Highways to a War by Christopher J. Koch

But he could not hide it from himself. It had always been here, like evidence of an hereditary illness.
    “It’s a wonder he didn’t burn these diaries,” I said.
    “He was too bloody mean,” Marcus said. “He thought they might be valuable—even though Devereux was a convict. Apparently this feller was a cut above the average. Good family, and all that.”
    “He doesn’t look like a criminal,” I said. “What did he do?”
    “Dad said it was something political. He was Irish. Always made trouble, the Irish, didn’t they? You’ll probably find out in the diaries, if you can get through ‘em. Maybe you’ll publish them, Ray.”
    He was fingering the writing-slope, and now he grinned sideways at me, with a flash of country cunning. “You don’t get this letter case, though. The old man used to reckon it was Devereux‘s, so it’s pretty old. Nice workmanship: mahogany and brass. Worth a bit, wouldn’t you say?”
    “Yes. It’s a nice heirloom,” I said. “I wonder how a convict would manage to bring a thing like that out with him. Do you mind if I have a look?”
    He nodded somewhat reluctantly, and I began to examine the interior. “These writing-slopes usually have secret drawers,” I said. “They’re not hard to find.”
    I proved to be right; it pulled back on a spring in the usual way, and Marcus looked at me sharply. “Well, well,” he said. “We never knew that was there.” He moved closer, as though fearing I’d purloin the contents, and peered into the drawer. “Anything valuable in there?”
    There were only some personal letters. I unfolded one of them; it plainly came from the same period as the diaries, and was signed Catherine. My heart raced again; these letters had been undisturbed and unread for over a hundred years, and I lusted after them. “They seem to be from his wife,” I said. “Can I put them with the diaries?”
    “Take them,” Marcus said. “They’ve got no interest for me.”
     
     
    His expression was glum; he’d perhaps been expecting money, and he looked around the storeroom now as though wondering why he was here. This had been a lot of talking for Marcus. The light through the blind was going, and his features were indistinct, his eyes lost in their deep sockets. When he spoke again, it seemed to me that he took on the dark authority of his youth, when he’d moved through the hop fields with his staff and tally-book.
    “Some people carry the past on their backs like a saddle,” he said. “My father did. It ate into his hide. I reckon this stuff affected him, sitting in here. Let’s get it bundled up, Ray.”
    I put the journals and letters carefully into my briefcase; then I picked up the set of news photographs, and I was held for a moment by the one on top.
    Mike walked in a line of South Vietnamese soldiers through a paddy field in the Mekong Delta. They were marching on a dyke above the rice field’s shallow water; young shoots could be seen. A small cinecamera was slung from Langford’s wrist by a strap; he wore cotton military fatigues and jungle boots like the soldiers. But unlike the soldiers, he had no helmet, and his blond hair was bright against the background of water and trees. He looked very tall, among the smaller Vietnamese men, but their faces were engraved with histories of experience that made his face look childlike. He was young; it was the sixties; he had a beauty that made him a little unreal. The war would always go on, and he would never die. He smiled with cool amusement, his lower lip pushed out.
    The photograph, like that decade, like the war, like the nineteenth-century portrait on the table, was dead, and gave off the subtle scent of all dead objects. And I reminded myself once again that Mike himself was almost certainly dead. Yet he and the man in the painting both resumed life as I looked at them, their smiles one smile, repeated on two different faces.

5.
    I switched the desk lamp off, and sat in