The Brothers Boswell (40 page)

“My father was livid,” I cannot help but add.

“I will never forget your definition,” James goes on, his voice sounding a bit stronger now. “It ran,
A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but which in Scotland supports the people.
And while I know you meant it as a jest, one in good nature, my father
took it as an intentional insult. He knew that you had no love for Scotland; that was well known even in Edinburgh. He brooded on the supposed slight all through our dinner, and when we had finished, he walked into the library and tore the page from the book. No fire was burning, or he would certainly have burned it. Instead he crumpled it and threw it on the scrap heap.”

Johnson sits blackly with this for a moment, then snorts, adding only, “And this man is a High Judge in your country. Taking his pique out on an inanimate object.”

I have no idea why James has chosen to tell this story, but it is one I like well enough, and always have. At some level, James has steered the conversation here to involve me, to make me nostalgic for the days when we conspired together against my father.

But even understanding the purpose behind his introducing it, I cannot help but add little bits to the story. “And there James found it, and stole away with it back to our room. Where we smoothed it out, and pressed it flat beneath a stack of books. And over the next several days, we studied that definition.”

James takes over almost immediately, as he has done all our lives. “We studied the entire
page
, in fact. It was a page of writing our father had forbidden. The words on it were stricken from the language, in effect. But we were beginning, then, to see that our father did not control the world, not entirely. And so we made a copy of the page—”

“
I
made a copy of the page,” I correct him, “for the simple reason that James would not share the sacred original.”

James looks over at me, and then nods, or bows his head rather. “That is true. I would not share it. It was my own page of Johnson’s dictionary, and it was my prized possession. But I allowed John to copy it. And we made a game of it. The idea was that twice each day, we had to use one of the forbidden words in a sentence while speaking to Father, and we had to do so when the other of us was present. Given that all of the words began with the letter
O
, it was no simple trick.”

Outside the shack, perhaps as far away as the Savoy Stair, there is the sound of shouting, voices raising an alarm. We all sit frozen for a moment, suddenly painfully aware of the guns in my hand again, and then the noise dies away.

After another instant, the silence of the timber-yard re-establishes itself. I wait an instant longer, by way of insurance, and then continue the story myself. “Of course, one can only use good Johnsonian vocabulary for so long before it becomes … noticeable, shall we say. A word like
oberration
will begin to stand out in conversation at the breakfast table. And so finally my father recognized the pattern, and had the truth out of James.”

James has his eyes down on the dag in my left hand, seems in fact to have his gaze focused on the very mouth of the snubbed barrel, the blackness there, as though it were a magic lantern showing the Edinburgh flat and my father’s rage.

“He found the page of the dictionary I had saved, and he made me confess that John had copied it out as well,” says James.

“In other words, James implicated me to save himself. No hero, even then.”

“This time the scrapheap was insufficient. He burned both copies, and stood watching until they were both ashes. And he did not spare the rod that day.” James looks up and into my eyes, and although I know he has his own skin in mind, I cannot help but feel the kinship there. “We were both soundly beaten for playing that game.”

“My father,” I say, turning now directly to Johnson, “wished to impress upon us the way that the English shape the world to their own advantage, using any tool that may come to hand.”

Maintaining an impotent rage seems finally to have become too much for Johnson. He has slumped back in his chair, and there is as much injury as anger in his air. His breathing, always labored, now seems to be occupying more of his attention, and there is an audible rattle when he inhales; his back too seems
to be troubling him, and he works a shoulder to ease a muscle pinching there.

“Had your father truly felt that way,” Johnson counters, “he would have cast out the book in its entirety. But he understood it to be indeed a tool, and one of superior English workmanship. One he could not do without. Yet he would posture before his sons.”

It is at moments such as this when I feel that killing him would be merited. He reveals so very smug a view of the universe, in which England naturally occupies the center, and the English tongue the center of that center, with Samuel Johnson the center-most pin anchoring the English language entire.

I cannot keep the sarcasm from my tone. “Yes, quite. Your book has had its effect, Mr. Johnson, and you must take responsibility for us, James and myself. We have been shaped by your grammar and syntax, even in the provinces. Your vocabulary has made up our world even as far away as Scotland. We have grown up accenting our words as you would have it done. We are your handiwork, for good or for ill.”

Johnson is silent a relatively long time, lips again pursed, air whistling through the cavernous nostrils. But when he speaks, the words are uncharacteristically plain and simple. “You are none of my handiwork. And you are not of your father’s making either. He was narrow in his view, and heavy-handed, but clearly he sought to instill respect. And you have none, John Boswell, none for your father, none for your brother, none for your country, none for your self. You are a sadly deluded young man. You have surrendered your reason to gratify your own sickly sense of self.”

“Mr. Johnson,” James nearly takes Johnson’s sleeve, then thinks better of it, “my brother needs rest, and the care of his doctors. But in his heart, he is as decent a man as I have ever known. You must believe that, sir. John is no criminal, no matter what tonight may seem to say of him.”

I ignore James, and repeat Johnson’s barb. “I am deluded, then, am I?”

Johnson sits up, brings his shoulders forward. His eyebrows are thick, and they do not trace a straight line over his eyes but rather slant up at an angle. It gives him an air of perpetual suspicion and doubt and even distaste, an air that now perfectly matches the look on the rest of his face. He has had enough of this night, enough of me.

“Yes, very obviously so.” He looks around the shack, at his own chair, the lamp, the door. “You have made it painfully obvious, and yet you remain willfully blind of the fact. You have some invented grievance, and you would keep us captive indefinitely while you relive it again and again in the warped world of your own mind.

“I have
done
with you, sir. You are no better than a wounded animal that must be dealt with on its own terms. I defy you. Do you understand me? Must I spell it out for you? I defy your games and your threats and dirty things in pockets.”

He is very near a breaking point of some sort, and I bring both guns to face him. I don’t worry as much about a sudden movement from James; he will remain as passive as he is humanly able. But managing Johnson is a minute-to-minute affair, even when one is holding the weapons.

“Let us speak then about delusions, but let us begin with your own, Mr. Johnson. For James has revealed himself all but entirely. Let us turn to you.”

He meets my eye, lowers his jaw a bit. Beneath the thick lids, his eyes are large and protrude just enough to render them unusual, fish-like. I stare into one until he blinks it, then responds finally. “I have no delusions, sir.”

“As you wish. You said at the Turk’s Head that you and I had never met. You tried your best to bully me out of maintaining that we had.”

His head is bowed a bit now.

“And yet on our walk over here you
admitted
your own falsehood to me, your own attempt to deceive. You admitted not only that you had concealed the truth, but that you were wrong to do so. And I
would put it to you this way: that it is
you
who are deluded,
you
who remain alienated from your very deepest self. Because the fact is that you and I have shared—”

Something about the last phrase, or the impassioned way I say it, has both of them staring directly at me, as though I have spoken in another language entirely.

But I push on with it. “You and I have shared a very great affection. And it has been the saving of my life, sir. And I am not ashamed of it. In fact, I have gone to nearly unimaginable lengths to prove it to be genuine, because I will no longer have it denied or rendered invisible.”

James is now examining Johnson with outright perplexity. And for his own part, Johnson’s face is a wash of emotions, anger and outrage and something I can only interpret as regret, even shame.

“Did you not say so on our way over here? Sir, did you not
admit
it to me?”

And then Johnson can remain silent no longer. “Yes! I did say so,” he blurts out, hands slicing at the air, his heavy body rocking in his chair with frustration. “I said so in the way that a man on the rack confesses to heresy! Because you left me no other
choice
, but would have it so! I was trying to end this horrific nightmare. That is
all.
I thought, for a moment, that hearing me say those words might put an
end
to all of this. And in a moment of weakness I went along with your damnable lie.”

“Do not attempt to deny the truth now, now that someone else may hear. Can you not see, James, what this man would be at?”

Dags or no, Johnson’s voice has risen beyond a bark almost to a shout. “I do deny it! I deny every particle of your twisted and deluded view of the world. We have
never
met, not once before this evening! You have clearly read my books, and perhaps in some mad way you have construed that—”

“Oh, do not flatter yourself so, Sir. Other than your dictionary, your books are mildly amusing at best. And at worst they are
soporific. They will none of them conjure a world. No, you have already admitted our connection, sir, and I
hold
you to that admission. It is the one moment this evening you have managed to face yourself in the mirror, actually face yourself.”

Here I gather in James with my glance, for in some way this has all been staged for his benefit. He is the intended audience, and has been all along, the lone representative of all the rest of the world, as well as the go-between to the rest of my family. He is the one who must hear what must be said.

“And I will tell James the rest that you will not admit. That you and I met on London Bridge, when you called me to an alcove there. That you came back to my rooms and eventually shared my lodgings, shared my bed. Yes, shared my bed, chastely, as
companions
, as two who cared for one another,
loved
one another. That you wrote there, sometimes in the middle of the night. That we—”

Johnson is out of his chair now, up on his big legs. James has him by one arm, trying vainly to pull him back to his chair. Johnson isn’t closing the distance between us, not yet, but he has lost all other rational consideration. He is sputtering with rage. Still, the words find their way out. “You are more than a mere liar or a damnable thief,” he manages, “you are true evil, and, worse, evil with the appearance of decent family and breeding. You have—you have
fattened
somewhere in the dark on your own poisonous envy, and you slither into London like the Devil himself, to destroy us, to pervert our understandings of one another, of our very
selves.
You will not be satisfied until we too are mad, or mouldering in a grave.”

“He is ill, Mr. Johnson!” James pleads.

I stay stock-still in my chair while Johnson raves.

“You say you will allow us to leave when I have capitulated, agreed to the twisted version of the world your fantasy has produced. But you
lie.
I tell you that you lie through your teeth. For that would never be enough.
Never!
It is not the past you would control, but the present and the future. You would displace your brother in my
affections, and nothing less will satisfy you. If you are not stopped this night, he will have your knife in his back by morning.”

I cannot hold my tongue any more. “It is
you
who would manipulate—”

“Silence!” Johnson thunders.

And then in the sudden quiet, he yells again just as loudly: “Silence, I say!”

He could not raise his voice any louder. We have been talking in whispers and low voices for an hour, but this is a genuine bellow, one that must reach the boats moving far out on the darkness of the Thames.

“You have surrendered your purchase on reality
entirely
,” Johnson goes on. The blood is up in his face again, and his cheeks are brick-red. “And your greatest delusion is that I would favor you with a single particle of my affection! That I would bring my pen and ink to whatever stinking hole in the earth you have managed to scratch out and line with leaves and twigs and bits of string, and call your rooms! That I would
work
there, and solicit your opinion! There is an excellent reason you have found yourself in the madhouse, sir, and it is this: you have become a monster. A mad—” Johnson loses his words again in his rage, but then drives on: “—smutty shriveled
thing
, and no one will associate with you by choice. That is the truth of it.”