Sometimes a Great Notion (6 page)

“Just scooted out, huh? That sure don’t sound like Jonas Stamper. Didn’t he leave anything?”

“Family, feed store, odds and ends, and a whole pisspot of shame.”

He had sold a feed store in Kansas, a good feed store with a rolltop desk full of leatherbound ledgers to finance the move, then had sent the money ahead so it was already waiting for him when he arrived, waiting bright green and growing, like everything else in the rich new land, the rich new
promising frontier
he’d read about in all the pamphlets his boys had brought him from the post office back in Kansas. Pamphlets sparkling red and blue, ringing with wild Indian names like bird-call signals in the forest: Nakoomish, Nahailem, Chalsea, Silcoos, Necanicum, Yachats, Siuslaw, and Wakonda, at Wakonda Bay, on the Peaceful and Promising Wakonda Auga River, Where (the pamphlets had informed him) A Man Can Make His Mark. Where A Man Can Start Anew. Where (the pamphlets said) The Grass Is Green And The Sea Is Blue And The Trees And Men Grow Tall And True! Out In The Great Northwest, Where (the pamphlets made it clear) There Is Elbow Room For A Man To Be As Big And Important As He Feels It Is In Him To Be!
¹

Ah, it had sounded
right
good on paper, but, as soon as he saw it, there was something . . . about the river and the forest, about the clouds grinding against the mountains and the trees sticking out of the ground . . . something. Not that it was a hard country, but something you must go through a winter of to understand.

“I’ll be switched. Just gone. It sure don’t sound like old Jonas.”

“I wouldn’t be too tough on him; for one thing, you got to go through a rainy season or so to get some idee.”

For
one
thing, Jonas couldn’t see all that elbow room that the pamphlets had talked about. Oh, it was there, he knew. But not the way he’d imagined it would be. And for
another
thing, there was nothing,
not a thing!
about the country that made a man feel Big And Important. If anything it made a man feel dwarfed, and about as important as one of the fish-Indians living down on the clamflats. Important? Why, there was something about the whole blessed country that made a soul feel whipped before he got started. Back home in Kansas a man had a
hand
in things, the way the Lord
aimed
for His servants to have: if you didn’t water, the crops died. If you didn’t feed the stock, the stock died. As it was ordained to be. But there, in that land, it looked like our labors were for naught. The flora and fauna grew or died, flourished or failed, in
complete
disregard for man and his aims. A Man Can Make His Mark, did they tell me? Lies, lies. Before God I tell you: a man might struggle and labor his livelong life and make
no
mark! None! No permanent mark at all! I say it is true.

I say there was
no
permanence. Even that town was temporary. I say it. All vanity and vexation of the spirit. One generation passeth away, and
another
cometh: but the earth abideth forever, or as forever as the rain lets it.

And even as I pass away, that blamed town, that piteous little patch of mud wrested briefly away from the trees and brush, it shall pass also. I knew so the moment I saw it. I knew all the time I lived there and I knew when death took me back. And I know now.

For what profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun if the trees and the brush and the moss strive everlastingly to take it back? Strive everlastingly until a soul felt that the town was only a sort of prison cell with green prison walls of brush and vine and he had to labor
ever
lastingly, day in day out, just to hang on to whatever pitiful little profit he might have made, labor everlastingly day in day out just to hang on to a floor of mud and a ceiling of clouds so low sometimes he felt he must stoop. . . . Floor and ceiling and a green prison wall of trees. I say it. The town? It may grow, but abide? It may grow and spread and proliferate, but abide? No. The old forest and land and river will prevail, for these things
are
of the earth. But the town is of man. I say it. Things cannot abide which are new and wrought by man. Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath already of old time, which was before us. I say it.

And space? Didn’t the pamphlets claim there was elbow room? Perhaps, but with all that hellish greenery on every side could a soul tell it? Could he see more’n a couple hundred yards in any direction? Back on the plains, there is space. I will admit that a man back on the plains might feel a freezing emptiness in his bowels when he looked in all directions and saw nothing but what has gone before and what will come, nothing but far-stretching flat land and sage. But I say a man can get
accustomed
, get comfortable and
accustomed
to emptiness, just the way he can get accustomed to the cold or accustomed to the dark. That place, however, that . . . place, when I cast my eyes about, at fallen trees decaying under the vines, at the rain chewing away the countryside, at the river which runs into the sea yet the sea is not full . . . at all . . . at things such as . . . a soul cannot find the words . . . such as plants and flowers, the beasts and the birds, the fishes and the insects! I do not mean that. At all the things going
on
and
on
and
on
. Don’t you see? It just all came at me so downright thick and fast that I knew I could never get accustomed to it! But I do not mean that. I mean. I had no choice but do as I did; God as my witness . . . I had no choice!

After the second year Jonas was sick with longing to leave Oregon and return to Kansas. After the third year his longing had turned to a constant burn. But he dared not mention it to his family, especially not to his eldest. For the three years of rain and wilderness that had weakened the stiff, practical plainsman’s starch in Jonas had nurtured a berry-vine toughness in his sons. Like the beasts and plants, the three boys grew on and on. Not larger by size; they were, like most of the family, small and wiry, but larger by look, harder. They watched the look in their father’s trapped eyes get more frantic after each flood, while their own eyes turned to green glass and their faces to leather.

“Sir,” Henry would ask, smiling, “You don’t look so perky.

Is something grievin’ you?”

“Grieving?” Jonas fingered the Bible. “ ‘For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.’ ”

“Yeah?” Henry shrugged and walked away before his father could go on. “Now what do you think of that.”

In the dark attic above the feed store the boys whispered jokes about the tremble in their father’s hands and about the squeak creeping into his onetime leatherbound meeting-house voice. “He gettin’ so he look more glare-eyed and twitch-lipped and skittish ever’ day, like a dog comin’ into heat.” They laughed in their corn-shuck pillows. “He gettin’ so he look itchy an’ uncomfortable: you reckon he’s been slippin’ off to Siskaloo for some of that red meat? That’ll give you the itch, I hear tell.”

Joked and laughed, but behind their grins were already despising old Jonas for what they could sense old Jonas was already bound to do.

The family was living in the feed store in town when it was very cold, and the rest of the time in the big tent across the river where they were working on the house, which, like everything else in the land, grew on and on with slow, mute obstinacy over the months, seemingly in spite of all Jonas could do to delay it. The house itself had begun to haunt Jonas; the larger it became the more frantic and trapped he felt. There the blamed thing stood on the bank, huge, paintless, Godless. Without its windows it resembled a wooden skull, watching the river flow past with black sockets. More like a mausoleum than a house; more like a place to
end
life, Jonas thought, than a place to start fresh anew. For this land was permeated with dying; this bounteous land, where plants grew overnight, where Jonas had watched a mushroom push from the carcass of a drowned beaver and in a few gliding hours swell to the size of a hat—this bounteous land was
saturated
with moist and terrible dying.

“By gosh, sir, you sure are lookin’ peaked, an’ that’s a fack. You want I should bring you back some salts from Grissom’s while I’m in town?”

Saturated and
overflowing!
The feeling haunted Jonas’s days and tortured his sleep. O, Jesus, light of life, fill the darkness. He was being smothered. He was being drowned. He felt he might awake some foggy morn with moss across his eyes and one of those hellish toadstools sprouting in the mist from his own carcass. “No!”

“What did you say, sir?”

“I said no salts, no. Something to let me sleep! Or to wake me up! One way or other, something to clear the
mist!” hangs from the limbs like gray bunting. In a dream you slide along the plank wall, eyes drifting about at the draped morning. . . . Snails in the night write glistening scripture on the planks; this wild-rose vine signals something to you with his many slow fingers . . . what? what?
His lean face is bent in an attitude of broken sleep as he moves along, one hand reaching to take a nail from the cluster jutting like quills from his now gray mustache. Then he stops, with the hand still raised, face still bent, unchanged. And leans forward, thrusts his head forward, straining to make out something a few yards ahead of him. The fog hiding the river has opened a small round hole in itself, lifting its corner for him to see. Through this opening he sees there has been another tiny cave-in at the bank since last night. A few more inches of soil have crumbled into the river. That cave-in is the source of that soft hissing sound, there, where the river sucks with rapt innocence at the new cut in its bank. Watching, it occurs to Jonas that it isn’t the bank that is giving way, as one might naturally assume. No. It is the river that is getting wider. How many winters before that seesaw current will reach the foundation where he is now standing? Ten years? Twenty? Forty? Even so, what difference?

(A car pulled up and parked out on the wharf near the fish-house, exactly forty years later. The car radio sent twanging strains of hillbilly-western across the gull-strewn bay. Two sailors home on leave from the Pacific told fabulous lies of Jap atrocities to a pair of wide-eyed sweethearts. The sailor in front paused to point to a yellow pick-up stopping down the ramp below them at the water’s edge. “Look there: isn’t that old Henry Stamper and his boy Hank? What the hell they got there in back?”)

Dreamily, still staring down at the cave-in, Jonas runs his tongue over the nails in his mouth. He starts to turn back to the house, then stops again, his face running gradually into a puzzled frown. He takes one of the square nails out and holds it in front of his eyes. The nail is rusted. He looks at another nail and finds more rust. One at a time he removes each nail from his mouth and looks at it, studying for a long time the way a slight powder of rust is already splotching the iron like a fungus. And it didn’t rain last night. In fact, it hasn’t rained now in almost two incredible days, that was why he hadn’t bothered tacking the lid back on the nail keg when he finished work the day before.
Yet, rain or no, the nails have rusted. Overnight. The whole keg, come all the way from Pittsburgh, four weeks on the road, bright and shiny as silver dimes . . . rusted overnight . . .

“By golly, you know, it looks like a coffin!” the sailor said.