Sometimes a Great Notion (5 page)

 

As the barroom explodes gently outward into the rain, in spreading spherical waves:

Dusty Kansas train depot in 1898. The sun lip-reading the bright gilt scrawl on the Pullman door. There stands Jonas Armand Stamper, with a furl of steam wafting past his thin waist, like a half-mast flag from an iron-black flagpole. He stands near the gilted door, a little apart, with a black flat-brimmed hat clamped in one iron hand, a black leatherbound book clamped in the other, and silently watches the farewells of his wife and three boys and the rest of his gathered kin. A sturdy-enough-looking brood, he decides, in their stiff-starched muslin. A very impressive-looking flock. And knows also that, to the eyes of the noontime depot crowd, he appears more sturdy-looking, stiff-starched, and impressive than all the others put together. His hair is long and glossy, showing Indian blood; his eyebrows and mustache exactly horizontal, as though rulered parallel onto his wide-boned face with a heavy graphite pencil. Hard jaw, tendoned neck, deep chest. And though he is inches under six feet he stands in such a way as to appear much taller. Yes, impressive. The stiff-starched, leatherbound, iron-cored patriarch, fearlessly moving his family west to Oregon. The sturdy pioneer striking out for new and primitive frontiers. Impressive.

“Be careful, Jonas.”

“God will provide, Nate. It’s the Lord’s work we are doing.”

“You’re a good man, Jonas.”

“God will see to His own, Louise.”

“Amen, amen.”

“It’s the Lord’s will that you should go.”

He nods stiffly and, turning to step onto the train, catches sight of his three boys . . . Look: they are all grinning. He frowns to remind them that, while they may have been the ones that argued for this move from Kansas to the wilds of the Northwest, it is still
his
decision and no other that allows it,
his
decision and
his
permission and they hadn’t, praise God, better forget it! “It is the good Lord’s will,” he repeats and the two younger boys drop their eyes. The oldest boy, Henry, continues to meet his father’s stare. Jonas starts to speak again but there is something about the boy’s expression, something so blatantly triumphant and blasphemous that the fearless patriarch’s words stop in his throat, though it is much later before he really understands the look.
No, you knew the moment you saw it. Branded there like the leer of Satan. You knew the look and your blood ran cold when you saw what you had unknowingly been party to
.

The conductor calls. The two youngest boys move past the father into the train, muttering thanks, thank ya kindly for the wrapped lunches offered by the queue of relatives who have come to see them off. Their nervous, wet-eyed mother follows, kissing cheeks, pressing hands. The oldest boy next, with his fists knotted in his trousers pockets. The train bucks suddenly and the father grasps the bar and swings on board, lifting his hand to the waving relatives.

“So long.”

“You write, Jonas, hear?”

“We’ll write. We look to see you folks following before long.”

“So long . . . so long.”

He turns to mount the hot iron steps and sees again that look as Henry passes from the landing into the car. Lord have mercy, he whispers, without knowing why.
No, admit it; you did know. You knew it was the family sin come back from the pit, and you knew your part in it; you knew your part just as surely as you knew the sin
. “A born sinner,” he mutters, “born cursed.”

For, to Jonas and his generation, the family history was black with the stain of that selfsame sin:
You know the sin. Curse of the Wanderer; curse of the Tramp; bitter curse of the Faithless; always turning their backs on the lot God had granted
. . . .

“Always troubled with itchy feet,” contended the more easygoing.

“Idiocy!” thundered those advocating stability. “Blasphemers!”

“Just roamers.”

“Fools!
Fools!
”

Migrants, is what the family’s history shows. A stringy-muscled brood of restless and stubborn west-walkers, their scattered history shows. With too much bone and not enough meat, and on the move ever since that first day the first skinny immigrant Stamper took his first step off the boat onto the eastern shore of the continent. On the move with a kind of trancelike dedication. Generation after generation leapfrogging west across wild young America; not as pioneers doing the Lord’s work in a heathen land, not as visionaries blazing trail for a growing nation (though they quite often bought the farms of discouraged pioneers or teams of horses from disillusioned visionaries making tracks back to well-blazed Missouri), but simply as a clan of skinny men inclined always toward itchy feet and idiocy, toward foolish roaming, toward believing in greener grass over the hill and straighter hemlocks down the trail.

“You bet. We get to that place down the trail,
then
we sit back and take ’er easy.”

“Right. We got plenty time then. . . .”

But, always, just as soon as the old man finally got all the trees cut and the stumps cleared and the old lady finally got the linseed coating she’d been so long griping about for her hemlock floor, some gangly, frog-voiced seventeen-year-old would stand looking out the window, scratching a stringy-muscled belly, and allow, “You know . . . we can do
better
than this yere sticker patch we got now.”

“Do better? Just when we finally got a toehold on ’er?”

“I believe we can, yes.”

“
You
can do better, may-be—though I truly do have my mis-givin’s about it—but your father an’ me, we ain’t leaving!”

“Suit yourself.”

“No sir, Mister Antsy Pants! Your father an’ me, we come to the end of it.”

“Then Father an’ you suit yourselfs, ’cause I’m movin’ on. You an’ the old man do what you please.”

“
Wait
a minute now, bud—”

“Ed!”

“Just hold your horses now, makin’ up
my
mind for
me
what
I
do, woman. Okay, bud, what egzackly was it you had in mind, just outta
curiosity?
”

“Ed!”

“Woman, the boy an’ me is talkin’.”

“Oh,
Ed
. . .”

And the only ones that ever stayed behind were either too old or too sick to continue west. Too old or too sick, or, as far as the family was concerned, too dead. For when one moved, they all moved. Tobacco-scented letters found in heart-shaped candy boxes in attics are filled with excited news of this moving.

“. . . the air out here is real good.”

“... the kids do fine tho the school as you can well imagine this far from civilization is nothing to holler about.”

“. . . we look to see you folks out thisaway very soon now hear?”

Or with the dejected news of restlessness:

“. . . Lu tells me I should not pay any attention to you that you and Ollen and the rest always put a burr in my blanket but I don’t know I tell her I don’t know. I tell her for one thing I am not as of yet ready to settle that what we got here is the whole shebang and give up that we cannot improve our situation some. So I’ll think on it . . .”

So they moved. And if, as the years passed, some parts of the family went slower than others, moving only ten or fifteen miles during their lifetime, still the movement was always west. Some had to be dragged from tumbledown homes by insistent grandchildren. Gradually some even managed to be born and to die in the same town. Then, eventually, there came Stampers of a more sensibly practical nature; Stampers clearheaded enough to stop and stand still and look around; deep-thinking, broodful Stampers able to recognize that trait they began calling “the flaw in the family character” and to set about correcting it.

These clearheaded men made a real effort to overcome this flaw, made a truly practical effort to put once and for all an end to this senseless fiddlefooting west, to stop, to settle down, to take root and be
content
with whatever portion the good Lord had allotted them. These sensible men.

“All right
now
. . .” Stopping on a flat Midwestern land where they could see in all directions: “All right, I do feel we have come about far enough.” Stopping and saying, “It’s high time we put an end to this foolishness that has been prodding at our ancestors; when a man can
stand here
—and see in every direction and left’s no better’n right and forward’s got just as much sage and buffalo weed as backward, and over that rise yonder is just more flat, more of the same we been walkin’ over for two hundred years, then
why
, praise Jesus, why go further?”

And when no one could come up with a good reason the practical men gave a stiff nod and thumped a worn boot against the flatiron land: “All right. Then
this
is the whole shebang, boys, right here underfoot. Give up and admit it.”

To begin devoting their restless energies to pursuits more tangible than wandering, more practical than walking, pursuits like business and community and church. They acquired bank accounts, positions in local government, and even, sometimes, these stringy-muscled men, potbellies. Pictures of these men found in boxes in attics: black suits poised with rigid determination before a photographer’s mural, mouths grim and resolute. Letters: “. . . we have come far enough.”

And they folded up in leather chairs like jackknives closing and climbing into scabbards. They bought family plots in cemeteries in Lincoln and Des Moines and Kansas City, these pragmatic men, and mail-ordered huge cushiony maroon chesterfields for their living rooms.

“Ah boy. Yes sir. This is the life. It’s about time.”

Only to be set in motion again by the first young wildeye able to sucker the old man into listening to his dreams.
Admit; you knew that look even then
; by the first frog-voiced young foot-itcher able to get Pop to believing that they could outdo this sticker patch by moving farther west. Be all set in plodding, restless motion again,
you knew that look and could have saved us the heartache
. . . like animals driven by a drought, by an unquenchable thirst—
but you didn’t
—driven by a dream of a place where the water tastes like wine:

 

Going until at last the whole family, the whole clan, reached the salty wall of the Pacific.

“Where from
here?
”

“Beats the piss outa me; all I know’s this don’t taste much like wine.”

“Where from here?”

“I don’t know.” Then desperately: “But
some
place,
some
place else!” With a desperate and cornered grin. “Someplace else, I can tell ya.” Not accepting God’s intended lot, Jonas says under his breath, driven by a curse.
You could have saved them the trouble of looking for that someplace. You know now that all is vanity and vexation of the spirit. Could you only of mustered
the courage when you first saw that devil’s leer shining through Henry’s grin there at the train station, you could of stopped it and saved us all the trouble.
He turns his back on his son and lifts his hand to the flock of cousins and brothers who walk alongside the slowly moving train.

“Mind, Jonas, you be thoughtful; don’t be too stiff on Mary Ann or th’ boys. It’s a hard new country.”

“I won’t, Nathan.”

“And mind, Jonas, them bad old Oregon bears and Indians, hee hee hee.”

“Pshaw, now, Louise.”

“Write, now, soon’s you get settled. Old Kansas is looking gosh-awful flat.”

“We’ll do that.”
You could of stopped it then, could you of only mustered the courage
. “We’ll write and advise you all.”

“Yessir; those bears and Indians, Jonas, don’t let such as them get you all.”

The Oregon bears, Jonas Stamper found, were well fed on clams and berries, and fat and lazy as old house cats. The Indians, nourished on the same two limitless sources of food, were even fatter and a damn sight lazier than the bears. Yes. They were peaceful enough. So were the bears. In fact the whole country was more peaceful than he had expected. But there was this odd . . .
volatile
feeling about the new country that struck him the very day he arrived, struck him and stuck, and never left him all the three years he lived in Oregon. “What’s so hard about this country?” Jonas wondered when they arrived. “All it needs is somebody to whip it into shape.”

No, it wasn’t such as bears or Indians that got stern and stoic Jonas Stamper.

“But I wonder how come it’s still as unsettled as it is?” Jonas wondered when he arrived; others wondered when he left. “Tell me, weren’t they a Jonas Stamper hereabouts?”

“He was here, but he’s gone.”

“Gone? Just up and gone?”

“Just up and scoot.”

“What come of his family?”

“They’re still around, her’n’ the three boys. Folks here are kinda helpin’ keep their heads above water. Old Foodland Stokes sends ’em a bit of grocery every day or so, back up river. They got a sort of house—”

Jonas started the big frame house a week after they settled in Wakonda. He divided three years, three short summers and three long winters, between his feed-and-seed store in town and his building site across the river—eight acres of rich riverbank land, the best on the river. He had homesteaded his lot under the 1880 Land Act before he left Kansas—“Live on the Highway of Water!”—homesteaded it sight unseen, trusting to the pamphlets that a riverbank site would be a good site for a patriarch to do the Lord’s work. It had sounded good on paper.