Sometimes a Great Notion (66 page)

The lion’s roaring began ringing in his head louder and louder, and he couldn’t keep the owners from hearing it. They couldn’t consider letting him go—he was far too good a foreman to lose—but they could become decidedly cold after so many of his tirades against unfair treatment of the men; no more “sport” or “Red,” and the service clubs dropped his name from their rosters. But others were also aware of the roar. One noon the men came to the solitary stump where he was eating his lonely foreman’s lunch—six of them, coming from the clearing down the slope where all the rest of the crew joked and horseplayed during sandwiches and Thermoses of coffee—to tell him that they, the crew, which was large enough to compose three-fourths of the local, had talked it over and were voting him president at the next meeting if he would consider taking the job. Evenwrite sat in mute, open-mouthed amazement for a long minute: voting him, a
foreman, their
foreman, to be their local’s president? And then stood up and removed his company-issue hard hat, threw it to the ground, and announced with tears in his eyes that he would not only consider it but he was quitting his job as of right now!

“Quitting?” the owners had asked later at the mill. “I don’t understand, Floyd; why quitting?”

“The men want me for local’s president.”

“Yes. I understand that. But that’s no reason to chuck your job; that’s no reason for quitting. . . .”

“All right then. Not quitting, if you don’t like that word. Let’s just say I’m leaving your side so’s I can finally get started working for my own!”

Even now, as he recalled the event, his eyes began to water. He’d never in his life been so proud. He’d gone to that first meeting with his head up and his shoulders back, figuring
now
, by god, now he was gonna show them, the ones who’d shot his grandfather dead for sticking up for his American rights, the ones who’d sandbagged the Wobblies into an ignoble back seat in the thirties, who’d forced his disillusioned father to a shameful life and a humiliating death, who’d put him—just a high-school kid!—behind the wheel of an overloaded truck long past the age of safety so’s they could hell around in a new convertible every year off the money his risks had made them! The ones who thought they were better, the
Big-Asses
. . . goddam if he wouldn’t show them!

Yet, after more than a year at it, what had he done? What could he point to? His eyes began to water faster, and he felt that warning tickle scrape in his throat. He plumped heavily down from the clothes hamper and took a sip of water to quench the tickle, then removed his shorts and undershirt and stepped into the tub. It wasn’t nearly as warm or as full as he liked it—no good old Vick’s neither—but it would have to do. He sighed and leaned back, searching for the comfort he used to find after a long day in the woods. But the water just wasn’t warm enough.

As he lay with his eyes closed, the scene at the Snag suddenly leaped back into his thoughts. Draeger. Damn, it was hard to know how to take that man. It seemed so strange to Floyd that they should both be on the side of labor. Try as he might, he couldn’t imagine Jonathan Bailey Draeger in there in the thick of it when the Wobs were winning those first terrible and costly victories . . . imagine him in there with pamphlets and sabot shoes, with ax handles and peavey poles, busting heads and risking his life for the right to stand up on a box in a company town and say what he thought, or for equipment safe enough it wasn’t going to kill you before you drew your time, or even imagine him doing a little reckless and mocking act of rebellion such as wearing a button proudly proclaiming himself one of the citizens that President Teddy Roosevelt had labeled as citizens who, if they weren’t guilty of any crime, were nevertheless “undesirable” as far as the USA was concerned. No, not Draeger, not this fastidious know-it-all who’d obviously never had on a pair of corks in his life, or swung a double-edge when every swing felt as though it was sinking three inches deep into a head three feet thick with last night’s liquor, or sat for hours at the end of a day with a needle under a bright lamp, digging the jaggers and berry thorns and cedar slivers out of tired fingers. . . . Not Jonathan Bailey Draeger.

Without any warning the tickle flared hot and crackling in his throat again. He didn’t try to stave off the sneeze this time. He let it roar through the house in all its full-volumed magnificence; it might wake the family but at least they’d know who was up and fooling around at this hour; they’d know the old man was home. It left him tingling all down his arms and thighs. A good sneeze was damn near like when you got your rocks off. It left a man feeling like he’d sure enough had something happen to him.

After a minute Larry, his four-year-old, appeared at the bathroom door, rubbing the matted red hair where his head had lain on the pillow. Evenwrite scowled at him.

“Here now, you little skunk . . . you ain’t supposed to be up an’ roaming around.”

“Hello, Daddy,” the boy said sleepily. He stepped closer to the tub and looked down at the bubbles in the stiff fuzz that swarmed from his father’s heavy shoulders down over his chest and belly like a mantle of thick orange moss. “I heard you an’ I woke up,” the boy explained.

“Do you have to pee?” Evenwrite asked.

The boy thought a while, looking at the hair, then shook his head. “No.”

“You sure?”

“I done peed once tonight.”

“Good fellow.”

“Where’d you go, Daddy?”

“Daddy had to see a man about some business.”

“Did you win?”

“It wasn’t a poker game tonight, skunk. Now you get on back to bed.”

“I peed before I went to sleep.”

“All right, good boy. Now back to bed.”

“Good night, Daddy.”

The boy scuffed out of the bathroom with short splay-footed steps, his round shoulders rolling with the walk: an infant parody of the bearlike Evenwrite movement. When Floyd heard the bedsprings squeak he reached out and pushed the bathroom door closed so the light or another sneeze wouldn’t wake the child’s brothers or sister. He slid down in the tub until the water came over his lips. His ears were submerged. He left just enough of his nose out to breathe. He closed his eyes again. Did I win, he thought, laughing warmly to himself at the boy’s imitation of the mother’s irritating question: I suppose he sees my whole life away from home as one big game of penny-nickel-dime draw. And that’s about it, too, you come down to it, playing the crummy cards you was dealt and betting on better cards to come. Bluffing and bullying when you’re short, laying back when you’re long. . . .

As he dozed, his thoughts returned again to Draeger. One thing, he promised himself, one thing, though: I ain’t gonna tell my kids one side or the other . . . because it’s getting so you can’t hardly be sure . . . any more . . . who’s the Big-Asses and who’s the Little-Asses . . . who’s on whose side . . . or who’s winning . . . any more . . . or even who you want to win for sure . . .

 

Before noon of the next day, Monday, Evenwrite had called the two mute Sitkins boys, Howie Evans, Mel Sorenson, and Les Gibbons. They arrived, except for Les, in time for deerburger and potatoes. They could see the picket signs Evenwrite had made standing against the wall like arms stacked before a battle.

“Sit down, boys,” Evenwrite told the four men. “Have some chow. We’ll wait a while longer for Les, then head on out. Boy”—he winked at them over the meat—“I tell you, I don’t know where we’d be during this strike it wasn’t for all the sidehill salmon I been catching.”

No one laughed. “This picket,” Howie said, “you sure Draeger knows about this?”

“Sure as shooting,” Evenwrite said brightly. “I let him know last night that we was capable of running our own affairs if he wasn’t going to get off the pot. . . .”

“I don’t know.” Howie hedged. “My old lady won’t like it if I’m doin’ something illegal—”

“Legal be screwed! We’re doin’ something right for a change, and legal be screwed!”

“But what about Hank?”

“What about him? What can he do? What is there he can possibly do about a picket?”

“I don’t know,” Howie muttered, standing. “You never can be sure . . .”

A half an hour later the pickets were plodding back and forth in front of the office at the mill. Orland Stamper came out and stood a moment looking at them, then returned to the shrieking mill.

“He’s gone to get word to Hank,” Howie said unhappily.

“So what if he does?” Evenwrite demanded. “Howie, I swear you do overestimate that bastard . . .”

The next time the log truck arrived from the show, Hank and Joe Ben alighted from its cab before it drove on to dump the logs in the river. The plodding men watched guardedly from beneath their metal hats as Hank and his little companion sat on the bench beneath the mill’s sheltered porch, viewing the parade. Half an hour passed. Hank smoked, grinning, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands dangling between his legs; Joe Ben provided some march music with his little transistor radio. Finally, to Howie’s relief, they saw Hank turn and whisper something to Joe and Joe erupt with laughter, then dash from the porch to a battered pick-up and drive away toward town. When the log truck returned again, Hank bade them all a pleasant afternoon and climbed into the cab. They didn’t see any more of him that day.

“We got him,” Evenwrite crowed, back at home that night with a new bottle of Vick’s. “They got to have supplies. They can’t run a show without supplies. An’ what supplier, what good teamster is gonna cross our picket line with gas or oil or parts, huh? Tomorrow or the next day will tell the tale.”

Tomorrow told it. When Floyd arrived with his pickets the next morning they found a television mobile unit from Eugene with a portable TV camera, two photographers from the
Register Guard,
and Indian Jenny. And that night the front page carried the heading: PICKETS PERPLEXED BY MYSTERIOUS MATRIMONY—
which one is happy groom?
And the six-fifteen TV news carried a picture of a woman with a shape like a stone and a face like a baked yam walking alongside a line of pickets, in poncho and rubber milking boots, just what the pickets wore, carrying a sign on a stick just like those the pickets carried. Their signs proclaimed: UNFAIR UNFAIR. Her sign added: JUST MARRIED. No one volunteered for picket duty the next day.

They met this time in the Snag. Behind the bar, completely absorbed in the polishing of a shot glass, Teddy seemed to barely register their called requests for drinks.

“What tactics are you proposing this time, Floyd?” Draeger had entered without anyone’s noticing; he stood near the bar, opening a newspaper. “No fire, I hope?”

“You’ll see, by godfrey. We’re tired of foolin’ around. You’ll see.”

“Fine,” Draeger said pleasantly and sat down. “Let me know how it all turns out.” And arranged his paper before him and leaned over it. “A bourbon,” he said without looking up. “I. W. Harper’s.” Teddy already had it poured.

“Okay then,” Evenwrite said in a terse whisper at his table. “About ten. I’ll call Sitkins. Mel, you call Howie and ask him. Ten, then.” The men nodded back, sitting in grim silence around the table, chewing the rims of glasses, not even breaking the serious mood of the approaching night to kid Teddy about his watered drinks. The talk went on until it was time to go to supper.

A half-dozen resolute and stouthearted men met that night in Evenwrite’s front room over a case of Olympia quarts and devised a plot to slip out to the Stamper mill and hacksaw the cable bolts linking the surrounding logs that penned the booms together. “Stampede them logs downstream like they was wild horses!” Les Gibbons exclaimed, pounding the floor beside him with a beer bottle. “’N’ if we’re lucky they’ll rip out the
whole rat’s nest
of the motherjumpers as they go stampedin’ past!”

“And we can drop a few blasting sticks amongst the booms to give them a good start.” Evenwrite could feel his heart beginning to hammer.

“Attaboy! Now we’re pickin’ cotton!”

“Maybe even let a stick or two drop right in the mill.” Yessir, this was the way to get things done, old-fashioned or no!

“Now we’re talkin’!”

Gibbons struck the floor again. “Awright then, we gonna
talk
sic ’em or we gonna
do
sic ’em?”

“
Do,
goddammit’hell! Jus’ like commandos. Let’s go, let’s go!”

They managed to get one boom opened before the slippery, lurching logs spilled Evenwrite and two other men into the freezing black water. These three unfortunate commandos were swept off into the dark and, after a moment, could be heard cursing and shouting from a flooded clump of bam trees where they clung, too far from solid land to risk swimming, too cold to wait for one of the others to drive into town for a motorboat. There was no choice but go into the mill and phone for help from the nearest boat.

“What’ll we tell him?” Howie Evans whispered as he stood, humpbacked and cold, dialing the flashlit wall phone in the mill.

“Tell him we need help quick to keep three men from perishing!”

“But I mean . . . what about the
logs?
” Howie whispered, holding his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone.

“McElroy is out there now wiring the cut back together. In the dark maybe he won’t notice a few logs missin’.”

Hank arrived, as eager to help as ever. With his flash he and Joe Ben found the three men in the leafless thicket of bam saplings. The bony saplings rattled and clattered as the current swept through their skinny trunks, making them appear as cold and miserable as the shivering men who clung to them. They all three were prepared to start talking as soon as the boat achieved the security of solid land; each had created his own elaborate and logical-sounding reason for being out so late, so far from town, and so near the property of their enemy, but when Hank didn’t ask for reasons, did not even seem inclined to ask for their reasons, they wisely chose to keep silent, realizing that any alibi or excuse they offered would be received probably without question, maybe even without comment, and certainly without belief.