The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  Elsa looked sideways at the children, listening round-eyed. He could say all he wanted. She was scared, just the same. A cougar could get through a tent wall like nothing, and even if he was afraid of a man, he wouldn’t be afraid of a child.

  “Think I should keep the kids inside?”

  “Akh!” Bo put the box of cartridges away. “They only prowl at night.”

  “Well, but ...”

  “Keep ‘em around close if it makes you feel better. But there’s nothing to be scared of. Bruce there could scare him clear into Oregon.”

  For the first hour after he left she kept glancing out into the clearing. It would be another fine day. She tried to imagine cougars lying in wait behind the sunny edge of the trees, but the thought in such fresh morning light was absurd. At mid-morning she had the children playing outside, and had settled herself with one of her new books on the step. Looking for something familiar, she found Romeo and Juliet.

  Once or twice, lifting her head from the book to make sure that the boys hadn’t strayed, she wondered about what she was reading. Shakespeare was something great and far-off, a vague magnificent name. She couldn’t remember ever knowing anyone who had read any Shakespeare, though Bo had told her about one night in Indianapolis when he saw Macbeth, a long time ago, and about the flames flying around a dark stage and three old hags dropping the finger bones of children into their pot. Now she was reading one herself, and it was much like any other story, except that it was in poetry and there were some words she wasn’t sure of. But it was a good story. She read again, and Romeo had just killed Tybalt in a street brawl when Bruce called.

  He had to go to the toilet. Absorbed in her reading, Elsa told him to go by himself, he was a big boy now. Watching him with one eye, she saw him start unwillingly on the path that led back into the fringe of trees, looking back all the time, dragging his feet. He got half way, looked into the jungle of blackberry bushes, stopped, and began to cry.

  Elsa put down her book. “Go on,” she said. “A big boy like you shouldn’t need help.”

  Chester, sitting on a stump swinging his legs and watching, said, “I go by myself, don’t I, Ma?”

  “Of course,” she said. “All big boys do.”

  Bruce only wailed louder, and she stood up. He was a difficult child, cried for any little thing, grew afraid at nothing, got stubborn helpless streaks. No wonder Bo got mad at him. But it wouldn’t do. You had to baby him or he got worse.

  She walked out to him. “Come on, then,” she said, and took his hand.

  He hung back, staring fearfully into the woods.

  “What are you afraid of?” she said, and pulled at him.

  The child screamed and hung his whole weight on her hand. The effort of hauling at him sent a deep throbbing ache through her injured arm, and her impatience grew. “What is the matter with you?”

  It was minutes before his screaming stopped. She had to give herself up to the job of quieting him, sit down by him, distract his attention, tell him a story. Then she took his hand again. “All right,” she said. “Let’s go do our business.”

  His round eyes swung to the woods again and his lip jutted. “Cougar’ll eat me!”

  “Ohhh!” Elsa opened eyes and mouth in understanding, pursed her lips and nodded. In a substratum of consciousness she felt irritation with Bo for making so much fuss about the cougar that morning. The first thing he knew, the child would be afraid to go ten feet by himself.

  “The cougar’s gone home,” she said. “He lives way over by Lake Samamish.”

  “He does not,” Bruce said. “He’s in the woods and he’s gonna eat me.”

  “No, he isn’t in the woods.” She rose, wincing at her throbbing arm. “Look, I’ll go in first and show you.”

  She walked into the brush, slipped off the path and hid herself from him. Peeking from a thicket of blackberry she saw him sitting on the ground, his whole face set for a wail, watching where she had disappeared. After a moment she came back on the path. “See?”

  “Isn’t there a cougar?”

  “Not a sign of one. Come on with me now.”

  Finally she got him to the privy and back, but her nerves were tried, and as she sat down again to read she thought in irritation that there wasn’t much real peace in living in the woods a mile from town, with cougars running around robbing camps and your children afraid, almost justifiably, of being eaten by wild beasts. But that wasn’t fair. Bo wasn’t to blame for the way they were living now. If anyone was, she and the boys were. They had been a millstone around his neck, a jinx. If he had had only himself to think of, he would be in Alaska now with Jud, doing what he wanted to do, living the kind of life he loved, instead of working fifteen hours a day in a place he hated. Considering how much he had given up, it was no wonder he was sometimes irritable and brooding. The wonder was that he took his bad luck as well as he did. He had every excuse to be as miserable as he was that winter they went back to Indian Falls.

  She couldn’t remember much about the arrival home except a pattern of confusion, embarrassment, humiliation—and amazement at the change in Kristin and Erling. Kristin had grown up. Her selfishness and her lack of responsibility were gone. As for Erling, he was a great raw-boned man at eighteen, an inch over six feet and looking bigger because of his mop of red curls. He was obviously glad to see her and obviously not going to show it. She remembered the look of quick astonishment in Kristin’s eyes, the sober, old-world courtesy in her father’s manner, when she introduced Bo, and she remembered Henry Mossman, mild, getting a little bald, stepping up to shake Bo’s hand and then stepping back as if he had just shaken hands with the President.

  She felt the forced conversation as a guard against their saying what they really were thinking, and in the very quiet politeness of their manners she felt that they didn’t like Bo. They had been prepared to dislike him, and now they did. He was only a big dark-faced man who had run a saloon or poolhall in North Dakota and tricked Elsa into marrying him. He was outside the pale of Christian society, son-in-law or no son-in-law. She knew also that Bo felt their careful courtesy for what it was, and that even before they reached the house he was despising them for a bunch of pious Scandihoovian hypocrites.

  They were oil and water, though with the children Bo got on better. Kristin he won over to a kind of giggling liking by teasing her until she flew back at him, when he backed away waving helpless hands before him, and called her a hell-cat. She was never quite sure of him, but she thought he was lots of fun. Erling, after the first day on the farm, was his slave.

  She remembered how that started. Bo, the first night, sat down after supper and lit a cigar and said well, he guessed they were set for the winter, and Erling, maliciously acute, said, “You mean stuck.”

  “All right,” Bo said. “Stuck.”

  Erling was eating an apple, pounding the hard red Jonathan on the table to pulp it and then sucking the cidery juice through a hole in the skin. “You folks going to church regular?” he asked.

  Bo blew out a cloud of smoke. “No.”

  “Swell. Then I won’t have to.”

  “Don’t go telling Pa we put you up to it,” Elsa said.

  “You’ve got the right idea,” Bo said. He reached in his vest and handed Erling out a cigar. Erling took it, startled but game. Elsa started to protest, but decided to keep still. Let him play.

  They sat in a haze of smoke for ten minutes. Erling took the cigar out of his mouth and looked at it, working his lips. “Good cigar.”

  “Just about got you whipped, hasn’t it?” Bo said.

  “Naw. I smoke a corncob generally.”

  “Not while Pa’s around, I’ll bet,” Elsa said.

  “He don’t bother me. I’m running the farm myself now.”

  “You’re the boss, uh?” Bo said.

  “I’m the head man.” Erling took the cigar out of his mouth again between thumb and forefinger and went to the door and spat, casually.

  Bo laughed. “Go
t any work for a good farmhand?”

  “You want-a work?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’d get so lathered out in a field you’d drownd out all the gophers.”

  “Sweat’s good fertilizer,” Bo said.

  Erling looked at him doubtfully, his little bright blue eyes squinting. Elsa could see him thinking. If this big guy wanted work, he’d sure give it to him. It would be fun to get him out and run his tongue out.

  On the table lay a seed catalogue half an inch thick. Casually Bo leaned over, winked at Elsa, and seemed to be reading, paying no attention to Erling. Then he rose with the catalogue in his hand. “Through with this?”

  “I guess so. Why?”

  “Got to make a little trip,” Bo said. He took hold of the upper corner with his other hand. The blunt fingers tightened, his neck swelled and his shoulders hunched. The catalogue tore slowly, reluctantly, until with a final twist he ripped it in two and went out without a word.

  Erling’s eyes bulged. He looked at Elsa, who smiled.

  “Holy cats!” he said. He took up the remaining half of the catalogue and tried to tear it. It was like tearing a board. “My gosh he’s strong,” Erling said. “Where’d he get it?”

  “Don’t let him fool you,” Elsa said. “Running a hotel he’s got a little soft, but I’ve seen him bend pokers with his hands.”

  In her brother’s transparent face she saw half-contemptuous toleration giving way to awed respect. She could see him beginning to like this big guy that Elsa had married. One gesture, and the boy was his. It was hard to explain, that knack he had of making men like him (and women, she said. Wasn’t I just the same after one afternoon in Helm’s parlor?). It was a kind of teasing and sultry. and almost dangerous charm, a feeling of power you got from him as you got heat from a stove.

  She remembered the way he worked during that fall, how he set himself to go Erling one better in everything they did, how he hid his blistered hands until they were toughened and callused, how every morning he and Erling wrestled out by the mill trough. Generally those bouts wound up with Erling going head-first into the tank. Big and agile as he was, he was lost if he let Bo’s hands get on him. Then he yelped like a stepped-on pup, and after the ducking he came up streaming water and blowing promises of what he would do next time he got that big goof, and ran steaming through the cold to change his overalls.

  Those were good clean sparkling mornings bright with color, with popcorn drying from the rafters of the porch, and Chester was growing into such a handful that half the time they were scared to death he would kill himself and half the time proud of his adventurousness. He was always wandering off into the cornfield by himself, or crawling up into the hayloft to burrow and growl at himself playing bear, or inducing visiting children, generally girls, to go swimming with him in the mill tank. In the evenings Bo sparred with him, “toughening him up,” cuffing him on the ears as he sailed in, letting himself be flailed-in return.

  Bruce was a different problem. Sometimes Bo would induce him to come in and fight, but one or two light flicks on the ear would set him howling. Bo got impatient then. He never could abide a child’s crying. Sometimes he roared at the boy to stop his noise, and once or twice he looked as if he might haul back and knock Bruce rolling if shame, or Elsa’s presence, hadn’t stopped him.

  “You baby him too much,” he said. “I never had any of this babying. I just got thrown out in the cold and had to get along. You’ve got Bruce so he bawls for any little thing.”

  “You let him alone,” she said. “You can toughen Chet up all you want. He likes being knocked around. But Bruce is sensitive. You watch his face when you yell at him sometime. Just a little difference in your voice is enough to scare him.”

  “Yeah,” Bo said heavily. “Yeah, I guess by God it is.”

  It was winter, the isolation and inactivity of just sitting and waiting for word from Jud, that frayed his temper. Even when the letter from Jud came, it helped little. He had an offer of three thousand, less than half what he and Bo had paid, and he was holding off to see if something better could be stirred up. When he read it, Bo got out paper and pencil and figured for an hour, and when he got through figuring he threw the pencil across the room and went outside. Next day, in a burst of activity, he sat down and wrote nine letters, more than he had written in a year, one to a steamship line in Seattle, two to fur houses in St. Louis, one to his sister, one to Jud, one to Sears Roebuck ordering some traps, two or three others she couldn’t remember. Then he sat down and played solitaire till supper time.

  Inactivity was like a disease in him. He needed the excitement of starting something, getting something going. Being cooped up in the house made him grit his teeth. Haunting the mailbox for letters that didn’t arrive set him swearing. And when he lost thirty-five straight games of solitaire without winning once, he threw down the cards and glared, and she knew from the look in his heavy-lidded eyes that he made an omen out of it, it was bad luck for the Klondike project. Before she could think of a way of distracting his mind from it, he was back at the table again, swearing he would sit there and play till he beat it if it took him till spring.

  But even after he had whipped it a good many times the omen was not conquered. He slept uneasily, woke up sweating and whimpering like a lost pup from frightful dreams. She remembered the dream he had had three or four nights in a row, that he worried over and tried to extract meaning from. He was a boy, fishing barefooted by the creek he had grown up on, with a watermelon on the bank beside him. He was there a long time, and caught a lot of fish that came up shining from the silvery water, almost as if they flew, weightless and beautiful, each one bigger than the last. Then people started coming, his sister and his mother and all his brothers and Elsa and the children and Elsa’s father and Sarah, and they all sat down and ate his watermelon, pushing him away when he protested, and asking him for nickels. They caught in their hands the gleaming fish that flew upward when he pulled in the line. In disgust he got up and moved to another hole, and the fish poured again in a silvery stream, beautiful firm glittering slippery fish that he gloated over. Then they stopped biting suddenly, and he saw the cork riding motionless on the water. It grew and grew till it filled the whole stream, and he looked up to see the people coming again, and ran. He ran across a sand beach, and by that time it wasn’t people that chased him any more, but some black Thing that swooped above the trees with edges that waved up and down in the wind like the swimming motion of a flounder, and his feet stuck, and the Thing was coming, and he woke up dripping wet when Elsa shook him and cried out to see what was making him moan so.

  Inactive days, haunted nights, wore out his patience and drove him against the shut doors that he wanted to burst open. He cursed Jud for not finding anyone to buy the hotel. One day he cursed the piddling nincompoop who had offered a measly three thousand, and the next he cursed Jud for not having the sense to take it. He didn’t care how much they lost, as long as they got a stake to go north on.

  One day he sat in the kitchen and petted the gray housecat, rubbing behind its ears, stroking under its lifted chin, pulling its whiskers gently while it blinked and rubbed and purred. Elsa, turning at the stove to reach for the salt shaker, saw Bo’s hand move down the crackling fur. The tom arched his back and tiptoed as the fingers stroked clear from ears to lifting haunches, up the raised and electric tail. Bo’s face was passive, almost expressionless, and his eyes were half closed. Then the heavy thumbnail dug into the cat’s tail with abrupt savagery. The cat yowled a startled, fighting yowl, turned and clawed and leaped free.

  “God damn!” Bo was on his feet, his face dark with a wash of blood. “Claw me, you damn ...

  The cat stood watchfully, yellow slit eyes on him, back humped, tail furred out and straight up. It leaped away from Bo’s kick, slipped through the dining room door, dodged another kick, and vanished down the cellar stairs. Bo stood irresolute, fingering his scratched wrist. “Damn cat clawed the hide off me,” h
e said, and sucked at the blood.

  “You started it. You pinched his tail.”

  “Oh, the hell I did!”

  “Bo, you did too. I saw you.”

  His heavy face, snarling, bullying, swung toward her. “And I say I didn‘t!”

  Her blood jumping with anger, she turned away from him. She had seen his face when he pinched, the sudden, convulsive tightening of his mouth.

  Through February and into a bitter March his irritability drove him from the house as if he couldn’t bear to stay under a roof. He took to walking alone through the cornfield and down to the muddy little rill of water buried under the mounded snow in the creek bed, carrying a trap or two and looking for muskrat or fox or skunk sign. But all he caught was a half dozen muskrats and two skunks, and coming home from his fruitless prowling he would sit staring gloomily out the window, or try to lure Erling into a blackjack game, or get a deck and lose himself in solitaire. The sheets of tablet paper appeared again, and the strings of penmanlike signatures and figures, Harry G. Mason, Harry G. Mason, Mr. Harry G. Mason, Mr. Harry G. Mason, Esq., with arabesques and flourishes, and pages of pictures of animals with bodies like frame houses and heads like gables and tails like chimneys with curls of smoke rising. The boys pounced on those whenever they found them, but the sight of them made Elsa feel cold and a little sick.

  Brooding, the book forgotten in her lap, Elsa watched the children riding switches among the stumps, and even in the midst of the deep bird-twittering quiet she felt the frustration and restlessness of that winter. All that energy bottled up without a thing to occupy it. And then the spring, and the sale, and that wonderful week or two when they were really on their way and the world opened out westward into hope.

  She pursed her lips and shook her head. You mustn’t think about it, she said, and looked around startled to see if she had spoken aloud and the boys had heard. They were still playing horse among the stumps. But she mustn’t think about it, anyway. It did no good to worry over things that were done and gone. But she wished with all her heart that it hadn’t happened, that they had caught the boat as they intended, that Bo were doing what he would have loved to do, playing wild man in the wilderness. She didn’t like to think of herself and the children as a hoodoo and a handicap.