The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  “Hello,” he said. “Hungry?”

  The weasel crouched, its snaky body humped, its head thrust forward and its malevolent eyes steady and glittering.

  “Tough, ain’t you?” the boy said. “Just you wait, you blood-sucking old stinker, you. Won’t I skin you quick, hah?”

  There was no dislike or emotion in his tone. He took the weasel’s malignant ferocity with the same indifference he displayed in his gopher killing. Weasels, if you kept them long enough, were valuable. He would catch some more and have an ermine farm. He was the best gopher trapper in Saskatchewan. Why not weasels? Once he and Chet had even caught a badger, though they hadn’t been able to take him alive because he was caught by only three hind toes, and lunged so savagely that they had to stand off and stone him to death in the trap. But weasels you could catch alive, and Pa said you couldn’t hurt a weasel short of killing him outright. This one, though virtually three-legged, was as lively and vicious as ever.

  Every morning now he had a live gopher for breakfast, in spite of Elsa’s protests that it was cruel. She had argued and protested, but he had talked her down. When she said that the gopher didn’t have a chance in the weasel’s cage, he retorted that it didn’t have a chance when the weasel came down the hole after it, either. When she said that the real job he should devote himself to was destroying all the weasels, he replied that then the gophers would get so thick they would eat the wheat down to stubble. Finally she had given up, and the weasel continued to have his warm meals.

  For some time the boy stood watching his captive. Then he turned and went into the house, where he opened the oatbox in the kitchen and took out a chunk of dried beef. From this he cut a thick slice with the butcher knife, and went munching into the sleeping porch where his mother was making the beds.

  “Where’s that little double-naught?” he said.

  “That what?”

  “That little wee trap I use for catching live ones for Lucifer.”

  “Hanging out by the laundry bench, I think. Are you going trapping again now?”

  “Lucifer hasn’t been fed yet.”

  “How, about your reading?”

  “I‘ne take the book along and read while I wait. I’m just going down by the dam.”

  “I can, not I‘ne, son.”

  “I can,” the boy said. “I am most delighted to comply with your request of the twenty-third inst.” He grinned at his mother. He could always floor her with a quotation out of a letter or the Sears Roebuck catalogue.

  With the trap swinging in his hand, and under his arm the book -Narrative and Lyric Poems, edited by Somebody-or-Other-which his mother kept him reading all summer so that “next year he could be at the head of his class again,” the boy walked out into the growing heat.

  From the northwest the coulee angled down through the pasture, a shallow swale dammed just above the house to catch the spring run-off of snow water. Below the dam, watered by the slow seepage from above, the coulee bottom was a parterre of flowers, buttercups in broad sheets, wild sweet pea, and stinkweed. On the slopes were evening primroses pale pink and white and delicately fragrant, and on the flats above the yellow and red burgeoning of the cactus.

  Just under the slope of the coulee a female gopher and three half-grown pups basked on their warm mound. The boy chased them squeaking down the hole and set the trap carefully, embedding it partially in the earth. Then he retired back up on the level, where he lay full length on his stomach, opened the book, shifted so that the glare of the sun across the pages was blocked by the shadow of his head and shoulders, and began to read.

  From time to time he looked up from the book to roll on his side and stare out across the coulee, across the barren plains pimpled with gopher mounds and bitten with fire and haired with dusty, woolly grass. Apparently as flat as a table, the land sloped imperceptibly to the south, so that nothing interfered with his view of the ghostly mountains, looking higher now as the heat increased. Between his eyes and that smoky outline sixty miles away the heat waves rose writhing like fine wavy hair. He knew that in an hour Pankhurst’s farm would lift above the swelling knoll to the west. Many times he had seen that phenomenon, had seen Jason Pank hurst watering the horses or working in the yard when he knew that the whole farm was out of sight. It was heat waves that did it, his father said.

  The gophers below had been thoroughly scared, and for a long time nothing happened. Idly the boy read through his poetry lesson, dreamfully conscious of the hard ground under him, feeling the gouge of a rock under his stomach without making any effort to remove it. The sun was a hot caress between his shoulder blades, and on the bare flesh where his overalls pulled above his sneakers it bit like a burning glass. Still he was comfortable, supremely relaxed and peaceful, lulled into a half trance by the heat and the steamy flower smells and the mist of yellow from the buttercup coulee below him.

  And beyond the coulee was the dim profile of the Bearpaws, the Mountains of the Moon.

  The boy’s eyes, pulled out of focus by his tranced state, fixed on the page before him. Here was a poem he knew ... but it wasn’t a poem, it was a song. His mother sang it often, working at the sewing machine in winter.

  It struck him as odd that a poem should also be a song, and because he found it hard to read without bringing in the tune, he lay quietly in the full glare of the sun, singing the page softly to himself. As he sang the trance grew on him again, he lost himself entirely. The bright hard dividing lines between senses blurred, and buttercups, smell of primrose, feel of hard gravel under body and elbows, sight of the ghosts of mountains haunting the southern horizon, were one intensely-felt experience focussed by the song the book had evoked.

  And the song was the loveliest thing he had ever heard. He felt the words, tasted them, breathed upon them with all the ardor of his captivated senses.

  The splendor falls on castle walls

  And snowy summits old in story ...

  The current of his imagination flowed southward over the shoulder of the world to the ghostly outline of the Mountains of the Moon, haunting the heat-distorted horizon.

  Oh hark, oh hear, how thin and clear,

  And thinner, clearer, farther going,

  Oh sweet and far, from cliff and scar ...

  In the enchanted forests of his mind the horns of elfland blew, and his breath was held in the cadence of their dying. The weight of the sun had been lifted from his back. The empty prairie of his home was castled and pillared with the magnificence of his imagining, and the sound of horns died thinly in the direction of the Mountains of the Moon.

  From the coulee below came the sudden metallic clash of the trap, and an explosion of frantic squeals smothered almost instantly in the burrow. The boy leaped up, thrusting the book into the wide pocket of his overalls, and ran to the mound. The chain, stretched down the hole, jerked convulsively, and when he took hold of it he felt the life on the other end trying to escape. Tugging gently, he forced loose the digging claws and hauled the squirming gopher from the hole.

  On the way up to the chicken house the dangling gopher with a tremendous muscular effort . convulsed itself upward from the broken and imprisoned leg, and bit with a rasp of teeth on the iron. Its eyes, the boy noticed impersonally, were shiny black, like the head of a hatpin. He thought it odd that when they popped out of the head after a blow they were blue.

  At the cage he lifted the cover and peered down through the screen. The weasel, scenting blood, backed against the far wall of the box, yellow body tense as a spring, teeth showing in a tiny soundless snarl.

  Undoing the wire door with his left hand, the boy held the trap over the hole. Then he bore down with all his strength on the spring, releasing the gopher, which dropped on the straw and scurried into the corner opposite its enemy.

  The weasel’s three good feet gathered under it and it circled, very slowly, along the wall, its lips still lifted to expose the soundless snarl. The abject gopher crowded against the boards, turned once and tried to
scramble up the side, fell back on its broken leg, and whirled like lightning to face its executioner again. The weasel moved carefully, circling, its cold eyes hypnotically steady.

  Then the gopher screamed, a wild, agonized, despairing squeal that made the boy swallow and wet his lips. Another scream, wilder than the first, and before the sound had ended the weasel struck. There was a fierce flurry in the straw before the killer got its hold just back of the gopher’s right ear, and then there was only the weasel looking at him over the dead and quivering body. In a few minutes, the boy knew, the gopher’s carcass would be as limp as an empty skin, with all its blood sucked out and a hole as big as the ends of his two thumbs where the weasel had dined.

  Still he remained staring through the screen top of the cage, face rapt and body completely lost. After a few minutes he went into the sleeping porch, stretched out on the bed, opened the Sears Roebuck catalogue, and dived so deeply into its fascinating pictures and legends that his mother had to shake him to make him hear her call to lunch.

  2

  Things greened beautifully that June. Rains came up out of the southeast, piling up solidly, moving toward them as slowly and surely as the sun moved, and it was fun to watch them come, the three of them standing in the doorway. When they saw the land east of them darken under the rain Bo would say, “Well, doesn’t look as if it’s going to miss us,” and they would jump to shut windows and bring things in from yard or clothesline. Then they could stand quietly in the door and watch the good rain come, the front of it like a wall and the wind ahead of it stirring up dust, until it reached them and drenched the bare packed earth of the yard, and the ground smoked under its feet, and darkened, and ran with little streams, and they heard the swish of the rain on roof and ground and in the air.

  They always watched it a good while, because rain was life in that country. When it didn’t stop after twenty minutes or a half hour Bo would say with satisfaction, “She’s a good soaker. That’ll get down to the roots. Not so heavy it’ll all run off, either.” Then they would drift away from the door, because it was sure to be a good rain and there was another kind of satisfaction to be gained from little putter jobs while the rain outside made a crop for you. Elsa would carry her plants outside, the wandering Jew and the foliage plants and the geraniums stalky like miniature trees, and set them in the rain.

  During that whole month there was much rain, and the boy’s father whistled and hummed and sang. The boy lay in bed many mornings and heard him singing while he fried the bacon for breakfast. He always fried the bacon; he swore no woman knew how to do anything but burn it. And these days he always sang, fool songs he had learned somewhere back in the remote and unvisualizable past when he had worked on the railroad or played ball or cut timber in Wisconsin.

  Oh I was a bouncing baby boy,

  The neighbors did allow;

  The girls they hugged and kissed me then,

  Why don’t they do it now?

  He had a deep, big-chested voice, and he sang softly at first, rattling the pans, or whistled between his teeth with concentrated pauses between sounds, so that from the bed you knew he was slicing bacon off the slab. Then a match would scrape on the tin front of the stove, and he would be singing again,

  Monkey married the baboon’s sister,

  Smacked his lips and then he kissed her.

  Kissed so hard he raised a blister ...

  You lay in bed and waited, feeling fine because it had rained yesterday but today was fair, a good growing day, and you could almost feel how the wheat would be pushing up through the warm and steaming earth. And in the other room your father sang in great good humor,

  She’s thin as a broomstick, she carried no meat.

  She never was known to put soap on her cheek.

  Her hair is like rope and the color of brass—

  But Oh, how I love her, this dear little lass!

  Dear Evelina, Sweet Evelina ...

  After a minute or two he would poke his head into the porch and frown blackly, turn his head and frown even more blackly at the other bed where your mother lay stretching and smiling. “I plow deep while sluggards sleep!” he would say sepulchrally, and vanish. Then the final act, the great beating on the dishpan with a pewter spoon, and his singsong, hog-calling voice, “Come and get it, you potlickers, or I’ll throw it away!”

  It was fun to be alive and awake, and wait for your father to go through his whole elaborate ritual. It was fun to get up and souse in the washbasin outside the door, and throw the soapy water on the packed earth, and come in and eat, while Pa joked at you, saying he thought sure you were dead, he had been in there five times, pinching and slapping like a Pullman porter, but no sign of life. “You sure do sleep heavy,” he would say. “It’s a wonder you don’t break down the bed. I better put some extra slats in there.”

  You joked back at him, and after breakfast you had a sparring match that left your ears all red and tingling, and then Pa went out to harrow to keep the earth broken up and the moisture in, and you went around your traps.

  All through June there were good mornings, but the best of them all was the day Bo went down to Cree for the mail, and when he came back there was a dog sitting in the car seat beside him, a big. footed, lappy-tongued, frolicsome pup with one brown and one white eye and a heavy golden coat. The boy played with him for an hour, rolling him over and pulling his clumsy feet out from under him. Finally he lay down on the ground and the pup at tacked his ears, sticking a red tongue into them, diving for openings, snuffling and snorting and romping. When the boy sat up, his mother and father were standing with their arms around one another, watching him. He went up very seriously and hugged them both in thanks for the pup.

  “You’ll have to teach him tricks,” his father said. “A dog’s no good unless you educate him. He gets the habit of minding you that way.”

  “How’ll I do it?”

  “Show you tonight.” His father reached out and cuffed him on the ear and grinned. “Anything you can think of you’d like to do next week?”

  The boy stared, wondering. “What?”

  “What? What?” his father said, mimicking him. “Can’t you think of anything you’d like to do?”

  “I’d like to drive the stoneboat next time you use it.”

  “I don’t think you know what fun is,” his father said. “Don’t you know what date it is?”

  “Sure. It’s June 27. No, June 28.”

  “Sure. And what comes after the week of June 28?”

  The boy wondered, looking at first one, then another. They were both laughing at him. Then it hit him. “Fourth of July!” he said.

  “Okay,” his father said. He cuffed at him again, but missed. “Maybe we’ll go into Chinook for the Fourth. Fireworks, ballgame, parade, pink lemonade sold in the shade by an old maid.”

  “Wheel” the boy said. He stooped and wrestled the pup, and afterward, when he lay panting on the ground, resting, and the pup gave up lapping his ears and lay down too, he thought that he had the swellest Ma and Pa there was.

  That night his father showed him how to get the pup in a corner and make him sit up, bracing his back against the wall. For long, patient hours in the next few days he braced the pup. there and repeated, “Sit up! Sit up! Sit up!” while he shoved back the slipping hind feet, straightened the limp spine, lifted the dropping front paws. You had to say the command a lot, his father said, and you had to reward him when he did it right. And you had to do only one trick at a time. After he learned to sit up you could teach him to jump over a stick, roll over, speak, shake hands, and play dead. The word for playing dead was “charge!” He would teach him, Bruce thought, to do that next, so they could play war. It would be better than having Chet there, because Chet never would play dead. He always argued and said he shot you first.

  When he wasn’t training the pup he was dreaming of Chinook and the ballgame and parade and fireworks, sky rockets, Roman candles, pinwheels. He was curious about pinwheels, because
he remembered a passage in Peck’s Bad Boy and His Pa where a pinwheel took after Pa and cornered him up on the sofa. But he was curious about all fireworks; he had never seen any except firecrackers. And the finest thing of all to imagine was the mountains, because Pa and Ma decided that since they were that close, they might as well drive up to the mountains too, and take the whole day.

  His father teased him. Probably, he said, it would rain pitchforks on the Fourth. But his mother said Oh Pa, don’t talk like that.

  Then on the afternoon of the third they all stood in the yard and watched the southeast. Thunderheads were piling up there, livid white in front and black and ominous behind. Thunder rumbled like a wagon over a bridge.

  “It’ll pass over,” Elsa said, and patted Bruce on the back. “It just wouldn’t be fair if it rained now and spoiled our holiday.”

  The boy looked up and saw his father’s dubious expression. “Do you think it’ll blow over, Pa? Hardly any have blown over yet.”

  “Bound to blow over,” his father said. “Law of averages. They can’t all make a rain.”

  But the boy remembered three rains from that same quarter that same month that had gone on for twenty-four hours. He stayed in the yard watching, hoping against hope until the wall of dark was almost to the fireguard and the advance wind was stirring dust in the yard, stayed until the first large drops fell and puffed heavily in the dust, stayed until his mother pulled him inside with dark speckles all over his shirt. “Don’t you worry,” she said. “It’ll be clear tomorrow. It has to be.”

  That night he stayed up until nine, waiting to see if the steady downpour would stop, hating the whisper of the rain outside and the gravelly patter on the roof. The tomcat awoke and stretched on the couch, jumped off with a sudden soft thud and went prowling into the sleeping porch, but the boy sat up. His parents were reading, not saying much. Once or twice he caught them looking at him, and always the house whispered with the steady, windy sound of the rain. This was no thunder shower. This was a drencher, and it could go on for two days, this time of year. His father had said so, with satisfaction, of other rains just like it.