After lunch that Sunday me and Joby took the guns and hiked to the slough to see if any of the geese had lit in down there. I got a load of widgeons, but that was all we saw. We got back to the house about four, and when I rounded the barn and looked across at the landing I could barely believe my eyes: there was cars packed over there thicker than I’d seen in years and more coming. Most of the Stampers within fifty miles showed up, whether they were connected with the lumber end of the business or not. I was surprised to see so many turn out on such short notice, and a lot more surprised than that at what a friendly, easy-going mood they were all in. That’s what really floored me! I knew they must have a notion of some kind what I was up to, but they all acted like maybe they was tired of mill work anyhow and looking forward to a little stretch out in the good old fresh air.
Even the weather took a turn toward an easy-going mood: the rain eased down a lot, even though the mercury had come up a good deal since morning. And the sun was showing through now and then the way it will sometimes at the start of the wet season, shooting all of a sudden between two clouds so the hills sparkle like they was sprinkled with sugar. By dark the rain had quit and I could occasionally make out a piece of the soggy moon. The wind laid down and bugs started showing up with the people. Nobody asked what the meeting was all about, so I didn’t say anything. We all just hung around on the porch while people showed up, talking hounds and recalling great hunting nights of the past and whittling white strips from the kindling near the woodpile; the ones that didn’t whittle stood at the screened wall watching the children spin each other around on the tire swing Joe’d made in the toolshed out of the rain. I went out and plugged in the big three-hundred-watt porch light, and the men standing on the bank near the incline cast shadows all the way across the river against that cut stone embankment above the railroad. Every time another car full of new arrivals swung onto the gravel across the way those shadows would kind of fold over it to see who it was just showed up.
“It’s Jimmy! Ye gods if it ain’t,” the shadows would holler across. “Jimmy, oh Jimmy . . . that you?”
A voice would come floating back. “Somebody gonna come over here an’ tote me across, or do I wade?”
Then one of us would get up and ramble down the planks to the boat and pick up the newcomer, bring him back to stand around the porch to talk hounds and whittle and guess at the next car that stopped.
“Who you think this time? Martin? Hey, Martin, that you?”
I just stood around enjoying it. The voices stretched like the shadows, becoming huge across the water as it got darker. It made me think of the way it used to be on Christmas and other get-togethers when us kids would sit in the porch windows and listen to the men laugh and lie and holler across the water. Back when the shadows were always big and the mood always seemed easy-going.
They kept coming. Everybody was all grins and greeting. Nobody asked what was up, and I didn’t volunteer the information. I even held off starting the meeting, waiting to see if any stragglers were showing up, I told people, but really because I hated to get around to business and foul up the whole evening. But after a while it got me so curious I went upstairs to ask Viv what she might of said over the phone to get so many people out in such a good mood.
The kid was there, laying belly down on her couch, stripped to the waist; Viv was working at the big cloudy blue welt below his right shoulderblade where he’d got tagged a day or so before. (
The room is hot, full of the stink of wintergreen. It reminds me of a locker room. . . . “How’s the back, bub?” I say.
“I don’t know,” he says. His cheek is on his arm with his face turned toward the wall. “Better, I guess. Until Viv began her ministerings and massagings I had given it up as a complete loss; now I think I might salvage the spine.”
“Well,” I tell him, “you keep on the bounce out there you won’t be gettin’ bopped by springbacks.” He don’t answer. I can’t think of anything else to say for a minute. The room is tight and strange. “Tomorrow . . . anyway, bub, tomorrow we’ll have a good number of extra men up there, so you can
take it pretty easy. You can maybe do some driving till it quits paining,” I say. I unbutton my jacket, wondering why is it always so hot in a room when he’s in it? Maybe he’s got thin blood . . .
)
I walked over and asked Viv, “Chicken, can you remember what you said when you called the kinfolks last night?” She looked up at me, lifting her eyebrows the way she would when something puzzled her, made her eyes look big enough to fall into. (
She’s got on Levis and the green and yellow striped jersey pullover that someway puts me in mind of bam trees on a sunny fall morning. Her hands are red from the analgesic. Lee’s back is red . . .
)
“Golly, hon,” she said, thinking. “I can’t remember exactly. Just what you asked me to say, I think: that they all should come out about suppertime because you had a few things to go over since this breakdown. And to check about the anti-freeze . . .”
“How many calls did you make?”
“Oh, four or five, I guess. Orland’s wife . . . Netty . . . Lou . . . and asked them to make some calls. Why?”
“If you’d been downstairs in the last hour you’d know why; we got every shirttail cousin in the country down there. And all of them acting like it was their personal birthday party they were attending.”
“Every
one?
” That got her. She raised up off her knees, wiping hair off her forehead with the back of her arm. “I didn’t get groceries enough for more than fifteen or so . . . how many do you mean by every one?”
“A good forty or fifty, counting kids.”
This really brought her to her tiptoes. “
Fifty?
” she said. “We’ve never had fifty people, even on Christmas!”
“I know, but we do now. And all of them happy as clams—
that’s
what I can’t explain . . .”
Then Lee said, “I can explain it.”
“Explain which?” I asked him. “How come they’re all here? Or how come they’re all so happy?”
“Both.” He was laid face to the wall on that day-bed affair of Viv’s. (
He scratches the wall with his fingernail.
) “It’s because,” he said, without turning over, “they are all under the impression that you have sold the business—”
“
Sold it?
”
“That’s right,” he went on, “and as stockholders—”
“
Stock
holders?”
“Yeah, Hank. Didn’t you tell me that you made each man that ever worked for you a stockholder? In order to—”
“But
sold
it? What a minute. What are you talking about
sold
it? Where did you hear about this?”
“Grissoms’. Last night.”
(
He never moves, laying there turned to the wall. I can’t see his face. His voice sounds like it could come from any place in the room.
) “What the hell are you talking about!” (
I want to grab him and roll him toward me so bad my hands are shaking.
)
“If I remember correctly,” he said, “Floyd Evenwrite and this other cat—”
“Draeger?”
“Draeger, yes, came up in a boat to visit you last night with—”
“Nobody was out here last night! Wait—”
“—with an offer to purchase the whole business with union funds, and the help of some of the local businessmen—”
“Wait. Hell’s bells, I see now . . . them
bastards!
”
“—and that you drove a hard bargain and got a good price.”
“Them snake-bellied
bastards!
Yeah, I see now. This Draeger musta thought of this—Evenwrite ain’t got the brains. . . .” I stormed around a while, pretty hacked off, then turned back to where Lee was still laid facing the wall. For some reason this hacked me off more than ever. (
He hasn’t so much as twitched a muscle. Damn. Viv’s got it so hot in here with the electric heater humming. And that smell of wintergreen. Damn. I want to throw ice water on him. I want him to yell, get excited, wake up, come to life. . . .
) “Why in the shit,” I said to him, “didn’t you let me know about this before
now?
”
“I guess,” he said, “I presumed that if you
had
sold the business you would probably already know about it.”
“But what if I hadn’t?”
“You would be just as apt, it seems to me, to know that, too.”
“Hell’s
bells!
”
Viv reached out and touched my arm. “What’s the trouble, honey?” she asked. The only thing I could say was “Hell’s tinkling
bells!
” and stormed around the room some more. What could I tell her? (
Lee is turned to the wall, tracing the edge of his shadow with a matchstick. I don’t know.
) What could I tell any of them? “What is it, honey?” Viv asked again. “Nothing,” I said. “Nothing. . . . But just what does a man
think
of somebody who’s supposed to be giving him a big red apple and puts him to work pruning the apple tree
instead?
Huh?” I walked to the door and opened it a little and listened, then I came back. (
I can hear them down there waiting. It’s so hot in here, and that smell . . .
) “Huh? How would you feel toward somebody who’d pull such a dirty switch on you?” (
I just don’t know. He just lies there. That electric heater purring.
) “No, Evenwrite don’t have the sense for something like this. . . .” (
I just want to wake him up. It’s so mothering hot . . .
) It’s this Draeger. . . .” (
Or I want to lie down myself. I don’t know.
)
Finally, after I’d fumed and fretted enough, I did what I’d known from the first I was going to do: I went out in the hall to the stairwell and hollered for Joe Ben to come up a minute.
“Whatsay?” I heard him holler from the back porch where the kids were.
“Never mind whatsay, just get up here!”
I met him out in the hall and we went into the office. He was eating the pumpkin seeds hollowed from the jack-o’-lantern, all big-eyed and curious about me calling him. He was wearing a necktie for the occasion, a big blue silk affair he’d had since high school with a hand-painted picture of a duck on it that he was real proud of; the tie was all twisted around and two buttons were off his white shirt from roughhousing outside with the kids. Just to look at him, standing there in that godawful tie and a pumpkin-seed hull stuck to his lip and his hand in his shirt front fingering his navel, it tickled me so that it took the edge off my mood. And anyhow, now that I had him up here, what was it I wanted from him? I don’t exactly know what good I thought he could do with that bunch down there, but now that he was there I could see what good he could do me.
“You know,” I said to him, “when we seen them cars, an’ I told you that I was damned if I was able to understand such a turn-out?”
He nodded. “Yeah; an’ I told you that it was the
ee-on
charge the atmosphere gets when it’s cold, puts people in a better mood.”
“Ion,” I corrected him, and went on. “But I don’t think that fully accounts for it.” I walked over to the desk and got out the pint I keep in there for bookkeeping work. “No, not completely,” I said.
“Yeah? What else?”
I took a little sip and offered him the bottle. “They’re all out here because they think I sold the business,” I told him. I told him what Lee’d said and how I figured Floyd Evenwrite and this other dude started the rumor. “So all those friendly folks of ours down there think they are in on the pie-slicing;
that’s
why the whole afternoon’s been smiles and shoulder-slapping, not from ions.”
“But what for?” he asked, blinking his eyes. “I mean what for would Evenwrite—?”
“Evenwrite wouldn’t,” I said. “Evenwrite wouldn’t have the sense. Evenwrite is more inclined toward planting spikes than planting rumors. No; it was this Draeger.”
“Uh-
huh
,” he said, punching his fist in his palm and nodding; then he went to blinking again. “But I
still
don’t see what they was hoping to get outa that . . . ?”
I took back the bottle, in as he wasn’t using it. I had me another sip and screwed the lid back on. “Just more pressure,” I said. “Like a squeeze play . . . a way to make me look more the villain than before, even to my own folks.”
He scratched at his bellybutton some more, thinking about that. “All right. I can see that, yeah; I can see how it ain’t gonna make some of the boys none too happy to be told they’re gonna be moved to work the woods when they was thinking the work was all over . . . and how some of them might hardtime you a little. . . . But I just don’t see for the
life
of me what good Evenwrite and Draeger thought it would do
them.
”
I grinned at him while I put the bottle back in the drawer and slapped it shut. “Why, by gosh, I don’t see neither, Joby,” I said and wiped off my mouth. “Now that you mention it. No good at all. So let’s get on downstairs and see how we stand up under a little hardtiming. Let’s get on down there and
show
those dirteaters who’s one of the Ten Toughest Hombres This Side of the Rockies.”
He followed me out of the room, still shaking his head. Good old Joby. Why anybody, dirteaters or no, would have to be showed something so obvious was way beyond him. (
That heater is still humming when I go past the door. Viv is gone, down in the kitchen helping Jan. But Lee is still there. He sits there on that day-bed couch with that thermometer hanging out of his mouth, cleaning his glasses on one of her silk hankies, looking at me with that innocent look nearsighted people have with their glasses off. . . .
)
None of the folks did handsprings over the news, but Orland and his wife was the only ones that really hardtimed me. The rest just moped around smoking cigarettes while Orland claimed he was damned if he could see where I got off trying to dictate to the whole
county
, and his wife kept yapping That’s right! That’s right! like a hysterical lap dog.