Sometimes a Great Notion (41 page)

I stood with a bowl of fetched cream fragrant as alfalfa in my hands, watching the dark poultice of dusk draw bullbats from their hideaways, listening to their throated diving buzzes blending in years with that honking from across the river.

“Why was I spun into an upstairs cocoon? This is a land for childhood frolic, with forests dark and magical and shady sloughs alive with chubs and mud-puppies, a land in which young and snub-nosed Dylan Thomas would have gamboled, red-cheeked and raucous as a strawberry, a town where Twain could trade rats and capture beetles, a chunk of wild beautiful insane America that Kerouac could have dug a good six or seven novels’ worth . . . why, then, did I refuse it as my world-to-grow-up-in?”

The question had a new and fearful ring to me. Always before, whenever I brooded in some moody apartment with some melancholy wine and let my mind wander back to stand gaping, perplexed and horrified, on the brink of my past, I was able to fix the blame on some convenient villain: “It was my brother Hank; it was my ancient fossil of a father, who frightened and disgusted me; it was my mother, whose name be frailty . . .
they
were the ones who tore my young life asunder!”

Or on some convenient trauma: “That tangle of arms and legs, sighs and sweat-wet hair telescoped through my bedroom peephole . . .
that
was what burned out my innocent eyes!”

But that doubting moon wouldn’t let me get away with it. “Be fair, be fair; that event didn’t happen until you were almost eleven, until a century of blooming cherry trees and dragonflies and river-skipping barn swallows had already danced past. Can you blame the first ten years on the eleventh?”

“No, but—”

“Can you accuse your mother and father and half-brother of more crime than is usually committed against
any
sulky son
anywhere?
”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

Thus I conferred with the moon as October drew to a close.

Three weeks after leaving New York with a suitcase full of certainty. Three weeks after infiltrating the Stamper castle with vague revenge simmering in my mind, three weeks of physical misery and wishywashy will, and still my revenge only simmered. Barely simmered, at that. In fact had grown rather cool. To tell the truth, had all but frozen in a corner of my memory; in the three weeks following my vow to pull Hank down, my intentions had cooled down and my heart warmed up, and a family of moths had taken up residence in my suitcase and chewed my slacks and my certainties full of holes.

So with the devil’s-advocate moon grinning over my shoulder, with demure quails calling and bullbats diving and old Henry honking across the river that gurgled coyly to the stars, and with my stomach heavy with Viv’s cooking and my head light with Hank’s praise, right then and right there I decided to bury the hatchet. I would blame my sad beginnings on no fiend but my own. Live and let live. Forgive me as I forgive my debtors. The man who seeks revenge digs two graves.

“So all right.”

Careless with victory, the moon leaned too far and fell into the cream. It swam there like half a golden macaroon, tempting me until I brought it to my lips. I opened my body to that fabled milk and that enchanted cooky. Like Alice I would expand, my life would now be changed. All those years barking various Shazams up the wrong tree—you’d think a foxy kid like me woulda known better. Magic words are too hard to come by, too tricky to pronounce, too unpredictable. Steady proper diet is the secret to growth. It
has
to be. I should have learned long ago. A sweet disposition, easy-going digestion, the proper diet, and love thy neighbor as thy brother and thy brother as thyself. “I’ll do it!” I decided—“Love him as myself!”—and maybe that was where I made my mistake, right then and right there; for if thee is fashioning all love after that thee holds for thine own self, then thee had best make a damnably thorough inspection of thy model . . .

 

By the time I got back the kitchen was impatient with the smell of baked apple and cinnamon, and Hank was just lacing on his boots to come look for me. “Damn anyhow, boy; we decided you’d got et by the skeeters or something out there.”

My throat was so choked with the heady effect of that milk and that moon that I could only respond by holding out the bowl of cream. “Oh, look,” squeaked Squeaky, Joe’s five-year-old, “
mus
-tash!
Mus
-tash! Uncle Lee has been into the cream. Mm-mm, Uncle Lee, mm-mmm on you”—and stroked her pink finger at me, shaming me into a blush that I am sure must have seemed far out of proportion to my crime.

“We ’uz just about to send the dogs out after you,” Joe said.

I wiped my mouth with the dishtowel to hide the blush. “I just heard the old man sending the clarion call from across the bank,” I offered as an explanation. “He’s waiting over there now.”

“And what do ya bet?” Hank said. “Oiled to the gills again.”

Joe Ben rolled his eyes and wrinkled his nose in a gnome’s grin. “Old Henry is big stuff in town these days,” he said, as though personally responsible. “Oh yeah. They say the girls aren’t
nowheres
safe near him an’ that cane. But didn’t I tell you, Hank? That there’s to be trial and tribulation
and
suffering but, man,
did
n’t I tell you? There
is
balm in Gilead. Oh yeah!”

“No fool like an old one.”

Viv dipped a finger into the cream and touched it to her tongue. “Don’t you start on my old hero now. I think that he has
plenty
of balm coming. He’s worked, golly,
how
many years building up this business?”

“Fifty, sixty,” Hank said. “Who knows? The old coon never lets on to anybody how old he is. Well, I bet he’s over there crappin’ bricks.” He dabbed at his mouth with the sleeve of his sweat shirt and pushed back his chair.

“No, Hank, wait . . .” I heard myself saying. “Please. I’d like to do it”—surprising god knows which of us the most. Hank stopped, half up from his chair, and gawked at me, and I averted my face and went after my cream mustache with the dishtowel again. “I’ll . . . I mean, it’s just that I haven’t had a chance to drive the boat since the day I arrived so I was thinking . . .”

I trailed off to an embarrassed dishtowel-muffled mumble under the glare of Hank’s spreading grin. He let himself back down in the chair and tipped it back to look across the table at Joe. “Well by god, Joby, what do you think of that? First the cream, now the boat—”

“Oh yeah! An’ don’t forget findin’ choker holes underneath all the logs, don’t forget that!”

“—and this was the nigger we was scared to write ’cause he wouldn’t never fit in with our illiterate make-do way of living.”

“All right,” I said, trying to shroud my pleasure in petulance, “if I’d known it was going to perpetrate such a stupid fuss—”

“No! No!” Joe shouted, scrambling up from his chair. “Here; I’ll even go out with you and show you how to start the motor. . . .”

“Joby?” Hank stopped him, then coughed a clever cough into his smile hand. “I believe Lee can handle it on his own. . . .”

“Oh yeah, but Hank, it’s
night
out there, with stumps big as elephants floating around—”

“I believe he can handle it,” Hank repeated with bored nonchalance; he fished the key from his pocket and tossed it to me and tipped the chair forward again to his plate. I told him thanks, and outside on the docks silently thanked him again for understanding, and for having faith enough in his literate little brother’s illiterate make-do to back up that understanding.

Dancing light in my stocking feet, I whizzed across the grass to the ringing reassurance of a full house of stars and down the plank in two springing leaps as the moon gave a bracing nod of encouragement—they were rooting for me all the way. I hadn’t touched the boat’s controls since my first bumbling attempt, but I had watched. I had taken notes. Stiff-lipped and set-jawed, grim and gritty as they come, I was ready for another go at making-do.

And the boat started with the first yank—as fir trees leaped cheering and stood waving madly with the warm chinook wind.

And the moon beamed like a junior-high-school coach.

I guided the boat skillfully across the spangled water, never brushing any of the mammoth-sized stumps the whole trip, aware of my audience, pleased with my performance under pressure, and proud of myself. How rare and beautiful in this day and age, I thought, is that simple combination of words—proud of myself . . .

In a pool of frozen gold Molly the dog recalls through a haze the scaling excitement she felt hours earlier when she first realized that the only voice baying was her own, and the only pawbeats behind the crashing bear the sound of her own lonely crashing; warms herself for a moment at the memory.
In her bed deep and soft and white as sifted flour, Simone sleeps with a stomach full of esteem and dignity; she has not sold herself for meat and potatoes; she has not eaten all day; she fed her children with the last of the ham-hock soup and saved none for herself, and tomorrow she will drive into Eugene to seek a steady job; she has not weakened; and she has kept her promise to herself and her little carved Virgin.
In his room Lee writes: “. . . I humiliate myself even to admit it, Peters, but for a brief time I actually felt my activities here praiseworthy.”
And in the garage by the landing old Henry is chided by a much soberer young Henry: “Stand up straight here, you old sot! Stop that infernal wobbling! You used to be able to down a quart of Ben’s white dynamite and never bat an eye.” “That’s th’ truth,” old Henry remembers proudly, “I whupped it.” And draws himself stiffly erect to go meet the boat . . .

When I reached the opposite shore I found our premonitions justified; the old man had obviously been enjoying the balm of Gilead for a good many hours, and had even been so thoughtfully kind as to bring a bottle of it home. He was a sight to behold. Like a victor he returned, singing, clumping, thrashing willy-nilly with his cane at the serfdom of dogs which clamored at his feet at the dock; like a Norse hero he entered his hall, glorified by scars and a nose red as the baked apples which graced his board; like a conquering warrior he bore the spoils of his campaign before him and called for glasses all around, kiddies too; then, like a venerable old warrior, he seated himself; loosed great blastings of wind from either end, sighed a well-deserved sigh, unhitched his belt, cursed the plaster armor that encased his right side, drew his teeth from a crumpled newspaper, and, adjusting same between his gums with the air of a dandy adjusting his foulard, asked when the goddam hell do we eat!

I was glad I had gone on first; his would have been a tough act to follow. He was in peak condition. The rest of us remained at the table while he ate the piece of deer liver Viv fried for him, laughing till we choked at his stories of the oldtime logging days, of bull-logging and horse-logging, of the year he had spent in Canada learning the trade in a camp forty thousand miles from
no
place and where men were
Men
, goddammit, and women were the knotholes in slippery-elm logs! By the time he finished the last of the deer liver, the apples were warmed again and Viv gave them to us in Pyrex dishes and sent us from the kitchen so she could clear away the table.

In the living room Hank and I sat spooning cream into the hot, bubbling apples while old Henry continued his monologue. The twins sat at the old man’s stockinged feet, eyes as round and wonderstruck as the white plastic disks of the pacifiers waggling in their mouths. Jan diapered the baby and Joe Ben stuffed Squeaky into flannel sleepers. The bottle of bourbon worked its way around the room, filling the corners and warming the cold little lonely shadows that hid in regions remote from the tasseled lamp. This lamp stood between Henry’s thronelike armchair and the big woodstove, and the little area made up by these three—the chair, the lamp, and the stove—comprised the cultural center of the enormous room, and as the old man talked the rest of us pressed in from the yawning hinterlands to be nearer to this center.

Most nights Henry ranted about politics or economics, space travel or integration—and while his attacks on foreign policy were pure noise, his reminiscings were well worth listening to.

“We did it,
we
,” he cried, warming up to his subject. “Me and the donkey. We whupped it, the swamp, the woods, all. Damn tootin’.” The words rattled like wet dice among the loose dentures. He paused to arrange his teeth and his cast more comfortably. Chalk, I thought to myself happily, as the liquor rose to my eyes and brought him into looming focus, chalk, limestone, and ivory. Teeth, limbs, and head; he’s turning directly from flesh legend to statue in one move, thereby cutting some park-commissioned sculptor out of a job . . .

“Let me tell you, me an’ the donk—ah . . . What was I saying? Oh, about them oldtime tales where we greased the skids and drove the ox and all that noise? Let me see now. . . .” He concentrated, zeroing in on the past. “Oh, I recall oncet about forty years ago: we had this slide, ya see, like a big greasy
trough
running from the hill down to the river, an’ we was easin’ the logs into the slide. Zoom! Hunnert mile an hour down to the river like a damn rocketship! Zoom! Kersplash. Float it down t’ the mill, zoom, kersplash. So oncet we’d just got this one big bastard of a fir eased into the trough and she’s just commencin’ to start inchin’ down before the big steep, an’ I look an’
here come
that boogin’ mailboat! Boy, howdy! I see we got a dead-center bead on her. That log’ll break her clean in half. Oh mother, let me think: who was it run that boat? The Pierce boys, I think, or was it Eggleston an’ his kid? Ah? Anyhow this is the picture; that log, it just
cannot
be stopped! All right, amen to that. Cannot be stopped, but maybe slowed. So I quick as a flash pick up a water bucket and scoop it fulla dirt an’ gravel an’ I jump on that big devil before she gets up too
momentium.
And I ride her down, sprinklin’ that dirt ahead of us in the skid trough to slow her. And sure it slowed her, you bet it did; maybe one gnat hair it slowed her down. Next thing I’m blazin’ down that hill with Ben and Aaron hollerin’ somewhere behind me, hollerin’ ‘Jump, you dumb nigger, jump!’ I don’t say nothin’—I’m hangin’ on with teeth, toenails an’ all—but if I
could of
I’d of told them
You
get on this here log goin’ so fast everything’s a blur an’ let’s see you jump! Yeah. See
anybody
nuts enough to jump, by god.”