Sometimes a Great Notion (33 page)

They watch the cable draw nearer.
“Then, you see, when the choker gets close to where you want it, give her
two
jerks.”
The whistle peeps twice. The highline stops. The choker cable hangs shuddering in its own dust.
“Okay, watch now; I’ll set it one more time for you.”

(The old man, see, was claiming the Bible said the spooks were born to be bondservants because their blood was black like the blood of Satan. Viv disagreed a while, then got up, walked to the gun case where we keep the big family Bible with the birthdays in it, and went to flipping through with Henry just aglowering . . .)

When Hank has repeated the procedure he turns to Lee . . .
“You got it now?” I nodded, determined and dubious. Brother Hank then took a wristwatch from his pocket and looked at it, wound it, and returned to the same pocket. “I’ll check with you when I can,” he told me. “I got to see about rigging a spar on that peak yonder this morning because we’ll have to move the yarding and loading later this afternoon or tomorrow. You sure you got it now?”

(When Viv found what she’s after in that big Bible she read, “The blood of all men is as one,” and shut the Bible. And I tell you: that pissed the old man so . . . that I don’t know if he would of
ever
spoke to her again, not another word ever, if it hadn’t been for the
lunches
she started packing for us to take to work. . . .)

Hank finished his instructions and walked away, leaving me to have at it. I looked after him stomping off through brush and brambles, then looked at the cable he had left with me, then at the nearest log, and, fired by that long-shot challenger’s elation that I had experienced earlier, pulled on my gloves and had at it . . .

The job was actually simple enough—on the surface—simple, backbreaking labor. But if there is one thing you learn in college it is that the first snowstorm is the most important—score high in your first test and you can coast out the rest of the term. So I had at it that first day with a will, dreaming that I might snow Brother Hank fast and measure up early and be finished with the whole ridiculous business before it broke my back . . .

The first log he chooses lies at the top of a small knoll, in a patch of firecracker weed. He heads toward it; the little red flowers with sulphur-yellow tips seem to part to make way for him and the cable. He throws the bell around the end of the log that is lifted free of the earth where the knoll drops sharply toward the canyon, then secures it in its hook. He steps back to examine the job, a little puzzled: “There doesn’t seem anything so difficult about this. . . .” and walks back to the jerk-wire. The whistle on the donkey peeps. The log tips and heads for the spar tree. “Nothing so very difficult . . .” He turns to see if Hank has been watching and sees his brother just disappearing over another ridge where a second line leads from the spar tree. “Where is he going?” He glances around, deciding quickly on the next log he will hook. “Is he going to that other cable over there?”
(Yeah, it was the lunches that Viv packed . . .)
Hank passes the boy at the other anchor stump, telling him he’d better get it in gear, “Lee’s already tooted one in” and continues on into the woods . . .
(Lunches, see, are about twice as big a deal in the woods as at home, because you get terrible hungry by noon; and the way the old man appreciates eating anyhow, they are like a Major League event. So when Viv took over the lunchbag packing from Jan—on account of Jan being pregnant, was Viv’s story, but I’ve always suspected it was more to get back in the old man’s good graces—well, Henry just somehow forgot all about Bibles and black blood. Not that Jan’s lunches weren’t all right, because they were; but that’s all they were. Viv’s lunches were always all right and then a good deal more than all right to boot. They were a goddamned feast sometimes.

But more than there just being plenty, there was generally something
special
about them . . .)

The second log goes as easy as the first. And as it is being unhooked he looks back toward the other anchor stump some hundred yards away on that other ridge. There still has been no whistle signal. As he watches he sees a figure struggling through a thicket of red alder, the cable still over his shoulder. Though the figure is not even wearing the same color sweat shirt, Lee is suddenly certain that it is Hank, “Taking over the other choker job!” The line above his head strums and with rising excitement he looks and sees his second log is unhooked and his cable is scrambling back to him. He takes it up before it has completely stopped and jogs, dragging the heavy cable as fast as he can, toward the next log, not even taking time to glance at the progress of the figure he supposes to be his brother . . .
(Something special and
different
in her lunches—something other than sandwiches, cookies, and an apple; something you could strut and brag about when you were sitting with a bunch of jacks eating out of their ordinary old nosebags—but, mostly, it was that Viv’s lunches gave you a little piece of the day to look forward to in the morning and think back on in the afternoon. . . .)
The cable snags briefly, but he wrenches it loose. A berry vine trips him and he falls to his knees, grinning as he recalls Joe Ben’s advice, but he is still able to secure the log and jerk the take-it-away signal just seconds before the second signal comes from the other ridge. In the distance Joe Ben’s head swings back in surprise: he has been sitting, his hands already on the levers controlling the cables running to that southern ridge, not expecting a call so soon from Lee. “That boy is really humping it.” Joe changes levers. Lee holds his panting, then sees the highline above him tauten and his log jump out of the vines: he is a log ahead, two if you count that first one! How about that, Hank?
(Her lunches sure changed the old man’s point of view . . .)
Two logs ahead!

The next log has fallen on a clear, almost perfectly level piece of ground. Unhampered by vines or brush, Lee reaches the log easily, noticing with elation that he is gaining on the other figure, who is fighting through the red alder again. But
the very flatness of the ground beneath Lee’s log presents a problem; how do you get the cable under it? Lee hurries along the length of the big stick of wood all the way to its stump, then crosses and hurries puffing back, bent at the waist as he tries to peer through the tangle of limbs lining its length where Andy’s saw has stripped them from the trunk . . . but there is no hole to be found: the tree has fallen evenly, sinking a few inches into the stony earth from its butt to its peak. Lee chooses a likely place and falls to his knees and begins pawing at the ground beneath the bark, like a dog after a gopher. Behind him he hears the peep of the other ridge’s signal and his digging becomes almost frenzied.
The trouble was, with my plan to put in a good first day even if it broke my back: I almost broke my back that first day. . . .
He finishes the hole and gets the cable through and hooked and jerks his whistle wire . . .
But
only
during the first half of that first day.
Then, panting rapidly, hurries to inspect the next log; “He should have told me about the holes, the prick. . . .”
(And see, the funny thing is: it was also Viv’s lunches that finally broke the ice and gave me the chance I was waiting for to talk with the boy . . .) The second half of the day went easier—because by then I had learned that I was breaking my back for naught . . .
The line strums overhead. The cable comes back. The moss begins to steam softly on the old stumps . . .
and that I was
never
going to measure up to Brother Hank, simply because he had rigged the scale, making it impossible.
As the sun gets higher and higher.

 

By the time Joe Ben blew a long, famished blast on the donkey whistle, indicating noon, Lee had regained his one-log lead over the other choker-setter. When the last thread of the whistle note raveled away into the forest Lee allowed himself to sink to the ground beside a stump. He looked blankly at his hands for a time without moving, then removed the gloves, a careful finger at a time. During the grueling morning he had forgotten the circumstances surrounding the gift of the gloves. Hank’s remarks had vanished. So had the anger and the shame caused by the remarks. The gloves now existed pure and with no strings to the past and O Lord
God
, was he ever thankful that he had something to cover his soft, pink grad student’s fingers! He had thought this a hundred times. Not long after Hank had left Lee had removed the heavy shirt to let the breeze dry off his sweat; the sweat wasn’t much affected as he tugged, jerked, and hauled the unwieldly cable through a miasma of berry vine and fire slashing, but within a half an hour both arms were quilted from glove top to shoulder with a pattern of welts and scratches. The view he had of his stomach made him think fabric instead of flesh, a bright garment of patchwork skin stitched together with thorns. He put his shirt back on but an inch or so of wrist still showed between cuff and glove; occasionally he would pause, gasping as he waited for Joe Ben to reel the cable back out or for Andy to buck another fallen tree into thirty-two-foot lengths, and tenderly draw up a shirt sleeve and frown at that inch of bare wrist which was beginning to look like a scarlet bracelet: he hesitated to even imagine what his hands would have looked like without the heavy leather gloves.

He let his head tilt back until it rested against the ragged side of the stump. He watched the other men move through a haze of distorted distance toward the carrier that had brought them to this hell. He felt sick. He wouldn’t have walked those ten wavering miles to that truck even if a hot steak waited for him. His stomach would never touch food again. He wouldn’t move from the spot, though his leg was twisted painfully beneath him, though those bastard carpenter ants, big and shiny as carpet tacks, crawled through his shirt and across his sweating belly, and though he was sitting in a thicket of what was surely poison oak—what else? He sighed. Why try to gild this Dante world? he was resolved to never move again. He closed his eyes. The sound of Joe’s radio was wafted intermittently through the trees:

 

His breathing slowed. His glasses were being streaked with sweat, but he couldn’t have cared less. He drew his eyelids over his mangled body . . . sliding backwards up a long, hot, glistening dream of a playground slide, tumbling over the top of the slide and down a thousand iron steps worn free of their nonskid texture by a century of sneakers, onto a gritty sandlot schoolyard. Where he was able to look from beneath the brim of a grade-school beanie at the names lettered on the side of the high-school gymnasium. WAKONDA HIGH SHARKS SPORTS RECORDS. And who there? Whose name on top of the list, record-holder for high jump? The same for pole vault? And for hundred-meter swim state record? The same name all the way on down. Whose? Shucks, you know whose. That’s my brother Hank Stamper. And just you wait. When I get big. He told me. Teach me to. Someday, boy-oh-boy. Said he would. I can make. Body clean mind. But I kept up. One log ahead. By the gods did keep up with him today . . .

And the ants crawled over him. And Joe’s little radio spun out in the hot air:

 

providing background accompaniment for Lee’s dreaming, as well as for Hank’s limber-legged stride.

 

(See when lunch blew I walked back to the crummy, but Lee isn’t anywhere to be seen. I pick up two sacks and tell Joe I’m going to look for the kid and I cut back and find him crapped out in the grass not a half a dozen steps from the anchor stump . . .)

 

Governor Jimmy Davis reminisced reverently with a steel guitar—

—while Hank stood for a long time looking down on the boy’s scratched and blistered features.

 

In his sleep Lee sought to change and control his dreaming, as he was usually able to do, but his exhausted mind ignored his efforts and kept threatening to ramble off in its own willy-nilly direction through all sorts of best-forgotten childhood impressions. Unable to influence its meandering, Lee was just surrendering himself to the dream when one of the carpenter ant scouts cruising the area decided to test the terrain for logging potential.