Sometimes a Great Notion

  "I promise."

  "Andy, man, what do you say me and you ride over t' the house and get me some of Lee's blood outa my hair and talk about grinning black cats and the like, hey? . . . over a bottle of Johnny Walker, what say? Okeedoke, then, bub; so long and maybe we'll see you around sometime."

  And we left him there, starting the jeep, and walked back down to the boat. I was feeling all right, maybe not in God's pocket because it ain't so easy a thing losing a wife, but more all right about myself than I had in a good spell . . .)

  In the attic, Viv reaches out to pull the window closed. In just the short time it has been open the rain has swollen the edges enough to make shutting it difficult. By the time she has it wedged shut again the jeep has pulled away down the road and Hank and Andy are returning in the boat. Hank seems cheerful when she greets him downstairs; she doesn't mention the fight; she can't tell if he knows she was watching or not. He is talking to Andy at a great rate about a fire at the mill.

  "Was it bad?" she asks Andy.

  Hank grins at her and answers for Andy. "Just enough, chicken, just bad enough. Tell you what I'm thinking about doing; I'm thinking--since I already missed my game, nothing else to do, can't dance, too wet to plow--that me, and Andy here might take us a little tugboat ride."

  "Hank!" She really doesn't need to ask. "Are you going to try to drive the booms down river to Wakonda Pacific?" She knew the moment she saw him. "Oh, Hank, by yourself?"

  "Pee on that Oh-Hank-by-yourself business. Don't you think Andy's gonna be in there helpin'?"

  "But it'll take one of you to pilot. Hon, you can't control all those logs by yourself."

  She watches Hank waggle a loosened tooth with his forefinger, speaking around it. "A man's always surprised just how much he can do by himself. Anyhow, what I want you to do . . . is Lee took the jeep in, see, so you ride in with Andy and bring it back out. Go look Lee up at the hotel and--"

  "Lee?" She tries to catch his eye, but he's busy fingering his tooth.

  "That's right--and tell him I sent you to--"

  "But Lee?"

  "You want to go or not? Huh? Okay, then. Andy, while you're gone I'll gather up a good supply of chains and peavey poles and get me some eggs . . . and I'll put us up a big Thermos of coffee, too, because I expect we'll need something hot--can you get a boat offn Mama Olson? She's liable not to care about getting out on Thanksgiving to rent one, especially when she hears what it's about . . ."

  "Yeah, I'll get a boat . . ."

  "Good man. Can you pilot one?"

  "I'll get it up here. I'll have it up here the way the tide's comin' in now in about an hour."

  "Good man. Now . . ." Hank slaps his belly; Viv starts at the flat, sudden sound. "We better get to moving around, I reckon."

  "Hank." She reaches to touch his arm. "I'll stay and cook you up some breakfast if you--"

  "No, you go on. I can burn me some eggs. Here--" He takes out his wallet and removes all the bills; he divides them between Andy and Viv. "This is for Mama Olson, and this . . . is in case the jeep needs money. So let's get in gear--Listen: what's that now?"

  The four measured notes of a musical auto horn reach them faintly. Andy goes to the window. "It's that delivery truck from Stokes' General," he says. "Lee said they was coming past, remember? You want me to go up the flagpole and signal or something?"

  "I'd like to signal him with a good salt load, the old spook. No, wait, Andy; wait . . . a . . . minute. I think I'll--Listen, you two head on out; I'll handle the signals." He grins, striding into the kitchen. "Where's that arm of the old man's, chicken?"

  "In the deep freeze where you put it. Why?"

  "I may fry it up to go with my breakfast. Now you two get gone and leave me to business. I got things to do, eggs to hatch, wood to chop, and ground to scratch. I'll see you in about an hour, Andy. Good-by, Viv, chicken. I'll see you when I see you. Now move, for Pete's sake! I got to run everything in this boogerin' two-bit show?"

  In her shack on the mudflats Indian Jenny casts her shells more and more slowly; any time now, baby, any time. In his bed Big Newton belches tremendously, and sleeps. Evenwrite waits by his phone, hoping Draeger had been as right about this one prediction as all the others. In the foyer Viv is once more climbing into the big rain poncho when Hank comes down from upstairs with Lee's leather-elbowed jacket. "Looks like the kid forgot his coat. You better take it to him: he ain't gonna look very spiffy runnin' around New York City in that old mackinaw of Joby's. And bundle up good, it's commencing to blow to beat the band out there."

  After pulling galoshes on over her tennis shoes she rolls the jacket into a small bundle and tucks it up inside her rain poncho. She stands then with her hand on the knob, feeling the door tremble with the force of the whipping rain. Andy is waiting silently beside her in his great brown coat. She stands, holding the door for a moment, waiting for Hank to say something else. "Hank--?" she starts. "Get gone, slowpoke," she hears him call from the kitchen, amused-sounding, over the hiss of frying sausages. She pushes the door and goes on out; she had wanted to talk with him but the tone of bitter amusement, though slight, is still clear enough to render looking at him unnecessary. Even without turning, she can see the look perfectly.

  Across the river the mountains and naked rock of the railway embankment loom in blurred relief, appearing almost flat, two-dimensional like a photograph, and scratched slantwise by the rain as if the photo had been scoured diagonally with a stiff wire brush. The effect seems extremely strange to her, though she can't at first decide why. Then she realizes it is because the scratches run from the upper right-hand corner of the picture down to the lower left, instead of from left to right as the rains usually fall. The wind is blowing from the east. The East Wind. The slides far up river, the constant grumble of the skies, and the vicious rains have wakened the old East Wind from his hermit's lair high up in the pass.

  Viv lifts the hood of her poncho against this ranting wind and hurries behind Andy down to the boat. Before she gets in the boat she tries to zip the front of her garment up to her throat to keep her hair dry, but the zipper snarls in her long tresses. She snatches at the snagged hair for a second with chilled fingers, then gives up and climbs into the boat, leaving the front of her blouse bared to the wind and her hair getting wet again in the rain . . . He's seen me before, she thinks wryly, with my hair a little straggly . . .

  In the Snag, Lee has already purchased his bus ticket. He is sipping a beer and checking through the policies in the shoebox while he waits for the bus. There are a lot of extra policies; he'll have to leave all those that do not concern him with Teddy. He finds the one naming him as beneficiary and shoves it inside the photo album and feels there the picture he appropriated up in that attic. Forgot all about it. And the little scuffle couldn't have helped it much . . .

  The album, though it had been in the boat during the fracas, had still been splattered with mud and blood, but the photo was still in as good condition as ever, which wasn't saying a whole lot; the only thing the scuffling had done was succeed where I had failed in separating the photograph from the papers. I started to drop these papers in the shoebox with all the other stuff I was planning to leave with Teddy, when the handwriting on one of the envelopes caught my eye. For an instant he is lost from time, the past and present crisscrossing through his mind like bright swords dueling in the dawn fog. They were letters from my mother, dating from our first years in New York up to the time of her death. The letters tremble, rustling; the picture in his other hand slides away unnoticed to the floor. In the dim barroom light it was almost impossible for me to make out much more than the barest of details. He sinks over the first letter, forming the words "Dearest Hank:" with his lips as he brings the faint rustle of scented print close to his eyes . . . Damn him, he has no right, no he has no right. I was able to make out however various requests for money, anecdotes, sentimentalities . . . but even more infuriating than these things was the discovery of that that perfume? lit
tle booklet of my high school poems White Lilac? that I remember she claimed she had no right lost in an Automat on Forty-second Street years before. The poems I had written and hand-printed meticulously the scent falls, white lilac for her birthday, now, here from the trembling page, her perfume it turns up, a few thousand miles like crumbling petals from dear old Forty-second shaken from a faded lilac . . . and in the mail of my brother! He has no right she has no right with my poems!

  As I scanned the letters I went quietly mad. Because he has no right it became increasingly apparent that she had never been mine my dearest Hank I have no way of telling you in all those years together she had still been his how much I missed your hands your lips and they had no right it can't be can we ever see each other again but each word, each scent without my bringing back so cruel Sweetheart the snow here turns black and actual movement of her hand the people here are even colder and blacker but as it lifted her hair to touch the bottle of perfume I do so wish that we might have beneath her pearled earlobe of course Lee does much better in school scented dark pendulum of her hair still, we may not have to wait as long as he has no right to my twelve years darling until he had his twelve years he has no right to mine we can find that place alone in the sky please to write more until, by the time the door opened, with all my love, Myra and Viv was there, crying, nondescript in her big poncho PS Lee needs tuition and the doctor writes that the payments on the policies have lapsed again; could you? By the time the poor girl arrived the insurance too? I was almost beside myself with rage. They had no right to do this!

  And by the time Viv had stopped crying long enough to tell me he was taking the run down the river, "Just he and Andy. And he'll drown out there . . . and I hope he does!" I was already feeling that the years had used me badly. When she finished choking out her news I felt as though I were being raped by time itself. Again! Just like he did before when he let her go! I tried to explain, but I fear it was largely gibberish. Again he will let her go and steal her forever from me! I could only try to tell her, "When we fought, Viv, he asked if I'd had enough. But hadn't I taken his best punch? Hadn't I! Hadn't I!" I demanded shouting at her, lashing out in a fury of denial and affirmation, but she didn't understand. "Viv, don't you see, if I let him do this I'll just lose all over again. I didn't have enough. I can never have had enough as long as he makes me say that! I can never have you as long as I let him make the heroic runs down the river. Don't you--? Oh, Viv . . ." I gripped her hand; I could see she had no idea what I was talking about; I could see I would never be able to explain it. "But listen . . . for a while there, do you see? out on the bank? I was fighting for my life. I know it. Not running for my life as I've always done before. But fighting for it. Not merely to keep it, or to have it, but for it . . . fighting to get it, to win it?" I slapped the table. She was saying something but I didn't hear. "No! by god I don't care what he thinks I haven't had enough. And the pompous prick, he doesn't have any goddamned right--Where is he, anyway, still at the house? Well, where's Andy with the boat? I'm not going to let him, not again. Not this time! Here, take all this stuff. I've got to catch a boat."

  She was saying something but I didn't hear, I ran, leaving her behind, toward my brother . . . leaving her and blindly hoping she might see that I was making it possible to perhaps someday have her. Her or someone. Later. For the dance between my brother and me was not finished. It was just intermission, just a bloody break with both partners supine and saturated . . . but not finished. Maybe never. Each of us had sensed that, on the bank, that when the partner is equal there exits no end, no winning, no losing, and no stopping . . . There is only the intermission while the orchestra takes five for smokes. Were I to have pounded Hank unconscious--I use the subjunctive because I had lost too much blood and smoked too many cigarettes for the possibility to be other than hypothetical--I still would have proved nothing but his unconsciousness. Not his defeat. I know it now, and I think I even knew it then. Just as he must have known when I struck back that my defeat was now beyond the reach of his weapons. The peavey pole I had worried about could only snatch out my innards; the cork boots could only tear my neurons to bits with my Golden Delicious; even by threat, even if he had held his twelve-bladed whittler knife at my throat while forcing me to sign a paper swearing everlasting allegiance to John Birch, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Daughters of the American Revolution combined, he would have defeated me no more than I would have defeated him by following him right into the sanctuary of the polling booth and forcing him at gunpoint to vote the straight Socialist ticket.

  For there is always a sanctuary more, a door that can never be forced, whatever the force, a last inviolable stronghold that can never be taken, whatever the attack; your vote can be taken, your name, your innards, even your life, but that last stronghold can only be surrendered. And to surrender it for any reason other than love is to surrender love. Hank had always known this without knowing it, and by making him doubt it briefly I made it possible for both of us to discover it. I knew it now. And I knew that to win my love, my life, I would have to win back for myself the right to this last stronghold.

  Which meant winning back the strength I had bartered away years before for a watered-down love.

  Which meant winning back the pride I had exchanged for pity.

  Which meant not letting that bastard make that goddam run against the river without me, not again, not this time; even if we both drowned, I did not intend to spend another dozen years in his shadow, no matter how big it loomed!

  Viv sits at the table, staring after Lee, her hands resting on the album. It is beginning to dawn on her that she has never really understood, not just since Lee came to Oregon, but since she came.

  The phone beside Floyd Evenwrite rings. He jumps, jerking it from his cradle. As he listens his face becomes redder and redder and just who the motherlovin' hell does he think he is, damn him anyway, calling a man on Thanksgiving Day with news like that . . . ! "Clara! That was Hank Stamper! The sonofabitch is gonna try to run them logs down to WP; what do you think of that kinda chickenshit business? I told that Draeger you couldn't trust them hardnoses . . ." Who the hell does he think, calling a man just sweet as you please to tell him he was about to have the rug jerked out from under him . . . well we'll by god just see about that! "Get me my boots. An' listen, Tommy, you get in here an' listen . . . I got to get out an' see if I can do something an' I want you to make these calls while I'm gone. To Sorenson, Gibbons, Evans, Newton, Sitkins, Arnsen, Toms, Nielsen . . . hell, you know . . . an' if that Draeger calls, tell him he can find me out at the Stamper house!"

  Lee sees the tug pushing through the heavy rain and swings the jeep to the side of the road. "Andy! Over here, it's Lee!" We'll see who's had enough and who hasn't . . .

  Jenny finishes her bottle and lets it drop to the floor. She picks up the shells. "Any time, now, honeybunch, any old time . . ."

  Viv gathers all the papers together that Lee left with her, tamping them neat and even and returning them to the shoebox. Then she sees the picture on the floor . . .

  Hank, grinning broadly, labors over one of the laundry trays beside the deep freeze on the back porch; steam clouds the cold air . . . (Soon as Viv was gone to meet the kid I get me that wing of the old man's out of the freezer. It's froze dry and light and the color of wet driftwood. And brittle as ice. When I try bending the little finger of it, it snaps off clean as a whistle. So I take it to the laundry tray and run tapwater over the rest of the fingers to thaw them limber. Cold water, too, at first, just like they say you're supposed to treat frostbite. Then I got to laughing about that and figured What the hell, meat's meat . . . and gave it the hot . . .)

  Steadying himself on the slippery foredeck, Lee watches Andy jockey their tug in as close to the destroyed boathouse as possible, tooting its little air horn. "There he is up yonder," Andy says, pointing to the second-story window; "and just look what he's hanging out. Golly, golly . . . I mean just look!"

  Shading his eyes
against the blowing rain, Lee leans out to look; "The devil," he says, grinning up at the arm. But if he thinks I've had enough . . . !

  As Viv looks at the photograph she absent-mindedly works at the zipper of her poncho, trying to free her hair. That hair. All the zippers of her life, it seems, have been snarled with that hair. That darn hair. Snarled in a zipper when the weather was cold or sweated to her brow and throat when the weather was warm. As a child her uncle had allowed her neither to cut it short nor to put it up. "Your mother did enough of that sort of thing for the both of you," was the way he looked at it, "and while you stay with me you'll let it hang like God and nature aimed it to hang." And spent her summer days hoeing irrigation trenches through the heat-weaving Colorado melon fields, with her hair prickling her neck and sticking to her face and hanging the way it was aimed to hang. Her nights she spent trying to keep it from hanging in the zipper of her sleeping bag where she lay near a flashlight and a four-ten single-shot guarding against the bands of young thieves that her uncle claimed were waiting to pillage his fields at night.

  In a country where melons grow wild along every waterhole, her uncle believed every poor soul in his jail to be secretly guilty of stealing his watermelons. The only marauders Viv had ever had a chance to rout were the jackrabbits and the prairie dogs, but the long wide-awake vigils gave her time to dream anyway, and to plan. She, and the stars and the big flatland moon had worked to build her a life from the dark, a life complete to the very flowers she would plant in her yard, detailed to the names of the four children she would have. What were those names? The first, a boy of course, was to be named after her husband, but he was to be called by his middle name, Nelson, after her dead father. The second . . . ? Was it a girl? Yes, a girl . . . but the name? Not after her mother. No. It was the same name as the doll her father had given her. Starting with N, also. What was it? Not Nellie . . . Not Norma . . . It seems it was an Indian name . . .

  She shakes her head and has a sip of Lee's beer, giving up trying to remember. That had been so long. And that dream that a little girl had helped the moon and the stars forge so painstakingly from the dry, crisp Colorado nights wasn't built to stand up against weather like this. The dream had been like the sand-paintings of the Hopis, permanent only in the dry. In this kind of weather the colors ran, the edges softened, and the dream which had once shone so sharp and precise in the future now remained only as an ambiguous lump to mock the little girl who had dreamed it so long ago.