“Boney,” Henry finally said in a flat voice, “you got any snoose on you?”
Boney’s face brightened. “Surely, surely.” He drew a can from the pocket of his coat. “Here, let me—”
“You give it here.”
He blinked at Henry, then placed the can carefully on the sheet, unopened. Henry picked it up. He began turning it around and around in his pink hand as the thumb laboriously pushed at the lid; a fraction of an inch, turn, another fraction, another turn . . . Hank ached to take the can from his father, quickly screw the lid off, and end this thing, free both himself and his father from an obsession that seemed more and more senseless. But he somehow did not dare move from his hiding place beside the curtain. Not yet. Not until it was finished of its own accord.
The lid popped off. The coarse brown fuzz of tobacco boiled out over the sheet. Henry cursed, then, patiently, with Boney watching motionless, scooped the bulk of the spill back into the tin, replaced the lid, popped it tight between thumb and finger, tossed it into Boney’s lap. . . .
“Much obliged.”
Then swept the remainder into a small heap on the sheet, rolled this into a ball, and placed the wad between his lower lip and his gums. He concentrated a second as he maneuvered the charge into comfortable position, then flapped the grains from the sheet with a victorious flourish. The stained lips broke into a broad grin.
“Much obliged, old fellow, old friend . . . very much obliged.”
Now it seemed it was Boney’s turn to fidget. Henry’s success with the snuff had shaken his complacency and placed the burden of the contest on his humped shoulders. “What do you plan on now, Henry,” he wanted to know, trying to sound matter-of-fact, “now that things have changed?”
“Why, what do you mean, Boney? Just what I been doin’, I imagine.” The old daring confidence returned to Henry’s eyes. “Plan to get back out there with the boys, I imagine, back out in the woods. Lettin’ daylight in the swamp. Bullwhippin’ the brush.” He yawned and drew a long fingernail down the stubble of his neck. “Ah, I ain’t foolin’ myself. I ain’t a pup any more. When you get into your seventies you got to think about slowin’ up, lettin’ the boys do the muley work while you rely on your knowhow and experience. Maybe even get me a chair out there. But, I don’t know, when it comes right down to it—”
“Henry.” Boney could stand it no longer. “You are a fool. Bullwhipping the brush . . . don’t you see you’re the one gettin’ bullwhipped?
You!
Ever since . . . But I
told
you, all along I told you—”
“Ever since what, Boney?” Henry asked pleasantly.
“Since I told you that there is no mortal bein’ capable of—of enduring all alone
this
country! We are in this together! Man . . .
man
has got to—”
“Ever since what, Boney?” Henry still wanted to know.
“What? Ever since I . . . What?”
Henry leaned forward intently. “Since Pa run off and I stuck? Since I survived that winter? Since I built up a business that you said nobody could?”
“I
never
had anything against men developing the land.”
“But
one man
doin’ it? One family? Heh? Heh? When you told us time an’ again we
couldn’t.
A ‘community effort’ is what you always said. God. I heard that pioneer-community-against-the-wilds shit so much the first years my belly was run over with it.”
“It was necessary. It was mortal man’s
only hope
against the untamed elements—”
“Sounds just like your old daddy talkin’.”
“—that we strive together to survive together.”
“I don’t recollect as how I did much
strivin’
together, but I believe I did survive. Even gained a little bit on the side.”
“Look what it’s got you! Loneliness an’ despair.”
“Well, I don’t know about that.”
“Bedridden!” Boney stood from his chair, twisting his hands in his shirtfront. “An arm lost! Dying!”
“I don’t know about that. It maybe winged,
nicked
me a little bit, but you got to expect that.”
Boney started to say more but was stopped by a fit of rage and coughing. When the coughing stopped he took his coat from the back of the chair and stabbed his skeleton arms into the sleeves. “Out of his head with pain.” He tried to dismiss Henry as he walked toward the door. The coughing had injured his throat so his voice squeaked comically. “That’s all. Crazy with pain. And dope. He can’t think reasonable.” He wiped his mouth and stood fingering the smooth buttons of the coat.
“Leavin’, Boney?” Henry inquired amiably.
“Burnin’ up with fever, too, I’d bet.” But he couldn’t walk out the door. Not while out of the corner of his eye he could see that cursed imbecile grin, shellacked with tobacco, that face like the face of a heathen idol shining out against everything he knew to be holy and right, those eyes that had so long needled and irritated and made uncomfortable an existence that would have otherwise been a peaceful stretch of pleasant pessimism. He feared that if he walked out through that door that face might solidify itself in death; that way he would never escape it. . . .
“Well, I’ll see you in the funny-papers, Boney Stokes, Bobby Stokes, sobby little Bobby Stokes . . . you remember that?”
That way not only would he be haunted by it for the rest of his days, but his whole past would be scooped out hollow, his whole life gutted. . . .
“An’ listen, if you run across Hank or Joe Ben, tell ’em I said to get in here an’ bring me up to date on where we stand.”
That way, if he let Henry get the last laugh, his entire world would—“What? Stand? Joe Ben?”
Horrified, Hank watched the opening door stop, pull slowly closed. He saw the stiff, thoughtful pivot of Boney’s turning, and his own realization mirrored there in Boney’s yellowed eyes. “Henry . . . old man, don’t you know?” No wonder Henry had seemed in such phenomenal good spirits; he hadn’t been told. Of course, neither he nor Boney had mentioned it; it simply wasn’t the sort of thing you talked about when visiting a man recovering from a serious—“Old boy?” But that
no one
had told him! “What I mean, Henry . . . hasn’t the doctor or the nurse or someone?”
“What’s got hold of you now, Boney?”
“Or about afterwards? What went on yesterday?”
“I told you nobody has been up to tell me anything.”
And now saw a second realization settle like a soft light over Boney’s whole face. Unconsciously, as Boney moved forward, Hank drifted farther back behind the curtain. Boney seated himself again, lighted up a large pipe, and began to speak in a pity-filled voice. He spoke quickly and confidently, without a hint of his usual cough. Through the tiers of blue smoke Hank watched the final scene of the drama; he had dropped out; he had become a spectator that just happened by for the last act, to sit in the very last row of a darkened balcony unseen and catch lines blown intermittent and disconnected through a drafty theater. He stared down on the two figures with unfocused eyes. He made no effort to concentrate. Without listening, he knew the lines by heart; without looking, he saw the action. A bit player with his part finished, waiting around to see the end, almost bored, almost dozing over familiar lines, until a repeated phrase told him it was drawing to that end.
“Hank did it because he didn’t want . . . to risk anybody else hurt.”
“I don’t think so. . . .”
Bleakly running down as the lights dimmed.
“He did it because . . . he didn’t want to risk anybody.”
“I don’t hardly think so, Henry.”
As the curtain closed, as the echoes stood up to leave: He wouldn’t of done it for any other reason—he didn’t want to have anybody to have to take the risk just for—I guess not, old fellow, because there wasn’t anybody but him left—He did it because—I guess not—because everybody left and he knows he can’t run them logs down by himself—He did it because . . . he finally saw how it was . . . because . . . he finally saw that there wasn’t any sense. Because of rust, of rot. Of push, of squeeze. Because there is really no strength beyond the strength of those around you. Because of weakness. Because of no grit, no grit anywhere at all and labor availeth not. Because all is vanity and vexation of the spirit. Because of that drum on the donkey forever breaking down. Of bruises from springbacks. Of sinus headaches and ingrown toenails. Of rain and the seas are still not full. Because of everything coming so thick and so fast for so long for so very long for finally too long. . . .
“Henry, Hank is nobody’s fool . . . he knows better than.”
Because strength is a joke, a fake.
“He’s a smart boy, Henry, he sees how the land lays . . . it just is not a one-man world, never was . . . no mortal man can long endure . . .”
Because sometimes the only way to keep from losing everything is to give everything up. Because sometimes strength must for the sake of winning give in to—
“My, oh my,” Boney said cheerfully, looking at a big pocket watch, “it’s got late.” He got up, stood up out of his chair again and finished up buttoning his coat. He coughed a little. He took the old man’s hand up from the bed like picking up a rag and he shook it. “I got to be gettin’ home, I guess, Henry,” he says. “Long walk for a man our age, weather like it is”—and then dropped the hand back down. He shook his head. “I hated to be the bearer of the tidings about Joe Ben, Henry. I know how fond you all were of him. I’d as leave tore my tongue out as been the one to tell you. Oh . . . here. I’ll leave this with you. Whyn’t you have the nurse put you some out in a saucer so you can get to it easier? Well. Anthing you want me to bring when I come back? The
Saturday Evening Post?
I got a lot of back issues. Here. Let me sit this TV up on the chest-of-drawers where you can get you a straight bead on her. Might as well ruin the old eyes too, hadn’t we?”
He flicked on the machine and turned to go before it warmed up. He stopped at that door again and looked back at the old man fingering at his nose. Boney’d clean forgot I was in the room. Both of them had.
“Chin up, old fellow,” he said to Henry. “What do you bet we’re still around chewin’ the fat when the rest of these boys have cashed it in. Okay, don’t let me hear about you giving that nurse a hard time, hey? So long. . . .”
And he walked out, strutting like a man with a good ten years of coughing and complaining left in him. I stepped out from where I’d been hid at the foot of the bed and started to say something to the old man, but with the way he looked I didn’t figure it would do a whole lot of good. “Papa,” I started, “you see what happened was—”
“Hm,” he says. “Well anyway,” he says, staring straight ahead at that TV, “anyway I still got . . . a good sense of smell for a nigger so old . . . an’ a man can still lick it he keeps . . . but Hank he . . . but then I woulda thought . . . I suppose we . . . they got that cast on wrong . . .” And on like that, with his talk dipping into his thoughts now and again. He was looking kind of poleaxed. The dope getting to him. But not just that. His whole face is changing, getting calm and peaceful. The muscles under his cheekbones relaxing, letting the grin droop down; the lines between his eyes unraveling like old cotton string. The morphine’s making him drowsy. . . . Then the eyes themselves went dull, like whoever was in there, like whatever was still left inside there, just went away through a door, leaving the empty body behind pumping air and blood and the empty face propped up there in the blue flicker of that television, like an old suit of threadbare skin somebody’d tossed onto a bed. . . .)
The lights flutter. The room drones as though the air is filled with big, drowsy flies. Muffled . . . muted . . . inurned between deep cotton-soft sheathings of morphine, the old man rolls his head and parts the sheath enough to look up a long spiraling of redwood columns supporting a high deep-green dome. A woodpecker hammers the air unseen; a jay screeches brightly across, pulling the eye around
splash
blue! “Wheeoo, lookit that!” to a splintering sight of the May Day sun trying to shine through the needles. “What a day! Man alive.”
Pollen hangs in the windless still, solidifying the one yellow-bright beam from treetop to the ground . . .
“Haw! Look yonder . . .”
where a twirl of butterflies white and busy as stars flush from a patch of sheep sorrel at his tread, where no other white man’s foot has ever trod before.
“Maybe no man’s foot of
no
color ever before!”
He looks up one of the columns and spits on his hands.
“Okay, stan’ clear. What d’ya think? I’m a bear got to hibernate? Let me have some bullyjacks. We got things to do. Cats to kill, eggs to hatch, trees to chop, an’ ground to scratch . . . stan’ clear, dammit!”
“Calm . . . calm does it, Mr. Stamper. We’re calm and peaceful now.”
“Who says I couldn’t? Just you stand outa my way. Never you mind. Hum, man alive . . . Let me clear my ears a second.”
And no other white man’s ax has ever sounded.
“Oh. The springboard. Oh, the misery whip.”
Then the sun is brushed momentarily aside by the gleaming green sweep of a thousand thousand rushing needles.
“Wham! Right down the old slot.” That was May, in the twenties, when redwoods still stood.
Above, the dome is broken. The sun springs back, flooding light down over a stretch of ground unlighted for a thousand thousand years.
“Jees H. Christ, what
time
must it gettin’ to be? Whoa. Just a minute now, what you think you’re doin’?” Scrappy, a little kitten, white and purply blue, just like a chicken gizzard, you know, useta scratch the bejesus outa—“Ouch?
Now
what are you—”
“There we go now. It’s all over. Calm and peaceful, now. It’s done. Rest now. Calm and peaceful . . .”
Ray and Rod are setting up on the bandstand when Evenwrite arrives at the Snag. The taut tuning of amplified steel stretches out into the darkening street. Andy, sitting in the jeep, hears it and takes his harmonica from his pocket, beats it against his thigh to remove the lint and sunflower-seed shells, and blows softly into it; he has decided he’d as leave wait and ride back up with Hank and Viv as hitchhike.