Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

“Is this theoretical, Mister Brown?” drawled Mr. Forbes. “Or are you planning a revolt?”

“Father,” I said into the darkness, cutting him off. “Isn’t it like Gideon and the Gileadites? In the war against the Midianites. Remember?”

“Ah! So it is! So it is! There’s your answer, Mister Forbes. My son knows what you do not, sir. That the greatest military manual ever composed is the Holy Bible! Properly construed. And he’s quite right, the answer to my question is in front of my eyes. For the Lord said unto Gideon, ‘Whoever is fearful and afraid, let him depart early from Mount Gilead.’ And twenty-two thousand men departed from the mountain, leaving behind ten thousand who were not cowards. And the Lord said, ‘There are yet too many.’ Too many! Imagine! Not too few. And the Lord conceived of a test for Gideon to put to the remaining people, such that all those who went down on their knees to drink were separated out, and there were then but three hundred remaining, only those who had put their hand to their mouth when drinking, the men too proud to go down on their knees even to drink from the river Jordan. And the Lord said unto Gideon, ‘By these three hundred men will I save you and deliver the Midianites into thine hand.’

“And here, Mister Forbes, the Bible is very instructive in a most particular and interesting way!’ Father went on. “Gideon, who this time was instructed by his dream, divided his three hundred men into three companies of one hundred each, and according to the dream, he himself would lead one company only, and they would go to the camp of the Midianites at the beginning of the middle watch. Very useful instructions, when you think about it. The beginning of the middle watch. Smart, eh?”

“Considering that it came from a dream,”Mr. Forbes said in a low voice.

Father ignored him. “And Gideon ordered each man to carry in one hand a trumpet and in the other a lamp lit inside a pitcher, and on hearing Gideon’s own trumpet they were to break the pitcher and hold up the lamp and blow upon the trumpet and cry out, ‘The sword of the Lord!’ so as to look and sound like ten times ten thousand. ‘The sword of the Lord!’ And when they did that, Mister Forbes, all the hosts of the Midianites who were not slain at once by the sword of the Lord fled into the wilderness!”

I heard Mr. Forbes utter a loud yawn. “Amazing,” he said.

“Yes. If your General Mazzini had looked more deeply into his Bible,” the Old Man went on, “he might in the end have triumphed over his enemies.” When Mazzini had wanted to know how to cut off his enemy’s supplies, Father explained to Mr. Forbes, he should have read 2 Kings, chapter 19. And for setting ambushes, he might have consulted Judges 9, verse 34, where he would have been told to lie in wait against Sechem in four companies, or else divide into two companies, as did Joshua against Ai, and lead the enemy out of its fortress by having one company pretend to flee, and then the second company could enter the fortress and set it afire, and when the men of Ai saw that their citadel was in flames, they would turn and rush back to save it and would be caught in the open plain between the two companies of Joshua and cut to pieces. And to know how to slay an enemy chieftain who is surrounded always by his guard, Father said to look into Judges 3,19–25, and go to your enemy as Ehud went to Gilgal and say that you have a secret errand to him from the Lord, and when Gilgal has sent away his guard, thrust your dagger with your left hand into his belly to the haft, so that the fat will close upon the blade and he cannot draw it out and only the dirt will come. Then go forth and lock the doors upon him and escape unto Seirath.

“Indeed,” Mr. Forbes said. “With your left hand, eh?”

“Oh, yes! Facing him! Because of the placement of the internal organs, the liver and the bowels and so forth,” he explained. “So he’ll die at once and not cry out.” For some time Father continued showing Mr. Forbes the brilliance of the Bible as a military manual, citing chapter and verse from a dozen different books, and I felt that his listener must surely have fallen asleep, for he no longer spoke. I, of course, had heard the Old Man employ the Bible this way hundreds of times before on any number of topics, from the care of sheep to the management of grief, and had myself fallen asleep in the middle of his citations, to waken in time for the grand peroration at the end and nod agreement. This was how the Old Man talked, how he communicated his thoughts and beliefs, and it could be pretty impressive, because he knew his Bible better than any man and could apply it with intelligence and verve and sometimes, perhaps without intending it, even with humor.

This time, however, I heard him differently. For it was clear, as he laid out one case after another, that he did indeed know more about military tactics and strategy than Mr. Forbes, his presumed expert, and probably knew more than General Mazzini, too. He was drawing on the experience of a people who had conducted wars large and small for thousands of years. Never mind that they claimed to have received their instructions from the Lord, from dreams, or even from the entrails of birds; Father’s great knowledge of the Bible gave him direct access to the experience of a thousand generations of military men and women, providing him with the collective memory of an entire race of people. Father didn’t read the Bible like a man who thought he was like the ancient Israelites, he read it as if he were an Israelite himself, as if he, too, were receiving instructions from the Lord. The man did not simply remember the Bible, as a person remembers the alphabet or even as he remembers old injuries or triumphs. No; for the Old Man, the Bible was his memory.

“Well, Mister Brown, that’s all very interesting,” said Mr. Forbes. “But I’m afraid the modern military mind requires a bit more than the Bible for its instruction. Times change, don’t they?”

“Ah, but human beings don’t!” Father exclaimed. “And, unfortunately, one of those things that do not change is the very belief, the delusion, if I may say so, which you have just now uttered, that human beings change. That, too, is constant, my friend. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’ Times may change, sir, but the Lord does not, and therefore neither does he who was made in His image, for changelessness is in the nature of Him who hath made us. We are the same man as old Adam was.”

“Indeed. Well, I’m afraid I’m not a religious man,” said Mr. Forbes. He then announced his desire to sleep, promising to resume this most interesting conversation in the morning before reaching London.

Father said fine, fine, he too would like to sleep, and so would we all, Miss Peabody especially, he added, although she had said not a word in several hours and must indeed have been lost in her dark thoughts, quite unconscious of Father’s and Mr. Forbes’s conversation and unlikely to sleep, regardless of her fellow passengers’ consideration or lack of it. She did not acknowledge Father’s remark, nor did I, and so we all fell into silence.

Through the long night we made our bumpy, rain-chilled way, catching short naps as we could, stopping briefly for breakfast at an inn outside the village of Dunstable, a ways north of London, and made the vast capital city proper shortly before midday. Several times, the Old Man tried picking up his discussion with Mr. Forbes where they had left off, but the Englishman seemed reluctant to pursue it further and smiled condescendingly and put him off, as if he thought Father slightly cracked. I had seen that response in people many times before, hundreds of times, in fact, and I had almost always felt sympathy for them, even a little pity, with anger at Father mixed with embarrassment for myself. But this time I felt merely superior to Mr. Forbes and dismissive. He was too closed-minded, too conventionally educated, or perhaps simply too stupid, to appreciate the Old Man’s originality and clarity, I thought.