Sometimes a Great Notion (73 page)

“Of course
you
—out here in the sticks like a hermit—you don’t have to worry about neighbors!” he kept telling me. “You don’t have a teen-aged daughter who comes home crying because the kids in school won’t vote her into the Y-teens.”

“That’s right!” his wife barked. “That’s right! That’s right!” She was one of these little-bitty women with bulgy, bright eyes and too big teeth pushing out of her lips, like she was about to jump right out of her hide at you.

“We
also
have a share in this business,” Orland said and waved around at everybody. “We also own stock! Shares! But do we get a chance to vote like other shareholders? Hank, I don’t know about the rest here, but
I
certainly don’t recall casting any vote of any kind for this deal with Wakonda Pacific. Or for going up to the woods and
working
for such a deal!”

“That’s right! That is right!”

“A share gets a vote; that’s how it’s supposed to be done. And my share votes we
take
this offer Evenwrite and these people are making!”

“I’ve yet to hear this offer Evenwrite and those people are making, Orland,” I told him.

“Yeah? Maybe that’s so and maybe not. But a considerable lot of the rest of us have heard it, and it sounds considerably better than anything you’ve offered.”

“That’s right!” his wife barked. “That’s right!”

“Orland, it seems to me that you—and that considerable lot of the rest of you—that you would all be a little slow in wanting your jobs sold out from under you.”

“We wouldn’t lose our jobs. The union doesn’t want to put men to work in our jobs, just back to their own. We’ll keep our jobs, it’s just they would own the operation.”

“The union not wanting to put men in our jobs sure comes as a surprise to me—considering how they been on my ass for years to get me to hire somebody other than family—but I do have to hand it to them for working it out so complete, jobs guaranteed and all. Did Floyd tell you this? My, my; I wouldn’t thought he concerned himself so over us. Was that who you heard it from? Floyd Evenwrite?”

“Never mind who I heard it from, I have faith in the particular party’s word.”

“You can afford to. It ain’t likely they’d fire you and have to train another sawyer. . . . But some of us others might be a little easier to do without. Besides, you wouldn’t want to sell the old Stamper operation down the river after so many years of faithful service to us, now would you?”

“So many years us serving the
business
, is what you mean. Ancient machinery, buildings . . . why, we’re still working a high-lead show, for the love of Pete! We’d be
wise
to get out from under it while the getting’s good—”

“That’s right!”

“—and I cast my vote to
sell!
”

“Me too! Me too!”

Some of the others started to stir around, talking about voting, and I was just about to say something when the old man suddenly appeared. “How many sheers you got to vote with, Orland?”

He was standing in the kitchen door, eating a drumstick. I hadn’t even seen him come back from town; somebody must have ferried him over while I was upstairs. He was wearing the shirt that he’d won off Rod the guitar player once in a game of dominoes, a black rayon job wove all through with strips of tinfoil thread so when he moved it shimmied against his hard little gut like a burlycue costume. I saw he’d cut off more of his arm cast to give his arm more freedom with a bottle, and that he was feeling his oats. He took another chomp out of the drumstick and asked, “How many sheers some of the rest you boogers got? Eh? Eh? A hunnerd between the whole lot of you? Two hunnerd? You got any
better’n
two hunnerd, I sure will be surprised. Yes
sir,
I will be surprised. Because I don’t offhand
recall
—the old nigger’s memory ain’t what it was, I admit—but, see, there
ain’t
but about twenty-five hunnerd sheers in
all,
I’m
blamed
if I recall turnin’ loose any of my twenty-one hunnerd in the last year or so. . . . Hank, you sell any that hunnerd you useta have? No? Joe Ben, how about you?” He shrugged, then took the last bite off the drumstick and scowled down at the bone. “Lordy, but this is fine chicken,” he said and shook his head. “It sure looks like we oughta bought more, though, for a bunch this size. Because somebody’s gonna be short.”

But not many hung around to eat, just Andy and John and one or two more. The others gathered up their coats and kids and followed Orland out to the dock, not having much to say, like they was stunned. I walked out with them and told the mill crew to meet at Scaler’s Bridge at six in the morning and they could ride up to the show on John’s truck. This set Orland off again; he said he was damned if he’d ride the back of a log truck in the confounded
rain!
. . . But I went on like I hadn’t heard him, telling them how much we had to get done and where and by when, and mentioned that it was getting close on to the end of the year and that the men who hung in with me and didn’t miss any work—unless they were sick or like that—could probably look for a nice fat bonus at Christmas. Nobody said anything. Even Orland hushed. They stood around the dock while Big Lou yanked at the boat motor . . . just standing quiet and watching the perch nibble at the trash floating through the circle of dock light on the water. The motor caught and I said good night and I moved on back up the incline to the yard. Then, I just had reached the door when I thought I made out a far-off honking. I stopped and cupped my ear to see if I was right, and finally heard for sure a big flock way off to the northeast over the mountains. Joby’ll be glad to hear that, I thought, and started to go on in. I had the door open when I heard the crowd down on the docks go to talking. They thought they’d waited long enough, that I’d gone in—I was out of sight up behind the hedge and they didn’t have a notion in the world that I could hear them. Not just Orland and his wife, either, everybody. I listened a minute to their voices rattle around in the cold, all jumbled and excited and salty-sounding, all saying something different, but it all coming out the
same
, somehow. Like a round sounds with the singing all mixed. I’d hear one guy start on a particular gripe about the way he was being treated or the way he wouldn’t be able to face the people at church, and then all the others would come in on it like a chorus. And they’d keep that going until some other guy would come up with a variation; then they’d all take that up. And Orland’s wife’s voice, high and clear above all the rest, going like a pile driver: That’s
right!
That’s
right!
That’s
right!

Actually, it didn’t surprise me much what they were saying—it was about what I figured all of them’d been thinking all along anyway—but the longer I listened the less it sounded like they were even talking, let alone saying anything. The longer I listened, the weirder the sound got. Usually, when you listen to people talk, you’re where you can see
what
is coming out of
who.
Kind of hook the voices up with the faces and keep them separate that way. But when you can’t see the faces, then the voices get all mixed together, and the talk isn’t exactly talk any more, not even a mixed-up round . . . it’s just a mish-mash of noise coming at you, without any individuality, damn near without source. Just a
sound
, feeding on itself the way a sound will when you get a microphone picking up its own broadcast so it goes running in circles faster and faster and faster into finally just a high, tight whine.

Eavesdropping has always hacked me, but I didn’t even think of this as eavesdropping, because it honestly didn’t seem that I was listening to a lot of people talk. It was just
one sound
, not a lot of people, just one building noise; and suddenly I realized it was getting louder and louder every second!

Then I woke up to what was happening: those damn geese! While listening to the crowd on the dock I’d clean forgot about the geese. Now they were going right over the house, raising such a din I couldn’t even hear the people any more. Just more of those old honkers.

I laughed at myself and headed on into the house; I was reminded of what Joby’s old man used to say about distraction, and how effective the spell of distraction was on women. (
I go into the kitchen. They’re already eating . . .
) Ben always claimed a woman was the easiest distracted of animals. He claimed he could walk up and go to talking to a woman, get her distracted, “and have her so hooked on the
noise
I was making that she wouldn’t even know I was in her drawers until I hushed talking to come!” (
Lee isn’t at the table. I ask if he’s going to eat tonight or not. Viv says that he has a temperature again.
) Well, I don’t know how reliable Ben’s claim was, but having that flock of geese get right overhead before I noticed them convinced me of the effectiveness of distraction in general, and that it worked on men as well as women. I wished, though, that it was the geese distracting me from Orland and his wife and all the rest goddam griping
relatives
, instead of vice-versa. (
I tell her that everybody is running a fever this particular night, and Lee oughten think he’s special or let it keep him from eating. She says she has a plate set back for him that she’ll take up to his room . . .
) I remember wishing, in fact, that the geese would do more than just distract me; I was peeved enough with the relatives at the time that I wished the geese would get loud enough to drown them out completely! But that was still before the flocks really hit their peak; that was before I got as tired of the geese as I was of the people, before I got to wishing they would
all
shut up
altogether.

(
. . . I sit down and go to filling my own plate. I ask Joe Ben to pass me the chicken platter. He picks it up and starts to pass it. There’s just a back left. He sees this and pulls back the platter and says Here, Hank, here, take this breast I don’t really want it I’m saving up for that old honker I’ll get me tomorrow so why don’t you go ahead and—He stops too late; I look around to see what’s wrong. Then, I see. The plate she’s set back for him on the warming shelf with all its chicken. I take the back and start eating. Everybody starts eating again, watching their plates. Then there is nothing but eating sounds for a long stretch before the people start talking again.
)

 

By that second week in November that year, all the little towns along the coast had become peacefully reconciled to the rain: they had elected, judged, and found it responsible for most of their troubles, and found responsible for the rain itself such impervious scapegoats as the satellites, or the Soviets, or their own secret and sinful ways; they had found something out-of-reach to blame and no longer minded the geese reminding them that “Winter is here, citizens, winter is sure enough here.”

All the little towns except Wakonda.

Wakonda, that year, hated the geese more than ever for their infernal night-long nagging about winter. The citizens weren’t being allowed the customary peace of blaming, like the other towns. These citizens of Wakonda, while they had judged and found their scapegoat every bit as responsible as the scapegoats in other towns, for some reason hadn’t had much say in their scapegoat’s election; and the particular candidate that had been forced upon them that year—for all his stand-offishness and his hardnosed obstinate ways—was just too damned
available
to be classified as out-of-reach and passed off as impervious.

So the second week of rain brought to Wakonda none of the traditional fogginess that descended on Coos Bay, and Winchester Bay, and Yachats and Florence and all the rest of the muddy little coast towns where year after year citizens with drowsing but dreamless eyes drift foggily through their winters in a state of near-hibernation. Not to Wakonda, not that November.

It brought instead to the town a wide-eyed insomnia, a great nuisance of geese, and a wild sort of grim and giddy spirit of dedication to the town’s Common Good—a spirit the likes of which the coast hadn’t seen since those big sky-watching sea-scanning war-effort days back in ’42 after that single Japanese plane fire-bombed the forest outside of Brookings to give the Brookings area the distinction of being the only American shore ever to suffer a foreign air attack. This sort of distinction is bound to provoke a certain amount of community feeling; the bombing and the strike, while they exhibited very little in common outwardly, were in a way quite similar in that both had the effect of making the citizens feel, well, feel just a bit . . . special? No; more than special; let’s admit it: it made them feel downright
different!

And there is nothing like feeling special for hustling a citizen out to round up every other comrade he can locate with a corresponding feeling; there is nothing like a sense of
difference
for getting a man lined up, shoulder to shoulder, with everybody as different as he is, in a dedicated campaign for the Common Good; which means a campaign either for the ramming of that difference down the throat of an ignorant and underprivileged and
unholy
world—this is only true, of course, in the case of a bona fide
holy
difference—or, at the other extreme, a campaign for the stamping-out of the thing that caused the damned difference in the first place.

Meetings sprang up everywhere there was room and warmth enough, like mushrooms after lying dormant for months waiting for proper conditions. Everyone convened. Old hatchets were laid aside for the duration of the campaign. The young saw eye-to-eye with the old, the women stood solidly behind their men. The loggermen consorted with the construction men (although the roads still scarred the loggerman’s slopes) and the construction men with the loggers (though a lack of trees still left the roadbuilder’s efforts vulnerable to slides and settlings), and the churches went easy on the sinners. Folks had to get solidly together! Something had to be done! Something
bold!