“Probably without being members of anything, too.” “Henry . . . old man—” The other boy blinked solemnly, following the paper’s teasing movements, then began reciting in unconscious parody of his father, “We are founders of a new frontier, workers in a new world; we must all strive together. A unified effort will—” Henry laughed and pushed the paper into the boy’s hand; then stooped to select some choice rocks from the river bank. He skipped one out across the wide gray-green water, flashing. “Oh, I reckon we’ll whup ’er.” His failure to be duly impressed by the offer made the other boy uneasy and a little irritated. “Henry,” he said again softly and touched Henry’s arm with two fingers thin as icicles, “I was born in this land. I spent my youth here amongst the wilderness and savages. I know the way a pioneer needs his fellow man. To survive. Now; I truly like you, old fellow; I wouldn’t want to see you forced to leave by the untamed elements. Like ...some others.” Henry threw his handful of pebbles all together into the river. “Nobody’s leaving, Bobby Stokes, Boney Stokes—nobody else is leaving.” Laughing that old man’s ferocious laugh at the other’s somber and fatalistic expression. As the pebbles slowly melt beneath the current. And years later, after he had used this same ferocity to build a small fortune and a logging operation the size of which was limited only by the number of relatives that migrated to the area to work for him, Henry rowed across one morning to find Boney waiting at the garage in the delivery truck. “Morning, Henry. How’s Henry Stamper, Junior?” “Noisy,” Henry answered, squinting a little as he looked sideways at his old friend standing like a post near the door of the truck. Boney was holding a ragged brown package against his thigh. “Yep. Noisy and hungry.” He waited, squinting. “Oh.” Boney suddenly remembered the package. “This came for you this morning. I guess they must of got word about the birth back in Kansas.” “I guess they must of done that.” Boney looked forlornly at the package. “It appears to be from Kansas City. A relative, perhaps?” Henry grinned into his hand, a gesture so like the one used by Boney to cover his barking cough that people of the town sometimes wondered if Henry had copied the move to further plague his morose companion. “Well—” He laughed at Boney’s fidgeting. “What the hell, let’s see what he sent.” Boney already had his pocketknife open to cut the string. The package contained a wall plaque, one of those sentimental souvenirs picked up at county fairs: a frame of wooden cherubs around a copper bas-relief of Jesus carrying a lamb through a field of daisies, and raised copper letters declaring, “Blessed Are the Meek, for They Shall Inherit the Earth. Matt. 6”—and a note saying, “This here is for my Grandchild; may he grow up to have more Christian Love and Sympathy and Charity than the rest of my family who have never understood nor communicated with me. J. A. Stamper.” Boney was shocked. “You mean to tell me you’ve never even written to that poor old fellow? Never?” Boney was more than shocked, he was horrified. “You’ve done him a terrible wrong!” a great notion “You reckon? Well, I’ll see ifn I can’t make it up some way. Come take a little ride to the house with me.” And in the mother’s room Boney’s horror turned to petrified disbelief as he stood watching Henry paint the plaque with dull yellow machine paint. Henry dried the paint with the heat of the burning note, and with one of the heavy red pencils used for marking the footage on the end of logs, finally put into words, into writing, what to Henry was nothing more than a good rule for his son to grow up under, but what essentially was the core of that family sin Jonas had seen in the eyes of his son in the Kansas sunlight: sitting on the edge of the bed that contained the fortyfive-year-old woman he had married upon his mother’s death, with Boney looking on incredulous as a totem pole, and the newborn child crying his lungs out, Henry had laboriously lettered his own personal gospel over the raised copper words of Jesus; bent tensely over the plaque, grinning his fierce, irreverent grin at his wife’s protests and Boney’s stare, and at the thought of what pious old Jonas would say if he could just see his gift now. “That ought to do ’er.” He stood up, right pleased with his work, and walked across the room and nailed the plaque into the wall over the enormous crib he and the boys at the mill built for Henry Junior. (Where the goddamned ugly outfit hangs, all the time I’m growing up. NEVER GIVE A INCH! In Pa’s broad, awkward hand. The dirtiest, crummiest, cruddiest yellow under the sun and that awkward school-kid lettering in red. NEVER GIVE A INCH! Just like one of them mottos you might see in a Marine sergeant’s orderly office, or like something Coach Lewellyn might of drawn up to hang alongside his other hardnose signs all over the locker room. NEVER GIVE A INCH! Just like the corny, gung-ho, guts-ball posters that I seen a good thousand of, just exactly like, except for that raised picture of Jesus and his lamb under the gobby machine paint and them curlicue words you could read with your fingers at night when the lights went out, “Blessed are the meek” and so forth and so on. . . . It hung there and I never had no more idea than a duck what all was behind it till I was sixteen and she told me what she knew about it and I connected what Boney told me with what the old man told me, then hooked all this up with the women. Funny, how things sometimes take so long to click together, and how something like that sign can hang unnoticed right next to your head for so many years; yet you have to be beat across the knob with it before it starts to dawn just how much it was noticed, whether you knew it or not...) When the boy Hank was ten, his mother, always grim and gray and distant—an almost identical remake of the nondescript grandmother he never knew—took to her bed in one of the dark rooms of the old house and devoted two months to some fervent ailing, then got up one morning, did a washing, and died. She looked so natural and unchanged in her coffin that the boy found himself striving to re-create conversations he had had with her—sentences she might have used, expressions— in an attempt to convince himself that she had once been more than that carved, peaceful form nestled there in ruffles of satin. Henry didn’t expend half as much thought. The dead’s dead, was the way he looked at it; get ’em in the ground and look to the live ones. So, as soon as he had paid Lilienthal, the mortician, he picked a carnation from one of the wreaths, stabbed it into the lapel of his funeral suit, and caught a train to New York and was gone for three months. Three precious months, right out of the middle of cutting season. Henry’s youngest brother, Aaron, and his family, stayed at the house to tak............