Sometimes a Great Notion Page 6

  When the boy Hank was ten, his mother, always grim and gray and distant--an almost identical remake of the nondescript grandmother he never knew--took to her bed in one of the dark rooms of the old house and devoted two months to some fervent ailing, then got up one morning, did a washing, and died. She looked so natural and unchanged in her coffin that the boy found himself striving to re-create conversations he had had with her--sentences she might have used, expressions--in an attempt to convince himself that she had once been more than that carved, peaceful form nestled there in ruffles of satin.

  Henry didn't expend half as much thought. The dead's dead, was the way he looked at it; get 'em in the ground and look to the live ones. So, as soon as he had paid Lilienthal, the mortician, he picked a carnation from one of the wreaths, stabbed it into the lapel of his funeral suit, and caught a train to New York and was gone for three months. Three precious months, right out of the middle of cutting season. Henry's youngest brother, Aaron, and his family, stayed at the house to take care of the boy. Aaron's wife began to fret for her brother-in-law after the first weeks of his mysterious absence lengthened into months.

  "Two months now. That poor man, grieving so. He's more heartbroke than any of us would have ever believed."

  "Heartbroke the dickens," Aaron said. "He's back East somewhere looking for some girl to take the old lady's place."

  "Now how in the world do you know that? Who does Henry know back East?"

  "Nobody that I ever heard tell of. But that's how Henry thinks: women come from back East, that's how it is. You need a woman, go back East and get you one."

  "Why, that is outlandish! That poor man is fifty-some years old. What reasonable woman would--"

  "Reasonable woman the dickens. Henry's back yonder looking for some woman he considers fit to be little Hank's mother. And when he finds her, her being reasonable won't have beans to do with whether she comes or not." Aaron lit his pipe and smiled pleasantly, accustomed after many years to sit back and enjoy watching the world follow along whenever Henry took it by the nose. "An' would you care to make a little bet about whether that poor old man comes back with her or not?"

  Henry was fifty-one at the time, and to those who saw him pacing the New York streets, with a boyish grin beneath a black derby and wrinkles at the side of his face looking like fresh cracks in old wood, he looked possibly twice his age, as easily half. To the casual observer he was more archetype than human: the country rube come to the city, the illiterate hick with a young man's wiry and vigorous stride and an old man's face, with too much stringy wrist showing from the cuff of a coat that looked right out of an undertaker's parlor, and too much neck stuck out of the collar. With his uncut mane going white as that of an old wolf and his green eyes excited and glittering, he looked like a comic-strip character of a prospector struck it rich. He looked like he might curse in the best dining room and spit on the finest rug. He looked like anything but a man capable of acquiring a young bride.

  That summer Henry became quite the current topic, he and his derby and his funeral-parlor suit, and toward the end of his stay was being invited to the best occasions to be laughed at. This laughter reached its peak when he announced one evening at a party that he'd picked the woman he aimed to marry! The partyers were overjoyed. Why, this was absolutely precious, better than a drawing-room farce. Not that it was his choice that the fellows were laughing at--secretly they were impressed that this skinny fool had had the perception to pick the most comely, the most witty and charming of all the eligibles, a young co-ed home for the summer from her studies at Stanford--it was the gall, the audacious, swaggering gall of this leering old lumberjack to even consider such a girl: that was what the fellows laughed at. Old, leering Henry, always good for a chuckle or two, whacked his thin flank and snapped his broad canvas galluses and paraded around like a burlesque clown, laughing right along with them. But noticed that the fellows' laughter got pretty watered down when he walked across the room and led the co-ed blushing and giggling from the parlor. Imagined the laughter got even weaker when, after weeks of persistent courting, he headed back West, taking the girl along as his fiancee.

  (Even after Boney'd told me about the plaque I never really paid it any more mind than a fly on the wall--till that year I was sixteen; when Myra comes into my bedroom for the first time. In fact, I'd just turned sixteen. It was my birthday. I'd got presents--baseball gear--from everybody at the house but her. I hadn't expected a gift; she'd never given me much more than the time of day. I didn't think she'd even noticed how old I was. But it was like she'd been waiting till I was old enough to appreciate my present. She just came in and stood there. . . .)

  Possibly the only one more astonished than the fellows was the girl herself. She was twenty-one and had one year to go for a degree at Stanford. She was dark-haired and slight, with delicate bones (like some kind of funny bird, stood there, like some kind of weird, rare bird always looking at the sky . . .). She had three horses of her own stabled at Menlo Park, two lovers--one a full professor--and a parrot that had cost her father two hundred dollars in Mexico City; all these things she left behind.

  (Just stood there.)

  She had perhaps a dozen Bay Area organizations she was active in, and as many in New York, where she had been active during the summer. Her family life had been moving along smooth as that of any of her friends. Wherever she was, East Coast or Stanford, when she composed a guest list for a party, it always ran into three figures. But all this had been thrown aside. And for what? For some gangly old logger in some muddy logging town clear up north of nowhere. What had she been thinking when she'd let herself be pressured into such a ridiculous change? (She had a funny way of looking, too, that was like a bird looked: you know, with the head turned, never dead at something, but kind of past it, past it like she could see something nobody else could see; and whatever it was she saw sometimes scared her like a ghost. "I'm lonely," she says.)

  She spent her first year in Wakonda wondering whatever on God's green earth had possessed her. ("I've always been lonely. It's always been in me, like a hollow . . .") By the end of her second year she had given up wondering and had definitely made up her mind to leave. She was already making secret plans for departure when she discovered that somehow, in some dark dream, something had slipped up and got to her and she would have to postpone her trip a few months . . . just a few more months . . . then she would be gone, gone, gone, and would at least have some little something to show for her sojourn in the north woods. ("I thought Henry would be able to fill that hollow. Then I thought the child would . . .")

  So Hank got himself a little brother and Henry got a second son. The old man, busy with expanding his logging operations, took no special notice of the blessed event other than christening the boy Leland Stanford Stamper in what he considered a favor to his young wife; he stomped into her room in Wakonda, calk boots and all, trailing sawdust, mud, and the stink of machine oil, and announced, "Little honey, I intend to let you call that boy there after that school you're forever mooning about quittin'. How does that strike you?"

  With impact enough, apparently, to stun any objection she might have had to the name, because her only reaction was a feeble nod. Henry nodded back and stomped proudly from the room.

  That was his only gesture of acknowledgment. The twelve-year-old Hank, busy riffling through the magazines in the waiting room, seemed determined to dismiss the birth completely.

  "You want to run in to take a quick look at your little brother?"

  "He ain't my little brother."

  "Well, don't you imagine you ought to leastways say something to the new mother?"

  "She ain't never said nothing to me." (Which was about the truth. Because she hadn't said more than hello and good-by until that day when she comes in on my birthday. It's late spring; I'm racked up in bed with a broken tooth I got from trying to field a bad hop with my mush, and my head's about to blow to pieces from the pain of it. She looks quick at me, then away
, walks across the room and flutters there against the window like a bird. She's wearing yellow and her hair's long and blue-black. She's got in her hand a story book she's been reading to the kid. He's three or four at the time. I hear him fussing next door. She stands there at the window, fluttering around like, waiting for me to say something about her being lonely, I guess. But I don't say anything. Then her eyes light on that plaque nailed up there beside the bed. . . .)

  In the years that followed Henry paid little attention to this second son. Where he had insisted on raising his firstborn to be as strong and self-sufficient as himself, he was content to let this second child--a large-eyed kid with his mother's pale skin and a look like his veins ran skim milk--spend his youth alone in a room next to his mother's, doing what-the-hell-ever it was that that sort of kid does alone in his room all day. (She looks at the plaque for a long time, twisting that book in her hands, then looks down at me. I see she's commencing to cry. . . .)

  The two boys were twelve years apart and Henry saw no reason to try to bring them together. What was the sense? When the boy Lee was five and had his drippy nose in a book of nursery rhymes, Hank was seventeen and he and Ben's boy, Joe, were busy running that second-hand Henderson motorcycle into every ditch between the Snag in Wakonda and the Melody Ranch Dance Hall over in Eugene.

  "Brothers? I mean, what's the sense? Why push it? Hank's got Joe Ben ifn he needs a brother; they always been like ham an' eggs and Joe's at the house most of the time anyhow, what with his daddy always hellin' around the country. An' little Leland Stanford, he's got his mama. . . ."

  "But who," the loafers matching pennies in the Snag wondered, "has little Leland Stanford's mama got?" The sweet little spooky thing, living the best years of her life over there in that bear den across the river with an old fart twice her age, living there after she's sworn, time and again to everybody who'd stop and listen, that she was leaving for the East just as soon as little Leland was school age, and that was how long ago? ". . . so who does she have?" Boney Stokes shook his head slowly at Henry, the woes of all mankind marking his face. "I just am thinkin' of the girl, Henry; because able as you still are, you can't be the stud you once was--ain't you concerned for her, day in and day out alone over yonder?"

  Henry leered, winked, grinned into his hand. "Why shoot, Boney. Who's to say whether I'm the stud of old or not?" Modest as a turkey gobbler. "Besides, some men are so wonderfully blest by nature that they don't need to prove theirselfs night after night; they're so fine-lookin' and so special, they can keep a woman pantin' with the pure mem'ry an' the wild hope that what has happened once is liable to happen again!"

  And no other explanation for his young wife's fidelity ever penetrated the old man's cock-certainty. In spite of all the hints and innuendos he remained doggedly certain of her devotion to pure memory and wild hope for the fourteen years she lived in his wooden world. And even after. His veneer of vanity was not even scratched when she announced that she was leaving Oregon for a while to take Leland to one of the Eastern schools.

  "It's for the kid she's doin' it," Henry told them. "For the little feller. He gets these sick spells the doctors here'bouts can't put their finger on the reason; maybe asthma. Doc reckons he'd feel better someplace drier so we'll give it a go. But her, no, don't fool yourself, it's tearin' the poor soul to pieces to leave her old man: cryin', carryin' on for days now. . . ." He dipped a dark brown thumb and finger into his snuff can and regarded the pinch with narrow eyes. "Carryin' on so about leavin' it makes my heart sore." He situated the wad between his lower lip and gums, then glanced quickly up with a grin. "Yessir boys, some of us got it, and some don't."

  (Still crying, reaches down and touches my puffed lip with a finger, then all of a sudden her head jerks back up to that plaque. Like something finally dawned on her. It was weird. She stopped crying just like that and shivered like a north wind hit her. She puts down the book, slow, reaches out and gets hold of the plaque; I know she can't pull it off on account of it's got two sixpenny nails in it. She quits trying. Then she gives a little high, quick laugh, tilting her head at the plaque like a bird: "If you were to come into my room--I'll put Leland in his playroom--do you think you would still be under its influence?" I look away from her and mumble something about not getting her drift. She gives me this kind of trapped, desperate grin and takes me by the little finger, like I was so light she could pick me right up by it. "I mean, if you came next door into the sanctuary of my world, where you can't look at it or it can't look at you--do you suppose you could?" I still give her this dumb look and ask suppose I could what? She just tilts her head toward the plaque and keeps smiling at me, then says, "Haven't you ever wondered about this monstrosity you've had hanging over your bed for sixteen years?" All the while pulling my finger. "Haven't you ever wondered about the loneliness it can cause?" I shake my head. "Well, you just come on into the next room with me and I'll explain it to you." And I remember thinking, why, by God, look here: she can lift me up by one finger after all. . . .)

  "You don't reckon," Boney called haltingly as Henry walked toward the saloon door, "Henry, ah, you don't reckon, do you . . ." reluctantly, with an apologetic tone as though hating it that he'd been driven to asking--for his old friend's good, of course--to asking this painful question ". . . that her leavin' . . . could have anything to do with Hank joinin' the U.S. Armed Services when he did? I mean, her decidin' to leave when he decided to join?"

  Henry paused, scratching at his nose. "Might be, Boney. Never can tell . . ." He pulled on his jacket, then jerked the zipper to his chin and flipped the collar. "Except she announced she was leavin' days before Hank had any notion a-tall about joinin'." His eyes flicked to Boney and the scurrilous grin snapped triumphant, like a rope jerked taut. "See you niggers around."

  (And next door I remember thinking, She's right about that plaque, too. It is nice to be out of sight of the godawful outfit. But I found that just being next door didn't make any difference about getting away from it. In fact, over in the next room, after she told me what she felt it was doing to me, was when I really began to see that plaque. With a pine wall in the way, I saw it--the yellow paint, the red lettering, and all the stuff underneath the red and yellow--clearer than ever before in my life. But by the time I noticed it, I guess it was too late not to. Just like by the time I noticed what that little trip next door had started--and if I was forced to mark a place where this whole business commenced, that's where I'd have to put it--it was way too late to stop it.)

  It is a later spring, years now since chasing tricky grounders. The air is chilled and tasting of wild mint. The river runs dappled from the mountains, catching the fragrant blizzard blown from the blossoming blackberry vines that line its banks. The sun throbs off and on. Unruly mobs of young clouds gather in the bright blue sky, riotous and surging, full of threat that convinces no one. On the dock in front of the old house Henry helps Hank and Joe Ben load clothes, bundles, birdcages, hat-boxes . . . "Crap enough to have a purty fair auction, wouldn't you say, Hank?"--cantankerous and jovial, becoming boyish with age as he had been once prematurely aged and grim.

  "Sure, Henry."

  "Son of a gun, look at the boogerin' stuff!"

  The big, cumbersome, low-slung hauling boat rocks and heaves as it is loaded. The woman stands watching, thin bird hand resting on the shoulder of her twelve-year-old son, who leans against her hip, polishing his eyeglasses with the hem of her canary-yellow skirt. The three men work, carrying boxes from the house. The boat heaves, sinking deeper. The colors strike with stinging clarity, cutting the scene deep: blue sky, white clouds, blue water, white petals floating, and that sparkling patch of yellow . . .

  "Crap an' corruption enough to stay a lifetime, let 'lone a few months." He turns to the woman. "What you takin' so much of your own stuff for, as well as the boy's? Travel fast and travel light, I allus say."

  "It may take longer than I anticipated, getting him settled." Then adds quickly, "But I'll be back as
soon as possible. I'll be back just as soon as possible."

  "Oho." The old man winks at Joe Ben and Hank as they carry a trunk along the dock. "See there, boys? See there. Can't go too long on san'wiches an' salad when she's used to steak an' potatoes."

  Blue and white and yellow, and from that pole jutting out of the second-story window hangs the flag that signals the grocery truck what supplies to leave; a sewn black number on a tailgate banner, red. Blue and white and yellow and red.

  The old man stalks back and forth alongside the boat, studying the packing job. "I guess it'll ride. Okay. Now then. Hank, whilst I'm driving them to the station you an' Joe Ben see to gettin' those parts we need for the donkey engine. You might have to take your cycle up to Newport and look around there, try Nyro Machine, they generally stock all the Skagit gear. I'll be back from the depot by dark; leave me a boat other side. Where's my hat at?"

  Hank doesn't answer. He bends instead to check the river's level on the marker nailed to one of the pilings. The sun splashes silver on his pale metal hat. He straightens and pokes his fists in the pockets of his Levis and looks down river. "Just a minute . . ." The woman doesn't move; she is a yellow patch sewn against the blue river; old Henry is absorbed whittling a sliver to stick in a leak he has discovered in the sideboards of the boat; the gnomish Joe Ben has gone into the boathouse for a tarp to cover the boat's cargo in case those jostling clouds decide to take action.

  "Just a minute . . ."

  Only the boy's head comes around with a jerk, swinging the pale brown cowlick. Only the boy seems to hear Hank speak. He leans toward his big brother, glasses flashing the spring sun.

  "Just a minute . . ."

  "What?" the boy whispers.

  ". . . I guess I'll ride along, if it's no skin offn nobody."