Sometimes a Great Notion (71 page)

But he relaxed and straightened back up; he hadn’t seen them, either. He might have mighty leaping powers, but his eyes couldn’t penetrate that Oregon twilight any better than mine.

I looked back down at my obscure pencilings in the ledger; I had been beating around the bush for a half-dozen pages of discursive philosophy and foolishness, trying to explain to Peters why I had tarried in Oregon so much longer than I had predicted. For days I had been afflicted with a malady of hesitation, and I was having the devil’s own time explaining it to Peters, not having got around to understanding it myself. The germs responsible for this current attack of procrastination were a good deal more difficult to isolate than those that had finally been wiped out during that argument following the fox hunt. That earlier attack had been much easier to diagnose; even before the fox hunt I halfway understood why I’d slowed to a sodden stop: at that time I had been so uncertain of myself, my scene, and my whole scheme in general that slowing to a stop meant mainly that I didn’t know where the hell I was headed in the first place. Not so, this time, not so at all . . .

Unlike my previous paralysis, this time I knew exactly where I was going, precisely how I would get there, and, most important, this time I had a clear idea what the realization of my objectives would accomplish.

Like all schemers, I relished the fantasy more than the finished work, and for this reason I had labored overlong, savoring my own craftsmanship (I knew I had; I don’t believe we can afford to pass over the grade-school kicks our daydreams offer), but the scheme had long since been finished and put into action; in fact, the campaign itself was nearly completed. Everything was ready. All precautions taken, all arrangements made. All the plastic bombs placed and awaiting my hand on the plunger. Had been waiting now for a number of days. Yet, I hesitated. Why, I demanded rhetorically, why wait at all . . . ?

Lee is piqued and prodded by the sound of the geese, but Hank listens with a different ear. All his life he has been affected by the sound of game birds, hunting and watching and associating their calls with other events until he could peg the feeling to come before the bird made a sound, but of all upland birds and all the waterfowl, and all their numerous sounds of migrating, nothing even came near to giving him a feeling approaching the soaring, pure, lonely sensation from hearing a Canada honker . . .

Widgeons, for instance, when they came in low, beneath the dawn—in scrambling clusters of six or seven—their melancholy whistlings could make a man feel a little sorry for them poor, foolish ducks who get so rattled by shotgun fire they fly in a circle around and around over your blind, watching their number reduced at each pass . . . but that was about the size of it: a little sorry. Mallards you could feel more for. A mallard is sharper than a widgeon. And prettier. And when they come in at dusk, cautious, clucking and quacking, yelling down at your spread of decoys for the come-on-in signal, orange feet reaching out to catch the shock of the water, heads flashing the last bit of daylight, not purple, not green, not quite the acetylene blue of a cutting torch, a color almost a
sound
it’s so bright: ringing of bits of tinted glass against each other in the wind . . . When a mallard comes in you can feel for him that kick you get watching fireworks web the sky with color. Seeing something pretty. The way you feel watching a chinee rooster explode out of the maize in the afternoon, and kind of the way you feel when you bring down a wood-duck, which is actually a far prettier bird than a mallard but it’s not a prettiness you see in the air because a wood-duck’s always glimpsed dodging and whizzing through the trees; you don’t generally even know he’s a wood-duck until you pick him up out of the water.
Then
he’s pretty, all scarlet and purple and white, like a clown with feathers, but then he’s dead, too.

Cinnamon teal can make you feel foxy if you hit one, foolish if you don’t, because they’re little and tricky and have a nasty habit of coming right past you about two feet off the ground at about two hundred miles an hour through the air. Coots can make you ashamed of yourself for creaming a dozen of them on the water after you get tired of them farting around your blind; the brant goose can give you a kind of laugh, him such a big bird with such a hoarse little squeak; and, boy oh boy, the cry of a
loon
when you’re out at night with the dogs and you hear that bastard calling across the dark slough—a sound like something lost and lonesome and stark gone crazy in a stark old world where it always knew it didn’t belong—that sound can give you the willies so bad you don’t know if you care to go outside in that stark old world ever again.

But there’s nothing, there’s none of the birds and all their whistles and squeaks and quacks, that can get to a guy like hearing a Canada honker go past the rooftop on a stormy night. For one thing, you can’t help feeling a little sorry for the poor devil, out there trying to fight his way through that muck. For another, you can’t help feeling a little sorry for your own self because you know when the weather gets bad enough to run off a bird as big as a Canada goose that winter has set in sure enough . . .

But mainly—I mean aside from the pure pleasure—I think you feel just a teeny bit
cheated
when you hear a honker. Because for all that you got going for you as a human—a warm bed, a dry place to stay, plenty to eat, plenty things to entertain you . . . for
all
that, you still aren’t able to fly; I don’t mean like inside an airplane, but just you yourself, make a run out into the air, and spread out your wings, and
fly!

Anyway, I was happy to hear them arrive. I heard the first of the migration come over the foundation when I was out hammering up some spare six-by-eights I’d brought home from the mill account of they was too knotty to sell . . . come flying over about forty, fifty feet off the water—low enough I was able to pick out a couple with that big eight-cell flashlight Joe Ben’d left with me—and I was so happy to hear them I hollered out and told them so.

Geese arriving always catches a man by surprise some way. Probably because they’re gone so long and last such a short piece when they do show back up; a couple weeks is about all the passing ever takes, a dang short time compared to how long it takes a lot of other things to pass, short enough I would of never in a hundred years imagined I could get tired of hearing their honking. It just wouldn’t of seemed possible. It’d be like imagining getting tired of the rhododendron flowers in the dozen days they bloom every year, or like getting tired of that one magic day of silver thaw we have every dozen years that turns the dirty old world all the way from rusty tow-chains and the needles on the long-leaf pine to a bright, tinkling crystal. . . . Now how could a man get drug with
that kind
of short-term treat?

That first flock passed on up the river and I decided it was time for me to move on too. The only reason I’d stayed out on the embankment as long as I had was to cool off a little after Evenwrite and this Draeger’d put my nose out of joint coming out and
asking
me sweet as you please if I wouldn’t consider breaking my contract with WP, so’s not to be a mean old man to the union . . . right out and asking, then Evenwrite for chrissakes acting like he was
disappointed
I didn’t say yes! It made me see red for a minute there. I was even scared for a minute that Floyd and me was on our way to locking horns right on that catwalk, and I tell you: to be honest about it I was in no particular mood nor condition for another hassle, not the day right after my fight in the Snag with Big Newton, anyway. . . .

I rounded up my paraphernalia and took it out to the tool-house. Between there and the house I heard another couple smallish flocks. And after I was up in bed and the lights was out, I heard a fair sized bunch. The advance guard, I figured; first ones to be shooed down from Washington by the storm. The main of them from Canada won’t be making it through till around Thursday or Friday at the soonest, was what I figured, and went off to sleep. But around one or two that night—Monday morning, actually—one by
Jesus
of a flock went over! In the
thousands
, it sounded like. And I decided then, well, maybe they was
all
shooed out at the same time. Too bad. That means they’ll pass through all in a bunch this year, be all gone in a night or so . . . because that is at least half the geese in the
world
going over up there right now.

But I was wrong again; they went over at that rate, in that size flock or better, night after night after steady night, from that first Monday in November dang near to Thanksgiving. Gave me some bad nights. Like that first week when Evenwrite decided to declare whole-hog war on us with pickets and midnight sabotagings and what-all, and I needed whatever few hours of rest I could grab in the sack, and I’d be laying there, about to drop off when a flock’d come by so loud and so low they’d lift me right up off the bed.

Yet and all, after a week of them hollering, I was still a little sorry when Joby finally got woke up enough to their presence ( Joby could sleep through the presence of a full-scale artillery attack, I swear if he couldn’t!) to come down to breakfast all hot to kill us a honker for supper. “No lie, Hank; there was a
tremendous
big flock went over . . . just a
tremendous
big flock.”

I told him I’d been laying in bed all week trying to go to sleep with big flocks going over just as tremendous.

“Well, then, there you go! Don’t you reckon you laid awake listening to enough of ’em to earn the eating of one?” He went to hopping around the kitchen in his sock feet, holding his hands at each side of his head. “Oh
yeah,
Hankus; I thought a long time about it, and today is the
day
: a wind like that wind last night, see now, is
bound
to scatter some of the flocks, what do you think? Yeah,
boy
, I bet there’s dozens of poor old lonely geese out there this morning, flying up an’ down. . . . Huh, what do you think?”

He turned to grin at me from across the kitchen, still shifting from foot to foot and holding his hands against the side of his head in that excited, little-kid way he had. (
Joe stands there looking . . .
) He knew how I felt about shooting geese; even if I’d never come out and said so, he knew I didn’t care for seeing them killed. (
Joe stands there looking at me. Worried about something more than taking a shotgun to work. Something’s funny.
) Not that I’ve ever had much patience with the kind of pantywaist who says, “Oh,
how
can you kill the cute little deer? How can you
be
such a brute and a coward?”

... I don’t have much respect for this sort of do-good thinking because it’s always seemed to me a whole lot
more
cowardly for a man to have nothing to do with the meat he eats except picking it up out of a supermarket meat section all sliced and boned and wrapped in cellophane, looking about as much like a pig or a cute little lamb as a potato does. . . . I mean, if you’re going to eat another living creature, I figure you at least should know he was
once living
, and that
some
body had to kill the poor devil and chop him up . . .

(
Viv comes in from upstairs. Joe looks quick at her, then back at me.
)

But people never think that way about hunting; it’s always “brute and coward” the hunters are called, by some Eastern prick who thinks pheasants are
found
under glass, plucked and already full of stuffing. (
Something’s funny . . .
)

“What do you think, Hank?” Joby asked again. I took a seat, kidding him by dragging it out. I told him that
one
thing I thought was that he looked like he was standing on the foul line about to take a free throw with his noggin, the way he was holding his head. He took his hands down. “I mean about taking along a
shot
gun?” he wailed.

“Sure, why not,” I told him. “You ain’t disturbed one single honker feather in twenty years of hunting, so I don’t suppose I’ll have to be doing any retrieving today.” And he said, “You wait an’ see . . . I got a
feeling
. . .”

Well, as it turned out, like it usually did with Joby’s predictions, it wasn’t his day after all: we didn’t see goose one all that day. It wasn’t my day either: that was the day Evenwrite spiked our logs and tore a six-hundred-dollar two-way carriage saw to pieces for me. Matter of fact it wasn’t even Evenwrite’s day: that breakdown gave the excuse I’d been waiting for, a good reason to move the mill crew to the woods. I didn’t tell them then, though. I let them go on home the rest of that day, figuring to start them Monday. They weren’t going to be red-hot for it.

So everybody came out sucking hind tit that day, except that honker Joby’d sworn to kill for supper; wherever he was, he got off easy. At the supper table that night Joe explained what had went haywire with his prediction. “The mist was too thick for good visibility. I hadn’t allowed for the mist.”

“Always my trouble ex-
actly.
” The old man put in his two bits’ worth. “I’d allow for the wind an’ the drop, but sonofagun if I was ever able to allow for that
mist!
”

We razzed Joby about that a while. He said okay, just wait till tomorrow . . . “Tomorrow
mornin’
, if I read the signals correct, it’s gonna be
colder!
Yeah . . . wind enough tonight to scatter the flock, cold enough in the morning to keep down the mist. . . .
Tomorrow
is the day I bag my honker!”

It was cold enough that next day, all right, cold enough to freeze your balls off, but it still wasn’t Joby’s day. That cold kept off the mist but it kept the geese huddled someplace to keep warm, too. There had been honking all night, but we didn’t even
hear
a goose that day. It got colder. By night it was cold enough it even showed signs of clearing. When I told Viv to give the relatives a call and have them all drop out for Sunday dinner the next day, I told her she better mention to them all to put in some anti-freeze, the way the mercury was going down. I damn sure didn’t want any of them not making it out to the meeting; they all had a pretty good idea what was coming, anyway, that I was planning to tell them we were moving everybody to woods work, “An’ knowing how much a lot of them hate outdoor work,” I told her, “I know better’n to give any of them the chance to miss the meeting by saying their radiator froze up. . . . I’d at least like to get enough cars parked at the landing over there to let that damned Evenwrite know what he’s up against.”