Chapter 41

And then it wasn’t just a way to pass the time: I was wanting to tell him something about what was happening, to wake him up and tell him to take advantage, dammit! Even if it meant popping him in the nose like the guy in Rocky Ford. So I repeated, “Forty thousand feet!” He nodded at me again.) Lee begins to wonder if Hank is going to bring up the subject of choker-setting at all. (I’m a long ways from convinced by that nod, but I go on anyway: “Forty thousand feet!” and hoped; this time he nods like he gets the picture and I go on . . .) “Anyhow...you get to where it’s eighteen inches around and man, here comes the ride. Feel this breeze? Not so much down here, is it? But up there you’re weaving around like a drunk man. You lash yourself on with a couple loops of slack and go to work with the short saw. Zsh zsh zsh... till you feel it start to crack...start to pull ... eck, eckkk....Okay, now, see if you can get this: as that thirty-so feet of top above you cracks and leans, it bends the tree with it . . . till you’re leaned out, oh god, I don’t know, maybe fifteen degrees off vertical is all it is but it feels like you’re bent clean parallel with the ground! And when that top finally busts loose, whosh, back you come! And that tree waves you around up there like a football pennant.” (I still knew he wasn’t getting any notion of it—the feeling, the charge a man gets rigging a tree . . .) Lee tries to step into the pause, starting to say something about his own particular morning in the woods. “I could have used a little of that wind down here. ...Look.” He pulls his soaked shirt from his chest with a thumb and finger. “You wouldn’t have thought a Yale man had this much juice in him, would you? God. Whoever that fellow on the other choke chain was, he gave me quite a workout.” And glances hopefully up at his brother . . . (So I ask myself: how can I show him? how can I give him some notion? how can I snap him outa that fog without getting in some hassle with him?) When Hank makes no comment Lee lifts a pant leg to show a lump on his shin like a blue egg. He touches it with his fingers, grimacing broadly. “There was a moment, just after I acquired this little gem, when I’ll have to admit I was just the teeniest bit tempted to chuck the whole business, chain and all, and let him have it. ‘You’ve managed to break your leg,’ I said to myself. ‘Do you want to try for a compound fracture just to keep ahead of that other fellow?’ Owee—” He blows on the wound. “Wowee, I’ll bet that’s a pretty color tonight. . . . See?” “What?” “Here...” His attention drawn, Hank acknowledges the bruise with a preoccupied grin, but says nothing; the jay calls distractedly as Lee inspects the bruise on his shin . . . When the day was half over I was sincerely a little proud of my stamina, and actually expecting Brother Hank to give some small praise. Then suddenly Hank looks up from Lee’s leg, snapping his fingers. (And then it came to me...) “Hey! I’ll show you want I mean, bub; look here.” (I hold out both my hands for him to see. As usual after topping I was all bunged to hell, raw and bleeding, and the gimp hand was swole across the knuckles like a piece of raw corned beef.) “See? that’s what I mean: I was for chrissakes halfthe-damn-way up that sonofabitch before I remember, sonofagun! no gloves! Halfway up. See what I’m drivin’ at, now?” Lee lets the pant leg drop and stares at the extended hands. The nausea that he felt after the noon whistle clamps again on his full stomach, but he fights it back. But quite the opposite of praise, I received a rundown of all the extra jobs Hank had completed while waiting for me to catch up . . . “You see what I’m driving at, bub?” Hank repeats his question and Lee forces himself to meet his brother’s eyes. “Yes, I believe I see what you’re driving at,” he answers, trying to keep the burning in his nose and throat from coming through in his voice. (And when I ask him that he looks up at me really for the first  time since he’s come home and says, “Yes, I see.” And for the first time since he’s come home I think by god we’re getting someplace. I think, He ain’t completely lost to us, after all. College or no, we can still find ways of making contact. I think, Yessir! we still got a lot going. Joby and Jan was full of beans. Me and the kid’s gonna hit it off just fine.) And the folly of my first half-day swept over me: He’ll always be running ahead for me to catch up. He keeps changing the rules for the run, or the run itself. He’s either running twelve years ahead of me, or the other direction, or claiming to be in a different race from what I am altogether. He challenges me to setting chokers, then after I’ve half killed myself informs me that he’s been climbing trees. ...He will never give me the chance! The whistle on the donkey shrills a quick shave-and-a-haircut, and Hank takes his watch from his pocket. “Hell. It’s goin’ on two. We farted away an hour.” He cups his hands to his mouth and shouts joyously toward the spar, “What say, Jooobee . . . ?” Joe Ben answered with shave-and-a-haircut on his whistle. Hank laughs. “That Joe . . .” He screws the lid back onto the Thermos. He scratches at his chin to hide a smile... (That’s what I thought. But then something happened. I asked the boy, “Well-sir, bub...what do you think after a few hours on the end of a choker chain?”) Lee has averted his face and is folding the rest of his candy carefully up in its foil. “I think,” he says thickly, “it probably ranks with the cleaning of King Augeas’ stables. I think dragging that ridiculous cable through berry bushes and thorn thickets is probably one of the most miserable, most tiring, most demanding and and and least rewarding jobs offered on this fucking earth if you want to know what I think of choker-setting!” (And what he answered was, “You can take choker-setting and the whole business and shove it up your ass!”) They stood, with Lee’s words still shaking the air between them; Hank squinting and taken aback momentarily; Lee trembling with outrage and trying to clean his glasses on his sweat shirt. And the jay, inspired by Lee’s invective, it seems, screeches louder than ever from a scrub cedar not far away. (So there you go. Just when I thought we were in good shape. I just couldn’t figure it. Well, Hank old sport, I say to myself, this’ll give you something to puzzle over the second half of the day. And I headed on back to my rigging, leaving diplomacy to somebody else.) When the jay stops Lee raises his glasses and looks through them at his brother. “And that,” he says with a shrug, “is what I think of your wonderful logging.” Hank smiles slightly, studying the tall boy before him. “Okay, bub, okeedoke. So now I’ll tell you something. . . .” He takes his cigarettes from his pocket and places one between his lips. “Did you know that every woods-worker who ever barked a shin or broke a finger agrees with you?—when it comes right down to the nuts of it—agrees with you to a T? That it’s one dirty, tough, miserable way to live. That it’s about as dangerous a way to make your bacon as you can find. That sometimes you’d be better off chuckin’ the whole scene and just flopping down on the ground.” “Then what possible reason—” “Lee, I just gave you my reason. With that riggin’ story. Or as close as I can come to it. And my reason is pretty nearly Joe Ben’s reason or Andy’s or even that bastard Les Gibbons’. What I was just studyin’ about, though, bub . . .” he pushes the last of the scraps down into the sack and tosses the sack away down the hill “. . . was just what Leland Stamper’s reason might be?”—hitches his pants and starts away up the slope, leaving the question dangling in front of Lee. “Let’s go, you coons!” he calls across the distance toward the men around the crummy, clapping his hands together. “If we don’t get him this round, we’ll get him the next!” And Joe’s radio answers with: Mister engineer take that throttle in hand ’Cause this rattler’s the fastest in all the land, So keep movin’ on . . . The boy again watches him disappear over the southern ridge into the veil of green needles. The jay calls incessantly from the cedar, in a voice as coarse and dry as the afternoon heat. Lee cleans his glasses again: have to get my regular ones fixed. He doesn’t move from his stump until he hears the other boy toot the take-it-away signal; then he sighs, stands, and walks stiffly to his cable, without even a look in the direction of the other choker-setter. Screw him up there, whoever he is, blowing that damned whistle; he can bust his blood vessels if he is so inclined. I’m just going to make it through the day. That’s all. Just make it through the day. Even so, even though I coasted from noon on, that first day still came about as close to undoing me completely, both physically and mentally, as any day had in almost a week. I didn’t comprehend how devastating it had actually been until it was nearly over, until we had returned to the carrier and reversed our up-river process and arrived back at the house—under a sky as dark as the one that had bade us farewell that morning—and I had struggled up the stairs to my room. And bed. A sight even more welcome than it had been the day before. If the days progress in this fashion, I advised myself, I would do well to attend to whatever I have in mind before the end of the week, because I’ll never last another. Lee lies on his bed, panting. Outside the silver chatter of stars anticipates the moon’s arrival. Hank finishes securing the boat for the night and walks into the house. There is no one to be seen but the old man, seated before the television with his cast extended before him on a hassock. “You here by yourself?” Hanks asks. Henry doesn’t turn his gaze from the flickering Western before him.