The Norman Maclean Reader

by Norman Maclean

  At first I felt kind of sorry for her because she was so well known in camp and was so much talked about, but she was riding “High, Wide, and Handsome.” She was back in camp every Sunday. She always came with a gallon pail and she always left without it. She kept coming long after huckleberry season passed. There wasn’t a berry left on a bush, but she came with another big pail.

  The pie fight with the cook and the empty huckleberry pail were just what I needed psychologically to last until Labor Day weekend, when, long ago, I had told both Jim and the foreman I was quitting in order to get ready for school. There was no great transformation in either Jim or me. Jim was still about the size of Jack Dempsey. Nothing had happened to reduce this combination of power and speed. It was just that something had happened so that most of the time now we sawed to saw logs. As for me, for the first (and only) time in my life I had spent over a month twenty-four hours a day doing nothing but hating a guy. Now, though, there were times when I thought of other things—it got so that I had to say to myself, “Don’t ever get soft and forget to hate this guy for trying to kill you off.” It was somewhere along in here, too, when I became confident enough to develop the theory that he wouldn’t take a punch at me. I probably was just getting wise to the fact that he ran this camp as if he were the best fighter in it without ever getting into a fight. He had us stiffs intimidated because he made us look bad when it came to work and women, and so we went on to feel that we were also about to take a punching. Fortunately, I guess, I always realized this might be just theory, and I continued to act as if he were the best fighter in camp, as he probably was, but, you know, it still bothers me that maybe he wasn’t.

  When we quit work at night, though, we still walked to camp alone. He still went first, slipping on his Woolrich shirt over the top piece of his underwear and putting his empty lunch pail under his arm. Like all sawyers, we pulled off our shirts first thing in the morning and worked all day in the tops of our underwear, and in the summer we still wore wool underwear, because we said sweat made cotton stick to us and wool absorbed it. After Jim disappeared for camp, I sat down on a log and waited for the sweat to dry. It still took me a while before I felt steady enough to reach for my Woolrich shirt and pick up my lunch pail and head for camp, but now I knew I could last until I had said I would quit, which sometimes can be a wonderful feeling.

  One day toward the end of August he spoke out of the silence and said, “When are you going to quit?” It sounded as if someone had broken the silence before it was broken by Genesis.

  I answered and fortunately I had an already-made answer; I said, “As I told you, the Labor Day weekend.”

  He said, “I may see you in town before you leave for the East. I’m going to quit early this year myself.” Then he added, “Last spring I promised a dame I would.” I and all the other jacks had already noticed that the rancher’s wife hadn’t shown up in camp last Sunday, whatever that meant.

  The week before I was going to leave for school I ran into him on the main street. He was looking great—a little thin, but just a little. He took me into a speakeasy and bought me a drink of Canadian Club. Since Montana is a northern border state, during Prohibition there was a lot of Canadian whiskey in my town if you knew where and had the price. I bought the second round, and he bought another and said he had enough when I tried to do the same. Then he added, “You know, I have to take care of you.” Even after three drinks in the afternoon, I was a little startled, and still am.

  Outside, as we stood parting and squinting in the sunlight, he said, “I got a place already for this dame of mine, but we’ve not yet set up for business.” Then he said very formally, “We would appreciate it very much if you would pay us a short visit before you leave town.” And he gave me the address and, when I told him it would have to be soon, we made a date for the next evening.

  The address he had given me was on the north side, which is just across the tracks, where most of the railroaders lived. When I was a kid, our town had what was called a red-light district on Front Street adjoining the city dump which was always burning with a fitting smell, but the law had more or less closed it up and scattered the girls around, a fair proportion of whom sprinkled themselves among the railroaders. When I finally found the exact address, I recognized the house next to it. It belonged to a brakeman who married a tramp and thought he was quite a fighter, although he never won many fights. He was more famous in town for the story that he came home one night unexpectedly and captured a guy coming out. He reached in his pocket and pulled out three dollars. “Here,” he told the guy, “go and get yourself a good screw.”

  Jim’s place looked on the up-and-up—no shades drawn and the door slightly open and streaming light. Jim answered and was big enough to blot out most of the scenery, but I could see the edge of his dame just behind him. I remembered she was supposed to be southern and could see curls on her one visible shoulder. Jim was talking and never introduced us. Suddenly she swept around him, grabbed me by the hand, and said, “God bless your ol’ pee hole; come on in and park your ol’ prat on the piano.”

  Suddenly I think I understood what Jim had meant when he told me early in the summer that he liked his whores southern because they were “poetical.” I took a quick look around the “parlor,” and, sure enough, there was no piano, so it was pure poetry.

  Later, when I found out her name, it was Annabelle, which fitted. After this exuberant outcry, she backed off in silence and sat down, it being evident, as she passed the light from a standing lamp, that she had no clothes on under her dress.

  When I glanced around the parlor and did not see a piano I did, however, notice another woman and the motto of Scotland. The other woman looked older but not so old as she was supposed to be, because when she finally was introduced she was introduced as Annabelle’s mother. Naturally, I wondered how she figured in Jim’s operation and a few days later I ran into some jacks in town who knew her and said she was still a pretty good whore, although a little sad and flabby. Later that evening I tried talking to her; I don’t think there was much left to her inside but it was clear she thought the world of Jim.

  I had to take another look to believe it, but there it was on the wall just above the chair Jim was about to sit in—the motto of Scotland, and in Latin, too—Nemo me impune lacesset. Supposedly, only Jim would know what it meant. The whores wouldn’t know and it’s for sure his trade, who were Scandinavian and French-Canadian lumberjacks, wouldn’t. So he sat on his leather throne, owner and chief bouncer of the establishment, believing only he knew that over his head it said: “No one will touch me with impunity.”

  But there was one exception. I knew what it meant, having been brought up under the same plaque, in fact an even tougher-looking version that had Scotch thistles engraved around the motto. My father had it hung in the front hall where it would be the first thing seen at all times by anyone entering the manse—and in the early mornings on her way to the kitchen by my mother who inherited the unmentioned infirmity of being part English.

  Jim did most of the talking, and the rest of us listened and sometimes I just watched. He sure as hell was a good-looking guy, and now he was all dressed up, conservatively in a dark gray herringbone suit and a blue or black tie. But no matter the clothes, he always looked like a lumberjack to me. Why not? He was the best logger I ever worked with, and I barely lived to say so.

  Jim talked mostly about sawing and college. He and I had talked about almost nothing during the summer, least of all about college. Now, he asked me a lot of questions about college, but it just wasn’t the case that they were asked out of envy or regret. He didn’t look at me as a Scotch boy like himself, not so good with the ax and saw but luckier. He looked at himself, at least as he sat there that night, as a successful young businessman, and he certainly didn’t think I was ever going to do anything that he wanted to do. What his being a socialist meant to him I was never to figure out. To me, he emerged as all laissez-faire. He was one of those peopl
e who turn out not to have some characteristic that you thought was a prominent one when you first met them. Maybe you only thought they had it because what you first saw or heard was at acute angle, or maybe they have it in some form but your personality makes it recessive. Anyway, he and I never talked politics (admitting that most of the time we never talked at all). I heard him talking socialism to the other jacks—yelling it at them would be more exact, as if they didn’t know how to saw. Coming out the back door of the Dakotas in the twenties he had to be a dispossessed socialist of some sort, but his talk to me about graduate school was concerned mostly with the question of whether, if hypothetically he decided to take it on, he could reduce graduate study to sawdust, certainly a fundamental capitalistic question. His educational experiences in the Dakotas had had a lasting effect. He had gone as far as the seventh grade, and his teachers in the Dakotas had been big and tough and had licked him. What he was wondering was whether between seventh grade and graduate school the teachers kept pace with their students and could still lick him. I cheered him up a lot when I told him, “No, last winter wasn’t as tough as this summer.” He brought us all another drink of Canadian Club, and, while drinking this one, it occurred to me that maybe what he had been doing this summer was giving me his version of graduate school. If so, he wasn’t far wrong.

  Nearly all our talk, though, was about logging, because logging was what loggers talked about. They mixed it into everything. For instance, loggers celebrated the Fourth of July—the only sacred holiday in those times except Christmas—by contests in logrolling, sawing, and swinging the ax. Their work was their world, which included their games and their women, and the women at least had to talk like loggers, especially when they swore. Annabelle would occasionally come up with such a line as, “Somebody ought to drop the boom on that bastard,” but when I started fooling around to find out whether she knew what a boom was, she switched back to pure southern poetry. A whore has to swear like her working men and in addition she has to have pretty talk.

  I was interested, too, in the way Jim pictured himself and me to his women—always as friendly working partners talking over some technical sawing problem. In his creations we engaged in such technical dialogue as this: “‘How much are you holding there?’ I’d ask; ‘I’m holding an inch and a half,’ he’d say; and I’d say, ‘God, I’m holding two and a half inches.’” I can tell you that outside of the first few days of the summer we didn’t engage in any such friendly talk, and any sawyer can tell you that the technical stuff he had us saying about sawing may sound impressive to whores but doesn’t make any sense to sawyers and had to be invented by him. He was a great sawyer, and didn’t need to make up anything, but it seemed as if every time he made us friends he had to make up lies about sawing to go with us.

  I wanted to talk a little to the women before I left, but when I turned to Annabelle she almost finished me off before I got started by saying, “So you and I are partners of Jim?” Seeing that she had made such a big start with this, she was off in another minute trying to persuade me she was Scotch, but I told her, “Try that on some Swede.”

  Her style was to be everything you wished she were except what you knew she wasn’t. I didn’t have to listen long before I was fairly sure she wasn’t southern. Neither was the other one. They said “you all” and “ol’” and had curls and that was about it, all of which they probably did for Jim from the Dakotas. Every now and then Annabelle would become slightly hysterical, at least suddenly exuberant, and speak a line of something like “poetry”—an alliterative toast or rune or foreign expression. Then she would go back to her quiet game of trying to figure out something besides Scotch that she might persuade me she was that I would like but wouldn’t know much about.

  Earlier in the evening I realized that the two women were not mother and daughter or related in any way. Probably all three of them got strange pleasures from the notion they were a family. Both women, of course, dressed alike and had curls and did the southern bit, but fundamentally they were not alike in bone or body structure, except that they were both big women.

  So all three of them created a warm family circle of lies.

  The lumberjack in herringbone and his two big women in only dresses blocked the door as we said good-bye. “So long,” I said from outside. “Au revoir,” Annabelle said. “So long,” Jim said, and then he added, “I’ll be writing you.”

  And he did, but not until late in autumn. By then probably all the Swedish and Finnish loggers knew his north-side place and he had drawn out his card from the Missoula Public Library and was rereading Jack London, omitting the dog stories. Since my address on the envelope was exact, he must have called my home to get it. The envelope was large and square; the paper was small, ruled, and had glue on the top edge, so it was pulled off some writing pad. His handwriting was large but grew smaller at the end of each word.

  I received three other letters from him before the school year was out. His letters were only a sentence or two long. The one- or two-sentence literary form, when used by a master, is designed not to pass on some slight matter but to put the world in a nutshell. Jim was my first acquaintance with a master of this form.

  His letters always began, “Dear partner,” and always ended, “Your pal, Jim.”

  You can be sure I ignored any shadow of suggestion that I work with him the coming summer, and he never openly made the suggestion. I had decided that I had only a part of my life to give to gyppoing and that I had already given generously. I went back to the United States Forest Service and fought fires, which to Jim was like declaring myself a charity case and taking the rest cure.

  So naturally I didn’t hear from him that summer—undoubtedly, he had some other sawyer at the end of the saw whom he was reducing to sawdust. But come autumn and there was a big square envelope with the big handwriting that grew smaller at the end of each word. Since it was early autumn, he couldn’t have been set up in business yet. Probably he had just quit the woods and was in town still looking things over. It could be he hadn’t even drawn a library card yet. Anyway, this was the letter:

  Dear partner,

  Just to let you know I have screwed a dame that weighs 300 lbs.

  Your pal,

  Jim

  A good many years have passed since I received that letter, and I have never heard from or about Jim since. Maybe at three hundred pounds the son of a bitch was finally overpowered.

  An Incident*

  “An Incident,” published here for the first time, is a “hometown talk,” as Maclean called it, that he gave in Missoula in May 1979 to conclude a four-day conference on the topic “Who Owns the West?” In it he addresses the craft of writing fiction, using A River Runs through It as his example. He organically defines plot and character, quoting a long passage from River—his “Incident” —to illustrate his definition and the artistic and self-destructive sides of his long-lost brother, Paul.

  There are three special reasons why I wanted to be in Missoula now, besides the ever-present one of wanting to see old friends and the mountains again, which are also friends—not only the remotely beautiful Squaw Peak or Mt. Lo Lo but always Reservoir Hill and Mt. Jumbo. These two are plain and bare admittedly, but they are close and warm and good practice-mountains for a boy to grow up on. Eventually a boy works his way up to Mt. Sentinel, and starts fires in the grass there and spends the rest of his life looking uphill over his shoulder afraid that somebody will catch him. But my favorite mountain has to be Mt. Jumbo, at least at this time of year. Then the sun covers its exposed sides with early flowers, especially near the moisture of its gulches. My father always took me for a walk to freshen up between his morning and evening sermons, and my mother took me whenever she could get me at this time of the year for a slow walk a little way up Mt. Jumbo to see the flowers on the edges of moisture. I was up there this morning. It is yellow and purple and white with balsam roots, larkspurs, and service berry bushes overpoweringly in bloom.

  The
re was a difference in my family about how I should be brought up. My father wanted to bring me up as a tough guy, and my mother wanted to bring me up as a flower girl. Since both of them had a profound effect on my character, I seem to have ended up as a tough flower girl.

  The mountains, too, I shall always remember from long ago when, in more vigorous times, Squaw Peak was called Squaw Teat and Mt. Lo Lo was thought to be named after the famous international whore, Lo Lo Montez, not as Bud Moore, the old Trapper, would have us believe, after some old Trapper who died somewhere back there and whose name was LouLou. Such is the leveling effect of time and trapping upon great mountains.

  I had another special reason for wanting to get to Missoula now. I wanted to start finishing something I started here two springs ago when I talked for John Badgley and the Institute of the Rockies at the old Florence Hotel.

  Since I had the impression the talk went well, I began to have an idea. My talk had been about how my father had kept me home from the early grades of school and taught me to read and write, and how some of the things he taught me about writing were visibly present in my stories even though I did not start writing them until I was 70. I talked mostly about style, including rhythm, because that is mostly what he taught me. Then I read from one of my stories to prove that stylistically my father was present in it. The idea I began to develop undoubtedly had something to do with the fact that after my father got through with me I went on to spend my total professional life in teaching literature and writing. So I thought to myself, “Why don’t you start pulling yourself together by writing a book on the job of writing stories, drawing illustrations from your own stories?” Then, last spring, I was invited to speak before the faculty and students of Montana State University, so I took advantage of another intelligent captive audience to talk about another aspect of the narrative art and again illustrate it from my own stories. Only at Bozeman I jumped to the other end of the ladder of the narrative art from style, which deals with such bricks and straw and mortar as words, sentences and paragraphs. In Bozeman, I talked, not about the building material, but about the blueprint, the architecture of the whole, referring to it loosely sometimes as the structure of the whole or the plot. It’s whatever holds the other elements together and presides over them and tells them what to be.