Sometimes a Great Notion

  "What?" Joe said, looking over at me.

  "He means you're a poor liar, Joby," I told him. "Not many of you left. It's almost as good as bein' 'incorrigible.' "

  "Oh," he said, then, "oh! Well, in that case"--he swelled up his chest--"I reckon I should be proud."

  "If not proud," Lee said, "at least thankful"--and headed on upstairs (Viv comes in from the kitchen, drying her hands. She asks where Lee went with the thermometer. I tell her upstairs . . . and she goes on up after him), leaving Joby standing there pleased as a frog eating fire.

  By the time the calls slacked off everybody was in bed but me and the old man (Viv doesn't come back down. They're up there together. I can hear Lee's voice reading that goofy poetry . . .); the old man was asleep in his chair by the stove and every time the phone'd ring he'd jump like he'd been goosed. (She calls down that she's going on to bed. I say okay, an' what about the kid? She says he's already in bed, feeling pretty rocky.

  I say okay, I'll be up after a while.) Finally the ringing got too much for Henry and he hauled himself on up to his room and left me there to chew the fat with all the folks phoning to let me know what a boon I was to the community and what an inspiration I was to the impressionable young kids, and that sort of thing. Gradually the calls got farther apart, and the geese let up a little, and I dozed off. I must've slept an hour or so, dead to the world, then the next thing I was over at the phone table in a kind of stupor like I'd been bopped a good one or something. All I knew was that I was sweated clean through my clothes from sleeping so near the stove, and my eyes was burning and my head ringing and I was jerking the phone out of the wall.

  I didn't know for sure what it was had woke me, or set my ears to whanging. When you doze off someplace strange, not expecting to, it takes a second to get straight. Especially if you been sleeping too warm. But it seemed it was more than just that. It seemed like I'd got a call from somebody. Something real screwy. But I wasn't sure, not till the next night, actually sure whether I'd heard that call or dreamed it or what.

  I carried the phone back to the couch with me and sat down and shut my eyes (There's still a light on upstairs), trying to remember if somebody'd called and what he'd said (What time is it?), but it seemed like the words just blew in and out of my head like pieces of torn newspaper. (The light's coming from Viv's room it looks like) I wasn't able to get a thing straight; I was just too goofy-feeling and wrung out to know if I'd got a call.

  I stood up to go up to bed and looked down at the phone. "Well, by god, there's one thing I know," I told myself, while I wound the wire around the phone and put it on the TV set on my way to the stairs. "That is if I get any more calls I'd be pretty damned sure they come from too long without sleep and too many nights with geese, not from the goddam telephone."

  (She's in bed but she's left the light on in that room of hers. I go down. That heater is going too. I go in and flick the heater off and start to turn off the light. Then I see that thermometer; it's sitting right beside that poetry book he reads out of. Up on the sewing-machine case. Right near the edge. I bump the case and the thermometer rolls off. It hits the floor sparkling like a icicle hitting a rock. I sweep the sparks under her cot with my foot; then I turn out the light and go on down to bed.) "I have seen things, Peters, I have seen a few things . . ."

  . . . Lee went on to write in his ledger:

  And, while I have only had uncertain glimpses at the iron man's rusty moments, they are glimpses that you would consider quite convincing if you could have seen them yourself. For example, the tremendous significance behind an act such as the deliberate destruction of an innocent little thermometer . . .

  I stopped writing, once more struck with the near-impossibility of communicating a scene so complex with a pencil so short. Too much went to make up the situation, both above and under the surface, too much to circumvent in a letter.

  Watching Hank through the hole and seeing him break that thermometer had come very close to pushing me to my final stroke. The morning after, when the old man's wake-up war-whoop knocked me from sleep, I awoke still trying to decide. Everything awaited my go-ahead. The scene with the thermometer proved this. So I tried a few practice coughs, and was checking down into my poor fevered frame to see if I was anywhere near well enough to have the energy to fake illness, when Joe Ben came bouncing in to try to coax me from bed by promising me an easy day of work. "Just burning today, Leland," he announced, "no more cutting, no more cable-pulling, no more choker-setting. Just lighting a few little fires is the all of it! Come on up. . . ."

  I groaned and closed my eyes to try to shut out my tormentor, but Joe was never one to give up easily.

  "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. "Alwa
ys 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.' "