Read Sometimes a Great Notion for Free Online Page A

stiff-starched muslin. A very impressive-looking flock. And knows also that, to the eyes of the noontime depot crowd, he appears more sturdy-looking, stiff-starched, and impressive than all the others put together. His hair is long and glossy, showing Indian blood; his eyebrows and mustache exactly horizontal, as though rulered parallel onto his wide-boned face with a heavy graphite pencil. Hard jaw, tendoned neck, deep chest. And though he is inches under six feet he stands in such a way as to appear much taller. Yes, impressive. The stiff-starched, leatherbound, iron-cored patriarch, fearlessly moving his family west to Oregon. The sturdy pioneer striking out for new and primitive frontiers. Impressive.
    “Be careful, Jonas.”
    “God will provide, Nate. It’s the Lord’s work we are doing.”
    “You’re a good man, Jonas.”
    “God will see to His own, Louise.”
    “Amen, amen.”
    “It’s the Lord’s will that you should go.”
    He nods stiffly and, turning to step onto the train, catches sight of his three boys . . . Look: they are all grinning. He frowns to remind them that, while they may have been the ones that argued for this move from Kansas to the wilds of the Northwest, it is still his decision and no other that allows it, his decision and his permission and they hadn’t, praise God, better forget it! “It is the good Lord’s will,” he repeats and the two younger boys drop their eyes. The oldest boy, Henry, continues to meet his father’s stare. Jonas starts to speak again but there is something about the boy’s expression, something so blatantly triumphant and blasphemous that the fearless patriarch’s words stop in his throat, though it is much later before he really understands the look. No, you knew the moment you saw it. Branded there like the leer of Satan. You knew the look and your blood ran cold when you saw what you had unknowingly been party to .
    The conductor calls. The two youngest boys move past the father into the train, muttering thanks, thank ya kindly for the wrapped lunches offered by the queue of relatives who have come to see them off. Their nervous, wet-eyed mother follows, kissing cheeks, pressing hands. The oldest boy next, with his fists knotted in his trousers pockets. The train bucks suddenly and the father grasps the bar and swings on board, lifting his hand to the waving relatives.
    “So long.”
    “You write, Jonas, hear?”
    “We’ll write. We look to see you folks following before long.”
    “So long . . . so long.”
    He turns to mount the hot iron steps and sees again that look as Henry passes from the landing into the car. Lord have mercy, he whispers, without knowing why. No, admit it; you did know. You knew it was the family sin come back from the pit, and you knew your part in it; you knew your part just as surely as you knew the sin . “A born sinner,” he mutters, “born cursed.”
    For, to Jonas and his generation, the family history was black with the stain of that selfsame sin: You know the sin. Curse of the Wanderer; curse of the Tramp; bitter curse of the Faithless; always turning their backs on the lot God had granted . . . .
    “Always troubled with itchy feet,” contended the more easygoing.
    “Idiocy!” thundered those advocating stability. “Blasphemers!”
    “Just roamers.”
    “Fools! Fools! ”
    Migrants, is what the family’s history shows. A stringy-muscled brood of restless and stubborn west-walkers, their scattered history shows. With too much bone and not enough meat, and on the move ever since that first day the first skinny immigrant Stamper took his first step off the boat onto the eastern shore of the continent. On the move with a kind of trancelike dedication. Generation after generation leapfrogging west across wild young America; not as pioneers doing the Lord’s work in a heathen land, not as visionaries blazing trail for a growing nation (though they quite often bought the farms of discouraged pioneers or teams of