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That night after the boys were in bed she put the lamp on the table and sat down to read. But the light, reflected off the oilcloth, hurt her eyes, and before nine she was preparing for bed herself. After the light was out she opened the door and stood for a minute breathing the balsam air. It was very dark, the heavy trees a black impenetrable wall across the lighter cleared ground, their tops triangular blacknesses against the sky. She shivered. So lonely a place. The Klondike couldn’t have been any lonelier. Ever since her marriage she had wanted for neighbors, in the hotel and on her father’s farm and later in Seattle when they knew no one, but now for a moment the desire to have people nearby was like a muscular ache. If there were only a smoke in the daytime, a light at night.
Very carefully she bolted the door, looked at the unseen flimsy canvas roof overhead, listened for a moment to the easy breathing of the children, and slipped into bed.
No noises after dark, at least none like the sounds in a town, the hoarse calling of trains, the rattle of wheels and clack of hoofs and squeak of a dry axle in the street, the unfamiliar roar of an automobile coming around a corner and diminishing, softening, disappearing again down another street you could imagine, tree-lined, pooled with shadows, perhaps a single light in the gable of some house, and the dark pitch of roofs cutting off the stars. Nothing here but the soft continuous murmur like a sigh from the trees crowding the clearing, nothing but the padded blow of an erratic, tree-broken wind on the canvas roof, the faint rustle of needles falling from the fir at the back corner of the tent and skating down the canvas incline. No noises but inanimate creak ings and rustlings that you strained to hear and were never satisfied with, stealthy noises that eluded identification and kept you straining for their repetition, noises too soft to be comforting, noises without the surety and satisfaction of trains calling or freight cars jarring as they coupled in the yards beyond the dark. You lay rigidly in bed and made your breath come shallowly, noiselessly, through your mouth, and your blood slowed and pounded until you felt its pressure like monotonous light blows on your injured arm. When you had listened for a sound until you were tightened to an unbearable tension, you heard it again, and it was only the needles falling, the sigh of the moving trees, and you relaxed in the bed and breathed once more. It seemed to you then that your present was a static interval like the pause between heartbeats, and when you lay thinking you thought of the past inevitably, because you couldn’t help it, because the present was without the meaning of either past or future, because the past was the thing you knew well, in image and idea, because in the past your future lay.
You remembered how the future had looked on that trip west, close and touchable and warm as it had been only once before, in the early weeks of your marriage. You remembered the oceanic plains pouring behind, the mountains, the Elbow Pass above Banff and the Three Sisters immaculate in snow behind the smoky windows; the strange smothery feeling in the tunnels, and the way the children’s noses bled in the altitude, and then Seattle, with Mount Rainier floating like a great smooth cloud high above where any mountain should be.
Everything about those days was full of a kind of drunkenness; it reeled in the memory. Even the cheap boarding house where you and Eva and the children stayed while Jud and Bo went to arrange passage, even Eva forgetting to have her pains, full of laughter. The things sweet to remember—the terrier puppy you bought for the boys, and the pictures you had taken to send back to Indian Falls: Chester with a clay pipe in his mouth, looking droll and eyebrowless, holding the puppy in his arms; the two boys posed behind a cardboard screen painted to represent the cutwater of a boat, with spray V-ing out on both sides and Bruce’s hands on an artificial wheel, the whole thing so convincing to the boys later that Bruce’s greatest boast even yet was that he had run a big motor boat all by himself.
The day when passage was arranged and the dog assured of a trip in the hold, and the actual tickets in Bo’s hands to prove that it was really going to happen. He was exalted with excitement, jumpy, full of sudden exuberances. He stood by the window looking out to where workmen with great firehoses were washing away a whole hill to make way for a street, looking out and humming, breaking into song,
It was at the battle of Bunker Hill
There’s where I lost my brother Bill.
‘Twas a mighty hot fight, we’ll all allow,
But it’s a damn sight hotter where Bill is now.
Breaking into song, standing with his hands in his pockets staring out at the activity of the city and having crazy tunes come to his lips without warning, singing,
Oh the Joneses boys, they built a mill,
They built it up on the side of a hill
And they worked all night and they worked all day
To try and make that old mill pay....
When a hurdy-gurdy man came by under the window, you remembered him breaking from the window to wheel you in a clumsy waltz around the room, catching heels in the old Brussels carpet, stumbling, roaring with laughter, singing,
Those six Canadian boys were drowned
But the oxen swam to shore ...
Teasing the kids, wrestling the puppy, going out in the evening for pails of beer, and you all sat around in the scrawny room, full of fun and stories and songs, growing silent once in a while as you thought of the Promised Land. You remembered evenings when Jud and Eva had gone to their room, and those nights were full of warm, low talk in bed, and lovemaking like a second honeymoon.
Ah, that dream of escape, you thought now, lying in the dark tent hearing the whisper of needles and the light breathing of the boys. That dream of taking from life exactly what you wanted—you too, not merely Bo and Jud, but all of you, drunk on that dream. Then the fall, the cracking away of the well-brink just as you were climbing out. Ding, dong, bell, pussy’s in the well, you thought, and made your face smile in the dark. Whose fault? Who put her in? Who,pulled her out? You knew of no one responsible, unless whoever or whatever ran the world was really what it seemed sometimes, a mean, vindictive force against which you beat yourself to rags, so that sometimes you felt like a drowning. sailor trying to climb into a lifeboat and having your fingers hammered off the gunwale time after time, until there was nothing to do except go down or make up your mind to stay afloat somehow, any way you could.
There was Bo’s face the day he came back from buying supplies for the voyage that would start now in two days, and found you tending Chester, sick and whining with a sore throat—the swift, hot, suspicious look, the look of outrage, the look as you traced it over now almost of certainty, as if he had known all along that something would happen. “God damn it,” he shouted, “he can’t get sick now!”
But he did. The next morning there was red rash in his throat. By noon it had spread all over his chest. By afternoon the man was tacking up Scarlet Fever signs on the boarding-house door, and most of the boarders had fled, and the landlady was bitter and Bo, hearing the doctor’s words, had flung out of the house like a madman, the doctor shouting after him.
You expected then that he would go without you, and were bitter at him, yet even then you couldn’t have blamed him much. He had set his heart so on that voyage. You sat all afternoon and evening, and late at night he came back, his footsteps creaking on the stairs, the anger gone from him and only a look of such hopeless defeat in his face that it shook you with pity. You begged him then to go, to get Jud and Eva and go, and you would join him when Chester was well, but he wouldn’t. He had fought it out with himself walking, and he would stick. Maybe they could go later, all of them. But the quarantine would be six weeks, and six weeks cut half the season away. Instead of agreeing to go, he went out to find another boarding place. In the morning he would look for a job. Should he get a nurse, he asked before he left. Could you get along with both kids to mind? But you didn’t want a nurse. You didn’t want to add that expense to what was already bound to be a disaster. You would stay afloat till another lifeboat came by.
; But no more boats. Empty ocean with a fog on it. Chester sick only a week when Bruce came down, and the quarantine lengthening through two weeks, three, four, six, seven. Bruce was barely through peeling when his ear became infected and he howled with pain so that no one slept. You remembered Bo’s coming one night, slipping in after his shift of running a streetcar was done, and you sat almost wordless, beaten and tired, though you hadn’t seen him for almost a month.
Even then you still talked as if you might go. You would have exposed the children to any amount of cold winter if you could have gone that fall. But Bo had turned in the steamer tickets; doctors bills and living expenses had cut down their money. And then came Jud’s first letter. It was a cautious letter. It didn’t say definitely that there was nothing stirring. It said merely that from all Jud could find out, the way to get in on either the gold or the fur was to go way back in the wilderness, and Eva didn’t like that idea much. Living was high as a kite. Just to fill in till he had located some likely proposition for them, Jud was dealing poker in a joint. If he kept his ears open, he expected that pretty soon he’d hear of something that was worth plunging on. Until then, Jud suggested that with a family to take care of Bo might do better to stay in Seattle. It was a hell of a lot cheaper to get along there than in Seward.
You saw, with the kind of slow, inevitable movement that a high wall makes in falling, that Bo’s face lost its eagerness, sagged, set hard. He crushed the letter and threw it at the wall. After a while he picked it up again, smoothed it out and read it again, and broke into a fit of foul swearing, and looking at his eyes and mouth you knew he wanted to cry.
He wore that bitterness around his mouth for months, until he heard about the little café for sale in Richmond, out in the timber, and the prospect of getting away from the carline, from the rocking platform and the swollen feet and the irritation of working for someone else, checking in and checking out, keeping still when inspectors bawled him out, was too tempting to resist. He never looked into the café at all carefully. He simply quit his job and took what little money they had and bought it, spent ten days furiously painting and cobbling and cleaning up, bought new stools and coffee urn and equipment. You flicked the shutter open on that cafe, and your eye saw it as you had seen it for six months, clean and painted and neat outside, where the customers saw it, its poverty plain where the poverty wouldn’t show. You saw the scuffed, softened, splintery fir floor behind the counter, the floor whose slivers found the holes in your shoes and drove in, stopping you sometimes as if you had stepped in a trap; the old cupboards that no amount of soda and scrubbing would sweeten.
But even so, you said, even so. It’s better. It’s steady, and it does make us a living, and since I’ve been hurt Bo seems to be willing to stick with it. That accident, unlucky as it seemed at the time, was a point of change, a climax of the bad luck, and since it was over things were better. You remembered old lady Moe at home in Indian Falls, and her belief that whenever she broke a dish she was bound to break three, and you remembered the day you saw her drop a saucer when she was serving afternoon coffee, and how she threw down a cup and another saucer on top of it, not angrily, not in a pet, but quite carefully, as if to finish a job. That was the way the burn was.
You were getting ready for the breakfast customers, you mixing pancake batter, Bo cleaning the coffee urn. He had emptied it, wiped it out, put in the fresh coffee, and heated the water in a pail. As you stirred the batter at the other end you saw him kick a low stool into place and climb up with the steaming water in his hand. He shifted the pail, reached down awkwardly for a dishtowel, wrapped it around his right hand, and took hold of the pail again to lift. The urn was high; he had to strain to hoist the pail. The lip caught under the flange of the urn top, and he hung there, teetering on the precarious stool. “Come here, quick!” he said.
You put down the bowl of batter, wiped your hands on a towel, started. “Hurry up!” he shouted. “This is scalding my hand!”
You were over to him in three steps, looking to see what he wanted you to do. “The stool!” Bo yelled. “The stool, the stool, the stool!” He could have lowered the pail and started over, but that was not his way. Convulsed with fury and strain, he shouted at you and kept the steaming pail jammed as high as he could reach. You grabbed the stool and held its teetering legs back on the floor, and Bo staggered, stuck his hand desperately at the wall, letting go of the bottom of the pail. Hot water slopped over him, and with a yell he dropped it and leaped back to save himself. The whole bucket of scalding water came down across your shoulder and arm.
And then Bo’s face again—so many times the memory projected an image of his face, the exact expression. You stood there, your teeth in your lip and your body rigid with the shock. Your bare arm, in the time you could count ten, turned fiery, clear to the fingers. His face fallen in a kind of anguish, Bo stared at the arm and then at your face, and you held yourself rigid, not quite aware yet how badly you were hurt, and looked at him. He burst out as if he couldn’t bear what he saw, “Yell! God damn it to hell, yell ! Cry!”
Then he was grabbing the butter can and smearing your arm, roughly, angrily. Under his fingers the skin puffed in great blisters, growing while you watched. By the time Bo closed up the place and routed out a stage driver to take you down to the doctor’s little office on the mill road, your arm was twice as big as normal and so hot and painful that you staggered getting out of the stage, and Bo picked you up and carried you into the office.
His face. It was almost as if you touched it, lovingly, seeing how strongly your lives had been welded together in spite of bad luck and bad temper, how behind all the violent irritability and the restlessness and the dissatisfaction you were his wife. You had never known what that meant, really, until you saw how it shook him to see you hurt ...
In the bed Elsa stiffened. There was something, a sound not skating needles or sigh of trees or soft blows of wind on canvas. Rigid with listening, she waited. Again, like the stealthy pad of feet at the rear of the tent, a sound as if something were prowling around the little shed where they stored food, the trunk, clothing, everything that overflowed from the tent itself. Her eyes wide upon the sightless dark, her head half lifted from the pillow, she listened, and the heavy pound of blood began in her burned arm. There again ... She strained her ears as she had strained them a hundred times at night noises, tight with fear that was not really fear but only apprehension that wanted to smile at itself, to take a long breath and relax again and know that what had brought it upright listening was only the wind or the settling of timbers in the house or the creak of a swaying door.
A long, furtive silence, the sigh of the wind, and then the noise of a stick of firewood falling on the woodpile.
It was as if a light had flashed on and made abruptly real all the fears that she hadn’t really believed in. There was something out there, prowling in the dark, and if it was friendly it wouldn’t prowl at this hour. Like a shutter that clicked three times, three swift thoughts went through her mind: the automatic question of what time it was and when Bo would be home, the realization that it couldn’t be more than ten o‘clock, and the thought of the cougar. Propped now on her elbow, she still listened. No more wood fell, but the soft sound of steps came through the flimsy canvas, and then unmistakably the rattle of the padlock against the hasp on the shed door.
Very slowly, so as not to make a noise, Elsa laid the covers back and inched her feet over the edge of the bed. The springs squeaked, and she waited with held breath. The noise outside was still there. It sounded as if the cougar, or whatever it was, had gotten into the shed. Even while she stood up she was wondering if she had pad-locked that door, but she couldn’t remember. She had been out to hang the ham on its hook just after supper.... For a moment, standing barefooted on the cold board floor, she cocked eyes and ears at the children’s bed. Sleeping. She knew what she must do. It froze her with terror, but she knew. She must drive the thing away, frighten it so it would never c
ome back, kill it if she could, for what peace would she ever have now when she had to leave the children alone, as she often had to do when she was helping at the café?
With her hurt arm held across her body she tiptoed to the bureau, felt for the revolver on the high shelf. Her teeth were locked, and her body shivered as if with cold, but she went on, over to the door. There she stooped, laid the gun on the floor, raised up and drew the bolt very slowly with her good hand, stooped again and picked up the gun. It was awkward left-handed, but it was better that way than trying to use the burned one.
On the narrow porch she listened again. Something bumped back in the darkness by the shed. The thing was bolder. All around her the dark ring of woods pressed on the less opaque darkness of the clearing, and she saw the cloudy sky above moving with the wind as silently and almost as invisibly as a thought moves in a mind. For a moment she wondered what she would do if the thing didn’t scare, if it turned and attacked her, but she shut her determination down and clenched her teeth upon it. In her bare feet, feeling the needles and tiny twigs digging into her skin, she stepped off into the yard and a dozen steps to the side, to where she could see the blob of shadow that was the shed.
With all her will, knowing she must do it quickly or not at all, she lifted the gun and pointed it at the place where the shed door ought to be. Her hand wobbled, and she braced it with the hurt one. “Bo!” she cried out in a last forlorn hope. “Bo, is it you?”
There was a rush of movement, a half-seen moving shadow. The shed door banged back as the retreating animal bumped it, and with her teeth in her lip Elsa pulled the trigger.
The Big Rock Candy Mountain Page 14
