Chaneysville Incident (42 page)

“There’s nothing to share,” I said. “Nothing that’s any good.”

“Then share the bad. You’re hurting, John; you need help.”

“I need no help,” I said.

“Oh, yes, you do. You need it. And you want it. That’s part of what you’re afraid of, needing me to help. You’d rather get your help out of a bottle.”

I just looked at her.

She didn’t say anything.

I took my cup and got up and went to the door and opened it. The snow was falling gently but steadily; the woodpile was hidden now, and the limbs of the trees looked like the shadows of the weight of snow they bore. They creaked with the weight of it. I threw the rest of the coffee out into the whiteness and watched it stain the snow. It steamed for a moment, and then it froze. I turned back inside and shut the door.

“Go home,” I said. “You don’t belong here. Go home.”

She didn’t say anything, just watched me as I went to the stove and pulled the kettle over the heat. I could feel her eyes on me, but I did not turn around; I just stood and waited until the water boiled, and then I took down the sugar and the bottle and made myself a toddy. When it was made I went and sat down again and sipped it. I did not look at her.

“When’s the next bus?” she said.

History is a dinosaur. To precisely what genus and species it belongs is difficult to say—possibly it is a triceratops, but most likely it is a brontosaurus, a large, gray-green thing, so large and cumbersome that to the uninitiated, its head appears to be in only vague and intermittent contact with its tail. It is cold-blooded, taking whatever warmth and passion it might possess from its surroundings. It is so far-flung of extremity and so limited in terms of central nervous capacity that, while it may have some dim sense of purpose, its movements are effectively aimless. It is, in general, slow-moving, but its speed may vary; at times it seems to leap forward with a velocity that fools the eye, at times it seems not to be moving at all. But it does move. Always. And always forward. And as it goes it knocks over everything in its path, not out of malice, or even out of indifference, but simply because it is too ponderous and stupid to notice. It is a minor miracle that history is not, like the other Great Lizards, extinct. But there are strong indications that this will soon be the case.

Reasonably enough, given the antediluvian nature of the beast, the study of history is based on the assumptions of antiquity. In fact, the basic tenets of “modern” historical study have their roots in the writings of the Greeks (Herodotus, recognizing history’s saurian nature, wrote lucidly of the crocodile), and there have been no recent branchings of any great significance since the good old days of the seventeenth century.

Those were the salad days of history. William Shakespeare dusted off the
Chronicles
of Raphael Holinshed and proceeded to turn history into popular fare. Ben Jonson followed suit. That started a ratings war. Marston, Dekker, Middleton, Heywood, Webster, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, and Ford all took up the pen, and soon it was history, history, history, Greek history, Roman history, Scottish history, English history, everybody’s history, in prime time and on every network, not just PBS. Of course, these playwrights paid about as much attention to research as the average TV producer does; but then came Isaac Newton.

Newton was, as many experts will tell you, the founder of the science we call physics. And it is true that, during a rather idle youth and while on an undesired sabbatical from Cambridge (the university was closed for a few years on account of political difficulties), Newton did amuse himself with “discovering” the law of gravitation, the laws of motion, the fundamental principles of optics, which led to the idea that light was composed of discrete particles or corpuscles, and for a bit of comic relief, the fundamentals of the calculus of variations, all of which we have come to associate with the physical sciences. However, these discoveries were of far greater importance to history than to science, a fact that, while probably not obvious to either the layman or the scientist, or perhaps even the historian, was certainly appreciated by Newton himself, who, in his later years, referred to mathematics and physics as “recreations” and turned his mature attention to questions of history; in particular, to the fundamental problem of chronology.

This did not indicate, as many have supposed, a change in the direction of Newton’s intellectual thrust. For the basis of both seventeenth-century science and seventeenth-century history was the same. There was a single, fundamental assumption: that every event has a preceding cause and a proceeding effect. To that assumption there were two major corollaries. First, that each event was discrete: separate and, given sufficient accuracy of measuring instruments, separately visible from both cause and effect. (In historical terms, this means that it occurs at a specific point in time, that it can be dated—that it is, in other words, an incident.) Second, that while cause and effect might appear to be broad, vague, and diffuse entities, they were, in fact, vectors: the sum total (in terms of both magnitude and direction) of a very large number (possibly an infinite number) of events—or incidents.

Things, of course, changed rapidly for the physicists. In two hundred years they had abandoned the corpuscular theory of light for the more complicated wave theory and then, eventually, wedded the two in quantum mechanics. Still later, Heisenberg came mouthing the heresy that one could not look at an event without changing it, which offended nearly everybody, including Einstein. But he didn’t offend the historians; they ignored him.

We still do. We still believe that, by whatever haphazard means, the past is created, fixed; that its understanding depends on finding out exactly when whoever did whatever to whomever. Some of us get a little crazy about it, but most of us have learned to accept the idea that we will never know everything, so long as we labor here below. But we also believe in Historians’ Heaven: a firmly fixed chamber far removed from the subjective uncertainties of this mortal coil, where there is a gallery of pictures of the dinosaur taken constantly from every angle, and motion pictures, and cross sections. And we believe that if we have been good little historians, just before they do whatever it is they finally do with us, they’ll take us in there and show us what was
really
going on. It’s not that we want so much to know we were right. We
know
we’re not right (although it would be nice to see exactly how close we came). It’s just that we want to, really, truly, utterly, absolutely, completely, finally,
know.

Except one wonders. One wonders if Newton really turned away from physics and took refuge in the immutable past because, as some suggest, no one could agree whether he or Leibniz was first to discover the calculus, or if it was something deeper; if it did not have something to do with the fact that there was a problem that he could not solve with classical mechanics, something ordinary and observable, something that he should have been able to figure out: the motion of a fluid in an excited state—the motion of water around the prow of a punt, the movement of air around a candle flame—turbulence. Maybe he ran against that one and turned away. Maybe he suspected, looking at his candle or his lamp, using the light to work out his equations, that there was something in it that made everything he was doing suspect. It had to bother him. Because it bothers historians now.

There were two of them. They were rectangular, three inches by five, and white (although the second one was a bit yellowed), with ten thin light blue lines and one red one at the top. The numbers were neatly placed in the upper left corner, and the letters were ranged below, centered as much as possible. I had used india ink, and the dates and words seemed to leap off the white surface, even in the uncertain lamplight, tearing events loose from their surroundings, an incident isolated and pure. In the year of our Lord 1890, in the ninth month, on the twentieth day (exact time unknown), a son was born to Cora Alice (née O’Reilly) and Lamen Washington. In the year of our Lord 1958, in the eighth month, on the seventh day (exact time unknown, although it was certainly not before three in the afternoon, probably not before six, and perhaps as late as sundown), that son departed this life. In the intervening years, he carried out the normal activities of men: he had at least one woman, whom he married, but one suspects he had others, whom he did not; he had two known children, both acknowledged, both legitimate; he made money, ate food, drank water and whiskey; of that there is evidence aplenty; one assumes he urinated and defecated. His life had the same amount of meaning that the lives of other men have; it was of vital interest to some, of great irrelevance to most. The significance was on the second card: his death, unlike that of most men, had significance. Or at least he had intended it to be so, had imbued it with meaning and wanted someone—me—to puzzle that meaning out. And I had come with my methods and my training and written it down, in india ink on a white file card. It floated there before me, in black and white. And it meant nothing.

I heard a sound behind me; the cot creaking. For a minute I was confused, and thought that it was Old Jack come back from the dead to give me some guidance. But it was not; it was only Judith.

“What are you doing?” she said. Her voice was clear and the sentence was fully formed; she had been awake, lying, waiting, watching me, for a long time.

“I’m failing,” I said. I took up another card. In the year of our Lord 1907 in the third month, Moses Washington appeared in a small town located in the Allegheny Mountains, on the Raystown Branch of the Juniata River, a tributary of the Susquehanna. He had advertised his arrival by taking up station on a stone bench in the town square and dispensing, to all and sundry, farmer and laborer and idler and judge, cupfuls of home brew whiskey that went down as smooth as an oyster and packed a kick like a mule. I reached out and turned the second card face up and looked at it. It still meant nothing.

“You know,” she said, “I’ve never seen you work before.”

“Of course you have,” I said.

“No,” she said. “No, I haven’t. I’ve seen you writing and going through books and making notes, and I’ve heard you lecture. But I’ve never seen you struggle with anything before.”

“Struggling,” I said, “is like defecation. It’s natural and necessary, but it’s vulgar, and ought to be done in private. Polite people don’t even mention it.” I wished she would be quiet and let me
think.

“You know who you remind me of?” she said. “My mother. She has some very precise ideas about what constitutes proper behavior. When I was little she just gave orders, but when it was time for me to go to boarding school she sat me down and laid out the rules for proper behavior for young upper-class ladies. You know what the first one was?”

“No,” I said. It wasn’t like her. Usually she knew when I did not want to talk.

“Never do anything that might work up a sweat.”

“I see,” I said.

“It’s not the same as struggling,” she said, “but it’s close.”

“Yeah,” I said. I picked up the next card. In the year of our Lord 1910 (exact date unknown), the man calling himself Moses Washington invaded the back room of the general store then run by Walter Jackson Hawley, the venue of a perpetual and only occasionally crooked poker game, there making the acquaintance of John “Old Jack” Crawley, shoeblack, free-lance political adviser, and Joshua “Snakebelly” White, itinerant laborer and albino. I looked back to the second card; it still made no sense.

“You know,” she said, “I always thought the two of you would get along.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I wish you’d meet her. I think she’d like to meet you. I don’t think she’s terribly happy about us, but I think she might be ready—”

“What did you do,” I said, “tell her I only drink the best bourbon?”

She didn’t say anything to that, but you couldn’t have called the result silence; it was too thick for that. I turned over another card, not sticking with the order anymore; I wasn’t getting anywhere that way. In the year of our Lord 1942, in the seventh month, Moses Washington was assigned to the 92nd Infantry Division, an all-black unit officered by white Southerners (because they
understood
negroes), which served in Italy, losing three thousand men and collecting 1,300 Purple Hearts, one of them his, 162 Bronze Stars, two of them his, and 65 Silver Stars, one of them his. And the second card still made no sense.

I heard her get up and come up behind me. Her hands reached out and touched me, kneading my shoulders. “What are the numbers?” she said. “Dates?”

“Yes,” I said. I turned the cards face down. She took her hands away.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

“No,” I said. “I just couldn’t stand to look at them anymore.”

“Sure,” she said.

“I’ll explain it if you want,” I said.

She hesitated.

“It’s not terribly complicated, anyway,” I said. “Each card lists an incident. The number in the corner is the date as precisely as I can figure it. Twelve digits: four for the year, two for the month, two for the date, four for the hour and minute. You don’t often get it down that close, but sometimes you can, or at least to morning or afternoon. The cards are color coded, according to scope of event. The gold ones are international, the red national; those are pretty standard. The orange ones are more restricted in this case: those are events that took place in Pennsylvania. The blue ones are local.”

She was kneading my shoulders again.

“The cards don’t really do anything,” I said. “They just help to order events. No suppositions or connections. No cause and effect.”

“Why?” she said.

“Why what?”

“Why not causes?”

“Because that’s what history is all about,” I said. “Finding out what happened and then figuring out why. The first part’s harder than it sounds. The second part is even harder than that. Because there are a whole lot of things that look like direct causes that aren’t, and a whole lot of things that are causes that you’d never think of. So you set up the cards, and you read through them and read through them until you’ve gotten them pretty much memorized, but while you’re doing that things occur to you. Part of it’s just deduction. Maybe you see that the legislature instituted a severe sentence for a particular type of crime, and that tells you that you ought to check on the possibility that there were a lot of such crimes going on at the time. But there’s more to it than reasoning….”