The room is hard and dark, patrolled by the icy air circulating through the jammed window . . .
I was about to tap on the boy’s door when I heard him rustling around, so I tiptoed back down to get shaved up for breakfast, thinking back on the first time cousin John came out from Idaho to work for us and Henry went in to root him out in the morning. John’d looked pretty bad when he arrived the night before—claimed he’d swum his way across country on a great river of alcohol—so we’d put him to bed before the rest of us, hoping he’d grow back together a little bit with a good snooze. When Henry opened the door that morning and went in, John reared up in bed like somebody’d shot off a cannon, blinking his eyes and pawing at the air in front of him. “What is it?” he said. “What is it?” The old man told him it was three-thirty was what it was. “Jesus Christ,” John said. “Jesus Christ, you better get some sleep, Henry. Didn’t you tell me we got a hard day’s work comin’ up tomorrow?” And flopped right back down. It was a good three days before we got John cooked dry enough to look human, and he still didn’t do us much good. He just moaned and groaned around. That was before any of us realized we were trying to run him without his fuel; just like his truck ran better
with
Diesel than without, John functioned better with a tankful of Seven Crown. One of the reasons for his drinking, Henry said, was John’s mama used to make the whole family get down on their knees and pray like fury every time John’s daddy—Henry’s first cousin, I believe—would come home boozed, and John never quite got it straight that they weren’t thanking the good Lord for his blessing same as they did at the supper table. So according to Henry booze come to be sort of
holy
to him and with faith like that John grew up religious as a deacon.
The bed is a frozen shell, surrounding one kernel of warmth from which you dare not move . . .
John was a good worker. A lot more drunks are good workers than people think. Maybe they need it like a medicine just like Jan every day needs to take her thyroid pills to keep even-keeled. I remember one day when we had to get John to drive the pick-up to town—the day old Henry busted himself up slipping off that mossy rock and Joe and me had to be in back with him to keep him from bouncing and rearing around and jumping out. John, I remember, was the only choice handy for driver. I thought he was going okay, but all the ride in Henry keeps hollering, “I’ll
walk
to town rather’n ride with that damn ginhead. I’ll walk, goddammit, I’ll
walk—
” like it’d be easier’n riding . . .)
You try to shrink further inside that warm center, but the booming of old Henry’s cast coming down the hall rips through your dark armor of sleep like a cannonball. “Wake it an’ shake it!” comes the war cry following the initial knuckled assault on the door: Boom boom boom! then:
“Wake it an’ shake it! Wag it an’ shag it! If you can’t carry it roll it out an’ drag it hee hee hee.”
Followed by more loud booming on the door and a high, malicious giggle.
“Give me some whistlepunks! Give me some bully jacks! Give me some fallers an’ chasers an’ chokersetters! Gaw
damn
; I can’t run a show without me some loggers!”
Gaw
damn
; I can’t sleep without me some quiet!
The door thundered again.
Wham wham wham
. “Boy?” The house shuddered. “Boy! Le’s get out there an’ take the shade offn the ground. Le’s get some daylight in that swamp.”
Daylight is right, I mumbled into the pillow. Still black as the holes of hell, and at any moment the senile old imbecile was going to proceed to fire the whole house as a precaution against slugabeds who might still harbor the ridiculous notion that the dead of night was meant for sleeping. In that first reawakening chaos a quick glance about at the morning proved as insufficient as it had the night before. For once again I was able to establish the
where
but not the
when
. Certain facts were apparent: dark; cold; thundering boots; quilts; pillow; light under the door—the materials of reality—but I could not pin these materials down in time. And the raw materials of reality without that glue of time are materials adrift and reality is as meaningless as the balsa parts of a model airplane scattered to the wind. . . . I am in my old room, yes, in the dark, certainly, and it is cold, obviously, but what
time
is it?
“Nearly four, son.”
Whomp whomp whomp!
But I mean what
time?
What year is it? I tried to recount the facts of my arrival but they had come unglued during the night and were too far blown in the dark to be readily recovered. In fact, it took at least the first two weeks of my stay to gather all the balsawood pieces—longer than that to glue them into any order again.
“Say, son, what are you doin’ in there?”
Push-ups. My Latin assignment. The Blue Tango.
“You woke at
all?
”
I nodded loudly.
“Then what are you a-
doin’?
”
I managed to mumble something that must have satisfied as well as amused him because he rumbled on off down the hallway, snickering with a diabolic glee, but after he was gone I couldn’t get back to my warm sleep because it dawned on me that I seriously was expected to rise and go outside in that frozen night, and
work!
And with this realization I repeated his question to myself: What
am
I doing here? I had managed up until then to avoid this problem by treating it facetiously, as demonstrated above, or by passing it off with vague fantasies about heroically measuring up or righteously pulling down. But now that I was being confronted by the demon work—and at four in the morning—and could no longer procrastinate answering, which was it to be? I was too sleepy to make a choice and I had about decided to table the question for the time and sleep on it when the old poltergeist came thundering back into my skull to make the choice for me.
“Get up, boy! Wake it an’ shake it. It’s time to get to makin’ your mark in the world.”
Lee rises abruptly from bed . . .
And, rather than risk his return, I struggled to my feet
he stares grimly at the door, his cheeks burning from the comment,
thinking, Yeah, Leland. If you’re going to measure up it’s time to get to measurin’.
I dressed and stumbled downstairs to the kitchen, where my fellow inmates were all elbows and ears over a checkered tablecloth covered with eggs and pancakes. They greeted me and bade me sit and join them in at least the last quarter of the meal. “Been waitin’ for you, Lee,” Joe Ben announced with a tangled grin, “just like one dog waits on another.”
The kitchen was calmer than it had been the previous night:
three of Joe’s children were sitting on the woodbox beside the stove, engrossed in a comic book; Joe’s wife was scraping the griddle with a wire brush; old Henry was one-handing his food skillfully into a set of false teeth; Hank was licking syrup from his fingers . . . a nice American breakfast.
Lee swallows hard and pulls out a chair, hoping it is meant for him.
But I noticed Hank’s elusive woods nymph was still not present. “What about this wife of yours, Hank; hasn’t Henry trained her to wake it and shake it?”
He sits, stiff-backed and apprehensive, hoping he makes a better impression than he did at supper . . .
Hank seemed preoccupied; he hesitated answering and old Henry jumped into the breach. His face lifted from his plate like a cast-iron lid being raised. “Ya mean
Viv?
Why lordymercy, Leland, we kick her outa bed
hours
before the rest of us males stir a finger. Just like we do little Jan, here. Why, Viv, she’s
up
, cooked this
breakfast
, mopped the
floor
, shelled a bushel of peas an’ made us all a
nosebag
already. You bet; I taught this boy how to
deal
with women, goddammit.” He snickered, lifting his cup, and a mouthful of pancake disappeared before a torrent of coffee; he exhaled loudly and craned backward to peer around the kitchen for the missing girl. The yolk of egg wobbled in the center of his forehead like a third eye. “I reckon she’s someplace here if you want to meet her . . .”
“Outside,” Hank answered moodily, “seein’ to the cow.”
“Why ain’t she in here eatin’ with us?”
“Damned if I know.” He shrugged, then turned vigorous attention once more to his food.
The food platter was empty. Jan offered to prepare me a new batch of cakes, but old Henry insisted time was far too much at a premium and said I could get by this morning on corn flakes. “Learn ya to hop right up, by god.”
“Some stuff in the oven,” Hank said. “I stuck a pie tin of cakes in to keep warm for him, figuring he might not make the first round.”
He took the pan from the black mouth of the oven and scraped the contents onto a plate for me as one might scrape leftovers to a pet. I thanked him for saving me from a fate of cold corn flakes, and cursed him silently for condescendingly assuming I would be late.
And again feels that flame redden his cheeks
. The meal continued, if not in silence, at least without benefit of words. I glanced at brother Hank a time or two, but he seemed to have forgotten my presence in the pursuit of some more lofty contemplation. . . .
(. . . of course, John made the drive okay, and the old man didn’t walk to the hospital like he threatened, but it turns out that that ain’t the end of it. By no means. When Joby and me go back to the clinic a day or so later, there John is, sitting on the front steps with his hands dangling between his knees, blinking up at us red-eyed as a white hat. “I heard Henry’s goin’ home today,” he says. “That’s so,” I tell him. “He didn’t break so much as he just knocked it outa line. They got him in a lot of plaster but the doc says it’s mostly to keep him from rearin’ around.” John stands up and whops his palms on his britches. “Well, I’m ready whenever you are,” he says, and I see that he’s someway got the notion that Joe and me’d have to ride in back again to hold the old man down. Now, I got no desire whatsoever to ride in back again while Henry raves about John’s driving, so before I think I say to him, “John, one of us’ll probably be in better shape to drive; maybe you oughta sit this one out.” Never for one instant imagining he’d be put out about it. But he is and bad. He bats his eyes at me three or four times while they run full of water and says, “Just thought I’d lend a hand,” and goes shuffling off around the corner of the hospital, cut clean to the bone. . . .)
The absence of talk fills Lee with almost uncontrollable nervousness. The silence is directed specifically at him, like a spotlight on a suspect in a police line-up, waiting. He recalls an old joke: “So you studied four years of trigonometry, eh? Okay, then, say something to me in Trigonom.” They’re waiting for
me to say something to justify all those years of study. Something worthwhile . . .
I concluded work on my pancakes and was in the process of finishing a cup of coffee when old Henry struck the table with an egg-dripping knife. “Hold on!” he demanded. “Hold on a minute.” He squinted fiercely at me, leaning so close I could see where the vain old peacock had oiled and combed his bushy white eyebrows. “How big are your feet?” Puzzled and a little worried, I swallowed and managed to stutter out my shoe size. “We got to get you some corks.”
He rose and rocked from the kitchen to search out the corks I obviously lacked; I sank back to my chair, overcome by the reprieve. “For a moment there,” I said, laughing, “I thought he had in mind to cut my feet to fit the shoe. That or stretch them. A sort of pediatric Procrustean bed.”
“What’s that?” Joe Ben was interested. “A sort of what kind of bed?”
“Procrustean bed. Procrustes? The Greek bed freak? Who Theseus did in?”
Joe shook his head in awe, eyes agog and mouth hanging open as mine once must have hung for the tales of the north woods’ legendary denizens, and I ended up giving a capsule lecture on Greek mythology. Joe Ben sat fascinated; his kids were drawn up from their comic; even his little doughball of a wife came away from her chores at the stove to listen;
Lee talks rapidly, his nervousness at first giving his speech an air of supercilious snobbery; but as he becomes aware of his audience’s genuine interest the tone changes to enthusiasm. He feels surprised and slightly proud that he can make an actual contribution to talk around the table. This gives him a simple eloquence that he has never—even in his dreams of teaching—imagined himself capable of. The old myth feels fresh in his mouth, pure, then he glances to the side to see if his half-brother is as enchanted as Joe and his family
—but when I looked to see if brother Hank was picking up on my mastery of mythology, I saw that he was staring with bored vacancy at his dirty plate as though all this were either old hat to him or just total nonsense—
and his inspired lecture runs down like a punctured bagpipe . . .
(So when John don’t show up for work the next day I figured I better head over and smooth him out. Joe says it might be tough because he was truly hurt, and Jan tells me be sure—ifn I
do
smooth him out—not to say something to hack him off again. I tell them not to sweat it, that “I never saw nobody you couldn’t bring around with a little whisky, nor couldn’t keep brought around with a little doin’.” I was right, too, that time; I found John sulled in his shack like a whupped dog, but the promise of a whole case of Seven Crown brought him right to the top. I wish it was always that easy. I knew it was gonna take more than whisky to smooth over the sull I’d put on Viv last night, and that the way I was feeling that morning, it was going to take some pretty fancy doing to follow Jan’s advice about finding something safe to talk to Lee about. During breakfast I tell him a little about corks, but it’s just make-work talk, about how to grease them and how wet shoes take to grease better’n dry shoes and how the best application is a mixture of bear fat, mutton tallow, and neat’s-foot oil. And then Joe Ben claims it’s just as good to paint the whole boot with heavy floor paint and me and Joe get to arguing on
that
old bit so I don’t say any more to Lee. I wasn’t sure he was listening anyhow . . .)