Sometimes a Great Notion (83 page)

“But Lee, boy, you might be
needed!
”

“Joe, stop, you’re getting my rear cold. Be
sides
”—I raised an edge of the sheet to eye him meaningfully—“just why is it that my company is so important? Needed? I don’t recall being needed before. Why now, Joe? Why now does poor Hank feel it necessary to have me continually in sight? Is he afraid to leave me alone? Some harm come to me, perhaps?”

“What are you talking, poor Hank?” He jerked away my quilt; “Hank don’t have nothing to do with my comin’ up here; what’s wrong with you? Hank don’t give a snap one way or the other. No sir! I came up here
thinking
you’d be interested—as a scholar—
interested
in the way logging was one time performed. History, man, yeah, history right out there! Come on with us, what do you say?”

I laughed and struggled to repossess the quilt from Joe. “Joe, tell Hank that as far as history goes, that I—as a scholar—don’t give a snap one way or the other myself. Night-night.” And drew my head back into the warm darkness, pretending to sleep . . .

Joe Ben turned and walked away from Lee, scratching the tip of his nose with a broken nail. Out in the hall he saw Viv coming out of old Henry’s bedroom. His face brightened and he took her hand. “Viv, honeybun, I—we all—we need you to
do
a thing for us! Need it real bad. The old boy up and around? He was gonna give us last-minute advice on handlogging. Oh yeah. Anyway. Look, we
need
somebody to run us up to the job in the pick-up and then get back to town and get a set of cotter pins soon’s the stores open. Need ’em bad, honeybun. Now you been close to Leland and all . . .
also!
I think the boy should drop in on Doctor Layton. I don’t like the sound of that throat.”

She smiled at him. “You’re one to talk about the way a throat sounds.” Joe’s voice would frighten a bear.

“Me? The trouble is—didn’t I ever tell you this?—the doctor didn’t beat all the phlegm outa me when I was born. It ain’t a sickness with me. I’m too lovable to be sick. But what do you think about Lee?”

“I don’t know, Joe,” she answered. He went on talking and she waited to see what he was getting at. Viv knew when Joe Ben was rearranging the truth to his own ends; everyone generally knew except Joe. Even when the reasons behind his rearrangements were obscure, people usually went along with Joe because they had learned that in the end his reasons were always unselfish. When she saw he had finished his jittery outburst, Viv nodded and agreed to talk with Lee, though she was still in the dark about his motives. Frowning, her slim light brows drawn together, she went to Lee’s room and knocked on the door.

“Lee?”
Thump thump thump.

“Who’s there?” I mumbled from beneath my quilt. “Go away.” Hank will now have to try himself, I thought, since Joe has failed, and maybe get angry enough at my malingering to lose his cool.
Thump thump?
The door opened and I steeled myself. WATCH OUT. Zero hour. If he did lose his cool the game would be mine. He was approaching the bait once more; the trap lay in readiness. All he needed to do was get a
little
angry, just enough to poke the trigger (my nose, I hoped; please my nose and not my lovely teeth, after all those years of braces and agony having them straightened). I would squeal in terror. Viv would rush to my aid, defending me against the cad, soothing my poor nose as he fumed with frustration . . . and the game would be mine, nothing left for me but to take her away.

So imagine my shock when I saw, instead of Hank, it was Viv who lifted that quilt to peek in.

“Morning,” she piped. “No,” I groaned. She was insistent. “Morning, Lee; up up up.” “Can’t,” I groaned again, but she said I
must
get up. To go to town. She told me she would worry unless I went to see a doctor about my throat and the swollen glands in my neck. “So up, Lee; I don’t plan to take no or can’t for an answer. Get some warm clothes on while I tell Hank to wait”—and left before I could protest further.

Puzzled, I managed to drag myself from the warm bed and shuffle down to another morose breakfast in the steamy kitchen. The tinny music of Joe’s radio only emphasized the silence. I ate slowly, curious, completely at a loss to understand her insistence on medical attention. Did she also object to my being left behind? Could she be worried about being alone with one so obviously harmless? Impossible. I ruminated slyly over my oatmeal and was right on the verge of making crafty alterations in my plans—
Viv
could drive me in; my fever, you know, feeling a bit giddy—when a second unforeseen event turned up to further complicate matters. Old Henry, all decked out in his going-t’-town best, came rumbling down the steps, hawking terrific hornlike blasts from an early-morning larynx as he struggled to pull on a heavy sheepskin-lined parka. . . . “Here we go, bullies, here we go.” I sighed. It was going to be that sort of day. . . .

“Yep, here we go. Today we really whup ’er, boys! Hm. Look at the rain. Fine-looking weather. Goddam, looks almost like you was aimin’ to run off without me.”

They all turned from the table to watch the old man work to pull on the parka; when he turned they saw he had removed his arm cast. . . .

“Henry,” Viv, she says to me when she sees. “Oh,
Henry.
” She’s standing at the table, about to give Leland some sausage, when she points at my wrist with the fork. “All right,” she says. “What did you do with it?”

“Goddam thing came off whilst I slept, if you got to know,” I tell her. “So when I heard you talking I thought to myself: Henry, you better ride into that doctor with Leland to see about should you maybe take the one off your leg.” I knocked agin the pant leg with my knuckles to show them how holler it sounds. “Hear that? I ain’t sure but the damn leg rotted clean away in there. So I’m goin’ along, if nobody
minds
too much.”

“Okay,” Hank, he says. “Let’s get with it. We ought to make it there right at daylight.”

Joe Ben, he rides in the back of the pick-up with the equipment. Hank, he drives. Beside Hank, Leland, he sits, nodding with his eyes closed, and next to the door I sit, trying to get squirmed around to some comfortable position for the goddam booging plaster leg. On the ride up to the new show site I try to give the boys some notion of what to expect up there today. Explaining as much as I can about handlogging, about this and that, about a man really
oughten
to be cutting in this wind and rain but since you can’t get around it then you go to more’n
ever
pay attention to the drift of the rain, to the gusts you see off in the distance comin’—you can see ’em, off there, shakin’ the tops of trees like some big goddamn invis’ble
bird
flyin’ at ya—an’ watch those ’cause they can
kill
ya . . . but you mainly got to be watchful
after
the stick is on the ground whilst you’re buckin’ it because you are fallin’ the bastard to slide
anyhow
an’ she ain’t always so polite as to wait for ready set go . . . and you mainly
most of all
need to study the trough she ought to take down hill, an’
there’s
where a man needs to know his beans!

“Takes some experience, huh?”

“Yes sir! Know his
onions!
”

My fossilized father had taken it into his head that he had to ride into town with us, and nothing would budge him. During the pick-up ride he talked on and on, rocking back and forth with his left hand cradled against his chest. The hand was blue and thin-looking, more like the limb of something ripped untimely from the womb than the hand of an octogenarian. He rocked the hand, cooing over it in a bemused, sing-song way as we drove toward the state park. When he spoke of some particularly exciting aspect of logging the hand stirred restlessly. I watched its fetal movements, wondering what I would say to the doctor at the hospital . . .

“Needs to be on the jump
every
second, a man does . . .”

They reached the end of the paved road. Hank consulted a section quadrangle map to see that it matched the section marker tacked to the tree. “Hold it here . . .” (Figuring that I’d best double check before we started work:
tired and none too clear-headed
. . .) “What’s that section shingle yonder read, Joe?” (I didn’t want to have the hill cleared, then find I was cutting the wrong forest. Joe called back a number and it checked; this was our show. “Better look around, bub.” I nudged Lee upright. “Better wake up and watch the turns or you won’t make ’er back to the highway, let ’lone be able to drive back up here tonight to pick us up,” I told him. He
looks at me. I don’t know. I just feel tired.

The pick-up rocked and pitched up a steep pan of streaming ruts, then leveled off and traveled for a few minutes along the ridge before I stopped it out on the lip of a rim. I opened the door and took a look down: below us, down one steep sonofagun of a hill through the shaggy trunks of firs, was the river. I pulled on the emergency brake and put the pick-up into neutral. “This is our slope,” I said. “The state park commission want these trees cleared to give tourists a view of the river. I imagine from this high they can see the coast from here too. Can you find your way back, bub?”

“I’ll be along with him,” the old man said, before Lee could answer, “and I could get back here with my head in a sack.” The old man’s voice had grown real calm as we got closer to the site. There was none of that tomfool childish sound been in his talk of late. And when he looked off at-the tree trunks, the huge looming trunks never seen anywhere any more except in government parks, his face set-up hard and his old toothless mouth pulled down. “I can show him the way back here in pitch dark an’ hurricane,” he says and gives the kid another nudge . . .)

“What?” Once more I was jolted awake. Just as Hank had predicted, we had reached the work site in a dead heat with gray dawn. Henry had reached into the cab to goose me awake for a look. Through the window I saw firs fingering the interminable rosary of rain. The old man stood, talking and pointing down through a shaggy opening in the forest. Hank got out and walked to his side, leaving me to sit in the muttering pick-up. Joe Ben was shivering from his long ride in the back, anxious for the old man to finish his grabbing so he could get to work and warm up, but Brother Hank’s attitude toward Henry had become very attentive, almost respectful for some reason. Their conversation drifted in through the heater vents under the dash . . .

(“Blamed right; worked many a slope just like this one forty years ago.”

“Fierce terrain.”

“Worked many a one fiercer,” the old man let me know.

“Hear you tell it, this country use to all be eighty-degree slopes with earthquakes and geysers,” I said, shucking him a little. He frowned and scratched his wet old noggin.

“I can’t call to mind any geysers right off,” he said. “But I admit earthquakes plagued us some.” And we both laughed a little, taking it easy while Lee came to enough to manage driving
Why can’t he wake up?
and while Joe drug the stuff out of the back end . . .)

At the rear of the pick-up, a ways apart from Hank and old Henry, Joe Ben was already unloading the gear; the saws and gas cans stood already against the fender and he was dragging out the old wooden hand-carved screwjacks and leaning these alongside the sleek and shiny Homelite saws, hurriedly, ready to get with it, hot to get at it and show old Hank that by golly just me and him is enough and
then
some! So I shag that gear out like a tiger. Hank and Henry talk. The kid gets out but he don’t offer to help. He just stands watching, coughing occasionally into his fist like he’s about to drop dead on the spot. Behind me there with Hank the old man stands at the edge of the road—that limp hand cradled in his other hairy claw—looking off down the hill—the rain swirls about the trees, the sound of gullies being dug into the mountainside is like the sound of a busy highway roaring past somewhere nearby—Hank and me’ll show ’em. The old man raises his hand to point to an outcropping of mossy rock. “Set up over yonder,” he says to Hank. “Start low close to the river an’ work up. These here bastards are big. We won’t need but a day or so cuttin’ to fill the contract.”

“How about stopping time, do you reckon?” Hank asks. “We don’t want to float logs past Andy in the dark, do we?”

The old man wrinkles his face, thinks about that a minute. “That’s something, that is something . . . let me see, from here it’ll take oh, a good hour’n half to float to him. Now, the river’s high and the tide’s ebbin’. Say one good hour, you say so Joe Ben?” I tell him sure and he says, “So stop cuttin’ one good hour before dark, ’bout tide change.” He turns and starts back toward the pick-up. “I’ll see that them cotter pins get back up here quick as possible.” He catches Lee by the sleeve and shakes him.

“You alive, boy? Or you need some ass-kickin’ to bring you to? Get in there. You drive. Let’s wag it an’ shag it. Say, by the by, Hank . . .” The old man aims his finger at Hank. (As the pick-up was backing up and turning, leaving me and Joe in the rain there, Henry rolled down the window and called back, “What the hell you mean
any
goddam way, runnin’ down so low on cotter pins? Do I hafta do
all
the thinkin’ for this worthless outfit? Do I hafta do
all
the goddam figgerin’?” Then they faded off.
There the kid goes. Back to the valley, there he goes. . . .

Joe Ben grinned at me as the pick-up drove off with the old man still calling. “Hardboiled ol’ owl, ain’t he?” Joe said and started dancing off toward the outcropping Henry had pointed out, rearing to get at it.
I follow after the squeak of Joe’s radio. Like in a dream. Can’t seem to get my mind off that pick-up, on my business.
And we headed out . . .)

On Main Street old Henry went into Stokes’s Hardware—hoping I’ll run onto the old spook, sort of—for them cotter pins. Leland, he stays behind in the pick-up to wait for me. Stokes ain’t there, but the nigger behind the counter, he’s damned rattled to see me. He kind of shudders when I ask for the pins, and starts to tell me sorry, Mr. Stamper, but Mr. Stokes said no service . . . so I say piss on him I’ll serve myself, and look and find the size I want and pick them from the shelf myself before the proprietor can think of a good answer to that. “Much obliged,” I tell him real nice. “Just put ’em on the Stamper tab.” And I go back out and get in the pick-up, where the boy’s setting there waiting. “Let’s go, son. Before we get accused o’ robbery.”