The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  Table of Contents

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

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  THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN

  Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was author of, among other novels, Remembering Laughter, 1937; The Big Rock Candy Mountain, 1943; Joe Hill, 1950; A Shooting Star, 1961; All the Little Live Things, 1967 (Commonwealth Club Gold Medal); Angle of Repose, 1971 (Pulitzer Prize); The Spectator Bird, 1976 (National Book Award, 1977); Recapitulation, 1979; and Crossing to Safety, 1987. His nonfiction includes Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, 1954; Wolf Willow, 1963; The Sound of Mountain Water (essays), 1969; The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto, 1974; and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West, 1992. Three of his short stories have won O. Henry prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsh Award from the Los Angeles Times for his lifetime literary achievements. His Collected Stories was published in 1990.

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  First published in the United States of America by

  Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1943

  Published in Penguin Books 1991

  30 29

  Copyright Wallace Stegner, 1938, 1940, 1942, 1943

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Stegner, Wallace Earle, 1909-

  The Big Rock Candy Mountain/Wallace Stegner.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-07789-4

  I. Title. II. Series.

  [PS3537.T316B5 1991]

  8I3’.52—dc20 90—44962

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  I

  The train was rocking through wide open country before Elsa was able to put off the misery of leaving and reach out for the freedom and release that were hers now. She tucked her handkerchief away, leaned her shoulder against the dirty pane and watched the telegraph wires dip, and dip, and dip from pole to pole, watched the trees and scattered farms, endless variations of white house, red barn, tufted cornfield, slide smoothly backward. Every mile meant that she was freer.

  The car was hot; opened windows along the coach let in an acrid smell of smoke, and as the wind flawed, the trailing plume swept down past her eyes, fogging the trackside. Two men up ahead rose and took off their coats and came back toward the smoker. One of them wore flaming striped suspenders and stared at her. She turned her face to the window. The wires dipped, lifted, dipped, in swift curves like the flight of a swallow. She felt her stomach dipping and lifting with them. The tiny thick locket watch that had been her mother’s said eleven o‘clock. They must be about thirty miles from home. Except for one visit to relatives in Iowa she had never been so far from home in her life.

  By eleven thirty the rocking of the car, the bite of the smoke-smell, had begun to make her sick. Forlornly she tried to brighten herself, sat straighter and stared harder, with a sick simulation of interest, at the country outside. But the wires dipped and lifted; her stomach lifted with every swoop of the wires, and she had to shut her eyes. Her face began to feel stiff, and there was a briny taste in her mouth. She swallowed.

  A preliminary spasm made her stand up desperately, her throat locked against the surge of nausea. Staggering, clinging to the seats, she made her way back through the car, looking neither right nor left. There were toilets on trains, she knew, but she had no idea where. At the end of the car, seeing a man come out of a small side door, she made for it. Her hand was on the knob when she read the sign: MEN. Sick shame gripped her. There were separate toilets, then, and she had almost walked into the men’s room. The women’s must be at the other end. She would have to walk the whole way back past all those people....

  A lurch of the car threw her sideways, and her throat muscles locked. In desperate haste she went back between the plush seats, head down, burning with forlorn and miserable shame, the vomit in her very mouth. In the women’s room she retched, rose, tidied herself shakily before the smeared mirror, started to go out, and returned to retch again. It was so hot in the little cubicle that perspiration burst through her skin and left her sticky all over. Bathing her face in cold water helped, but then she discovered that there was no towel except a blackened rag. Her handkerchief was back in the seat. All she could do was to wait till her wet face dried.

  But the closet was too smothering. Instead of drying, she grew wetter. It was all she could do to stand. In a moment she was on her knees again, her lips wet with bitter gall.

  In despair, fearing that at this rate she never would get back to her seat, she washed again and dried her face on the lifted edge of her petticoat. Then back to the middle of the car, past passengers who looked at her, she was sure, with disgust or lurking smiles, until she fell into her seat with a half sob and closed her eyes, feeling defiled and dirty and weak.

  People the length of the car were eating. Papers rattled, tin tinkled, and into the stuffy heat came the strong smell of peanut butter. Elsa’s stomach rolled, and she gritted her teeth. She was resolving to do a half dozen desperate things rather than go back in that women’s room when the train began to slow, the wheels pounded in a gradually lessening tempo, and the conductor poked his head in the door. “Sioux Falls,” he said.

  Her lunch box under her arm and her telescope in her hand, Elsa followed the crowding passengers out to the step. Her stomach was still queasy, she felt that her face must be green with nausea, and the station platform was strange and busy, but she clinched her mind around the thought of a rest, a stop. On a bench up under the protecting eaves of the station she sat the full hour of the stop-over, letting her stomach gradually settle and her muscles relax. After a long time she opened her shoebox and tentatively nibbled a sandwich. It made her feel better, and she ate another, then a little square of cheese, then a piece of cake. By the time her train was ready she could face the prospect of another three hundred miles.

  Afterward she fo
und that the train no longer made her ill. Through the long hot afternoon she sat and watched the immediate trackside flowing straight as a river backward, the horizon revolving in a slow circle. There were few trees now. Somewhere, while she had been sick, they had come to some sort of dividing line. Farms were more scattered, the buildings unpainted, and either ramshackle or staringly new. There were no hills, only a wide bare green-gold plain, pasture and unthrifty-looking cornfields. Once in a while they came to creeks or rivers flowing turgidly in sandy beds between strips of dusty cottonwoods. Mile after mile, hour after hour, past sod shanties with weeds growing green on their roofs, past unpainted shacks and ragged sheds, past windmills and discouraged plantings of saplings, past fields of wheat still meadow-green in the heat, past flocks of crows that flapped heavily off the wires as the train roared by, past herds of nondescript cattle with cowbirds sitting on their hipbones.

  The sun went down redly behind a ridge of scattered buttes, throwing into black relief the broken skyline and flushing a low range of hills beyond. Elsa ate from her lunch box, watching the light die and the dark come up out of the ground. When they stopped at a town the elevators loomed high and angular against the darkening sky, and the spout of a watertank outside the window was like the upraised trunk of a huge elephant. A little later, when it was black as a wall outside, the porter came in and lighted the kerosene lamps at the ends of the car. The girl leaned her head against the dark reflecting glass and watched the strange, unknown, lonely country flow past like a banner of darkness starred with tiny ephemeral lights. After a while she slept, and when she woke they were in Fargo.

  There was a half hour stop, and she got up to walk on the platform. On her second round through the group of workmen and trucks and strolling passengers, a man lifted his straw hat and smiled, and she stopped in surprise, thinking he must be someone she knew. But he was a total stranger, and the half-bow he made, the uplifted hat, the smirk on his face, put her to flight. She went in and sat down in the station restaurant and ordered a cup of coffee.

  After the momentary glad shock of thinking she had met an acquaintance the depression of utter strangeness was on her again, accentuated by the flaring yellow lamps, the tired movements of the waitress, the midnight lackluster actions of the people sitting there, the dusty last-year’s calendar on the side wall telling her that it was December 24, 1904. She looked at the smoke-grimed hands and faces of the trainmen eating at the counter, the withered pies and bare hard stools, and through the door at the yellow benches of the waiting room, and the sense of being alone, friendless in a desolate land, rose in her like a sickness, so that she gulped her coffee and went out to the friendlier activity of the platform.

  The oppressive darkness crowded in from the far side of the tracks, pushing against the platform lights and the clustered yellow panes of the town. When at last the train started again she sat for a long time staring blankly into the solid black outside, looking past her faintly-mirrored image and thinking of her father and Sarah and home. Her home seemed now very dear, her rebellion childish and petulant; oppressed by her own loneliness, she could understand Sarah’s now.

  Then she slept again, waking fitfully through an interminable drowsy discomfort until the world outside lightened into color, emerging in flat lines of cloud and horizon and field. At five thirty the conductor came through and shook her, thinking her still asleep. The next stop was Hardanger. She did not remember until she stepped off the train that she had entirely forgotten her uncle’s instructions to wire him when she would arrive. And she had forgotten to tip the porter. Hurriedly she felt for her purse and started back, but the train was already moving. The conductor waved from the step and she was alone, with the helpless feeling that everything she had done in getting there had been done wrong.

  The country about her was flat as a floor and absolutely treeless. On both sides of the tracks the town sprawled, new, temporary-looking, cut by rutted streets whose borders were a jungle of sweet clover and weeds. Across the roofs of two cottages Elsa could see the square high fronts of stores on what seemed to be the main street. Toward them she started, pulled off balance by the weight of her telescope. As she passed the first cottage a man in his undershirt threw open the door and stood in the sun yawning and stretching and staring at her.

  The main street was a river of fine powder between the raised plank sidewalks. On both sides a row of hitching posts stood in vanishing perspective down to the end of the street, which trailed off weakly into open country. As she walked, looking for her uncle’s store, Elsa saw with sick certitude that Hardanger was ugly. Frame buildings, false fronts, gaping vacant lots piled with old barrels, boxes, blowing newspapers, ashes. Dust-choked streets and sidewalks that were treacherous to walk on because sometimes the ends of the boards were loose. A general store whose windows were crammed with overalls, pitchforks, gloves, monkey wrenches, spools of barbed wire, guns, boxes of ammunition, ladies’ hats. A butcher shop and bakery under the same roof, the windows of both opaque with fly specks. On the first corner a two-story frame hotel, its windows giving her a momentary glimpse of leather chairs and a disconsolate potted palm. A drug store across the street, its sides plastered with advertisements for medicines. Next to that a vacant lot, then a pensioned railroad car set end-to to the street and wearing on its front the legend “Furs bought for cash.” Another vacant lot, a store labeled “Gents and Ladies Haberdashery,” a billiard hall and bowling alley, and then her uncle’s store: “Karl Norgaard, Plain and Fancy Groceries.”

  But the store was closed. It was only, Elsa discovered by a look at her watch, twenty minutes past six. There was not a soul in the street. She was standing on the sidewalk, clasping and unclasping her fingers to restore the circulation after the weight of the telescope, when a young man came out of the pool hall. He was tall, slim, but heavy in the shoulders. His black hair was parted in the middle and pomaded flat over a forehead dark as an Indian’s from the sun. His sleeves were rolled up to expose powerful arms, thick in the wrists and roundly muscled.

  “Hello!” he said, staring at her. Elsa flushed. The man had a merry and speculative glint in his eye; his stare bothered her as the smirk of the man at the station in Fargo had.

  “You looking for somebody?”

  Elsa stooped and picked up the telescope, some notion in her mind that that showed she was leaving in a minute. “I was looking for my uncle, Mr. Norgaard. You don’t know where he lives, do you?”

  “Sure. Just down around the next corner. You can see it from here.” He came toward her with a slightly lurching stride, his shoulders swinging, and pointed to a gray frame house on the first cross street.

  “Thank you,” Elsa said, and started away.

  He followed her. “You his niece? I could tell, though, by that hair.”

  Her hot, suspicious look made him laugh. “No need to get mad. We all been expecting you.”

  “I was supposed to wire him,” she said. “He didn’t know when. ... Well, thank you for ...”

  “Can I lug that satchel for you?” He kept pace with her, watching her, talking with a hidden burble of laughter in his voice.

  “No thanks. I can carry it.”

  She hurried faster, and he stopped, but all the way to her uncle’s house she could feel him watching her, and her mind’s eye could see him standing in his shirt sleeves on the sidewalk with the sun on his dark face. It irritated her. There was something fresh about him.

  Karl Norgaard was not yet dressed when she knocked. After a moment his red head appeared in an upstairs window.

  “Hello, Elsa! I thought you were going to wire me.”

  She tilted back her head to smile at him, feeling suddenly very tired and hungry and soiled. “I forgot, Uncle Karl. Can I come in anyway?”

  “You bet you,” he said. “Be down in a minute.”

  In a minute the door opened and he was grinning at her, his pink round face so full of welcome that she found herself laughing weakly aloud. “Velkommen
!” he said. “Velkommen, Elsa.”

  Elsa unwound her scarf from her hat and said, “Thanks, Uncle Karl. It’s nice to be here at last.”

  “You came in a hurry,” Karl said. He stood in his felt pantofles and regarded her with shrewd eyes. “How’s everybody at home?”

  “Fine. Everybody’s fine. But I had to come in a hurry, Uncle Karl. I couldn’t stay there a minute longer.”

  Karl rubbed one apple cheek. “Well, you’re young. Herregud, the fool things you do when you’re young.” He grabbed her by the arm. “Well, come in, come in. Come on upstairs. Want to wash your face? Take a bath? There’s a tub in the cellarway. I’ll heat some water.”

  “Let me get my breath first,” she said. “Can I put this bag somewhere?”

  He showed her her room, led her into the other two upstairs rooms, one his own bedroom, one his office. “You might as well learn right away to leave the office alone,” he said. “I can’t find anything as it is.”

  “How about your bedroom? Can you sleep if I take off those dirty old sheets and put some clean ones on?”

  “It was changed two weeks ago,” Karl said. “That’s pretty good for an old batch.” He frowned. “Maybe I made a mistake letting you come. You get so neat a man can’t stand you and I’ll send you home.”

  “I’ll be good,” she said. “I’ll be as sloppy as you want, but don’t send me home.” She took off her hat and lifted her hair with her fingers to ease its weight. “You go get a fire going and I’ll get your breakfast.”

  After breakfast he went off to the store. In spite of his instructions to go to bed, she tidied up, swept, changed the beds and laid out a washing for the next day, cleaned up the sardine cans and cracker boxes and cheese rinds from the kitchen. The curtains, she decided, had not been washed since the flood, and took them down to add them to the washing. Then she went up to her room and unpacked. By the time she had things put away, the telescope stuck into the attic, and the daguerreotype of her mother set up on the dresser, she began to feel settled and permanent. The mere fact of working in this house made it her own, her clothes hanging in the wardrobe gave her proprietorship.