Chapter 10

 Only the boy’s head comes around with a jerk, swinging the pale brown cowlick. Only the boy seems to hear Hank speak. He leans toward his big brother, glasses flashing the spring sun. “Just a minute...” “What?” the boy whispers. “. . . I guess I’ll ride along, if it’s no skin offn nobody.” “You?” the boy says. “You guess you’ll—” “Yeah, bub, I just guess I’ll ride on along to town with you instead of comin’ in later. My bike ain’t runnin’ to form anyhow—that sound all right, Henry?” The hounds, suddenly aware of the activity on the dock, come pouring from beneath the house and charge barking down the plank walk. “Fine with me,” the old man says and steps into the boat. The woman follows, her face lowered. Hank pushes the hounds away and steps in, almost overloading the boat. The boy still stands, with a look of disbelief, surrounded by dogs. “Well, sonny?” Henry looks up, squinting against the sun behind the boy. “You comin’ along or not? Dang that glare. Where the hell’s that hat?” The boy gets in and sits on a trunk near his mother. “Yonder I see it, under that box. D’ya mind, Myra?” The woman proffers the hat. Joe Ben brings out the folded gray square of canvas, and Hank takes it from him. “What you say, Henry?” Hank asks, reaching for the oars. “You want me to take it across?” The old man shakes his head and takes up the oars himself. Joe Ben unties the rope and, bracing himself against a piling, shoves the boat away from him into the current. “See you people later. G’by, Myra. G’by, Lee, hang tough.” Henry cranes his head around for a sight on the landing at the garage across and commences to pull with a steady, measured strength, green eyes shaded beneath the brim of the tin hat. The blossom-covered surface of the river is smooth, stretched taut from bank to bank like a polka-dotted fabric. The prow of the boat rips a passage through with a sizzling hiss. The woman keeps her eyes closed, withdrawn into some vague half-sleep, as though fighting the pain of a headache. Henry rows steadily. Hank looks off down river where fishducks are slapping the water with beaded wings. Little Lee squirms nervously atop his perch on the trunk at the back of the boat. “Well now,”—old Henry spaces his words between oar strokes. “Well now, Leland”—in a detached, remote, inviolable voice—“I’m sorry you think you need”—cords snapping in his neck as he leans backward with the pull—“need a back East schooling ...but that’s the long and short of it, I reckon . . . this ain’t no easy row to hoe out here ...specially if you ain’t allus feeling up to snuff ...and some just ain’t equal to it. . . . But it’s okeedoke ...I want you to do proud back there...” A litany spoken over me, Lee thinks later, listened to only for the rhythm, a chant in a primitive dialect, an incantation perpetrating a spell; anesthetized time; nothing moves and everything is at once. He thinks one time, years later. “. . . yes, do yourself and all of us proud . . .” (Now it’s done, Hank thought. Then. Taking them across to the train. Now it’s finished, and I won’t ever see no more of her again.) “. . . an’, well, when you get stronger . . .” (I was right about not seeing her no more . . .) A litany, chanted over me ...(I was right about that much—) They row through the glittering water. And reflections swirling gently among the flower petals. Jonas rows alongside, muffled from the neck down in green fog: You have to know. Lee meets himself coming back across twelve years after with twelve years of decay penciled on his pale face, and translucent hands cupping a vial of poison for Brother Hank. . . . or, more aptly, like a spell....(But I was wrong about it being finished. Dead wrong.) You have to know there is no profit and all our labor avoideth naught. Jonas pulls, straining at the fog. Joe Ben goes into a state park with a brush knife and an angel’s face, seeking freedom. Hank crawls through a tunnel of blackberry vines, seeking thorny imprisonment. The arm twists and slowly untwists. The logger sitting in the mud calls curses across the water. “I’m hollowed out with loneliness,” the woman cries. The water moves. The boat moves with measured heaves. Rain begins to fall suddenly; the wink of a million white eyes on the water. Hank looks up, intending to offer the woman his hat to protect her, but she has drawn a quilt over her dark hair against the rain. The red and yellow and blue patchwork shape heaves softly up and down, tossed by waves the boat does not feel. Hank shrugs and closes his mouth. He spreads out the tarp and turns to look down river again, but his eyes connect with the boy’s, locking there finally. For long seconds the two stare at each other. Hank is the first to break the painful current of the stare. Dropping his eyes, he grins warmly and attempts to pass off the tension by reaching out to playfully squeeze the boy’s knee-bone. “What ya say, bub? You going to like New York for a home? All them . . . museums and galleries and that sort of thing? All them cute little college mice after you, you being such a big stud logger from the north woods?” “Mmm, wait, I—” Henry laughs. “That’s right, Leland”—pulling steadily— “that’s how I got your mama ...them Eastern girls just go all to pieces ...at the sight of one of us big good-lookin’ lumberjacks . . . just you ask her if that ain’t so.” “Mm. Oh, I—” (Just you ask her. Just you ask her...) The boy’s head goes back, mouth opening. “What’s the trouble, son?” “Oh...I...Mmm—” (The taunt was wordlessly repeated to every ear but the old man’s: “Just you ask her”—an echoing litany that became a spell.) “I ask ya, what’s the trouble?” Henry stops rowing. “You feeling sick again? The sinus trouble?” The boy’s hand clutches his lips, to try to control his voice, mangling the words with his fingers. He shakes his head, making a humming sound through his fingers. “No? Maybe—maybe, then, it’s the boat rockin’. You get hold of something to make you sick this morning?” He doesn’t see the tears until the boy’s face comes forward again. The boy appears not to have heard the old man. Henry shakes his head. “Must of been somethin’ godawful rich to make you so sick.” The boy isn’t looking at Henry. He is glaring at his brother. He thinks the words have come from Hank. “You . . . just . . . wait,” he says, squeezing out the threat. “Mmm. Mm boy, Hank, someday you’ll get it for what you—” “Me? Me?” Hank erupts, twisting in his seat. “You’re lucky I don’t bust your scrawny little neck! Because let me tell you, bub—” “You just wait till—” “—if you wasn’t a kid and I found out what you’d been—” “—till I’m a big guy!” “—found about what a lowdown, crummy—in fact, I might even of gone back like she—” “—just wait till I’m big enough to—” “—but you’d just pull the same crummy—” “What!” Old Henry silences the outburst. “In God’s creation! Are you two talking about!” The brothers look at the bottom of the boat. The hump of colored quilt is very still. Finally Hank laughs. “Ah, some little business me an’ the kid had. No big deal, right, bub?” Silence forces the boy to nod weakly. Old Henry takes up the oars again, apparently satisfied, and rows on; Hank mumbles that them prone to gettin’ seasick ought to know better’n eat rich foods before getting into a boat. The boy controls his tears. He clamps his jaw and turns pompously to look off into the water, after whispering, “You, . . .” one more time, indicating with crossed arms that he has said all he intends to say on the subject. “Yeah...just ...you... wait.” And remains so silent all the rest of the boat ride and car trip on in to the Wakonda station—even while Hank is offering comical good-bys and good wishes to him and his mother at the train—remains so silent, so dramatically grim and brooding and vengeful, that it would seem he, not his older brother, were the one waiting. And whether Lee consciously thought about it or not, he waited twelve years—before a postcard arrived from Joe Ben Stamper in Wakonda, Oregon, saying that old Henry was out of commission with a bad arm and leg and plenty old anyhow and the logging operation was in a kind of tight and they needed another man up in the woods to help them meet a contract deadline—another Stamper, natch, to keep them clear of the union—so since you’re the only footloose relative left not already working for us, what you say, Lee? If you think you’re equal to it, we could sure use another jack . . . And penciled at the bottom, in a thicker, stronger hand: You should be a big enough guy now, bub. I often feel it would be nice to have a pitchman handy to push the product. A winking, grinning, vegetable-slicing salesman, a scrawny State Fair con artist with a throat mike hung over his beckoning Adam’s apple, to lean from his booth, white cuffs rolled from hypnotic long-fingered hands, to con the attention and ballyhoo the passing eyes: “Lookee lookee look! At this little Wonder of the Everyday World, fellas and gals. A viz-yoo-al rarity, I’m certain you’ll agree. Tilt it, tip it, peer through it from any position . . . and your gaze you’ll notice comes out someplace else. Seenow: the spheres lie concentrically one inside the other like diminishing glass balls becoming so minute! ...you cannot perceive the smallest without the aid of scientific devices. Yessir, a real rarity, buddies, a ab-so-lute-ly unique article I’m positive you’ll agree. . . .”