Sometimes a Great Notion (36 page)

For I was certain by now that no other elixir would heal me; no potion but victory would stem the curse and halt my slow ascent up the steps to my own forty-first floor. My whole future keened silently with suffocated need for that victory, my whole past screamed in fury for it . . . while across the ceiling overhead, with its stigmata of cavernous knotholes exuding forms hideous and vapors terrifying, walked the evidence of those very weaknesses that rendered my wrath impotent and my victory impossible. Watching helplessly, I was struck by the parodoxical beauty of the situation. It seemed to me that up there, projected overhead, was at once the absolute
proof
of my need for a victory over my brother as well as undeniable evidence of my inability to bring about that victory. The need instigated and paralyzed itself simultaneously. Helpless, I lay witness to my production: a panorama of unparalleled paranoia, as every neuron cowered in terror from its neighbor while the sheep were being slaughtered. WATCH OUT WATCH OUT WATCH . . .

Then, at the moment, with exquisite timing, just as I was about to surrender to death by Status Quo, there came to me a sign, my pillar of fire leading to salvation, my torch . . .

A click in the next room sent a thin finger of light through that hole. The finger wrapped itself about my head and tugged. I lay still for a long time before I gave in to the pull of the light and let it draw my throbbing bones standing.

I remember perfectly my first impression: that the girl—not the lamp behind her—was emitting the light. She stood there, motionless, her back to me, seemingly entranced by some vision across the room; clothed from the waist down in a beige-colored slip and nothing else . . . quite pale, quite slender, with wonderfully long sorrel-blond hair following the slender line of her head down over her shoulders—and she made me think of a burning candle.
She moves, tipping her head slightly forward.
Then she turned, and as she walked directly toward my spying eyes,
smooth almost hipless body, graceful wick of neck, pale unpainted face which seems to flicker and glow like a solitary flame . . .
I saw that her cheeks were wet with crying.

 

As a trilobite wades out of the paleolithic age and drags itself across the ruts of Breakbutt Road into the outskirts of town, and across a field of hop clover and beer cans, finally up the steps of the Mad Scandinavian’s shack to stop and scratch at the front door like a dog wanting in out of the chill.

As an antique Indian with a face like an aerial photograph of a bombed-out city—Indian Jenny’s father, incidentally—sits in a pine-log shelter back up fifty years of practically impassable dirt road, on a pine-needle floor with a greasy bearskin robe pinned at his wattled neck with a porcupine quill, intensely watching “Have Gun, Will Travel.”

As Simone leans against her empty refrigerator, studying through the half-open door to her bedroom the little carved Virgin that studies her in turn, breathing the kitchen’s odor of candlewax and wine. Who do they think they are, anyway? These Stampers? To make this bad strike?

As the rest of the town breathes their own passing breezes:

Willard Eggleston, in his theater’s ticket office, counts the night’s take. “If it don’t get worse, if I can take in
just this much a night
I’ll make it to the first of the year.” Every night the take gets smaller. One night it will be too small.

Floyd Evenwrite waits nervously while Jonathan B. Draeger leafs casually through a stack of yellow papers.

Molly the hound watches the moon melt like wax, and feels the wax fall freezing on her hide, petrifying on her eyes and tongue . . .

 

Joe Ben, out clamdigging one summer morning with his three oldest kids, pauses in his giddy rushing from child to child to look across the flats at a pack of bony hogs that comes sniffing from the bam-tree thickets onto the mud. As he watches, a black swarm of crows appear almost simultaneously from the top branches of a fir grove; they sail screeching down to settle two or three apiece on the back of each rooting hog. A hog grubs a clam or mud shrimp into sight; a great squealing and squawking fight for the prize . . . a bird flaps off laughing hoarsely to break his clam against the rocks of the jetty. Joe Ben stands enthralled, palms pressing his skull—“
Oh man! Oh boy!
”—as though to reinforce the walls of his bursting soul, to take precaution against an explosion of joy . . .

Oh man, them
birds!
And them goofy hogs. . . . can you believe it? Pap used to tell about that hog pack but I never myself laid eye on them before. He said them birds been here long as the hogs, or at least the bird kin long as the hog kin. All the way clear back to 1900. Oh man, Pap, what a kick you must’ve been, tearing around the country seeing all these funny things and bouncing from bed to bed with all those women. I wish, ah gosh I wish I might of knowed and enjoyed you when I had the chance, might of freed myself earlier from you somehow so’s I could of give you the respect and attention you deserved. What a kick it could of been, me and Hank and Aaron’s two boys bagged out on the floor while you’n old Henry sit cooking your shoes on the stove, drinking green beer and smoking cigars . . . fart and belch, fart and belch all night long while you talked about the way it was . . .

Very swampy, son, back then. Arnold Eggleston and his brood tried to settle Siskilou flat nineteen ought six or seven. Very swampy, I recollect. Arnold put his hogs loose on the land to grub out wapatoos an’ skunk cabbages—I seen two them devils last week whilst bringin’ the boom down river—those type pigs with their ears slung over their eyes like car fenders, an’ they went wild. And
mean
, let me tell you: Sam Montgomery, you recall, Henry? brother to Miss Montgomery?”

“Betsy? Betsy Montgomery . . . ?”

“She was the first of a long line of the mattressback Montgomery girls—”

“Never mind her, you foul-mouthed bastard, what ’uz you saying about Sam an’ them wild hogs?”

“Yes. . . . One day me ’n’ him was pirating drift logs off the flat and I ’uz doin’ this or that an’ all at once Sam commenced to holler, an’ one of them devils had him down an’ was workin’ at him. I made a run to the skiff an’ grab Sam’s double-barrel he’d brung in case we get a chance at some mergansers. Sam’s got the hog and the hog’s got Sam. Over an’ over they go, squalling an’ cussin’! Mud and kelp and garbage an’ god knows what all so’s I can’t make out
what’s
about. ‘Shoot, dammit,
shoot!
’ Sam yells. ‘I can’t tell which is
what!
’ I tell him. ‘Never mind that, dammit, just shoot into the
wad!
’ So I run back a piece an’ fly at the two of them on the ground there.
Whoo!
Both barrels. Hog turned loose an’ lit out back to the thickets, an’ I
swear
if Sam didn’t jump up and tear off after him, cussing and screamin’ that he was gonna break his skinny fuckin’ back, an’ I tell ya! if he didn’t of trip over some roots I bet he’d of come mighty damn close. . . .”

“
I
remember Betsy Montgomery. I recall her
now.
I recall one time you traded Sam Montgomery a nearly full box of White Owls for the privilege of driving his sister Betsy to a dance up at Yachats and they were
my
White Owls too, by god!”

“Well.” Ben shrugs and smiles at his older brother. “A cigar is just a cigar, but a good woman is a fuck.”

The men guffaw and tip their foaming fruit jars; the boys lie full length on the wooden floor, chins on their crossed hands, grinning sleepily. Everyone has heard the story. Everyone has heard all the stories, even before they happen. At the stove Henry is recalling a tale told him by an oldtime hand logger who heard it from a one-eyed Indian, a folk legend . . . years of hard famine, game all gone, and the coyote god leads the men of the tribe to the beach as the waves recede revealing an abundance of food, warning that as soon as anyone picks up even the tiniest morsel the waves will start back; a hungry brave tries to sneak a clam into his loincloth and the coyote god catches him. The water begins to move landward again, explaining the origin of the tides . . .

On the riverbank the Indian storyteller materializes in full feathered dress; light from a driftwood fire illuminates eager ghosts dancing from a shiny, milkstoned eye; his stories, pure and comfortable and full of the fleshless fact of spirits, are still innocent of the demons to come from a far-away land called Hudson’s Bay Company. His hand floats weightless in the night buoyed up on the heavy stream of his words; a circle of firelit faces listens. . . . A car’s horn rings across the moonplated river and Hank rises from the supper table and crosses to the kitchen window. “Hush a minute; I thought I heard the old man toot. . . . Seems I been spending a lot of my time lately listening for that old fart to come home gassed and honkin’.”

At home, wearing a green eyeshade on his bald head, Willard Eggleston writes a final figure at the bottom of a page full of calculation. “If I take in
just this much
next month, then maybe the overhead won’t kill me. Just this much is all I need to overcome the overhead.” But every month the figure to overcome is bigger. One month it will be too big. It seems to Willard he is always spending his time with figures too big or too little.

Indian Jenny’s father rises with a grunt to stop the roll-over in his TV set. He spends a lot of his time adjusting his Westerns.

Viv reads, curled against a large satin-covered pillow on her makeshift couch. She spends a large part of her time reading. She didn’t read nearly so much back in Colorado; and even during her first years in the house in Wakonda, when Hank brought her books down from the attic for the long lonely afternoons, she had had a difficult time getting interested—the books were so worn with other readings from other years that it didn’t seem she should peek—but in the weeks spent in bed after she lost the baby she had forced herself to try, sometimes reading the same page over and over, until one sleepy afternoon something clicked, like a lock unlocking, and she saw those printed doors swing open on a vast house of words. She entered carefully, feeling that she was trespassing, knowing that this had never been her house and hoping almost that someone—whoever had lived here first—would come back and chase her out. But no one came, and she reconciled herself to living in another’s house, and gradually came to understand and appreciate the beauty of the house’s various furnishings. Since then she has amassed a large and erratic library. Books on all subjects—books hardbound and books paperbacked, some ragged with reading, some never opened—range over the wall at various levels on a unique bookcase forming a floor-to-ceiling fortress of words.

Once, as Viv tidied up her sewing before coming to bed, Hank stood before that fortress, rubbing his bare belly as he scanned the titles. He shook his head. He had long forgotten that the books were his idea in the first place. “All this,” Hank said with a sweep of his arm, “all these books, all these buggy
words.
” He turned and drew a finger down his wife’s spine, producing a murmurous giggle. “Tell me, little girl: how’s it possible all these words go in an’ so piddling few come out?” He parted the bright glide of hair at the back of her head and examined her neck. “You must be so stuffed with words you due to
explode!
”