Chapter 9

“He ain’t my little brother.” “Well, don’t you imagine you ought to leastways say something to the new mother?” “She ain’t never said nothing to me.” (Which was about the truth. Because she hadn’t said more than hello and good-by until that day when she comes in on my birthday. It’s late spring; I’m racked up in bed with a broken tooth I got from trying to field a bad hop with my mush, and my head’s about to blow to pieces from the pain of it. She looks quick at me, then away, walks across the room and flutters there against the window like a bird. She’s wearing yellow and her hair’s long and blue-black. She’s got in her hand a story book she’s been reading to the kid. He’s three or four at the time. I hear him fussing next door. She stands there at the window, fluttering around like, waiting for me to say something about her being lonely, I guess. But I don’t say anything. Then her eyes light on that plaque nailed up there beside the bed. . . .) In the years that followed Henry paid little attention to this second son. Where he had insisted on raising his firstborn to be as strong and self-sufficient as himself, he was content to let this second child—a large-eyed kid with his mother’s pale skin and a look like his veins ran skim milk—spend his youth alone in a room next to his mother’s, doing what-the-hell-ever it was that that sort of kid does alone in his room all day. (She looks at the plaque for a long time, twisting that book in her hands, then looks down at me. I see she’s commencing to cry....) The two boys were twelve years apart and Henry saw no reason to try to bring them together. What was the sense? When the boy Lee was five and had his drippy nose in a book of nursery rhymes, Hank was seventeen and he and Ben’s boy, Joe, were busy running that second-hand Henderson motorcycle into every ditch between the Snag in Wakonda and the Melody Ranch Dance Hall over in Eugene. “Brothers? I mean, what’s the sense? Why push it? Hank’s got Joe Ben ifn he needs a brother; they always been like ham an’ eggs and Joe’s at the house most of the time anyhow, what with his daddy always hellin’ around the country. An’ little Leland Stanford, he’s got his mama. . . .” “But who,” the loafers matching pennies in the Snag wondered, “has little Leland Stanford’s mama got?” The sweet little spooky thing, living the best years of her life over there in that bear den across the river with an old fart twice her age, living there after she’s sworn, time and again to everybody who’d stop and listen, that she was leaving for the East just as soon as little a great notion Leland was school age, and that was how long ago? “. . . so who does she have?” Boney Stokes shook his head slowly at Henry, the woes of all mankind marking his face. “I just am thinkin’ of the girl, Henry; because able as you still are, you can’t be the stud you once was—ain’t you concerned for her, day in and day out alone over yonder?” Henry leered, winked, grinned into his hand. “Why shoot, Boney. Who’s to say whether I’m the stud of old or not?” Modest as a turkey gobbler. “Besides, some men are so wonderfully blest by nature that they don’t need to prove theirselfs night after night; they’re so fine-lookin’ and so special, they can keep a woman pantin’ with the pure mem’ry an’ the wild hope that what has happened once is liable to happen again!” And no other explanation for his young wife’s fidelity ever penetrated the old man’s cock-certainty. In spite of all the hints and innuendos he remained doggedly certain of her devotion to pure memory and wild hope for the fourteen years she lived in his wooden world. And even after. His veneer of vanity was not even scratched when she announced that she was leaving Oregon for a while to take Leland to one of the Eastern schools. “It’s for the kid she’s doin’ it,” Henry told them. “For the little feller. He gets these sick spells the doctors here’bouts can’t put their finger on the reason; maybe asthma. Doc reckons he’d feel better someplace drier so we’ll give it a go. But her, no, don’t fool yourself, it’s tearin’ the poor soul to pieces to leave her old man: cryin’, carryin’ on for days now. . . .” He dipped a dark brown thumb and finger into his snuff can and regarded the pinch with narrow eyes. “Carryin’ on so about leavin’ it makes my heart sore.” He situated the wad between his lower lip and gums, then glanced quickly up with a grin. “Yessir boys, some of us got it, and some don’t.” (Still crying, reaches down and touches my puffed lip with a finger, then all of a sudden her head jerks back up to that plaque. Like something finally dawned on her. It was weird. She stopped crying just like that and shivered like a north wind hit her. She puts down the book, slow, reaches out and gets hold of the plaque; I know she can’t pull it off on account of it’s got two sixpenny nails in it. She quits trying. Then she gives a little high, quick laugh, tilting her head at the plaque like a bird: “If you were to come into my room—I’ll put Leland in his playroom—do you think you would still be under its influence?” I look away from her and mumble something about not getting her drift. She gives me this kind of trapped, desperate grin and takes me by the little finger, like I was so light she could pick me right up by it. “I mean, if you came next door into the sanctuary of my world, where you can’t look at it or it can’t look at you—do you suppose you could?” I still give her this dumb look and ask suppose I could what? She just tilts her head toward the plaque and keeps smiling at me, then says, “Haven’t you ever wondered about this monstrosity you’ve had hanging over your bed for sixteen years?” All the while pulling my finger. “Haven’t you ever wondered about the loneliness it can cause?” I shake my head. “Well, you just come on into the next room with me and I’ll explain it to you.” And I remember thinking, why, by God, look here: she can lift me up by one finger after all. . . .) “You don’t reckon,” Boney called haltingly as Henry walked toward the saloon door, “Henry, ah, you don’t reckon, do you . . .” reluctantly, with an apologetic tone as though hating it that he’d been driven to asking—for his old friend’s good, of course—to asking this painful question “. . . that her leavin’... could have anything to do with Hank joinin’ the U.S. Armed Services when he did? I mean, her decidin’ to leave when he decided to join?” Henry paused, scratching at his nose. “Might be, Boney. Never can tell . . .” He pulled on his jacket, then jerked the zipper to his chin and flipped the collar. “Except she announced she was leavin’ days before Hank had any notion a-tall about joinin’.” His eyes flicked to Boney and the scurrilous grin snapped triumphant, like a rope jerked taut. “See you niggers around.” (And next door I remember thinking, She’s right about that plaque, too. It is nice to be out of sight of the godawful outfit. But I found that just being next door didn’t make any difference about getting away from it. In fact, over in the next room, after she told me what she felt it was doing to me, was when I really began to see that plaque. With a pine wall in the way, I saw it— the yellow paint, the red lettering, and all the stuff underneath the red and yellow—clearer than ever before in my life. But by the time I noticed it, I guess it was too late not to. Just like by the time I noticed what that little trip next door had started— and if I was forced to mark a place where this whole business commenced, that’s where I’d have to put it—it was way too late to stop it.) It is a later spring, years now since chasing tricky grounders. The air is chilled and tasting of wild mint. The river runs dappled from the mountains, catching the fragrant blizzard blown from the blossoming blackberry vines that line its banks. The sun throbs off and on. Unruly mobs of young clouds gather in the bright blue sky, riotous and surging, full of threat that convinces no one. On the dock in front of the old house Henry helps Hank and Joe Ben load clothes, bundles, birdcages, hat-boxes . . . “Crap enough to have a purty fair auction, wouldn’t you say, Hank?”—cantankerous and jovial, becoming boyish with age as he had been once prematurely aged and grim. “Sure, Henry.” “Son of a gun, look at the boogerin’ stuff!” The big, cumbersome, low-slung hauling boat rocks and heaves as it is loaded. The woman stands watching, thin bird hand resting on the shoulder of her twelve-year-old son, who leans against her hip, polishing his eyeglasses with the hem of her canary-yellow skirt. The three men work, carrying boxes from the house. The boat heaves, sinking deeper. The colors strike with stinging clarity, cutting the scene deep: blue sky, white clouds, blue water, white petals floating, and that sparkling patch of yellow... “Crap an’ corruption enough to stay a lifetime, let ’lone a few months.” He turns to the woman. “What you takin’ so much of your own stuff for, as well as the boy’s? Travel fast and travel light, I allus say.” “It may take longer than I anticipated, getting him settled.” Then adds quickly, “But I’ll be back as soon as possible. I’ll be back just as soon as possible.” “Oho.” The old man winks at Joe Ben and Hank as they carry a trunk along the dock. “See there, boys? See there. Can’t go too long on san’wiches an’ salad when she’s used to steak an’ potatoes.” Blue and white and yellow, and from that pole jutting out of the second-story window hangs the flag that signals the grocery truck what supplies to leave; a sewn black number on a tailgate banner, red. Blue and white and yellow and red. The old man stalks back and forth alongside the boat, studying the packing job. “I guess it’ll ride. Okay. Now then. Hank, whilst I’m driving them to the station you an’ Joe Ben see to gettin’ those parts we need for the donkey engine. You might have to take your cycle up to Newport and look around there, try Nyro Machine, they generally stock all the Skagit gear. I’ll be back from the depot by dark; leave me a boat other side. Where’s my hat at?” Hank doesn’t answer. He bends instead to check the river’s level on the marker nailed to one of the pilings. The sun splashes silver on his pale metal hat. He straightens and pokes his fists in the pockets of his Levis and looks down river. “Just a minute . . .” The woman doesn’t move; she is a yellow patch sewn against the blue river; old Henry is absorbed whittling a sliver to stick in a leak he has discovered in the sideboards of the boat; the gnomish Joe Ben has gone into the boathouse for a tarp to cover the boat’s cargo in case those jostling clouds decide to take action. “Just a minute...”