Voices in the Night (26 page)

L
et me tell you a story about Paul Bunyan. You’ve all heard a tale or two about Paul Bunyan. You know the kind of man Paul Bunyan was. He could out-run out-jump out-drink and out-shoot you. He could out-cuss out-brag out-punch and out-piss you. He could swing that ax of his so hard, the wind it made would blow the needles clean off all the pine trees in ten acres of good timberland. Those pine needles, they’d come raining down for days. There never was a logging man could swing an ax like Paul Bunyan. Work! Why, he’d leap out of his bunk before the sun was up, jump into his greased boots, and finish buttoning up his mackinaw before his eyes were done opening. He’d step outside and pluck up a pine tree to brush his beard. Comb his hair with a porcupine. Then over to the cookhouse while his men were snoring away like a plague of mosquitoes and Hot Biscuit Slim standing there waiting at the griddle. You’ve heard about Paul Bunyan’s griddle. That griddle was so big that to grease it you had to have three men skating on it with chunks of bacon fat strapped to their boot soles. Paul Bunyan would swallow those hotcakes whole.
He’d wash them down with a keg of molasses. He’d swallow so many hotcakes that if you laid them end to end they’d stretch clear across Minnesota, and that was before he got serious. After that he’d drink down two kettles of black coffee and a barrel of cider and head out to the woods. You never saw a man like Paul Bunyan for laying down timber. He’d swing that ax so hard the blade would cut through a white pine high as a hill and wide as a barn and just keep going. Time his swing was done he’d have two hundred trees laid out at his feet. He could log off twenty acres of good pine forest before lunch. Meantime the swampers would be cutting trails to the riverbanks, the limbers’d be chopping off branches, the sawyers cutting the pines into hundred-foot logs, and the hitchers hitching the logs to Babe the Blue Ox, who’d snake them over the trails to the riverbank landings. A forest never did stand a chance against Paul Bunyan. You know what they say about North Dakota. Used to be all timber till Paul and his shanty boys came by. They cut their way from Maine to Michigan and from Michigan to Wisconsin and from Wisconsin clear on over to Minnesota. They sawed their way from Minnesota through both Dakotas and on into Montana, swamping and chopping and limbing like men on fire. There never was anything like it. You know all that. You’ve heard the stories. But there’s one story you might not have heard. You might not have heard the one about Paul Bunyan’s brother.

Paul Bunyan never talked about his brother, and no wonder. That do-nothing dreamer drove Paul wild. Just the look of him was enough to set a logging man’s teeth on edge. He had Paul’s height all right, but that was all he had. He was the skinniest man alive enough to move. He was so skinny the sun couldn’t figure out how to lay down
his shadow and gave up trying. He was so skinny and scrawny that when he turned sideways all you could see was the end of his nose. He was a slump-shouldered knob-kneed stick-shanked droop-reared string-necked pole-armed shuffling husk of a man, with shambly shovel-feet that went in two different directions. His shoulders were so narrow he had to loop his red suspenders around his scraggy neck to keep his saggy pants from falling off. His knees were so knobby, when he walked it sounded like cookhouse spoons banging in tin bowls. But worse than the broomsticky look of him, this poor excuse for a mother’s son was so lie-around lazy he made a dead dog look lively. He’d get up so late in the day it was time to go back to bed again. And what did this drowsy loafer like to do when he dragged himself out of bed slower than a log rolling uphill? Not one thing. He was so lazy it took him two days just to scratch the side of his head. He was so dawdly it took him six days just to finish a yawn. He was so loafy that when he blinked his eyes during a lightning storm, by the time he unblinked them the sun was shining. This spindly splintery slivery slip of a half-dead half-man didn’t eat enough in two days to feed a starving spider. If he found an old green pea at the back of a cupboard he’d cut it up into seven pieces and have enough dinner to last a week. If he found a crumb on the table he’d break it in half and wonder which half to have for lunch. And when he wasn’t spending his time eating nothing and doing less, you’d find this skin-and-bonesman bent over some book like a hungry man leaning over a haunch of venison. Books! Why, you’ve never seen such a heap of books as that string-bean snooze-man had. There were books in the cupboards and books spilling out of the sink. There were slippery stacks of books on chair seats and books on the bedcovers and piles of books sticking up so wobbly high you couldn’t see out the windows. You couldn’t walk in that house without books falling down around you like shot ducks. And when he was done blinking over his books, do you think that slumpy dozer would rouse himself to do a decent
day’s work? Not likely. Next thing you knew, he’d be taking a walk in the woods with his hands in his pockets just as cool as you please or sitting under a tree staring off at a sunbeam on a tree root or a moonbeam on a pond. If you asked him what in thunderation was he doing sitting under that tree, he’d look at you like maybe he’d seen a human being before but couldn’t be sure of it just yet. Then he’d say: Just dreaming. Dreaming! That James Bunyan never drank whiskey, never put a plug of Starr tobacco in his cheek, never spat a sweet stream of tobacco juice over the rail of a porch, never shot a possum or cut open a rabbit or skinned a deer. He didn’t know a pike pole from an ax helve. He couldn’t tell you how to shoe a draft horse or fix a split spoke in a wagon wheel. And yet this slope-backed dreamer, this walking cornstalk, this drift-about bone-bag and slouchy idler was brother to Paul Bunyan, who could tie a rope around a twisty river and straighten it out with one mighty pull.

Now, whatever you may say about Paul Bunyan, with his strut and his swagger and his great blue ox that measured forty-two ax handles and a plug of tobacco between the eyes, there was no denying he had his share of family feeling. Paul Bunyan felt duty-bound to visit that no-work all-play brother of his twice a year. That was once after the spring drive when the men rode the logs downriver to the mill and once near the start of the fall season. James Bunyan lived in a run-down house in the middle of whatever was left of the Northeast Woods, up in Maine. Paul would leave things in the hands of Johnny Inkslinger or Little Meery and go on over to the stable and give Babe the Blue Ox a good tickle behind his ears. Then he’d shoulder his ax and head out east. He’d start out fast with those mighty strides of his, one foot splashing down in the middle of Lake Michigan and the
other making waves on the shore of Lake Huron, but the closer he got to Maine the slower he moved, cause the last man on earth he wanted to see was that leave-me-be brother of his. Well now, on this visit that I’m going to tell you about, he arrived on a fine September afternoon with the sun shining and the birds chirp-chirping and not a cloud in the sky. He found that joke of a brother of his flat on his back in bed just opening his eyes to take a look around. So there was James Bunyan lying there looking up at his brother Paul standing over him like the biggest pine tree you ever saw, and there was Paul Bunyan looking down at his brother James lying there like a long piece of rope nobody had any use for, and each one thinking he’d rather be standing up to his neck in a swamp with the rain coming down and the water rising than be there looking each other over like two roosters in a henhouse. Not a one of them could think of anything to say. How’s Ma. How’s Pa. That’s good. Paul was just standing there fidgeting and squidgeting and eyeing the books and the apple cores lying all over the bedcovers and a boot on the chair and a shirtsleeve sticking out from under the bed, and he’s burning for his neat bunkhouse with the rows of bunks against the walls and the washbowls with their pitchers all in a row and the boots at the bottoms of the beds. You get up now, Paul says, and I’ll find somethin to eat. But in the kitchen all he could find was the other boot in the sink, a raccoon on the table, and nothing to eat but a bunch of dried-out berries and a jug of sour cider. In the front room his brother and him sat down to talk, but there was no more to talk about than there ever was. Paul told him about the spring drive down the river when Febold Feboldson fell off a log and was picked out of the rapids by the hook of a peavey, and he told him about the good timber to be had out in Oregon, and James listened with a look on his face like a man who can’t make up his mind whether to close his eyes and take a quick nap or open his mouth and take a slow yawn. The more Paul talked, the more James said nothing, till Paul couldn’t stand it no more and said I don’t see how a man can
live like this and James said It suits me fine and before you know it Paul was shouting Why don’t you make somethin of yourself instead of lyin around all day like a dog doin nothin and James was saying I’d rather lie around all day like a dog doing nothing than spend my time killing off good trees that weren’t doing anybody a bit of harm and that got Paul so mad he said I can out-run out-jump out-drink and out-shoot you and I can out-chop out-cut out-saw and out-swamp you and James said Maybe you can out-run out-jump out-drink and out-shoot me and maybe you can out-roar out-scream out-howl and out-shout me but there’s one thing you can never do not if you live five hundred years and that’s out-sleep me. Well now, Paul had never heard words the like of that coming out of his brother’s mouth before. And when Paul heard those words coming out of his brother’s mouth like a swarm of angry bees he didn’t know whether to laugh till he cried at the sight of his bony brother challenging him like a man with muscle on him or cry till he laughed at the thought of himself Paul Bunyan taking up a challenge thrown out by that bloodless no-man brother of his. Then he said I can out-bash out-gash out-mash and out-smash you and there’s one other thing I can do more than anyone ever can and that’s out-sleep you. So that was how the Great Sleeping Contest got its start.

Well now, first thing Paul Bunyan did when he got back to camp was step into his bunkhouse and give a good look at his bed. That bed of his was so long that when it was morning at one end it was midnight at the other. That bed of his was so wide, Johnny Inkslinger once reached the middle of it riding a fast horse all day. Paul Bunyan took a look at that bed and knew it wasn’t a bad bed as beds go, a little cramped maybe, good enough to lie down in for thirty-nine winks
before you jumped back to work, but there were bunks all up and down the other wall with men snoring and grunting and talking in their sleep, and sometimes old Babe would stick his head in through a bunkhouse window and lick Paul awake. What he needed was a bed set off by itself somewhere, a bed where a man could settle in for a good long sleep and turn over any which way he pleased and not wake himself up. The more he thought about it, the more he knew what he had to do. So he hitched up Babe to a supply wagon and headed out to Iowa. You know what they say about Iowa. In Iowa the corn grows so tall it takes one man to see halfway up the stalk and another man to see the rest of the way. In Iowa the corn grows so tall you find hawks and eagles building nests up near the top. They say those Iowa cornstalks grow so wide, the farmers have to hire loggers from the Michigan woods to chop everything down and haul it all off to the silos. They say there’s so much corn growing in Iowa, if you want to lift up your arm to scratch your nose you have to cross over into Nebraska. Now, what Paul did was this. He hired himself out to harvest half the corn in Iowa. He and big Babe tramped right into the middle of that Iowa corn. Paul swung his ax and stalks began falling so fast and hard the ears popped right out of the husks and landed smack in the wagon. Paul hauled the ears over to the silos and loaded up the stalks in the wagon till the sides creaked with the weight of it. He spit out some tobacco juice and headed out of Iowa by way of Nebraska and then Colorado and made it down to Arizona before the tobacco juice hit the ground. He went on over to the Grand Canyon and looked down into it. You know the story of the Grand Canyon. That was back when Paul Bunyan was traveling west and dragged his peavey behind him. The hook of the peavey is what dug up that canyon. Now, what Paul did there on the rim was this. He tipped his wagon over and watched those cornstalks go crashing down. The cornstalks spread out over the canyon bottom and rose halfway up the cliffs. Paul liked what he saw but he wasn’t done yet, not by a long shot.
That layer of cornstalks made a pretty good mattress for a man of his size, but it was scratchy as a pack of alley cats. He stood on the rim of the canyon looking down and thinking hard. Just then a big flock of geese came flying over and Paul got himself an idea. He sucked in his breath till his chest looked like a mainsail in a storm. He raised his face to the sky and blew so hard you could see the sun flicker and almost go out. That big breath of his blew all the feathers off those geese. The feathers came floating down nice and soft and settled over the cornstalks. When another flock flew by, Paul puffed himself up and gave another blow. He kept blowing feathers off so many geese, by the time he was done he had himself a thick cover of feathers laying all over the cornstalks like a big quilt you could slip inside of and keep warm. Only thing missing was a pillow. So Paul, he traveled back to camp and ordered some of his boys to buy up five thousand head of good merino sheep. You know those ranches out in Montana and Utah where they have so many sheep you can take off your shoes and walk river to river on sheepback. Well, while his men were off buying up sheep, Paul set about clearing the stumps from fifty acres of logged-off woods. How he did it was this. He walked along and stomped those stumps into the ground one after the other with one stamp of his boot till they were all set even with the dirt. Soon as the boys came back with the sheep, Paul drove every last one of those merinos onto his cleared-off land. He sharpens two axes and sets the handles in the ground with the ax blades facing each other. Then he sets up two more axes with the blades facing each other only lower down. Then what he does, he runs the sheep between those double axes so you have strips of fleece dropping off on both sides clean as a whistle. That was the first sheep-shearing machine. He loaded up the sheared-off wool in his wagon and headed back down to the Grand Canyon. He lifted out those strips of wool and laid them down along one end of his goose-feather quilt and had himself a pillow so fine and soft that before he was done, three ringtail cats, two mountain lions, and a mule deer lay curled up on it fast asleep.