Chapter 80

You are a force, a force. He nods slowly when the light switches on in one of the hotel’s upstairs rooms. Why, it’s almost like Mr. Draeger 450 ken kesey wanted him to see the ruse; You know I always stand by this window . . . it’s a real confidence! “We,” you said to me . . . “we”—and feels his plump little body stretch nearly to bursting as his initial admiration and awe swells to love and beyond—to adulation, to worship. When my father mustered out of the Navy in 1945 we moved from a fair-sized town near Mare Island, where he had been stationed, to the “Old Jarnaggan Place” in the Willamette Valley—a two-story farmhouse thirty miles from Eugene, where Daddy had a job, fifteen miles from Coburg, where I would attend the third grade, and a good million light-years from the highway, where the nearest other human being could be found. Electricity had penetrated as far as the kitchen and living room, but to illuminate any of the rest of the house one needed to go through the entire Coleman lantern bit, replete with ash mantles, a nickel-plated handpump, and white gasoline which was considered too dangerous for a third-grader who should be old enough by now to sleep in the dark, for goodness’ sakes! And my second-floor bedroom was indeed dark. Damned dark. A back-country night in a one-window room during a tar-bucket rain, in the sort of dark where nothing at all happens when you open and close your eyes. There is simply no light. But, like water, this thick dark affords tremendous conductivity to sounds of unknown sources. And after I had lain three or four bulge-eyed hours of my first night in my new bed, I began to perceive one of these very sounds: something hard, heavy, and horrible, rumbling and thudding insanely from one side of the hall to the other, coming steadily closer. My head lifted from the pillow. I stared in the direction of my door, filling the void with demented monster crabs and drunken robots as the noise came relentlessly on through my door, into my room. . . . (I recall thinking when I discovered Edgar Allan Poe’s world some years after: Yes; this is sure the way it sometimes is!) I lay with my head lifted. I didn’t call out; I felt totally bereft of voice, the way you feel when you try calling out of the confines of a 452 ken kesey dream. And as I waited an odd, recurring light at my window began to illuminate the room—a brief, quick glow, separated by long intervals of identically timed darkness. The rain had stopped and the clouds lifted, allowing the sweeping beam of a beacon from a cropduster’s airfield to swing across my upstairs window (I traced down this mystery light weeks later); from the stroboscope impressions given me by this periodic flash I was able to solve my mystery: a small rat had scored a large walnut from the storeroom down the hall and was trying to corral it against something solid so he could gnaw through its stubborn shell. The nut kept skittering away from the rat’s teeth, and the rat kept chasing after it and rolling it back against the wooden wall, which amplified his gnawing like a sounding board. Teamed thus, the two of them had worked their way from the storeroom, along the baseboard, all the way to my open door. Just a mouse, that light showed me, just a little old field rat. I breathed and let my head fall back to the pillow: just a mouse chewing a nut. That’s all. That’s all it— But what’s this light that keeps flashing past like a ghost or something flying round and around the house looking for a place to get in? ...What is this awful light? The same November rain that drove the mice from their holes and beat the eelgrass flat also stirred up the mightiest flock of migrating geese the coast had seen in centuries. At night, above the lullabying roll of the wind and rain, the ring of their voices could be heard, the free, bright, yodeling toll of Canada honkers. They were stirred south all the way from Dawson Creek by the storm, feeding in the oat-stubble by day and flying southward by night; and the great honking set up by this nightly flight came pealing like mountain bells down from the peaks of the wind, through the clouds, and into the little muddy towns that line the coastal flyways. When most of the citizens of these little towns woke to hear them tolling past their rooftops, they only heard “Winter is here, winter is here,” like a taunting, malevolent chant, over and over; “Winter is here, winter is here . . .” sometimes a great notion Willard Eggleston, the bald and bespectacled brother-in-law of the Real Estate Hotwire in Wakonda, listens more carefully one quiet night through the chipped round hole that opens from his ticket window onto a street wet and shiny with the light of the theater marquee, and remarks to himself and the empty street: “The geese have their special secrets too, I bet. They are singing out all the secrets of the dark, and no one to listen but me.” And when Lee happens to hear a small flock flying over the parked carrier wagon where he sits, at the stumpy edge of the logged-off show, waiting for Hank and Joe Ben and Andy to finish burning the slashing, the sound prompts him to remark in a letter he is writing to Peters in an old ledger he discovered under the seat: We are kept on the move by continual reminders of the lateness of the hour, Peters: nature signals to us in her numerous ways that we’d best get our ass in gear while we can, because the summer is never going to last, my darlings, never. Just now a flock of geese passing over calls out to me “Go south! Follow the sun! If you wait too long it will be too late.” And I get all manicky just hearing them. . . . But Hank hears the geese call a dozen different thoughts, stimulating a dozen dozen feelings—envy and resentment, worship and bitterness—making him long to join in their reeling southward song, cut loose, leave! A variety of thoughts and feelings, flowing and blending and breaking apart in sudden octaves, like the sound that set them off . . . The towns listened to the geese tell them, “Winter is here,” that first week, and despised the geese for rubbing it in. All the little coast towns listened, and all despised the geese in those first dingy November days. Because the irrevocable fact of winter is never a particularly rosy picture (But this winter, here in Wakonda, it’s gonna be worse even than the last), and these first nights of November are always tough because they are a preview of a hundred such nights to come (Yeah, but, this time it’s 454 ken kesey special tough, because we got no job, no income, no roll socked away for the rainy days this time...here in Wakonda) . . . does anyone ever like harbingers of such tidings? And winter was certainly there. All along the coast that first week of November, while the geese swept noisily down from the north, a flock of darker clouds swept viciously in from the sea’s western horizon. The clouds combed overhead and broke against the mountains like waves breaking, and the water ran back toward the sea ...clouds like waves breaking, or like clawed hands thrust grasping up from depths to furrow the earth with gray-nailed fingers. Like the hands of something trapped and determined to claw its way up on land, or pull the land down beneath the sea. The hands reached up and out, to Breakleg and Breakrib, to Mary’s Peak and Tillamook and Nahamish, to west-facing slopes along all the coast, and the blind fingers scratched bleeding gullies in the slopes. These gullies bled into bigger gullies, bigger gullies into freshets dry all summer, freshets into ditches choked full of Canada thistle and buffalo weed, and these ran into Elk Creek and Lorain Creek and Wildman Creek and Tyee Creek and Tenmile Creek; sharp, steep noisy creeks, looking like saw-teeth on the map. And these creeks crashed into the Nehalem and the Siletz and the Alsea and the Smith and the Longtom and the Siuslaw and the Umpqua and the Wakonda Auga, and these rivers ran to the sea, brown and flat with the clots of swirling yellow foam clinging to their surfaces, running to the sea like lathered animals. “Winter is here,” the geese proclaimed, flying from river to river over the little towns, “winter is here.” A winter just like last year (But last year we was able to blame them Reds and their bomb tests, screwing up the weather), and just like the winter before that (But that winter, think back now, there was all them hurricanes down in Florida that blew us up more than our share of rain), and just like the winters a thousand years before these little coast towns ever existed. (But those years were just winters, those towns just towns . . . this year, I tell you, in Wakonda, things is truly different!) In the bars and bowling alleys the men of these little towns packed snuff under stained lips and cleaned their ears with sometimes a great notion matchsticks, gave each other stiff, knowing nods as they watched the rain hopping in the street, and listened to the geese. “Lots of rain. Listen at them boogers shag it up there—they know it’s a lot. It’s all them frigging satellites the government keeps shooting up in the air, is what’s causing it. Just like you shoot a cannon inta the clouds to get rain. That’s who done it. Those numskulls in the Pentagon made a slip-up!” The geese might claim that it was winter just like the year before, just like a thousand years before, but these little towns found it helped to survive an unpleasant inevitability if you regarded it as a slip-up and found something to blame it on. It eased the outlook a little if you had some scapegoat to point a finger at: the Reds, the satellites, the hurricanes down south. . . . The logger men in these little towns could blame the construction men: “Loosenin’ the dirt with all them damn roads you’re buildin’!” The construction men could blame the logger men: “You, you ax-happy nuts, takin’ out all the brush off the watershed, layin’ the mountainsides naked . . . what can you expect?” The younger people found ways to blame the older generation, who had borned them into this mess; the older people blamed the churches. The churches, not to be outdone, put it all at the feet of the Lord: “Oh yay-us, now! Haven’t I been saying so? Havn’t I now! again and again, warned you to stand up in His light now and live by His laws now and not chance His awful wrath? Yay-us now! Now look: the Arm of the Lord is on its way; the floodwaters chastiseth!” Which is just another way of blaming, and perhaps the best way, because there is solace and a certain stoical peace in blaming everything on the rain, and then blaming something as uncontrollable as the rain on something as indifferent as the Arm of the Lord. Because nothing can be done about the rain except blaming. And if nothing can be done about it, why get yourself in a sweat about it? Matter of fact, it can be convenient to have around. Got troubles with the old lady? It’s the rain. Got worries and frets about the way the old bus is falling to pieces right under you? It’s the ruttin’ rain. Got a deep, hollow ache bleeding cold 456 ken kesey down inside the secret heart of you from too many deals fallen through? too many nights in bed with the little woman without being able to get it up? too much bitter and not enough sweet? Yeah? That there, brother, is just as well blamed on the rain; falls on the just and unjust alike, falls all day long all winter long every winter every year, and you might just as well give up and admit that’s the way it’s gonna be, and go take a little snooze. Or you’ll be mouthin’ the barrel of your twelve-gauge the way Evert Petersen at Mapleton did last year, or samplin’ snail-killer the way both the Meirwold boys did over to Sweet Home. Roll with the blow, that’s the easy out, blame it on the rain and bend with the wind, and lean back and catch yourself forty winks—you can sleep real sound when the rain is lullabying you (But I tell you things is different this year in Wakonda) real nice and sound...(because geese ain’t letting us sleep, and the Lord ain’t taking the blame, not this year, in Wakonda . . .) Because that year, in Wakonda, the citizens truly weren’t being allowed the easy out. They weren’t being allowed to lean back as the days passed and nights slid by. They weren’t being allowed to make themselves comfortable by blaming it on the rain, or on the Lord, or the Reds, or the satellites. Not when it was so goddam evident, so right-before-youreyes obvious, that in Wakonda, that year, the town’s worries and woes were being caused by nobody else but that goddam hardnose up the river! And rain is one thing and, fine, maybe you can’t do nothing about the weather except yak about it, but Hank Stamper is a different breed of cat from the rain! And you can maybe put the blame on the Arm of the Lord those years when that arm puts a stranglehold of frost on the woods so tight it freezes all the way to your pay envelope, and maybe you can roll with the blow of the wind if there’s nothing else except the wind blowing ...but when the arm is the arm of Hank Stamper strangling off your income, and you damn well know that the blow is being dealt by the fist on that arm, then you find yourself having a pretty hard time blaming your woes on anything other than that arm! And a harder time than that leaning back and catching forty winks when there’s geese going by in a steady stream telling sometimes a great notion you, “Winter is here and you better get the lead out and do something about that particular arm ...!” Willard Eggleston plans to do something, all right, but he isn’t saying what. He finally closes the ticket window and switches off the marquee, tells the projectionist to cap it up and climbs the balcony stairs to let the solitary young couple know the picture has ended. In the lobby he pulls on his overcoat and rubbers and opens his umbrella and walks out into the rain. The geese remind him again of the secret that he isn’t telling, and he stops for a minute to look wistfully through the window next to the theater into his laundry and wish his old confidante was still there (even though he wouldn’t have been able to tell her this) like she used to be. Oh, those were the days of secrets, those good years before the coin-operated Laundromats had come to change his life and before his wife and brother-in-law had pushed him into buying that movie-show house for what they called “real prudent real-estate reasons, Willard; it’s right next door and you wouldn’t want a Laundromat concern picking it up, now, would you?” He laughed to remember that. Now that you mention it, he thought, tracing his fingers along the familiar glass door of his old laundry, I don’t think I would have cared. Even if it had been likely. He knew that wasn’t their real reason for pushing him into the sale. He had known better at the time: his wife’s brother had simply been interested in moving a worthless property, and his wife had just wanted to move Willard. After ten years she had finally grown suspicious of the extra time he spent at night in the laundry with Jill Shelly—“that little bar of dark soap you call your ‘assistant.’ What is it she assists with, I’d like to know, that takes until all hours of the night?” “Jelly and me just sort clothes and talk—” “Jelly? Jelly? Blackstrap Molasses would be more appropriate. Or Tar . . . why don’t you call her Tarbelly?” Funny, Willard thought, because it had been his wife who had first called the young girl “Jelly”—more a sarcastic comment on the child’s fleshless frame, he was certain, than a mispronunciation of her name. He had never called her anything but Miss Shelly before, just as it had never occurred to him to 458 ken kesey chat with the girl during their late working hours until his wife accused him of it. Now he wished he’d been accused much earlier, and of much more; look at all those years wasted when she was nothing more than a skinny black girl, all knees and elbows and teeth... why hadn’t he noticed her value until his wife called his attention to it? “I’m tired of it, do you understand me? You think I don’t know what goes on back there in all those dirty clothes?” Perhaps it was because his wife insisted so much on acting the part of the overbearing spouse that he had found it easiest to play the dominated husband and wait for her to call the shots. He didn’t know. But before his wife had been so kind as to suggest it, he and the girl had had nothing at all going in the dirty clothes except dirty clothes and silly little secrets. Although that had been quite a bit, he realized, now that it was gone for good; that was the part he liked best to remember, the dirty clothes and the silly secrets. It had started that way, showing each other little treasures of information they discovered in the town’s dirty laundry, then working together to interpret their findings. Gradually they got to be able to read a soiled slip as though it were a syndicated gossip column. “Look here what I found, Will. . . .” She would come to him, proudly bearing a coupon for a prescription for an oral contraceptive found in the pocket of Pucker Pringle’s coat. “Now who in the blue-eyed world would of thought? And such a good Catholic besides.” He might counter with a spot of lipstick found on Howie Evans’ undershirt, and she would come back with the cuff of Floyd Evenwrite’s new trousers, caked with the dawn-blue mud like a fellow might step in out in them old mudflats around Indian Jenny’s shack . . . Oh, those may not have been the best nights, he conceded, but they were the nights he liked best to recall. Strange as it now seemed to him, looking through the window of a business he owned but no longer ran, at piles of laundry that had been coldly sorted by some unappreciative and heartless hand, the memory of those long-ago nights giggling over the town’s telltale stains still held more warmth than the memory of nights sometimes a great notion much more recent and far warmer. Those early nights had been his. No one had suggested they study those stains. For nearly five years he and the girl folded sheets and sewed buttons, matched pennies to see who would go across to the Sea Breeze for Cokes, and satisfied themselves with such intimacies as those which could be read aloud to one another from other people’s letters found in other people’s pockets. And never shared a single secret of their own until his wife practically insisted on it. Then, for a few marvelous, frantic months, they had shared two secrets: the first on top of the pile of unfolded sheets that came nightly from the drier, fragrant and fluffy and white, like a great bed of warm snow...and the second beneath the dark blanket of the girl’s skin, warmer even that the pile of sheets, and growing. “And when you get this movie house, Willard, I think it would be a very wise plan to get you a new assistant, too; employing the only darky in town hasn’t been the best way to get new customers, by any means; also, I would imagine she might like to be with her own, for a while. Why don’t you see if she wouldn’t be interested in going back to wherever it is—she must have a family—that she came from?” Again, it seemed, his wife had come up with just the right suggestion at just the right time. Jelly laughingly agreed that it was considerate of her, all in all, and that it might be wise indeed to spend a few months up in Portland visiting with the folks, “long enough leastways that when I come back I can tell everybody about this wild marriage I had with this sailor who drowned at sea, me just bringing the poor lad’s child into the world. Sure; everything’ll work out hunky-dory. I think your wife always has some wise ideas.” Everything did work out hunky-dory. Not a suspicion in town was aroused, not an eyebrow lifted: “About Willard Eggleston? An’ that chocolate drop worked for him? Never, in a hundred years . . .” And, while she didn’t even know where Jelly had gone, once more it was his wife’s idea that he take trips to Portland every month or two to screen the pictures he wanted for the theater. 460 ken kesey Hunky-dory as you could ever wish for. Never even a slip to make the bank-messenger curious, as though the whole conspiracy had been planned for him, and worked out to the last detail. Jelly was even considerate enough to schedule the birth of the drowned sailor boy’s child to coincide with one of his screening trips to Portland: Willard arrived at the Burnside Infirmary and asked about the Shelly girl just in time to have a colored intern tell him she was fine and point to a glass case being wheeled from the delivery room. He leaned to look through the glass at a child so wild-looking and fierce, so absolutely individual with his conglomeration of characteristics, that it was all Willard could do to keep from spoiling everything by announcing, “That’s my boy!” Now, hardly a year after the birth, he was able to find only the feeblest residue of that moment of terrible pride. He found it hard to bring his mind around to admitting that the thing had ever happened, that these two most important people in his life even existed. Especially since the strike; at first he had seen them almost weekly, when he was still doing well enough to send three hundred a month without its being missed. Then another Laundromat opened, and the best he could do was two-fifty, then two hundred. And since this strike he had been forced to borrow on theater and laundry both to be able to send them a hundred and fifty. He couldn’t face a son so fierce, so wild-looking, when a hundred and fifty dollars a month was the best he could do as a father. And today he had received a letter from Jelly telling him that she knew how hard it must be, with the conditions and all, for him to keep slipping her money . . . so she was thinking of marrying. “A Merchant Marine, Will, most the time at sea and he don’t have to know one single thing about anything me and you do while he is gone. Then we won’t keep on being a burden and a drain on you, you see?” He saw. Things were still working out hunky-dory for his protection. His world had been kept under his hat so long that pretty soon no one would even need to worry about somebody’s finding out; there wouldn’t be anything under there to find out. sometimes a great notion If he didn’t take steps it would all never have been, like the sound a tree doesn’t make when it falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it. Willard stepped back from the laundry window to leave and was stopped by his dim reflection in the glass: hardly there at all, a ridiculous little character with a receding chin and eyes swimming nearsightedly behind glasses out of style years ago, a cartoonist’s wash-drawing of the capital-H henpecked husband, a satirist’s two-dimensional straw man designed to convey at first glance a two-dimensional personality that everyone knows everything about before it even opens its straw man’s mouth. Willard wasn’t shocked by the image; he had been aware of it for years. When he was younger he had scoffed to himself at all those people who treated him as though he really were this image he projected—“What do I care for what they see? They think they know the book by its cover, but the book knows what it is.” Now he knew better; if the book never opens up and comes out, it can be warped to fit the image others see. He remembered Jelly telling of her father ...a shy and gentle man until a car’s windshield branded him from chin to ear with a scar that raised the hackles of any strange Negro in a bar and provoked policemen to frisk him every chance they got: once a gentle man, he was now serving twenty to life for killing an old friend with a razor. No, a book wasn’t invulnerable to the appearance of its cover, not by any means. He took a parting look at the reflection—not a figure adapted to having a burden or a drain put on it, that was certain—then moved on off toward the streetlight on the corner. This funny-paper image is so complete and so consistent, he thought, it’s a wonder the rain doesn’t just wash me away down the gutter like a old paper doll. It is, for a fact, a real wonder ...that I haven’t been washed down a long time ago. Yet, when he turned the corner and walked away from the light, his shadow stretched before him, black and solid. So he wasn’t quite disengaged from his world. There was still something. His two-dimensional perfection was still marred, he knew, by the memory of a skinny colored girl and an ugly and outraged baby: they were the blood and heart and bones that 462 ken kesey kept him from collapsing flat. But that blood had grown thin and the bones transparent, and the heart small and riddled with holes the way a plant grows, kept untended too long from the light. And now she had written that she was planning to marry her sailor boy, just as she said in their whispered fantasy, so she and the child would need less of his tending than ever. He had written back begging her to wait: There was something he could do; he’d be thinking about it for some time, couldn’t tell her, but take his word, please, just for a few days, wait! As his shadow stretched on to nowhere down the wet sidewalk, he became aware of the geese again. He lowered the umbrella to hear them better, lifting his face to the rain: You birds ...you aren’t the only ones with secrets to tell. Though it did seem a terrible shame that he couldn’t find some soul to share this final secret with. Just one person who would never tell. A real shame, he thought, lifting his umbrella again and continuing on with his face wet with rain, envying the geese their invisible confidants in the winnowing dark overhead. Whereas Lee, being long on confidants and short on courage, envies them their outspoken, and terse, honesty. “Fly now! Delay later!” they tell me, Peters, which leaves me feeling that if I hang around here too much longer I will begin to take root right through the hobbed soles of my boots. “Fly! Fly!” they cry, and I raise my feet up from the muddy floor of this vehicle just to play it safe. . . . What is there about our generation, man, that makes us sweat this root scene so much? Look at us: we wander across America in dedicated droves, equipped with sideburns and sandals and a steel-stringed guitar, relentlessly tracking our lost rootbeds ...yet all the while guarding against that most ignoble of ends: becoming rootbound. What, pray, is it we hope to do with the object of our search if we succeed? If we have no intention of attaching ourselves to these roots, what use do you suppose we have in mind? Boil us up a tea and use them, like sassafras, as a purgative? Stash them away in the cedar chest with our high-school diploma and prom programs? It’s always been a mystery to me... sometimes a great notion Another straggling flock came over, sounding quite close. I looked up from my ledger and out the peephole I had rubbed in the fogged windshield; the sky was filled with the same twilight of rain and smoke that had been hanging over the carrier like impatient six o’clock kept waiting ever since noon. The geese must have passed within yards of me, but not so much as a gray ripple broke that twilight’s surface. There was a feeling of curious doubt building in my mind about these phantom birds, like that sensation one gets hearing a canned audience on TV: in days and days of hearing thousands and thousands of them pass overhead, I had actually seen only one. The honking faded off where Hank and Joe and Andy were working. I saw Hank stop work, listen, start off toward the donkey after his shotgun, change his mind, stop, and stand ready for their appearance, barehanded and cruel-looking in his hood and smoke-blacked face: Watch; he’s going to spring into the air and snag one on the fly the way that ape in the New York zoo used to catch pigeons ...rip them to feathery shreds before he hits the ground! But he relaxed and straightened back up; he hadn’t seen them, either. He might have mighty leaping powers, but his eyes couldn’t penetrate that Oregon twilight any better than mine. I looked back down at my obscure pencilings in the ledger; I had been beating around the bush for a half-dozen pages of discursive philosophy and foolishness, trying to explain to Peters why I had tarried in Oregon so much longer than I had predicted. For days I had been afflicted with a malady of hesitation, and I was having the devil’s own time explaining it to Peters, not having got around to understanding it myself. The germs responsible for this current attack of procrastination were a good deal more difficult to isolate than those that had finally been wiped out during that argument following the fox hunt. That earlier attack had been much easier to diagnose; even before the fox hunt I halfway understood why I’d slowed to a sodden stop: at that time I had been so uncertain of myself, my scene, and my whole scheme in general that slowing to a stop meant mainly that I didn’t know where the hell I was headed in the first place. Not so, this time, not so at all . . . 464 ken kesey Unlike my previous paralysis, this time I knew exactly where I was going, precisely how I would get there, and, most important, this time I had a clear idea what the realization of my objectives would accomplish. Like all schemers, I relished the fantasy more than the finished work, and for this reason I had labored overlong, savoring my own craftsmanship (I knew I had; I don’t believe we can afford to pass over the grade-school kicks our daydreams offer), but the scheme had long since been finished and put into action; in fact, the campaign itself was nearly completed. Everything was ready. All precautions taken, all arrangements made. All the plastic bombs placed and awaiting my hand on the plunger. Had been waiting now for a number of days. Yet, I hesitated. Why, I demanded rhetorically, why wait at all ...? Lee is piqued and prodded by the sound of the geese, but Hank listens with a different ear. All his life he has been affected by the sound of game birds, hunting and watching and associating their calls with other events until he could peg the feeling to come before the bird made a sound, but of all upland birds and all the waterfowl, and all their numerous sounds of migrating, nothing even came near to giving him a feeling approaching the soaring, pure, lonely sensation from hearing a Canada honker . . . Widgeons, for instance, when they came in low, beneath the dawn—in scrambling clusters of six or seven—their melancholy whistlings could make a man feel a little sorry for them poor, foolish ducks who get so rattled by shotgun fire they fly in a circle around and around over your blind, watching their number reduced at each pass ...but that was about the size of it: a little sorry. Mallards you could feel more for. A mallard is sharper than a widgeon. And prettier. And when they come in at dusk, cautious, clucking and quacking, yelling down at your spread of decoys for the come-on-in signal, orange feet reaching out to catch the shock of the water, heads flashing the last bit of daylight, not purple, not green, not quite the acetylene blue of a cutting torch, a color almost a sound it’s so bright: ringing of bits of tinted glass against each other in the wind ...When a mallard comes in you can feel for him that kick you get watching sometimes a great notion fireworks web the sky with color. Seeing something pretty. The way you feel watching a chinee rooster explode out of the maize in the afternoon, and kind of the way you feel when you bring down a wood-duck, which is actually a far prettier bird than a mallard but it’s not a prettiness you see in the air because a wood-duck’s always glimpsed dodging and whizzing through the trees; you don’t generally even know he’s a wood-duck until you pick him up out of the water. Then he’s pretty, all scarlet and purple and white, like a clown with feathers, but then he’s dead, too. Cinnamon teal can make you feel foxy if you hit one, foolish if you don’t, because they’re little and tricky and have a nasty habit of coming right past you about two feet off the ground at about two hundred miles an hour through the air. Coots can make you ashamed of yourself for creaming a dozen of them on the water after you get tired of them farting around your blind; the brant goose can give you a kind of laugh, him such a big bird with such a hoarse little squeak; and, boy oh boy, the cry of a loon when you’re out at night with the dogs and you hear that bastard calling across the dark slough—a sound like something lost and lonesome and stark gone crazy in a stark old world where it always knew it didn’t belong—that sound can give you the willies so bad you don’t know if you care to go outside in that stark old world ever again. But there’s nothing, there’s none of the birds and all their whistles and squeaks and quacks, that can get to a guy like hearing a Canada honker go past the rooftop on a stormy night. For one thing, you can’t help feeling a little sorry for the poor devil, out there trying to fight his way through that muck. For another, you can’t help feeling a little sorry for your own self because you know when the weather gets bad enough to run off a bird as big as a Canada goose that winter has set in sure enough . . . But mainly—I mean aside from the pure pleasure—I think you feel just a teeny bit cheated when you hear a honker. Because for all that you got going for you as a human—a warm bed, a dry place to stay, plenty to eat, plenty things to entertain you...for all that, you still aren’t able to fly; I don’t mean like 466 ken kesey inside an airplane, but just you yourself, make a run out into the air, and spread out your wings, and fly! Anyway, I was happy to hear them arrive. I heard the first of the migration come over the foundation when I was out hammering up some spare six-by-eights I’d brought home from the mill account of they was too knotty to sell ...come flying over about forty, fifty feet off the water—low enough I was able to pick out a couple with that big eight-cell flashlight Joe Ben’d left with me—and I was so happy to hear them I hollered out and told them so.