by Ken Kesey
I just sit there in a kind of doze, looking out through the flicker of ditch willows zipping past along the road and enjoying the scenery. Maybe I was seeing things so clear because it was the first time in I don't know how many years I'd rode this stretch without having to do the driving. Maybe that's it. All I know is everything was shining like a new dime. There's rusty screen-topped cones of sawdust-burners vomiting sparks and blue smoke; widow's-lace fern waving around the mailboxes; busy glisten of little breezes blowing across the standing water . . . swoop of powerlines . . . spearmint bush so bright and new I smell them as we pass . . . squirrels hustling around . . . then more rusty burners. Leaves, bright, waxy green, scrubbed, sort of. Prismed light where the sun comes through the drops hanging off the leaves, shattered and pure and bright. . . .
I put my face closer to the little window so I could see more. There was the sky, the little clouds, then the treetops running into the steep sloped-off canyon down to the railroad embankment, then there's a wide drainage between the road and the track. This ditch is a mangle of scrubby little Himalaya vines; Himalaya blackberry got a pretty good flavor but loaded with seeds big enough to knock a tooth out. All the leaves had been whipped off the vines by that last big storm, and the vines look like a king-sized roll of steel wool. I bounce along, looking at them vines, thinking to myself if a fellow was big enough he'd just grab him a handful of that and scrub the world to a fare-thee-well, get shut of them clouds, really brighten things up. . . . This notion slid into a kind of open-eyed dream. I take a giant fistful of steel wool and go at it, working like a nigger. I can't stop somehow. I finish with the sky and go at the beach. Then the town, then the hills. I'm panting and sweating and scrubbing like a nigger! I step back and take a look: but instead of things getting brighter and clearer this time, it's just made them duller. Like it kind of faded the color out. I grab up the roll and tear into it again, and when I'm finished this time it's even more faded than before. So this time I really work it over. I scrub everything, the world and sky and my eyes and the sun and everything, and finally fall back, wore clean out. I take a look and it's bright all right, like a movie-show screen when the film breaks and you got nothing to look at up there but the bright white light. Everything else is gone. I throw away the steel wool; it's fine to brighten things up with once in a while, but too much of it, man, can rub everything away.)
In the Snag, Boney Stokes complains about the glare as he moves his chair closer to the window. Teddy finally gives Mrs. Carleson a call and she says sorry but she's too busy herself right then, but she'll send over her daughter. Big Newton watches Les Gibbons get drunker and fiercer but seriously doubts that the big liver-lipped monkey will ever get drunk or fierce enough. And the crowd lingering outside the funeral parlor swings suddenly around at someone's whisper to see a yellow jeep turn the corner of Nahamish and South Main, coming toward them, finally.
(So many folks had come to the funeral that we couldn't find a parking place closer than two blocks off. "Joe Ben would've popped his eyes out to see what a draw he was dead," I said to Viv. I popeyed a little myself; I knew he was the type guy always liked by everybody that knew him, but I didn't know this many even knew him. Walking back from the jeep, I saw that even the lawn on the family-entrance side of Lilienthal's was packed to the sidewalk with dark blue suits and black frocks. As I got closer I saw that the whole working force from WP was there, Floyd Evenwrite too--all standing and talking in respectful voices, and slipping off two or three at a time behind Lilienthal's big black '53 Caddy hearse where they could crack out their pocket stashes and have a nip out of sight of the women. Most of the women were standing up on the steps or just inside the door, touching their faces to little white hankies. The men nipped; the women dabbed. Everybody to their own kick, I figured.
They saw Viv and me come walking up toward them, and I heard the talk drone to a stop. The guys behind the Caddy quick stuck their bottle out of our sight. They all watched us walk past, working their faces, those faces you always see at a goddamned funeral. Little smiles, understanding smiles, and eyes like they borrowed them from cocker spaniels especially for the occasion. They watch and nod whenever I look their direction. Nobody says a thing. The crowd from around the other side of the building comes bustling to get a look, and a couple more women's heads poke out the door. Orland's car slides up to the side door, and Orland's wife helps Jan out. Jan's just as lumpy and owl-like as ever, for all the black net they'd hung over her. The crowd turns to watch her walk along so stooped for a second, but then turns right back to me and Viv. They aren't interested in Jan. Big a deal as a griefstruck woman is, she still isn't what they'd gone to the trouble of primping and preening and getting into their Easter Sunday costumes to come out and see. Jan's just the side attraction, the prelim. And they didn't come for that. A crowd comes to an event to see the main attraction, I thought to myself. And at a funeral the main attraction is somebody belly up. That ain't lumpy little Jan. And, much as I hate to steal your thunder, Joby, I'm afraid that you ain't the main attraction at this particular event, either.
Viv and me followed Orland and Jan and them into the dim-lit family room. Everybody else was there, sitting quiet in little padded folding chairs in front of a sort of gauzy curtain separating us from the main section. We could see them out there but they couldn't see in; they'd to be satisfied with what sniffs and sobs drifted out to them.
The heads of the family craned around at me and Viv as we sidled into our seats. I braced myself for the scalding looks I'd been expecting to get, but the heat wasn't there. I'd expected a verdict of guilty from every Stamper eye in the house, but got nothing except that same sad cocker-spaniel smile. I guess I was still a little rummy from the ride because this threw me pretty bad. I stared back at them, froze where I stood. . . . Good Christ, didn't they realize? Didn't they know I'd as well as killed him? I opened my mouth to demand at least one of them recognize this, but the only sound that came out was the moo of an electric organ someplace, then old lady Lilienthal singing. Viv took my hand and pulled me into my seat.
The organ mooed and bawled. Old lady Lilienthal tried to outdo it with "End of a Perfect Day," the same song she'd sung at my mom's funeral out at the house twenty years before, sung just as bad today, only slower. It took her hours. If she lasted another twenty years of funeral singing and kept getting slower, they would have to come up with some new embalming preservatives.
The organ played again. Somebody recited something from a book of poems. Lilienthal, who couldn't stay out of the show any more than his wife, read a list of names of folks who couldn't make it for one reason or another, and had sent flowers in their place. "Lily Gilchrest," he would singsong, "her spirit is with us today. Mr. and Mrs. Edward R. Sorenson . . . their spirit is with us today." La-da-dee-la-dee-la-da. It was a running battle built up over the years between him and his wife and that mooing organ, to see which one could drag out his part the longest. Then old man Toms got up and went to droning on. I thought about how funny it was that Joby should be drummed out this way . . . a guy who could cram more words into a minute than these three, going all at once, could get into a day.
I begin to get sleepy.
Brother Walker came out in his shirtsleeves, looking like a coach at half-time. He opened a Bible that bristled like a porcupine with place-markers and, using Joby's death like a man on a springboard, took a running jump at the stars. He lost me someplace during the dive.
Viv shook me awake. We were getting up out of the seats and filing through an opening in the curtain. The main room had already took its look and were waiting outside while we had our turn. I strolled past and looked in. By golly. You don't look so bad. The drowned ones I seen before always looked waterlogged. I guess you weren't in long enough to soak up much. Fact the matter is, you ugly little toad, you look a damn sight better than usual. They painted your face with some stuff that dulled the scars some, and you don't have your ordinary raw-meatball look. And a black tie. You
'd be amazed. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. To see how godawful handsome they could make.
"Hank . . . Hank, please . . ."
Except. Damn, I wish they hadn't made you such a frigging sobersides because it makes you look like.
"Please, the others are waitin'. . . . What are you doing?"
You need the grin, man. The goofy one. You taking it so serious. Swing with what you got. Here. Hold on, I'll just.
"Hank! Lord, man, you can't touch the--"
Orland grabbed my wrist and brought me out of it. "It was all that music and that crap," I told him. "Made me sleepy as a dog."
"Let's move on outside," Viv whispered. I followed her out.
My time with the tarp was justified; it had clouded over solid. I saw a little patter of rain hurrying up the street. It had been scheduled for the funeral but made it late; now it was hustling to be sure it didn't miss the burying. Men hunched their shoulders and women held the little flowery funeral programs over their hairdos and went to scurrying like chickens for shelter. It looked like it was going to open up all the time we were hustling to the jeep, but it never. It kept pittypatting during the funeral procession through the middle of town; just barely; holding back, like it was waiting. . . .)
Boney Stokes waits until the whole procession has passed. He wants to be sure the doctor is at the funeral grounds as well as Hank. It is a long walk from the Snag to the hospital for an old man--for a sick old man--and he doesn't want to chance being turned away from his goal, after enduring the journey, by some young fool doctor with orders otherwise. A long walk. Through rain, too, he noticed as he buttoned his long black raincoat to his skinny neck, through rain and cold and me with these weak lungs. . . . Oh, what a man of Christian intent will not endure for an old friend!
(At the graveside the rain got down to business and thinned the crowd down to only about a third what it was at the parlor. We bunched up close around the hole. They were burying Joby beside his old man, or beside all of his old man that had been brought back down from that shack where he'd disappeared to. Enough insult right there to make both of them plow the ground with turning. It was almost funny. If this judgment day Joe was always looking forward to ever comes round, I thought, and those two come up for air and find they been buried next to each other, then the fur is really gonna fly. Joe always wanted to be as far from his old man as possible, even got his face rearranged so he wouldn't look like Ben Stamper; he couldn't think of anything worse than growing up with what he called that handsome and hopeless face. I thought again about the way Lilienthal had fixed Joe's dead face--powdered over the scars, ironed out the grin--and I wanted to open that box and fix them for him. I wanted to so bad it made me clench up my fists till I could feel myself shake; it made me strain all over. Not to hold myself back from doing it, but because I knew I wasn't going to do it. I just stood there. I watched them straddle the grave rails, and lower the coffin, all the while clenching my fists and straining and wishing they'd get that mud thrown on that coffin and get it out of sight. And just stood there.
As soon as Joe was buried I took Viv's arm and started off. When we got to the jeep I heard somebody holler, "Hank! Hank boy!"
It was Floyd Evenwrite; he was yelling and waving out of the window of his big Pontiac to me. "You an' your woman jump in here with us. We got room to waste. You don't need to drive all that way back down to town in that leaky old jeep. Let Andy take it an' jump in here in a decent machine. . . ." Evenwrite gave me a big old toothy grin and waited. It was an open invitation to bury the hatchet, and everybody concerned damn well knew it. But I thought I saw what was almost a taunt behind that grin. Like he was grinning that, sure, just a week or so ago, Hank old boy, I was trying to sabotage your mill and stampede your whole summer's work down the river. But let's be buddies. . . . "What you say, boy . . . ?"
I looked at Viv, and at Andy standing near the crowd around Big Lou's car. They waited for me to decide; we all knew that Floyd and his bunch had a lot to do with putting that squeeze on us that helped to do in Joe. I tried to decide something, but all I could think was I'm tired, I'm tired of being the villain. . . .
"Be right with you, Floyd," I hollered back at him and grabbed Viv by the hand. "Okeydoke with you, Andy? Just leave it on Main someplace, the jeep." We scampered over to the door he held open for us. Nobody said anything during most of the ride. When we got down near town Evenwrite asked why I didn't drop by the Snag for a beer or so. I told him that I thought Viv was wanting to get on over to Joe's new house to be with Jan, and he said fine, we'd drop her by, but then what? I told him that I ought to go by the hospital and see how the old man was making out, but after that I'd think about it.
"Good. You do that. I'll drop Viv off and we can turn up Necanicum and take you right past the hospital. Then you think about it. Okay?"
I said okay. I tried to catch Viv's eye a time or two to see how she felt about my decision, but she kept to herself. And after we dropped her off I asked myself why should I care anyhow? I was glad to be in a good dry car. I was glad to be getting invitations for rides and beers. I was glad to have somebody stick out a hand to me.
We turned from South Main to Sillits Street toward Necanicum. I sank back in the deep cushion of the big car and listened to the wipers and the heater and Evenwrite make small talk with his family. I didn't care how Viv or Andy looked at me. I didn't care if there was a little taunt in Evenwrite's grin. I didn't' even care what Joby would've thought about it.
Because as far as I was concerned the fight was finished, the hatchet buried . . . for good.)
The minute Hank was out of the car, Evenwrite's kids, kept in sedate behavior in the back seat for so long by the presence of two strange grown-ups and the solemnity of the occasion, begin to act up so that Floyd was forced to stop the car twice before he got home, to knock some ears down. He left his house in a fury, jumped back in the car, and screeched away from his yard toward the Snag, with his kids crying and his wife threatening and his bowels turning.
When he reached Main he made two runs the length of the street, checking for Draeger's car, before he stopped; he by god wasn't about to go in there and have Draeger crow about the human heart to him! Not him! He was amazed that Hank could even consider dropping by, with "I told you so" on the tip of everybody's tongue. Amazed and, he found, a little disappointed: he'd expected more of Hank. And he felt that Hank had betrayed him some way or other, though he couldn't exactly say why. . . . And why ain't I satisfied how things worked out?
Indian Jenny pulls on her boots and begins her trek to the Snag. Sometimes direct action worked better than magic. Especially some night, in a bar. Be a lot of drunks there tonight. And who knows?
Simone opens the package just delivered by the young matchstick-chewer from Stokes's General. "No card from who?"
"No, no card or nothin'," he had told her. "Howie said be sure no card or nothin' . . . so's you couldn't send it back to somebody."
"Well you just take it right back to somebody--so pretty, though, how could he?--and you tell somebody I accept no gifts from strange men. . . . But how could he know to pick one so pretty and the right size, I bet?"
"His sister was with him to help, maybe?"
"Then you take it back to his sister."
"I can't do that," the boy said, moving to try to peek through the front of her housecoat. "I just deliver."
"Yes?"
"Yeah." He winked and shifted the matchstick to the opposite corner of his mouth and was gone before she could stop him. Simone hustled the gift into her bedroom before Mother Nielsen or her kids in the other half of the duplex heard and came snooping. She spread the frock on her bed and looked at. . . . So pretty. But no. She had promised. She could not disappoint the Virgin . . .
She had returned the dress to the box and started folding the tissue paper back over it when through her bedroom window she saw Indian Jenny passing, thick and dumpy and rubber-booted, in the dimming rain. Simone stared, lightly trailing her fingers a
long the rustling tissue. That--she grimaced at Jenny--is what I did not wish to become. That is the thing I did not wish to become. I made the confession, I swore on the Book, I promised the Sweet Mother of God to sin never again . . . but that woman there is what I do not wish to become.
She suddenly remembered her image in the mirror, and the pity in the eyes of the women who saw her on the street. Her eyes closed . . . I have had virtue. But it is almost that I have become through virtue what that heathen slut out there became through sin, a tramp, a shuffler in dumpy dresses. It is so now that to the women of the town I look like the town whore. Because of my appearance. Because I can't afford to look decent. Oh, oh, Sweet Mother! She pressed the tissue against her lips. Oh give me strength in my weakness . . .
The sin that she now felt from looking sinful, Simone realized as she sobbed into the tissue, was more painful than the sin she had once felt from sinning. "What has happened, Holy Mother, that I become so sinful?" she beseeched the wooden statue in her closet. "What has happened that I become so weak?"
But another thought was already growing like yeast in her mind: And you, Holy Mother, to let this happen . . . what has happened to you?
Fluorescent tubes fluttered and hissed. The air felt purified. The Amazon of a nurse had said, "Right this way, Mr. Stamper," as soon as Hank approached her desk, before he had even asked to see his father. She picked up a clipboard and led him out of the newer part of the hospital, down a corridor so low he found himself ducking involuntarily to avoid the overhead lights, through hallways so old he thought they might have been carved out of the bygone centuries by Indians and whitewashed in honor of the white man's coming. A section of the clinic that he had not seen before--wooden walls fossilized by endless scrubbings, linoleum floors worn bare by endless shufflings of white canvas shoes . . . and through open doors glimpses of old people propped like cloth dolls against brass bed-steads, hairless faces limp and wrinkled in the stony blue flickering of TV.