Chapter 7

“Look there: isn’t that old Henry Stamper and his boy Hank? What the hell they got there in back?”) Dreamily, still staring down at the cave-in, Jonas runs his tongue over the nails in his mouth. He starts to turn back to the house, then stops again, his face running gradually into a puzzled frown. He takes one of the square nails out and holds it in front of his eyes. The nail is rusted. He looks at another nail and finds more rust. One at a time he removes each nail from his mouth and looks at it, studying for a long time the way a slight powder of rust is already splotching the iron like a fungus. And it didn’t rain last night. In fact, it hasn’t rained now in almost two incredible days, that was why he hadn’t bothered tacking the lid back on the nail keg when he finished work the day before. Yet, rain or no, the nails have rusted. Overnight. The whole keg, come all the way from Pittsburgh, four weeks on the road, bright and shiny as silver dimes . . . rusted overnight . . . “By golly, you know, it looks like a coffin!” the sailor said. . . . So, nodding to himself, he replaces the nails in the keg and lays the hammer on the dewy grass, then walks thigh-deep through fog to the river and gets in the boat and rows across to the dirt road where a lean-to stables the mare. And saddles the mare and goes back to Kansas, to the dry, flatiron prairies where sage struggles for a grip in the meager soil, and jackrabbits nibble barrel cactus for the moisture, and decay goes on slow and unseen under the baked brick sky. “It is a coffin! In a shipping box like on trains.” “Oh, look what they’re doing!” The other sailor and his girl untangled swiftly, and the four of them watched the old man and the boy on the launching dock unload the pick-up’s cargo and drag it across the planks and tip it into the bay—then get back in the pick-up and drive away. The sailors and the two girls sat in the car and watched the box up-end and slowly sink over many minutes. Eddy Arnold sang: There’ll be smoke on the water, on the land an’ the sea, When our Army and our Navy overtake the en-ah-mee . . . as the box gave a stiff lurch and finally slid under, leaving a spreading circle, trailing bubbles down through winding kelp and algae into the green-brown purple-brown avenues of rubbery sea grass where crabs with eyes on stalks patrol a dreary collection of bottles, old plumbing, blown-out tires, iceboxes, lost outboard motors, broken porcelain, and all the other debris that decorates the bottom of the bay. In the pick-up, home from the docks, the tight-knit little man with the bottle-green eyes and the hair already turning white tried to ease his sixteen-year-old son’s curiosity by reaching over to knuckle the boy’s head. “Watcha say, Hankas? How’d ya like to drift down to Coos Bay tonight an’ watch the old man tie one on. I’m gonna need a level head to look after me.” “What was in it, Papa?” the boy asked (didn’t even know then that the thing was a coffin...). “Was what?” “In the big box.” Henry laughed. “Meat. Old meat I didn’t want stinkin’ up the place.” The boy glanced swiftly at his father—(Old meat, he says ...Pa said....And I didn’t know any better for lord, it’s hard to say, for a couple of months anyhow when Boney Stokes—who’s been the local doom-teller around town as far as I can remember—took me aside when he was out to the house visiting and we sit there for a good half-hour, me squirming around and him all the goddam time laying that goddam spit-dripping hand on my leg or my arm or my head or any other place he could get to me with it like he just won’t rest a wink till everybody else is saddled with whatever germ it is he’s vending. “Ah, Hank, Hank,” he says, wagging his head back and forth on a neck about the size of his skinny wrist, “I hate to do it but I feel it my Christian duty to tell you some of the hard facts of life.” Hate to, bull: He’d rather play the ghoul with other people’s dead than ride a speedboat. “About who was in a great notion that box. Yes, I feel someone should tell you about your grandfather, and his early years in this land . . .”)—but said nothing. They drove on in silence. (“. . . in his early years, Hank, child”—old man Stokes leaned back and let his eyes get misty—“things wasn’t just the way they are now. Your family didn’t always have a big logging business. Yes... yes; your family, one might say, suffered some terrible misfortunes . . . back then...”) That foggy morning the eldest boy, Henry, was the first to wake and discover his father missing. He took up the hammer and, working along side his two brothers Ben and Aaron, completed more work on the house that day than had been accomplished in the last week. Boasting: “We got ’er by the tail, men. Yessir. Goddam right.” “What’s that, Henry? What we got?” “The tail, you dumb bunny! We’ll show these boogers in town who been sniggerin’ in their beards. That Stokes bunch. We’ll show ’em. We’ll whup this swamp from hell to breakfast.” “What about him?” “About who? About old All-Is-Vanity? Old No-Profit-under-the-Boogin’-Sun? Shit. Ain’t he already made hisself crystal clear where he stands? Ain’t it apparent he’s run out? Give up?” “Yeah, but what about he comes back, Henry?” “He comes back, he comes back crawlin’ on his belly an’ even then—” “But Henry, what about he don’t come back?” Aaron, the youngest, asked. “How’ll we make it?” Hammering: “We’ll make it. We’ll whup it! We’ll whup it!” Slamming the hammer head into the springy white planks. (So I first heard from Boney Stokes about how old Henry’s daddy, Jonas Stamper, disgraced Henry and the rest of us. Then heard from Uncle Ben about how Boney had spent so many years trying to rub it in on Pa. But it was from Pa himself that I found out what it all come to, how the disgrace and the rubbing-in had built an iron-clad commandment. Not that Pa come out and told me. No. Maybe some fathers and sons talk with each other like that, but me and old Henry was never able to hack it. But he did something else. He wrote it down for me, and hung it up on my wall. On the very day I was born, they tell me. I didn’t catch on to the whole of it till a good spell later. Sixteen years. And then it still wasn’t the old man that told me; it was his wife, my stepmother, the girl he brought from back East ...But I’ll get to that directly . . .) They found Jonas had taken the money from the feed store and left them with little more than the building and what meager stock was on hand and the house across the river. The stock was mostly seed, nothing that would bring in cash until spring, and they made it through that first winter largely on charity from the most well-to-do family in the county, the Stokes family. Jeremy Stokes was unofficial governor, mayor, justice of the peace, and moneylender of the county, having been granted the positions by that old unwritten decree: First Come, First Served. What he had first served himself to was an enormous warehouse left empty by Hudson’s Bay. He moved in; when no one ever came around to move him out, he turned the warehouse into the town’s first general store and worked out a nice deal with the shipping line that steamed every two or three months into the bay, a sweet little deal whereby they received a little something extra for the privilege of selling to no one but him. “It’s on account of I’m a member,” he explained, but never made it clear of exactly what. He talked vaguely of some obscure union in the East between the steamboat men and the merchants, “And I propose, friends and fellow pioneers, to make all of us around here members: I’m a generous man.” Generous was hardly the word. Hadn’t he fed that tragic Mrs. Stamper and her brood after their old man left? The goods had been delivered for seven months by his oldest boy, a thin, pale drink of water—Bobby Stokes, who not only enjoyed the distinction of being one of the few white natives of the county but was as well the only member of the town ever to take a cruise all the way to Europe; “None of the doctors around here,” Aaron once remarked, “could really appreciate the quality of Boney’s cough.” Delivered daily, for seven charitable months, “And the only thing father asks,” the boy said after the term of generosity was up, “is that you become a member of the a great notion Wakonda Co-op.” He handed a sharpened pencil and a paper to the mother. She took glasses from a black coin purse and studied the document for a long time. “But ...doesn’t this mean our feed store?” “Just a formality.” “Sign it, Mama.” “But ...” “Sign it.” It was Henry, the eldest. He stepped forward and took the paper from his mother and put it on a plank. He put the pencil in her hand. “Just sign it.” The thin boy smiled, watching the paper warily. “Thank you, Henry. You’re very wise. Now, as shareholding members this entitles you folks to certain deductions and privileges—” Henry laughed, an odd, tight laugh he had recently developed, able to cut off conversation like a knife. “Oh, I reckon we’ll whup ’er without certain privileges.” He picked up the signed paper and held it just out of the other boy’s reach.