The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  There was not a sound as he walked away. The men parted and let him by, and wiping his bloody nose as he went, he walked over to the bunkhouse, his head still singing with the power of McCarthy’s fists, his ear swelling, but his blood pounding with a triumph so high and savage that he wanted to yell. The picture of McCarthy lying back there with his ribs caved in was raw alcohol to his soul. He was drunk on it; the toughest Irishman on the crew was back there cold as a clam.

  The next day he was on his way to Wisconsin, bound for a logging camp where another section hand had worked the winter before. The food, he said, was good, the work hard but agreeable, the wages fair. They would just about be getting crews ready for the winter’s cutting.

  Two winters in Wisconsin gave him many skills. Either with rifle or shotgun he was the best shot in camp, so that frequently he got laid off the saw to go hunting for the cook. Those days of prowling the timber with a gun only deepened the wild streak in him as the work on the crosscut deepened his chest. He took to skis and snow-shoes as if he had known them all his life, and he went out of his way to make friends.

  He was genial, a good story-teller, a hearty drinker and a ribald companion in the towns where the rafts and the wanigan tied up and the men swarmed ashore for a bender. On winter evenings, when there was nothing doing in the bunkhouse steaming with the thick smell of drying socks and scorched leather and mutton tallow, he often lay on his bunk reading the one book he had found, a volume of Burns, and before the first winter was up he had added the whole volume to his fantastic collection of memorized McGuf fey. He learned Paul Bunyan yarns, or invented them himself, and when half tight would sometimes take off on an extemporaneous ballad or poem that lasted half an hour. And he played poker, for higher stakes.

  Those two summers, when the camps were shut down, he worked on a farm out of Portage, simply because he liked being outside better than he would have liked a carpenter’s job in town. The Portage baseball team discovered him, and in the end of his second summer he leaped into local notoriety by getting a bid from the Terre Haute team in the Three-Eye League.

  That winter he did not go back to the woods, for reasons which he kept to himself, and when he stood in the yard late in April ready to leave for Terre Haute, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the house burst into sudden tempestuous tears and fled to the barn.

  “For gosh sakes,” her father said. “What’s the matter with her?”

  Bo did not enlighten him.

  He liked playing ball in Terre Haute. It was a wandering life, full of action, and the adulation of fans put a cocky swagger in his walk. His name in the papers pleased him, the fellowship of the gang he played with was good masculine fellowship, with many afternoons in the icehouse cooling off on beer after a game, and many evenings of quiet, intent poker. He lost money, but he learned much. If it had not been for an accident he might have stayed on as a professional ball player, might even have moved up into the big time, because his hitting was consistent and powerful, and he was a good man behind the plate in the days when catchers worked with a thin fingerless glove. But late in the season of 1896 he tried to stretch a long hit, got tangled up in a plunging fight for the bag with the opposing third baseman, and came up limping with a badly wrenched knee.

  That put him on the hospital list for the rest of the season, and he had to get another job. For a while he worked in a glass factory, gave it up because it kept him inside ten hours a day, went back to his old trade as carpenter, and quit that with pleasure at the beginning of the next season. But the third day of training he wrenched his knee again; in spite of bandages it felt as if it might cave under him, and it hindered his swing at the plate. Before the middle of the first month he had been released from the club and was selling beer on the road for a Milwaukee brewery.

  His territory took in all of southern Minnesota, western Iowa, and South Dakota, and sometimes was stretched to include an illicit trip into North Dakota to pick off the blind pig trade. North Dakota was then a focal point for armies of immigrants and land seekers. The trains were full of Norwegian and Russian families burdened down with masses of belongings, the station platforms were piled with bundles and boxes and trunks and farm machinery, the station walls were plastered with posters, land was for sale everywhere, new lines were pushing across the fertile Red River country and into the western part of the state.

  Something in the bustle of migration stirred a pulse in Bo Mason. He was not a lazy man; his activities had been various and strenuous since he was fourteen. But the boredom of carpentry, of towns, of regular hours and wages every Saturday and orders all the rest of the week, had always made him restless. Here in Dakota there was something else. Here everybody was his own boss, here was a wide open and unskimmed country where a man could hew his own line and not suffer for his independence. Obstacles raised by nature—cold, heat, drouth, the solid resistance of great trees, he could slog through with almost fierce joy, but obstacles raised by institutions and the habits of a civilized community left him prowling and baffled.

  That was partly why he loved the feel of life in Dakota. Frequently he stopped over for a day or two to go bird shooting, coming home from the wide grasslands and sloughs with a buggy full of prairie chickens, sage hens, grouse, ducks. Those days he remembered, and he remembered the sniff of something remote and clean and active in the prairie wind, the flat country leaning westward toward the Missouri Plateau, the sight everywhere of new buildings, new plowing, new grain elevators rising along the new tracks on the edges of new towns. Saloon conversations were full of tales of fantastic crops. “Sixty bushel to the acre!” men said. “Sixty bushel. I seen it, I was at the spout of that threshing machine. My God, that wheat grows tall as Iowa corn.” And from train windows Bo looked out over fields of flax in flower, acres and acres of blue, and then his brewery job, full of travelling as it was, seemed trivial, picayune, confining. He wanted breath in his lungs and the sight of a flock of prairie chickens rising over his gunsights.

  “Things are going on out there,” he told his boss on the next home stop. “Every time I go through there the towns along the line are bigger.”

  His boss sat pulling a bushy eyebrow with thumb and forefinger. “You want to quit?” he said.

  “How did you know?”

  “You’ve got the itch in you,” his boss said. “I’ve seen it before. You can stay on if you want, glad to have you. I’ve got no complaints about your work or sales.”

  Bo said nothing.

  “Planning to take up a homestead?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Don‘t,” his boss said, and hauled himself straighter in his chair. “You take my advice and stay away from farms. I knew a lot of people went to Dakota and Nebraska in the old days. And the ones that made money weren’t the ones that sweated themselves skinny farming. The ones that made money was the storekeepers and bankers and saloon-keepers. I don’t suppose you know anything about banking.”

  “No.”

  “And you wouldn’t like running a grocery store.”

  “No.”

  “Then it looks like a saloon,” the old man said, and grinned. “And saloons are banned in Dakota.”

  “Not if you believe my sales reports,” Bo said. They laughed.

  The old man set the ends of his fingers together and brooded. “Looky here, son,” he said. “I’ll make you a proposition. You go out to some new town and set yourself up a place and I’ll help you out. You can draw on me for fixtures and beer, and pay me off when you get going. I think you’re the kind of guy might make a go of it.”

  “Thanks,” Bo said, and rose. “I’ll let you know. I want to go look around a little more first.”

  Two months later he wrote from Hardanger, saying that he had a good thing in a new town, no local police or anything to bother. He had bought half a building, was putting in bowling alleys himself, had three pool tables coming. He’d like a thirty-foot bar, mirrors to match it, and a shipment of beer, bottled bee
r. It was cleaner that way and it could be kept out of sight. “This town is only ten years old,” he said, “and it’s twice as busy now as it was two-three years ago. Five years from now I’ll be buying out the brewery.”

  That was in the summer of 1899. Now it was 1905.

  In September the roads were full of wagons, and on mornings when she worked around the house with doors and windows open Elsa could hear the shunt and crash of boxcars being backed under the spouts of the elevators. When the jolting and puffing stopped she could, by listening intently, hear the swishing rush as the dipped spout let go its river of wheat into the cars. Harvest excited her, as it had always excited her at home, and one afternoon, on an impulse, she left the house and went down.

  There were dribbles of golden wheat below the spout, and at the bottom of the elevator wall a shining gold cone. She scooped her hand full and stood back watching, chewing and crunching the wheat kernels till they were sweet, rubbery gum in her mouth.

  The last car was just being pulled away. Inside the elevator she heard the grunting of a separator engine and the occasional thud of a sack being thumped on the floor. She peeked in. A man she did not know, probably Bill Conzett’s hired man, was separating seed flax, and Jud Chain, immaculate, dandified, wearing coat and vest even in the fall heat, leaned one shoulder negligently against the wall. He had his hat off, and a streak of sun through the elevator roof glinted on his blond hair.

  “Hello,” Elsa said. “I didn’t expect to see you in an elevator.”

  “Come down a good deal,” Jud said. “Bo and I are turning grain speculators. Buying flax this fall.”

  “Well,” she said, and could think of nothing else to say to him.

  “I’m daffy about flax anyway,” Jud said. “Something about it makes me feel good. It’s so slick and silky to feel.” He ran his hand into the mouth of a sack and wriggled his fingers.

  “We never grew it at home,” Elsa said.

  “Feel.”

  She pushed her hand into the brown flaky seeds. They slipped smoothly up her wrist, cool and dry, millions of polished, purple-brown, miniature guitar picks. She moved her hand and the flax swirled like heavy smooth water against her skin.

  “That’s nice,” she said.

  “It’s something to see in flower, too,” Jud said. “Acres of blue-bells.”

  Her quick look acknowledged something sensitive, almost feminine, in the expression of his face as he caressed the flax with his fingers. “It’s like everything else that’s lovely,” Jud said. “Dangerous. Boy was drowned in a flax bin here a year ago. Fell in and it sucked him down before anybody could get to him. We had to empty the whole bin to get him.” He rubbed his wrist with a flat white hand. “Nice boy, too,” he said. “That’s the kind things always happen to. A mean, tough kid, now, he’d never know enough to appreciate the feel of flax, and he’d never get caught in it.”

  “I guess so,” Elsa said. She let her fingers move in the satiny, treacherous seeds.

  “Seen Bo lately?” Jud said.

  “Not for three or four days.”

  “I thought he spent all his time on your front porch.”

  “Oh, go along!” she said.

  Jud lifted an amused eyebrow; his mouth puckered into an expression almost arch. “Don’t make out that you don’t know the conquest you’ve made,” he said.

  She blushed. “Oh, fiddlesticks!”

  “Laugh,” Jud said. “You’ve got poor old Bo roped and hogtied. You know what he’s been like for the last three weeks? When the kid that sets them up in the alleys gets his pins up, he has to jump out of there and beat it over to rack the pool balls, and then fly up to serve somebody a drink, and then hike back to the alleys to set them up again. You know why? Because Bo is standing all that time out by the door watching to see if you won’t be coming down the sidewalk.”

  Elsa’s face was hot. “Oh yes,” she said sarcastically. “He’s just been a regular preste-rompe.”

  “What’s a preste romper?”

  “Preacher’s tail. Somebody that’s always tagging along. Like Bo.”

  “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Oh no,” she said. “I always feel sorry for strays. I pat him on the head once in a while.”

  His laugh was deep, moist, cavernous, like something alive down a cistern, a laugh that matched oddly with his polished and almost effeminate manners.

  “Has Bo asked you anything lately?” he said.

  She was startled. “No. What?”

  “I guess he’s been pretty busy,” Jud said. “I know he’s got it on his mind.”

  “Now you’ve got me curious.”

  “Oh well,” Jud said. “I don’t know why I shouldn’t ask you. He’d get all tangled up in his tongue. How’d you like to go to Devil’s Lake next Saturday?”

  “Fine,” she said. “What for?”

  “State trap shoot. Bo’s entered in the singles—would be in doubles too, but he can’t stay away that long. We thought you and Eva might come along for the day. The fair’s on, and there’s a carnival in town. Big excitement.”

  “It sounds like fun,” she said. “What if Bo forgets to ask me, now?”

  “That,” Jud said, “is the last thing he’d forget. He might forget his shotgun, maybe, but not you.”

  5

  She saw him, from the parlor window, come up the walk with his derby already in his hand, and because they had a twenty-mile drive to make, and the shooting began at ten, she hurried to meet him at the door. He took the lunch box from her hand and held her elbow while she gathered her skirts for the step up to the axle of the buggy. “Here we go,” he said, “if these old plugs can make it.”

  Settling herself, she said in surprise, “Why that’s a beautiful team.”

  “Best old Handley had,” Bo said. “If they ever caught up with the times in this burg they’d have horseless carriages for rent.” He flicked the lines and the horses snapped into their collars; their trotting feet beat light and swift on the dust. Elsa knew they could make that twenty miles in two hours, easily. But it was like Bo to disparage anything he was proud of. Either he or Handley had worked over those horses. Their gray hides shone, their manes were roached, their forelocks tied, their tails curried smooth and glossy. She was glad they weren’t docked; a docked horse was a pitiful thing when the flies were bad.

  Jud was waiting in front of the hotel. Bo didn’t slow down. Jud’s great flat hand hooked the rail, his leg swung up, and he slid into the rear seat on the fly. The smell of bay rum came with him. “Must be in a hurry,” he said. He breathed on the ruby ring on his left hand, rubbed it on his sleeve.

  “Pony Express doesn’t stop for anything,” Bo said.

  But they stopped for Eva. In front of her house Bo whistled and Jud whistled, but nothing happened. “Still snoring,” Bo said. “Go on up and break the door down, Jud.”

  Jud climbed out. “Not Eva’s door,” he said. “I prize my health.” He went up and rapped, bending to listen for movement inside.

  “Make some noise, for God’s sake,” Bo said. He lifted his voice in a bellow that shocked down the quiet, weedgrown street. “Hey, EVA!” The echo bounced off Sprague’s barn.

  Jud knocked again. “Must be asleep,” he said.

  “That’s just what I think,” Bo said. “Eva! Hey, Eva! Wake up!”

  An upstairs window opened and Eva stuck her head out. Her left hand held a flowered kimono close to her chest. “Shut up, you big loon,” she said. “You’ll wake Ma.”

  The window slammed. They waited five minutes, ten. Jud wandered across the porch, cut off a twig from a shrub with his knife, and began peeling it. In the buggy Bo looked at Elsa, then at his watch. “Fifteen minutes,” he said, and muttered indistinguishable things under his breath.

  “Maybe she misunderstood the time.”

  “Maybe my hip pocket is a gold mine. She just likes to keep people waiting.”

  At six-thirty Eva came out in a white pleated shirtwaist
and a dark sport skirt that just cleared the ground. Her mouth was very red, and she walked briskly, as if unaware that she had delayed anyone. Jud helped her in, waited while she got over her despairing little laughs and helpless attempts to get her skirts arranged. Bo sucked a back tooth and looked bored, but Elsa reached back and gave Eva a hand. Men ought to consider that a girl with her waist squeezed at least four inches too small couldn’t move very freely. Still, she supposed Eva could have left the corset a little looser.

  “Get all prettied up?” Bo said.

  “I didn’t even stop to eat,” Eva said. “Just on account of you and your noise.”

  “What were you doing, then? You had time for a ten course meal.”

  “You needn’t act so nasty,” Eva said. “I didn’t keep you waiting long.”

  Bo clucked to the team, lifted his derby and ran a hand over his hair, tipped the derby on again at a cocky angle. “No trouble at all. Do the horses good to have that hour rest.”

  “Oh, an hour!”

  “Cut it out,” Jud said genially. “We’re moving, aren’t we?”

  He moved Bo’s shotgun case from under Eva’s feet and folded the buffalo robe on the floor so that her feet wouldn’t dangle. Eva was always complaining that all seats were made too high for short people.

  As they drove along the road the mist was rising from a slough on the left, and a half dozen ducks turned and swam away into the tules as if pulled on wires. “Getting close to bird season,” Bo said, and watched them with a nostalgic eye.

  The grays lengthened out in a mile-eating trot across the flats. Flickertails jerked and ran and sat up with absurd little hands hanging on their chests. The light cloud of dust behind them hung a long time in the still air, so that turning at section corners they could see it for a quarter of a mile behind. They sang, the grays went crisply, perfectly matched, heads up and tails arching a little, the mist melted from above the sloughs and the sun burned warmer. They were pulling into the carnival grounds at Devil’s Lake at nine-thirty.

  Jud lifted Eva down, straightened his vest. “I don’t suppose there’ll be anything doing till later,” he said, and looked at Bo.