Sometimes a Great Notion (65 page)

And only then, after he had looked all about him, turning in a circle in the red and amber light to be sure he had finished with all the chores he could think of, only then did he go to the table where they had been sitting to see what Draeger had written on the placemat.

The Snag’s placemats were of corrugated paper, embossed with a silhouette of a topper just completing the saw-through of a spar tree, the top of the tree just beginning to tip as the topper reeled back, gripping his rope. Teddy held the mat to the light. Draeger’s doodles seemed quite ordinary at first: The tree had been striped like a barber pole—how many times had he seen that one?—and the logger’s eyes had been blacked out and a beard added; and a few crude popcorn-shaped objects had been placed about the paper sky to portray clouds. . . . Then, down in one corner he saw three lines of writing, in a sharp, precise hand so small Teddy almost missed seeing them:

 

Teddy stared at the inscription in thrilled, unblinking wonder,
What is it? what is it about you?
until his eyes began to burn from the strain and the mat in his hand began to flutter in the light as though a red wind were blowing through the empty bar.

 

At home, in his bathroom, Evenwrite sat on the clothes hamper in his shorts and undershirt, waiting for the tub to trickle full. It took hours nowadays to pull a good hot bath. They needed a new water heater, had for a long time. In fact—he sighed, looking about him—they needed a lot of new things; even the bottle of Vicks had been empty.

He had taken a big cut in money when he had accepted the head job at the local; the job didn’t pay near what he’d been drawing as the first push for Wakonda Pacific. But he’d be damned if he’d try to hold down his union job and work the woods at the same time, the way a lot of local officials did. You couldn’t do worth a shit at neither job if you did. And both positions meant too much to him for that.

He prided himself in knowing that both logging and labor were in his blood, though the price of this pride came high. His granddad had been a big man in the very start of the movement, in the IWW, the Wobblies. He’d been personal friends with Big Bill Haywood; a photograph of the two of them hung on Floyd’s bedroom wall: two mustached men, each wearing a large white button with the words “I AM AN UNDESIRABLE CITIZEN” pinned to his pea-jacket, and held between them a circular picture of a grinning black cat, the Wobblies’ sabotage symbol. His granddad had given his life both in deed and in fact to the movement: after years of work as an organizer he had been killed in 1916 in the Everett Massacre, championing the union man’s right to free speech in that Washington milltown. Penniless, his grandmother had returned to her family in Michigan with her young son, Floyd’s father. But the son of a martyred Wob wasn’t about to settle down in tame old Michigan; not when the fight still raged. After a few months the boy had run away, back to the north woods and the work the old man had died for.

By the time he was twenty-one this stocky, thick-featured redhead—called Knob, because of the predominant Evenwrite feature of a head set without benefit of neck on heavy round shoulders—had chopped a reputation for himself as one of the fiercest, fence-nail-chewingest, carpet-tack-spittingest men in the woods, both as an all-around dawn-till-dark diehard logger and as rip-roaring loudmouth of a labor visionary, a Wob that his old man—or even Big Bill Haywood himself—would have been proud of.

By the time this redhead was forty-one, he was a skid-road alky with a rotting liver and a broken heart, and no one in the world proud of him.

The Wobs were dead, gone, crushed between the thundering collisions of the AFL and CIO, discredited as Communist (though they had spent more fighting the “Red Dawn” than the other two unions combined), and the woods Knob Evenwrite had loved were rapidly filling up with exhaust smoke where there had once been only clear, pine-winy air, and the rough diehard loggers he had fought for were being replaced by beardless boys who learned their logging from textbooks, and smoked instead of chewed, and slept between snow-white sheets just like they thought lumberjacks had always slept that way.

There didn’t seem anything left but to get married and drown the disappointed memories.

Floyd never met the young diehard fire-eating Knob, not face to face, though he often felt that he knew the young man better than he knew the dejected spook in the fire-eater’s cast-off skin who staggered about the impoverished shadows of their three-room shack in Florence, intent on drinking and dying. For some nights, when his father came home from his boiler-tender’s job at the mill, he would do more than just drink and die. Maybe on these nights something had ripped some old memory loose from the bottom of his father’s past, or it might be that he had witnessed some capitalistic injustice at the mill that relit the fire-eater in him, but on these nights the man would sit in the kitchen, telling young Floyd how things
used
to be, how they by god
woulda
handled a injustice like that back in the days when the air was still clear and the Wobs still stalked the woods! Then the cheap liquor that usually brought nothing but silence and eventually sleep would, on these special nights, stir up the sleeping zealot imprisoned behind the blue-veined bars of sick flesh, and Floyd would see the young Knob Evenwrite rise up from the rubbish and walk forward to glare from the cell’s two eyeholes and shake at the hellish blue bars like an enraged lion.

“Listen, kid, it all boils down to this,” the lion would sum up the situation. “There’s the Big-Asses like
them
, an’ the Little-Asses like
us
. It’s easy to tell who’s on whose side. There’s just a few Big-Asses; they own the world an’ all the corn. There’s millions of us Little-Asses; they grow the corn an’ all go hungry. The Big-Asses, they think they can get away with this because they think they’re
better
than the Little-Asses—on account of maybe somebody died an’ left them a lot of money so they can pay the Little-Asses to grow their corn for them, an’ pay ’em what they want to pay. We got to haul ’em
down
from that, do you see? We got to
show
them we’re just as important as they are!
Every
body is as important as they are!
Every
body grows corn!
Every
body eats it! Simple as that!”

Then would leap up to sway about the room, roaring fiercely:

 

Floyd’s mother and his two sisters cringed from the rare roaring visits of this lion. His two sisters blamed the devil for these spells of violent nostalgia; his mother maintained that it was the devil, all right, the devil in a pint bottle without a label! But young Floyd knew it was something far stronger than a bogey-man from the Bible, or from a bottle either; he knew that when his father’s past roared out through the old stories about injustices overcome in their fight for shorter hours and longer lives, and through old songs about the impossible utopias they had worked to realize, he could feel in his own young blood the roaring cry for justice and see rise again in the distance those blazing utopias that his father’s whiskied eyes perceived—though the boy hadn’t touched a drop.

Of course, these nights of passion were rare. And, like his mother and sister, Floyd could despise the worn-out fanatic who kept them locked in poverty, the husk of a man who nightly drank himself into a senseless sleep to keep from having to face all the bewildered, groping ghosts of his stillborn dreams and extinct ideals, but just as he could hate the old man he could love the tough visionary who had dreamed the dreams and forged the ideals—though this young visionary was responsible, he knew, for the fanatic’s worn-out husk that he hated.

His father died during Floyd’s freshman year in high school—burned to death on a mountaintop. The man’s drinking had finally reached the point of making him incapable of even tending a boiler. After a long winter of unemployment some old friends had found him a job as a fire lookout on the highest mountain in the county. He left for the job with his spirits high. Everyone had hopes that the lofty solitude, and the month-long periods without access to any kind of alcohol, would ease old Knob of his anguish and perhaps even start him on the road to a cure. But when a party of firefighters reached the smoldering ruin of the lookout shack, they discovered not only how mistaken those friends had been but how the fire had started as well: in the ashes of the shack they found the exploded remains of a makeshift still. Every available container—from the coffee-pot to the chemical toilet—was filled with a fermenting mash concocted from potato peelings, salmonberries, wild barley, and a dozen different kinds of flowers. The condensate worm had been fashioned by laborious coupling of empty rifle cartridges with their caps poked out. The firebox was of stone and mud.

The boiler had been wrought from beaten stovepipes. Then the whole affair had been riveted together with tacks, and with staples, and with bleak, unimaginable desperation. . . .

It appeared that the betrayed ghosts of old dreams and ideals, however bewildered, could grope their way up even the highest mountain in the country.

The two sisters left home after the funeral, bound for a holier land, and the mother, who had spent the last years of her husband’s life hiding his label-less fruit jars from him, began bringing the bottles from their hiding places and took up right where old Knob had left off. Floyd managed to support his mother’s sorrow as well as put himself through the rest of high school (through to the midpoint of his senior year, actually, when his last football season ended). The only job that afforded him the hours and the money for this was a shady arrangement he made with a gyppo outfit that was running log trucks so ancient with loads so big that none of the union men would touch them and none of the state patrolmen would leave them alone, so the runs had to be made in secret, in untraveled areas from the gyppo’s show to the mill, and in the dark.

“Scabbin’!” Floyd used to call out in the night during an overloaded lights-out drive down a mountain road where state cops might wait up any side spur and black death over any part of the road’s narrow shoulder, “Scabbin’! For a goddam gyppo outfit who won’t meet union regs! How do you like
that
, old man Little-Ass?”

He hoped the old man could hear him. He hoped the old bastard was spinning in his drunkard’s grave to hear his son blaspheme so. For wasn’t it the old bastard’s fault—and the union’s too—that he had to be out there every other night like this, risking life and limb? None of the other kids, with their level-headed feet-on-the-ground daddies—even those whose daddies had been killed in accidents—had to take such risks to get along, because none of them had fanatics for fathers. So wasn’t it the old fanatic’s fault that he was out on some garter-snake road with no lights three hours a night, just when he should be resting up for a big game the next day?

The question he never asked, though, was why he didn’t quit the team and get a regular job after school. He never let himself ask why it was so important that he get out on a stinking mud-wallow field three hours a day and try to kick the stuffing out of all the other bastards, smartasses who acted like it was a federal crime having an alky for an old man. . . . He never did ask himself that.

When he left high school Floyd went straight to the woods for work. For
day
light work! no more living by the dark of the moon for Floyd Evenwrite! And since he was goddamned if he was gonna join the Teamsters or any
other
goddam union just so’s he could jockey a truck, woods work was the only choice left him. Being non-union, he had to work twice as hard to survive a layoff. In fact, his anti-union feelings were so strong that he was soon noticed by top brass in the show—old woodsmen who still figured a man oughta be his own man, no organization to back him up!—and it didn’t take these old timers very long to recognize this young tight-muscled redhead as prime potential for foremanning work. After two years he made cutting boss, from choker-setter to cutting boss in two years, and in one more year he was top push of the whole outdoor operation.

Things were looking rosy. He married a girl from one of the county’s big political families. He bought a house and a good automobile. Big men in the community, mill-owners and bank presidents, began to call him “sport” and “Red” and invite him to join service organizations and participate in drives to provide money for decent living quarters for the Indians. Things were certainly coming along.

But there were nights . . . when his sleep was troubled by a ringing roar, and days when a bum deal was given some fellow worker by one of the lard-butts who never stepped outside his office except to walk down to the bank, when Floyd would find his thick red hands rolling and unrolling in musclebound outrage, and his thick red ears echoing old battle tunes:

Gradually he found himself less and less on the side of management and more and more in sympathy with the workers. And why the hell not? Foreman or no, wasn’t he a worker himself, when you come down to it? The son of the son of a worker to boot? He gained nothing by whipping the men to better production; he had no finger in any of the pies when the profits were cut up at the end of the year; he worked his hours and drew his wages and felt the slow abuse of logging make its inevitable marks on his body, on his only skilled instrument of any value to the owners, just like the other stiffs. So why the living hell
shouldn’t
he feel the workers’ jolt? Not that he was ready to throw his lot in with the union—he’d had enough of that crap to last him a good long while, thank you, so he’d just pay a fee and sign a paper and stay inactive—but oh
me!
did it piss him off to see a man, say a old bushler or the like,
a man fifteen motherin’ years devoted to the same motherin’ company!
turned out cold by some new mechanical gadget . . . oh, that did get his blood up!