Sometimes a Great Notion Read Online Free PDF Page A

ask him personally? I mean—”
    “Call? Call? Hellsfire, what do you think we been doin’ ever since we got out here? Listen to Gibbons hollering yonder.”
    “I mean the phone. Didn’t you try to phone?”
    “Of course we tried to phone.”
    “Well . . . ? What was his answer? I mean—”
    “His answer?” Evenwrite rubs his face again. “Why, I’ll show you what his answer was—is. Howie! Come over here’th them glasses. Mr. Draeger here wants to know what Hank’s answer is.”
    The man on the bank turns slowly. “Answer . . . ?”
    “Answer! Answer! What he told us when we ast him to reconsider, so to speak. Bring here them glasses and let Mr. Draeger have a look.”
    The binoculars are drawn from the belly pouch of a rain-gray sweat shirt. They are cold in Draeger’s hands, even through the heavy elkhide. The men crowd forth. “There.” Evenwrite points triumphantly. “There’s Hank Stamper’s answer!”
    He follows the point and notices something through the fog there, the swing of some object hanging like fish bait from a big stick in front of that ancient and ridiculous house across the river there. . . . “But what does this—” He lifts the glasses and leans into the eyepieces, forefinger twiddling the focus knob. Hears the men waiting. “I still don’t—” The object blurs, fuzzes over, blurs, twisting, then clicks solid into focus so close he momentarily experiences the reeking stench of it high in his burning throat—“It looks like a man’s arm, but I still don’t—” then feels that growing foreboding blossom full. “I’ll—what?” Hears the rising of wet laughter from around his car. Curses and thrusts the glasses back at a face unrecognizable in mirth. Rolls up his window but he can still hear it. Leans over the wheel toward the beating wipers—“I’ll talk to that girl, his wife—Viv?—in town and find—” and spins out the ruts onto the highway, away from the laughing.
    He clamps his jaw and follows the lip of that grinning river. Confused and furious; he has never been laughed at before, not by such a pack of fools—not by anyone! Confused, and bleakly, crazily furious, and haunted by the suspicion that he is not only being laughed at by that pack of fools back there on the riverbank—as if their fools’ response concerned him one dime’s worth!—but that there is also some other fool laughing at him unseen from the upstairs window of that damned house. . . .
    “What could have happened? ”
    Where whoever had hanged the arm from its pole had made certain that it was as much a gesture of grim and humorous defiance as the old house; where whoever had taken the trouble to swing the arm out into sight of the road had also taken trouble to tie down all the fingers but the middle finger, leaving that rigid and universal sentiment lifted with unmistakable scorn to all that came past.
    And somehow lifted especially, Draeger could not help feeling, to him. “To me! Disparaging me personally for . . . being so mistaken. For . . .” Lifted as a deliberate refutation of all he believed to be true, knew to be true about Man; as a blasphemous affrontery to a faith forged over an anvil of thirty years, a precise and predictable faith hammered out of a quarter-century of experience dealing with labor and management—a religion almost, a neatly noted-down, red-ribboned package of truths about men, and Man. Proven! that the fool Man will oppose everything except a Hand Extended; that he will stand up in the face of every hazard except Lonely Time; that for the sake of his poorest and shakiest and screwiest principles he will lay down his life, endure pain, ridicule, and even, sometimes, that most demeaning of American hardships, discomfort, but will relinquish his firmest stand for Love. Draeger had seen this proven. He had watched oak-hard mill bosses come to ridiculous terms rather than have their pimply daughters pilloried at the local junior high, seen die-hard