Sometimes a Great Notion (16 page)

A flourish of trumpets; Hank, tin hat in hand, waits for the ranks to finish the Family Anthem.

“An’ that the most
important
thing was to keep them ordinary people
from by God ever fergittin’ it!
”

Shouts and whistles. “You tell ’em, Hank!” “Thatsa boy!” “Yeh!”

“An’ the only way we gonna do that . . . is
keep our empire goin
’, come hell or high water; no matter what degree of family scum it takes—that’s how to prove what a superior race we are.”

More applause. Jaws become grim and nod in terse, manly affirmative. Old Henry dries his eyes and swallows. Hank is standing. He jerks one of his handy axes from a pillar and waves it about dramatically.

“An’ didn’t we all sign in blood that we’d by god fight to our last by god man? Okay then . . . let’s
fight
.”

More trumpets. The men join Hank in a closed-rank march about a flag mounted in the center of the hall. They march each with right hand clapped firmly on the shoulder of the man ahead, singing snatches of World War One battle songs. There is an air of relief and good fellowship among the kinsmen now that the crisis has past, and they call back and forth to one another in raucous voices: “Yea bo! You betcha! Damn right!” As they march past the plastic sack they conceal their shame beneath a veneer of humor: “Lookee there.” “When we said last man, we never thought anything like
this
.”

“You right certain he qualifies as last man? Mebbe we oughta run a check . . .”

“Naw. Let ’im be. I don’t want the ol’ man havin’ us paw around on him agin; it ’uz nasty enough gettin’ ’im in that sack,” he warns them.

(
Hank mounts the steps, feeling a little shaky. He turns down the corridor toward the room used as an office. He hears Viv call from the kitchen, where she and the other wives are doing dishes, “Boots, honey.” He stops and supports himself with one hand against the wall while he removes his dusty boots. He takes off the wool socks and puts them inside the boots and continues on barefooted, sighing deeply . . .
)

The clansmen have all squatted on their haunches before the ornate old woodstove into which they periodically spit tobacco; each of these oral projectiles provokes a lovely bloom of flame which lights the robust faces of the revelers a merry red. They all open pocketknives and begin whittling. Some clearing of throats . . .

“Men . . . ?” Hank goes on. “Now to the problem at hand: who’s gonna teach thisyere boy to ride a motorcycle an’ doodle a cousin an’ all that sorta thing?”

(
Once inside the office Hank stands for a while with his eyes closed before going to the desk for the figures Orland demanded. He finds the papers, in a folio labeled, in Viv’s graceful hand, “P & L statements, January to June, 1961.” He closes the desk drawer and walks across the room. He opens the door a few inches but doesn’t go back out into the corridor. He stands, looking at the yellowed wallpaper, his ear turned slightly toward the buzz of talk from downstairs; but he can distinguish nothing except the ceaseless barking laugh of that little bitch Orland married . . .
)

“Who’s gonna learn him to shave with a ax blade? To nut a nigger? We got to
tend
to these details. Who’s gonna see to him gettin’ a tattoo on his hand?”

(
From the kitchen Orland’s wife laughs, like sticks breaking. The pinball banging light bursts into a steel guitar run, “Shovel that coal, let this rattler roll . . . ’cause I’m movin’ on.” Evenwrite stumbles out to his car to sleep, his fists bloodied but his pride still unpacified: who’d ever of thought that that galoot in the bar there would know the name of the All-State high-school fullback from twenty years back? Jonathan Draeger makes a neat unruffled ridge of bedspread, and a face handsome and impassive in the calculated center of his pillow. Lee slumps against the window as the bus idles at the stop sign. Hank draws a deep breath, opens the office door, and strides into the hall. His face assumes a look of belligerent amusement and he begins whistling and smacking his thigh with the folio of profit-and-loss statements. Joe Ben comes out of the bathroom and waits at the head of the stairs, buttoning the fly of his ill-fitting slacks while he watches his cousin approach . . .
)

“Look at him.” Joe contorted his features into a derisive grin. “Look at him with that whistling, leg-slapping, nothing-bothers-me baloney,” he whispered as Hank approached.

“Appearances, Joby. You know what the old man says about appearances . . .”

“In
town
, maybe, but who’s gonna care about appearances in
that
ratpack?”

“Joe! Now boy, that there is your
family
you’re calling a ratpack.”

“Not that Orland. Not him.” Joe dug into the pocket of his slacks for more sunflower seeds. “Hank, you should of smacked him in the mouth for what he said down there.”

“Hush. And give me some of those seeds. Besides, what would I want to smack good old cousin Orly for? He didn’t say anything—”

“Okay, maybe not in so many
words
, but with what they all think about Leland and his mother and all—”

“Hell, do I give a shit what they think? What people think about a man, Joby, now that doesn’t even bark the hide on his shins.”

“Just the same—”

“Okay, drop it. And give me some of those.”

Hank held out his hand. Joe Ben gave him a few seeds. Sunflower seeds were Joe’s latest obsession and in the month he and his family had been staying with Hank at the old house while they completed his new home in town, the halls had become littered with the shells. The two men leaned against the hand-polished two-by-four that served as a banister, and ate the little seeds in silence for a few minutes. Hank felt himself growing calmer. A little bit more and he’d be ready to get back down and lock horns again. If only Orland—who as a member of the school board was naturally worried about his social position—had kept his mouth shut about the past . . . But he knew better than to expect such, from Orland anyhow. “Well, Joe”—he threw aside the rest of the seeds—“let’s get with it.”

Abruptly Hank stooped to pick up his boots, spat away a sunflower-seed shell, and started thumping down the steps toward the waiting furor of relatives, telling himself, Hell; what people think don’t even leave a blue spot.

While to the west, almost a week away, Indian Jenny is just getting around to telling herself that Henry Stamper
musta
had reason to avoid her other’n her being Indian; didn’t he fool with them Yachats squaws up north? And them squaws at Coos Bay? No, it isn’t her being Indian that’s kept him from her. So it must be that somebody
close
to him objects to Henry partying with Indians . . . somebody
elset
that’s kept them apart all these years . . .

Downstairs Hank finished up the meeting as quickly as he could, telling the relatives, “Let’s leave it hang till we get some answers back from our letters. But, say we do decide to log for WP, just remember: if we was running this outfit to the town’s liking we’d of been shut down years ago.” Telling himself, Besides, even if they
do
leave a blue spot or two . . . they don’t really mean any harm by it.

To the north Floyd Evenwrite is awakened by a state highway patrolman. He mumbles a thanks and climbs out of the back seat and seeks a nearby gas station restroom. Where he vows to his red-nosed and red-eyed image in the mirror that he’ll make Hank Stamper rue the day he used his family influence to get picked on that All-State team over him, by jumping Jesus!

Ten minutes after he had finished up the meeting Hank was outside in the barn, leaning his cheek against the warm, drumtight and pulsing stomach of the Jersey milk cow, grinning to himself over the way he had consented to do the milking while Viv helped clear up the kitchen. “Just this once, woman,” he had let her know. “Just this once. So don’t go gettin’ any notions.” She had smiled and looked away; he knew she hadn’t been fooled by his hardass tone any more than Joe had been fooled by his whistling upstairs. Viv knew what Old Henry said about appearances. He wondered if she also knew just how much he enjoyed coming out and doing the milking.

He moved his ear to the animal’s sleek bulk and could hear her guts working. He liked the sound. He liked the cow. He liked feeling her warmth and squeezing the rhythm of milk into the pail. It was a dumb-ass thing keeping a milk-cow these days when you could buy milk cheaper’n alfalfa, but dammit a cow’s tit was a nice change from an ax-handle, and the soft working of a cow’s gut was a relief after the old man’s snortin’ and fartin’ and John’s bullshitting and Orland’s wife’s screeching. Oh, well; they didn’t really means anything by it.

The milk rang into the pail, then muffled its ringing in folds of white froth, a measured bell sounding through thick, creamy warmth.

This is Hank’s bell.

On the river the motorboat gnashed at the leaf-dappled water as Joe Ben ferried the loads of people across. Cars started, spinning gravel to get back onto the highway. Henry’s plaster cast thundered and rolled on the docks.

A dumb-ass thing, keeping a cow.

In the deepening sky where the spearpoint firs scratch the clouds, already a moon—like a cast-off paring from the setting sun. This is Hank’s bell, too.

But god oh mighty ain’t they warm to lean against?

On the docks the noisy woodpecker of a man parades up and down, shaking his plume of hair that is yellow and coarse as a bundle of broken toothpicks when seen close up; fifty yards away it is white as a thunderhead; fifty yards away at the wrong end of a telescope the drink-whipped cheeks of John glow with ruddy health, and Orland’s wife steps into the waiting boat with a foot as demure and dainty as that of a thoroughbred colt. Joe Ben’s poor hacked gridiron of a face shines out across the green water as pure as a cameo, and his potato-shaped wife is a swan in polka-dotted taffeta. Fifty yards away.

This is Hank’s bell—secret between peaks of foam, muffled in warm white valleys—this is Hank’s bell ringing.

In her cluttered kitchen amid an architectural marvel of dirty dishes, Viv wipes with her wrist that lock of hair that always touches her brow when she hurries, and hums “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming umming umm.” The dogs bulge the back screen as they watch the venison bones and bread scraps and gravy leavings pile up in the chipped porcelain pan. Past the barn up in the orchard the little iron trees with the dusty gray-green leaves beginning to curl at the edges hang out their tributes to the sun: brass apples, and the summer sun sliding away into the ocean, old and mellow, takes the offering graciously. The gulls rock above a red surf; the long, strung-out flocks of black long-necks that like to play that they are part of the sea and fly always a foot above the water, matching every swell, every trough, make one last black thrust before finally settling to roost on the water like a speckled blanket against the night.

When it rings it’s like ripples in a pool, spreading in all directions.

In town Grissom reads the comic books from his bookracks, his eyes glittering with Batman and Robin and paregoric. Boney Stokes comes from his house and moves along the sidewalk like a comical black stork, step-hop-stepping the distance to his store to check his son’s bookkeeping and counting the steps to make sure no one has stolen a piece of the sidewalk. Coach Lewellyn blows his whistle and sends the team into one last clattering, sweating, dull runthrough of a play they have already practiced a dozen times; Hank sets himself for the blow of the defensive end’s knee, fakes a quick sidestep, cuts back neatly, catching the boy’s charge on his thighpad. The end goes down with a tired grunt and they roll together in the crushed smells of grass and sand as the halfback gallops past through the opening; the coach blows his whistle to call an end to practice; the sound stringing out on the dusk like a piece of tinsel . . .

“Hay-ank . . .”

Be nice if it could ring like this all the time . . .

“
Hank?
”

But it’s hard to stop out other noises.

“In here, Joe; the milkhouse.”

“Hankus?” Joe Ben poked his face through the milkhouse window, spitting away a sunflower seed. “I done that postal card to Leland. You want to come in and put something on it? From you personal?”

“I’ll be in in just a shake. I’m just stripping out the last of her.”

Joe’s head withdrew. Hank put the milking stool back on top of the big box that housed the emergency generator and carried the pail of milk to the side door. He put his shoulder against the door and slid it wide, then returned to unlatch the stanchion from the cow’s drowsing head and hurry her back into the pasture with a slap on the flank.

By the time he had walked back to the house with the pail of milk knocking against his leg, Viv had finished the dishes and Jan was upstairs getting her kids ready for bed. Joe was bent intently over the postcard on the breakfast table, rereading it.

Hank put the pail down on the drainboard and wiped his hands on his thighs. “Let me have a look at it . . . I suppose I should add something.”

. . . and the postman, sneezing blood over a tableful of third class, advises his superior: “I don’t think it was any accident; I think it was too
perfect
to be coincidental. I think that boy out there is a dangerous psycho and I think the blast was
planned!
”

And the pinball machine flashes. And the clouds file past. The bus huffs and hisses its blunt nose out into the traffic finally, where it swings hugely, ceremoniously west through the bright, picture-postcard countryside. The hand appears. The postcard flutters, dips, explodes, splintering wood and window. The lawn bucks and glitters. Evenwrite spreads his rear end on another gas station toilet seat and opens another package of Tums. Jonathan Draeger leaves a meeting in Red Bluff before it is half over, with the excuse that he has to drive on north to Eugene, but goes instead to a café where he sits and writes in his notebook: “
Man is certain of nothing but his ability to fail
. It is the deepest faith we have, and the unbeliever—the blasphemer, the dissenter—will stimulate in us the most righteous of furies. A schoolboy hates the cocky-acting kid who says he can walk the fence and never fall. A woman despises the girl who is confident that her beauty will get her man. A worker is never so angered as by an owner who
believes
in the predominance of management. And this anger can be tapped and used.”