Sometimes a Great Notion

  "Joby, I said drop it!"

  The order was so charged with emotion that it caused all three of us in the boat to stare at Hank in surprise. He sat at the motor, grim and trembling. No one spoke, no eyes looked. And for a third time I experienced that feeling of combative elation that a long-shot challenger must feel when he notices a small but decided limp in his massive opponent's seven-league stride.

  (The whole blamed trip. Just sitting there like a lump, trying to find the toehold to start with, trying to figure some way of working up to all the things I got to say, all the things I got to ask. But I can't make it. I introduce him to John when we pick him up in front of his shack, and John's able to get a hell of a lot more going with him than me. It seems they're both big on Seven Crown. John offers him a slash from the Thermos of the stuff he always carries, and they talk about how it is with a little coffee added. They got a common ground. Even Orland's three boys do better than me. When I wake them up from the rear end of the crummy truck and introduce them to Lee they're able to shoot the bull a few minutes, asking him questions about New York and what's it like, before they go back to sleep. Even them lugs.

  I pour it to that old rattletrap. We're running a little late, what with waiting breakfast on the kid. The sun's already coming through the trees. We head out up Blueclay Road toward the North Spur of Breakneck, where the show is, and after about a half-hour bouncing and bumping and nobody saying word one to nobody else we get up to the site. The slashing piles are still smoking from yesterday's burning, and the sun's rose out of the branches and is promising to make a long hot sticky sonofabitch of a day of it. I slide out from behind the wheel and go around and open the door and stand there stretching and scratching my belly while the truck empties, kind of not looking at him. "What do you think?" I ask Joe Ben. "Did we or did we not come up with a fine day to welcome old Leland Stanford home to the woods?" Joe, he tips an eye up for a check with his Big Time Weatherman just to be sure and says, "Oh yeah! Maybe get a little on the toasty side before the sun sets, but the way I look at it all the signs point to a day with a heart of gold. Ain't that the way you read it, Leland?"

  The boy is shaking like a dog shitting peach pits, still cold from the river ride. He frowns over at Joe like he isn't sure whether he's being spoofed or not, then he grins and says, "I'm afraid I failed to take any courses on astrological signs, Joe; I'll have to trust to your interpretation." This tickles Joe to pieces. Joe digs big words, especially when they're aimed at him. He giggles and spits and goes to hauling out all the paraphernalia for the day--maps and hard hats and "Boy, be sure an' take these gloves!" and candy bars and snuff cans and pocket knives, and, naturally, the little transistor radio he keeps near him all day--passing them around like a munitions officer issuing arms before a big battle. He hands Lee his hard hat and goes prancing around, tilting his head this way and that to get a good look at the way it sits, saying "Um . . . oh yeah . . . say there . . . wait . . . here we go," and fooling with it till he gets it settled the way he wants it. Then he starts giving Lee a rundown on what to expect and what's happening and what to look out for working the woods.

  "The main thing," Joe says, "oh yeah, the mainest thing . . . is, when you fall, fall in the direction of your work. Conserve yourself." He demonstrates how to conserve yourself by doing a couple of nose dives as we amble along. "The whole notion of loggin' is very simple if you get onto it. It comes to this: the idea is to make a tree into a log and a log into a plank. Now, when it's standin' up vertical it's a tree, and when it's laid down it's a felled tree. And then we buck it into lengths of thirty-two feet an' them lengths are logs. Then we drag them logs acrost to where the truck is and lift 'em up onto the truck an' then the truck drives 'em down to the bridge at Swedesgap where the government scalers cheat us an' then we take 'em on down to our mill an' dump 'em into the water. When we get enough of 'em in the water we drag 'em up into the mill and we cut 'em up an' we got planks, lumber." He stops to twiddle with the dial of his transistor, trying to pick up one of the Eugene stations. "Or, sometimes, instead of cuttin', we just sell the logs outright." I look over at him to see how he means that, but he's holding the radio to his ear. "Ah. Now it's comin' through. Oh man, Lee, you ever see the beat of one of these little outfits? Listen to that tone." He shakes his head at his little radio and twists the dial loud as it'll go. The tinny screech of some awful Western is squeezed out into the forest. "Makes the day a joy," he says, grinning till you'd think he'd pop; a little thing like that radio could give Joe Ben a thousand dollars' worth of kicks, just about any little thing could.

  You broke my heart an' tol' me lies,

  Left me cold without good-bys;

  Oh, your frosty eyes . . .

  We stop walking right near where Andy's starting his chain saw. The saw chokes and barks and dies and barks again with a rising snarl. Andy grins over at us and hollers, "Commencin'!" cocks an eye up above for widow-makers, then touches the saw's blurred teeth against the flank of a big fir. A fountain of white fir sparks spew against the sun. We stand and watch him make his undercut and sight the tree. He's made it a little too much sloped, so he cuts him a dutchman and slides it in to account for the extra inch or so, and goes around to the other side and goes at it with the saw again. When the tree creaks and tips and goes whooshing down I glance over to check the boy and see he's impressed by it. That makes me feel better. I'd begun to wonder if it's possible at all to talk with him; I'd begun to wonder if maybe what a man learns over twelve years in a world so different is like a foreign language that uses some of the words from our world but not enough to be familiar to us, not enough so we can talk. But when I see him watch that tree come down I think, There's that; just like any man I ever knew, he likes to see a tree felled. There is that, by Christ.

  "Well," I say, "we ain't makin' anything but shadows. Let's get hold of it." And we start walking again.

  Joby leaves to fire up the donkey. Lee follows me across a clearing toward the edge of the woods. At the edge of a pile of slashing and dozed berry vine the clearing quits and the trees plunge into the sky. It's the part of the show I like best, this edge, where the cutting stops and the forest starts. I'm always reminded of the edge of a grain field where the reaper has stopped.

  Behind us the donkey engine begins wheezing and gagging. I see Joe sitting like a twisted bird high up in his spiny nest of levers and cables and wires, grabbing at the throttle. The radio sits in front of him, sometimes carrying across to us, sometimes swallowed up by the noise. A ball of blue smoke explodes from the exhaust and I think the whole machine is going to shake itself to death. "That goddamned outfit should of been retired with the old man," I say. The boy doesn't say anything. We start walking again. Somewhere I hear the knock of an ax where John is chopping off branches. Like a wooden bell ringing. And that squeal of Joe's radio coming and going on little breezes. All these things, the way a day gets going, the sound and all, and seeing Lee dig that tree falling, make me feel a whole lot better. I decide maybe it's not going to be such a bear as I thought.

  Overhead the highlines that swoop to the spar tree are commencing to bob and jiggle and strum the air. I point up at them. "That's your row to hoe, bub, that line. I aim to see if you can stand up under the strain of setting choker, by god, so just resign your ass to your fate." I'm meaning to rib him a little. "Course, I don't expect you to last out the morning, but we got a stretcher handy." I grin over at him. "That boy of Orland's is handlin' the other line . . . he can take over when you fall behind." He looks like he's being ordered up to the front lines, standing all at attention and his jaw set. I'm intending to kind of kid him but, try as I may, I can hear myself sounding just exactly like old Henry doing some first-rate ass-chewing, and I know I couldn't pick a worse way to talk to Lee. But I'm damned if I can stop it.)

  "You ain't gonna like it at first. As a matter of fact you're gonna think I'm givin' you the dirtiest end of the dirtiest stick on the whole operation." (And he wouldn't of be
en far from the truth.) "But it can't be helped. The easier jobs, the machinery jobs, it'd take too long to teach you and they're risky even when a guy knows what he's about. Besides, we're hurting for time. . . ."

  (And maybe that right there is why I couldn't help sounding angry, because of knowing just how tough setting choker was going to be on a tenderfoot. Maybe I really was trying to be extra tough and was hacked at myself for loading him with it. I do that sometimes . . .)

  "But one thing: it'll make a man of you."

  (I just don't know. All I know is I thought I was relaxing a little around him, then tied up, the same as I tied up trying to talk with Viv the night before, explaining our deal with Wakonda Pacific. Same as I tie up with anybody except Joe Ben; and me and him didn't really have to talk a whole lot . . .)

  "If you can make it through the first few days you'll have it whipped; if you can't, well, you just can't is all. There's lots of other niggers can't cut it neither and they ain't all in Dixie."

  (I've always had a tough time trying to talk to others without barking. With, say, Viv, I'd start out trying to sound like Charles Boyer or somebody and come off, every time, sounding like the old man telling Sheriff Layton how to deal with the boogin' Reds in this country, how to take care of them Commy bustards right! And believe me, sounding like that is sounding pretty damn hard. When old Henry got going on the Reds he could really come on fierce . . .)

  "But all I ask is you give it a fair go for a while." (Because Henry always claimed he was convinced that the only thing worse than Reds was Jews, and the only thing worse than Jews was high-and-mighty niggers, and the only thing worse than the whole lot of them was them goddamned hard-headed southern bigots he was always reading about. "Oughta poison everybody south of the Mason-Dixon line . . .'stead sending Northern tax money down to feed 'em . . .")

  "So if you're ready, grab hold of that piece of cable and drag it here. I'll show you how to look for a choker hole. C'mon, snap out of it. Bend down here an' watch . . ."

  (I wouldn't argue much with the old man myself, mainly because I didn't know Reds here in America, and didn't feel much one way or the other about uppity jigs, and was just a little vague about what a bigot was . . . but I tell you, for a while him and Viv used to really lock horns about just that very subject, that race business. Really get into it. I remember . . . well, let me recall the thing that stopped the whole business. Let's see . . .)

  "Okay, now, you watch this."

  Lee stands with his hands in his pockets while Hank explains the job with the slow patience of a man who is explaining something once and it had better be picked up because it isn't about to be repeated. He shows Lee how to loop the length of cable over a fallen and bucked log and how to hook the cable to the big line that runs in a circle from the pulley at the anchor stump to the rigging at the top of the spar. ". . . and when you get it hooked you'll have to be your own whistlepunk till things level out. We're too short-handed for such luxuries. You savvy?" I nodded and Hank went on outlining my duties for the day. "Okay, listen." Hank gives the cable a kick to make sure it is secure, then leads Lee up the slope to a high stump where a small wire runs in a gleaming arch to the donkey puffing and clanging seventy-five yards away. "One jerk means take 'er away." He pulls the wire. A shrill peep from a compressed-air whistle on the donkey sets the tiny figure of Joe Ben into action. The cable tightens with a deep twanging. The donkey engine strains; an outraged roar; the log lurches out of its groove and goes bumping up the hill toward the yarder. When the log reaches the spar they watch Joe Ben leap from the donkey cab and scuttle over the pile of logs to unhook the choker. Then one of Orland's boys creaks the neck of the yarder forward, like the skeleton of some prehistoric reptile painted yellow and brought fleshless to life; Joe Ben gouges the tongs into each side of the log and jumps clear as he waves to the boy in the yarder cab. Again the gigantic piece of wood lurches and is jerked into the air as Joe Ben hustles back to the donkey controls. "Joe's bein' his own chaser. It's tough on him, but like I said, it can't be helped." By the time the yarder has pivoted and swung the log onto the bed of the truck and nudged it into place, Joe Ben is back in the donkey and the cable is reeling back out again. It comes snaking through the brush and torn earth toward the place where Lee and Hank stand waiting. I listened, hoping Hank would explain more about the task, cursing him for presuming he needed to explain as much as he had. We were standing alongside each other at the "show," going through last minute instructions before my big First Day . . .

  (Viv, see, spends a lot of her time reading and is up on a lot of things--that's trouble right there, because there's nothing in the whole world makes old Henry madder than somebody, especially some woman, having the common gall to be up on a lot of things he's already got opinions on . . . so, anyhow, this once, they got into it about what the Bible of all things says about this race business . . .)

  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?"

  Lee nods again, his mouth tight. Hank says, "Okeedoke, then," and goes crashing off through the vine and brush toward the crummy truck. "Hey." A few yards away he stops and turns . . . "I bet you didn't think to bring those gloves, did you? No, I mighta known. Here. Use mine." Lee catches the wadded gloves and mutters, "Thanks, thanks ever so much." Hank resumes his crashing through the brush . . .

  (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. . . .)

  Lee holds the gloves one in each hand, burning with frustrated and confused anger as his brother walks away: You prick, he calls wordlessly after Hank, you pompous prick! Use mine, huh, as though he was giving me his right arm. Why I'll wager every nickel I can lay my hands on that he has at the very least a dozen such pairs in that truck!

  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 . . .

  As soon as Hank is gone Lee curses again and jerks on the first of the gloves in a stylized parody of drawing-room fury, but the elegance of his style is marred when he is forced to inspect the second glove, and the fury turns abruptly back on itself when he withdraws from the last two fingers the dirty, sweat-packed cotton padding Hank uses to protect the ends of his tender stumps . . .

  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 lie
s 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!