Sometimes a Great Notion

by Ken Kesey

  Now, hardly a year after the birth, he was able to find only the feeblest residue of that moment of terrible pride. He found it hard to bring his mind around to admitting that the thing had ever happened, that these two most important people in his life even existed. Especially since the strike; at first he had seen them almost weekly, when he was still doing well enough to send three hundred a month without its being missed. Then another Laundromat opened, and the best he could do was two-fifty, then two hundred. And since this strike he had been forced to borrow on theater and laundry both to be able to send them a hundred and fifty. He couldn't face a son so fierce, so wild-looking, when a hundred and fifty dollars a month was the best he could do as a father.

  And today he had received a letter from Jelly telling him that she knew how hard it must be, with the conditions and all, for him to keep slipping her money . . . so she was thinking of marrying. "A Merchant Marine, Will, most the time at sea and he don't have to know one single thing about anything me and you do while he is gone. Then we won't keep on being a burden and a drain on you, you see?"

  He saw. Things were still working out hunky-dory for his protection. His world had been kept under his hat so long that pretty soon no one would even need to worry about somebody's finding out; there wouldn't be anything under there to find out.

  If he didn't take steps it would all never have been, like the sound a tree doesn't make when it falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it.

  Willard stepped back from the laundry window to leave and was stopped by his dim reflection in the glass: hardly there at all, a ridiculous little character with a receding chin and eyes swimming nearsightedly behind glasses out of style years ago, a cartoonist's wash-drawing of the capital-H henpecked husband, a satirist's two-dimensional straw man designed to convey at first glance a two-dimensional personality that everyone knows everything about before it even opens its straw man's mouth. Willard wasn't shocked by the image; he had been aware of it for years. When he was younger he had scoffed to himself at all those people who treated him as though he really were this image he projected--"What do I care for what they see? They think they know the book by its cover, but the book knows what it is." Now he knew better; if the book never opens up and comes out, it can be warped to fit the image others see. He remembered Jelly telling of her father . . . a shy and gentle man until a car's windshield branded him from chin to ear with a scar that raised the hackles of any strange Negro in a bar and provoked policemen to frisk him every chance they got: once a gentle man, he was now serving twenty to life for killing an old friend with a razor. No, a book wasn't invulnerable to the appearance of its cover, not by any means.

  He took a parting look at the reflection--not a figure adapted to having a burden or a drain put on it, that was certain--then moved on off toward the streetlight on the corner. This funny-paper image is so complete and so consistent, he thought, it's a wonder the rain doesn't just wash me away down the gutter like a old paper doll. It is, for a fact, a real wonder . . . that I haven't been washed down a long time ago.

  Yet, when he turned the corner and walked away from the light, his shadow stretched before him, black and solid. So he wasn't quite disengaged from his world. There was still something. His two-dimensional perfection was still marred, he knew, by the memory of a skinny colored girl and an ugly and outraged baby: they were the blood and heart and bones that kept him from collapsing flat. But that blood had grown thin and the bones transparent, and the heart small and riddled with holes the way a plant grows, kept untended too long from the light.

  And now she had written that she was planning to marry her sailor boy, just as she said in their whispered fantasy, so she and the child would need less of his tending than ever. He had written back begging her to wait: There was something he could do; he'd be thinking about it for some time, couldn't tell her, but take his word, please, just for a few days, wait!

  As his shadow stretched on to nowhere down the wet sidewalk, he became aware of the geese again. He lowered the umbrella to hear them better, lifting his face to the rain: You birds . . . you aren't the only ones with secrets to tell.

  Though it did seem a terrible shame that he couldn't find some soul to share this final secret with. Just one person who would never tell. A real shame, he thought, lifting his umbrella again and continuing on with his face wet with rain, envying the geese their invisible confidants in the winnowing dark overhead.

  Whereas Lee, being long on confidants and short on courage, envies them their outspoken, and terse, honesty.

  "Fly now! Delay later!" they tell me, Peters, which leaves me feeling that if I hang around here too much longer I will begin to take root right through the hobbed soles of my boots. "Fly! Fly!" they cry, and I raise my feet up from the muddy floor of this vehicle just to play it safe. . . . What is there about our generation, man, that makes us sweat this root scene so much? Look at us: we wander across America in dedicated droves, equipped with sideburns and sandals and a steel-stringed guitar, relentlessly tracking our lost rootbeds . . . yet all the while guarding against that most ignoble of ends: becoming rootbound. What, pray, is it we hope to do with the object of our search if we succeed? If we have no intention of attaching ourselves to these roots, what use do you suppose we have in mind? Boil us up a tea and use them, like sassafras, as a purgative? Stash them away in the cedar chest with our high-school diploma and prom programs? It's always been a mystery to me . . .

  Another straggling flock came over, sounding quite close. I looked up from my ledger and out the peephole I had rubbed in the fogged windshield; the sky was filled with the same twilight of rain and smoke that had been hanging over the carrier like impatient six o'clock kept waiting ever since noon. The geese must have passed within yards of me, but not so much as a gray ripple broke that twilight's surface. There was a feeling of curious doubt building in my mind about these phantom birds, like that sensation one gets hearing a canned audience on TV: in days and days of hearing thousands and thousands of them pass overhead, I had actually seen only one.

  The honking faded off where Hank and Joe and Andy were working. I saw Hank stop work, listen, start off toward the donkey after his shotgun, change his mind, stop, and stand ready for their appearance, barehanded and cruel-looking in his hood and smoke-blacked face: Watch; he's going to spring into the air and snag one on the fly the way that ape in the New York zoo used to catch pigeons . . . rip them to feathery shreds before he hits the ground!

  But he relaxed and straightened back up; he hadn't seen them, either. He might have mighty leaping powers, but his eyes couldn't penetrate that Oregon twilight any better than mine.

  I looked back down at my obscure pencilings in the ledger; I had been beating around the bush for a half-dozen pages of discursive philosophy and foolishness, trying to explain to Peters why I had tarried in Oregon so much longer than I had predicted. For days I had been afflicted with a malady of hesitation, and I was having the devil's own time explaining it to Peters, not having got around to understanding it myself. The germs responsible for this current attack of procrastination were a good deal more difficult to isolate than those that had finally been wiped out during that argument following the fox hunt. That earlier attack had been much easier to diagnose; even before the fox hunt I halfway understood why I'd slowed to a sodden stop: at that time I had been so uncertain of myself, my scene, and my whole scheme in general that slowing to a stop meant mainly that I didn't know where the hell I was headed in the first place. Not so, this time, not so at all . . .

  Unlike my previous paralysis, this time I knew exactly where I was going, precisely how I would get there, and, most important, this time I had a clear idea what the realization of my objectives would accomplish.

  Like all schemers, I relished the fantasy more than the finished work, and for this reason I had labored overlong, savoring my own craftsmanship (I knew I had; I don't believe we can afford to pass over the grade-school kicks our daydreams offer), but t
he scheme had long since been finished and put into action; in fact, the campaign itself was nearly completed. Everything was ready. All precautions taken, all arrangements made. All the plastic bombs placed and awaiting my hand on the plunger. Had been waiting now for a number of days. Yet, I hesitated. Why, I demanded rhetorically, why wait at all . . . ?

  Lee is piqued and prodded by the sound of the geese, but Hank listens with a different ear. All his life he has been affected by the sound of game birds, hunting and watching and associating their calls with other events until he could peg the feeling to come before the bird made a sound, but of all upland birds and all the waterfowl, and all their numerous sounds of migrating, nothing even came near to giving him a feeling approaching the soaring, pure, lonely sensation from hearing a Canada honker . . .

  Widgeons, for instance, when they came in low, beneath the dawn--in scrambling clusters of six or seven--their melancholy whistlings could make a man feel a little sorry for them poor, foolish ducks who get so rattled by shotgun fire they fly in a circle around and around over your blind, watching their number reduced at each pass . . . but that was about the size of it: a little sorry. Mallards you could feel more for. A mallard is sharper than a widgeon. And prettier. And when they come in at dusk, cautious, clucking and quacking, yelling down at your spread of decoys for the come-on-in signal, orange feet reaching out to catch the shock of the water, heads flashing the last bit of daylight, not purple, not green, not quite the acetylene blue of a cutting torch, a color almost a sound it's so bright: ringing of bits of tinted glass against each other in the wind . . . When a mallard comes in you can feel for him that kick you get watching fireworks web the sky with color. Seeing something pretty. The way you feel watching a chinee rooster explode out of the maize in the afternoon, and kind of the way you feel when you bring down a wood-duck, which is actually a far prettier bird than a mallard but it's not a prettiness you see in the air because a wood-duck's always glimpsed dodging and whizzing through the trees; you don't generally even know he's a wood-duck until you pick him up out of the water. Then he's pretty, all scarlet and purple and white, like a clown with feathers, but then he's dead, too.

  Cinnamon teal can make you feel foxy if you hit one, foolish if you don't, because they're little and tricky and have a nasty habit of coming right past you about two feet off the ground at about two hundred miles an hour through the air. Coots can make you ashamed of yourself for creaming a dozen of them on the water after you get tired of them farting around your blind; the brant goose can give you a kind of laugh, him such a big bird with such a hoarse little squeak; and, boy oh boy, the cry of a loon when you're out at night with the dogs and you hear that bastard calling across the dark slough--a sound like something lost and lonesome and stark gone crazy in a stark old world where it always knew it didn't belong--that sound can give you the willies so bad you don't know if you care to go outside in that stark old world ever again.

  But there's nothing, there's none of the birds and all their whistles and squeaks and quacks, that can get to a guy like hearing a Canada honker go past the rooftop on a stormy night. For one thing, you can't help feeling a little sorry for the poor devil, out there trying to fight his way through that muck. For another, you can't help feeling a little sorry for your own self because you know when the weather gets bad enough to run off a bird as big as a Canada goose that winter has set in sure enough . . .

  But mainly--I mean aside from the pure pleasure--I think you feel just a teeny bit cheated when you hear a honker. Because for all that you got going for you as a human--a warm bed, a dry place to stay, plenty to eat, plenty things to entertain you . . . for all that, you still aren't able to fly; I don't mean like inside an airplane, but just you yourself, make a run out into the air, and spread out your wings, and fly!

  Anyway, I was happy to hear them arrive. I heard the first of the migration come over the foundation when I was out hammering up some spare six-by-eights I'd brought home from the mill account of they was too knotty to sell . . . come flying over about forty, fifty feet off the water--low enough I was able to pick out a couple with that big eight-cell flashlight Joe Ben'd left with me--and I was so happy to hear them I hollered out and told them so.

  Geese arriving always catches a man by surprise some way. Probably because they're gone so long and last such a short piece when they do show back up; a couple weeks is about all the passing ever takes, a dang short time compared to how long it takes a lot of other things to pass, short enough I would of never in a hundred years imagined I could get tired of hearing their honking. It just wouldn't of seemed possible. It'd be like imagining getting tired of the rhododendron flowers in the dozen days they bloom every year, or like getting tired of that one magic day of silver thaw we have every dozen years that turns the dirty old world all the way from rusty tow-chains and the needles on the long-leaf pine to a bright, tinkling crystal. . . . Now how could a man get drug with that kind of short-term treat?

  That first flock passed on up the river and I decided it was time for me to move on too. The only reason I'd stayed out on the embankment as long as I had was to cool off a little after Evenwrite and this Draeger'd put my nose out of joint coming out and asking me sweet as you please if I wouldn't consider breaking my contract with WP, so's not to be a mean old man to the union . . . right out and asking, then Evenwrite for chrissakes acting like he was disappointed I didn't say yes! It made me see red for a minute there. I was even scared for a minute that Floyd and me was on our way to locking horns right on that catwalk, and I tell you: to be honest about it I was in no particular mood nor condition for another hassle, not the day right after my fight in the Snag with Big Newton, anyway. . . .

  I rounded up my paraphernalia and took it out to the tool-house. Between there and the house I heard another couple smallish flocks. And after I was up in bed and the lights was out, I heard a fair sized bunch. The advance guard, I figured; first ones to be shooed down from Washington by the storm. The main of them from Canada won't be making it through till around Thursday or Friday at the soonest, was what I figured, and went off to sleep. But around one or two that night--Monday morning, actually--one by Jesus of a flock went over! In the thousands , it sounded like. And I decided then, well, maybe they was all shooed out at the same time. Too bad. That means they'll pass through all in a bunch this year, be all gone in a night or so . . . because that is at least half the geese in the world going over up there right now.

  But I was wrong again; they went over at that rate, in that size flock or better, night after night after steady night, from that first Monday in November dang near to Thanksgiving. Gave me some bad nights. Like that first week when Evenwrite decided to declare whole-hog war on us with pickets and midnight sabotagings and what-all, and I needed whatever few hours of rest I could grab in the sack, and I'd be laying there, about to drop off when a flock'd come by so loud and so low they'd lift me right up off the bed.

  Yet and all, after a week of them hollering, I was still a little sorry when Joby finally got woke up enough to their presence ( Joby could sleep through the presence of a full-scale artillery attack, I swear if he couldn't!) to come down to breakfast all hot to kill us a honker for supper. "No lie, Hank; there was a tremendous big flock went over . . . just a tremendous big flock."

  I told him I'd been laying in bed all week trying to go to sleep with big flocks going over just as tremendous.

  "Well, then, there you go! Don't you reckon you laid awake listening to enough of 'em to earn the eating of one?" He went to hopping around the kitchen in his sock feet, holding his hands at each side of his head. "Oh yeah, Hankus; I thought a long time about it, and today is the day: a wind like that wind last night, see now, is bound to scatter some of the flocks, what do you think? Yeah, boy, I bet there's dozens of poor old lonely geese out there this morning, flying up an' down. . . . Huh, what do you think?"

  He turned to grin at me from across the kitchen, still shifting from foot to foot and hold
ing his hands against the side of his head in that excited, little-kid way he had. ( Joe stands there looking . . .) He knew how I felt about shooting geese; even if I'd never come out and said so, he knew I didn't care for seeing them killed. (Joe stands there looking at me. Worried about something more than taking a shotgun to work. Something's funny.) Not that I've ever had much patience with the kind of pantywaist who says, "Oh, how can you kill the cute little deer? How can you be such a brute and a coward?"

  ... I don't have much respect for this sort of do-good thinking because it's always seemed to me a whole lot more cowardly for a man to have nothing to do with the meat he eats except picking it up out of a supermarket meat section all sliced and boned and wrapped in cellophane, looking about as much like a pig or a cute little lamb as a potato does. . . . I mean, if you're going to eat another living creature, I figure you at least should know he was once living, and that somebody had to kill the poor devil and chop him up . . .

  (Viv comes in from upstairs. Joe looks quick at her, then back at me.)

  But people never think that way about hunting; it's always "brute and coward" the hunters are called, by some Eastern prick who thinks pheasants are found under glass, plucked and already full of stuffing. (Something's funny . . .)

  "What do you think, Hank?" Joby asked again. I took a seat, kidding him by dragging it out. I told him that one thing I thought was that he looked like he was standing on the foul line about to take a free throw with his noggin, the way he was holding his head. He took his hands down. "I mean about taking along a shotgun?" he wailed.