Steven Millhauser - Voices in the Night - Stories

The Biggest Bed That Ever Was

Well now, first thing Paul Bunyan did when he got back to camp was step into his bunkhouse and give a good look at his bed. That bed of his was so long that when it was morning at one end it was midnight at the other. That bed of his was so wide, Johnny Inkslinger once reached the middle of it riding a fast horse all day. Paul Bunyan took a look at that bed and knew it wasn’t a bad bed as beds go, a little cramped maybe, good enough to lie down in for thirty-nine winks before you jumped back to work, but there were bunks all up and down the other wall with men snoring and grunting and talking in their sleep, and sometimes old Babe would stick his head in through a bunkhouse window and lick Paul awake. What he needed was a bed set off by itself somewhere, a bed where a man could settle in for a good long sleep and turn over any which way he pleased and not wake himself up. The more he thought about it, the more he knew what he had to do. So he hitched up Babe to a supply wagon and headed out to Iowa. You know what they say about Iowa. In Iowa the corn grows so tall it takes one man to see halfway up the stalk and another man to see the rest of the way. In Iowa the corn grows so tall you find hawks and eagles building nests up near the top. They say those Iowa cornstalks grow so wide, the farmers have to hire loggers from the Michigan woods to chop everything down and haul it all off to the silos. They say there’s so much corn growing in Iowa, if you want to lift up your arm to scratch your nose you have to cross over into Nebraska. Now, what Paul did was this. He hired himself out to harvest half the corn in Iowa. He and big Babe tramped right into the middle of that Iowa corn. Paul swung his ax and stalks began falling so fast and hard the ears popped right out of the husks and landed smack in the wagon. Paul hauled the ears over to the silos and loaded up the stalks in the wagon till the sides creaked with the weight of it. He spit out some tobacco juice and headed out of Iowa by way of Nebraska and then Colorado and made it down to Arizona before the tobacco juice hit the ground. He went on over to the Grand Canyon and looked down into it. You know the story of the Grand Canyon. That was back when Paul Bunyan was traveling west and dragged his peavey behind him. The hook of the peavey is what dug up that canyon. Now, what Paul did there on the rim was this. He tipped his wagon over and watched those cornstalks go crashing down. The cornstalks spread out over the canyon bottom and rose halfway up the cliffs. Paul liked what he saw but he wasn’t done yet, not by a long shot. That layer of cornstalks made a pretty good mattress for a man of his size, but it was scratchy as a pack of alley cats. He stood on the rim of the canyon looking down and thinking hard. Just then a big flock of geese came flying over and Paul got himself an idea. He sucked in his breath till his chest looked like a mainsail in a storm. He raised his face to the sky and blew so hard you could see the sun flicker and almost go out. That big breath of his blew all the feathers off those geese. The feathers came floating down nice and soft and settled over the cornstalks. When another flock flew by, Paul puffed himself up and gave another blow. He kept blowing feathers off so many geese, by the time he was done he had himself a thick cover of feathers laying all over the cornstalks like a big quilt you could slip inside of and keep warm. Only thing missing was a pillow. So Paul, he traveled back to camp and ordered some of his boys to buy up five thousand head of good merino sheep. You know those ranches out in Montana and Utah where they have so many sheep you can take off your shoes and walk river to river on sheepback. Well, while his men were off buying up sheep, Paul set about clearing the stumps from fifty acres of logged-off woods. How he did it was this. He walked along and stomped those stumps into the ground one after the other with one stamp of his boot till they were all set even with the dirt. Soon as the boys came back with the sheep, Paul drove every last one of those merinos onto his cleared-off land. He sharpens two axes and sets the handles in the ground with the ax blades facing each other. Then he sets up two more axes with the blades facing each other only lower down. Then what he does, he runs the sheep between those double axes so you have strips of fleece dropping off on both sides clean as a whistle. That was the first sheep-shearing machine. He loaded up the sheared-off wool in his wagon and headed back down to the Grand Canyon. He lifted out those strips of wool and laid them down along one end of his goose-feather quilt and had himself a pillow so fine and soft that before he was done, three ringtail cats, two mountain lions, and a mule deer lay curled up on it fast asleep.

Up in Maine

While Paul was blowing a storm of feathers down from the sky and running merino sheep through his four-ax shearer, that droopy drag-foot brother of his was spending his time sitting slumped on his backbone in a broke-legged armchair next to a spiderwebby window or leaf-shuffling his sloggy way along a soggy path in the woods with three floppy mufflers wrapped around his stretchy neck and a beat-up book sticking out of his peacoat pocket.

In Which Paul Shoulders His Ax and Sets Off

The Great Sleeping Contest was set to begin a good month into the fall season, first night of October at nine sharp. To keep things fair, Paul went and hired up a crew of sleep-checkers to work three-hour shifts keeping an eye on each dead-to-the-world stone-faced snorer. You could twitch in your sleep and you could turn over in your sleep, you could groan in your sleep and moan in your sleep, but if you opened an eye so much as half a crack you were done sleeping. These sleep-checkers were shrewd-eyed rough-living no-nonsense men known for rock-hard character and knife-sharp sight — a couple of keelboatmen who worked the Ohio River, a buffalo hunter from Oklahoma, three Swede farmers from Minnesota, a Kentucky sharpshooter, two trail guides from the high Rockies, a frontiersman from Missouri, a cattle rancher from Texas, two Utah sheep ranchers, a Cheyenne Indian from Colorado, and two fur trappers from Tennessee. After a cookhouse dinner of thick pea soup and spiced ham baked in cider, Paul Bunyan stood up and addressed his shanty boys. He told them he could out-jump out-run out-fight and out-work any man who ever logged the north woods or walked the face of the earth in spiked boots and he was off to prove he could out-sleep out-nap out-snooze and out-doze any man big enough to brag and fool enough to try. Johnny Inkslinger would take over camp operations while he was away. Any trouble and Little Meery and Shot Gunderson would take care of it with four hard fists and a six-foot pike pole. Then Paul Bunyan said goodbye to his men and specially to Johnny Inkslinger and Little Meery and Hot Biscuit Slim and Big Ole the Blacksmith and Febold Feboldson and Shot Gunderson and Sourdough Sam and Shanty Boy and then he went over to the stable and gave old Babe a big hug around the neck and a big tickle behind his blue ears and set off walking with a swing in his stride and his ax over his shoulder. He stamped through forests and along river valleys, took one step over the Missouri River onto the plains of Nebraska, and dusted off his boots in Colorado. First thing he does in Arizona is pluck up a fifty-foot saguaro cactus to comb his beard. Gets to the Grand Canyon two minutes before nine. One minute before nine he’s down on his crackly cornstalk bed. Went and laid himself out on his back and sank into those goose feathers with his feet up against a cliff and his head on his pillowy wallowy wool. He set his ax steel-down in the cornstalks with the hickory handle sticking up beside him, and right at nine sharp he shut his eyes and fell into a mighty sleep.