Sometimes a Great Notion

  He had taken a big cut in money when he had accepted the head job at the local; the job didn't pay near what he'd been drawing as the first push for Wakonda Pacific. But he'd be damned if he'd try to hold down his union job and work the woods at the same time, the way a lot of local officials did. You couldn't do worth a shit at neither job if you did. And both positions meant too much to him for that.

  He prided himself in knowing that both logging and labor were in his blood, though the price of this pride came high. His granddad had been a big man in the very start of the movement, in the IWW, the Wobblies. He'd been personal friends with Big Bill Haywood; a photograph of the two of them hung on Floyd's bedroom wall: two mustached men, each wearing a large white button with the words "I AM AN UNDESIRABLE CITIZEN" pinned to his pea-jacket, and held between them a circular picture of a grinning black cat, the Wobblies' sabotage symbol. His granddad had given his life both in deed and in fact to the movement: after years of work as an organizer he had been killed in 1916 in the Everett Massacre, championing the union man's right to free speech in that Washington milltown. Penniless, his grandmother had returned to her family in Michigan with her young son, Floyd's father. But the son of a martyred Wob wasn't about to settle down in tame old Michigan; not when the fight still raged. After a few months the boy had run away, back to the north woods and the work the old man had died for.

  By the time he was twenty-one this stocky, thick-featured redhead--called Knob, because of the predominant Evenwrite feature of a head set without benefit of neck on heavy round shoulders--had chopped a reputation for himself as one of the fiercest, fence-nail-chewingest, carpet-tack-spittingest men in the woods, both as an all-around dawn-till-dark diehard logger and as rip-roaring loudmouth of a labor visionary, a Wob that his old man--or even Big Bill Haywood himself--would have been proud of.

  By the time this redhead was forty-one, he was a skid-road alky with a rotting liver and a broken heart, and no one in the world proud of him.

  The Wobs were dead, gone, crushed between the thundering collisions of the AFL and CIO, discredited as Communist (though they had spent more fighting the "Red Dawn" than the other two unions combined), and the woods Knob Evenwrite had loved were rapidly filling up with exhaust smoke where there had once been only clear, pine-winy air, and the rough diehard loggers he had fought for were being replaced by beardless boys who learned their logging from textbooks, and smoked instead of chewed, and slept between snow-white sheets just like they thought lumberjacks had always slept that way.

  There didn't seem anything left but to get married and drown the disappointed memories.

  Floyd never met the young diehard fire-eating Knob, not face to face, though he often felt that he knew the young man better than he knew the dejected spook in the fire-eater's cast-off skin who staggered about the impoverished shadows of their three-room shack in Florence, intent on drinking and dying. For some nights, when his father came home from his boiler-tender's job at the mill, he would do more than just drink and die. Maybe on these nights something had ripped some old memory loose from the bottom of his father's past, or it might be that he had witnessed some capitalistic injustice at the mill that relit the fire-eater in him, but on these nights the man would sit in the kitchen, telling young Floyd how things used to be, how they by god woulda handled a injustice like that back in the days when the air was still clear and the Wobs still stalked the woods! Then the cheap liquor that usually brought nothing but silence and eventually sleep would, on these special nights, stir up the sleeping zealot imprisoned behind the blue-veined bars of sick flesh, and Floyd would see the young Knob Evenwrite rise up from the rubbish and walk forward to glare from the cell's two eyeholes and shake at the hellish blue bars like an enraged lion.

  "Listen, kid, it all boils down to this," the lion would sum up the situation. "There's the Big-Asses like them, an' the Little-Asses like us. It's easy to tell who's on whose side. There's just a few Big-Asses; they own the world an' all the corn. There's millions of us Little-Asses; they grow the corn an' all go hungry. The Big-Asses, they think they can get away with this because they think they're better than the Little-Asses--on account of maybe somebody died an' left them a lot of money so they can pay the Little-Asses to grow their corn for them, an' pay 'em what they want to pay. We got to haul 'em down from that, do you see? We got to show them we're just as important as they are! Everybody is as important as they are! Everybody grows corn! Everybody eats it! Simple as that!"

  Then would leap up to sway about the room, roaring fiercely:

  "Which side are you on?

  Which side are you on?

  When we all line up in the bat-tul . . .

  Tell me which side are you on?"

  Floyd's mother and his two sisters cringed from the rare roaring visits of this lion. His two sisters blamed the devil for these spells of violent nostalgia; his mother maintained that it was the devil, all right, the devil in a pint bottle without a label! But young Floyd knew it was something far stronger than a bogey-man from the Bible, or from a bottle either; he knew that when his father's past roared out through the old stories about injustices overcome in their fight for shorter hours and longer lives, and through old songs about the impossible utopias they had worked to realize, he could feel in his own young blood the roaring cry for justice and see rise again in the distance those blazing utopias that his father's whiskied eyes perceived--though the boy hadn't touched a drop.

  Of course, these nights of passion were rare. And, like his mother and sister, Floyd could despise the worn-out fanatic who kept them locked in poverty, the husk of a man who nightly drank himself into a senseless sleep to keep from having to face all the bewildered, groping ghosts of his stillborn dreams and extinct ideals, but just as he could hate the old man he could love the tough visionary who had dreamed the dreams and forged the ideals--though this young visionary was responsible, he knew, for the fanatic's worn-out husk that he hated.

  His father died during Floyd's freshman year in high school--burned to death on a mountaintop. The man's drinking had finally reached the point of making him incapable of even tending a boiler. After a long winter of unemployment some old friends had found him a job as a fire lookout on the highest mountain in the county. He left for the job with his spirits high. Everyone had hopes that the lofty solitude, and the month-long periods without access to any kind of alcohol, would ease old Knob of his anguish and perhaps even start him on the road to a cure. But when a party of firefighters reached the smoldering ruin of the lookout shack, they discovered not only how mistaken those friends had been but how the fire had started as well: in the ashes of the shack they found the exploded remains of a makeshift still. Every available container--from the coffee-pot to the chemical toilet--was filled with a fermenting mash concocted from potato peelings, salmonberries, wild barley, and a dozen different kinds of flowers. The condensate worm had been fashioned by laborious coupling of empty rifle cartridges with their caps poked out. The firebox was of stone and mud.

  The boiler had been wrought from beaten stovepipes. Then the whole affair had been riveted together with tacks, and with staples, and with bleak, unimaginable desperation. . . .

  It appeared that the betrayed ghosts of old dreams and ideals, however bewildered, could grope their way up even the highest mountain in the country.

  The two sisters left home after the funeral, bound for a holier land, and the mother, who had spent the last years of her husband's life hiding his label-less fruit jars from him, began bringing the bottles from their hiding places and took up right where old Knob had left off. Floyd managed to support his mother's sorrow as well as put himself through the rest of high school (through to the midpoint of his senior year, actually, when his last football season ended). The only job that afforded him the hours and the money for this was a shady arrangement he made with a gyppo outfit that was running log trucks so ancient with loads so big that none of the union men would touch them and none of the state patr
olmen would leave them alone, so the runs had to be made in secret, in untraveled areas from the gyppo's show to the mill, and in the dark.

  "Scabbin'!" Floyd used to call out in the night during an overloaded lights-out drive down a mountain road where state cops might wait up any side spur and black death over any part of the road's narrow shoulder, "Scabbin'! For a goddam gyppo outfit who won't meet union regs! How do you like that, old man Little-Ass?"

  He hoped the old man could hear him. He hoped the old bastard was spinning in his drunkard's grave to hear his son blaspheme so. For wasn't it the old bastard's fault--and the union's too--that he had to be out there every other night like this, risking life and limb? None of the other kids, with their level-headed feet-on-the-ground daddies--even those whose daddies had been killed in accidents--had to take such risks to get along, because none of them had fanatics for fathers. So wasn't it the old fanatic's fault that he was out on some garter-snake road with no lights three hours a night, just when he should be resting up for a big game the next day?

  The question he never asked, though, was why he didn't quit the team and get a regular job after school. He never let himself ask why it was so important that he get out on a stinking mud-wallow field three hours a day and try to kick the stuffing out of all the other bastards, smartasses who acted like it was a federal crime having an alky for an old man. . . . He never did ask himself that.

  When he left high school Floyd went straight to the woods for work. For daylight work! no more living by the dark of the moon for Floyd Evenwrite! And since he was goddamned if he was gonna join the Teamsters or any other goddam union just so's he could jockey a truck, woods work was the only choice left him. Being non-union, he had to work twice as hard to survive a layoff. In fact, his anti-union feelings were so strong that he was soon noticed by top brass in the show--old woodsmen who still figured a man oughta be his own man, no organization to back him up!--and it didn't take these old timers very long to recognize this young tight-muscled redhead as prime potential for foremanning work. After two years he made cutting boss, from choker-setter to cutting boss in two years, and in one more year he was top push of the whole outdoor operation.

  Things were looking rosy. He married a girl from one of the county's big political families. He bought a house and a good automobile. Big men in the community, mill-owners and bank presidents, began to call him "sport" and "Red" and invite him to join service organizations and participate in drives to provide money for decent living quarters for the Indians. Things were certainly coming along.

  But there were nights . . . when his sleep was troubled by a ringing roar, and days when a bum deal was given some fellow worker by one of the lard-butts who never stepped outside his office except to walk down to the bank, when Floyd would find his thick red hands rolling and unrolling in musclebound outrage, and his thick red ears echoing old battle tunes:

  Which side are you on?

  Which side are you on?

  In this war for life and liberty,

  Which side are you on?

  Gradually he found himself less and less on the side of management and more and more in sympathy with the workers. And why the hell not? Foreman or no, wasn't he a worker himself, when you come down to it? The son of the son of a worker to boot? He gained nothing by whipping the men to better production; he had no finger in any of the pies when the profits were cut up at the end of the year; he worked his hours and drew his wages and felt the slow abuse of logging make its inevitable marks on his body, on his only skilled instrument of any value to the owners, just like the other stiffs. So why the living hell shouldn't he feel the workers' jolt? Not that he was ready to throw his lot in with the union--he'd had enough of that crap to last him a good long while, thank you, so he'd just pay a fee and sign a paper and stay inactive--but oh me! did it piss him off to see a man, say a old bushler or the like, a man fifteen motherin' years devoted to the same motherin' company! turned out cold by some new mechanical gadget . . . oh, that did get his blood up!

  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 Draege
r.

  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. . . .