of the blossoms. Even from here he can see the frilled petals tremble, white and yellow, pink and red. He thinks he hears the cattle lowing in the pasture, the herd of purebred Angus that is still his pride.

He is walking in the pasture now, a flower in his hand. His mind is clear of any desire to question how he comes to be walking, after so long confined to the bed, the chair, the capable strength of his several nurses. He accepts this change without question because his world no longer holds fast to
then
and
now
and
someday
. Sometimes a man must act without looking anywhere but straight on. A general must look ahead and choose the path he'll send others to tread. If he looks back, what will he see? Boys at study, boys at play, mothers holding their infant sons close to the breast, fathers smiling down into the cradle.

I should have resigned.

The pasture is a minefield, every crater in it holds an empty cradle. If he goes on, he knows that he will see worse sights than these.

He goes on.

They are waiting for him on the hillside, a gathering of tall men in fine wool uniforms with shining, polished boots and the bearing of kings. He strokes his naked cheeks, feeling somewhat ill at ease to come clean-shaven into the midst of so many lush beards and noble sets of whiskers. Their eyes meet his with kindness, but their lips remain small, untouched by smiles. He knows that he is welcome, even if they welcome him to a place and time that can hold nothing but duty and death.

There is a stand of trees on the hill; he thinks they might be oak even as he knows that it doesn't matter. The words that cherish differences between tree and tree, man and man, have no place here. The sheltering oak that draped the poet's house in shade, its trunk the trysting place where he first kissed his lost sweetheart, that tree is now nothing more than an objective, a target against which the generals must hurl men. The boy who fished the backwoods stream with string and pin at only six years old, who brought fat trout home to the black cast iron frypan and his mother's praises, her scrubwater-chapped hands stroking the smoothness of his dark hair, that boy is now a man who will try to take the objectives of the generals' field and—perhaps, likely, at a hazarded guess—die.

I should have resigned.

He is shaking hands with the generals on the hillside, nodding greetings to those who remain higher up, on the hill's crest, too rapt in what they see in the lowland farther away to bother with the social niceties. Their uniforms are dark blue with bright buttons, snipped from a midnight sky, stars and all. There are keen, solid swords or the dashing sweep of sabers at their belts. Some wear hats that shade their eyes from the summer sun, others break with dignity to remove them and wipe the sweat from their brows. One holds a tattered leatherbound Bible in his hand.

The old man can smell their sweat even over the more pleasing reek of manure in the cow pasture. How can the smell of cowpats remain when the pasture itself is gone? Before he can begin to seek the answer, his sense of smell is hit hard by the sharp invasion of burned black powder, the tang of hot iron as clouds of gray smoke rise up from the unseen lands beyond the hill.

He starts forward, drawn by the smoke's voluptuously rising cloud as if it were a siren's song made visible. The ground beneath his feet is firm, yet he hears the deep boom of artillery passing through both air and earth, and he knows that by rights he should feel the guns' impact as well as hear it. Wildly he thinks,
It's my age. My illness. The senses play tricks on me, turn traitors, all of them. And yet . . . here I am, on my feet once more, alert. No. Illusion. Impossible.

Yet knowing how impossible it all is, he still goes on.

A hand grasps him by the arm. The gentle slope beneath his feet turns sharply up to form a wave of turf that blocks his view of smoke and sky and sun. For a dozen breaths he stares at the ragged green grass of summer inches from his eyes, the soil that teems with life in the teeth of the guns, then slowly turns around.

It's one of the blue-coated generals who has detained him. The man is an imposing figure despite the thinning of his steel-gray hair. His silver-shot beard is neatly trimmed, but in a way that tells of military precision rather than worldly vanity, and the eyes that shine behind the wire-rimmed glasses burn an icy blue. He has the sort of nose that would look well in profile on an ancient Roman coin, though his eyes hold too much melancholy to serve him as a Caesar.

Hope
, the old man thinks, regarding the bearded general's dour face critically.
Where's the look of hope you owe your troops, the optimism? We've got to have it, hold it for their sake. It's our obligation as their leaders, the least we can give them when we're asking them for so much. Hope against hope, but with the reality of the situation tight in our grasp, that's what we've got to give them, that's what command is all about. Showing a face that tells the boys
We can win!
and holding back a face like yours with a look that tells them outright what they already suspect, fear, flee:
You're bound to die.
But who here'd have the guts to tell you as much to your face? If I could speak— But you would never listen, would you, General Meade? No, not you.
And he stands once more on the rocks and stony ridges of this very battlefield and hears Montgomery's elegantly accented, supremely arrogant voice pronouncing the hindsight judgment without appeal that Meade ought to have been sacked, and Lee along with him.

But Monty's gone, and this is not the Gettysburg where two former commanders of another war strolled at leisure among the monuments, blind to the dead. The old man realizes that he's slipped somehow into the hairline fissures that snake along the boundaries of world and world. He's never had much use for such notions. Vision and imagination that allow a general to guide a battle yet to be fought don't necessarily impose the presence of dreams on him as well. The old man comes from a long line of pragmatists, honest, solid citizens, men who knew their business, and yet . . .

The general is speaking to him. "Don't go over the hill," Meade says, and it's not a request at all. The cold blue eyes can flash from gloom to wrath at a word. "Your place is here, with us: Command, not combat."

The old man hears him, sees his lips move, but the words don't seem to reach his ears as anything but sound without true meaning. He feels himself slipping back into the shell of skin he left behind him on the glassed-in porch. Another face is inches from his own, another mask than Meade's. The male nurse is smiling, asking him if he'll be wanting his lunch soon, not expecting any answer. The nurse talks to him the way he'd talk to a goldfish. The old man doesn't blame him; men need to talk, and men on solitary duty need to hear the sound of their own voices if only because noise has always kept the demons at bay. But talk to yourself and they'll lock you up, even when you desperately need to get the words out before they burn away your soul.

The nurse's face retreats, melting away General Meade's with it. Montgomery's outspoken ghost lingers awhile in the wake of their departure but the wind that blows across the Channel soon sweeps it off as well. Foam washes over the old man's feet in their leather bedroom slippers. He feels the water's chill, though summer has come to France. He stares into the pearly foam, surveys the pale sand that still awaits the first bloody assault out of the sea, and foam and sand blend pallors until they form the sheet of slick white paper under his hand.

He is writing again, his fingers steady around the pen. He sits alone at a table, a terrible burden of unsaid words bowing his back, all of them born out of thoughts that don't bear thinking. He lets them escape the only sane way, as ink on paper. He has made the decision that will be D-Day. Now he is writing an apology.

I should have resigned.

He looks up from the blank sheet before him and his eyes see only darkness. So many decisions made, so many paths rejected, so many possibilities still to be sorted through. But when shadows conspire to conceal every way your feet might carry you, when you're left as good as blind, then how can you choose any path at all? He's given an order conceived according to the best of his knowledge. What does he really know? Too much. Too little. His own power combined with the burden of harm his ignorance might do is an insight that threatens to break him.