The Speechwriter by Barton Swaim Page B

the—the—the feed-and-seed think of it? You’ve got to think about the truck driver at the feed-and-seed.”
    Nat, who’d been pretending to write things down on a scrap of paper, said, “Why would a truck driver be in a feed-and-seed?”
    The governor stared at him. “No, the point—.”
    â€œSeriously,” Nat said, “does this truck driver have some kind of side interest in farming?”
    â€œOkay, I got it,” the governor said, “you got me.”
    â€œGovernor, Barton has a good story here. Just ignore the issue of phrasing for a minute and hear him out.”
    From there I went on to tell the governor about the War of 1812 and how the young nation had learned the importance of maintaining a standing professional army and how it couldn’t rely on a bunch of farmers to come together in times of crisis and form a lethal fighting force to repel a well-trained invader. At last he settled on something, I don’t remember what. Maybe it was 1812 or maybe some other idea, or maybe it was one of his usual bits of rigmarole; he was very fond of aquote from some historical novel, something about land being more than dirt, although he would tell it as if it weren’t fiction but history. Anyhow he settled on something and left.
    It must have been seven or eight o’clock by then, and my wife had been calling, leaving messages asking when I’d be home. I hadn’t called her back. These were bad days for us. I was ignoring her, fixated instead on pleasing a man who could not be pleased. I didn’t work the long hours some of my colleagues did—Stewart never left the State House, as far as I knew—but even when I went home I’d find myself fretting over op-eds and agitatedly telling the children not to talk to me while I took a call from the governor or Aaron about the next day’s talking points. Laura would ask, with some logic, why I was getting so worked up over an op-ed or a speech when I knew he would ignore it or find a reason to dismiss it. I didn’t have an answer. I was either worrying over work or reading books; my income couldn’t support a family of five (we’d had a third daughter by then), and I had to turn out book reviews and essays as fast as I could. My colleagues would see me eating lunch over a biography of Hardy or a book about Scottish literature, and they would assume I was learned. In fact I was just surviving, barely.
    Between work and writing my mind was almost completely elsewhere. Unlike other men my age who ignore their families, though, I couldn’t point to a hefty income to justify my absenteeism. Laura dealt with it, but sometimes we shouted at each other. Sometimes fights would arise about my work, but usually the cause was something else entirely, and I wouldn’t know how it started or how to solve it.
    That night I didn’t go immediately home. I walked out the west wing door intending to meet some friends a few blocks from the State House for a drink. But instead of walking to the bar, I just stood there, looking at the sky. A breeze made the sweat on my back feel cool. I leaned against the wall. Just above my head was a bronze star marking the spot where one of Sherman’s cannonballs had struck the building, ripping away a chunk of stone.
    Stewart came out to smoke. “You have fun with the—what was it—the police academy groundbreaking?”
    â€œYeah.”
    He lit a cigarette.
    â€œYou want to kill him, don’t you?” he asked after a minute or two.
    â€œDo you?”
    â€œI’ve wanted to kill him many times,” he said in a calm, almost soporific voice. “He’s a terrible person.”
    â€œIs he? I mean, you really think he’s a terrible person?”
    â€œIn a way, yeah. You can’t get to where he is without being a terrible person. At this level, they’re all self-aggrandizing bastards. You should go with us to