Red Man's Will

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

PART I

LIFE ON MARS

PART II

SNOWDEN’S WAR

PART III

THE END OF THE WORLD

PART IV

RED MAN’S WILL

TOUJOURS P

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The principals in Red Man’s Will are fictional and any resemblance to any real person is unintended. But they now and then share the stage with such historical figures as Percival Lowell, Archibald McIndoe, Hans Ulrich Rudel, and assorted Nazi fugitives. Much of the story is set in the real world, although the reader will look in vain for a Cordelia near Arizona’s Verde River, or Cerro Soldado Southern Observatory in the Andean foothills east of La Serena. Our narrator tells his story from a place much like Le Rochay, the Breton family home of our good friend Hervé Carré, whom I thank for the use of the premises.

Alexandria, Virginia

PROLOGUE

When he slept the fire returned, a terrible vermillion flower that bloomed in his memory. He saw its tentative illumination dart among the dark shadows behind the scuffed shine of the rudder pedals, the instrument panel glowing from within, like the door of a furnace. Luminous creepers filled the cockpit in a sudden exflorescence, enfolding his little world in flame. The cry of engine noise, the gale of slipstream where his dying ship wallowed and fell, inverted, the abrupt lightening of the impossibly heavy controls as ailerons and elevators, then wingtips and empennage, flaked away, the shearing scream that meant the end of everything, even the blessed darkness that had leapt, cool and eternal, to his rescue at the end—all were silenced beneath this swaddling of fire.

Its wings mere ragged stumps protruding from a smoking sphere of orange light, his airplane had Catherine wheeled down and down toward the neat farmlands of the Danube plain, its cockpit stinking of fuel and hot metal and every bloody thing in the periodic table, flickering now green, now a soft blue, now a yellow-tinted flare of blinding white where magnesium suddenly combusted. The bubbling rubber of his oxygen mask placed an everlasting kiss upon his skin; fire foraged through his clothing like a thief, producing a curiously tolerable pain where it robbed his bones of flesh.

When he slept the fire returned . . .

He knew it was a dream of dying. Often it seemed to him that the dreamed death had been real and that he had returned to life as someone else, a man defined by a cocoon of ruined skin and what he supposed must be a vast, thickly padded white bandage over much of his body, even over his eyes, which had no lids, which had stuck, as he put it to himself, on open. He had been reincarnated as the Michelin man, he would tell himself, because cracking jokes, like being able to spit, meant that you were not afraid in a world that had begun to terrify.

His remains clamored with pain beyond a thin, protective wall of morphine—there was never quite enough to quiet it entirely. Sometimes the membrane parted and the hurt poured in, like sound rushing into silence. Then, somehow, the breached anesthetic wall would be repaired before the intrusion finished him.

But even a wrapper of pain had its uses. It was a kind of moat against further exploration, a sea he didn’t dare to cross. He did not speculate about the vanished face, the probability of blindness, fused fingers, webs of molten dermis like the exoskeleton of an insect still unformed. He would not think of sex. He existed, he thought, like another kind of creature, burned into another species that lived among drifts of white bandage and a blackened crust of tannic acid and morphia, somehow maintained in that simple, immobile state.

Any other life was inconceivable.

Slowly, reasoning out his new existence, he realized that one could live as he did only in a medical setting. He began to wonder where his remains had come to rest. He listened for signs from beyond the barriers of his rather perfect world and soon heard the clink of glass, the passing rattle of trolleys and metal trays, the terrored exclamations of dreaming boys, no doubt restored by sleep to some fire of their own. He sensed occasional human contact with his infinite white body, when the wall cracked and admitted the pain; he found it mysterious and wonderful that he could be touched at all, so abstract did he seem to himself. He heard muted, melancholy voices speaking German, and, in the sadly matter-of-fact chorus of the field hospital, he heard for the first time the voice of Eva Stern.

She spoke in a low, controlled way that he believed must be secretly musical, a latent soprano that would unexpectedly burst into the sweetest of songs one day, when things were happier for her. Grüss Gott, she would say to everyone each time she made her transit of the place, so that, listening to her greetings, he was able to sound the space. He thought it must be a narrow, crowded room.

The other German voices were mostly male, mostly expressions of pain or despair; there seemed to be fewer every day. They were brought here to die, then hauled away for burial or cremation—the idea of yet another fire caused him almost to lose consciousness. But he somehow remained, a white abstraction on some intermediate stratum of vitality, where, he decided, he was not supposed to be.

Ich bin Doktor Stern, she’d told him in her wonderful voice. He thought she must have told him everything before, when he had waited underground deciding whether to return to life. She reminded him that he’d crashed during the big raid on March 12th. Sie war einer der letzten. It had been one of the last. A pause. He imagined her looking toward the southeast, toward the almost infrasonic rumble of approaching Russian artillery. Die Russen sind ganz nahe, she told him. Yes, they were very near. He was in the Volksopern Lazarett, on the Gürtel, but not for long. Bald ziehen wir an eine bessere Stelle. He wanted to tell her he knew they wouldn’t be moving him anywhere, except to heaven; well, that was definitely a bessere Stelle. A better place. Sad to say, she would just have to wait for him to die.

At first, he regretted his inability to will his life into the ether, where it clearly belonged, and get it over for her—his hanging on only made her hard life harder. But then he began to sense that she wanted him to live. Once, while she worked gently at his bandages, her voice caught and he knew that she had parted his disguise and seen what the fire had done. In that instant’s hesitation, in her sharp intake of breath, he felt her empathy like an embrace . . . and something more—her keen wish that he survive. Her unspoken expectation buoyed him up. When he slept he began to relax into the arms of her unstated but palpable concern. The fire could not reach him there; somewhere in the hiss of his falling airplane he now heard her distant, imaginary song.

One night he awoke to hear her murmuring to someone in the next bed, in a careful English, and detected that same urging toward life. It brought him a moment’s envy, thinking of her wanting life for some American or British boy burned or wrenched into an abstraction. There, Jacob, she would say, there. Soon is having you good again. Soon is going home to America.

The boy only moaned, heedlessly, perhaps a little selfishly— his repeated, wordless question was not Why?; it was Why me? Because of your selfishness, thought the Michelin Man beside him, and gave another of his internal laughs, careful not to let it reach the bandaged surface. Of course, he acknowledged, had he not been muffled the world might fill with his complaint, too. Everybody was selfish when Death came round.

The ward would suspend in its nocturnal stillness for a time, until the pool of morphia in which Jacob was floating dried up, causing him to chatter nervously from inside his own evil dream, and finally to cry out, awake and hurting. In a way, this American boy’s cycle of fear and oblivion brought order to one’s ward existence, and, listening, Michelin Man felt his own consciousness begin to coalesce around the pitch of his frightened neighbor. But he could not quite fix himself there— it was as if the boy and Fraulein Stern were strolling away together, their voices descending toward silence. Soon the only sound from the bed was a rattled breathing and her diffident, There, Jacob, there. Her presence seemed to fill the little universe while she hovered over this lost American boy—and over him as well, an exhausted angel to them both.

Next morning, crossing the flaming moat around his sleeping, he was struck by a new and deeper silence. For a moment he thought he had died, again. Then, coming as fully awake as he ever did there, he realized that the silence flowed from the boy, who was no longer breathing. He heard Fraulein Stern summon a colleague, then the usual sounds of a dead boy being hauled away. After that, the ward was so quiet that he decided everyone else had finally died, and he might have followed them, except that now, more emphatically than ever, he felt her spirit urging him to live.

He longed to speak to her, but his lips had been literally sealed except for a small aperture through which someone inserted the glass straw that fed and watered him. His only word was a kind of whistled exhalation: Swee. He gave her his little whinny to show he was alive inside his bandages.

He wondered what she looked like, whether she was other than the blonde Viennese beauty her voice conjured for him. When they fidgeted with his bandages and medicated the scorched paste that had once been his eyelids, he could discern blurred shifts of light and darkness, and a pale ghost that might have been Eva Stern.

He imagined how she must rise in the morning, shake the dust of sleep away, have tea or coffee if there was any left in Vienna, bathe—he diffidently raced past her imagined toilette, not wanting too much detail—then the hurried run to the tram, if any still ran in Vienna. No doubt they were horse-drawn by now, if any horses remained to pull them. Was she dressed as a sister? Was there a Herr Stern? She seemed to have authority; of course, she was a doctor.

To him, Vienna was a target of deformed concentric circles—the Ringstrasse, the Gürtel—fragmented into black and white briefing photographs pinned on a yellow map. Vienna had always appeared to him through ragged breaks in mid-level clouds, the narrow Danube the color of muddy steel, looping on its southern bank in a canal that cut through the city, slicing off a trapezoid of warehouses, oil storage tanks, rail yards—an island of industry, a magnet for bombers. He remembered the green parks with their monolithic concrete flak towers, the black flowers blooming ahead of the bombers. For a moment he would see the rising trajectories of tracers, the ashen roses of flak upon the sky, a clutch of Messerschmitts and Focke Wulfe’s like exhausted bees defending a ruined hive, too few by now to swarm, merely annoying the great stream of American bombers and their wheeling long-range escorts. At such times, his mind played its magic, and dropped him back into the flames . . .

Eva Stern, he decided, would live on that prominence rising to the south of the custard yellow castle of Schönbrunn, but not in a devastated shell of a flat; she would have a stuccoed house with ancient rose trees writhing up its yellow flanks, the scent of the blood-red flowers dense and sweet upon the air. It would have been her parents’ place. She would have grown up with those rose trees, would have gone to Vienna medical school from there. Inside, the broad, high-ceilinged rooms would be cozily furnished with the Biedermeier and Jugendstil stuff of better times. She lived there alone—he was no longer willing to imagine a Herr Stern.

When all this was over, she would take him home, her Michelin Man in his bandages, and they would read and listen to the wireless and she would sing in her secret soprano. They would go to the state opera. Like a curing radiation, her happiness would mend him. He would resume his course through the world, but with her on one arm. As the return to fire was a dream of dying, he often cautioned himself, this was a dream of future life—improbable, fantastic, but better in its way than morphia.

The Lazarett remained empty of despairing voices. When she came each day, there was only the one Grüss Gott, for him. The windows had been opened, for he heard the birds with their brilliant, desperate April songs; he also heard the thunder of advancing artillery. He imagined the Soviet troops spreading through Vienna, using their antitank guns like big rifles to smash their way across the shattered northeastern quadrant of the city—often the report and the explosion came only a fraction of a second apart, separated by a terrible zipper noise.

Soon it will be over, she murmured to him in the night. Dear God, soon it will end. The burden of her fatigue moved him profoundly. But all he could reply was: Swee.

They would want to send him to another part of the cosmos in his white wrappings—he would be brought back to life again somewhere else. Without her. He thought he discerned a corresponding stress in her touch, a thread of apprehension in the voice that had held him on the earth. I count on you, she told him at last. If you find it becomes too hard to live for yourself, then live for me. Live and live.

Swee.

One day—it was early morning, for the birds outside were going crazy with song—Fraulein Stern touched him very gently on his bandaged shoulder. Listen, she said in English. All is over. Listen.

Sure enough, the guns were quiet except for the odd snap of a rifle. The city seemed almost to hum with its silence, and, he realized, you could hear a pin drop in the Lazarett—there were others with them. He sensed threatening presences near his bed, and now and then heard an unfamiliar voice; he thought of them as skeletons, a gathering of Deaths, finally come to take him.

All is over, she said to him, her gentle hand still on his bandaged shoulder, the anchor that restrained him, that tethered him to life. Thanks to God.

He searched for her in the textured shadows of his bandaged sight and thought he might have seen her at last— something may have moved. But, no, it was a mere flickering of remembered fire, darting at his memory. Remember, she said, I count on you. Live and live.

Swee! he cried at her, flames rising in his mind.

Now, Jacob, they take you home. To America.

SWEE! SWEE!

To America, she whispered, and took her hand away.

His cockpit filled with flame. It swirled up his legs, his torso, his arms; his vision dimmed within a cloud of searing light. And, deep, deep within the charred abstraction he took to be himself, the remains of his heart cracked audibly. He’d believed it was real. Now he realized that, as he might have suspected, his time with Fraulein Stern had been merely an addendum to the act of dying. Now it was over; now he was dead. Alles ist vorbei. All is over.

PART I

LIFE ON MARS

I

Often, as the grey of our Breton winter lightens to the grey of our Breton spring, the season’s last storms give my skeleton a final plangent shake and sunlight begins to lift the chill from our large, smoky rooms, I think of the world to which Eva Stern consigned her patient— a hot, blue bowl of sky perpetually sheltering the Martian deserts of northern Arizona; a raw and luminous world of almost unimaginable strangeness to a European of her experience and generation. And yet she, her humane impulse, inadvertently penetrated to the very core of that place, setting in motion the game in which I have become one of the last remaining pieces, a final, creaking incarnation, one might say, of that person she created all those years ago.

Now, the few of us who survived her good-hearted intrusion lurch warily through our end game, conscious that just there, beyond the rim of the enormous, nearly empty board that is the life of her Jacob Kingdom, stand all the pieces lost on both sides—a shadowy multitude of them, silent and perhaps also accusing. Of course the board, the context, was not entirely of her making, or even of her unconscious intent; indeed, it had first begun to coalesce around the hopes of Benjamin Kingdom.

These were mainly a wish for adventure and the expectation that there would be enough offspring and grand-offspring to fuel annual gatherings of people great and small, entwined affectionately around their surname and the large house he would provide them. He’d hatched his idea of a tolerable future while still a bachelor engineer just learning to squeeze copper from the modestly endowed Sonoran pits, before he had given Chile a thought, before aea Cyprium, the metal of Cyprus, as he enjoyed calling it, made him rich. In fact, the idea of a robust, close-knit clan was a young man’s talisman against something inbred and frail in the line. His family’s women tended to die in childbirth, and were magnets for any potent germ. The men were just unlucky, especially in war.

Ben had fled that frailty, or tried to, in 1898; he gave up just about everything that had to do with his life as Benyamin Malachi, which he reconstituted into Kingdom for the rudely contented, uniformed men at Ellis Island. He’d possessed enough English to know that, with a name like Malachi you’d end up as Malarkey, or so he liked to say; he took some pride in being one of those Central European wise guys, full of rough proverbs from Bavarian and Austro-Hungarian farmyards. Of his former orthodoxy he retained none, beyond a spectacularly Semitic profile and a wolfish black beard, which he trimmed but never abandoned. If he sensed that God, heartsick at his defection, would be forever looking over his shoulder, he kept it hidden.

He had no degrees but was a natural engineer in the way that his blacksmith father had been, able to see the shapes within the iron, the train of moving parts leading to some desired mechanical outcome, the webs of force in the stability of structures. Engineering had kept Benjamin moving west, into the mines perforating the Rockies, and then into the southern desert, where his forsaken deity had seeded the species of rock called porphyries with copper—beautiful, malleable, conductive, incorruptible. Engineering took him to it; geology compelled him to stay. He marveled at, and took vast pleasure in, the temporal spread of his vocation, the simple but incomprehensible fact that his pick chipped away not so much at rock as at time, and he was a kind of prospecting ant, scrambling over a terrain of epochs.

When the amiable metal had brought him a little money, Ben moved north and staked out ten sections everybody thought were twenty miles too far from Prescott to be valuable. But he loved what copper gave him, the hundreds of acres of high red and grey ground out along the Verde River, the castle rocks and arroyos, the groves of Arizona sycamores with pale-barked limbs writhing like the bared arms of women. He put down his lodgings with care—a compound of white stucco and red tile, roses that would grow to trees, willows near a spring, live-oaks along the curved trail he fashioned from the compound down to the main track into Cordelia, barely a watering stop then for the Santa Fe line between Prescott and Flagstaff and never quite a town.

He rode up to Jerome, that strange vertical community spewing a fortune in copper from shafts cut in cliffs that looked a mile down into the Verde’s gentle valley, for the occasional binge and for whores. There was nothing, he would laugh to his colleagues, like a horizontal woman in a perpendicular town. Why, said one girl, to the general amusement of the house, you’re circumscribed! He caught the train to Prescott for supplies and such more conventional companionship as he thought he should have, and to court tall, slender, golden-haired Miriam Van de Kamp.

To feed his restlessly foraging intellect, however, he turned east and put himself and his buckskin stallion on the train to Flagstaff, where he would clatter off the flatcar and ride up through the pines and fir to have a drink and converse with Mr. Percival Lowell, in what they called the Baronial Mansion up near his new observatory on Mars Hill. They had met at a territorial meeting in Prescott, and, like passing planets, had felt some mutual gravitation. Lowell could still dazzle with his knowledge of the far east, and of nearly everything else. When he characterized Asians as the survival of the unfittest, the authority in his observation was downright thrilling; the man seemed to know about everything, except copper.

In mining, as in astronomy, Benjamin explained, one cannot select a desirable locality—one takes what is there. He told Lowell about the bright grains dispersed in the vast porphyric monolith like nutrients in the vast desert of the sea, the journey of the metal toward his hand across millennia of time—a journey that seemed to him to bind the universe and humanity, not proving God so much as connections. Remember that the Bronze Age was really an age of copper.

This was the kind of thing a man like Lowell appreciated. Not long afterward, as the two men sat before the Mansion’s great stone fireplace, Ben lamented that copper had dropped from 17 to 12 cents a pound. Don’t worry, Lowell told him. My nerves collapse about as often as the price of copper, but here I am, back to 17 cents, as you can see.

Sometimes Ben’s visit coincided with one of the picnics with the staff astronomers and young ladies from Flagstaff, or from the pretty red rocks country to the south, like Mrs. Sedona Schnebly, and visitors from Boston and other great cities. There were celebrities. Ben met Mr. William Randolph Hearst on Mars Hill and Lick Observatory’s Dr. Campbell, the man who destroyed the whole business of an ether, and Bostonians and politicians, people rough and smooth. The year he’d met Hearst, the whole world was furiously debating Lowell’s ideas about the canals he’d seen on Mars, and of the proud race of canal-building engineers who were doomed to lose their long war against their planet’s dessication.

The Mars stuff struck a chord in Ben Kingdom, who believed that a man of Lowell’s upbringing and abilities would know canals if he saw them, and liked it that a superior race of extraterrestrials were engineers—he was one too, after all. The common ground seemed proof of a cosmic intelligence. Indeed, he had seen the canals himself, with Lowell helping him pick out their details in the geometric chimera that appeared and vanished, coalesced and dispersed, in the eyepiece of the 24-inch refractor.

I’m not seeing those canals, Mr. Lowell.

Keep looking, Mr. Kingdom, it will come clear.

You couldn’t look through one of the world’s most powerful telescopes, Ben would say to Miriam or to a fellow-follower of copper in a Jerome saloon, without your heart leaping with fear and admiration for what the human mind could comprehend. He’d known and vastly admired them all— Lowell, Vespo Slipher and old Lampland, the German, and young Tombaugh, who finally discovered Pluto after fourteen years at the blinker.

Benjamin had in mind a world that Lowell might have admired—a race of Kingdoms in that Mars-like valley land by the Verde, where, each year, among the budding cottonwoods and oak and sycamore, there would be brides and freshly minted children to celebrate, the newly dead to mourn, a calamity or two to talk about in hushed voices. He could just see his people; they condensed out of his imagination like figures in a pointillist tableau.

The women would look like Miriam Van de Kamp, and, like her, they would play the piano and carry children with the quiet ease of squaws. The men would be just over six feet tall, as Ben was, formidable in an age when a giant was five foot ten. They would be geologists and physicians and economists, men of the mind but also of the world. They would be physically powerful, as he was—without his shirt Ben might have been carved from the twisted dark wood of a mesquite tree. Years later, he would be moved to recognize his imagined offspring in the faces of Israeli soldiers, before they clouded with the ennui of everlasting war.

They would arrive at the big house, the men charmed and diffident, the women entranced, the children enchanted and sometimes deliciously scared by the wildness of Cordelia, where there were snakes and owls and all kinds of stinging insects, prickly cacti, and a rough, uncharted landscape that might have been the surface of another planet. At night the stars would lower over them like glowing satellites, adding to the strangeness of the place. And, if that was not enough, there were Indians, Apache, Navajo, Hualapai, Hopi, Kaibab—proud and doomed, like Lowell’s Martians.

In those earlier days, when he’d still believed in Lowell’s Martians and in his ability to raise an army of children, Ben had thought of his family when he was out in the Sonora, gathering the geological threads that converged in 1905 at a line of russet hills marking the visible outcroppings of Kingdom Copper’s incomparable Palo Blanco deposit, which began production only a year behind Dr. James Douglas’s Morenci.

Ben had thought of the visiting legions of Kingdoms when he scouted on horseback through the northern Andes, chasing the copper lode that would become Kingdom’s El Caudillo by 1912, a mine two miles high and one deep, as Ben put it, and of a higher rank than Bill Braden’s El Teniente strike east of Rancagua. Of course, by then, Braden was busy up at Potrerillos.

Benjamin Kingdom was in Chile when Slipher finished his studies of what looked like chlorophyll in the spectrum of light reflected from Mars—a discovery that was nine parts loyalty to Lowell, as it turned out—and in 1908, when Percival Lowell, then 53, married Constance Savage Keith in New York. He was still in Chile when the Arizona constitutional convention gathered in 1910—he thought it significant that the event coincided with Chile’s hundredth year of liberation—and on the Valentine’s Day in 1912 when Arizona became the 48th state.

In 1913, a letter from Lowell reported a good recovery from another nervous collapse: Back to 17 cents a pound. The observatory had embarked on a search for the still-undetected planet whose gravitational hand everyone believed could be seen in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. Running neck and neck with Harvard’s Wm. Pickering on Planet X. Ben heard nothing further until word came of his friend’s death, fifteen years almost to the day after the copper crash of 1901. Of course, by then, copper was just about priceless. The human race couldn’t produce enough copper to supply all those guns in France and Belgium, or so it seemed to Ben. He later boasted about being wrong—that the Copper Men, meaning him and Braden and the others, could produce enough copper for anything.

Still, as his mind touched the business, the miracle, of copper, and of canals on Mars, and the astonishing world he had discovered in the Andes, it also brooded over his imagined family. It must have been high up a Chilean mountain east of La Serena one night, with the stars swarming around him like fairies and the center of the Milky Way like a lighted door to the universe, barely at arm’s length, that Ben decided, perhaps as an offering to the tired deity who seemed always to watch him, to place the Kingdom reunion somewhere near the vernal equinox, when the celestial apparatus began the annual quickening of the north.

At first, Benjamin and Miriam—he married Miss Van de Kamp on his return from Chile in 1917, and later argued that he would have left that beautiful country for no one else—had seemed charmed to multiply as the distant Malachi originals had not. Maurice was born in April 1919, a powerful sign of life after the war and the terrible pulse of flu that swept around the planet. David arrived in 1921. But then the dynastic engine began to seize. Miriam miscarried twice. Saul, her third son, was born in 1923 with his heart drumming in a tangle of blood vessels on his little chest; he endured only a few days.

Jacob burst into the world in 1925, sound of mind and body, robust of voice, and fair, like his mother. Miriam gamely misfired twice, then produced Simon Bernardo, named for the liberators Bolivar and O’Higgins, in 1927. Indeed, Simon’s birth was surrounded by favorable omens, not the least of which was the opening of the fabled Hassayampa Inn in Prescott: If Aladdin had lived in these modern days, opined the Journal Miner in a special edition, he would not have thought of building a palace, but would have commanded the genie to transport him and his fair bride to the Hassayampa Inn. Ben’s heart ached with success.

But he never held those equinoctial gatherings. His familial queries had flown off into oblivion like letters scattered from the stern of a moving ship. Finally, Benjamin Kingdom realized that the big house near Cordelia, far from being the center of a great, connected biomass, was merely a tiny oasis in a vast, empty desert. When Benjamin could remember almost nothing else, he could recall the moment when that realization had pressed itself upon him, and the lonely anomie it had produced. Near the end of his life, when he saw the unpopulated Martian surface in images from the Mariner probe, his flickering memory revived that profound aloneness, that sudden absence of identity, the certainty that he and his little family were alone in a void.

Near the vernal equinox of 1930, the exhausted Miriam, who to the end of her days played the piano and remembered that she’d once carried babies with the quiet ease of a squaw, died giving life to Sarah. Benjamin buried his beloved wife where the stone could be seen from the terrace of the big house, and had the Mexican gardener plant a rose tree over her, that her latent life would be revealed in a fire of red flowers. He had the gardener swear on a crucifix, on pain of eternal damnation, that he’d protect Miriam’s roses from the legion of creatures that would come from all over the American southwest to devour them.

Then Ben walked up the worn trail of red earth from the single grave toward a mob of boulders and pines, where he drew a .32-calibre Belgian automatic and shot himself in the chest. He missed his heart, lungs, and spine. Always at his side, God, as Ben would tell us over and over again, had bumped his elbow. He didn’t want me putting all that stuff on little Sarah, and he was right—well, he often is, I suppose.

But sometimes when the former bitterness gathered round his spirit, he would offer another explanation: His heart had withered into a target so small that no one could have hit it. In fact, he just wasn’t ready for death.

Maurice walked away from the big house in 1937, a beautiful 18-year-old, as Ben would forever describe him, off to Spain and all the other war that gathered on the horizon. He was built along Benjamin’s rough lines, and born to be a Central European wise guy. He took back the surname Malachi—his father wrote him letters that began, My Dear Malarkey—and he wrote his father wonderful, long vernacular narratives of all that touched his life. His last wars were for Israel, a Kingdom of Arizona serving the kingdom of God, Benjamin said, but in a voice drowned in sadness. He had loved Maurice so much, and now all he had were the letters and the jokes and the odd photograph of a son always in harm’s way, always en route to trouble. It hurt Ben as much to lose Maurice, I think, as it had to bury Miriam; but he still wasn’t ready for death.

Benjamin’s hopes fled briefly to his second son, who’d stayed around the Cordelia house until, smelling disapproval, he drifted into the desert north of Tucson, where he lived his whole life in a tin-roofed adobe hovel fenced with the remains of exhausted automobiles people had discarded in the wilderness. An obese, filthy boy, David grew into an obese, filthy man. Everybody in Arizona, it seemed, had heard something unspeakable about his search for a sexual identity. Ben attributed his vulgarity to a feeble mind, but, really, there was no feebleness in him beyond those of character and inertia.

A more energetic man of David’s moral constitution and intelligence would have left a string of mutilated women and children across the land, and escaped detection. But he expended as little energy as was possible for life; good times followed bad, relatives were born, lived, and returned to the ether, the world plunged through famine, pestilence, and war, but David took no notice and was never asked to serve.

The third son, Jacob, had gone off to the Army Air Forces a callow boy in the summer of 1944, a fellow who talked a lot and thought a little, as Benjamin fondly put it, his voice almost as melancholy as it was when he spoke of Maurice. Jacob had become the receptacle of all Ben’s hopes for the Kingdoms— the company, the land, the family, everything. He’d watched with something close to horror as the boy grew up lazy and opaque, a young man who may have had David’s streak of aimlessly self-absorbed evil.

Of course, Ben felt more than horror—he felt an enfeebling love as well, to which he became an eternal hostage. His heart cracked when Jacob went off to war, a disappointing but adored boy who had somehow been trained to fly bombers. Ben never understood how the Army had managed that. The cocky young lieutenant had merely waved and walked away, his heart sealed against his father’s affection.

David, watching from his stockade of abandoned vehicles a hundred-fifty miles south of Cordelia, thought it wasn’t such a bad idea, Jacob flying off to what looked like certain death; only a high attrition among pilots could explain why they’d made him one in the first place. As for little Simon and Sarah— they’d been glad to see their bully go.

II

The walls of my study are lined with the photographs of another family, one less close to me than the Kingdoms, but also, in a way, intimates of mine. When the windows become mirrors in the night, these sepia ghosts hover almost cheerfully about my rusty improvisation of a face, floating on the darkness that runs out like a river between the dark files of poplars. Those images evoke in me the anguish Benjamin Kingdom must have felt as the Second World War came to an end. They are portraits of young Frenchmen in uniform, fresh-faced, mustached, rather haughty, taken early in the century. Some strike poses, show good leg, as they used to say. Some are in polished boots, some in puttees and brown wool. Some sit with their sabres holding up their intertwined fingers. There is a calm ferocity about them that keeps the images alive.

My predecessor in this house never bothered to take them down—perhaps he heard their sad song too—and I haven’t had the heart to remove them; indeed, I would miss them, and would hate myself for being the one who finally caused them to disappear utterly. You see, they belonged to the modestly aristocratic generation that was decimated in a few days’ fighting in August 1914. The Copper Men had satiated both sides, after all. My sepia companions are dead men, and, in the aggregate, a dead family.

They had owned the land for centuries, including the crumbling sixteenth-century tower that anchors the old southern end of the house, which was added, along with a few stone outbuildings, in the 18th century. The more recent extension of enormous, frigid rooms where I spend most of my time was built a hundred years ago. The young poplars marching toward the road behind my Frenchmen’s sad reflections were put in to celebrate our new century. Somehow that vanished line had cleaved to this estate through thick and thin, even through the Revolution; but they were unable to survive the Great War, which, in killing all their young men, ripped the heart and vitality out of the family.

Well, Ben was facing the death of his family, or thought he was, when word came that Jacob had spiralled to earth near Vienna in a ball of fire. The cold hand of death seemed to squeeze him, the old man told us later; it was as if the universe were slowing down, congealing in cosmic ice. That Hans Höbiger had it right about Welteis, he said, the wise guy unable not to crack a joke about Nazi science, because I’m telling you I can hardly move for the ice.

Mostly, the wise guy kept quiet as the father suspended in despair, waiting for Jacob’s fate to change. And then, improbably, it had. In June of 1945, the Army wrote that Jacob had somehow survived his crash, and was in Princess Mary’s Royal Air Force Hospital, Halton, Aylesbury, Berkshire.

Simon and Sarah had thought Jacob’s death too good to be true, and now tried hard not to show their disappointment. They gamely hurried with Benjamin to the Rand McNally, and aided his nervous search among England’s fine crosshatching of village names until Aylesbury popped out, not fifty miles northwest of London. To Ben, the remoteness of this distant, mysterious place, a hospital that might as well have been on Pluto, lent authority to the matter of resurrection—only in such a place could the dead return to life, or so it seemed to him. His destroyed son miraculously reborn, Benjamin felt Höbiger’s cold grip relax and the universe begin to thaw, although it never quite recovered its former warmth.

Fraulein Stern had sent her patient, her Michelin Man, off into a larger, safer world she knew nothing about. Nothing in the charred scraps the real Jacob carried with him had said he was one of the Kingdoms of Cordelia, Arizona, and she would have had little sense of what that meant in any case, beyond what she may have read in a Karl May yarn of the American west. Well, she had been forced to improvise. A squad of Russians, along with an officer each from the Allied armies, had come to the Lazarett and asked if there were Allied casualties there. On impulse, she led them to her young man in white, and gave them a handful of scorched artifacts identifying him as Second Lieutenant Jacob Kingdom of the U. S. Army Air Forces. They had thanked her in the tough way of conquerors and started her patient back toward the west—although not toward his new home.

Swathed in bandages and a dense opiate cocoon, the new Jacob had been taken to an ambulance and driven through the Vienna streets and across the Danube to the Aspern aerodrome, where he heard the terrifying cough of engines and caught the incendiary scent of aircraft. Swee! The flickering variations of light and shadow that were his new keepers gave him enough morphine to propel him out into the void, where he calmly drifted, a Michelin Man full of helium, lulled by the resonant drumming of what he thought must be a Dakota’s engines, or perhaps the murmuring diesels of a heavenly barge. He ascended like a deep diver to the squeak of the plane’s wheels touching down in a light crosswind, one-two, then the tail.

Soon hands were at him again. A chorus.

One of ours, then?

Nah, a Yank.

Then he wants a Yank hospital.

They said we should take him.

The Yanks?

Nah, East Grinstead. Their Ward Three’s choking full, they said.

Well, they missed a grand challenge, didn’t they.

Lucky he’s alive.

If you call that luck.

Well, bad luck, then.

Wouldn’t want to think what he must be, under there.

My nose says he’s a great perished fruit.

Yes, he’s gone very sweet, hasn’t he.

Well, it’s off to Princess Mary’s with you, Yank, and God have mercy.

Jacob, his bandages an ivory blimp full of dream helium, floated miles above such salutations and farewells. Very funny, he would tell himself. Ja, these blokes is very funny. He didn’t care how much fun they had with him, provided it didn’t hurt and there was no fire.

Jesus.

Bright lights now, shadowy figures fluttering over him, the distant feel of bandages being pulled away. A mummy, he thought, would feel more than I do. He imagined the medics unpeeling him to find only old bones and dust.

Joseph and Mary.

Ah, that sad radiation of helpless sympathy. He’d sensed it flowing from Fraulein Stern. Now from these Englishmen. He must look like a roasted boar.

Jerry fucking basted him in tannic, didn’t he! Sorry, nurse.

How’d we get him?

God knows.

He belongs at East Grinstead.

Yeh, King of the Guinea Pigs.

He belongs in a fuckin’ grave. Sorry, nurse.

Sorry nothing. What if he hears you? Think of that.

All right, Yank, I take it all back. We’ll have you on flight status again by the Fourth of July.

Come on, boys and girls, no more grumping. A silence followed the entrance of this new male player, godly and determinedly cheerful. Perhaps, Jacob mused, I am not as funny as they thought.

After a time, in which he felt the faraway touch of disembodied hands, the man—the doctor it must be—said in a voice weighted with weary despair, You need a genius, my boy, and I am what you might call a pretty good journeyman. I do wish they’d put you with McIndoe’s Pigs, but they haven’t done, so we shall do what we can.

You’ll be adoptin’ him, doctor?

Not quite, but he’ll be with us a good, long time. He’s one of ours, boys and girls, and we must put him back together as if he came to us from a Spitfire. For now, let’s get him to the saline baths and soak these bloody German rags off him.

German rags. These British blokes, they is so funny.

III

That was where Benjamin saw him, nearly two years after the casual wave, the rejection of paternal affection, that had marked Jacob’s going off to war. Ben and Simon and Sarah had taken the New Amsterdam to Southampton, and then a relay of trains through London into Berkshire, where the rolling pale green flanks of the low hills and their dark mossy manes and toupees of trees seemed almost jungle-like to the Arizonans, so much did it evoke abundant water, leaden skies, soaking rains. After Cordelia, Ben would tell his new neighbors in the village of Wendover, everywhere looked like a rainforest.

And Halton—well, Halton looked a literal Hell, its prison skyline of barracks and hangars and smokestacks reminded Ben of those Aggie colleges back home, except that Halton was rendered terrifying by the hospital and its population of incapacitated young men. The wise guy kept quiet about Halton.

Their taxi brought the trio up the gravel apron outside the long, two-storey row of blood-colored brick, its central façade punctuated by three corniced bays, whose large, white-trimmed windows stared like surprised eyes across the fields to a nearby slope tangled with low trees. The entrance door was in the center of these, its lintel an inverted U, like the crying mouth of a tragic mask.

Beyond the apron, on a large, nearly flat green, young men waited to heal, some of them in wheelchairs, some leaning on a cane or crutch, or wife or sweetheart or melancholy parent; most, alone. They seemed isolated from one another, as you would expect lost souls to be, each navigating this underworld in his own way.

The place was quiet, the only sound the distant ring-ring of an interior telephone, the mutter of engines at the RAF field beyond the meadows’ green beard of trees, an echoed cadence from the brick barracks and the cry of bagpipes herding the apprentice boys to their mechanics classes. Sometimes, the night would be as still as the water in a deep cave, and then there would come the mournful scree of a lone piper, wandering the forested crest of the hills around RAF Halton.

As the Kingdoms stepped from the cab into this silence, a tall, sallow young man who seemed not to have been destroyed, or even touched, by combat, strode out of the sad mouth of the entrance. He wore the uniform of an American army captain, and the Air Corps shoulder patch, but no silver wings. Mr. Kingdom? he called out, his voice nasal and loud in the tranquil air. He stuck out a small, soft hand, which Ben took in his enormous copper-digging one. My name is Conklin. Captain Jimmy Conklin. Welcome to England.

Christ, wondered Benjamin, was this man here on behalf of the King? But he only nodded, then introduced Simon and Sarah.

Good, well, said Conklin, rubbing his little hands and smiling for them, come in.

We wanted to see Jacob . . . .

I need a couple minutes of your time, Mr. Kingdom. After that, you’ll get to see your boy.

Conklin steered them through the entrance, into a lobby where a few other visitors perched nervously on wooden chairs. In the corner a woman of about twenty sat with her broken man, who evidently could not do much but look at her, or at something near her, anymore than she could cease her quiet crying. In offices off the hallway, Benjamin could see sisters and uniformed orderlies and office workers seated at their labors, carefully oblivious to the horrors eddying around them.

The captain took them into a small room with four folding metal chairs in it and a green wooden table, and had them sit down, offered cigarettes, and, when they declined, lit one himself. Ben watched the young officer’s face, noticing that it had come through the war without its pudgy smoothness being marred by care. Yet the man seemed full of sympathy for those who had endured the fighting that he had somehow avoided, and it was clear he admired the men who had finally washed up here at RAF Halton.

Benjamin and his children sat ossified with vicarious terror, hearing for the first time how Jacob arrived in Vienna—about his B-17 shattered by flak above the Danube plain, its broken wings folded back like a wounded duck’s, the cracked pod of a fuselage cradled in the spheres of fire that had formerly been engine nacelles. A real piece of luck, Conklin told them earnestly. Your Jacob surviving that crash. Then surviving Austrian medicine. Well, I guess if you came upon a burned American pilot right after your street took a string of 200pounders, you just shot ‘im, or killed ‘im with a stick. Nossir, this was a real piece of luck, a real piece of luck.

He leaned closer and his loud voice quieted a little. "Generally, you get a pilot in here, he’s got what the English call Airman’s Burn, which is bad burns on the hands because they take off their gloves—they say you can’t feel your plane with gloves on—and on the faces. They push up their goggles to see better and the fire gets their eyes. Your Jacob’s got the Airman’s Burn, in spades, and he’s burned over a good bit of his body—he was in the fire too long, his flight togs couldn’t protect him. And the Austrians, who I guess meant well, gave him the standard treatment. Tannic acid. It coagulates the blood, stops the shock and screaming, see, but it forms this dark crust—tough as armadillo hide, blacker than a nigger. Takes time to cure the cure, if you follow me.

When you see Jacob—and that’s really what I wanted to talk to you about—you’re going to see a young man you’ve never seen before. Well, you’re going to see a lot of young men you’ve never seen before. Men with flaps of skin hanging down their faces. You’ll see men with no jaws, no ears. You’ll shake hands that are like claws. Jacob is one of the worst. That’s why he isn’t in an American hospital—he ought to be with the Guinea Pigs—those are Dr. McIndoe’s burn patients in Ward Three over at East Grinstead—but they couldn’t take him. So he’s here at Halton, where the RAF docs are gradually putting him back together. Now and then McIndoe comes by, and the Guinea Pigs inducted Jacob as an honorary member. Now and then one of the Pigs drops by to show him what he has to look forward to. What you have to remember is that your boy’s alive and likely to stay that way. A real piece of luck.

At first, Ben was not so sure. Their introduction to the burn ward, to its smells of flesh and flowers, to its platoon of ruined, often bitter boys given to tacking up signs that said Do Not Feed the Animals and Caution: Monsters Crossing, was almost unbearable. Films and novels had led them to expect a room filled with silent men swaddled like mummies, their awful injuries concealed in gauze. Instead, they wore their burns with a kind of easy insolence, or with a good humor that shamed the squeamish visitor, and they bantered cruelly in the argot of the burned. They lived like creatures from another world, their heads shaved so that the virgin skin there could be harvested for grafts, their fused claws tortured into fingers. Their days suspended between operations, spans of time anchored on intervals of pain.

Those saline baths give you a powerful thirst, they would say, and head for the pubs of Wendover. Now and then one would go out drinking and not return; life had become a choice they made on a daily basis, and there were no surgeons beyond the grave.

Benjamin watched the strange, voiceless figure in its long, loose dressing gown that swept the ground like a train, the face lightly swathed in white gauze, its bald, dark-skinned scalp poking out of its wrappings like the skull of someone disinterred, the eyes glimmering through slits in broad pink circles of grafted skin—and found not the faintest signal of recognition. This creature was still unable to speak beyond a murmur; it seemed to see a little, and could hear. Ben thought that very little of the original had been restored to him after all.

Once Benjamin dreamed that he had secretly unwound his son’s bandages, only to find charred meat within; it had crumbled like cigar ash before his horrified eyes. Who knew what kind of monster the government was giving back to him? Still, he could not turn away, even if the wrappings held nothing but ashes, or something worse—he wondered what that could be. In fact, the unseen thing he dreaded, it has always seemed to me, was the possibility of error; he feared Conklin’s coming to him to say that the real piece of luck had turned out to be bad luck after all, that this boy was not his but someone else’s, that his son was finally, eternally, irrevocably dead. Thus, frightened of ending up with nothing, the father forced himself to love the swaddled ruin in the hospital bed.

He rented a furnished stone cottage close to Wendover, where he and Simon and Sarah lived among English hills and meadows, surrounded by roses that seemed to grow wild in their tiny, walled yard. It was, he would tell new friends over a pint in the Red Swan, set down on the village’s single narrow street of ageless shops, the kind of garden Arizona would destroy in a minute—what insects did not eat the sun would blast. The British, he discovered, loved to hear about his red world, and its red men.

Mostly, though, Ben kept to Halton, and to the ward up beyond the long rows of brick that Princess Mary’s presented to the world. While Jacob, sometimes mobile, sometimes tortured into a foetal position while a loop graft fed skin from one end of him to the other—Careful not to carry on shitting through your nose, now, Jacob, cautioned Lee, a friendly little Guinea Pig whose face had ended as a scalded primate’s, whose hands were those of a crab. About once a month, Jacob would vanish into the operating theatre, where, under the enormous moon of light there, the doctors would