Sometimes a Great Notion (79 page)

“It’s just
woman’s
work, Lee boy, just
old woman’s
work!” He pranced about the bed in his heavy wool socks and canvas trousers. “Nothing to it a-
tall! You’ll
probably even find it
interesting.
Listen. We doze up the ol’ slashin’ in a pile. We squirt it with coal oil. We light it on fire. We sit around chewing the fat and toasting marshmallows. What could be easier?”

I opened one doubting eye. “If it’s all that easy one might think you two heroes could manage it alone without half trying. And let me sleep, please, Joe. I’m dying. I’m riddled with viruses. Look”—I ran out my tongue for Joe Ben to examine—“thith look like I care about marthmellowth?”

Joe Ben took my tongue daintily between thumb and forefinger and leaned close. “My, would you look at the tongue on this animal,” he marveled. “Looks like he’s been eating chalk. Hm, well . . .” Joe Ben turned toward the door. Hank had come up silently to stand looking in. “What you think, Hankus? Lee maintains he’s suffering bad and wonders why we don’t burn the job trash without him? We could probably handle it, me and you and Andy. We won’t have nothin’ to do but clean up. We won’t be able to get any cuttin’ done up river today nohow. We could leave the boy here to gather his resources for . . . we could, ah . . .”

Joe Ben ceased abruptly, it was as though he’d just seen something invisible to our less sensitive eyes. He blinked rapidly, took another quick look at Hank leaning against the doorjamb nonchalantly paring his fingernails with a pocketknife, then looked back at me. Then he seemed to come to some decision and suddenly reached out and snatched off my blankets.

“But then again,” he reflected, “on second hand we can’t have you
sufferin
’ cooped up here in this room all day long. It’d hang you up. You’d get the wearies. Tell you what, Leland. You come along with us just for
moral
support, and just sit around and watch; what do you say? Oh yeah, that don’t need a healthy tongue, just watching. So
up! up!
We can’t leave you to waste away. ‘Rejoice in thy youth, an’ let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth,’ or something like that.” He thrust a handful of clothes at me. “Let’s go. We’ll get the boat warmed up for you. Hank, tell Viv to butter him up some toast. We’ll make it. Yeah. We’re all in God’s great pocket.”

While I finished breakfast, Hank waited silently at the kitchen window, looking out through a hole he had rubbed in the steamed glass; the condensed beads of water gathered and ran in a slow-motion parody of the rain’s fervid pattern on the other side of the pane. The kitchen was hot and silent except for those tiny rain sounds: the monotonous drumming on the porch roof, the sluggish gushing as the downspout flushed into the worn ditch that ran down to the bank, the endless reiteration of rain spattering against the window . . . all sounds that served to sink one into that state of drowsy fascination that Oregonians label “tranquilitis” or that Joe Ben titled more graphically “standin’ an’ starin’.” I finished eating but I didn’t move, nor did Hank notice. So lost was he in his thoughts that he might not have moved for another twenty minutes if he hadn’t been startled awake by the shiny rubber apparition of old Henry carrying a lantern from the barn. Hank stepped backward from the windows, yawning. “Okeydoke,” he announced, “let’s move it.” He went striding into the hall, calling up the dark stairwell. “Get my shotgun too today, will you, Joby?” He took a poncho from the nail. “And better wrap a plastic laundry sack or somethin’ around them.” He came back into the kitchen and picked up his calk boots from beside his chair and gulped the last cold inch of his coffee. He started again for the hall, passing without looking at me. “Hurry the grub, bub. Let’s get the show on the road.”

“Let him finish his breakfast,” Viv said brightly. “He’s a growing boy.”

“He get up with the rest of us, he’d have time for three breakfasts.” He picked up his lunch sack and went again into the hall, where he sat down on the bench to lace on his boots.

The screen of the back porch squeaked and through the window of the kitchen door I could see the old man in his glistening rubber garment, looking like a creature left over from a black-lagoon movie, doing his outlandish utmost to drag a muddy nylon parachute in out of the rain. I watched this unusual struggle with interest and curiosity but little sense of involvement: that one of the inhabitants of this den had need of a parachute was of only the barest concern to me, and that it was important for this parachute to be in out of the elements I never for a moment doubted, but neither did I feel the slightest obligation to go out and give the old man a hand with the battle. So I did not move. I was really feeling too ill to want to move.

But when I heard a thud of boots behind me and another call to “get the show on the road,” I began to stir; for, while I felt no more obligation to help get the show on the road than to help get the parachute on the porch, I knew I couldn’t in this case be faithful to my sluggish disinvolvement; it was necessary in this case not to appear too sick; at least not so sick as I felt. The necessity of presenting this image of false illness put me in something of an ironic bind. Because while everyone thought my complaints fake and my ills fraudulent—like the mysterious virus maladies of the other relatives who had phoned in nightly since the meeting to advise us they could not help on the job because they were dropping like flies—I was, in truth, so sore I could barely move and so sick I could barely fake it. My only recourse was overacting. So I moaned dolorously at Hank’s call, rubbing my sinuses with one hand, my back with the other. “Well,” I sighed, “another day, another dullard.”

“Do you feel better?” Viv asked.

“I feel like my entire cerebrum has become waterlogged.” I stood up slowly, shaking my head from side to side. “Hear it? Slosh, slosh, slosh.”

She moved close, watching the hallway door. “I told him,” she confided in a whisper, “that he was out of his mind taking you back up there today. You had almost a three-degree temperature last night before you went upstairs, a hundred and one point four. I’d take it again this morning but the thermometer’s missing.”

“A hundred and two . . . Is that all?” I grinned at her. “What a paltry score. I’ll hit a hundred and three tonight or hang up my togs. Look out the window, there; perfect day to set a record. So have the thermometer ready”—at the same time making a mental note to be sure in the future to keep a more careful watch on the mercury. Three degrees is a bit high to be a good malingering temperature. I couldn’t have her thinking I was truly in a faulty physical condition. Conditions of that physical nature can be cured with pills and penicillin and other chemical curatives, whereas areas correspondingly faulty but definitely
non-physical
responded only to the medication of love.

“Let’s make it,” Hank’s voice called from the doorway. I limped out of the kitchen with every cell in my body screaming a protest at the misery that lay ahead. Not much longer, I kept reassuring myself; if I can last another day or two I’ll be forever finished with the whole excruciating nightmare. . . .

In spite of Joe’s efforts, the trip to the job seemed even more silent than the day before. Andy was alone at the mill again; this time Hank didn’t ask about the others and Andy looked relieved that he had been spared answering. When they reached the job nothing was said to Lee about helping. He remained in the carrier at the base of the spar, appearing to fall asleep immediately, with his arms crossed and tucked in the folds of the mackinaw he wore, and his chin pushed deep into the sheepskin collar. When Hank returned from the top of the spar, where he had been unsnapping the rigging cables, he noticed that the crack in the rear door had been chinked with a piece of burlap and the windows of the carrier were fogged with breathing.

Andy swarmed the small tractor over the hills, between rocks and stumps, pushing the bark and branches and deadwood into piles. The machine hurried back and forth through the dingy rain with its little loads rolling and cracking ahead of it, looking like a big yellow crab busy tidying up the floor of its undersea home. Joe Ben followed after the tractor with a forest-fire fighter’s tank filled with a mixture of gasoline and oil and sprayed a dirty stream into the piles of rubbish, then set the piles afire. He went about his work with fervor, panting, sweating, running from pile to pile as he saw a fire about to flicker out beneath the rain; a comic fireman engaged in a life-or-death battle with perverse blazes which not only defied his attempts to extinguish them, but roared their defiance in the face of his puny hose. His face was blackened and rutted with sweat and rain under the brim of his rainhat. The scars appeared to have all shifted into a vertical order. And with his back humped to the weight of the tank he looked like a troll or gnome of the woods.

Hank worked with the machinery, securing the yarder and donkey by packing all the open parts in grease and tying canvas over the engines. When he finished he loaded one of the olive-drab fire-fighting tanks with oil and gasoline from the big drum resting in the mud beside the yarder, strapped the tank to his back, and went to help Joe.

By midday a dozen fires screwed thin black columns of smoke into the rain. Over the warbling sputter of the cat motor there was a sound like a wind through the branches of a forest no longer there; a phantom wind, blowing through the ghosts of the trees that had stood on these slopes; this was the sound of the rain steaming in the fires. When one of the fires seemed to have burned out, Andy rooted it over with the blade of his cat, and it burned again, and when the fire died down again he spread it until the ashes were scattered smoldering and hissing among the stumps.

They worked past lunchtime, partly because by the time it was noon they saw that they could finish the job in another few hours—“Let’s just keep at ’er, Joby, whatya say?”—and partly because Hank made no move toward the spar where the carrier sat holding their lunch buckets behind steamed windows. When the clean-up was finished they all stopped at once, without a signal or word, as men stop at the end of a baseball game. Andy switched off the cat, and the motor gave a short, baffled gasp, turned over a few more times, and gasped again, unable to believe its day was finished so early. It finally stopped, to stand inert and patient, and in the after silence the little hissing burst of the raindrops steaming on the motor seemed far louder than the detonations the cylinders had made. Andy remained motionless on the seat, staring out through that steaming. Across a canyon Hank and Joe Ben stood next to each other on the rise opposite the spar, the tanks still strapped to their backs. Joe looked thoughtfully down at the land they had opened to the sky to see if things had been improved or not.

The hills were dark and torn. The fires still hissed, but the rain was beginning to get the top hand, beating the coals into the reddish-brown mud. The stumps stood arranged in stark, surprisingly ordered patterns now that the vine and slashing that had concealed these patterns was burned away. Joe Ben followed the pointing smoke finger of one fire to the sky. “Y’know ... it might be letting up, do you reckon?”

“I reckon we may as well give up dreaming it’s gonna let up,” Hank said, “and get to fixing that donkey.”

“Now what we need to fix that donkey?” Joe wanted to know. “We can’t use it on this next job.”

“We’ll need it fixed so it can pull itself up on the truck, won’t we?”

“I suppose, yeah . . . But why we so pressed to get it fixed now for?”

“Why not?”

“Be dark in a little bit.” Joe listed one reason.

“We can use the drop light. We won’t need Andy, I reckon. I’ll tell him to snooze in the carrier with Lee if he wants.”

Joe sighed, resigning himself to hunger and cold. They fell quiet, looking out across the hacked landscape. “Always put me in mind of a graveyard,” Joe Ben observed after a time. “You know, tombstones? Here lies so an’ so, here lies Douglas Fir, Born the Year One, Chopped down the Year Nineteen Sixty-One. Here Lies Ponderosa Pine. Here Lies Blue Spruce.” He sighed again with poignant remorse. “Ever since I can recollect, it’s brought that thought to mind.”

Hank nodded a halfhearted agreement, but Joe noticed that his attention was directed more toward that crummy wagon uphill than the stump field down the gully. “Look over yonder at Andy.” Joe pointed the nozzle toward the dark figure seated motionless on the tractor. “I bet he’s thinking the same thing, looking out at a logged-off show. Thinking, ‘How Them Mighty Are Fallen.’ ”

Hank nodded once more and began working the tank from his shoulders, still not taking part enough in the discussion to satisfy Joe.

“Still . . . I suppose that’s one of the things that keeps men knocking their brains out at this profession,” Joe supposed in a serious tone.

“How’s that? Turning forests into cemeteries?”

“No. Seein’ ‘How Them Mighty Are Fallen.’ Didn’t you ever note how a fellow, I don’t care how long he’s been at it, will stop what he’s at whether he’s peein’ or pullin’ cable, to turn and watch and see a tree come falling down?”

“You better believe it. That’s how he keeps drawin’ air. His life depends on him keeping one eye peeled.”

“Oh, yeah, oh yeah, there’s that. But even it’s on a completely different
slope
he’ll turn to watch. Even a half-mile off. Even he’s on a clear hill with no trees even
close
to worry about, he’ll always raise up to watch. Don’t you? I always do. Even ol’ Bottled in Bond John with a hangover that’s splittin’ him in half, whenever he hears somebody holler, ‘Tree’ or ‘Down the hill’ he’ll raise clean up and turn clean around to look and he wouldn’t do that some mornings if somebody yelled, ‘Naked lady.’ ”

Hank slid the tank off and helped Joe Ben off with his. They carried their tanks by the canvas straps, walking down the hill in the direction of the donkey. Hank’s long legs reeled smoothly out in front of him like ropes that stiffened at just the last moment to hold his weight; Joe Ben, taking two steps to Hank’s one, followed down the hillside in a jerky, bowlegged skitter, lifting each foot quickly as though the mud were hot. He kept quiet, hoping Hank might be drawn into the talk of watching the mighty fall; it was the sort of rich ground that gave Joe possibilities to raise and crossbreed his own peculiar strain of parables. He waited, but Hank seemed off in thought. Joe tried again.