Sometimes a Great Notion (18 page)

The bushes along the bank were trimmed, but instead of being attacked with that mathematical dedication one so often finds in suburban landscaping, they had been trimmed for a purpose, to let in light, or to afford a better view of the river and make the dock walk more accessible. The flowers that bloomed at random around the porch and along the sides of the embankment had obviously required great care and attention, but again there was nothing forced or unnatural: they were not flowers bred in Holland and raised in California and flown in to be pampered in local nurseries; they were the flowers common to the area, rhododendron and wild rose, trillium and ghost fern, and even some of the cursed Himalaya berry that the denizens of the coast battle the year round.

I was thunderstruck because, difficult as it was for me to imagine either old Henry or brother Hank or even Joe Ben accidentally achieving the subtle, spare beauty that I saw across the river there, it was a hundred times more ridiculous imagining that any of them had done it on purpose.

(
It useta be so simple when I could hear better. Things was easy to figure. You come up to a rock you either jumped it or heaved it outten the path. Now I don’t know. Twenty or thirty years ago I’d of made sure there were a shell in this barrel instead of make sure there ain’t. Now I don’t know. The old nigger don’t hear so clear no more is one trouble.
)

With my last dollar I purchased from the bus driver the privilege of alighting in front of the garage instead of having to ride eight miles on into town and walk back. As I stood in the dust the driver advised me that my measly buck paid for nothing more than his stopping and letting me off; he couldn’t foul up his schedule by opening the baggage compartment—“Sonny this ain’t the Wells Fargo Stage Coach!” And left me protesting in his exhaust.

So there stands our hero, with nothing but the wind in his hair, the clothes on his back, and the carbon monoxide in his nostrils. Quite a contrast, I mused, crossing the road, from that boatload of essentials I left with twelve years ago. I hope the calf is well fatted.

On the gravel apron near the garage a new pea-green Bonneville gleamed in the sun. I walked past it and on into the three-sided affair that served as shelter, machine shop, dock-house, and garage. Grease and dust upholstered the floor and walls in a rich mauve velvet; mud hornets whizzed through dusty sunbeams near the roof; a yellow jeep heaped with equipment rested boxlike and resigned to its load near one wall, and beyond its cracked headlights I saw that Hank had purchased a bigger and brighter motorcycle; it was tethered on a chain against the back wall and bedecked with black leather and polished brass like a show horse in parade trappings. I looked about the garage for a phone; I had taken for granted that they
must
have installed some kind of device for signaling when a boat was desired, but I saw nothing, and when I glanced through the cobwebbed window toward the house across the river I caught sight of something that made me forsake all hope of such modern convenience; swung from a pole was a tattered cloth with numbers on it, the signal used for ordering wares from the Stokes grocery truck that came by every other day, the same primitive method of communication that had been going on years before my birth.

(
But by god the old hound don’t need good ears for some things goddammit. He don’t need good ears to know where to draw the boogin’ line! And all this goddam telling me it’s best old man you keep outta sight and outta trouble that don’t set so good. I get tired! I get tired of!
)

I left the garage and was wondering how my modulated tenor, tuned for polite classroom intercourse back in a civilized world, could be expected to carry across the expanse of water, when I saw a disturbance at the massive front door across the way. (
By god I maybe can’t hear so good but I know what’s right and what ain’t by god if I don’t!
) I saw a stocky man in a brown suit come running across the lawn in thick-legged haste, holding his hat to his head with one hand and an attaché case in the other, shouting back at the house. Stirred by the shouts, a battalion of hounds charged from beneath the house and the man cut short his tirade, paused a moment to flail at the pack with the case, which burst open in a bright yellow blizzard of paper, turned to run again, dogs and paper flapping at his heels. (
By god one thing I just ain’t about to tolerate is!
) The front door banged again and another figure came charging out (
goddammit is is is;
) brandishing an ugly black shotgun and making a clamor that put to shame the barking and shouting that had gone before. The man in the suit dropped his case, turned to recover it, saw the terrifying approach of this new menace, and ran on without it down the incline to the dock, leaped into the fire-engine-red launch at the mooring, and began wildly jerking at the motor rope. He paused once to look back up the plank walkway at the awesome creature storming through the dogs and bearing vengefully down on him, then redoubled his frantic efforts to start the motor (Get back! Henry Stamper, you gone crazy with age there’s laws in this country [
is IS is
] oh Jesus he’s got a shotgun, Start! Start!) as the other man came closer and closer (
What’s wrong’th this boogin’ gun
[Start! Start!]
I’ll by the goddam see to who unloaded one thing I won’t tolerate by god is is is
) louder and louder. (Start! oh god here he comes [IS IS IS] oh god START!)

Across the river Henry had dropped his gun. No; now he had it again! Now he was down. Now he was moving toward the dock again! His hair flew out behind him in a long white mane. His arm pumped him onward. He was impressive in a plaid shirt and a pair of knee-length wool undershorts and a plaster cast that ran in one piece from the tip of one foot seemingly all the way up his side and out over his shoulder, forcing him to carry that arm bent before him as though ossified there. Why, the old trouper has grown so venerably ancient, I thought, that he is preserving his matchless idiocy for posterity by gradually having himself done over in limestone (
if anybody goddammit thinks for one minit that just because I’m I’m I’m
).

He swayed and teetered in his restricted advance and struck at the welter of hounds with the shotgun, which served alternately as firearm, crutch, and club. He reached the dock and I could hear the thundering boom of his plaster leg as it sounded on the boards, the report reaching me a second after the foot set down, so the sound appeared to issue from the lifting foot instead of the dock. He lumbered forward down the dock like a comic Frankenstein’s monster, booming that foot, striking about with that gun, and cursing so fast and loud that the words were sacrificed to wholesale noise (
because I never yet rose to see the GODDAM day I weren’t up to RUNNING my own SONVABITCHING affairs and if any BASTARD thinks
).

The man in the boat jerked the motor to life and threw off the mooring just as the three other characters in this drama came running from the house and down onto the dock: two men and what I ventured to think a woman in jeans and an orange-colored apron, and a long braid flopping down the back of the ubiquitous sweat shirt. She passed the two men and scampered across the dock to try to calm Old Henry’s raving; the two men held back, letting him rave his damnedest and laughing so they could barely walk. Henry ignored the calming and laughing alike and continued to rail at the man in the boat, who must have concluded that the gun was empty or broken because he had pulled a safe twenty yards away from the dock and was idling the boat at a standstill into the current so he could have his turn at shouting back at the others. All up and down the river I could see startled gulls flapping airward in a frightened flight from the uproar.

(
Oh lordy what am I doing with this here scattergun? Oh lordy I don’t hear so good. I truly do not . . .
)

Henry appeared to be tiring. One of the men, the taller one, who I decided must be Hank—what other Caucasian ever moved with that slack-limbed indolence?—left the others and loped into the boatshed and reappeared, bent in an odd position as he shielded something with his cupped hands. He stood at the edge of the dock in this position for a moment, then straightened up to throw whatever he held in the direction of the boat. (
Oh lordy, what’s happening?
) And then there was nothing but
silence
as the whole cast—the figures on the dock, the petrified brown lump in the boat, even the pack of dogs—stood perfectly still and quiet for perhaps two and three-quarters seconds before a thundering blast right next to the boat jammed a white column of water forty feet into the hot, smoky air, ka-
whooomp!
like an Old Faithful erupting in the middle of the river.

As the water fell back into the boat the men on the dock roared with laughter. They stumbled with their laughter, they grew weak with it, they finally collapsed under it like drunks. Even Old Henry’s cursing became so diluted with laughter that he was finally forced to lean weakly against a piling, no longer able to support both himself and the colossal amusement that shook him. The lump in the boat saw Hank heading back into the shed to reload and overcame his shellshock enough to gun the boat motor on full so that he was out of range of Hank’s next throw by a good three feet. The explosion bucked the boat forward like a surfboard catching a fifteen-foot comber, and this set off new hysterics on the dock. (
Anyhow by god I guess I showed him he can’t tell me how to run my my . . . business, hear good or no!
)

The boat pulled up to the landing where I watched, and the man grabbed for a hold on one of the bumper tires that were dangling in the water. He leaped out onto the landing without tying the boat or turning off the motor, and I was compelled to make a courageous lunge to catch the rope at the rear of the boat lest it escape pilotless down river. As I stood there with my feet braced, holding the boat while it tugged to be off again like a whale on a leash, I thanked the man pleasantly for bringing transportation across to me and congratulated him on the little welcoming-home skit he had so generously taken part in. He stopped gathering what was left of his papers and raised a reddened round face in my direction, seeming to notice me for the first time.

“And I’ll just bet you’re another one of the scabbin’ bastards!” He thrust his Jiggs-like face in my direction. Little rivulets of water running out of his frizzy red hair kept getting in his eyes, forcing him to blink and rub at the sockets with both fists like a child crying. “Ain’t I right?” he demanded, rubbing and blinking. “Huh? Ain’t I now?” But before I could summon an appropriately clever answer he turned and lurched up the planks toward his new car, cursing so mournfully that I wasn’t sure whether to laugh at the man or pity him.

I lashed the impatient boat to a mooring and went back to the garage for the jacket I had left lying on the jeep. When I returned I saw across the way that Hank had removed his shirt and shoes and was in the process of pulling down his trousers. He and the other man—Joe Ben, from the banty-legged way he stood—were still laughing. Old Henry was working his way back up the bank toward the house, much more laboriously than he had come down.

As Hank pulled a leg from his pants he supported himself by leaning a hand on the shoulder of the woman standing near him. This must be brother Hank’s pale wildwoods flower, I decided; barefooty and fattened out round and comfortable on huckleberry and pemmican. Hank finished with his pants and made a flat, whacking dive into the river, the same racing dive I had watched him practice years ago as I peeked from behind curtains of my room. As he started stroking across I noticed that the neat, strength-conserving stroke of the racing swimmer was somehow marred. There was a hitch in the smoothness of the movement every two or three strokes, a jog in the rhythm that seemed caused by something other than a lack of practice; if one could be permitted the term in reference to a swimmer, I suppose we might say that Hank had developed a limp. As I watched I thought, I was right, he is past his prime; the old giant is weakening. Perhaps that recompense of blood will not be so difficult to claim as I feared.

Heartened by this thought I got into the boat, untied the rope, and with some experimenting managed to turn the bow about and head in Hank’s direction. The boat moved only slightly faster than idling speed, but I couldn’t fathom the throttle on the motor and had to proceed at the rate Jiggs had left for me; by the time I had putted out to Hank he was better than halfway across.

When I got close he stopped swimming and trod water, squinting against the water to see who was picking him up, as he waited for me to stop the boat for him. But I found I was no more able to slow the motor than I had been able to speed it up. I had to make three runs before Hank realized I couldn’t stop for him; he got a hand over the side on the third time by and jerked himself on board, his long, veined arm snapping his body into the air like an arrow fired from a lemonwood bow. As he rolled into the boat I saw why he had limped in his swimming stroke and why he had used only the one hand to pull himself from the water: two fingers were missing from the other, but other than that he still seemed pretty much in prime.

He lay for a moment in the bottom of the boat, blowing water, then climbed onto a seat facing me. He dropped his face into his hand as though he were rubbing the bridge of his nose, or wiping the water from his mouth; this was his characteristic attempt to either hide the grin you already knew was there, or to draw your attention to it. Watching him, watching the way he had jerked himself into the boat with flawless physical control and now watching the composure with which he confronted me—at ease, as though he had not only known it was me coming to pick him up but had planned it that way—I felt the momentary optimism I had experienced back on the dock replaced by a surge of apprehension. . . . If the giant is weakening WATCH OUT! WATCH OUT! then he has chosen a poor way to demonstrate it.

Still he didn’t speak. I fumbled out some apology for being unable to stop the motor to pick him up, and was about to explain that Yale offered no course on seamanship when he raised his wet eyebrows—without moving his face, without lifting it from his hand—raised his brown and beaded eyebrows and looked at me with eyes as bright and green and poisonous as copper sulfate crystals.