Sometimes a Great Notion (108 page)

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.

She jerks again at the zipper, smiling: “But I do remember this part real clear: that the man I marry is going to have to agree to me cutting my hair short. That was one of the first things, the hair, I remember . . .”

Suddenly she feels that she wants to cry, but that she has been robbed of her tears somewhere along the way. She hunches down inside the poncho, like a snail . . .

“I remember . . . I promised me—her—that I would never marry a man who made me keep my hair long. I—she trusted me to keep that promise. She trusted me to get my hair cut short . . .” A skinny child looks up from the task of picking cockleburs out of her hair and watches Viv with curious eyes; after a moment she speaks. “You were going to have a boy and a girl and two more boys. Nelson, Neatha, Clark, and William after little Willy, the rope doll?”

“That’s right. You’re right . . .”

The little girl reaches a slim hand to touch Viv’s cheek. “And a piano. We were going to get him to buy us a piano, don’t you remember? And teach the kids to sing? Kids and a piano, and teach them all the songs Mama and Daddy sang, who studied at Juilliard . . . remember, Vivvy?”

She moves nearer, looking up into Viv’s face.

“And a canary. Two canaries, we would call them Bill and Coo. Real German rollers that could sing as good as the ones in the United Motor Parts and Radio Repair . . . Weren’t we going to have two canaries?”

Viv looks past the child to the present, down at the photograph in her hand. She examines the face in the picture: the eyes direct and powerful, the hands folded, the shadow, the little boy standing there so serious in glasses . . . back to the girl’s face, and the smile that laughs at her through the hair, the tossed swoop of hair out over her left shoulder like a glossy black wing fixed in time . . .

“And most of all, Vivvy, that Someone, remember? He was to be Someone who wanted the real us, me, who wanted—truly—what I am—was. Yes. Not a Someone who just wanted what they needed me to be . . .”

She turns the picture over and brings it closer to her face: Rubber-stamped on the back was the studio name, “MODERN’S . . . Eugene, Oregon,” and the date, “Sept. 1945.” She hears Hank now for the first time, trying to tell her, and Lee, finally hears them, and sees for herself how they had all been cheated . . .

“I love them, I do. I truly can love. I have that . . .”

But this minute, for this woman, this dead image, she feels a hatred that sings in her ears like steam. This woman has been like a dark fire, a cold fire, that melted them all almost beyond recognition. Burned them until they barely knew themselves or each other.

“But I won’t let her use me any longer. I love them but I cannot give myself for them. Not my whole self. I have no right to do that.”

She slips the picture inside the shoebox and picks up the bus ticket Lee has left lying on the table.

The rain drives against the earth; the river swells, glutted and still hungry. Hank leaps from the yard over the berry vine, one foot striking the bank, one on the overturned boathouse, and on into the back of the tug; he is surprised to see Lee, but his hand covers his smile . . . “Can you swim, bub? You may have to do a little swimming, you know . . .”

Jenny casts her shells.

Evenwrite charges about the bank among the gathering loggers, outraged and righteous and sweating in his underwear. “Just where does this big-ass Stamper think he gets off?”—and still smelling of gasoline.

“Just you?”

“Just me . . .”

Teddy watches Draeger hurry from his car toward the Snag’s front door.
There are bigger forces, Mr. Draeger. I don’t know what they are but they got ours whipped sometimes. I don’t know what they are but I know they aren’t making me a dime.

And Draeger, walking past the gently throbbing glow of the jukebox, the shuffleboard, through the partitioned gloom of empty booths—
I want to know what happened, and why
—finally finds the slim blond girl. By herself. With a beer glass. Her pale hands resting on a large maroon album. Waiting to tell him:

“You must go through a winter to get some notion . . .”

 

Viv closes the large book. For some time now she has been turning the pages in silence as Draeger watches, entranced by the flow of faces. “So,” she says, smiling. Draeger starts, his head coming up. “I
still
don’t understand what happened,” he says after a moment.

“Maybe that’s because it’s still happening,” Viv says. She gathers the strewn papers and photos into a neat pile on the table, laying that picture of the dark-haired woman and boy on top. “Anyway . . . I think I hear my bus now. So. It’s been nice running through the family history with you, Mr. Draeger, but now—as soon as I . . .”

Viv borrows a knife from Teddy and frees her snagged hair in time to board the bus. Just she and the driver and a gum-chewing child. “I’m going to Corvallis to visit my grandmother and grandfather and their horses,” the child informs Viv. “Where are you going?”

“Who knows?” Viv answers. “I’m just going.”

“Just you?”

“Just me.”

Draeger sits his term at that table. The juke bubbles. The whistle buoy moans in the bay. Cables ravel. Johnny Redfeather sings “Swanee.” The tug heaves against its load.

The booms begin to move, groaning, behind the chugging wake of the tug; Hank and Lee hurry to secure the couplings between the great carpets of logs. “Keep on the bounce,” is Hank’s advice, “or they’ll go to rollin’ under you. It maybe don’t look it, but it’s safest to keep on the bounce.”

The bus hisses through the swirling rain; Viv takes a Kleenex from her pocket to wipe the fog from the window to get a look at the two tiny figures leaping foolishly from log to log. She rubs and rubs, but the mist just doesn’t seem to clear.

“They’re nincompoops!” Gibbons proclaims. “They cain’t make it in this water . . .”

On the boat Andy repeats over and over to himself, in spite of Hank’s admission of worry before going out onto the booms, “
Nothin’
to sweat, nothin’ to sweat . . .”

Evenwrite calls a group into the garage near the landing. “We got some things to work out, boys . . . in case they do make it.”

Big Newton, still belching, begins doing push-ups on the living-room rug.

The arm, dangling in front of the dogs, twists and slowly untwists in the billowing rain.

Jenny steps back from the face before her, dropping her eyes.

“Jenny . . . is that your name, Jenny?”

“Yeah. Not really. People just allus call me Jenny.”

“And your real name?”

“Leahnoomish. Means Brown Fern.”

“Lee-ah-noo-mish . . . Brown Fern. That is very pretty.”

“Yeah. Look here. You think I have a pretty legs?”

“Very pretty. And the skirt also. Very very pretty . . . little Brown Fern.”

“Haw,” Jenny says triumphantly, lifting the mud-hemmed garment on off over her head.