Sometimes a Great Notion (23 page)

At the end of the dock a hinged plank incline with one railing ran up the embankment to the hedge bordering the yard; in high water, when the floating dock rose, this walkway inclined to a gradual slope, in low water it slanted down so steeply that time and again in wet weather spikeless-shoed climbers would slip and zoom like otters out into the river. Hank mounted this incline at a run and when the hounds heard the hollow thudding they swung as a pack and dashed after him, whooping their confidence: anyone heading in the direction of the house was headed in the direction of the rows of coffee cans nailed along the edge of the steps, the dogs reasoned, and any time is suppertime.

The dogs left Lee standing alone. Even the old redbone, gimping and whining at the rear of the pack, forsook him for the possibility of a meal. Lee stood for a moment watching the old dog strain up the incline, then took his jacket from the tar-paper roof of the boathouse and started after him.

From the power lines swooping across the water a kingfisher dived at his shadow:
What are these creatures? Where is this land?

At one place on the dock the backwash of the explosion had swept water across the planks; beyond this puddle the dogs had tracked a polka-dot pattern on the ruglike surface of the dock as they chased after Hank’s larger tracks. “But for his heel-print,” Lee observed out loud looking down at the tracks, “the whole pack of prints might be made by the same species.” His voice sounded stark and strange, and not at all wry as he had hoped.

He noticed another set of prints as he walked along: dim, phantasmal sketches faded almost dry. Probably the tracks of the woman he’d seen, Hank’s mate. He looked more closely. He had been right; brother Hank’s wildwoods flower
had
been barefooty, just as he’d predicted. But as he traced the tracks up the incline he noted also how incredibly narrow and high the instep was, how precise and light the placing—as though this set of prints had been made not by slapping feet, like Hank’s or the dogs’, but with the touch of a curved feather. Barefooty, all right, but he decided he might not be as correct about her size and weight.

He topped the rise and paused to look about him at the house and land. Beside the riverstone chimney a great pyramid of split firewood was stacked against the sunshine like ingots of some bright metal. A single-edged ax sticking from a round chopping stump directed his eye on toward the old port-red barn. One side of the barn was covered with the yellowing leaves of an ambitious grapevine. On the front, tacked on the huge sliding door sagging off its trolley, a display of coon and fox and muskrat hides dried and stiffened.
Who trapped the animals and stripped the hides? In this world, in this day? Who played at Dan’l Boone in a forest full of fallout?
And at the side of this door, distinguished and alone, looking more like a big, ill-cut window than an animal skin, was the massive dark patch of a bear hide.
What tribe is this so sunk in itself that it dreams in a night gone crazy?

He stared at the dark pool of fur as at a dark window, trying to see through it, as Hank entered the house . . .

(When I got on in the kitchen I saw the old man’s already up to his elbows. I tell him the kid’s come home and he looks up with a chop bone sticking out of his greasy mug like the tusk out of a wild hog. “What kid?” he hollers around the bone. “What kid’s come home where?”

“Your kid’s come home here,” I tell him. “Leland Stanford, big as life. Christ, look at you; you didn’t waste any time tearing inta the groceries, did you?” Cool and matter-of-fact because I don’t want him blowing a gasket. I turn to Joe Ben. “Where’s Viv, Joby?”

“Upstairs powderin’ her nose, I imagine. Her an’ Jan here are—”

“Hold on! What’s this you was talkin’ about, this kid?”

“Your kid, goddammit, Leland.”

“Bullshit!” He thinks I’m shucking him again. “Ain’t nobody come nowhere.”

“Have it your way.” I shrug and make like I’m going to sit down. “Just thought I’d tell you—”

“What—”
He whangs the table with his fork—“the hell’s going on behind me
now
, I wanta know! By god, I won’t tolerate—”

“Henry, take that bone outa your mouth and listen to me. If you’ll quit stuffing your face a minute maybe I can get something through to your ears. Your son, Leland, has come home—”

“Where? Let me see this bullshit!”

“Easy, dammit. This is why I got to talk to you; if you’ll slack off a minute—I don’t want you shoveling him in your mouth an’ half gumming him to death before you catch on he ain’t a pork chop. Now listen. He’ll be in in a jiffy. But before he is let’s get some things straight. Sit back down.” I reach out and ease him back down and straddle a chair myself. “And forchrissakes take that bone outa your face. And look here.”

Lee turned his head, mechanically. Beyond the yard a pen of pigs worked the ground like quarrelsome grubs. Farther still a grove of runty fruit trees offered shriveled apples to the sun. And beyond this hung the vast green curtain of forest, woven from fern and berry and pine and fir, a flat drop of forest scenery furled down from the clouds to the earth below.
These hokey sets went out with “The Girl of The Golden West”; what audience still attends such period pieces? What actors still act in them?
)

That green curtain had been one edge of Lee’s childhood world; that steel-plated river, the other. Two walls, running parallel. Lee’s mother had striven to make him as conscious of these two imprisoning walls as she was. He was never, she intoned, to go up into that forest, and above all
never
to go near the edge of that river. He was to consider those mountains and that river as
walls
, did he understand? Yes, Mother. Was he sure? Yes. Was he
sure?
Yes; the mountains and the river were walls. Very well then, run on out and play . . . and watch out.

But what of the other walls?
The east and west walls that should have been joined the southern wall of the forest and the northern wall of the river to form a completed cell? What about up river, Mother, where there were slick and mossy rocks perfect for the breaking of clumsy bones? or down river, where the rusty guts of an abandoned sawmill threatened blood-poisoning at every turn and a herd of marauding hogs ate men whole . . . what about that?

No; only the forest and the river. Her cell had only two walls; his cell needed but two walls. She had been sentenced at conception to life imprisonment between parallel lines. Or not quite parallel. For one day they had crossed.

“Look at the sunset my
eye!
”

(And dammit the thing is when I finally do get the old fart to get the bone out of his mouth and get him settled across the table from me with a streak of pork gravy running into his eyebrows, waiting for me to say what’s on my mind, I realize I
can’t
say what’s on my mind. “Look here,” I say, “It’s just that . . . well, Christ, Henry, for one thing it’s probably been a long hard old trip on him. He told me he’d come all the way on the bus. That right
there’s
enough to make him green around the gills . . .”—can’t say it on account I don’t want the old man to get all fired up and go to asking all the questions I’m thinking . . .)

Over his shoulder Lee saw the stricken sun drowning in a putrescent mire, and its icy cries sank deep into his flesh. He shivered and walked on up the path to the front door and stepped inside. Whoever had redecorated the exterior of the old house had stopped there; the inside was even more cluttered and unsightly than he remembered it: guns, paperback Westerns, beer cans, ash trays overflowing with orange peels and candy wrappers; greasy parts of invalid machinery convalescing on coffee tables . . . Coke bottles, milk bottles, wine bottles—all spread so evenly about the room that it almost looked as though an effort had been made for uniform distribution. The Northwestern trend in interior furnishing, Lee concluded, trying to smile: the junk motif. I can see it: “I think this side of the room is overbalanced by that; get some more bottles scattered around here . . .”

Not much had changed: decades of muddy boots had deepened the dark path from the front door across the still unfinished floor to the center of the room where gray-yellow socks still hung, still steaming, from crisscrossing wires strung above the great iron woodstove that still smoked where the stovepipe was still ill-fitted into the chimney.

The big door swung shut of its own weight. The junk vanished. Lee found he was alone in the lofty, soot-colored room. Just he and the old stove moaning and sighing like an obese robot as it gawked at him with its glowing quartz-glass eye. Hank’s wet tracks led dimly across the floor, beneath the closed kitchen door where Lee could hear the murmured reaction to his arrival. He couldn’t make out what was being said but he knew they would soon all descend on him along that stripe of light that was drawn from the edge of the door across the room. He hoped they waited. He wished they would give him a little time, just a little bit of time to reorient himself with the terrain.

He stood still. WATCH OUT. Perhaps they hadn’t heard him come in yet. If he kept still they might not be aware of his presence. WATCH OUT NOW . . .

Breathing as silently as possible, he began to move his head about in an attempt to see through the gloom. The three small windows of the room, composed of many panes held in place with lead stripping, afforded a rather morose and sanguine illumination. Some of the panes were colored. And even the clear panes were so old and of such a poor-quality glass that what light they allowed in had a green undersea tint. This phlegmatic luminance seemed to impair rather than aid vision. The room was filled with shifting clouds of iridescent gas. Had it not been for the stove, seeing would have been practically impossible; the firelight flickering through the quartz kept the objects of the room pinned squirming in their proper places.
Who is so square any more as to use such Gothic trappings? What collection of chain-rattlers feeds that ruminating stove and breathes these pastel gases?

He wished for more light but didn’t dare risk tiptoeing across to the lamp. He’d have to be satisfied with the fire pulsing and winking from the round eye of that stove. The light darted softly about the room, touching one object after another . . . a gaily bedecked pair of French royalty dancing a ceramic minuet in a bric-a-brac ballroom; an antler-handled hunting knife skinning buckskin wallpaper from a wall; a full battalion of
Reader’s Digest Condensed Books
marching in close order across an L-braced plank; hassocks crouching; shades breathing; stools walking long-legged along a web of shadows . . .
and where are the real denizens?

(“Listen.” I take a scan of the yard through the kitchen window. “I think he’s out there now in the front room,” I whisper to the old man. “He must’ve come on in the house and’s just standin’ out there.”

“All by himself?” Old Henry whispers too, not even knowing it, like you whisper in a library or a whorehouse. “What in hell’s wrong with him?”

“
Nothing’s
wrong with him, I told you. I just said he looked a little fuzzy at the edges.”

“Then why don’t he come on here in the kitchen an’ get a bite to eat if he’s out there if nothin’s wrong with him? I
swear
I don’t know what’s happening here—”

“Shush, Henry,” Joe Ben says. All his kids are sitting still at their plates, eyes big as dollars, like Jan’s. “It’s just that Hank thinks the boy’s wore out from the trip.”

“I know that; we talked about
that!
”

“Shush now.”

“All this shushin’ . . . my god, you’d think we was hiding from him. He’s my
son
, dammit. I want to know why on
earth
—”

“Pa,” I say, “all I ask is give him a second before you go roaring out there asking all kinds of things.”

“All kinds of things like what?”

“Christ,
you
know.”

“Well, I like
that
. What’d you think I’d be asking? About his mom? About who pushed her or something like that? By god, I ain’t a
complete
boob, I don’t care what you sonsabitches think, I beg your pardon, Jan, for my language, but
these two sonsabitches
seem to think—”

“Okay, Henry,
okay
. . .”

“I mean what the hell? Ain’t he my own flesh-and-blood son? I might
look
like it but I ain’t turned to rock yet.”

“All right, Henry, I just didn’t want—”

“So if it is
okay
by you . . .” He pushes himself standing. I see it won’t do no good talking to him. He teeters a moment with one gnarled hand on the formica top of that new chrome dinette set that is always tripping him up because the legs don’t go straight down to the floor like you’d expect but sort of flare out, and I make a little jump to catch him. But he holds up his hand, wagging a finger back and forth. He stands there, balanced, in top shape, perfect control, no sweat, and looks all of us over for a good long pause, then ruffles the hair of little John, who’s been kind of scared by it all, and says, “So. If it is okay . . . I just believe I’ll mosey on out yonder and say hello to my
son
. I may be mistook, but I
think
I’m up to that much.” And pivots on his cast and goes rocking off. “I
believe
I am up to handling
at least
that much . . .”)

The stove hummed and moaned, brooding insolently on its four bowed legs. Lee stood before it with one finger lifted pensively to the corner of his lips as he gazed about him at the display of trivia collected by years of living: satin pillows from the San Francisco Exposition; a framed testimonial making Henry Stamper a charter member of the Muscle Monkeys of Wakonda County; a quiver of arrows and a bow stalking knotholes; picture postcards tacked to a two-by-four; a sprig of mistletoe lurking near the ceiling; a plastic pull-toy duck with rolling eyes for a nearby Teddy bear reclining in provocative position; photos of fish held hip high; photos of bears with dogs sniffing; photos of cousins and nephews and nieces—all inscribed with the date of capture.
Who snapped those shots and inked those dates and bought that atrocious collection of Chinatown plates?