Steven Millhauser - Voices in the Night - Stories

In Which James Gets Himself Ready

The day the Great Sleeping Contest is set to begin, the sun’s going down in Maine and James Bunyan is dragging himself out of bed slower than a one-horned snail in an icehouse. He goes yawning his way into the creaky kitchen and looks around for anything to eat but all he can find is a dead mouse in a cupboard and one stale raisin in a box. He sits down on a three-leg chair at a tilty table with a hungry cat on it and looks at that dried-up raisin like it’s a plate of bear stew served with brown beans baked in molasses. He sets to work slow on that wreck of a raisin and when he’s done he’s so stuffed he just sits there like a dead branch leaning against the side of a barn. He stares at his left hand so long it starts looking like a foot. He stares at his right foot so long it turns into a nose. He figures it’s time to rest up after his exertions, so what he does, he goes back to his room and crawls into bed and stretches out on his bone-bumpy back with his hands behind his bootlace of a neck and his stringy legs crossed at his stalky ankles and looks at the ceiling beams jumpy with shadows thrown up by the candle on the bedside table. He sees blue horses riding over hills. The clock hand on the cracked old clock on the wall crawls over to nine slow as a cat on crutches. James closes his eyes and starts snoring.

How the Shanty Boys Spent the Night

Back at the camp the men swamped and felled and limbed from sun-up to noon. They sat on stumps to gulp down sourdough biscuits and black coffee brought over by wagon and went on logging till the sun dropped down. None of it was the same without Paul Bunyan. After the cookhouse dinner they swapped stories round the bunkhouse stoves but they all of them knew they were just sitting there waiting. Paul Bunyan was the no-sleepingest man they’d ever seen. He’d throw himself down on his back and before his head hit the pillow the rest of him would be standing up raring to go. Some said he was bound to come back before midnight, others said he was already back out there chopping in the dark. Little Meery said they ought to get themselves some rest cause he knew in his bones a man like Paul Bunyan wouldn’t be back till next morning. Past midnight there was a crashing noise in Paul Bunyan’s bunkhouse and the men sat up ready to yell out a cheer and dance him a welcome home but it wasn’t anybody there but big Babe, busted out of the stable to knock his head through a bunkhouse window. All next day the men swamped and chopped and sawed but their hearts weren’t in it. That night not a story got told round the bunkhouse stoves. The men stayed flat in their bunks with ears open wide as barn doors and eyes shut tight as friz oysters waiting for Paul Bunyan to come on back from his cornstalk mattress and sheep pillow down there in that faraway canyon under the stars.

The Long Sleep

Johnny Inkslinger could push the men hard when he had to. He told them Paul Bunyan was bound to sleep for a week and they ought to stop dreaming about it and get to work. Why, a man like that could sleep two weeks, maybe three. Weeks passed, the first snow came. It snowed so hard you couldn’t see the end of your ax. One day the sun came out, birds sang in the trees. The men drove the logs downriver to the mill and broke camp for the summer. In the fall they hitched the bunkhouses and the cookhouse and the stable to Babe the Blue Ox, who hauled the whole lot of it over hills and across rivers to a fir forest that grew so high the tops of the trees were hinged to let the moon go by. Nights they still talked about Paul Bunyan round the bunkhouse stoves, but it was like telling stories about someone who was long gone and maybe never had been there at all. Remember the winter of the blue snow? Member the time old Paul Bunyan walked across Minnesota and his boot prints were what formed the ten thousand lakes? Member the time Paul Bunyan dug that watering hole for Babe the Blue Ox? That watering hole is Lake Michigan. Then there was the time Paul Bunyan chopped a dog in half by mistake. Put it back together wrong, with two legs up and two legs down. Remember the hodag? The whirling whimpus? In the cold weather the men rose late and stopped work early. Johnny Inkslinger cussed and howled but it was no use at all. Babe was so sad he stayed put in his stable and wouldn’t come out for anything. The men forgot all about him, all except Hot Biscuit Slim, who brought barrels of hotcakes out to the stable every morning. That winter the snow fell for forty-seven days. Snow was so high you had to cut tunnels to get to the trees. The trunks were hard as whetstones. When the axheads dragged against them, the blades got so sharp they could cut a snowflake in half. Some of the new men said they’d heard about Paul Bunyan, but it was so cold their words froze in the air and didn’t thaw out till spring. In the warm weather the men drove the logs downriver to the mill, and when it was over some of the crew went to work in the mill town and didn’t return to camp in the fall. Johnny Inkslinger moved the camp to higher ground that looked out over miles of fresh spruce forest. The men cut trails and felled trees and hauled them to the river landings. Snow howled down from black skies. In the warm nights the men sat outside the bunkhouses, spitting tobacco juice into the fire. Some said Paul Bunyan had gone to sleep down there in the Grand Canyon and drowned when the river rose. Some said Paul Bunyan was a story men used to tell at night around the bunkhouse stove.

In Which James Does Some Dreaming

While Paul Bunyan was sleeping the stony sleep of an ax-swinging man dead to the world on his mighty bed, that no-account brother of his was doing what he was always doing up in the woods in Maine: dreaming his life away. There was nobody ever dreamed so much as that dodge-life brother did. Dreamed all day on his bone-hard backside and dreamed all night on his brawnless back. Now he was nose-up in his bed dreaming so many dreams you’d think his head would be crackling like a pinewood fire in a bunkhouse stove. He dreamed he was a fish swimming in a river. He dreamed he was flying through the sky like a buzzard or a red-tailed hawk. He dreamed about things you weren’t supposed to see, like what it was like walking around up in heaven with angels going by and what it was like far down under the earth where things looked at you in the dark. He dreamed he was red fire. He dreamed he was dead. He dreamed he was so big his brother Paul could stand on the flat of his hand with his little ax on his shoulder. He dreamed he was throwing fistfuls of pinecones into every state and great pine forests sprang up all over the land. Those trees grew so high they brushed up against the Big Dipper. There wasn’t anything but trees every which way you looked. Towns and cities got swallowed up. Birds spoke words you could understand. People lived on riverbanks and grew what they needed. Bears and coyotes lay down with wild turkeys and deer. Loggers turned their axes into harmonicas. It was summer all the time. They say James Bunyan dreamed so hard it plumb wore him out and he had to go on sleeping just to keep himself alive enough to dream some more.

In Which the Great Contest Is Decided

You know the kind of man Paul Bunyan was. Once he set his mind on something, there was no stopping him. He slept down there in that canyon when it was so cold you could see ten-foot icicles hanging from his chin. He slept in that canyon when it was so hot, red rocks melted away in the sun. He slept with coyotes and bobcats curled up in his beard and two bald eagles nesting in his hair. He slept when howling winds sent boulders crashing down cliffsides right onto his bed and he slept when raindrops the size of McIntosh apples whipped against his face and soaked through his mackinaw. One day a strange thing happened. Paul Bunyan opened his eyes. Just like that. Up above him, a crowd of people standing on a rim trail pointed down and started shouting. Somebody called out, Ten years and twelve hours! Paul stood up so fast, goose feathers flew all around him like a storm of snow. First thing he did, he plucked a spruce tree off the top of the North Rim and combed his beard. That beard was so long it grew down to his feet and wrapped around his wool socks and kept going. It kept going till it reached a cliff and grew halfway up like ivy. Next thing he did, he stepped up out of the canyon all covered in feathers like a giant goose. He brushed off his mackinaw with a ponderosa pine and put his ax on his shoulder. A powerful hunger was in him, but he needed to do one thing before he ate and that was see that brag-mouth brother of his. He headed east and got to Maine so fast he was knee-deep in ocean before he realized he had to turn back. The house in the woods wasn’t the same. Bushes rose up over all the windows, wildflowers grew on the roof. The porch was mashed in by a dead pine covered in moss. Inside, long branches stuck in through the smashed-up windows. Squirrels and possums scampered over the mossy furniture. The door to the bedroom stood open and in the dark of the room he saw a stranger sitting in a chair at the side of the bed. In the bed his brother was stretched out on his back with his broom-straw arms crossed over his twig of a chest. His stringy beard was so long it came slithering down over his legs and curled around his chicken-hawk feet. From there it dropped to the floor and twisted itself around a bed foot. A bony dog lay up on the bed next to him whimpering for all he was worth. Moss and wild mushrooms grew in that beard. His brother’s long nose was thin and sharp as an ax blade. The whimpering dog, the dark room, the stranger in the chair, the graveyard silence, it was all making Paul mighty uneasy. He looked at his brother’s caved-in cheeks and forgot the Great Sleeping Contest. He forgot everything in that dead-quiet room. All he wanted to do was get out of there quick as a fox on fire and go back to his loggers, but he couldn’t hardly make himself move. He bent down to look close at his brother. Those nothing shoulders stuck up through his shirt like chicken bones. Paul wondered what it would feel like to touch him. He wanted to give him something. He took his ax off his shoulder and put it down on the bed next to his brother. He laid it out real slow. Just then James opened one eye and looked at him. The stranger in the chair said, Ten years twelve hours and sixteen minutes. Paul jumped back and gave out a roar. He roared so loud the bony dog who was licking James’s face went flying off the bed and rolled into a corner. Paul Bunyan roared so loud the branches blew away from the windows and let in the sun. James scrunched up his eye in the sunlight and laid a spidery arm across his face. He said, Can’t a man get a little shut-eye around here? Then he rolled over and went back to sleep.