The Hauntings of Hood Canal

Flying Home

It was big and silver and the nose poked at air which in my memory is blue. People dashed back and forth beneath its wings with the bustle of third-rate bureaucrats over a fifth-rate rule. The thing was a Ford Tri-motor. It was the biggest plane I had then seen. At age nine the sight of that plane embarked me on a lifetime of social philosophy.

This was before the flowers came and before Baez began asking where they had gone. It was before anyone thought of throwing daisies at a cop. The USA in voluminous compassion had not yet bombed Hiroshima, lynched the Rosenbergs or lately engaged in war crimes. There were no sales taxes, televisions, shopping centers, subdivisions or freeways. We were told that the way to get an heir was to contact God. He dispatched a stork.

The Tri-motor was storklike. Squatted on the runway it stood high on widespread wheels. The tail slouched to the ground. When you boarded you walked uphill. The three propellers, one to a wing, one on the nose, rested gawkish as sticks cast at random. It was a toy designed for a monster poodle. Fetch, Fido, fetch; but the damned thing flew. In the air it was most beautiful.

“To your dad and to me a plane could be beautiful.” I say this to my friend as we discuss our differences. My friend was born after the Second World War.

“It was before the Theatre of the Absurd,” she says.

It sure was, although the world was drenched in the absurd. It was polluted with the absurd. My friend’s father, twelve years my senior, was about to go to war when I saw that plane. He would trail mules on the Burma Road. The battle jacket he wore in those days was given to his daughter. It hangs in our attic. Dry and cracking leather, a blaze of forgotten insignia.

The man who wore that jacket now runs a business in a large city and spends most of his time fighting encroachment by government minions or the large gulp and screw of corporations. He does not like the world’s business or its music or its plans. He works too hard and his voice is quiet on times when it might be loud. Both of his daughters are living with freaks. One with a writer, the other with a potter. At fifty-seven that sort of thing can be hard to deal with. He probably tries not to think about it.

At fifty-seven, and as a representative member of a generation that has been excoriated as nazi, conservative, business jock and all-around bad guy by half the population now alive, it may also be that he sometimes wishes his kids had more understanding. Is an act of justice due? Is it wanted? If justice were done would it hurt? Maybe. He expresses few opinions on amnesty for others, expresses no opinions on amnesty for himself.

I write of a silver Ford Tri-motor and of a generation of revolutionaries. Revolutionaries are those who turn the established order upside down. I write of their success and of their failure. There has been time to ponder the history. Part of that history is my own, and, though the philosophy of history and society has produced plenty of foolishness, it is not a fool’s errand. This is especially true in a time when the xeroxed soul is the convention, and when the hero has been abandoned for the martyr because the society produces few heroes. It is true at a time when big chunks of the population are emotional survivors before age thirty.

The contrast between these revolutionaries and their children can only be as angular and gawky as a stork. The generation of which I write did not know shit from shinola about ‘lifestyles,’ ‘chairpersons’ or ‘creation’ by committees. Few turtlenecks infested their closets. They were sometimes hep, never hip, and when their big bands swung they told each other to get hot, not cool.

They caused a revolution and raised a bunch of kids who during the ’60s would engage in a reformation. Reformation has historically been purifying reform movement based not on radical ideas but on fundamentalism.

Time rolls, the generations pulse, pant, dream and make babies. My friend is twenty-eight, her father fifty­ seven. In twenty-five years she will be thought an old fogey and her old man and I will both be dead. We lived hard. Thank God you don’t have to take it with you.

He was born in 1920. That meant that he was too young to enjoy the fun. The cats were celebrating the invention of walls by climbing them in those days. They were the days of Fitzgerald and Thomas (not Tom) Wolfe. A world of red hot and enlightened boy scouts. Someday a professorial set of whiskers will flash on the similarity between Richard Nixon and Gatsby.

At the time Henry Ford was the revolutionary. He did it at no inconsiderable profit to himself. Like most revolutionaries of both the 19th and 20th centuries his interests were economic and only secondarily political. As in all revolutions the results were social. Only in the emerging U.S.S.R. would there be revolutionaries who would post a record of political change to equal the social flip-flop that the industrial U.S. would make in this century.

In 1920 Ford had nearly every industry in the nation screaming. His assembly plants boomed. During the First World War he had announced the five-dollar day for employees. It forced industry to compete. Five dollars was an astonishing wage. It caused the kind of shock that took some time to wear off. Early labor leaders in the U.S. were as inept and fumbling before the fact as was the Communist Party in Russia after Kerensky but before Lenin.

The Model T sold more than half a million copies in 1916, two million in 1923, and the total run before the Model A appeared in ’28 would be fifteen million. This in a nation of a hundred fifteen million (of which ten million were black and at the time not entitled to own anything but the blues). A nation that had yet to discover how to build a road that would work all year round.

Our hero (my friend’s father and not Henry Ford) was nine years old when the world died. We must call him hero since his generation knew nothing of protagonists. The Tri-motor was still a thing of the future. The stork was taking a Freudian beating. The life of the nation was as rumpled as a bird sprawled by a shotgun blast. Social patterns, sexual customs, economic beliefs and booze chanted new themes in tin pan alley jargon over the flaming truth of this brave new world. Flight, Oh, beautiful. We can fly.

I pause to consider sin. Billy Sunday has given way to Billy Graham. What this means is perhaps implied by the fact that no one in America has yet written a book entitled Fundamentalism and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Graham chants dogma. He tells of the faith of our hero’s father, of which there is more to say.

Sin was not an abstraction in 1920, nor was it confined to theological disputation. It was not merely a scare word to evoke societal guilt. It was real. It was walking around out there with a forked tail, horns on its head, the Letter ‘A’ emblazoned across its brow and on its lips was the smile of the goat. Our hero’s parents were products of the Victorian era. They were provincial and that is what our hero learned. Geographic mobility for the majority had been limited to a range of no more than twenty miles from home. Thus, home was different.

Home was more important and more people lived there. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, shirt-tail cousins. The home involved community. It was community.

The Model T broke that community. It was possible to think in terms of a hundred miles, even a thousand. The quick rise of industry in World War One, together with European immigration, caused the cities to boom. From an agrarian society the U.S. rapidly moved toward an urban society. The country boys learned a lot when they got to town.

The first thing they learned is that in a city you can walk around a corner and become a stranger. This is one of the few keys it takes to open the lock of the 1920s.

All bets were off except for one. You may be a stranger to others, and you may behave like others, but your conscience is not a stranger to you. The rule of a Victorian morality weakened because the community was not there to enforce the rules. It only caught up in the late hours when the music had stopped.

It rarely stopped. Business was king. Money was not plentiful for all, but it was plentiful for many. Those who had none had the knowledge of the true believer that all it was going to take was a little time. Everyone would soon be rich.

The U.S. discovered education. It became important to finish high school. That assured success in business.

The educated, as well as the popular press, discovered Freud. Repressions were bad for you. A generation of ladies who had been raised with the expectation of meeting suitors in the home parlor, instead found themselves in roadhouses riding the whirl of illegal booze. Prohibition had struck. Yes, repression was bad for you… and God was back home with the old folks. Deaden that stylistically ridiculous conscience. By 1929 the situation was so tangled that it must have confused a nine-year-old.

A lot has been written. There have been more than enough sentimentalities bruited around about the good old days. Horror stories tinged with the schmaltz of sentimentality. In 1929 the economic crisis was more abrupt and longer lasting than would be the political crisis of 1973. Similarities are easy to see. In each case a superficial system of unwarranted power went bankrupt. In each case the enlightened boy scouts took the test for eagle and laid ostrich eggs instead.

This is hardly sarcasm. In each case we see men who were given power, but who did not understand why they deserved it or even why they had it. That they misused power was unremarkable. That they misused it with the sincerity and locker-room morality of boy scouts is most fortunate. Lenin would not have made such a mistake. Neither would Andrew Carnegie or Leland Stanford.

In 1929, at the age of nine, our hero embarked on his revolutionary career. He did not know it at the time. That is one clear difference between a revolutionary and a saint.

Two economic facts have characterized all depressions of the past. There is no work. Of this particular depression there were other characteristics as grim. Let us consider them through the experience of one who saw them between ages nine and nineteen in the years 1929 through 1939.

The nation was in retreat. We read statistics on yellowing pages, read of cannibalism in Chicago, of starvation and millions dispossessed. All statistics. We do not read of the emotions that washed over the child, then over the young man. He will not tell you of them. He has most earnestly tried to forget them.

There was guilt, shame, hatred and fear.

In what was still a fundamentalist religious nation, guilt was exploited from the pulpit at a time when the people were confused and reaching for any explanation. Recall, also, that this was a people but newly removed from the authority of small communities. It is easy to understand the impact on the American mind by snarling and implacable preachers. Whether or not our hero cared two sticks for religion is unimportant. He lived in a shattered world that did. As late as 1939, when I was seven, I can recall a sermon in which the depression was explained as having been a vengeance of God upon the excesses and pride of the ’20s.

Shame took its quiet shape, spoken in gestures, whispers, avoidance. In the American ethic, every man had always known that a good man could work and support his family. When that knowledge became a lie the men did not blame economics or government. They blamed themselves. Later, when the shame was too wearing, they sought scapegoats and masked the shame with hatred.

For the first years, fear was everywhere. Government made futile cries alternating between optimism and disgrace. Since no politician can admit error, the political persons acted then as political persons would act thirty-five years later on the withdrawal from Viet Nam… which is to say they all agreed that everyone had behaved splendidly, except, perhaps, the American people. The voters may have privately agreed, but they elected Franklin Roosevelt, as they would later elect Jimmy Carter. This is characteristic of American history. Whenever the nation has been armpit-deep in muck it has opted for change.

Roosevelt was, or was not, a great man. It depends on one’s political hates. Our hero does not love him. Roosevelt was greatly championed or greatly despised by those who remember his governments. Only the most bigoted, however, would deny that into the guilt, shame, hatred and fear, Roosevelt injected optimism and hope. He moved across history like he was on roller skates. Only the deliberately stupid could fail to see that he saved an industrial and economic system which would then curse him forever. It is a mixed bag. It seems most likely that the hope caused both guilt and shame to turn to hatred.

Our hero got a jolt of hate that was as scorching as a steel pour. Tin horn messiahs had been circling the action for years. By 1937 a hate campaign rose through the nation targeting the Jews, and, in lesser fashion, the Catholics and Negroes. The latter term is appropriate for the period. The agitators, of course, said nigger like always.

I recall one of those vocal tramps. In our high school auditorium in 1939 came forth a man of tales. Some were perverse even in the light of this PG-rated day. There were only two Jews in that town so the rap was about Catholics.

Most of it was conventional. When a Catholic boy was born another rifle was buried beneath the church. Some were grotesque, nuns having abortions using a Satanic technique of bathing in tubs of used menstrual cloths. Priests smearing sperm around confessional to help stimulate this peculiar race.

In the remembered instance the speaker was waylaid by a group of townspeople after the festivities. He received two broken arms. That rarely happened. Too often the people believed. Too often the rap was about the international cartel of Jews. Hitler’s support would not be only in Germany.

What is more, the people understood a new fear. In 1938 every man, woman and child knew there as going to be a war. The dogs and the cats knew it. The birds in the trees knew it. The only ones who did not know it were the politicians.

Our hero is eighteen. He is in a hell of a fix. The majority believed that we would soon be at war with Germany. A vocal and determined minority supported Hitler. In September, 1939, Hitler moved on Poland. In the barber shops, in beauty shops and at the soda fountain you could hear that it was a good thing. Roosevelt, the former N.R.A., and the Puritan ethic in combination would not produce wealth as quickly as would the God of the Germans leading His people to war. Stay out of the war but make it pay. Nearly everyone forgot the Japanese.

Now he is nineteen. He looks back on ten long years of hate, shame, guilt and fear. He understands without knowing exactly how, that the nation has been decimated by more than poverty. It has had a lesson in survival. As in all such lessons, many did not survive.

The point one remembers when some security-minded economist hitches up the pants of his two hundred-dollar suit and speaks of Malthus is this: starvation kills, but the dead feel no pain. The pain happens when you are alive. What was killed during the romantically remembered great depression in the U.S.A. circa 1929-39 was faith. Faith in institutions. Faith in every kind and variety of religion. Faith in government. Finally, faith in a man’s very self. Our hero’s generation was, and is, characterized by a fear of failure so profound that for many there will never be enough visible symbols of success, tangible goods, or grocery stores stocked with food to remove that fear this side of the grave.

To those who remember only the seedy and expensive conflicts of Korea and Viet Nam the Second World War is almost unimaginable. The world was saturated in blood. From Murmansk to South Africa, across the continent of Europe, through the middle east and the far east, at both poles, through the snarling waters of seven seas; through Russia and Alaska and Greenland and Australia the blood flowed like a curse to saturate the world. Combatants and non-combatants alike. Jews, Gypsies, workers on rubber plantations, the natives of islands… these were the incidental flow. So were the workers in factories. Jury-rigged machinery, death traps to keep the Victory E flying… a flag, naturally. It had its counterpart in every nation. The entire personnel loss of the U.S. in Nam was equal to the total loss for both sides of one battle for one island. Guadalcanal.

A hundred million deaths is a most conservative guess for the period 1941 through 1945. Our hero does not talk about it much. He talks about mules sometimes, but not where the mules went and the hulks they passed.

It is fair to say that scarcely a family was not struck by that war. If it was not an immediate member who was killed or wounded it was a man or woman from down the street. Community had not entirely vanished. During the depression it had even been rebuilt. Anyone who had a farm to go to had gone. At least on a farm you could eat.

The curse of hope had not vanished either. Often the telegram read, “Lost, somewhere in the Pacific.” People went to the globe or map, stared at the immensity of blue, knew hope not as a feathered thing but as enormous grief.

Then victory. Only the politicians and fools believed that. The people shouted not because the war was won, but because it was over and the majority was still alive. There were few pangs of conscience about Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Conscience in that matter would be for later years. There was three days of shouting, then troubled murmurs in the streets. There was the spectre of Russia. There was the equal spectre of another depression that would destroy the prosperity brought by war. This was an experienced people.

Our hero returns. He has been starved and degraded for ten years, and he has feared his death for the next five. Behind him is a wrecked faith. He says to himself, and he says to others, that he has taken just all of the shit that he will ever again take in this life. The revolution has arrived. It is not economic, only. It is social. There is no hint of the boy scout. Later there will be, when dogma replaces faith.

Statistics do not pant, sweat, tumble on rumpled beds. They do not bleed. They do not dream. Statistics give measurable rates.

The birthrate rose like a scared cat going up a tall tree. So did the rates for divorce, insanity and suicide. The crime rate rose. It nearly equaled other rates. Those, more mundane, suggest an important story.

Suburbs grew from cornfields faster than those same fields have ever produced grain. Universities expanded like the castles of wizardry. A transportation system of rails had been sufficient to run a war. It was insufficient to run a peace. The trucking industry doubled, then doubled again, then doubled again. In 1939 I remember being driven twenty miles so our family could ride on a new section of three-lane road. By 1945 that road was scrap, although it was still the best road around. By 1950 it was laughably obsolete. In 1944 it was still possible and practical, because of rationing, to make horse-drawn deliveries on the streets of major cities. By 1947 the vestigial remains of the work horse had disappeared. Our hero had no time to waste on inefficiency.

The initial step of revolution was to build. For a while it did not make much difference what was being built, as long as one stone was placed on another. When concrete was poured for a new foundation no one asked why. No one cared to ask. Poor no more, they would be poor no more.

Like Gatsby, Nixon was a boy scout. That is here taken to mean of an innocence which suspects thought, a fatuousness that collects baseball cards of some denomination, and a respect for the conventional wisdom. J. Edgar Hoover was a boy scout. Gerald Ford appears in such a line-up as a Cub. These men, held to be representative of two separate generations, have as much to do with our hero’s generation as a balsa model of a Piper has to do with a Tri-motor. The Tri-motor was awkward and ungainly but it flew. The Piper is slick with glossy paper and enamel and it is powered by a rubber band.

There never has been, and likely never will be again, a nation more enamored of education than was this nation in the late ’40s and the ’50s. At a time when one half of one percent of the British population ever saw the inside of a university, the U.S. opened every door and built new doors, sometimes for the sheer joy of opening them.

What was meant by education is another matter. We look at then, look at now, shake our heads and understand. Poor no more. They went to school in order to achieve success. They were hungry enough to cultivate hunger of belly and mind against the time when there would never be hunger again, anywhere. When one considers that this was the age of the rebuilding of Europe, the rebuilding of Japan, the Marshall Plan, and the wild and indiscriminate sharing and spreading of wealth through the world, it is clear that this was not a generation of Gatsbys and Nixons. They were revolutionaries. They were idealists as well. The new faith was a faith in universal wealth. In the ’60s the faith would turn to dogma as it became clear that the revolution was lost. My friend remembers her father, our hero, as an exciting man when she was a child. He invented things, worked incredible hours and taught radical ideas. As she grew older, it seemed to her that he changed.

The faith turned to dogma because of the education they sought. That generation produced few philosophers and fewer theologians. It produced countless scientists, social scientists and designers of systems. There was no system they could not design, and today, as the systems wear thin and fall apart, it is not because of the original design but because of the overload… and they were not philosophers.

The Reformation of the ’60s was a direct result of a lack of philosophy in these revolutionary idealists. They had broken the old rules and they had paid the price in madness, guilt and suicide. Now they would pay another price. Since they had no philosophy to teach their kids, they had thoughtlessly trotted out the philosophy they had learned as kids. It was a way of life tailored and tested for community in a fundamentally agrarian system. It still worked well in Kansas, though not too well in Topeka.

As the system failed, and it did most starkly fail, the revolution died. Our hero watched his friends become dogmatic and he felt the same. To this day he does not understand what happened, and neither do I, and perhaps no one does. I do know this:

They raised a generation of kids to believe in expectations that became increasingly unreal in the world that was building. Their attitude was unreal. If I have heard it once, I have heard it ten thousand times that, “My kid is not going to have to put up with what we went through.”

When they turned out a predictable percentage of spoiled brats they could not understand why. When their peers, through affluence, began to turn into aging spoiled brats, they did not understand why. When the kids began demonstrating and the boy scouts shrieked of God and Patriotism and “Love it or leave it,” they felt betrayed. In protecting their revolution some turned to hatred, some to indignation, and most became silent… a silent majority that feared the failure that was now upon them. A majority facing more banality and lies and exploitation, as they had faced it since 1920. Piles of red tape lay at their feet. This is not what they had meant; it is not what they had meant at all. There was no way to say what they had meant. They had forgotten to try to put it into words and it was too late to put it into tears.

Soon it will be time for them to pass from the scene. They will take their contrary mules, their memories of bread lines, their hallowed halls without ivy. They will pack them up and go. It is predictable that they will pass in silence. There is nothing more to say.

It was a vision, perhaps. Perhaps it was only an illusion. It was the memory of the memory of a dream. It was awkward and maybe as useless as a grounded silver plane with its nose pointed at the air; and yes, yes, dear friend, it all happened before the Theatre of the Absurd.

Welcome Sweet Springtime

As winter turns to spring the woodpile gets to looking small and lost and lonesome. Wind still humps along this northwest coast, bringing snow and rain from out of Alaska. People still hunch before stoves while admiring the thought of daffodils. Sometimes even the oldest heads and hands get caught with knowing we’ve got more winter than they’ve got woodpile. That’s what happened to Mitchell around crocus time, and a month before the daffodils.

You’d think the man would blush. He’s been at this business of living for eighty-four years, and he’s shoved enough fir and pine and alder into stoves. He’s toasted his shins with heat from maple, cherry, pear and apple. During the Great Depression he even heated with dry corn mixed with rabbit droppings. The man has seen his share.

He still got caught, though, and had to go out hunting; which, when you’re eighty-four, means firing up the rusting pickup and chugging down to Water Street which runs long and pretty empty this time of year. Mitchell doesn’t much hold with chainsaws, but doesn’t mind buying wood from men who do. In this small town there won’t be many jobs until spring tourist season.

Our young guys rob timber company slash piles, then park their trucks on Water Street. People walk along checking the loads. A good mix of seasoned fir and madronna brings the highest price.

So Mitchell went out shopping, and probably told himself and everybody else that they don’t grow firewood like they used to.

He likely fussed and poked and prodded and thumped like a man adrift in a melon patch. He’d never stoop to haggling, but you can bet he claimed prices were mighty dear. Anyway, he comes home in triumph, trailed by a wide-side pickup full of wood. The youngster driving is grateful and hiding it. Cordwood brings ninety dollars, and the kid sure needs ninety dollars. You can tell by looking at his truck.

The whole business turns out sort of liberating. Winter around here tucks us into our houses. We wave across wet or snowy lawns as we trundle to the woodpiles. There’s Dave and Sally’s small place, and it couldn’t be more clean and tidy if it was Dutch. Across the street sit the disabled apartments where social workers put up folks who need a lift. There’ s my place next to them, and Mitchell across from me. Christine and Ed live in the apartments and kind of make the place a point of interest.

Ed is blind and in a wheelchair, but he’s got a good mind for stories. He records them on tape for others who have his problem.

And there’s the crazy lady, Sarah Jane, who cranks up volume on her record player and dances before her front window, usually wearing clothes. She owns a good heart, though. Mostly. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

Just as the wood truck backs into Mitchell’s yard, along comes a break in the clouds. The snow is nearly melted after rain, and it’s like nature spoofs Mitchell who got nervous and bought wood. It’s like nature says, “Mitchell, old son, I’ve tricked you all over again, because here comes a warm spring. “

The break in the clouds is just enough so everyone can get out and superintend the wood truck, plus catch up on all the happenings. I go over, and my new pup bought before Christmas trails along; the new dog in the neighborhood.

Ed and Christine’s dog is Shadow, but Shadow doesn’t live here anymore except in memory; which we all have lots of. I’m the youngster in this neighborhood, being only sixty-one.

The pup makes a hit with the kid, and of course that takes time from unloading. The black-haired kid and the brown-furred pup go skylarking off somewhere, and I ease up to the firewood with a critical eye. Mitchell stands looking proud and shamed; proud because he’s bought well-seasoned fir, and shamed because he had to in the first place.

“It looks real good,” I tell him. He grunts, still standing tall as a ladder, but bent as a warped board, and ready to change the subject. His hands are larger than his thin arms say they ought to be. He’ll be two days stacking that wood. Maybe Dave and I will help, if Mitchell’s pride can handle it.

Dave and Sally step from their house and walk toward us, Dave walking straight, like the soldier he once was; Sally wearing a red scarf and looking pretty frail. If Dave did not check the load he’d bust.

From out of a stand of scraggly weeds the pup pops loose in that jack-rabbity way pups have. The kid comes back to his truck, breathing deep but not winded. Now we’ve got a crowd. The kid starts to unload. Balks of fir fly, hit the ground, thump and roll.

We talk about firewood and pups. Then we talk about Sarah Jane who went to hospital yesterday. Sarah Jane didn’t take her medicine, and that made her get a butcher knife and go after Christine. Christine ducked in the house and called 911. Ed couldn’t see a blamed thing, being blind, and, being in a wheelchair, in no shape to tussle a knife.

This business about Sarah Jane is news because sometimes I forget to open my drapes. When 911 came I missed it. I tsk and tush and figure something will happen next.

The kid has his load coming off thumpity-thump. I’m holding the pup so she won’t dance under a flying hunk of fir. Christine comes from her apartment. She’s still a pretty woman, but care­worn. She has her hardships, but still congregates real easy. It isn’t the firewood that draws her, but the first meeting of the neighborhood this spring.

A squincy lot of snow still lingers among some weeds, and Christine has to get enough together so the pup can chase her first snowball. Christine throws the ball about eight feet, and the pup does what we expect. She jumps after the snowball and gets all confused when the thing falls apart. In between dead weeds a little green is starting to perk, and that’s a good sign of early spring, and a good sign Mitchell’s been bamboozled.

“She’s going to look like a beerkeg on stilts,” Christine says about the pup, who is half lab and half spaniel.

“But with a very fine smile,” I tell her. The break in the clouds disappears, and gray northwest mist sits high in the trees.

“I dread the day when we lose ours,” Sally says, and everybody is polite. Dave and Sally have a mutt who is nobody’s favorite, being a bad-tempered loudmouth, and rowdy. Sally just got over a dead-serious bout at the hospital, and now she’s got to make it through spring; because, have you ever noticed, how, if old folks are going to slide, they do it just before spring?

“I couldn’t bear to get another dog,” Sally says, and everybody thinks the same thing but nobody talks. Dogs live ten or twelve years. There isn’t a mother’s son or daughter in the neighborhood with a real long chance of outliving a pup, even though it’s a responsibility; something I’d better think about.

The kid bangs his fingers between a couple hunks of wood, and cusses under his breath but not loud. That means he’s had some raising from somebody.

“Things got sort of exciting yesterday.” Sally says this noncommittal in case Christine doesn’t want to talk about it, but Christine does.

“I hope she’s going to be all right,” Christine says. “I worry over Ed. He feels helpless as it is.”

“Sarah Jane’s okay when she takes her medicine. “ Dave thinks Sarah Jane is a nut, but defends her. Defending folks is what Dave does best.

We stand around thinking about all this. The doctors say Sarah Jane is paranoid schizophrenic, and it’s probably something wrong with her system and not her brain. She talks to herself a lot, but, hell, I talk to myself a lot.

“I honestly don’t know whether I hope she comes home or not. “ Christine looks kind of guilty. “We have our own problems. I feel like a hypocrite. “

“It’s cheaper to buy wood midsummer,” Mitchell murmurs.

He’s not wandering, exactly. He’s trying to change the subject because Sarah Jane scares the spit out of him. When his wife died, Mitchell got defensive. Nobody was around to stand between him and reality. Mitchell’s one of those dreamers without the steam to make dreams happen. He’s just cruised these many years. Then he lost Mary, and Mary is now like Shadow; living here just in memory.

The pup wiggles in my arms. The last of the wood flies off the truck. The kid has broken a good sweat, a tall kid and kind of skinny. The pup wiggles harder. She’s found a new friend, and she’s ready for more skylarking.

“The state people might not let her come back,” Dave says about Sarah Jane. “Those government people don’t like inconvenience. “

“Nothing to feel guilty about,” Sally tells Christine. She touches Christine’ s hand, kind of sympathetic, then holds onto Dave’s arm.

I set the pup on the ground. Sarah Jane has her own personal grocery cart that she pushes four blocks to the store. The store manager puts up with it. I wonder if 911 returned the grocery cart. Meanwhile, Mitchell heads toward his house to get money for the kid. Sally and Dave and Christine sort of drift away. Sally leans a little on Dave, her red scarf a spot of color on this gray northwest afternoon. Skylarking starts up between pup and kid. A breeze comes by, promising the temperature will hit sixty.

It looks like all of us will make it through another spring.

I look at the heap of wood, knowing that winters and woodpiles and lives never come out exactly even; but the red and golden fir is beautiful to see. Young creatures are beautiful. I watch the kid and pup. The kid throws a stick. The pup knows exactly what to do. It’s easy to understand why Sarah Jane goes crazy, but I’m not sure my reasons and her reasons match.