He had taken a big cut in money when he had accepted the head job at the local; the job didn’t pay near what he’d been drawing as the first push for Wakonda Pacific. But he’d be damned if he’d try to hold down his union job and work the woods at the same time, the way a lot of local officials did. You couldn’t do worth a shit at neither job if you did. And both positions meant too much to him for that. He prided himself in knowing that both logging and labor were in his blood, though the price of this pride came high. His granddad had been a big man in the very start of the movement, in the IWW, the Wobblies. He’d been personal friends with Big Bill Haywood; a photograph of the two of them hung on Floyd’s bedroom wall: two mustached men, each wearing a large white button with the words “i am an undesirable citizen” pinned to his pea-jacket, and held between them a circular picture of a grinning black cat, the Wobblies’ sabotage symbol. His granddad had given his life both in deed and in fact to the movement: after years of work as an organizer he had been killed in 1916 in the Everett Massacre, championing the union man’s right to free speech in that Washington milltown. Penniless, his grandmother had returned to her family in Michigan with her young son, Floyd’s father. But the son of a martyred Wob wasn’t about to settle down in tame old Michigan; not when the fight still raged. After a few months the boy had run away, back to the north woods and the work the old man had died for. By the time he was twenty-one this stocky, thick-featured redhead—called Knob, because of the predominant Evenwrite feature of a head set without benefit of neck on heavy round shoulders—had chopped a reputation for himself as one of the fiercest, fence-nail-chewingest, carpet-tack-spittingest men in the woods, both as an all-around dawn-till-dark diehard logger and as rip-roaring loudmouth of a labor visionary, a Wob that his old man—or even Big Bill Haywood himself—would have been proud of. By the time this redhead was forty-one, he was a skid-road alky with a rotting liver and a broken heart, and no one in the world proud of him. The Wobs were dead, gone, crushed between the thundering collisions of the AFL and CIO, discredited as Communist (though they had spent more fighting the “Red Dawn” than the other two unions combined), and the woods Knob Evenwrite had loved were rapidly filling up with exhaust smoke where there had once been only clear, pine-winy air, and the rough diehard loggers he had fought for were being replaced by beardless boys who learned their logging from textbooks, and smoked instead of chewed, and slept between snow-white sheets just like they thought lumberjacks had always slept that way. There didn’t seem anything left but to get married and drown the disappointed memories. Floyd never met the young diehard fire-eating Knob, not face to face, though he often felt that he knew the young man better than he knew the dejected spook in the fire-eater’s cast-off skin who staggered about the impoverished shadows of their three-room shack in Florence, intent on drinking and dying. For some nights, when his father came home from his boiler-tender’s job at the mill, he would do more than just drink and die. Maybe on these nights something had ripped some old memory loose from the bottom of his father’s past, or it might be that he had witnessed some capitalistic injustice at the mill that relit the fire-eater in him, but on these nights the man would sit in the kitchen, telling young Floyd how things used to be, how they by god woulda handled a injustice like that back in the days when the air was still clear and the Wobs still stalked the woods! Then the cheap liquor that usually brought nothing but silence and eventually sleep would, on these special nights, stir up the sleeping zealot imprisoned behind the blue-veined bars of sick flesh, and Floyd would see the young Knob Evenwrite rise up from the rubbish and walk forward to glare from the cell’s two eyeholes and shake at the hellish blue bars like an enraged lion. “Listen, kid, it all boils down to this,” the lion would sum up the situation. “There’s the Big-Asses like them, an’ the Little-Asses like us. It’s easy to tell who’s on whose side. There’s just a few Big-Asses; they own the world an’ all the corn. There’s millions of us Little-Asses; they grow the corn an’ all go hungry. The Big-Asses, they think they can get away with this because they think they’re better than the Little-Asses—on account of maybe somebody died an’ left them a lot of money so they can pay the Little-Asses to grow their corn for them, an’ pay ’em what they want to pay. We got to haul ’em down from that, do you see? We got to show them we’re just as important as they are! Everybody is as important as they are! Everybody grows corn! Everybody eats it! Simple as that!” Then would leap up to sway about the room, roaring fiercely: “Which side are you on? Which side are you on? When we all line up in the bat-tul . . . Tell me which side are you on?” Floyd’s mother and his two sisters cringed from the rare roaring visits of this lion. His two sisters blamed the devil for these spells of violent nostalgia; his mother maintained that it was the devil, all right, the devil in a pint bottle without a label! But young Floyd knew it was something far stronger than a bogeyman from the Bible, or from a bottle either; he knew that when his father’s past roared out through the old stories about injustices overcome in their fight for shorter hours and longer lives, and through old songs about the impossible utopias they had worked to realize, he could feel in his own young blood the roaring cry for justice and see rise again in the distance those blazing utopias that his father’s whiskied eyes perceived— though the boy hadn’t touched a drop. Of course, these nights of passion were rare. And, like his mother and sister, Floyd could despise the worn-out fanatic who kept them locked in poverty, the husk of a man who nightly drank himself into a senseless sleep to keep from having to face all the bewildered, groping ghosts of his stillborn dreams and extinct ideals, but just as he could hate the old man he could love the tough visionary who had dreamed the dreams and forged the ideals—though this young visionary was responsible, he knew, for the fanatic’s worn-out husk that he hated. His father died during Floyd’s freshman year in high school— burned to death on a mountaintop. The man’s drinking had finally reached the point of making him incapable of even tending a boiler. After a long winter of unemployment some old friends had found him a job as a fire lookout on the highest mountain in the county. He left for the job with his spirits high. Everyone had hopes that the lofty solitude, and the month-long periods without access to any kind of alcohol, would ease old Knob of his anguish and perhaps even start him on the road to a cure. But when a party of firefighters reached the smoldering ruin of the lookout shack, they discovered n............