The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  “All right,” his father said. “Let’s get a move on.”

  Back at the house he started nailing boards over the two windows, rolling down the porch blinds and cleating them fast. He sent the boy for the three chicken crates saved from the spring, and they ran down all the hens and put them squawking into the boxes. The boy loaded them in the Ford while his father lugged the rain barrel and all the loose tools inside. The plow went into the chicken house, the stoneboat was leaned up against the wall.

  Then there was the last-minute gleaning of the house, the loose bundles of odds and ends, the left-over food in a cardboard box, the cat, the dog, the almost-forgotten cigar box of gopher tails, and finally the moment when they stood in the door looking back into the darkened, unfamiliar cave of the house, and the last shutting of the door.

  “Want anything to eat before we start?” his father said. He had the box of left-over food, ready to load it into the Ford.

  “No,” the boy said. “I don’t feel very good.”

  His father looked at him sharply, and his brows drew down. “What do you mean, you don’t feel very good?”,

  “I feel kind of sick to my stomach,” the boy said, and stood lugubrious and resentful under his father’s harsh glare.

  “Oh Jesus,” his father said finally. “You would. Well, get in.”

  The boy walked out to the gate, closed it when the Ford passed through, and climbed in. His father needn’t act as if a person got sick just for fun. He belched, testing himself, and thought with forlorn satisfaction that he would probably have to throw up pretty soon. He could feel his insides rolling as the Ford lurched, and he tasted deep inside himself for that old familiar awful bitter taste of a sour stomach. He thought that the belch had had it, just a little.

  “How’re you feeling?” his father said as they passed Pete and Emil.

  “Kind of sick,” the boy said. He tasted again, thinking how bad it was that his mother had gone off and left him, and now here he was going to have a bilious spell, and nobody with him but Pa, who didn’t ever have any patience with sickness even though he had plenty of sick headaches himself. He belched again, and the gall burned his throat. Misery went through him. He was sick, and all Pa would do about it was to get mad and think he did it on purpose to make things unpleasant. Brine flooded his mouth, he swallowed, belched again, felt the blood drain from his face, and hung onto the side of the car.

  “Pa,” he said. “Pa, I got to throw up!”

  Through his fear and misery he saw his father’s sideward face, the exasperation, the irritation just short of swearing, but no sympathy, no pity. He began to bawl, and as the Ford rolled to a stop in the narrow wagon-track he leaned out and vomited over the side.

  When Elsa turned to look back for the last time she saw the broad body of her husband, the slight one of her son, standing together at the gate, and behind them the shanty and the vanishing line of fence dipping down the coulee. Bruce’s figure looked thin, spidery, somehow pathetic, and she waved, watching his arm come up. His face remained steadily fixed in her direction. Poor lamb, he’d had a lonesome summer. It would be a treat for him to get back to town.

  The sun’s glare was bright in her eyes, and she bent her head away from it. Almost fifty miles to go, and no roads to speak of for the first fifteen, just wagon tracks that split and branched and wandered through the buffalo grass. It would have been much nicer if Brucie could have come with her. Someone to talk to. And he didn’t want to ride with Bo. He’d been a little sullen with Bo ever since the shooting of the sparrow. She sighed, wondering if all boys held things against their fathers as a kind of natural reaction against authority, or if Bruce were going to be a grudge-holder, or if maybe—she thought of the hot-cold river and the picnic in the Bearpaws—if he might remember something about that time back in Washington.

  She put her foot on the trailing lines and wriggled out of her coat. Letting the team plod on, she pushed up her sleeves and opened the throat of her blouse. It was already hot. The scar on her right arm caught her eye. In six years the shiny red had faded, but it always reacted to sunburn violently, and was redder than the tan of the unharmed skin. There was a ridge of tight scar in the elbow that wouldn’t quite let her straighten the arm out. That was one relic of the days she wanted to forget. Could there be, she wondered, another relic in the mind of that child? Would he, at four years, have hatred and fear so burned into him that the scar would never leave?

  She laughed at herself and picked up the lines. Put me by myself, she said, just let me sit alone for a few hours, and I’ll sure worry something up.

  She sat looking at the base of the wagon tongue, watching the singletrees jerk, staring half-seeing at the black hairs snagged in the bolt of the doubletree. Her mind doubled on itself, avoiding things as a horse shies. She didn’t want to think of those things. But there was the look on Bruce’s face as he watched his father, the old familiar feel in the air of hard times and restlessness, as definite and recognizable as a weather change to a rheumatic old man.

  The prairie lay around her, withered and pitted and brown like a very old face, but she didn’t see it. Her eyes were fixed on the space between the horses, and her mind went back, beyond Washington, beyond Dakota, back to Minnesota where it started, back to Indian Falls when she was eighteen and had run away from what she couldn’t bear, or thought she couldn’t bear. Her mother might have stayed and borne it and made some kind of triumph out of it, but when you were eighteen you didn’t know what you knew when you were thirty-two, and because you were eighteen and proud and blind and full of high notions you ran away like a coward and called it the only decent thing to do.

  She couldn’t run away from this, and wasn’t going to. Only she wished that the still, breezeless air didn’t carry that threat of storm, and that the rheumatic joints of her old worrying mind didn’t ache with the fear of something.

  She looked up. She was approaching Gadke‘s, and Mrs. Gadke was in the yard, her apron full of chicken feed. She came to the road to meet the wagon, her greeting so warm and hearty that Elsa heard the loneliness and isolation in it. Farm women were always lonely. There were never enough visitors to satisfy their itch to talk, and up here there were probably not a half dozen a year. She leaned down to shake Mrs. Gadke’s hand.

  “Well, well!” Mrs. Gadke said. “Moving in again.”

  Elsa took off her hat and fanned herself and laughed. “Seems like we’re always loaded up going somewhere.”

  “I wish I was,” Mrs. Gadke said. She looked at the loaded wagon with envy. “Come in and have a cup of coffee and a bite.”

  “I shouldn‘t,” Elsa said. “Bo and Bruce are coming in the car, and I ought to be covering ground.”

  “Oh, come on in,” Mrs. Gadke said. “You can spare twenty minutes. We don’t see you folks more’n twice a year.”

  Elsa let herself be temped down. She sat in the kitchen and had a cup of coffee and looked at Mrs. Gadke’s brilliant row of geraniums, more than a dozen, in a wooden box under the window. “Your plants are pretty,” she said.. “Moving as much as we do, I can’t seem to keep flowers going. I just get some nice plants started in town and we have to leave them with somebody or bring them out here, and if we leave them they get forgotten and die, and if we bring them they get broken.”

  “They’re a comfort,” Mrs. Gadke said. “But if I could talk Gadke into going in for the winter I’d sure be glad to do without.”

  “I notice you’ve got a rose bush outside.”

  “Gadke put that in for me last spring. It seems to be doing all right. I dump my dishwater on it every day. It’s a climbing kind, white blossoms.”

  “It’ll be lovely when it blooms,” Elsa said. “There are some people over by us, some English people named Garfield, that have planted trees in their coulee. He used to work in a greenhouse and he thinks they’ll grow.”

  She knew while she said it that she was envying Mrs. Gadke her geraniums and that rose bush, and that she en
vied the Garfields their trees. But what she really envied in both of them was the permanence they had. They had both made up their minds to settle down and stick, they weren’t bonanza farmers gambling against the rains. Or if they gambled, they risked their whole lives, and it was only on that assumption that you could be comfortable in a place.

  She rose. “I really have to get on,” she said. “It’s a long drive in the wagon.”

  “I s‘pose you’ll be out again come spring,” Mrs. Gadke said. “Plan to stop off and stay the night. Then you could get a good start and have the morning to shake down in your own place.”

  “Thank you,” Elsa said. “That’s nice of you.” She put her foot on the hub and took hold of the dusty iron tire, hoisting herself up. “I don’t know,” she said, looking down. “Bo’s so discouraged about. the crop this year that I don’t know whether we’ll ever be out again. I had a kind of feeling this morning when I drove off that I was saying goodbye for good.”

  “Of course you’ll be back,” Mrs. Gadke said. She stood back as the wagon started, and Elsa turned three times to wave to the stout aproned figure before she dipped down into the first rolling country and climbed off to open the horse-pasture gate. Ahead of her was fifteen miles without house or field, just one immense pasture with herds of horses thundering away from the wagon, standing on high ground to stare with ears up, whickering loudly, curiously, and putting the team into a state of nervousness and scaring the colt so that he hugged his mother’s side.

  The wagon rocked, the road over the rolling ground was rougher and rockier, and the seat was hard. She folded her coat and sat on it, and the team went steadily. The trees seesawed, the tugs slacked and tightened, the doubletree bolt squeaked, and she felt the weight of the wagon like a falling thing whenever the wheels rolled solidly over a hump and jounced down.

  You never like what you’ve got, she was thinking. Mrs. Gadke, with something permanent and good started there, wanted to leave it and come to town for the winter. You had to stay in a place to make it a home. A home had to be lived in every day, every month, every year for a long time, till it was worn like an old shoe and fitted the comfortable curvatures of your life.

  It was almost eleven before she heard the tooting of the Ford’s horn, and looked back to see it behind her. She turned off the road and stopped, and Bruce got out of the car and into the seat beside her. Elsa took one look at his greenish-white face and wrapped her arms around him.

  “Oh, what’s the matter?” she said.

  “Sick to his stomach,” Bo said from the car. His lips went down in a wry, deprecatory grimace.

  Stroking the boy’s thin back, Elsa said, “Maybe he should go on with you. I’ll be hours behind.”

  “He doesn’t want to go with me,” Bo said, and pressed his lips together.

  She saw that he was irritable, sore, exasperated, ready to bite. “All right,” she said. “You go on then.”

  She watched him pull ahead in the trail. Bruce lay down with his feet in her lap and his straw hat over his face. Within a mile they came to the other edge of the pasture. Bo had left the gate open, and she knew from that how cranky he was. He was usually as fussy as an old woman about gates.

  When she got up again after closing it, Bruce was sitting up, looking forlorn and pinched around the mouth.

  “Feel better?”

  “No,” he said sullenly.

  “You’d better lie down again.”

  “I don’t want to lie down.”

  She let him have his contrary way while they rocked over the last mile of ruts to the junction with the Robsart road. He wanted, she knew, to be sympathized with, and if he wanted that, he wasn’t as sick as he pretended to be. When he got a real sick headache he was in bed for two days.

  Bruce squirmed sullenly. He said, “Pa got mad at me for being sick.”

  “You couldn’t help being sick,” she said. “He wouldn’t get mad at you for that.”

  “Well, he did.”

  “Pa’s just disappointed about the crop,” she said. “He’s got a lot of worries on his mind. He wasn’t mad at you.”

  The boy pulled his straw hat down over his eyes and glowered under the brim. “I hate Pa!” he said.

  Elsa reached out and shook him hard. “I don’t want you talking like that. Understand?”

  His shoulders contracted under her hands, and bending to look at his face she saw his old expression of stony, stubborn implaca bility. It was useless to try to talk to him when he wore that look, but she shook him again anyway, and said, “Pa’s doing the best he can. That’s all any of us can do. We’ve all got to do the best we can and help all we can.”

  She said no more to him for a long time, and there was nothing on the road to interest him. He sat for a while slumped, lurching with the wagon, thinking how he hated his father and how when he got big enough he would run away and after a while he would come back rich and well’ dressed and grown up, and take Chet and Ma away to live with him, and if Pa wanted to come too he’d just turn his big McLaughlin around and drive off and leave him standing there.

  After a time he lay down, and his mother said, “Feeling sick again?”

  “No.”

  “You might as well keep lying down anyway,” she said. “It’ll be three hours at least before we’re there. You can go right to bed when we get back.”

  “I feel all right.”

  He lay quietly, his straw hat over his face and his legs sprawled over the boxes piled in front of the seat. His mind slipped away from how he hated his father, caught for a spiteful minute, wandered off again to consider what he would do when they got to town. The thought of town made him squirm his back and keep his eyes shut the way he did when he was having a nice dream and didn’t want to wake up. He nursed the pictures that came to him, went painstakingly around and through everything that town meant, and everything that made summer and winter different.

  In summer it was the farm, and freedom and loneliness and the clean sharpening of the senses, the feeling of strong personal identity in the midst of a wide, cleanly-bounded world; but the rest of the year it was the town, sunk in its ancient river valley hemmed in by the bench hills, and that was another life.

  That life centered around the three houses on the cutbank side of the west bend, and the bath houses behind, on the bank, that the boy got to use only for a short time in the spring. In winter they were used as storehouses by the three families in that end of the town. His feet knew the path, rutted hard with frost or deep in snow, that Went out past the barn to the bath houses; his fingers knew the cut of the bail and the icy slop of water as he lugged buckets from the chopped hole in the river ice, staggering lop-sidedly up the dugway from the footbridge head. His fingers knew too the sticky bite of a frosty doorknob, they knew the clumsy fumbling with the bath house key when he was sent out to bring a chunk of frozen beef or pork in from the still, cold, faintly urine-and-wet-bathing-suit-smelling shanty. His nose knew bath house smell and barn smell and kitchen smell and the smell of baking paint behind the redhot parlor heater, and those were town.

  Town was Preacher Morrison and the Sunday school parties where they played beanbag and crocinole. It was birthday parties the girls gave, and the bolt of hair-ribbon that Mr. Orullian cut from when you went in to spend your two bits for a present. It was McGregor’s hardware store with the smell of stove blacking and turpentine and the tallowy smell of the baled muskrat skins on the back counter. It was the Pastime Movie Theater where every Friday night there was a new installment of The Black Box or Tarzan of the Apes or The Red Ace. It was the boys, Weddie Orullian or Preacher-Kid Morrison that the cave caved in on last spring, or Bill Brewer or the Heathcliff kids from across the river, the bunch he went skating with around the river’s bitter bends, spreading his mackinaw to the wind on the way back and skimming like a bird up to the fires and slush and noise by the cutbank.

  Town was many things, was the irrigation dam of old man Purcell where they trapped muskrats
and weasels and once a mink, the willow breaks where in late fall the gang of little kids built huts of branches, playing they were holing up for the winter-huts which the Big-Kid gang, Chet among them, always discovered and tore down. It was the smell of dry willow leaves crushed and rolled in tissue paper and smoked, the taste of wild rose hips nibbled on an October afternoon, the numb blue-white of snow moons when the crowd of them rode on a bob behind Pete Purcell’s pony up the long Swift Current hill, their handsleds stretched out in a black line behind. It was the game they played after a heavy blizzard, when they tunneled down through the overhanging drifts piled against the cutbanks, making a smooth packed burrow through which they could dive in a breathless belly-ride and skid snowy and yelling onto the river ice.

  The town was Whitemud, Saskatchewan, what Bo Mason, when he was disgusted, was likely to call a dirty little dung-heeled sagebrush town. But to the boy it was society, civilization, a warm place of home where his mother sat sewing long hours under the weak light of the north windows, singing sometimes to herself, making dresses for girls who were going to be married or for women who lived up on Millionaire Row. The town was school, the excitement of books, the Ridpath History of the World that he had read entirely through by his eighth birthday. His mother, telling that to neighbors, always spoke with awe in her voice, and her pride in his brains sent him scrabbling for anything else in the old bookcase upstairs that he had not already read. Mostly it was novels like The Rock in the Baltic and Graustark and The Three Musketeers.

  Town, home, was that and more. It was the steel engravings in Ridpath, the “Rape of the Sabine Women” that he puzzled over and finally asked his mother about, to be told that he shouldn’t be so everlastingly curious. It was the sixth grade room where they sang “God Save the King” and “In Days of Yore from Britain’s Shore” and “The March of the Men of Harlech,” and the boy sang with tears in his eyes because the songs were heroic and Miss Crow’s brother was in the army and Canada was at war with the Huns.