“Don’t you mean chance to be a nursemaid, Jan? I appreciate your good intentions but take my word: Viv is wife aplenty. If she needs to doctor something I’ll get her a kittycat.” Besides, he added to himself, for anybody to figure what the devil Viv’s secret spiritual needs are or what to do about them you’d have to know her a hundred years. Have to be tuned in exactly to Viv’s wave length. And Jan might be good at figuring people’s needs but she wasn’t that good.... (But I got a big boot out of Jan that way. She was always corralling me in a corner with some of her big-eyed advice. Which I usually let slide off me like water off a duck. But when she come up to me that first morning Lee was at the house and told me to be real easy with the boy and I said, “Easy? what do you mean easy? I intend to get some work outa the cuss is what,” and she said that wasn’t what she meant, that what she meant was not to get into some kind of argument with him right off, I knew what she was driving at; better than she did, in fact. Because what with Viv and me getting into it the night before about her always wanting to fraternize with those harpies in town, and getting into it again that same morning as she headed for the barn in a huff, I was in a pee-poor mood. And that’s the point: knowing this feeling like I did, I knew that if me and the kid started disagreeing about something I’d get an urge to pop somebody and it’d be just like me and that gleef in that bar in Colorado, only more so by a damned sight: I’d talk myself onto a limb again and end up getting pissed and kicking the living shit out of Lee . . . only this time it’d be worse than a little stretch in boot—we’d lose a badly needed woods hand. “What I mean, Hank,” Jan said, “is you find something safe to talk about when you talk to that boy.” I grinned at her and lifted her chin up with my finger and told her, “Janny lamb, you just ease yourself; I won’t talk about nothing with him but the weather and the woods. That’s a promise.” “Good,” she said and drew those waxy lids down over her eyes [I used to kid Joby about her being able to see through those lids like a frog], and headed off back to the kitchen to work on breakfast. Soon as she left, Joby was on me about practically the same thing, only he wanted me to be sure I said something to Lee. “Tell him how he’s growed or something, Hank. Last night you was about as friendly to him as a leper.” “By god, now,” I said, “you an’ Jan get together and rehearse this?” “Just let the boy know he’s home, is all. You gotta keep in mind he’s one of the sensitives.” Joe went on off, leaving me kind of peeved—they act like the place was a grade school welcoming first-graders. I thought I knew what they were both angling at though. And I was already wondering how I was going to make it with another sensitive in the house, especially the way Viv’d been since finding out about the WP contract. I knew I was going to have to walk on eggs just to keep peace. I walked on over to his room anyhow and stood there a minute, listening to see if he was up and around or not. Henry had give him a holler a few minutes before, but he could of passed that off as a bad dream, the way the old devil sounded with his calling; since the old man’d been laid up he’d been big on being the first one out of bed, storming through the house rise-and-shining till I could of choked the old bastard. Nothing galls a man more than being yelled out of bed by somebody all full of piss, vinegar, and the knowledge that as soon as everybody else is off to the job then he can cripple back to the sack and sleep till noon. The room is hard and dark, patrolled by the icy air circulating through the jammed window . . . I was about to tap on the boy’s door when I heard him rustling around, so I tiptoed back down to get shaved up for breakfast, thinking back on the first time cousin John came out from Idaho to work for us and Henry went in to root him out in the morning. John’d looked pretty bad when he arrived the night before—claimed he’d swum his way across country on a great river of alcohol—so we’d put him to bed before the rest of us, hoping he’d grow back together a little bit with a good snooze. When Henry opened the door that morning and went in, John reared up in bed like somebody’d shot off a cannon, blinking his eyes and pawing at the air in front of him. “What is it?” he said. “What is it?” The old man told him it was three-thirty was what it was. “Jesus Christ,” John said. “Jesus Christ, you better get some sleep, Henry. Didn’t you tell me we got a hard day’s work comin’ up tomorrow?” And flopped right back down. It was a good three days before we got John cooked dry enough to look human, and he still didn’t do us much good. He just moaned and groaned around. That was before any of us realized we were trying to run him without his fuel; just like his truck ran better with Diesel than without, John functioned better with a tankful of Seven Crown. One of the reasons for his drinking, Henry said, was John’s mama used to make the whole family get down on their knees and pray like fury every time John’s daddy—Henry’s first cousin, I believe—would come home boozed, and John never quite got it straight that they weren’t thanking the good Lord for his blessing same as they did at the supper table. So according to Henry booze come to be sort of holy to him and with faith like that John grew up religious as a deacon. The bed is a frozen shell, surrounding one kernel of warmth from which you dare not move... John was a good worker. A lot more drunks are good workers than people think. Maybe they need it like a medicine just like Jan every day needs to take her thyroid pills to keep even-keeled. I remember one day when we had to get John to drive the pick-up to town—the day old Henry busted himself up slipping off that mossy rock and Joe and me had to be in back with him to keep him from bouncing and rearing around and jumping out. John, I remember, was the only choice handy for driver. I thought he was going okay, but all the ride in Henry keeps hollering, “I’ll walk to town rather’n ride with that damn gin-head. I’ll walk, goddammit, I’ll walk—” like it’d be easier’n riding . . .) You try to shrink further inside that warm center, but the booming of old Henry’s cast coming down the hall rips through your dark armor of sleep like a cannonball. “Wake it an’ shake it!” comes the war cry following the initial knuckled assault on the door: Boom boom boom! then: “Wake it an’ shake it! Wag it an’ shag it! If you can’t carry it roll it out an’ drag it hee hee hee.” Followed by more loud booming on the door and a high, malicious giggle. “Give me some whistlepunks! Give me some bully jacks! Give me some fallers an’ chasers an’ chokersetters! Gawdamn; I can’t run a show without me some loggers!” Gawdamn; I can’t sleep without me some quiet! The door thundered again. Wham wham wham. “Boy?” The house shuddered. “Boy! Le’s get out there an’ take the shade offn the ground. Le’s get some daylight in that swamp.” Daylight is right, I mumbled into the pillow. Still black as the holes of hell, and at any moment the senile old imbecile was going to proceed to fire the whole house as a precaution against slugabeds who might still harbor the ridiculous notion that the dead of night was meant for sleeping. In that first reawakening chaos a quick glance about at the morning proved as insufficient as it had the night before. For once again I was able to establish the where but not the when. Certain facts were apparent: dark; cold; thundering boots; quilts; pillow; light under the door—the materials of reality—but I could not pin these materials down in time. And the raw materials of reality without that glue of time are materials adrift and reality is as meaningless as the balsa parts of a model airplane scattered to the wind. ...I am in my old room, yes, in the dark, certainly, and it is cold, obviously, but what time is it? “Nearly four, son.” Whomp whomp whomp! But I mean what time? What year is it? I tried to recount the facts of my arrival but they had come unglued during the night and were too far blown in the dark to be readily recovered. In fact, it took at least the first two weeks of my stay to gather all the balsawood pieces—longer than that to glue them into any order again. “Say, son, what are you doin’ in there?” Push-ups. My Latin assignment. The Blue Tango. “You woke at all?” I nodded loudly. “Then what are you a-doin’?” I managed to mumble something that must have satisfied as well as amused him because he rumbled on off down the hallway,............