Chapter 60

“Joe Harper? Huck who? Lee, them boys town boys?” “A joke, Joe, forget it.” Which he immediately did as he launched into an enthusiastic description of the plans he had for his bathroom’s color motif: “A man, don’t you agree, needs something to look at all that time besides white porcelain? Something wild, something gassy?” I let Joe Ben and his wife discuss bathroom fixtures while I finished my eggs . . . ...A threat that he finally attributes to the fear he had as a child of being forced to eat a raw egg . . . (from Hank’s shoulder the little boy gave his mother a last entreating look, but she said only, “Have fun, Leland.”) and to the fact that Hank is obviously still quite upset.... Joe was in high spirits even for Joe. He had missed the hostilities last night and had gone to bed ignorant of the redeclaration of the cold war between Hank and me, and had spent a night dreaming visionary dreams of brotherhood while his relatives wrangled below Joe’s Utopia: a color-filled world of garlands and maypoles, of bluebirds and marigolds, where Man Is Good to His Brother Simply Because It Is More Fun. Poor fool Joe with your Tinker Toy mind and scrambled world ...The story is told that when Joe was a child his cousins emptied his Christmas stocking and replaced the gifts with horse manure. Joe took one look and bolted for the door, eyes glittering with excitement. “Wait, Joe, where you going? What did ol’ Santa bring you?” According to the story Joe paused at the door for a piece of rope. “Brought me a bran’-new pony but he got away. I’ll catch ’em if I hurry.” And ever since then it seemed that Joe had been accepting more than his share of hardship as good fortune, and more than his share of shit as a sign of Shetland ponies just around the corner, Thoroughbred stallions just up the road. Were one to show him that the horses didn’t exist, never had existed, only the joke, only the shit, he would have thanked the giver for the fertilizer and started a vegetable garden. Were I to tell him I wanted to ride to church with him solely to complete my rendezvous with Viv he would have rejoiced that I was cementing relations with Hank by becoming better friends with his wife. Lee sees Hank glance briefly at him from behind the paper; eyes troubled and mouth searching for a kind and prudent phrase that will make everything all right again. He cannot find it. The mouth closes in defeat, and before the paper is lifted again Lee sees an expression of helplessness that makes him feel both elated and somewhat troubled.... But I liked the little gnome too much to risk the truth with him. What I did tell him: “I don’t mind, Joe, waiting till dark to come home. Besides, I think I heard—didn’t I hear you say, Viv, that you were thinking about driving in for low tide this afternoon after some clams?” Viv sat darning socks on a chrome kitchen stool with the toes of her tennis shoes hooked under a gleaming rung and a sock pulled over a light bulb. She drew the needle through the knot and brought the thread to her gleaming row of sharp little teeth Snip! “Not clams, Lee”—guardedly, looking into her darning box for another sock—“rock oysters. Yes. I mentioned that I might be coming in, but I don’t know . . .” She looked toward Hank. The newspaper rustled across the table, straining its newsprint eardrums. “Can I ride back with you? If you do come in?” “Shall I pick you up at Joe and Jan’s new house or where? If I do?” “That’ll be fine.” She slid the bulb into another sock; a GE eye winked at me slyly from a woolen rim. “So . . .” I had a date. I stood up from the table. “Ready when you are, Joe.” “Right. You kids! Squeaks, get the kids in the boat. Get all your stuff. Hup! Hup!” Wink. The eye was gradually stitched closed with white woolen eyelashes. Snip. “So I guess I’ll see you later, Lee?” she asked with tense indifference and a white woolen thread hanging from her lip. “Yeah, I guess.” I yawned over my shoulder as I followed Joe out of the kitchen. “Later”—and yawned again: I could be as indifferent as they come. For a second, after Hank returns to his newspaper, unable to go through with his start, Lee longs to run to his brother and ask for his forgiveness and his help: Hank, pull me up! save me! don’t let me die down here like an insect! (The little boy turned from his mother. “Hank, I’m awful tired—” Hank knuckled the boy’s head. “Don’t be a sissy now, sport—ol’ Hankus’ll keep the dark from gettin’ you.”)—but decides instead: The devil with him; what does he care? and clamps his jaw indignantly . . . In the front room Hank asked if I was planning on staying in town a while to hobnob with the hobgoblins after church. I told him I might, yes; he grinned—“Little of God, then a little of ghosts, is that it, bub?” as though our unfortunate argument were forgotten. “Well . . . keep a tight hold on it.” As a matter of fact, I thought, leaving the house, when it comes to being tensely indifferent, all three of us can swing it pretty skillfully . . . In the daylight sky outside, Lee finds the full moon waiting, like one who has stayed up all night to see the action and is not going to miss it now (“If you’re ever gonna get through this ol’ world,” Hank told the child as they left the house, “you’re gonna have to get big enough to take the dark of it.”)—a daylight moon, staring at him even more fiercely than had the plate of eggs—and his indignation begins to quickly melt . . . As we drove the road to town, Joe was so enthusiastic at the prospect of a convert that he took it upon himself to relate to me the tale of how he came to be saved. . . . “Come at me one night in a dream!” he shouted, trying to make himself heard above the pick-up’s roar; though all the noise—the throb of the tires on the pavement, the kids in back hooting Halloween horns and twirling ratchet-clattering noisemakers—somehow added to the effect of his tale. “Just like it come to David an’ them others. All day, all week, we’d been working a piece of swamp up a good deal north of here—oh, let me see, this was a good seven, eight years back, weren’t it, Jan? When I got the call told me to join the church? In the early part of spring—and the wind had been blowin’ to take the hair right off your head. It ain’t so dangerous cutting in the wind as some say, especially you keep a good track of what’s what ...check for snags with high limbs that might bust off and like that—I ever tell you about Judy Stamper? Aaron’s little grandkid? She was just walking along one day, through the state park back up river it was, too, and got hammered flat by a spruce limb. In a state park, by gosh! Her mom and dad up and left the country for keeps. Like to kilt ol’ Aaron. Wasn’t exceptional windy, neithers, nice summer day—they was out picknickin’—she just left the picnic table a second to go off behind the bushes to see a man about a dog and kerwhack, just like that, dead as a doornail ...Man!” He sat soberly shaking his head over the tragedy, until he recalled the story from which he had digressed. “But, oh yeah!” A wide white smile flashed from his orange face and he went on with the tale. “It’d been windy, like I said, an’ that night when I went off to sleep I had this dream like I was up topping this spar and the wind commenced to blow and blow till wasn’t a thing still; everything whirling this way and that and a great ...big ... voice booms out Joe Ben ...Joe Ben, thou must be saved and I said sure sure ain’t I been planning to all along? but let me first get this here tree topped we’re running way behind and here it is March! So I go back to chopping ...and that wind cranks up a notch. And the voice comes again: Joe Ben, Joe Ben, go get yourself saved and I says okay can you just hang on a second for chrissakes? Can’t you see I’m bustin’ my butt hurryin’? And went to choppin’ again. And then the wind really cut loose! If it’d been blowing before, it was just warming up. Trees come loose outa the ground and walked around the countryside like dancers; houses went to whippin’ past in the air; big old geese came zipping by backwards....And there I am, blowed out from that tree stiff at an angle, hanging with just my fingernails. Flapping like a flag. Joe Ben, Joe Ben—go get—But that was enough for me. I jumped right up in bed.” “That’s right,” Jan confirmed. “He did jump right up in bed. In March.”  “And I says, ‘Jan, get up an’ get on your clothes. We’re gonna be saved!’” “That’s right. That’s just what he said. To get up an’—” “Yeah, just like that. We were livin’ in the old Atkins place at the time, down river—just made a down payment on it, you recall, Jan? Couple months later, Lee, the old crackerbox just jumped in the river like a frog. Just one day kersplash! I swear, I no more thought it would cave off like that than I thought it could fly! But she did. Jan lost her mama’s antique spinet piano, too.” “It did. I’d nearly forgot that. Just like a frog it—” “So right the next day I went to see Brother Walker.” “After your house was lost?” I was a little confused by the chronology of his narrative.