The boat pulled up to the landing where I watched, and the man grabbed for a hold on one of the bumper tires that were dangling in the water. He leaped out onto the landing without tying the boat or turning off the motor, and I was compelled to make a courageous lunge to catch the rope at the rear of the boat lest it escape pilotless down river. As I stood there with my feet braced, holding the boat while it tugged to be off again like a whale on a leash, I thanked the man pleasantly for bringing transportation across to me and congratulated him on the little welcoming-home skit he had so generously taken part in. He stopped gathering what was left of his papers and raised a reddened round face in my direction, seeming to notice me for the first time.
"And I'll just bet you're another one of the scabbin' bastards!" He thrust his Jiggs-like face in my direction. Little rivulets of water running out of his frizzy red hair kept getting in his eyes, forcing him to blink and rub at the sockets with both fists like a child crying. "Ain't I right?" he demanded, rubbing and blinking. "Huh? Ain't I now?" But before I could summon an appropriately clever answer he turned and lurched up the planks toward his new car, cursing so mournfully that I wasn't sure whether to laugh at the man or pity him.
I lashed the impatient boat to a mooring and went back to the garage for the jacket I had left lying on the jeep. When I returned I saw across the way that Hank had removed his shirt and shoes and was in the process of pulling down his trousers. He and the other man--Joe Ben, from the banty-legged way he stood--were still laughing. Old Henry was working his way back up the bank toward the house, much more laboriously than he had come down.
As Hank pulled a leg from his pants he supported himself by leaning a hand on the shoulder of the woman standing near him. This must be brother Hank's pale wildwoods flower, I decided; barefooty and fattened out round and comfortable on huckleberry and pemmican. Hank finished with his pants and made a flat, whacking dive into the river, the same racing dive I had watched him practice years ago as I peeked from behind curtains of my room. As he started stroking across I noticed that the neat, strength-conserving stroke of the racing swimmer was somehow marred. There was a hitch in the smoothness of the movement every two or three strokes, a jog in the rhythm that seemed caused by something other than a lack of practice; if one could be permitted the term in reference to a swimmer, I suppose we might say that Hank had developed a limp. As I watched I thought, I was right, he is past his prime; the old giant is weakening. Perhaps that recompense of blood will not be so difficult to claim as I feared.
Heartened by this thought I got into the boat, untied the rope, and with some experimenting managed to turn the bow about and head in Hank's direction. The boat moved only slightly faster than idling speed, but I couldn't fathom the throttle on the motor and had to proceed at the rate Jiggs had left for me; by the time I had putted out to Hank he was better than halfway across.
When I got close he stopped swimming and trod water, squinting against the water to see who was picking him up, as he waited for me to stop the boat for him. But I found I was no more able to slow the motor than I had been able to speed it up. I had to make three runs before Hank realized I couldn't stop for him; he got a hand over the side on the third time by and jerked himself on board, his long, veined arm snapping his body into the air like an arrow fired from a lemonwood bow. As he rolled into the boat I saw why he had limped in his swimming stroke and why he had used only the one hand to pull himself from the water: two fingers were missing from the other, but other than that he still seemed pretty much in prime.
He lay for a moment in the bottom of the boat, blowing water, then climbed onto a seat facing me. He dropped his face into his hand as though he were rubbing the bridge of his nose, or wiping the water from his mouth; this was his characteristic attempt to either hide the grin you already knew was there, or to draw your attention to it. Watching him, watching the way he had jerked himself into the boat with flawless physical control and now watching the composure with which he confronted me--at ease, as though he had not only known it was me coming to pick him up but had planned it that way--I felt the momentary optimism I had experienced back on the dock replaced by a surge of apprehension. . . . If the giant is weakening WATCH OUT! WATCH OUT! then he has chosen a poor way to demonstrate it.
Still he didn't speak. I fumbled out some apology for being unable to stop the motor to pick him up, and was about to explain that Yale offered no course on seamanship when he raised his wet eyebrows--without moving his face, without lifting it from his hand--raised his brown and beaded eyebrows and looked at me with eyes as bright and green and poisonous as copper sulfate crystals.
"You had three tries, bub," he observed wryly, "and missed me every time; now don't that frost you?"
. . . While Indian Jenny, having swallowed enough snuff and whisky to make her feel confident of her race's ability to influence certain phenomena, looked out through the spider web that laced her lone window and finished her spell: "Oh clouds . . . oh rain. I call down all sorts bad weather an' bad luck on Hank Stamper, uh-huh!" Then turned her black little eyes back into the empty shack to see if the shadows were impressed.
. . . And Jonathan Draeger, in a motel in Eugene, wrote: "Man will do away with anything that threatens him with loneliness--even himself."
... And Lee, riding with his brother across the river toward the old house, wondered, Home again all right, but now what?
All up and down the coast there are little towns like Wakonda, logging bars like the Snag, where weary little men talk about hard times and trouble. The old wino boltcutter has seen them all, has heard all the talk. He has been listening over his shoulder all afternoon, hearing the younger men talk about the trouble nowadays as though their dissatisfaction is a recent development, a sign of unusual times. He listened for a long time while they talked and pounded the table and read bits from the Eugene Register Guard blaming the despondency on "these troubled times of Brinkmanship, Blamesmanship, and Bombsmanship." He listened to them accuse the federal government of turning America into a nation of softies, then listened to them condemn the same body for its hardhearted refusal to help the faltering town through the recession. He usually makes it a rule on his drinking trips into town to remain aloof from nonsense such as this, but when he hears the delegation agreeing that much of the community's woes can be laid at the feet of the Stampers and their stubborn refusal to unionize, it is too much for him to take. The man with the union button is in the middle of explaining that these times demand more sacrifice on the part of the goddamned individual, when the old boltcutter rises noisily to his feet.
"These times?" He advances on them, his bottle held dramatically aloft. "What do you think, everything used to be apple-pie 'n' ice cream?"
The citizens look up in surprised indignation; it is regarded as something of a breach in local protocol to interrupt these sessions.
"That bomb talk? All horseshit." He rears over their table, unsteady in a cloud of blue smoke. "That depression talk and that other business, that strike business? More horseshit. For twenty years, thirty years, forty years, all th' way back to the Big War, somebody been sayin' oh me, the trouble is such, oh my the trouble is so; the trouble is the ray-dio, the trouble is the Republicans, the trouble is the Democrats, the trouble is the Commy-ists . . ." He spat on the floor with a pecking motion of his head. "All horseshit."
"What, in your opinion, is the trouble?" The Real Estate Man tilts back his chair and grins up at the intruder, preparing to humor him. But the old fellow beats him to the punch; he laughs sadly, the sudden anger turning as suddenly to pity; he shakes his head and looks about at the citizens--"You boys, you boys . . ."--then places his empty bottle on the table and crooks a long, knob-knuckled forefinger around the neck of a full bottle and shuffles out of the bright sun that slants through the Snag's front window. "Don't you see it's just the same plain old horseshit as always?"
You can make a mark across the night with the tip of an embered stick, and you can
actually see it fixed in its finity. You can be absolutely certain of its treacherous impermanence. And that is all. Hank knew . . .
As well as he knew that the Wakonda has not always run this course. (Yeah . . . you want to know something about rivers, friends and neighbors?)
Along its twenty miles numerous switchbacks and oxbows, sloughs and backwaters mark its old channel. (You want me to tell you a thing or two about rivers?) Some of these sloughs are kept clean by small currents from nearby streams, making them a chain of clear, deep, greenglass pools where great chubs lie on the bottom like sunken logs; in the winter the pools in these sloughs are nightly stopovers for chevrons of brant geese flying south down the coast; in the spring the pole willows along the banks arch long graceful limbs out over the water; when an angler breeze baits the tree, the leafy tips tickle the surface and tiny fingerling salmon and steelhead dart up to strike, sometimes shooting clear into the sunshine like little silver bullets fired from the depths. (Funny thing is, I didn't learn this thing about rivers from the old man or any of the uncles, or even Boney Stokes, but from old Floyd Evenwrite, a couple years ago, that first time Floyd and us locked horns about the union.)
Some sloughs are flooded spear-fields of cattail and skunk cabbage where loons and widgeon breed; some are bogs where maple leaves and eelgrass and snakeweed skeleton with decay and silently dissolve into purple, oil-sheened mud; and some of the sloughs have silted in completely and dried enough to become rich blue-green deer pastures or two-story-high berry thickets. (The way it happened I'd come to town to meet with Floyd Evenwrite that first time this Closed Shop business came up and instead of taking the cycle I figured I'd use the boat to try out this brand-new Johnson Seahorse 25 I'd picked up in Eugene not a week before, and swinging in toward the municipal dock I whanged into something floating out of sight; probably an old deadfall washed loose, and the boat and motor went down like a rock and I had to swim it, mad as hell and sure as shooting in no frigging mood to talk Labor Organization.)
There is one such berry thicket up river from the Stamper house, a thicket so dense, so woven and tangled that even the bears avoid it: from the mossy bones of deer and elk trapped trying to trample a path rises a wall of thorns that appears totally impenetrable. (In the meeting Floyd did most of the talking, but I didn't do my share of the listening. I couldn't get my mind on him. I just sat there looking out the window where my boat and motor had sunk, feeling my Sunday slacks shrink dry on me.) But when Hank was a boy of ten he found a way to penetrate this thorny wall: he discovered that the rabbits and raccoons had tunneled an elaborate subway system next to the ground, and by pulling on a hooded oilskin poncho to protect his hide from the thorns, he was able to half crawl, half worm his way through that snarl of vines. (Floyd kept talking on and on; I knew he was expecting me and the half-dozen or so other gyppo men to be mowed right over by his logic. I don't know about them other boys, but for myself I wasn't able to follow him worth sour apples. My pants dried; it got warmer; I pulled on my motorcycle shades so's he couldn't see if I dropped off during his talk; and I leaned back and sulked about that boat and motor.)
When the spring sun was bright above the thicket, enough light filtered down through the leaves so he was able to see, and he would spend hours on his hands and knees exploring the smooth passageways. He frequently came face to face with a fellow explorer, an old boar coon, who, the first time he encountered the boy, had huffed and growled and hissed, then turned loose a musk that put a skunk to shame, but as they met again and again the old masked outlaw gradually came to regard this hooded intruder as something of a partner in crime; in a dim passageway of thorn the boy and the animal stand nose to nose and compare booty before they go on with their furtive ramblings: "What you got, old coon? A fresh wapatoo? Well, look here at my gopher skull . . ." (Floyd talked on and on and on and--what with sitting there half asleep stewing about the boat and river and all--I got to thinking about something that'd happened a long time before, something I'd clean forgot about . . .) He found countless treasures in the passageways: a foxtail caught in the thorns; a fossilized bug that still struggled against a millennium of mud; a rusted ball-and-cap pistol that reeked still of rum and romance . . . but never anything near to equaling the discovery made one chilly April afternoon. (I got to thinking about the bobcats I found in the berry vines, is what; I got to remembering them bobcats.)
There were three kittens at the end of a strange new passageway, three kittens with their blue-gray eyes but a few days open, peering up at him from a mossy, hair-lined nest. Except for the nub of a tiny tail, and the tassels of hair at the tip of each tiny ear, they looked much the same as barn kittens that Henry drowned by the sackful every summer. The boy stared wide-eyed at them playing in their nest, overcome by his remarkable good fortune. "Suck egg mule," he whispered reverently, as though such a find needed the awed respect of Uncle Aaron's expressions instead of the forceful punch of old Henry's curses. "Three little baby bobcats all by theirselves . . . suck egg mule."
He picked up the nearest kitten and began to fight and tear at the vine until he had made a space large enough to turn around in. He headed back the way he'd come, reasoning, without even consciously thinking about it, that the mother would most likely pick a route that he hadn't used, she would most likely steer clear of a tunnel with man-smell in it. He found he was being slowed by holding the hissing and snapping kitten in his hands so he took the scruff of its neck between his teeth. The kitten became immediately calm and swung placidly from the boy's mouth as Hank sped through the blackberries as fast as elbows and knees could carry him. "Beat it out; beat it!"
When he emerged from the thicket he was scratched and bleeding from a score of places on his hands and face, but he didn't remember any pain, he didn't remember any of the scratches; all he could recall was the soft flutter of panic beneath his chest. What would have happened had that old bitch bobcat suddenly run smack dab into a boy toting one of her offspring in his mouth? A boy pinned down and practically helpless under fifteen feet of blackberry vines? He had to sit down and breathe deeply before he could manage the ten more yards to the empty blasting-cap crate where he put the kitten.
Then, for some reason, instead of securing the box and beating it back to the house as he advised himself, he hesitated to inspect his catch. Carefully he slid back the lid and bent to look into the box.
"Hey you. Hey there you, Bobby the Cat . . ."
The little animal ceased its frantic scurrying from corner to corner and lifted its fuzzy face toward the sound of the voice. Then uttered a cry so tragic, so pleading, so frightened and forlorn, that the boy winced with sympathy.
"Hey, you lonely, ain't you? Huh, ain't you?"
The kitten's yowled answer threw the boy into an intense conflict, and after five minutes of reminding himself that nobody no-body but a snotnosed moron would go back in that hole, he gave in to that yowling.
The other two kittens had fallen asleep by the time he reached the nest. They lay curled about each other, purring softly. He paused for an instant to catch his breath, and in the silence that descended, now that the brambles were no longer scratching and resounding on his oilskin hood, heard the first kitten crying from its box at the edge of the thicket; the thin, pitiful wail penetrated the jungle like a needle. Why, a noise like that must carry for miles! He grabbed up the next kitten, clamped his teeth over the fur at the back of the neck, thrashed quickly around in the little turning space that was already beginning to take on a smooth, used appearance, and once more sprinted on elbows and knees for that opening to safety that lay an ever farther distance away through an ever smaller tube of thorns and terror. It seemed to take hours. Time got snagged on a sticker. The vines hissed past. It must have started to rain, for the tunnel had grown quite dim and the ground slick. The boy squirmed through with eyes straining, that bobcat's child swaying and swinging in his mouth, keening a shrill plea for help, the other in the box echoing and relaying the plea. The tunnel got
longer as it grew dimmer, he was certain of it. Or the other way around. He gasped for breath through the fur in his teeth. He battled the mud and vine as though it were water drowning him, and when he broke into the clear at the end of the tunnel he drew a huge breath like a swimmer coming after many minutes into the glorious air.
He placed the second kitten in the box with the first. They both hushed their yowling and became quiet and drowsy against each other. They began to purr quietly along with the soft swish of rain through the pines. And the only other noise, through all the forest, was the brokenhearted wailing of that third kitten, alone and frightened and wet, back in that nest at the end of that tunnel.
"You'll be okay." He called assurance toward the thicket. "Sure. It's rainin' now; mama'll be hustlin' back from huntin', now it's rainin'."
And this time even went so far as to pick up the box and walk a few yards toward home.
But something was strange; safe as he knew himself to be--he had picked up the .22 from the hollow log where he always stashed it during his forays into the thicket--his heart still pounded and his stomach still heaved with fear, and the image of that mother cat's wrath still burned in his head.
He stopped walking and stood very still with his eyes closed. "No. No sir, by gosh, I ain't." Shaking his head back and forth: "No. I ain't such a dummy as that, I don't care what!"
But the fear continued to shake against his ribs, and it occurred to him that it had been shaking that way constantly from the moment he'd found the three kittens playing peacefully in their nest. Because it had known--it, the fear, the being-awful-scared-of-something --had known the boy better than he knew himself, had known all along from that first glance that he wasn't going to be satisfied until he had all three kittens. It didn't make any difference if they were baby dragons and mama dragon was breathing fire on him every step of the way.