Chapter 8

“Probably without being members of anything, too.” “Henry . . . old man—” The other boy blinked solemnly, following the paper’s teasing movements, then began reciting in unconscious parody of his father, “We are founders of a new frontier, workers in a new world; we must all strive together. A unified effort will—” Henry laughed and pushed the paper into the boy’s hand; then stooped to select some choice rocks from the river bank. He skipped one out across the wide gray-green water, flashing. “Oh, I reckon we’ll whup ’er.” His failure to be duly impressed by the offer made the other boy uneasy and a little irritated. “Henry,” he said again softly and touched Henry’s arm with two fingers thin as icicles, “I was born in this land. I spent my youth here amongst the wilderness and savages. I know the way a pioneer needs his fellow man. To survive. Now; I truly like you, old fellow; I wouldn’t want to see you forced to leave by the untamed elements. Like ...some others.” Henry threw his handful of pebbles all together into the river. “Nobody’s leaving, Bobby Stokes, Boney Stokes—nobody else is leaving.” Laughing that old man’s ferocious laugh at the other’s somber and fatalistic expression. As the pebbles slowly melt beneath the current. And years later, after he had used this same ferocity to build a small fortune and a logging operation the size of which was limited only by the number of relatives that migrated to the area to work for him, Henry rowed across one morning to find Boney waiting at the garage in the delivery truck. “Morning, Henry. How’s Henry Stamper, Junior?” “Noisy,” Henry answered, squinting a little as he looked sideways at his old friend standing like a post near the door of the truck. Boney was holding a ragged brown package against his thigh. “Yep. Noisy and hungry.” He waited, squinting. “Oh.” Boney suddenly remembered the package. “This came for you this morning. I guess they must of got word about the birth back in Kansas.” “I guess they must of done that.” Boney looked forlornly at the package. “It appears to be from Kansas City. A relative, perhaps?” Henry grinned into his hand, a gesture so like the one used by Boney to cover his barking cough that people of the town sometimes wondered if Henry had copied the move to further plague his morose companion. “Well—” He laughed at Boney’s fidgeting. “What the hell, let’s see what he sent.” Boney already had his pocketknife open to cut the string. The package contained a wall plaque, one of those sentimental souvenirs picked up at county fairs: a frame of wooden cherubs around a copper bas-relief of Jesus carrying a lamb through a field of daisies, and raised copper letters declaring, “Blessed Are the Meek, for They Shall Inherit the Earth. Matt. 6”—and a note saying, “This here is for my Grandchild; may he grow up to have more Christian Love and Sympathy and Charity than the rest of my family who have never understood nor communicated with me. J. A. Stamper.” Boney was shocked. “You mean to tell me you’ve never even written to that poor old fellow? Never?” Boney was more than shocked, he was horrified. “You’ve done him a terrible wrong!” a great notion “You reckon? Well, I’ll see ifn I can’t make it up some way. Come take a little ride to the house with me.” And in the mother’s room Boney’s horror turned to petrified disbelief as he stood watching Henry paint the plaque with dull yellow machine paint. Henry dried the paint with the heat of the burning note, and with one of the heavy red pencils used for marking the footage on the end of logs, finally put into words, into writing, what to Henry was nothing more than a good rule for his son to grow up under, but what essentially was the core of that family sin Jonas had seen in the eyes of his son in the Kansas sunlight: sitting on the edge of the bed that contained the fortyfive-year-old woman he had married upon his mother’s death, with Boney looking on incredulous as a totem pole, and the newborn child crying his lungs out, Henry had laboriously lettered his own personal gospel over the raised copper words of Jesus; bent tensely over the plaque, grinning his fierce, irreverent grin at his wife’s protests and Boney’s stare, and at the thought of what pious old Jonas would say if he could just see his gift now. “That ought to do ’er.” He stood up, right pleased with his work, and walked across the room and nailed the plaque into the wall over the enormous crib he and the boys at the mill built for Henry Junior. (Where the goddamned ugly outfit hangs, all the time I’m growing up. NEVER GIVE A INCH! In Pa’s broad, awkward hand. The dirtiest, crummiest, cruddiest yellow under the sun and that awkward school-kid lettering in red. NEVER GIVE A INCH! Just like one of them mottos you might see in a Marine sergeant’s orderly office, or like something Coach Lewellyn might of drawn up to hang alongside his other hardnose signs all over the locker room. NEVER GIVE A INCH! Just like the corny, gung-ho, guts-ball posters that I seen a good thousand of, just exactly like, except for that raised picture of Jesus and his lamb under the gobby machine paint and them curlicue words you could read with your fingers at night when the lights went out, “Blessed are the meek” and so forth and so on. . . . It hung there and I never had no more idea than a duck what all was behind it till I was sixteen and she told me what she knew about it and I connected what Boney told me with what the old man told me, then hooked all this up with the women. Funny, how things sometimes take so long to click together, and how something like that sign can hang unnoticed right next to your head for so many years; yet you have to be beat across the knob with it before it starts to dawn just how much it was noticed, whether you knew it or not...) When the boy Hank was ten, his mother, always grim and gray and distant—an almost identical remake of the nondescript grandmother he never knew—took to her bed in one of the dark rooms of the old house and devoted two months to some fervent ailing, then got up one morning, did a washing, and died. She looked so natural and unchanged in her coffin that the boy found himself striving to re-create conversations he had had with her—sentences she might have used, expressions— in an attempt to convince himself that she had once been more than that carved, peaceful form nestled there in ruffles of satin. Henry didn’t expend half as much thought. The dead’s dead, was the way he looked at it; get ’em in the ground and look to the live ones. So, as soon as he had paid Lilienthal, the mortician, he picked a carnation from one of the wreaths, stabbed it into the lapel of his funeral suit, and caught a train to New York and was gone for three months. Three precious months, right out of the middle of cutting season. Henry’s youngest brother, Aaron, and his family, stayed at the house to take care of the boy. Aaron’s wife began to fret for her brother-in-law after the first weeks of his mysterious absence lengthened into months. “Two months now. That poor man, grieving so. He’s more heartbroke than any of us would have ever believed.” “Heartbroke the dickens,” Aaron said. “He’s back East somewhere looking for some girl to take the old lady’s place.” “Now how in the world do you know that? Who does Henry know back East?” “Nobody that I ever heard tell of. But that’s how Henry thinks: women come from back East, that’s how it is. You need a woman, go back East and get you one.” “Why, that is outlandish! That poor man is fifty-some years old. What reasonable woman would—” a great notion “Reasonable woman the dickens. Henry’s back yonder looking for some woman he considers fit to be little Hank’s mother. And when he finds her, her being reasonable won’t have beans to do with whether she comes or not.” Aaron lit his pipe and smiled pleasantly, accustomed after many years to sit back and enjoy watching the world follow along whenever Henry took it by the nose. “An’ would you care to make a little bet about whether that poor old man comes back with her or not?” Henry was fifty-one at the time, and to those who saw him pacing the New York streets, with a boyish grin beneath a black derby and wrinkles at the side of his face looking like fresh cracks in old wood, he looked possibly twice his age, as easily half. To the casual observer he was more archetype than human: the country rube come to the city, the illiterate hick with a young man’s wiry and vigorous stride and an old man’s face, with too much stringy wrist showing from the cuff of a coat that looked right out of an undertaker’s parlor, and too much neck stuck out of the collar. With his uncut mane going white as that of an old wolf and his green eyes excited and glittering, he looked like a comic-strip character of a prospector struck it rich. He looked like he might curse in the best dining room and spit on the finest rug. He looked like anything but a man capable of acquiring a young bride. That summer Henry became quite the current topic, he and his derby and his funeral-parlor suit, and toward the end of his stay was being invited to the best occasions to be laughed at. This laughter reached its peak when he announced one evening at a party that he’d picked the woman he aimed to marry! The partyers were overjoyed. Why, this was absolutely precious, better than a drawing-room farce. Not that it was his choice that the fellows were laughing at—secretly they were impressed that this skinny fool had had the perception to pick the most comely, the most witty and charming of all the eligibles, a young co-ed home for the summer from her studies at Stanford—it was the gall, the audacious, swaggering gall of this leering old lumberjack to even consider such a girl: that was what the fellows laughed at. Old, leering Henry, always good for a chuckle or two, whacked his thin flank and snapped his broad canvas galluses and paraded around like a burlesque clown, laughing right along with them. But noticed that the fellows’ laughter got pretty watered down when he walked across the room and led the co-ed blushing and giggling from the parlor. Imagined the laughter got even weaker when, after weeks of persistent courting, he headed back West, taking the girl along as his fiancée. (Even after Boney’d told me about the plaque I never really paid it any more mind than a fly on the wall—till that year I was sixteen; when Myra comes into my bedroom for the first time. In fact, I’d just turned sixteen. It was my birthday. I’d got presents—baseball gear—from everybody at the house but her. I hadn’t expected a gift; she’d never given me much more than the time of day. I didn’t think she’d even noticed how old I was. But it was like she’d been waiting till I was old enough to appreciate my present. She just came in and stood there. . . .) Possibly the only one more astonished than the fellows was the girl herself. She was twenty-one and had one year to go for a degree at Stanford. She was dark-haired and slight, with delicate bones (like some kind of funny bird, stood there, like some kind of weird, rare bird always looking at the sky . . .). She had three horses of her own stabled at Menlo Park, two lovers—one a full professor—and a parrot that had cost her father two hundred dollars in Mexico City; all these things she left behind. (Just stood there.) She had perhaps a dozen Bay Area organizations she was active in, and as many in New York, where she had been active during the summer. Her family life had been moving along smooth as that of any of her friends. Wherever she was, East Coast or Stanford, when she composed a guest list for a party, it always ran into three figures. But all this had been thrown aside. And for what? For some gangly old logger in some muddy logging town clear up north of nowhere. What had she been thinking when she’d let herself be pressured into such a ridiculous change? (She had a funny way of looking, too, that was like a bird looked: you know, with the head turned, never dead at something, but kind of past it, past it like she could see a great notion something nobody else could see; and whatever it was she saw sometimes scared her like a ghost. “I’m lonely,” she says.) She spent her first year in Wakonda wondering whatever on God’s green earth had possessed her. (“I’ve always been lonely. It’s always been in me, like a hollow . . .”) By the end of her second year she had given up wondering and had definitely made up her mind to leave. She was already making secret plans for departure when she discovered that somehow, in some dark dream, something had slipped up and got to her and she would have to postpone her trip a few months . . . just a few more months ...then she would be gone, gone, gone, and would at least have some little something to show for her sojourn in the north woods. (“I thought Henry would be able to fill that hollow. Then I thought the child would . . .”) So Hank got himself a little brother and Henry got a second son. The old man, busy with expanding his logging operations, took no special notice of the blessed event other than christening the boy Leland Stanford Stamper in what he considered a favor to his young wife; he stomped into her room in Wakonda, calk boots and all, trailing sawdust, mud, and the stink of machine oil, and announced, “Little honey, I intend to let you call that boy there after that school you’re forever mooning about quittin’. How does that strike you?” With impact enough, apparently, to stun any objection she might have had to the name, because her only reaction was a feeble nod. Henry nodded back and stomped proudly from the room. That was his only gesture of acknowledgment. The twelveyear-old Hank, busy riffling through the magazines in the waiting room, seemed determined to dismiss the birth completely. “You want to run in to take a quick look at your little brother?”