The same November rain that drove the mice from their holes and beat the eelgrass flat also stirred up the mightiest flock of migrating geese the coast had seen in centuries. At night, above the lullabying roll of the wind and rain, the ring of their voices could be heard, the free, bright, yodeling toll of Canada honkers. They were stirred south all the way from Dawson Creek by the storm, feeding in the oat-stubble by day and flying southward by night; and the great honking set up by this nightly flight came pealing like mountain bells down from the peaks of the wind, through the clouds, and into the little muddy towns that line the coastal flyways.
When most of the citizens of these little towns woke to hear them tolling past their rooftops, they only heard "Winter is here, winter is here," like a taunting, malevolent chant, over and over; "Winter is here, winter is here . . ."
Willard Eggleston, the bald and bespectacled brother-in-law of the Real Estate Hotwire in Wakonda, listens more carefully one quiet night through the chipped round hole that opens from his ticket window onto a street wet and shiny with the light of the theater marquee, and remarks to himself and the empty street: "The geese have their special secrets too, I bet. They are singing out all the secrets of the dark, and no one to listen but me."
And when Lee happens to hear a small flock flying over the parked carrier wagon where he sits, at the stumpy edge of the logged-off show, waiting for Hank and Joe Ben and Andy to finish burning the slashing, the sound prompts him to remark in a letter he is writing to Peters in an old ledger he discovered under the seat:
We are kept on the move by continual reminders of the lateness of the hour, Peters: nature signals to us in her numerous ways that we'd best get our ass in gear while we can, because the summer is never going to last, my darlings, never. Just now a flock of geese passing over calls out to me "Go south! Follow the sun! If you wait too long it will be too late." And I get all manicky just hearing them. . . .
But Hank hears the geese call a dozen different thoughts, stimulating a dozen dozen feelings--envy and resentment, worship and bitterness--making him long to join in their reeling southward song, cut loose, leave! A variety of thoughts and feelings, flowing and blending and breaking apart in sudden octaves, like the sound that set them off . . .
The towns listened to the geese tell them, "Winter is here," that first week, and despised the geese for rubbing it in. All the little coast towns listened, and all despised the geese in those first dingy November days. Because the irrevocable fact of winter is never a particularly rosy picture (But this winter, here in Wakonda, it's gonna be worse even than the last), and these first nights of November are always tough because they are a preview of a hundred such nights to come (Yeah, but, this time it's special tough, because we got no job, no income, no roll socked away for the rainy days this time . . . here in Wakonda) . . . does anyone ever like harbingers of such tidings?
And winter was certainly there. All along the coast that first week of November, while the geese swept noisily down from the north, a flock of darker clouds swept viciously in from the sea's western horizon. The clouds combed overhead and broke against the mountains like waves breaking, and the water ran back toward the sea . . . clouds like waves breaking, or like clawed hands thrust grasping up from depths to furrow the earth with gray-nailed fingers. Like the hands of something trapped and determined to claw its way up on land, or pull the land down beneath the sea. The hands reached up and out, to Breakleg and Breakrib, to Mary's Peak and Tillamook and Nahamish, to west-facing slopes along all the coast, and the blind fingers scratched bleeding gullies in the slopes. These gullies bled into bigger gullies, bigger gullies into freshets dry all summer, freshets into ditches choked full of Canada thistle and buffalo weed, and these ran into Elk Creek and Lorain Creek and Wildman Creek and Tyee Creek and Tenmile Creek; sharp, steep noisy creeks, looking like saw-teeth on the map. And these creeks crashed into the Nehalem and the Siletz and the Alsea and the Smith and the Longtom and the Siuslaw and the Umpqua and the Wakonda Auga, and these rivers ran to the sea, brown and flat with the clots of swirling yellow foam clinging to their surfaces, running to the sea like lathered animals.
"Winter is here," the geese proclaimed, flying from river to river over the little towns, "winter is here." A winter just like last year (But last year we was able to blame them Reds and their bomb tests, screwing up the weather), and just like the winter before that (But that winter, think back now, there was all them hurricanes down in Florida that blew us up more than our share of rain), and just like the winters a thousand years before these little coast towns ever existed. (But those years were just winters, those towns just towns . . . this year, I tell you, in Wakonda, things is truly different!)
In the bars and bowling alleys the men of these little towns packed snuff under stained lips and cleaned their ears with matchsticks, gave each other stiff, knowing nods as they watched the rain hopping in the street, and listened to the geese. "Lots of rain. Listen at them boogers shag it up there--they know it's a lot. It's all them frigging satellites the government keeps shooting up in the air, is what's causing it. Just like you shoot a cannon inta the clouds to get rain. That's who done it. Those numskulls in the Pentagon made a slip-up!"
The geese might claim that it was winter just like the year before, just like a thousand years before, but these little towns found it helped to survive an unpleasant inevitability if you regarded it as a slip-up and found something to blame it on. It eased the outlook a little if you had some scapegoat to point a finger at: the Reds, the satellites, the hurricanes down south. . . .
The logger men in these little towns could blame the construction men: "Loosenin' the dirt with all them damn roads you're buildin'!" The construction men could blame the logger men: "You, you ax-happy nuts, takin' out all the brush off the watershed, layin' the mountainsides naked . . . what can you expect?"
The younger people found ways to blame the older generation, who had borned them into this mess; the older people blamed the churches. The churches, not to be outdone, put it all at the feet of the Lord: "Oh yay-us, now! Haven't I been saying so? Havn't I now! again and again, warned you to stand up in His light now and live by His laws now and not chance His awful wrath? Yay-us now! Now look: the Arm of the Lord is on its way; the floodwaters chastiseth!"
Which is just another way of blaming, and perhaps the best way, because there is solace and a certain stoical peace in blaming everything on the rain, and then blaming something as uncontrollable as the rain on something as indifferent as the Arm of the Lord.
Because nothing can be done about the rain except blaming. And if nothing can be done about it, why get yourself in a sweat about it? Matter of fact, it can be convenient to have around. Got troubles with the old lady? It's the rain. Got worries and frets about the way the old bus is falling to pieces right under you? It's the ruttin' rain. Got a deep, hollow ache bleeding cold down inside the secret heart of you from too many deals fallen through? too many nights in bed with the little woman without being able to get it up? too much bitter and not enough sweet? Yeah? That there, brother, is just as well blamed on the rain; falls on the just and unjust alike, falls all day long all winter long every winter every year, and you might just as well give up and admit that's the way it's gonna be, and go take a little snooze. Or you'll be mouthin' the barrel of your twelve-gauge the way Evert Petersen at Mapleton did last year, or samplin' snail-killer the way both the Meirwold boys did over to Sweet Home. Roll with the blow, that's the easy out, blame it on the rain and bend with the wind, and lean back and catch yourself forty winks--you can sleep real sound when the rain is lullabying you (But I tell you things is different this year in Wakonda) real nice and sound . . . (because geese ain't letting us sleep, and the Lord ain't taking the blame, not this year, in Wakonda . . .)
Because that year, in Wakonda, the citizens truly weren't being allowed the easy out. They weren't being allowed to lean back as the days passed and nights slid by. They weren't being allowed to make th
emselves comfortable by blaming it on the rain, or on the Lord, or the Reds, or the satellites.
Not when it was so goddam evident, so right-before-your-eyes obvious, that in Wakonda, that year, the town's worries and woes were being caused by nobody else but that goddam hardnose up the river! And rain is one thing and, fine, maybe you can't do nothing about the weather except yak about it, but Hank Stamper is a different breed of cat from the rain! And you can maybe put the blame on the Arm of the Lord those years when that arm puts a stranglehold of frost on the woods so tight it freezes all the way to your pay envelope, and maybe you can roll with the blow of the wind if there's nothing else except the wind blowing . . . but when the arm is the arm of Hank Stamper strangling off your income, and you damn well know that the blow is being dealt by the fist on that arm, then you find yourself having a pretty hard time blaming your woes on anything other than that arm!
And a harder time than that leaning back and catching forty winks when there's geese going by in a steady stream telling you, "Winter is here and you better get the lead out and do something about that particular arm . . . !"
Willard Eggleston plans to do something, all right, but he isn't saying what. He finally closes the ticket window and switches off the marquee, tells the projectionist to cap it up and climbs the balcony stairs to let the solitary young couple know the picture has ended. In the lobby he pulls on his overcoat and rubbers and opens his umbrella and walks out into the rain. The geese remind him again of the secret that he isn't telling, and he stops for a minute to look wistfully through the window next to the theater into his laundry and wish his old confidante was still there (even though he wouldn't have been able to tell her this) like she used to be. Oh, those were the days of secrets, those good years before the coin-operated Laundromats had come to change his life and before his wife and brother-in-law had pushed him into buying that movie-show house for what they called "real prudent real-estate reasons, Willard; it's right next door and you wouldn't want a Laundromat concern picking it up, now, would you?"
He laughed to remember that. Now that you mention it, he thought, tracing his fingers along the familiar glass door of his old laundry, I don't think I would have cared. Even if it had been likely. He knew that wasn't their real reason for pushing him into the sale. He had known better at the time: his wife's brother had simply been interested in moving a worthless property, and his wife had just wanted to move Willard. After ten years she had finally grown suspicious of the extra time he spent at night in the laundry with Jill Shelly--"that little bar of dark soap you call your 'assistant.' What is it she assists with, I'd like to know, that takes until all hours of the night?"
"Jelly and me just sort clothes and talk--"
"Jelly? Jelly? Blackstrap Molasses would be more appropriate. Or Tar . . . why don't you call her Tarbelly?"
Funny, Willard thought, because it had been his wife who had first called the young girl "Jelly"--more a sarcastic comment on the child's fleshless frame, he was certain, than a mispronunciation of her name. He had never called her anything but Miss Shelly before, just as it had never occurred to him to chat with the girl during their late working hours until his wife accused him of it. Now he wished he'd been accused much earlier, and of much more; look at all those years wasted when she was nothing more than a skinny black girl, all knees and elbows and teeth . . . why hadn't he noticed her value until his wife called his attention to it?
"I'm tired of it, do you understand me? You think I don't know what goes on back there in all those dirty clothes?"
Perhaps it was because his wife insisted so much on acting the part of the overbearing spouse that he had found it easiest to play the dominated husband and wait for her to call the shots. He didn't know. But before his wife had been so kind as to suggest it, he and the girl had had nothing at all going in the dirty clothes except dirty clothes and silly little secrets.
Although that had been quite a bit, he realized, now that it was gone for good; that was the part he liked best to remember, the dirty clothes and the silly secrets. It had started that way, showing each other little treasures of information they discovered in the town's dirty laundry, then working together to interpret their findings. Gradually they got to be able to read a soiled slip as though it were a syndicated gossip column. "Look here what I found, Will. . . ." She would come to him, proudly bearing a coupon for a prescription for an oral contraceptive found in the pocket of Pucker Pringle's coat. "Now who in the blue-eyed world would of thought? And such a good Catholic besides."
He might counter with a spot of lipstick found on Howie Evans' undershirt, and she would come back with the cuff of Floyd Evenwrite's new trousers, caked with the dawn-blue mud like a fellow might step in out in them old mudflats around Indian Jenny's shack . . .
Oh, those may not have been the best nights, he conceded, but they were the nights he liked best to recall. Strange as it now seemed to him, looking through the window of a business he owned but no longer ran, at piles of laundry that had been coldly sorted by some unappreciative and heartless hand, the memory of those long-ago nights giggling over the town's telltale stains still held more warmth than the memory of nights much more recent and far warmer. Those early nights had been his. No one had suggested they study those stains. For nearly five years he and the girl folded sheets and sewed buttons, matched pennies to see who would go across to the Sea Breeze for Cokes, and satisfied themselves with such intimacies as those which could be read aloud to one another from other people's letters found in other people's pockets.
And never shared a single secret of their own until his wife practically insisted on it.
Then, for a few marvelous, frantic months, they had shared two secrets: the first on top of the pile of unfolded sheets that came nightly from the drier, fragrant and fluffy and white, like a great bed of warm snow . . . and the second beneath the dark blanket of the girl's skin, warmer even that the pile of sheets, and growing.
"And when you get this movie house, Willard, I think it would be a very wise plan to get you a new assistant, too; employing the only darky in town hasn't been the best way to get new customers, by any means; also, I would imagine she might like to be with her own, for a while. Why don't you see if she wouldn't be interested in going back to wherever it is--she must have a family--that she came from?"
Again, it seemed, his wife had come up with just the right suggestion at just the right time. Jelly laughingly agreed that it was considerate of her, all in all, and that it might be wise indeed to spend a few months up in Portland visiting with the folks, "long enough leastways that when I come back I can tell everybody about this wild marriage I had with this sailor who drowned at sea, me just bringing the poor lad's child into the world. Sure; everything'll work out hunky-dory. I think your wife always has some wise ideas."
Everything did work out hunky-dory. Not a suspicion in town was aroused, not an eyebrow lifted: "About Willard Eggleston? An' that chocolate drop worked for him? Never, in a hundred years . . ."
And, while she didn't even know where Jelly had gone, once more it was his wife's idea that he take trips to Portland every month or two to screen the pictures he wanted for the theater.
Hunky-dory as you could ever wish for. Never even a slip to make the bank-messenger curious, as though the whole conspiracy had been planned for him, and worked out to the last detail.
Jelly was even considerate enough to schedule the birth of the drowned sailor boy's child to coincide with one of his screening trips to Portland: Willard arrived at the Burnside Infirmary and asked about the Shelly girl just in time to have a colored intern tell him she was fine and point to a glass case being wheeled from the delivery room. He leaned to look through the glass at a child so wild-looking and fierce, so absolutely individual with his conglomeration of characteristics, that it was all Willard could do to keep from spoiling everything by announcing, "That's my boy!"