Sometimes a Great Notion Page 5

  "Sir," Henry would ask, smiling, "You don't look so perky.

  Is something grievin' you?"

  "Grieving?" Jonas fingered the Bible. " 'For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.' "

  "Yeah?" Henry shrugged and walked away before his father could go on. "Now what do you think of that."

  In the dark attic above the feed store the boys whispered jokes about the tremble in their father's hands and about the squeak creeping into his onetime leatherbound meeting-house voice. "He gettin' so he look more glare-eyed and twitch-lipped and skittish ever' day, like a dog comin' into heat." They laughed in their corn-shuck pillows. "He gettin' so he look itchy an' uncomfortable: you reckon he's been slippin' off to Siskaloo for some of that red meat? That'll give you the itch, I hear tell."

  Joked and laughed, but behind their grins were already despising old Jonas for what they could sense old Jonas was already bound to do.

  ... You move along the wall, your shoulder brushing the fresh budded beads of pitch which have sprung like jewels from the green wood. You move along slowly . . .

  The family was living in the feed store in town when it was very cold, and the rest of the time in the big tent across the river where they were working on the house, which, like everything else in the land, grew on and on with slow, mute obstinacy over the months, seemingly in spite of all Jonas could do to delay it. The house itself had begun to haunt Jonas; the larger it became the more frantic and trapped he felt. There the blamed thing stood on the bank, huge, paintless, Godless. Without its windows it resembled a wooden skull, watching the river flow past with black sockets. More like a mausoleum than a house; more like a place to end life, Jonas thought, than a place to start fresh anew. For this land was permeated with dying; this bounteous land, where plants grew overnight, where Jonas had watched a mushroom push from the carcass of a drowned beaver and in a few gliding hours swell to the size of a hat--this bounteous land was saturated with moist and terrible dying.

  "By gosh, sir, you sure are lookin' peaked, an' that's a fack. You want I should bring you back some salts from Grissom's while I'm in town?"

  Saturated and overflowing! The feeling haunted Jonas's days and tortured his sleep. O, Jesus, light of life, fill the darkness. He was being smothered. He was being drowned. He felt he might awake some foggy morn with moss across his eyes and one of those hellish toadstools sprouting in the mist from his own carcass. "No!"

  "What did you say, sir?"

  "I said no salts, no. Something to let me sleep! Or to wake me up! One way or other, something to clear the mist!" hangs from the limbs like gray bunting. In a dream you slide along the plank wall, eyes drifting about at the draped morning. . . . Snails in the night write glistening scripture on the planks; this wild-rose vine signals something to you with his many slow fingers . . . what? what? His lean face is bent in an attitude of broken sleep as he moves along, one hand reaching to take a nail from the cluster jutting like quills from his now gray mustache. Then he stops, with the hand still raised, face still bent, unchanged. And leans forward, thrusts his head forward, straining to make out something a few yards ahead of him. The fog hiding the river has opened a small round hole in itself, lifting its corner for him to see. Through this opening he sees there has been another tiny cave-in at the bank since last night. A few more inches of soil have crumbled into the river. That cave-in is the source of that soft hissing sound, there, where the river sucks with rapt innocence at the new cut in its bank. Watching, it occurs to Jonas that it isn't the bank that is giving way, as one might naturally assume. No. It is the river that is getting wider. How many winters before that seesaw current will reach the foundation where he is now standing? Ten years? Twenty? Forty? Even so, what difference?

  (A car pulled up and parked out on the wharf near the fish-house, exactly forty years later. The car radio sent twanging strains of hillbilly-western across the gull-strewn bay. Two sailors home on leave from the Pacific told fabulous lies of Jap atrocities to a pair of wide-eyed sweethearts. The sailor in front paused to point to a yellow pick-up stopping down the ramp below them at the water's edge. "Look there: isn't that old Henry Stamper and his boy Hank? What the hell they got there in back?")

  Dreamily, still staring down at the cave-in, Jonas runs his tongue over the nails in his mouth. He starts to turn back to the house, then stops again, his face running gradually into a puzzled frown. He takes one of the square nails out and holds it in front of his eyes. The nail is rusted. He looks at another nail and finds more rust. One at a time he removes each nail from his mouth and looks at it, studying for a long time the way a slight powder of rust is already splotching the iron like a fungus. And it didn't rain last night. In fact, it hasn't rained now in almost two incredible days, that was why he hadn't bothered tacking the lid back on the nail keg when he finished work the day before. Yet, rain or no, the nails have rusted. Overnight. The whole keg, come all the way from Pittsburgh, four weeks on the road, bright and shiny as silver dimes . . . rusted overnight . . .

  "By golly, you know, it looks like a coffin!" the sailor said.

  . . . So, nodding to himself, he replaces the nails in the keg and lays the hammer on the dewy grass, then walks thigh-deep through fog to the river and gets in the boat and rows across to the dirt road where a lean-to stables the mare. And saddles the mare and goes back to Kansas, to the dry, flatiron prairies where sage struggles for a grip in the meager soil, and jackrabbits nibble barrel cactus for the moisture, and decay goes on slow and unseen under the baked brick sky.

  "It is a coffin! In a shipping box like on trains."

  "Oh, look what they're doing!"

  The other sailor and his girl untangled swiftly, and the four of them watched the old man and the boy on the launching dock unload the pick-up's cargo and drag it across the planks and tip it into the bay--then get back in the pick-up and drive away. The sailors and the two girls sat in the car and watched the box up-end and slowly sink over many minutes. Eddy Arnold sang:

  There'll be smoke on the water, on the land an' the sea,

  When our Army and our Navy overtake the en-ah-mee . . .

  as the box gave a stiff lurch and finally slid under, leaving a spreading circle, trailing bubbles down through winding kelp and algae into the green-brown purple-brown avenues of rubbery sea grass where crabs with eyes on stalks patrol a dreary collection of bottles, old plumbing, blown-out tires, iceboxes, lost outboard motors, broken porcelain, and all the other debris that decorates the bottom of the bay.

  In the pick-up, home from the docks, the tight-knit little man with the bottle-green eyes and the hair already turning white tried to ease his sixteen-year-old son's curiosity by reaching over to knuckle the boy's head. "Watcha say, Hankas? How'd ya like to drift down to Coos Bay tonight an' watch the old man tie one on. I'm gonna need a level head to look after me."

  "What was in it, Papa?" the boy asked (didn't even know then that the thing was a coffin . . .).

  "Was what?"

  "In the big box."

  Henry laughed. "Meat. Old meat I didn't want stinkin' up the place." The boy glanced swiftly at his father--(Old meat, he says . . . Pa said. . . . And I didn't know any better for lord, it's hard to say, for a couple of months anyhow when Boney Stokes--who's been the local doom-teller around town as far as I can remember--took me aside when he was out to the house visiting and we sit there for a good half-hour, me squirming around and him all the goddam time laying that goddam spit-dripping hand on my leg or my arm or my head or any other place he could get to me with it like he just won't rest a wink till everybody else is saddled with whatever germ it is he's vending. "Ah, Hank, Hank," he says, wagging his head back and forth on a neck about the size of his skinny wrist, "I hate to do it but I feel it my Christian duty to tell you some of the hard facts of life." Hate to, bull: He'd rather play the ghoul with other people's dead than ride a speedboat. "About who was in that box. Yes, I feel someone should tell you abou
t your grandfather, and his early years in this land . . .")--but said nothing. They drove on in silence. (". . . in his early years, Hank, child"--old man Stokes leaned back and let his eyes get misty--"things wasn't just the way they are now. Your family didn't always have a big logging business. Yes . . . yes; your family, one might say, suffered some terrible misfortunes . . . back then . . .")

  That foggy morning the eldest boy, Henry, was the first to wake and discover his father missing. He took up the hammer and, working along side his two brothers Ben and Aaron, completed more work on the house that day than had been accomplished in the last week.

  Boasting: "We got 'er by the tail, men. Yessir. Goddam right."

  "What's that, Henry? What we got?"

  "The tail, you dumb bunny! We'll show these boogers in town who been sniggerin' in their beards. That Stokes bunch. We'll show 'em. We'll whup this swamp from hell to breakfast."

  "What about him?"

  "About who? About old All-Is-Vanity? Old No-Profit-under-the-Boogin'-Sun? Shit. Ain't he already made hisself crystal clear where he stands? Ain't it apparent he's run out? Give up?"

  "Yeah, but what about he comes back, Henry?"

  "He comes back, he comes back crawlin' on his belly an' even then--"

  "But Henry, what about he don't come back?" Aaron, the youngest, asked. "How'll we make it?"

  Hammering: "We'll make it. We'll whup it! We'll whup it!" Slamming the hammer head into the springy white planks.

  (So I first heard from Boney Stokes about how old Henry's daddy, Jonas Stamper, disgraced Henry and the rest of us. Then heard from Uncle Ben about how Boney had spent so many years trying to rub it in on Pa. But it was from Pa himself that I found out what it all come to, how the disgrace and the rubbing-in had built an iron-clad commandment. Not that Pa come out and told me. No. Maybe some fathers and sons talk with each other like that, but me and old Henry was never able to hack it. But he did something else. He wrote it down for me, and hung it up on my wall. On the very day I was born, they tell me. I didn't catch on to the whole of it till a good spell later. Sixteen years. And then it still wasn't the old man that told me; it was his wife, my stepmother, the girl he brought from back East . . . But I'll get to that directly . . .)

  They found Jonas had taken the money from the feed store and left them with little more than the building and what meager stock was on hand and the house across the river. The stock was mostly seed, nothing that would bring in cash until spring, and they made it through that first winter largely on charity from the most well-to-do family in the county, the Stokes family. Jeremy Stokes was unofficial governor, mayor, justice of the peace, and moneylender of the county, having been granted the positions by that old unwritten decree: First Come, First Served. What he had first served himself to was an enormous warehouse left empty by Hudson's Bay. He moved in; when no one ever came around to move him out, he turned the warehouse into the town's first general store and worked out a nice deal with the shipping line that steamed every two or three months into the bay, a sweet little deal whereby they received a little something extra for the privilege of selling to no one but him. "It's on account of I'm a member," he explained, but never made it clear of exactly what. He talked vaguely of some obscure union in the East between the steamboat men and the merchants, "And I propose, friends and fellow pioneers, to make all of us around here members: I'm a generous man."

  Generous was hardly the word. Hadn't he fed that tragic Mrs. Stamper and her brood after their old man left? The goods had been delivered for seven months by his oldest boy, a thin, pale drink of water--Bobby Stokes, who not only enjoyed the distinction of being one of the few white natives of the county but was as well the only member of the town ever to take a cruise all the way to Europe; "None of the doctors around here," Aaron once remarked, "could really appreciate the quality of Boney's cough." Delivered daily, for seven charitable months, "And the only thing father asks," the boy said after the term of generosity was up, "is that you become a member of the Wakonda Co-op." He handed a sharpened pencil and a paper to the mother. She took glasses from a black coin purse and studied the document for a long time.

  "But . . . doesn't this mean our feed store?"

  "Just a formality."

  "Sign it, Mama."

  "But . . ."

  "Sign it."

  It was Henry, the eldest. He stepped forward and took the paper from his mother and put it on a plank. He put the pencil in her hand. "Just sign it."

  The thin boy smiled, watching the paper warily. "Thank you, Henry. You're very wise. Now, as shareholding members this entitles you folks to certain deductions and privileges--"

  Henry laughed, an odd, tight laugh he had recently developed, able to cut off conversation like a knife. "Oh, I reckon we'll whup 'er without certain privileges." He picked up the signed paper and held it just out of the other boy's reach. "Probably without being members of anything, too."

  "Henry . . . old man--" The other boy blinked solemnly, following the paper's teasing movements, then began reciting in unconscious parody of his father, "We are founders of a new frontier, workers in a new world; we must all strive together. A unified effort will--"

  Henry laughed and pushed the paper into the boy's hand; then stooped to select some choice rocks from the river bank. He skipped one out across the wide gray-green water, flashing. "Oh, I reckon we'll whup 'er."

  His failure to be duly impressed by the offer made the other boy uneasy and a little irritated. "Henry," he said again softly and touched Henry's arm with two fingers thin as icicles, "I was born in this land. I spent my youth here amongst the wilderness and savages. I know the way a pioneer needs his fellow man. To survive. Now; I truly like you, old fellow; I wouldn't want to see you forced to leave by the untamed elements. Like . . . some others."

  Henry threw his handful of pebbles all together into the river. "Nobody's leaving, Bobby Stokes, Boney Stokes--nobody else is leaving." Laughing that old man's ferocious laugh at the other's somber and fatalistic expression. As the pebbles slowly melt beneath the current.

  And years later, after he had used this same ferocity to build a small fortune and a logging operation the size of which was limited only by the number of relatives that migrated to the area to work for him, Henry rowed across one morning to find Boney waiting at the garage in the delivery truck.

  "Morning, Henry. How's Henry Stamper, Junior?"

  "Noisy," Henry answered, squinting a little as he looked sideways at his old friend standing like a post near the door of the truck. Boney was holding a ragged brown package against his thigh. "Yep. Noisy and hungry." He waited, squinting.

  "Oh." Boney suddenly remembered the package. "This came for you this morning. I guess they must of got word about the birth back in Kansas."

  "I guess they must of done that."

  Boney looked forlornly at the package. "It appears to be from Kansas City. A relative, perhaps?"

  Henry grinned into his hand, a gesture so like the one used by Boney to cover his barking cough that people of the town sometimes wondered if Henry had copied the move to further plague his morose companion. "Well--" He laughed at Boney's fidgeting. "What the hell, let's see what he sent."

  Boney already had his pocketknife open to cut the string. The package contained a wall plaque, one of those sentimental souvenirs picked up at county fairs: a frame of wooden cherubs around a copper bas-relief of Jesus carrying a lamb through a field of daisies, and raised copper letters declaring, "Blessed Are the Meek, for They Shall Inherit the Earth. Matt. 6"--and a note saying, "This here is for my Grandchild; may he grow up to have more Christian Love and Sympathy and Charity than the rest of my family who have never understood nor communicated with me. J. A. Stamper."

  Boney was shocked. "You mean to tell me you've never even written to that poor old fellow? Never?" Boney was more than shocked, he was horrified. "You've done him a terrible wrong!"

  "You reckon? Well, I'll see ifn I can't make it up some way. Come
take a little ride to the house with me." And in the mother's room Boney's horror turned to petrified disbelief as he stood watching Henry paint the plaque with dull yellow machine paint. Henry dried the paint with the heat of the burning note, and with one of the heavy red pencils used for marking the footage on the end of logs, finally put into words, into writing, what to Henry was nothing more than a good rule for his son to grow up under, but what essentially was the core of that family sin Jonas had seen in the eyes of his son in the Kansas sunlight: sitting on the edge of the bed that contained the forty-five-year-old woman he had married upon his mother's death, with Boney looking on incredulous as a totem pole, and the newborn child crying his lungs out, Henry had laboriously lettered his own personal gospel over the raised copper words of Jesus; bent tensely over the plaque, grinning his fierce, irreverent grin at his wife's protests and Boney's stare, and at the thought of what pious old Jonas would say if he could just see his gift now. "That ought to do 'er." He stood up, right pleased with his work, and walked across the room and nailed the plaque into the wall over the enormous crib he and the boys at the mill built for Henry Junior. (Where the goddamned ugly outfit hangs, all the time I'm growing up. NEVER GIVE A INCH! In Pa's broad, awkward hand. The dirtiest, crummiest, cruddiest yellow under the sun and that awkward school-kid lettering in red. NEVER GIVE A INCH! Just like one of them mottos you might see in a Marine sergeant's orderly office, or like something Coach Lewellyn might of drawn up to hang alongside his other hardnose signs all over the locker room. NEVER GIVE A INCH! Just like the corny, gung-ho, guts-ball posters that I seen a good thousand of, just exactly like, except for that raised picture of Jesus and his lamb under the gobby machine paint and them curlicue words you could read with your fingers at night when the lights went out, "Blessed are the meek" and so forth and so on. . . . It hung there and I never had no more idea than a duck what all was behind it till I was sixteen and she told me what she knew about it and I connected what Boney told me with what the old man told me, then hooked all this up with the women. Funny, how things sometimes take so long to click together, and how something like that sign can hang unnoticed right next to your head for so many years; yet you have to be beat across the knob with it before it starts to dawn just how much it was noticed, whether you knew it or not . . .)