He must have run, she decided afterward, all the way to the store, taking a direction and plowing ahead blind. Probably he wanted to get there and back before she had time to worry; probably he also wanted to impress her with how fast he could do it. She was surprised; she was even startled, the stamping came on the porch so soon. She ran to open the door. Karl, his face muffled in a felt cap with earlaps and a broad chin band, with a yellow icicle in each nostril and his eyebrows stiffly iced, stumbled in. The rope around his waist was a smooth, velvety white cable.
The hall was full of wind and drift. “Herregud!” Karl said, and grabbed the storm door to keep it from blowing off its hinges. Bo loomed through the opaque, white-swirling darkness like a huge hairy animal.
When she had untied their lifeline she led them in, inspected them under the light for signs of frostbite, rushed Bo out into the hall while she scooped up snow and held it again the leprous spots on his cheekbones. He bit at her fingers, and she slapped him on the nose.
“That’s a heck of a way to welcome a guy that’s just risked his neck to go get a worthless old tumblebug like Karl.”
“You hold still,” she said. She scrubbed his face with snow till it glowed, looked to make sure all the spots were gone, and relaxed with a noisy sigh. “Oh, I’m glad you’re back!” she said, and reached up to kiss his wet, beefy, ice-cold face, right in front of Karl. “How’d you ever make it?”
“Just spread my sails and coasted down. Wind lifted me right up and set me down square in front of the alleys. Ask Karl how we got back.”
Huddling close to the stove with his neck still pulled into his shoulders, Karl grumbled. “Ask me!” he said. “Pulled me along like a steer. My belly’ll be sore for a week.”
Tall in the doorway, full of pride, Bo grinned at her. “Once,” he said, “Karl got off the path and started off toward Fargo somewheres. I thought he was stuck in the snow, when it was only the rope caught around a telegraph pole, and I yanked him half in two before he backtracked and got straight again.” He put an icy hand on the back of Elsa’s neck. “Satisfied now?”
She squeezed the heavy muscles of his arm. Karl went into the kitchen, and she followed to get him his supper. Bo wandered after her. “What’s the use of postponing this marriage till New Year?” he said. “Why don’t we get a preacher and get it over with?”
“You sound as if it was like moving the furniture, or something,” Elsa said. She couldn’t get married in a rush like that. There wasn’t anything ready, no towels, no sheets, no clothes, no anything to keep house with. But as she looked at his cold-reddened face and his smoky, laughing eyes, and thought how nice he’d been, really, to go out in a storm like that and bring Karl back just so she wouldn’t get talked about, and because she wanted him to ...
“I guess we can at least wait till the blizzard’s over,” she said.
It was almost the first time she had heard real mirth in his laughter, the first time it had sounded exuberant and full instead of short and half impatient. He pulled her onto his lap on the kitchen chair, while Karl grunted and grumbled over his supper, and scuffled with her, trying to take a toothy bite out of her between the neck and shoulder, where she was most ticklish. He was so boisterous and rough and strong that she struggled, but he held her arms and reduced her to helplessness.
“Hear that, Karl?” he said. “You can give the bride away about day after tomorrow.”
“I’ll be giving her away, all right,” Karl said. “Might as well throw a girl to the lions.”
“I’m tame,” Bo said. “I’m completely house-broke. You tell him, Elsa.”
“About like a dancing bear,” she said. He set her suddenly on her feet and stood up.
“We have to consult the oracles,” he said. “See if this marriage is going to be a success. I’ll play you eleven games of casino to see who’s going to wear the pants in the family. And if I win I’ll play you eleven more for the championship of the Chicago stockyards.”
Even after Karl had been long in bed and the kerosene in the parlor lamp had given out, and the lamp had dimmed, flared, sunk, flared up again, and gone out in a stink of coal oil; even after they had quit fooling around playing cards and had settled on the sofa with the rattle of granular snow on the windows and the house shuddering under the whining strength of the wind, there was a golden light over her mind, and her senses swayed with the swaying of a ghostly hammock in an idyllic grassy backyard with hollyhocks tall against a whitewashed fence, and a redbird was nesting in the grape arbor.
II
In one way the accident was a blessing, for now, after she had swept the broom awkwardly, one-handed, across the tenthouse floor, had soused the dishes and set them to dry, and had stooped and pulled, making the beds, while the blood rushed painfully into her injured arm, there was good time to rest. For an hour or more in the mornings and for long quiet periods in the afternoons she could sit on the plank platform before the door and let the children run in the clearing and simply relax, her mind still and her senses full of the sounds and smells that the woods had always had but that she had never had time to notice before.
Cradling her right arm, spiralled with thick bandage, in her lap, she could close her eyes and hear the tapping of woodpeckers off in the forest, and sometimes the drumming of a grouse. Her lungs loved the balsam air, and her body soaked up warmth, infinitely pleasant after the weeks of rain. It was as if a blessing had fallen suddenly on the half acre of stumpy ground. For five days there had been fine weather: every morning the sun tipped the firs and poured into the open, creeping from chip to chip until it filled the clearing, leaned its friendly weight on the tenthouse door. By the time Bo went to work at seven the shadows had all pulled themselves back toward the ring of woods, and while she did her housework she could feel the warmth growing on the canvas roof. When she handed out the carrots and greens for the two boys to feed to their rabbits, and came out to stand in the full sun, it was with a sense of peace and permanence so alien that she had to smile at her own perception of it.
More than anything else, it was the rabbits that gave her that feeling of home—they and the children digging in the dirt around a big stump. Home, as she imagined it and remembered it, had always meant those things, children, permanence, the recurrence of monotonous and warmly-felt days, and animals to care for. More than once, leaning her back against the wall, she fingered the bandage caressingly. It was odd you never realized how tired you were until something made you take a rest.
Even the pain beating in her arm from wrist to elbow with a steady nagging ache was good, because it reminded her that now there was a kind of fulfillment. The pain was like something left over from the rainy winter, lying in her like the things that she could not forget. But it would pass, and the things she had thought she could never forget she would forget. Unless she stirred too fast, or got impatient at her crippling, when it would leap instantly to an immense and throbbing pressure against the tight bandage, it was even a half-pleasant kind of pain. It would pass, but the peace would not pass. While you lay against the tent wall in the sun and the children dug endlessly and happily in the dirt Bo was working, and when the arm was better you would go back to work too, and the tenthouse would not always be a tenthouse. As you got ahead a little further it would become a house, with a barn behind at the edge of the firs, and the café would bring in a little money and you could have a garden and a few animals, a cow and some chickens, and that would be a good life.
In the sun, her face tipped back and her burned arm in her lap, she let down her hair and shook it over her shoulders, as thick and wavy and richly tinted as ever, lavish and rich and good to feel when it was well brushed. That was an odd thing too. In your childhood everybody teased you about your hair and yelled, “There comes a white horse, kid!” but now everybody seemed to think it was beautiful. You got more compliments on your hair than anything. As she brushed evenly down, pulling the hair over her breast to get at it with her good hand, she thought
much about how their lives would be now, how Bo seemed to be over his disappointment and his restlessness. Seven years of hard times, and the crash of 1907, had humbled his ambitions. Perhaps that was good too. It didn’t do to expect too much.
It was that hotel, she thought. Five years of butting our heads against that wall! Idly she watched a half dozen chickadees fussily busy at a crust of bread one of the boys had dropped. Her brush handle lay smooth and rounded and solid in her hand. She felt it there, something she could put down if she chose, but she did not put it down. She liked its solid familiar feel. That was the way with things you remembered. You could put them down if you chose, but you didn’t quite choose. Every once in a while you took them up and found them familiar and well worn and intimate, and you kept them where you could touch them when you wanted to.
But that hotel. There was little you wanted to remember about that. The musty smell of the halls, the unpleasant work of cleaning rooms after the bank went and the help had to be let go, the unfriendly masculine atmosphere of the lobby, with its faint sour smell of whiskey from the bar that had gone in in spite of her protests (How can you run a commercial hotel without a bar?). It was funny, but the things you felt most vividly about that hotel, even more vividly than you felt the birth of Chester and Bruce in the first floor front suite where you lived, even more than you felt the loss of the first one, the girl baby born dead, were the evenings when Bo played solitaire and the time Pinky Jordan came around. Those things had weight in the memory; those were what was left when you boiled down six years in your mind.
The solitaire grew on him slowly in the days when receipts and expenses chased each other in an endless circle and the big companies took their drummers off the road and the bank had been cleaned out. It became a ritual, a kind of intent solitary fortune-telling game. Every evening he sat down at the table with cards and a tablet and pencil. The game never varied. He bought the deck for fifty-two dollars and got back five for every card he put up. For hours, some nights, she heard the stiff riffle of cards, the slipping noise as he thumbed the deck, the light smack as he laid them down. Looking up, she saw his dark, intent face, dark even in winter, bent over the game. When the last card was gone he leaned over and added figures to the long string on the tablet, adding or subtracting from his total gain or loss. Then the riffle again, the expert flip of the cut, the light smack of a new layout going down. Sometimes, cleaning up, she looked with baffled wonder at the columns of figures on a discarded tablet sheet, the thousands of dollars of mythical debt, and once in a while at top or bottom a string of aimless figures elaborately penmanlike, neat sevens and nines and twos with curly tails, or signatures with strong flowing downstrokes: Harry G. Mason, Harry G. Mason. 7 7 7 7 7 7, 2 2 2 2 2 2, 9 9 9—and the debt going up in fantastic figures from page to page. She learned to know that whenever the aimless signatures and the strings of numbers appeared on the pages, he was more baffled and restless and prowling and dissatisfied than usual, that somebody had ducked on his bill or that he and Jud had lost money in a poker game in the room behind the bar.
It did no good to laugh at him or get mad at him. He wanted, he said, to see how much he would stand to make from a solitaire game if he ever had a gambling house. When she asked him if he were planning on starting a gambling house he said no, of course not. But he wanted to know. She knew that he attached cabalistic importance to his figures. If he made money off his game one night, that meant that the next day the bar would do a good business, or there would be a couple more rooms rented. If he lost, the next day would be bad. So he did his best never to lose. He would play five games more just to see if he couldn’t pick it up. When he lost on those he would play five more, and then ten more, and then fifteen more, just to make it an even fifty games for the evening, and if he had a string of games in which he did not win at all he became angry and intent and touchy, and went to bed angrily leaving cards and tablet sheets scattered over the table.
When he finally threw the deck down one night and said he had lost fifty-six thousand dollars on five thousand games, she thought he might be over that streak. But the next night he was playing solitaire cribbage, with the purpose, he said, of determining exactly what the average crib hand was. But cribbage too he used like a crystal ball. If he won as often as he lost, then the hotel would pull out of it and be a decent proposition. If he lost seventy-five out of a hundred games, it was a washout, they might as well sell it tomorrow, or give it away. If he won seventy-five out of a hundred, they’d make a mint.
She shook her head and smiled, remembering that. She couldn’t remember how it had ended. So many evenings were blended into one composite recollection that she didn’t know for sure whether he had been playing solitaire up to the time Pinky Jordan came to town, or whether he had stopped of his own accord. All she knew was that by the time Pinky Jordan came the hotel was a hopeless weight on their backs, that even Jud was getting the look of failure and defeat that it seemed to her now lay like mildew over all of them. And Eva still living with Jud in the hotel, not married but going by the name of Mrs. Chain, having attacks of her gall bladder trouble or whatever it was that ailed her, and needing attention like an invalid half the time. They were all tired out and low when Pinky Jordan came. Perhaps that was why he seemed like a comet across their horizon.
That day Elsa remembered as clearly as if it had been last week. (And why not? she said. If it hadn’t been for him we wouldn’t be here in Washington now, we wouldn’t have gone back to Indian Falls that winter, we wouldn’t have done anything, probably, except go on trying to make the hotel pay. Why wouldn’t I remember an afternoon that changed our whole lives?) At the end of an opaque, telescoped gap in her life there was a little man with a nicked ear and a whiskey voice, a kind of Pied Piper who whistled one tune and up came all the roots of the people who heard him.
She was sitting in the chair behind the desk, resting after putting the children away for their naps and trying not to hear the random talk that came through the door of the blind pig, brazenly halfway open because of the heat. Chester had been down before going to bed, and Bo had swatted him with buggy pillows and tickled him into spasms and had ended by setting him on the bar and giving him a sip of beer. When she sailed in and rescued him, Bo had been disgusted, almost nasty. “Oh for God sakes!” he said. “What’s the harm in that?” Jud, tending bar, winked at her and raised his shoulders eloquently. A couple of drummers had laughed.
Then as she sat behind the desk the screen door of the lobby opened and a little hatless baldheaded man came in. His face was a fiery rose-pink, and his bald red scalp was scrawled with bluish veins above the temples. His breath, when he leaned confidentially toward her, almost knocked her down. His voice was a whiskey voice. She had learned to recognize that. “I was told,” said his hoarse whisper, “that a man could get a drink in here.”
She jingled the bell for Bo, not even bothering to deny that they served liquor, as she ordinarily would have. This man was obviously no officer, but only a tramp or barfly wandering in on his way through town. Bo came hurriedly to the door, looked the man over, and motioned him inside. The door he left ajar.
She heard the clump of a bottle on the bar, and a low mutter of talk. Shortly the whiskey voice rose. “I’ll have another’n of those.”
Altogether he ordered five drinks in the course of an hour, in his hoarse, commanding whisper. The dead summer afternoon drifted on. A boy going past opened and slammed the screen door just to hear the noise. “Gimme another‘n,” said the whiskey voice from the bar.
Drowsily, without much interest but with nothing else to occupy her attention, she heard Bo come over and set one up for the stranger as he always did when anyone was buying freely. After a time the whiskey voice said, “How much, barkeep?”
Jud’s voice said, “One seventy-five,” and change clinked on the bar.
“Ain’t got the change,” the whiskey voice said. “You got a gold scale?”
“Hell no,” Jud s
aid, and laughed. “What for?”
“This’s all I got with me.” There was a sodden thump on the wood, and for once Elsa heard excitement and haste in Jud’s voice. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “Hey, Bo, this guy wants to pay off in gold dust.”
But the rapid steps, the noise of crowding, the exclamations, were at the bar almost as soon as he started to speak. “Where in hell did you get that?” Bo said.
“Klondike,” said the superior, bored whiskey voice, “if that’s any-a your business.”
“No offense, no offense,” Bo said. “We just don’t see any of that around here. Pan it yourself?”
“Right out of the gravel, boys.”
He must have poured some into his palm, for there were whistles and exclamations. Elsa strained her ears, but she needn’t have. The men in the pig were almost shouting. “Jumping Jesus,” a drummer said. “How much is that poke worth?”
“Oh—five, six hundred.”
“Quite a slug to be lugging around,” Bo said.
“More where that came from,” the stranger said. “Plennnty more salted away, boys. Never carry more than I need.”
“I’ll go try the drugstore for a scale,” Bo said. “How much an ounce?”
“Eighteen bucks.”
Bo laughed, a short, incredulous chop of sound. “You have to spend your money with an eyedropper at that rate.”
Pinky Jordan stayed all afternoon to soak up the admiration he had aroused. After she had brought the baby down in his buggy and set Chester to playing with his blocks, Elsa heard scraps of the tales he was holding his listeners with. Three more men had come back with Bo from the drugstore, and all afternoon others kept dropping in to have a beer and listen to stories of hundreds of miles of wild timberland, hundreds of thousands of caribou, hundreds of millions of salmon in suicidal dashes up the rivers; of woods full of bear and deer and otter and fox and wolverine and mink; of fruit salads on every tree in berry time. You didn’t need to work for a living. You picked it off the bushes, netted it out of the river, shot it out of the woods, panned it out of the gravel in your front yard.
The Big Rock Candy Mountain Page 11
