Sometimes a Great Notion Read online

  Jesus, sometimes this feeling gets so bad we need a little war just to perk ourselves up. In Sometimes a Great Notion the head of the hell-for-leather Stamper clan is old Henry, an eighty-year-old man who refuses to give in. He is the best part of ourselves and the worst part of ourselves. He is our war against the land, our mindless pursuit of the work at hand so that we do not have to wonder why we are doing this work.

  Henry Stamper says:

  The trucks! The cats! The yarders! I say more power to 'em. Booger these peckerwoods always talkin' about the good old days. Let me tell you there weren't nothin' good about the good old days but for free Indian nooky. An' that was all. Far as workin', loggin', it was bust your bleedin' ass from dark to dark an' maybe you fall three trees. Three trees! An' any snotnosed kid nowadays could lop all three of 'em over in half an hour with a Homelite. No sir. Good old days the booger! The good old days didn't hardly make a dent in the shade. If you went to cut you a piece you can see out in these goddam hills you better get out there with the best thing man can make. Listen: Evenwrite an' all his crap about automation . . . he talk like you gotta go easy on this stuff. I know better. I seen it. I cut it down an' its comin' back up. It'll always be comin' back up. It'll outlast anything skin an' bone. You need to get in there with some machines an' tear hell out of it!

  Well, Henry, we did like you said. Now what?

  There's a guy who was a lot like Kesey. He also was a hellion when young, wrote two famous novels, and then refused to write another one for decades while he pursued other matters. He was a Russian count named Leo Tolstoy. When he was a boy, his older brother told him that there was a green stick buried in the woods of the family estate and, if he could find that stick, he'd learn the secret of life. When Tolstoy finally died as very old man, he asked to be buried near the rumored site of that green stick.

  Kesey, after his legendary bus ride in Furthur, kept the old machine in the woods on his farm, where it has slowly rusted and been devoured by moss. The Smithsonian kept asking him for it as a doodad for its collection. He refused. Now Kesey is dead, the bus still rusts under the Oregon sky, and we're left with this fat novel called Sometimes a Great Notion. Nobody seems to know what to do with it, any more than they could figure out what to do with Ken Kesey. This book just doesn't seem to fit our notions of what a proper novel should be or of what America should be. I think this is our green stick buried in our ancestral woods. Get a shovel. You're likely to break a sweat, but you'll get to a better place, your own country.

  I suppose I should mention Indian Jenny, but you'll meet her along the way. Listen to her. She knows the gospel truth.

  You'll see.

  Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range . . . come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River . . .

  The first little washes flashing like thick rushing winds through sheep sorrel and clover, ghost fern and nettle, sheering, cutting . . . forming branches. Then, through bear-berry and salmonberry, blueberry and blackberry, the branches crashing into creeks, into streams. Finally, in the foothills, through tamarack and sugar pine, shittim bark and silver spruce--and the green and blue mosaic of Douglas fir--the actual river falls five hundred feet . . . and look: opens out upon the fields.

  Metallic at first, seen from the highway down through the trees, like an aluminum rainbow, like a slice of alloy moon. Closer, becoming organic, a vast smile of water with broken and rotting pilings jagged along both gums, foam clinging to the lips. Closer still, it flattens into a river, flat as a street, cement-gray with a texture of rain. Flat as a rain-textured street even during flood season because of a channel so deep and a bed so smooth: no shallows to set up buckwater rapids, no rocks to rile the surface . . . nothing to indicate movement except the swirling clots of yellow foam skimming seaward with the wind, and the thrusting groves of flooded bam, bent taut and trembling by the pull of silent, dark momentum.

  A river smooth and seeming calm, hiding the cruel file-edge of its current beneath a smooth and calm-seeming surface.

  The highway follows its northern bank, the ridges follow its southern. No bridges span its first ten miles. And yet, across, on that southern shore, an ancient two-story wood-frame house rests on a structure of tangled steel, of wood and earth and sacks of sand, like a two-story bird with split-shake feathers, sitting fierce in its tangled nest. Look . . .

  Rain drifts about the windows. Rain filters through a haze of yellow smoke issuing from a mossy-stoned chimney into slanting sky. The sky runs gray, the smoke wet-yellow. Behind the house, up in the shaggy hem of mountainside, these colors mix in windy distance, making the hillside itself run a muddy green.

  On the naked bank between the yard and humming river's edge, a pack of hounds pads back and forth, whimpering with cold and brute frustration, whimpering and barking at an object that dangles out of their reach, over the water, twisting and untwisting, swaying stiffly at the end of a line tied to the tip of a large fir pole . . . jutting out of a top-story window.

  Twisting and stopping and slowly untwisting in the gusting rain, eight or ten feet above the flood's current, a human arm, tied at the wrist, (just the arm; look) disappearing downward at the frayed shoulder where an invisible dancer performs twisting pirouettes for an enthralled audience (just the arm, turning there, above the water) . . . for the dogs on the bank, for the blinking rain, for the smoke, the house, the trees, and the crowd calling angrily from across the river, "Stammmper! Hey, goddam you anyhow, Hank Stammmmmper!"

  And for anyone else who might care to look.

  East, back up the highway still in the mountain pass where the branches and creeks still crash and roar, the union president, Jonathan Bailey Draeger, drives from Eugene toward the coast. He is in a strange mood--owing, largely, he knows, to a fever picked up with his touch of influenza--and feels at once oddly deranged and still quite clearheaded. Also, he looks forward to the day both with pleasure and dismay--pleasure because he will soon be leaving this waterlogged mud wallow, dismay because he has promised to have Thanksgiving dinner in Wakonda with the local representative, Floyd Evenwrite. Draeger does not anticipate a very enjoyable afternoon at the Evenwrite household--the few times he had occasion to meet with Evenwrite at his home during this Stamper business, those times were certainly no joy--but he is in a good humor nevertheless: this will be the last of the Stamper business, the last of this whole Northwest business for a good long time, knock wood. After today he can get back down south and let some of that good old California Vitamin D dry up this blasted skin rash. Always get skin rash up here. And athlete's foot all the way to the ankle. The moisture. It's certainly no wonder that this area has two or three natives a month take that one-way dip--it's either drown your blasted self or rot.

  Yet, actually--he watches the scenery swim past his windshield--it doesn't seem such an unpleasant land, for all the rainfall. It seems rather nice and peaceful, rather easy. Not as nice as California, God knows, but the weather is certainly far nicer than weather back East or in the Middle West. It's a bountiful land, too, so it's easy as far as survival goes. Even that slow, musical Indian name is easy: Wakonda Auga. Wah-kon-dah-ah-gah-h-h. And those homes built along the shoreline, some next to the highway and some across--those are very nice homes and not at all the sort one would imagine housing a terrible depression. (Homes of retired pharmacists and hardware-men, Mr. Draeger.) All this complaining about the terrible hardship brought on by the strike . . . these homes seem a far cry from terrible hardship. (Homes of weekend tourists and summertime residents who winter over in the Valley and make enough to take it comfy near the up-river salmon run in the fall.) And quite modern, too, to find in a country one might think of as somewhat primitive. Nice little places. Modern, but tastefully so. In the ranch-style motif. With enough yard between the house and the river to allow for additions. (With enough yard, Mr. Draeger, between the house and the river to allow for the yearly six inches the Wakonda Auga takes as its ye
arly toll.) It has always seemed odd, though: no houses at all on the bank--or no houses at all on the bank if one excludes the blasted Stamper home. One would think that some houses would be built on the bank for convenience's sake. That has always seemed peculiar about this area. . . .

  Draeger bends his big Pontiac around the riverside curves, feeling feverish and mellow and well fed, with a sense of recent accomplishments, listlessly musing about a peculiarity that the very house he muses about would find not the least bit peculiar. The houses know about riverside living. Even the modern weekend summertime places have learned. The old houses, the very old houses that were built of cedar shake and lodgepole by the first settlers at the turn of the eighteen-hundreds, were long ago jacked up and dragged back from the bank by borrowed teams of horses and logging oxen. Or, if they were too big to move, were abandoned to tip headlong into the water as the river sucked away the foundations.

  Many of the settlers' houses were lost this way. They had all wanted to build along the river's edge in those first years, for convenience's sake, to be close to their transportation, their "Highway of Water," as the river is referred to frequently in yellowed newspapers in the Wakonda Library. The settlers had hurried to claim banksite lots, not knowing at first that their highway had a habit of eating away its banks and all that those banks might hold. It took these settlers a while to learn about the river and its habits. Listen:

  "She's a brute, she is. She got my house last winter an' my barn this, by gum. Swallered 'em up."

  "So you wouldn't recommend my building here waterside?"

  "Wouldn't recommend or wouldn't not recommend, neither one. Do what you please. I just tell you what I seen. That's all."

  "But if what you say is so, if it is widenin' out at that rate, then figure it: a hundred years ago there wouldn't have been no river at all."

  "It's all in the way you look at it. She runs both directions, don't she? So maybe the river ain't carryin' the land out to sea like the government is tellin' us; maybe it's the sea carryin' the water in to the land."

  "Dang. You think so? How would that be . . . ?"

  A while to learn about the river and to realize that they must plan their homesites with an acknowledged zone of respect for its steady appetite, surrender a hundred or so yards to its hungry future. No laws were ever passed enforcing this zone. None were needed. Along the whole twenty miles, from Breakback Gully, where the river crashes out of the flowering dogwood, all the way to the eel-grassed shores at Wakonda Bay, where it fans into the sea, no houses at all stand on the bank. Or no houses at all on the bank if one excludes that blasted home, if one excludes this single house that acknowledged no zone of respect for nobody and surrendered seldom a scant inch, let alone a hundred or so yards. This house stands where it stood; it has not been jacked up and dragged back, nor has it been abandoned to become a sunken hotel for muskrats and otters. It is known through most of the western part of the state as the Old Stamper Place, to people who have never even seen it, because it stands as a monument to a piece of extinct geography, marking the place where the river's bank once held . . . Look:

  It, the house, protrudes out into the river on a peninsula of its own making, on an unsightly jetty of land shored up on all sides with logs, ropes, cables, burlap bags filled with cement and rocks, welded irrigation pipe, old trestle girders, and bent train rails. White timbers less than a year old cross ancient worm-rutted pilings. Bright silvery nailheads blink alongside oldtime squarehead spikes rusted blind. Pieces of corrugated aluminum roofing jut from frameworks of iron vehicle frames. Barrel staves reinforce sheets of fraying plywood. And all this haphazard collection is laced together and drawn back firm against the land by webs of wire rope and log chain. These webs join four main two-inch heavy-duty wire-core construction cables that are lashed to four big anchoring firs behind the house. The trees are protected from the sawing bite of the cables by a wrapping of two-by-fours and have supporting guy lines of their own running to wooden deadmen buried deep in the mountainside.

  Under normal circumstances the house presents an impressive sight: a two-story monument of wood and obstinacy that has neither retreated from the creep of erosion nor surrendered to the terrible pull of the river. But today, during flood time, with a crowd of half-drunk loggers on the bank across, with parked press cars, a state patrol car, pick-ups, jeeps, mud-daubed yellow crew carriers, and more vehicles arriving every minute to line the embankment between the highway and river, the house is a downright spectacle.

  Draeger's foot lifts from the accelerator the instant he turns the bend that brings the scene into view. "Oh dear God," he moans, his feeling of accomplishment and well-being giving way to that feverish melancholy. And to something more: to a kind of sick foreboding.

  "What have the fools done now?" he wonders. And can see that good old California Vitamin D suddenly receding out of sight down another three or four weeks of rain-soaked negotiations. "Oh damn, what can have happened!"

  As his car coasts closer he recognizes some of the men through the slashing windshield wipers--Gibbons, Sorensen, Henderson, Owens, and the lump in the sports coat probably Evenwrite--all loggers, union members he has come to know in the last few weeks. A crowd of forty or fifty in all, some squatting on their haunches in the three-walled garage next to the highway; some sitting in the collection of steamy cars and pick-ups lining the embankment; others sitting on crates beneath a small makeshift lean-to made of a Pepsi-Cola sign ripped from its mooring: BE SOCIABLE--with a bottle lifted to wet red lips four feet across . . .

  But most of the fools standing out in the rain, he sees, in spite of the ample room in the dry garage or beneath the sign, standing out there as though they have lived and worked and logged in wet so long that they are no longer capable of distinguishing it from the dry. "But what?"

  He swings across the road toward the crowd, rolling down his window. On the bank a stubble-faced logger in stagged pants and a webbed aluminum hat has cupped his mouth with gloved hands and is shouting drunkenly across the water--"Hank STAMMMMPerrrr ... Hank STAMMMPerrr"--with such dedicated concentration that he doesn't turn even when Draeger's lurching car sloshes mud from the ruts onto the back of his coat. Draeger starts to speak to the man but can't recall his name and drives on toward the thicker part of the crowd where the lump in the sports coat stands. The lump turns and squints at the approach of the automobile, rubbing vigorously at wet latex features with a freckled red rubber hand. Yes, it's Evenwrite. All five and a half boozy feet of him. He comes slogging his way toward Draeger's car.

  "Why now, look here, boys. Why, just lookee here. Look who come back to teach me some more lessons about how to rise to power in the labor world. Why, ain't that nice."

  "Floyd." Draeger greets the man pleasantly. "Boys . . ."

  "Very pleasant surprise, Mr. Draeger," Evenwrite says, grinning down at the open window, "seeing you up and about on such a miserable day."

  "Surprise? But Floyd, I was under the impression that I was expected."

  "Daw-gone!" Evenwrite bongs the roof of the car. "That is the truth. For Thanksgivin' supper. But, see, Mr. Draeger, they's been a little change of plans."

  "Oh?" Draeger says. Then looks about at the crowd. "Accident? Somebody drive off into the drink?"

  Evenwrite turns to inform his buddies, "Mr. Draeger wants to know, boys, if somebody drove off into the drink." He turns back and shakes his head. "Naw, Mr. Draeger, nothing so fortunate as all that."

  "I see"--slowly, calmly, not yet knowing what to make of the man's tone. "So? what exactly did happen?"

  "Happen? Why nothing happened, Mr. Draeger. Nothing yet. You might say we--us boys--are here to see nothing does. You might say that us boys are here to take up where your methods left off."

  "What do you mean 'left off,' Floyd?"--voice still calm, still quite pleasant, but . . . that sick foreboding is spreading from stomach up through lungs and heart like an icy flame. "Why not just tell me what has happened?"

&n
bsp; "Why, by jumping Jesus--" Evenwrite realizes with dawning incredulity--"he don't know! Why, boys, Johnny B. Draeger he don't even the fuck know! How do you account for that? Our own leader and he ain't even heard!"

  "I heard that the contracts were drawn and ready, Floyd. I heard that the committee met last night and all were in complete accord." His mouth feels quite dry the flame reaching up to the throat--oh damn; Stamper couldn't have--But he swallows and asks imperturbably, "Has Hank changed his plans?"

  Evenwrite bongs the car top again, angry now. "I'll by godfrey say he changed his plans. He just chucked 'em out the window is how he changed his plans!"

  "The whole agreement?"

  "The whole motherkilling agreement. That's right. The whole deal we were so certain of"--bong!--"just like that. Looks to me like you called a wrong shot this one time, Draeger. Oh me . . ." Evenwrite shakes his head, anger giving way to profound gloom, as though he had just announced the end of the world. "We are right where we started before you came."

  In spite of the doomsday tone in Evenwrite's dramatics, Draeger can easily perceive the triumph behind the words. Of course the fat fool must crow a bit, Draeger realizes, even though my defeat is his own. But how could Stamper have changed his mind? "You are certain?" he asks.

  Evenwrite shuts his eyes and nods. "You must of made a slight miscalculation."

  "How peculiar," Draeger mutters, trying to keep any sound of alarm from his voice. Never show alarm, he always maintained. Jotted in a notebook in his breast pocket: "Alarm, when used for anything less than a fire or an air attack, is certain to muddle the mind, unsettle the senses, and, in most cases, more than double the danger." But where is that slight miscalculation? He looks back at Evenwrite. "What were his reasons? What did he give as his reasons?"