Chapter 45

He tickled the wood with a glistening blade. “Was a pretty nice funeral, I bet?” “Very nice, very nice,” I allowed, watching the knife. “Considering.” “Good.” Thhht thhht. “I’m glad.” Curlicues of barbered pine fell like trimmed tresses at his feet. Viv wriggled herself deeper into the cushions, and I drank again from the gallon of the old man’s blackberry wine. The liquid had been aprickle with thorns at the top of the bottle, lumpy with seeds at the shoulder, now, halfway down, it had smoothed out soft as cotton. We waited for each other, wondering what on earth had prompted us to risk our cool by straying so far into long-forbidden territory, wondering if we dared throw caution to the winds and go even farther. Finally Hank turned the stick over. “Yeah, well, like I said, I was really sorry to hear about her.” I still felt a little of that first anger. “Yeah,” I said. Meaning: You should have been, you cad, after the way you— “Huh?” The knife ceased its whispering, half a curl of pine lifting unfinished from the stick. I held my breath; had he heard the thought behind the words? WATCH OUT, Old Reliable warned, HE’S GOT A SHIV! But the knife moved again on the wood; the curl looped complete and fell with the others; my breath drifted out of my nostrils in a swirl of relief and disappointment. Blank expectations (what had I imagined he would do?) remained blank. The earth turned again (what had I imagined I would do?), continuing its falling circle. The curlicues curled. I sipped again of Henry’s homemade wine. I was sorry for my anger; I was glad he’d chosen to ignore it. “Sack time.” He folded the knife and with a woolen sweep of his stockinged foot swept the curls into a neat pile. He bent and cupped the pile and dropped it into the woodbox: tomorrow morning’s kindling. He flapped his hands free of sawdust and sentiment, calluses husking against each other like wood against wood. “I believe I’ll see if I can catch a few Z’s; I told Joe I’d give him a hand at his place in the morning. Viv? Kitten?” He shook her shoulder; she yawned, showing a rose-petal tongue over bright white pips of teeth. “Let’s head up to the sack, okay? You might as well make it too, bub.” I shrugged. Viv slipped past, dragging the sheepskin robe and smiling sleepily. At the foot of the stairs Hank stopped; his eyes lifted to mine for an instant—“Uh . . . Lee . . .” bright, green as glass, pleading for something, before they dropped to study a broken thumbnail. “I wish I could of been there.” I didn’t say anything; in that quick click-and-glitter of lifted eyes I saw a hint of more than guilt, more than contrition. “I really wisht there’d been something I could of done.” Meaning: Was there? “I don’t know, Hank.” Meaning: You did enough. “I always worried about her.” Meaning: Was I partially to blame? “Yeah.” Meaning: We were all to blame. “Yeah, well,”—looking down at the destroyed thumbnail, wanting to say more, ask more, hear more, unable to—“I guess I’ll hit the hay.” “Yeah,”—wanting everything he wanted—“me too.” “G’night, Lee,” Viv murmured from the top of the stairs. “Good night, Viv.” “Night, bub.” “Hank.” Meaning: Good night but stay. Viv, silent and slim as a shaft of sleepy light, stay, talk more to me with your articulate eyes. Hank, forget my words behind my words, stay, say some more. This is our chance. This is my chance. Say enough more for love or hate, enough more to make me sure of one or the other. Please stay, please stay . . . But they left me alone. They frightened, tantalized, excited me with contact, then left me alone. And confused. I think we approached each other that night and muffed it. He didn’t venture further, and I couldn’t. I look back on that evening through a film of mashed blackberries, trickling juices spiny and sour, as my brother and his wife fade out up the stairs, into personal realities, to dream dreams, and I think, We almost made it that time. A little courage on someone’s part and we might have made it. We were swollen and ripe for an instant together, ready for picking, offering our store to each other’s hesitant fingers ...a little tender courage at that rare right instant, and things might well have turned out differently.... But the breath of memory still plucks such instants, setting the whole web shaking. People fade up the stairs, but to dream of each other’s dreams; of days coming gone and nights past coming; of hard sun-rods crisscrossing back and forward across outspreading circles of water, meaningless-seeming. . . . From the dappled surface of the river a red-gilled, blue-greenstriped steelhead salmon explodes in a shimmering dance, gyrating wild in glistening suspension, falls back on its side with a blistering crack, and jumps again and falls, and jumps again—as though trying to escape some terror pursuing it beneath the water. And falls and this time darts to the bottom to lie behind a rock, with its stomach resting exhausted on the sand and the sea-lice still gnawing its fin and gills in spite of its efforts. Swarms of black, squawking crows harass a herd of hogs. Green beer sloughs in the throbbing stovelight. Indian Jenny’s old man rises, disgusted, and tries to clear up “The Sheriff of Cochise.” Molly watches her life pumping from her in clouds of white frost. Floyd Evenwrite curses himself for not having made a better impression on Jonathan B. Draeger, and curses Draeger for being so goddamned biggity and making him feel like he had to make a good impression, and curses himself for letting Draeger be so goddamned biggity as to make him feel like he had to make a good impression. . . . Willard Eggleston hopes. Simone prays. Willard Eggleston despairs. And a Diesel freight running empty to Wakonda for the last of Wakonda Pacific’s stockpiled lumber at the Cascade Pacific yards honks for a crossing, low and obscene, like the rutting call of a mechanical dragon . . . At a scarred tabletop near the front door of the Snag, sitting with a cluster of cronies who are obviously more interested in his free beer than in his talk, old Henry jiggles his ill-fitting dentures in his cheeks and draws a deep breath. He takes another swallow from the pitcher, holding it by the handle as though it were a giant mug; whenever he filled a glass, he has noticed, one of the audience at his table drank it, so he has resigned himself to the pitcher. He is relaxed, glowing, feeling his swelling belly push for another notch in his belt. For the first time in his life the old man finds the time to pursue his pitifully neglected social obligations. Almost every afternoon since his accident he has propped his plaster frame against the same beam near the Snag’s front door, where he drinks, rambles about old times, argues with Boney Stokes, and studies the way the big iridescent-green river-flies electrocute themselves on the charged screen door. “Hsst! Listen. I hear one—” Teddy’s electric killing device holds a great fascination for Henry; during some gusty preamble—eyes half closed, smile nostalgic with mellow reminiscence—he will suddenly freeze in midword. “Hsst! Hsst! Listen now . . .” He cocks a white-fuzzed ear toward the grid as some yet unseen victim buzzes closer. “Listen...Listen...” There is a sizzling spurt of blue. The parched carcass falls to join its predecessors on the doorstep. Henry cracks the tabletop with his cane. “Son of a gun! You see that? Got a nother one, didn’t it? Lord, lord, if they don’t make some foxy outfits these days then I’ll eat your goddam hat. Modrun scientific technologee: that’s the ticket. I said so all along; ever since I seen the first winch an’ cable rigged to snake out spruce I been saying so. Ah, I tell you we come a long ways. I can recall—an’ I swear this is the truth— but you know it’s goddam hard to believe the way it was sometimes, because things changing so all the time, every day ...I still say we’ll whip it Boney, you old sobersides—anyhow, let me think, it was durin’ Coolidge, I think . . .” A young Henry with a fashionable black mustache skitters nimble as a squirrel up the trunk of a log lodged against a steep hill, and with hands like flickering steel frees drunk cousin Lari-more from the tangle of oxen reins. A swift, grim, taciturn young Henry, carrying a compass in every pocket of his trousers and a boning knife in a scabbard on his boot . . . “Listen! Don’t you hear? Ah . . . ahh . . . bing! There. Son of a gun, ain’t that somethin’? Got a nother one.” At the back of the bar Ray and Rod, the Saturday Night Dance Band, dressed now in weekday Levis and work shirts, sit across from each other, writing letters to a girl in Astoria. “How do you spell ‘disparaging’?” Ray asks. “Spell what...?” “ ‘Disparaging,’ for the luvachrist; ‘dis-paraging’! Don’t you know shit? Dis-paraging, like, say for an instance: ‘I get a definite feeling he is writing you disparaging lies and remarks about me.’ ” “Hold on a minute.” Rod makes a grab for Ray’s letter. “Who are you writing? Come on, give, give.” “Watch it, Jack. Just cool it with the hands. Just cool it, all right? Because I’ll write to whoever I—” “You’re writing to Rhonda Ann Northrup!” “—to who-goddam-ever I take a notion that—” “Are you? Because the fur is really gonna fly if I find out.” “Now is that a fact.” “The shit is really gonna hit the fan.” “Is that the truth now.” “You better believe that’s the truth.” They go back to their writing. It has been the same ever since they teamed up to play small-town dance bars eight years ago, fighting, bickering over the same woman, each confiding in her that before long he aims to split from that ginhead who’s been holding him back, leave this mud wallow and make it big with Decca or Capitol or maybe even TV ...at odds with each other eternally, yet eternally bound by failure and the need for some excuse for that failure. “If it wasn’t for that danged tin-eared square holdin’ me back, honey, I’d be long gone from this pest-hole.” They write laboriously with a grinding of teeth. After a moment Ray looks toward the other end of the bar, where old Henry is pounding home a dramatic point in his story by striking a chair with his cane; he spits between his teeth to the floor. “Will you listen to that old fool carry on up there? You’d think he’s deef, wouldn’t you? Loud as he talks? He rides right over anything anybody else might say, just like a deef man.” “Maybe he is. He’s old enough to be deef.” But at the other end of the bar the old man’s interest in the fate of certain flies shows a nearly superhuman acuteness of ear. “Listen! Hear him? Hear him? Assssh bingo!” “Jee-zus Christ! Let me have a dime and I’ll see if I can drown him out.” The jukebox whirs, caressing its coin, throbbing light and mechanical sound. Ray returns to this seat, whistling a memorized steel guitar intro between his big teeth: A jewel here on earth, a jew-wul in heaven, She’s one of the diamonds around God’s great throne. . . . He is pleased with his tone. I’ll be up there someday, he tells himself. “Grand Ol’ Opry.” Memphis, Tennessee. I’ll make it. My day is coming. Leave these squares. Dust ’em all. Rod, old buddy, face it, your beat is beginning to drag like your butt. And Rhonda Ann, you’re a pretty fair punch but nothing to write home to mother about . . . “You boys mark it down,” Henry exclaimed at the other end of the bar. “We are gonna whip it, we by god are gonna!” What it was that Henry was going to whip no one ever knew for certain, but of his convictions there could be no doubt. “All this new equipment, new methods . . . we are gonna lay it low!” “How do you spell ‘recently’?” Rod was now having trouble. “The same as I did a while back,” Ray told him. “A-yuk a-yuk.” Yes sir man, dust ’em all. Memphis, Tennessee, make way for me! “Our day is coming,” Henry announced. “No. Oh no no no.” Boney Stokes, searching out tragedy the way a brush bear searches out garbage cans, found reason to rejoice his own way in spite of the rampant optimism. “No, we are old, Henry. Our day is ending, our skies are turning black.” Henry whooped his derision. “Bosh! Black? Just you look out yonder at that glow-rus sunset, does that look black to you?” Oregon October, when the fields of timothy and rye-grass stubble are being burned, the sky itself catches fire. Flocks of wrens rush up from the red alder thickets like sparks kicked from a campfire, the salmon jumps again, and the river rolls molten and slow . . . Down river, from Andy’s Landing, a burned-off cedar snag held the sun spitted like an apple, hissing and dripping juices against a grill of Indian Summer clouds. All the hillside, all the drying Himalaya vine that lined the big river, and the sugar-maple trees farther up, burned a dark brick and over-lit red. The river split for the jump of a red-gilled silver salmon, then circled to mark the spot where it fell. Spoonbills shoveled at the crimson mud in the shallows, and dowitchers jumped from cattail to cattail, frantically crying “Kleek! Kleek!” as though the thin reeds were as hot as the pokers they resembled. Canvasback and brant flew south in small, fiery, faraway flocks. And in the shabby ruin of broken cornfields rooster ringnecks clashed together in battle so bright, so gleaming polished-copper bright, that the fields seemed to ring with their fighting. This is Hank’s bell. He and Lee and Joe Ben watched the sinking sun as the boat rocked down the big river. It was the first evening in all the weeks Lee had been working that they’d run the river home with the sun still up to light their way. This is Hank’s bell ringing. “We’ve been lucky,” Hank said. “You know that? We’ve had enough fall this year to make up for the last three early winters.” Joe Ben nodded avidly. “Oh yeah, oh boy yeah. Didn’t I tell you it was gonna be that way? Oh yeah, we’re in the good Lord’s pocket. Lots of good log-cutting weather ...say, didn’t I say so this morning? Was gonna be a bountiful day, a blessful day.” The little man thrashed ecstatically about the front of the boat, jerking his torn face from side to side in a frenzied attempt to miss nothing. Hank and Lee turned to share a brief grin of amusement behind his knotted back. And also shared, in spite of themselves, some of the very enthusiasm they were smiling about. For it had been a blessful day, the blessfullest day, Lee had to admit, since he’d returned to Oregon. The day had started blessful, with the filbert- and blackberry-filled coffee cake Viv had baked for breakfast, and had seemed to get better as it went along; the air that greeted them in the yard was cold and sour with the smell of apples turning to vinegar beneath the trees; the sky was clear but it threatened none of the previous week’s stinging heat; the tide was coming in perfect and carried them up river at top speed ...then—and perhaps best, Lee thought, perhaps the true beginning of the blessful day came when they had given Les Gibbons his usual free ferry-ride  across and deposited him, still jabbering, on the bank near his car; he had turned to call over his shoulder just how he wanted once more to say thanks and how he wanted them to know he sure did hate bein’ beholden an’ sure did hay-ay-ate!—had slipped, with his lips trailing the last word, scrambling like a drunken ape, back down the bank into the icy water beside the boat. Hank and Joe Ben howled with laughter as he surfaced, blowing and cursing, and Les’s phony good-fellowship shattered under the laughter. He clung dripping to the side of the boat and screamed in unleashed fury that he hoped the whole motherjumpin’ Stamper brood o’ them was drownt! The whole horselaughin’ brood was wrecked and killed and drownt! And good motherjumpin’ riddance to bad motherjumpin’ rubbish—! Lee had smiled at the man’s uncontrolled frustration and then had laughed out loud at the cool and Christian way his big brother had fished him back into the boat and asked sympathetically, as a patient policeman might question a hysterical child, did Leslie want to go wet into town like a rat fished from the well? Or did he want to be toted back across for a change into different clothes? “Because we’ll sure wait on you, Les, if you want to go back up to your place and get into a dry outfit; whatever you say....” Les swallowed, and swallowed again. He pulled his blue lips back from his chattering teeth in a grotesque attempt to smile. “Ah, Hank, naw, naw I c-couldn’t put you boys out th-ththataway.” Hank shrugged. “Whatever you say, Les old buddy.” Then with heavy concern Hank stepped out of the boat to lead the shivering man up the bank by the hand.