In Which James Does Some Dreaming
While Paul Bunyan was sleeping the stony sleep of an ax-swinging man dead to the world on his mighty bed, that no-account brother of his was doing what he was always doing up in the woods in Maine: dreaming his life away. There was nobody ever dreamed so much as that dodge-life brother did. Dreamed all day on his bone-hard backside and dreamed all night on his brawnless back. Now he was nose-up in his bed dreaming so many dreams you’d think his head would be crackling like a pinewood fire in a bunkhouse stove. He dreamed he was a fish swimming in a river. He dreamed he was flying through the sky like a buzzard or a red-tailed hawk. He dreamed about things you weren’t supposed to see, like what it was like walking around up in heaven with angels going by and what it was like far down under the earth where things looked at you in the dark. He dreamed he was red fire. He dreamed he was dead. He dreamed he was so big his brother Paul could stand on the flat of his hand with his little ax on his shoulder. He dreamed he was throwing fistfuls of pinecones into every state and great pine forests sprang up all over the land. Those trees grew so high they brushed up against the Big Dipper. There wasn’t anything but trees every which way you looked. Towns and cities got swallowed up. Birds spoke words you could understand. People lived on riverbanks and grew what they needed. Bears and coyotes lay down with wild turkeys and deer. Loggers turned their axes into harmonicas. It was summer all the time. They say James Bunyan dreamed so hard it plumb wore him out and he had to go on sleeping just to keep himself alive enough to dream some more.
In Which the Great Contest Is Decided
You know the kind of man Paul Bunyan was. Once he set his mind on something, there was no stopping him. He slept down there in that canyon when it was so cold you could see ten-foot icicles hanging from his chin. He slept in that canyon when it was so hot, red rocks melted away in the sun. He slept with coyotes and bobcats curled up in his beard and two bald eagles nesting in his hair. He slept when howling winds sent boulders crashing down cliffsides right onto his bed and he slept when raindrops the size of McIntosh apples whipped against his face and soaked through his mackinaw. One day a strange thing happened. Paul Bunyan opened his eyes. Just like that. Up above him, a crowd of people standing on a rim trail pointed down and started shouting. Somebody called out, Ten years and twelve hours! Paul stood up so fast, goose feathers flew all around him like a storm of snow. First thing he did, he plucked a spruce tree off the top of the North Rim and combed his beard. That beard was so long it grew down to his feet and wrapped around his wool socks and kept going. It kept going till it reached a cliff and grew halfway up like ivy. Next thing he did, he stepped up out of the canyon all covered in feathers like a giant goose. He brushed off his mackinaw with a ponderosa pine and put his ax on his shoulder. A powerful hunger was in him, but he needed to do one thing before he ate and that was see that brag-mouth brother of his. He headed east and got to Maine so fast he was knee-deep in ocean before he realized he had to turn back. The house in the woods wasn’t the same. Bushes rose up over all the windows, wildflowers grew on the roof. The porch was mashed in by a dead pine covered in moss. Inside, long branches stuck in through the smashed-up windows. Squirrels and possums scampered over the mossy furniture. The door to the bedroom stood open and in the dark of the room he saw a stranger sitting in a chair at the side of the bed. In the bed his brother was stretched out on his back with his broom-straw arms crossed over his twig of a chest. His stringy beard was so long it came slithering down over his legs and curled around his chicken-hawk feet. From there it dropped to the floor and twisted itself around a bed foot. A bony dog lay up on the bed next to him whimpering for all he was worth. Moss and wild mushrooms grew in that beard. His brother’s long nose was thin and sharp as an ax blade. The whimpering dog, the dark room, the stranger in the chair, the graveyard silence, it was all making Paul mighty uneasy. He looked at his brother’s caved-in cheeks and forgot the Great Sleeping Contest. He forgot everything in that dead-quiet room. All he wanted to do was get out of there quick as a fox on fire and go back to his loggers, but he couldn’t hardly make himself move. He bent down to look close at his brother. Those nothing shoulders stuck up through his shirt like chicken bones. Paul wondered what it would feel like to touch him. He wanted to give him something. He took his ax off his shoulder and put it down on the bed next to his brother. He laid it out real slow. Just then James opened one eye and looked at him. The stranger in the chair said, Ten years twelve hours and sixteen minutes. Paul jumped back and gave out a roar. He roared so loud the bony dog who was licking James’s face went flying off the bed and rolled into a corner. Paul Bunyan roared so loud the branches blew away from the windows and let in the sun. James scrunched up his eye in the sunlight and laid a spidery arm across his face. He said, Can’t a man get a little shut-eye around here? Then he rolled over and went back to sleep.
After
Paul knew he was beat, and beat by his own rickety bone-pile of a no-good brother. But before he had time to feel powerful bad, a mighty hunger rose up in him. He hadn’t had a bite to eat in ten years twelve hours sixteen minutes and then some. He was so hungry he could’ve eaten his own boots fried in butter. He was so hungry he could’ve bitten off half of Maine and washed it down with the St. Lawrence River. In his mind he saw Hot Biscuit Slim standing over his griddle with the batter spattering and the hotcakes flipping over in the air. Paul picked up his ax and left that cabin in a hurry. He was in such a hurry he jumped onto a hurricane going his way but got off fast when he saw it was blowing too slow. He got one foot wet in Lake Huron and the other foot wet in Lake Michigan. Time he reached camp the men were looking up from the middle of the woods wondering what all the ruckus was about. When they saw Paul Bunyan standing there like the tallest tree in the forest some let out a cheer, some looked surprised, and some scratched their heads in wonder. Paul went straight to the stable and hugged his blue ox so hard they say Babe turned green and then red before he went back to his rightful color. Then over to the cookhouse so fast his hug had to catch up with him later. They say Hot Biscuit Slim out-cooked himself that day. He set up a big chute at the side of the griddle and sent those hotcakes down one after the other so’s they’d fall smack on Paul’s platter and stack up all by themselves. Ten men kept filling the batter kettle and twenty men kept throwing split logs and brush under the griddle to keep the fire roaring. Paul ate so many hotcakes that morning that rivermen and sawmill men came from far away as Idaho just to watch that ax-man eat. He ate so many hotcakes there wasn’t any flour left from Maine to Oregon and they had to haul it down in barrels on flatboats from Canada. Paul kept throwing hotcakes into his mouth and washing’m down with a kettle of molasses till he figured it was time to pick up his ax and do a little work. He went out into the woods and swung his ax so hard, when the trees hit the ground they split into piles of trim pine boards. He worked so quick he felled an acre of white pine before you even heard the sound of his ax. As he swung he roared out: I can out-run out-jump out-drink and out-shoot you and I can out-bash out-gash out-mash and out-smash you and my own little brother up in Maine can out-sleep out-nap out-snooze and out-doze you even if you’re a grizzly bear holed up in a cave in winter. All that night the men in the bunkhouses could hear trees falling and no sign of Paul Bunyan. They say he swung that ax fourteen days and fourteen nights before he stopped to wipe a drop of sweat from his cheek. Some say he chopped his way over the Rockies clear past the coast of Oregon and stood knee-deep in the Pacific chopping waves in half. He chopped so hard he never did have time to see that no-muscle brother of his again. They say James Bunyan was so almighty tired after battling it out with his brother he spent all his time trying to catch up on his sleep. Some say he’s sleeping still. I wouldn’t know about that. These are stories you hear.
A VOICE IN THE NIGHT
1
The boy Samuel wakes in the dark. Something’s not right. Most commentators agree that the incident takes place inside the tem
ple, rather than in a tent outside the temple doors, under the stars. Less certain is whether Samuel’s bed is in the sanctuary itself, where the Ark of the Covenant stands before a seven-branched oil lamp that is kept burning through the night, or in an adjoining chamber. Let’s say that he is lying in an inner chamber, close to the sanctuary, perhaps adjacent to it. A curtained doorway leads to the chamber of Eli, the high priest of the temple of Shiloh. We like such details, but they do not matter. What matters is that Samuel wakes suddenly in the night. He is twelve years old, according to Flavius Josephus, or he may be a year or two younger. Something has startled him awake. He hears it again, clearly this time: “Samuel!” Eli is calling his name. What’s wrong? Eli never calls his name in the middle of the night. Did Samuel forget to close the temple doors at sunset, did he allow one of the seven flames of the lamp to go out? But he remembers it well: pushing shut the heavy doors of cedar, visiting the sanctuary and replenishing the seven gold branches with consecrated olive oil so that the flames will burn brightly all night long. “Samuel!” He flings aside his goat’s-hair blanket and hurries, almost runs, through the dark. He pushes through the curtain and enters Eli’s chamber. The old man is lying on his back. Because he is the high priest of the temple of Shiloh, his mattress on the wooden platform is stuffed with wool, not straw. Eli’s head rests on a pillow of goat’s hair and his long-fingered hands lie crossed on his chest, beneath his white beard. His eyes are closed. “You called me,” Samuel says, or perhaps his words are “Here am I, for thou didst call me.” Eli opens his eyes. He seems a little confused, like a man roused from sleep. “I didn’t call you,” he answers. Or perhaps, with a touch of gruffness, since he doesn’t like being awakened in the night: “I called not; lie down again.” Samuel turns obediently away. He walks back to his chamber, where he lies down but doesn’t close his eyes. In his years of attending Eli he’s come to understand a great deal about the temple and its rules, and he tries to understand this night as well. Is it possible that Eli called his name without knowing it? The priest is old, sometimes he makes noises with his lips in his sleep, or mutters strange words. But never once has he called Samuel in the night. Has Samuel had a dream, in which a voice called out his name? Only recently he dreamed that he was walking alone through the parted waters of the Red Sea. Shimmering cliffs of water towered up on both sides, and as the watery walls began to plunge down on him, he woke with a cry. From outside the walls of the temple he hears the high-pitched wail of a young sheep. Slowly Samuel closes his eyes.
2
It’s a summer night in Stratford, Connecticut, 1950. The boy, seven years old, lies awake in his bed on the second floor, under the two screened windows that look down on his backyard. Through the windows he can hear the sound of summer: the chk chk chk of crickets from the vacant lot on the other side of the backyard hedge. For donkeys it’s hee-haw, for roosters it’s cock-a-doodle-doo, but for crickets you have to make up your own sound. Sometimes a car passes on the street alongside the yard, throwing two rectangles of light across the dark ceiling. The boy thinks the rectangles are the shapes of the open windows under the partially raised blinds, but he isn’t sure. He’s listening: hard. That afternoon in his Sunday-school class at the Jewish Community Center, Mrs. Kraus read the story of the boy Samuel. In the middle of the night a voice called out his name: “Samuel! Samuel!” He was an attendant of the high priest and lived in the temple of Shiloh, without his parents. When he heard his name, Samuel thought the high priest was calling him. Three times in the night he heard his name, three times he went to the bedside of Eli. But it was the voice of the Lord calling him. The boy in Stratford is listening for his name in the night. The story of Samuel has made him nervous, tense as a cat. The slightest sound stiffens his whole body. He never thinks about the old man with a beard on the front of his Child’s Illustrated Old Testament, but now he’s wondering. What would his voice be like? His father says God is a story that people made up to explain things they don’t understand. When his father speaks about God to company at dinner, his eyes grow angry and gleeful behind his glasses. But the voice in the night is scary as witches. The voice in the night knows you’re there, even though you’re hidden in the dark. If the voice calls your name, you have to answer. The boy imagines the voice calling his name. It comes from the ceiling, it comes from the walls. It’s like a terrible touch, all over his body. He doesn’t want to hear the voice, but if he hears it he’ll have to answer. You can’t get out of it. He pulls the covers up to his chin and thinks of the walls of water crashing down on the Egyptians, on their chariots and horses. Through the window screens the crickets seem to be growing louder.
3
The Author is sixty-eight years old, in good health, most of his teeth, half his hair, not dead yet, though lately he hasn’t been sleeping well. He’s always been a light sleeper, the slightest sound jostles him awake, but this is different: he falls asleep with a book on his chest, then wakes up for no damn reason and strains his neck to look at the green glow of his digital clock, where it’s always some soul-crushing time like 2:16 or 3:04 in the miserable morning. Hell time, abyss time, the hour of no return. He wonders whether he should turn on his bedside lamp, try to read a little, relax, but he knows the act of switching on the light will wake him up even more, and besides, there’s the problem of what to read when you wake up at two or three in the godforsaken morning. If he reads something that interests him he’ll excite his mind and ruin his chance for sleep, but if he reads something that bores him he’ll become impatient, restless, and incapable of sleep. Better to lie there and curse his fate, like a man with a broken leg lying in a ditch. He listens to the sounds of the dark: hsssh of a passing car, mmmm of a neighbor’s air conditioner, skriiik of a floorboard in the attic—a resident ghost. Things drift through your mind at doom-time in the morning, and as he listens he thinks of the boy in the house in Stratford, the bed by the two windows, the voice in the night. He thinks of the boy a lot these days, sometimes with irritation, sometimes with a fierce love that feels like sorrow. The boy tense, whipped up, listening for a voice in the night. He feels like shouting at the boy, driving some sense into that head of his. Oil your baseball glove! Jump on your bike! Do chin-ups on the swing set! Make yourself strong! But why yell at the boy? What’d he ever do to you? Better to imagine the voice calling right here, right now: Hello, old atheist, have I got news for you. Sorry, pal. Don’t waste your time. You should’ve made your pitch when I was seven. Had the boy really expected to hear his name in the night? So long ago: Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders on the radio, his father at dinner attacking McCarthy. War in Korea, the push to Pusan. Those old stories got to you: Joseph in the pit, the parting of the Red Sea, David soothing the soul of Saul with his harp. In Catholic working-class Stratford, he was the only boy who didn’t make the sign of the cross when they passed Holy Name Church on the way to school. Girls with smudges of ash on their foreheads. His God-scorning father driving him to Sunday school but taking him home when the others went to Hebrew class. No bar mitzvah for him. His father mocking his own rabbi for making boys jabber words they didn’t understand. “Pure gibberish.” A new word: gibberish. He liked it: gibberish. Still: Sunday school, “Rock of Ages,” the story of Samuel, why is this night different from all other nights. The boy lying there listening, wanting his name to be called. Had he wanted his name to be called? Through the window the Author hears the sound of a distant car, the cry of the crickets. Sixty years later, upstate New York, and still the cry of the crickets in the summer in Stratford. Time to sleep, old man.
1
Samuel wakes again. This time he’s sure: Eli has called his name. The voice stands out sharply, like a name written on a wall. “Samuel!” He throws off the goat’s-hair blanket and steps onto the straw mat on the floor by his bed. He has lived with Eli in the temple of Shiloh for as long as he can remember. Once a year his mother and father visit him, when they come up from Ramah to offer the annual sacrifice. When he wa
s born, his mother gave him to the Lord. She had asked the Lord for a son, and that’s why his name is Asked-of-the-Lord. That’s why he wears a linen ephod, that’s why his hair flows down below his shoulders: no razor shall ever come upon his head. Samuel: Asked of the Lord. He enters Eli’s chamber, where he expects to find Eli sitting up in bed, waiting impatiently for him. Instead, Eli is lying on his back with his eyes closed, like a man asleep. Should he wake Eli? Did Eli call Samuel’s name and then fall back to sleep? Samuel hesitates to wake a man who’s old and filled with worries. Though Eli is the high priest of the temple, his sons are wicked. They are priests who do not obey. When flesh is offered for sacrifice, they take the best part for themselves. They practice iniquities with women who come to the doors of the temple. “Here am I!” Samuel says, in a voice a little louder than he intended. Eli stirs and opens his eyes. “For thou didst call me,” Samuel says, more softly. The old priest raises his head with difficulty. “I called not, my son. Lie down again.” Samuel doesn’t protest, but lowers his eyes and turns away with the uneasy sense of having disturbed an old man’s sleep. As he enters his own chamber, he tries to understand. Why has Eli called his name twice in the night? He called out in a loud, clear voice, a voice that could not be mistaken for some other sound. But Eli, who speaks only truth, has denied it. Samuel lies down on his bed and pulls the blanket up to his shoulders. Eli is very old. Does he call out Samuel’s name and then, when Samuel appears beside him, forget that he has called? Old men are forgetful. The other day, when Eli spoke to Samuel of his own childhood, he could not remember a name he was searching for and grew troubled. Samuel has seen an old man at the temple whose body trembles like well-water in a goatskin bucket. His eyes are unlit lamps. Eli is old, his eyesight is growing dim, but his body doesn’t tremble and his voice is still strong. On the shoulder of his purple and scarlet ephod are two onyx stones, each engraved with the names of six tribes of Israel. When he stands in sunlight, the stones shine like fire. Slowly Samuel drifts into sleep.
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