The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  There were still children hopping up and down, crowding to get close, when Mrs. Hemingway lifted the pan upside down to show that everything was gone, and disappeared inside. Chet stood against the wall with his slice, and as he nibbled around the edge delicately, like a rabbit, he saw Bruce. Bruce hadn’t got anything. Chet watched him somberly. In a minute Bruce would start to blubber, prob‘ly, and want a bite. Chet bit into the slice, deeply, just as Bruce saw him.

  “Gimme a bite,” Bruce said.

  “Go on,” Chet said. “You should of got here sooner.”

  “George Rising pushed me,” Bruce said. “I was here early as anything, but he pushed me.” He came close, his eyes steady on the bread in Chet’s hand. “Just one bite, Chet,” he said, and reached out. Chet pushed him away.

  “You big pig,” Bruce said. “Gimme a bite!”

  “Go on, or I’ll bust you one in the nose,” Chet said. He turned to avoid Bruce’s lunge, and made a threatening motion with his fist.

  Helen Murphy, brushing crumbs from her hands, came swinging across the back of the house, humming to herself. She looked right through Chet, smiled as if at something she had thought of, and paused at the cellar doors. Chet watched her, pushing Bruce off with one hand. Win Gabriel was hanging around at the corner.

  “Let’s see now,” Helen said, her finger against her cheek. “I’ll play house, I guess.” She smiled the vague smile that included Chet without recognizing him, and skipped down the stairs.

  “I’ll tell Ma,” Bruce was saying. “I’ll tell Ma you wouldn’t give me any.”

  “Oh, for the love of Mike,” Chet said. He shoved the remains of the slice at Bruce, wiped his hand across his mouth and went downstairs after Helen. He was on the bottom step when he heard Win Gabriel behind him.

  They stood in the doorway a while watching Helen play house with two other girls. Helen was bossy, and she paid no attention to Chet and Win. “I’m the mama,” she said. “You’ve got to be my two kids, and when I come home and find you messing up the kitchen, I spank you and then we get supper and then I’m the papa, and I come home ...”

  “You can’t be mama and papa both,” one of the girls said. “I want to be papa.”

  “You will not,” Helen said. “First I’m mama, and then I’m papa.”

  Win looked at Chet. “My God,” he said, .like a grown man, and spit on the floor.

  They climbed on boxes and jumped for the pipes running along under the floor. Win caught a pipe that was hot, and let go with a yelp. He hit a box and sprawled halfway across the floor.

  “You’re terrible,” Chet said. “Watch a great acrobat.” He jumped and caught a pipe and hung warbling, his eyes on Helen and the girls. But they still squabbled. Helen had a rag-plugged basin they were playing was a kettle, and another girl was tugging at it.

  “I’ll tell Mrs. Mangin,” the girl said.

  “Go ahead and be a tattle-tale.”

  “I will!”

  “Go head. Go on and tattle.”

  The other girl started to cry and fight, and Helen pushed her so she fell down. Then both the other girls went out, the one crying and saying she was going to tell Mrs. Mangin and Mrs. Hemingway and everybody.

  “Bawl-baby titty-mouse

  Laid an egg in our house!” Helen said after her.

  Win jumped and swung beside Chet, swinging with his knees bent, making faces. Helen put down her basin and put her hands behind her back. “You two are silly,” she said.

  Win dropped down, and Chet followed him. “I know what you did this morning,” Win said.

  “What?” Helen said, daring him. “You don’t know anything.”

  “I know.”

  Win jerked her pigtail and they wrestled. In a minute he had her backed against the cement wall, penning her in with his arms. She giggled. “Chet ran away,” she said.

  “Aw, I did not,” said Chet. “I heard Mrs. Hemingway coming.”

  “I bet you we wouldn’t run away if you did it again,” Win said. She stuck out her tongue at him, but she was smiling, watching Chet.

  “I bet you would. I just bet you would!”

  “Like fun,” Win said. “I double-dare you.”

  Helen watched them both. She sucked her thumb briefly, looking up from under her eyelashes. She winked both eyes. “Not for nothing,” she said. “You have to too.”

  Win looked at Chet, fished uncertainly in his pockets. “You’re scared,” he said.

  “I’m not either scared,” she said. “You do it and I will.”

  Win promptly slipped his overall straps down and let the overalls fall around his ankles. He was not wearing any underwear. Helen looked at him slyly, two little white teeth hooked over her lower lip. “Chet too,” she said.

  A glaze was over Chet’s eyes. He moved jerkily, afraid and ashamed and shaken with excitement. “You first,” he said.

  “No. I won’t till you do.”

  Through eyes strangely misted, Chet looked at her shining eyes, her red cheeks, her teeth hooked over her lip. Her breath whistled a little out-of the corner of her mouth. “You’re afraid,” she said.

  “Oh, I ain’t either afraid!”

  “Well, do it then.”

  “Come on,” Win said, standing in the puddle of his overalls. “You’re both a-scared. I’m the only one ain’t a-scared.”

  Excitement grew in Chet until he could hardly breathe. Just as Helen was tossing her head and turning away in scorn he whipped down the overall straps and fumbled at the buttons of his underwear. He saw Helen reach up under her dress and pull her black drawers down, saw her hands gather the skirt and lift. Then he saw her face change, her eyes fix in a frightened stare. Her hands still helplessly held up the skirt, but her mouth dropped as if she were going to yell. Win jerked around with a squawk, grabbed for his overalls and started to run, and Chet did the same. But there was nowhere to run to. There was only one entrance to the basement room, and Mrs. Mangin was standing in that.

  He was glad they had sent him out into the hall. He didn’t want to stay in the company parlor and have Mrs. Mangin look at him as if she could just barely keep from vomiting, and he didn’t like to see Ma sitting there. He hated Mrs. Mangin. That morning after she caught them she had taken them all up into the kitchen, just dragged them up with their clothes still hanging off them, and turned them up one by one and beaten them on the bare bottom with a yardstick. Chet wished he’d had as much nerve as Win, to fight her, even if he had got beaten over the head with the stick the way Win had. He wondered where Win was now, and Helen too. Prob‘ly still locked up, the way he had been all day without anything to eat.

  The hall still held the smell of supper, and he swallowed. He wished he had a belt to cinch tight, the way Indians did. Or he wished he had, right in his overalls pocket, a great big chocolate bar with peanuts in it. The vision and the taste came together, so delicious and overpowering that he felt in the pocket almost hopefully. There were only four slingshot rocks, a rubber band, a couple of carpet tacks he had been saving to put on seats in school, and an empty brass cartridge case.

  Sitting on the hall seat in the dark he took the cartridge and blew in it experimentally. It made a thin, breathy whistle. He wished he had a gun. He’d put in this bullet and aim it right through the wall at where Mrs. Mangin was sitting inside talking to Ma, and he’d shoot it off and shoot a hole right through Mrs. Mangin. He aimed the cartridge, squinting. Bang, he said. Bang, bang, bang! There ... I guess you won’t ever lick me again, you old stink of a Mrs. Mangin.

  His bottom was still sore from the whipping, and he shifted to get comfortable. He would be an Indian, and some morning he would come to the door with his gun under his blanket and say to Mrs. Mangin, “Last week you spanked Chet and Win and Helen right in the kitchen in front of everybody, and you’re always going around thumping kids with your pencil. Well, I’ll fix you.” Then he would shoot her with his cartridge and whip out his scalping knife and snip off her scalp, zing, and pull ou
t her gold teeth and sell them and give the money to the kids to buy marbles and candy with.

  The voices in the parlor had grown louder, and he listened. It sounded as if Mrs. Mangin was mad. Carefully he slid off the hall seat and sneaked up to the door. By the time he got there and held his breath to listen, it was his mother’s voice.

  “... that you’re not being fair to him. You can’t lay all the blame on him. He’s not a bad boy.”

  Now Mrs. Mangin‘s, heavy and triumphant. “What do you call climbing on the rafters and peeking at the girls in bed? If that isn’t bad ...”

  “You don’t know he did that. Mrs. Hemingway doesn’t think he did.”

  “What else would he be doing up there? I’m sorry to say it, Mrs. Mason, but I think we are dealing with a corrupt and filthy-minded child.”

  “Oh, nonsense!” Ma said, almost as loudly as Mrs. Mangin. “He’s not quite seven years old yet.”

  Mrs. Mangin said, “My experience lets me know many more children than you can have known, Mrs. Mason ...”

  There was the scrape of a chair, as if someone had stood up, and Chet started to scuttle for the hall seat, but stopped when he heard his mother’s voice again. “I know that when I brought Chester here he was as clean and nice a boy as anyone could ask for.”

  Mrs. Mangin’s voice cut in, rising, “Mrs. Mason, if you mean to insinuate ...”

  “So if there’s any evil in his mind now, he learned it at this home. I won’t stand for your putting him in jail for two weeks, making him feel as if he’s done something horrible. There’s no evil in a child that age. The evil is read in by other people.”

  “There is only one way to treat a rotten-minded child,” Mrs. Mangin said. “If our methods don’t suit you ...”

  “There is only one kind of rotten-minded child,” Ma said, almost shouting, “and that’s the kind that exists in a rotten mind. You can just bet your methods don’t suit me.”

  His ear against the wood, Chet shook his shoulders and crowed silently. Ma was just giving it to the old stink. “I looked at Bruce tonight, too,” Ma was saying, and her words sounded jumbled and fast as if she were trying to say two or three things at once. “He’s thin as a rail, all shoulder blades and eyes.”

  “If he won’t eat his meals,” Mrs. Mangin said, “he gets nothing else here. We don’t coddle children, Mrs. Mason.”

  Ma didn’t say anything for a minute, and Chet stretched his neck, trying to see through the crack in the door. But all he could see was the tiled fireplace, and the stone dog set above the opening. He jerked back when Ma’s voice came, much closer to the door.

  “There’s not much point in discussing it, is there?” she said. “I’m taking the children out, right now.”

  Chet ducked back against the hall seat and the door opened, letting out a wide stripe of light across the hall. Ma stepped out and came over to him quickly. Her shirtwaist smelled like ironing as she stooped to hug him. “Wait here,” she said. “I’m going up and get Bruce and we’re going to get out of this place.”

  Ten minutes later she was down carrying Bruce; he was dressed, but sleep had not entirely left him, and his knuckles dug into his eyes. Mrs. Mangin stood in the parlor door, drawn up high, with her teeth not quite covered by her inadequate lips. Chet sidled past her, watchful for a thumping, till he got his hand in his mother’s.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow for their clothes,” Ma said.

  Mrs. Mangin, with her wintry and goldenly-gleaming smile, watched them out the door. Chet stuck out his tongue from the porch, and then Ma set Brucie down and they walked together down the aisle of black spruces. It was the latest Chet had ever been out, and the yard looked funny in the dark. He wouldn’t have known it was the same place.

  “Where we going, Ma?” he said.

  Her hand closed on his. “To my room.”

  “Are we gonna live there?”

  “No.”

  “Is Pa coming back and get us?”

  “No.”

  “What are we gonna do then?”

  Ma sounded tired. “There’s only one thing we can do,” she said. “We’ll have to go back and visit Grandpa.”

  4

  That house—the dark, quiet little parlor, the library table stacked with Norwegian newspapers, the glass-fronted bookcases full of sets, Ibsen, Bjørnson, Lie, Kjelland, the folksongs of As bjørnson and Moe, the brass-and-leather Snorre, the patriotic landsmaal songs of Ivar Aasen—she knew the feel and look of everything there, the wallpaper, the curtains, the stained dark woodwork. Nothing had changed a particle. She knew on what page of the great Snorre she would find the engraving of the death of Baldur that had made her cry as a child because Good was being destroyed by Evil, and she even felt some of her old hatred of the unstable and mischievous Loki. The most wonderful thing about the place was that sense of everything just where it had always been.

  Kristin’s arm was around her all the way upstairs, as if she were an invalid. The affection and sympathy in her sister’s face was almost too much. She hadn’t found it in her father or in Sarah; they were polite, dutiful, a little cold, and she knew they didn’t want her, she knew their disapproval cut so deep that even now, in her desperation, when she had no other place to turn to, they suffered her merely, without real welcome. She smiled a little wearily, going upstairs, at what her pride had come to. Not once only, but twice, she had come back on them like a charity case.

  Her room was just as it had always been. The roses still clustered in the wallpaper, the curtains hung crisply against the window whose bars were outlined by early snow, the carpet still took its streak of sun, and she saw the mark where it had faded through the years. On the wash stand was the big red and white bowl, the pitcher inside it, just as they had stood through her childhood, and through the misted window was the same quiet street and the same three white houses and the same gentle swell of open country dotted with bare trees..

  Like smoke that rose and filled a room the feeling swelled in her that she had never breathed properly since she had run away from home. Dakota had been too open, a place of wind and empty sky. Seattle had been tenements in crowded streets and the interminable drifting rain. The tent-house where she had almost got the feeling of home had been huddled closely within a circle of woods. But here there was both shelter and space, here was home even if she was unwelcome in it. The changelessness of the house and the strip of quiet street and the swell of farmland was like an open and reassuring door.

  She heard Kristin talking without being fully aware of what she said. There was a sad-sweet relaxation in all her bones, as if she had just taken off a rigid corset after hours of formality. Then Kristin’s talk paused, and Elsa looked up to see her holding a dress she had just taken from the telescope. The dress was cheap, too-much-laundered, and the instant defensive words jumped to Elsa’s lips. “I’ve had that dress ever since we lived in Hardanger. I ought to have thrown it away, years ago, but you know how you hang onto things.”

  “Yes,” Kristin said quietly, and hung the dress in the wardrobe, but there was a vague hostility between them. Elsa had no idea what they all thought about her leaving Bo. Maybe they thought she had left because he wasn’t a good provider, as if she were as disloyal and selfish as that! She shut the empty telescope and shoved it under the bed.

  “Is there any hot water?” she said. “The boys ought to have baths.”

  “So should you,” Kristin said. “They’re out playing around the barn. You look after yourself first.”

  “Maybe I will,” Elsa said. “A bath will feel good.”

  “I’ll bring the tub up here.”

  “I can get it.”

  “Let me,” Kristin said. “Please.” She was out the door, and Elsa let her go. Slowly she unbuttoned her blouse and took it off, unhooked her corset, unlaced her shoes. Kristin labored in with two pails of steaming water, went out again after the tub. As she set the tub down she looked at Elsa, and Elsa saw her eyes widen and her mouth twist. She
was looking at the burned arm. Elsa raised it and laughed a little.

  “Oh, Else, how did you do it?” Kristin said.

  “The coffee urn tipped over.”

  Kristin came up and touched the smooth whitish scar that prevented the arm’s being completely straightened. “It must have been awful,” she said. “Were you alone?”

  “Do you want to blame that on him, too?” Elsa said.

  Kristin stammered, flushing.

  “He was there,” Elsa said. “He carried me down to the doctor.”

  “Oh.” Kristin stood twisting her engagement ring around on her finger.

  “He isn’t as bad as all of you always thought he was,” Elsa said bitterly.

  “I’m sorry, Elsa. Honestly, I didn’t mean to ...”

  “Oh, let’s not,” Elsa said. “Please, Kristin. I didn’t mean to snap at you, either. I just get tangled up. I can feel it all through the house, the way they blame him for everything. I’m as much to blame as he is.”

  “Do you know what Dad said to me after we got your wire?” Kristin sat down on the bed and took both of Elsa’s hands. “He’d talked it all over with Sarah, and you know what he said? He said he wanted me to keep you occupied, and stay around and do things with you, because this whole thing was going to be pretty hard on Sarah. On Sarah! Oh, Else, she’s still ashamed of marrying Dad, and she dislikes you for it, somehow, I know she does.”

  “Does she?” Elsa said. “I gave up disliking her a long time ago. She married Dad because she was alone and didn’t have any place to turn. I couldn’t dislike her for that very long. And besides, he’s doing me a favor if he asks you to look after me. Isn’t he?”

  “I think Dad would be all right if it weren’t for her,” Kristin said. “She’s just got so good. He missed you after you went away, but she keeps reminding, him of all the sins she says Bo does. When you came back before she didn’t want Dad to let you. That’s the only time I ever heard him get mad at her and bawl her out.”