Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey Read Free Book Online Page A

others wondered when he left. “Tell me, weren’t they a Jonas Stamper hereabouts?”
    “He was here, but he’s gone.”
    “Gone? Just up and gone?”
    “Just up and scoot.”
    “What come of his family?”
    “They’re still around, her’n’ the three boys. Folks here are kinda helpin’ keep their heads above water. Old Foodland Stokes sends ’em a bit of grocery every day or so, back up river. They got a sort of house—”
    Jonas started the big frame house a week after they settled in Wakonda. He divided three years, three short summers and three long winters, between his feed-and-seed store in town and his building site across the river—eight acres of rich riverbank land, the best on the river. He had homesteaded his lot under the 1880 Land Act before he left Kansas—“Live on the Highway of Water!”—homesteaded it sight unseen, trusting to the pamphlets that a riverbank site would be a good site for a patriarch to do the Lord’s work. It had sounded good on paper.
    “Just scooted out, huh? That sure don’t sound like Jonas Stamper. Didn’t he leave anything?”
    “Family, feed store, odds and ends, and a whole pisspot of shame.”
    He had sold a feed store in Kansas, a good feed store with a rolltop desk full of leatherbound ledgers to finance the move, then had sent the money ahead so it was already waiting for him when he arrived, waiting bright green and growing, like everything else in the rich new land, the rich new promising frontier he’d read about in all the pamphlets his boys had brought him from the post office back in Kansas. Pamphlets sparkling red and blue, ringing with wild Indian names like bird-call signals in the forest: Nakoomish, Nahailem, Chalsea, Silcoos, Necanicum, Yachats, Siuslaw, and Wakonda, at Wakonda Bay, on the Peaceful and Promising Wakonda Auga River, Where (the pamphlets had informed him) A Man Can Make His Mark. Where A Man Can Start Anew. Where (the pamphlets said) The Grass Is Green And The Sea Is Blue And The Trees And Men Grow Tall And True! Out In The Great Northwest, Where (the pamphlets made it clear) There Is Elbow Room For A Man To Be As Big And Important As He Feels It Is In Him To Be! 1
    Ah, it had sounded right good on paper, but, as soon as he saw it, there was something . . . about the river and the forest, about the clouds grinding against the mountains and the trees sticking out of the ground . . . something. Not that it was a hard country, but something you must go through a winter of to understand.
    But that’s what you did not know. You knew the cursed look of wanderlust but you did not know the hell that lust was leading you into. You must go through a winter first. . . .
    “I’ll be switched. Just gone. It sure don’t sound like old Jonas.”
    “I wouldn’t be too tough on him; for one thing, you got to go through a rainy season or so to get some idee.”
    You must go through a winter to understand.
    For one thing, Jonas couldn’t see all that elbow room that the pamphlets had talked about. Oh, it was there, he knew. But not the way he’d imagined it would be. And for another thing, there was nothing, not a thing! about the country that made a man feel Big And Important. If anything it made a man feel dwarfed, and about as important as one of the fish-Indians living down on the clamflats. Important? Why, there was something about the whole blessed country that made a soul feel whipped before he got started. Back home in Kansas a man had a hand in things, the way the Lord aimed for His servants to have: if you didn’t water, the crops died. If you didn’t feed the stock, the stock died. As it was ordained to be. But there, in that land, it looked like our labors were for naught. The flora and fauna grew or died, flourished or failed, in complete disregard for man and his aims. A Man Can Make His Mark, did they tell me? Lies, lies. Before God I tell you: a man might struggle and labor his livelong life and make no mark! None! No