The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  2

  He had been playing with Chet and a bunch of other kids in the loft of Chance’s barn, back in Whitemud, and Chet had slid down the hay on top of him and they had had a fight. Chet had thumped him unmercifully, got him down and tried to make him holler enough, but he wouldn’t holler enough, even when Chet bent his arm back in a hammerlock and he felt his shoulder heaving out of joint. “I’ll give you an enema!” he kept screaming. “God damn you, just wait, I’ll give you an enema!”

  “Friend or enema?” Chet said. He put his grinning face down close to Bruce’s and twisted his arm harder. “Come on, friend or enema?”

  “Enema!” Bruce screamed. “Do you hear me, enema!”

  Chet’s face began to fade, the grin dwindled and sobered until the face hanging above him was serious and frowning, thinning away, going ...

  “Chet,” his mother’s voice said, and without surprise Bruce saw that she was there and that the kids had gone. “Chet, I wish you’d try not to scowl so. You look as if you didn’t have a friend in the world.”

  “I’ll give him an enema!” Bruce screamed. He opened his eyes and saw the row of green chair backs, the blue night lights, the sprawling figures of sleepers, the pale gleam of bunched pillows half falling off the arms into the aisle. Outside there was a thin and watery light, not yet strong enough to be called daylight, but not quite darkness. His mouth was bitter with the taste of coal smoke, and his throat was sore.

  In the curious unreality of the chair car, less real than the dream. he had just awakened from, he straightened himself, lifted his aching shoulder from its cramped position. Half stupefied, he rose and rocked back between the sleepers to the men’s room, rinsed his mouth, washed his face and hands, looked at himself in the mirror. His face was pale and floating, his tie twisted, and for a long time he stood stupidly wondering where he’d got the overcoat. It wasn’t his. He didn’t own one. He had got around to combing his hair before the realization came to him, not suddenly, but as a dull transition from not-knowing to knowing. Brucker’s coat. He remembered Brucker, solicitous, almost anguished, and himself wandering down the hall, shaking off Brucker’s hands, standing with his back to the top of the stairs while the messenger boy’s scared face went on down and the fact of death lay in the hall like a heavy foul smell. Then Brucker putting him on the twelve-fifteen later, pressing his overcoat on him, shaking his hand hard, wringing it, his face stiff with sympathy. A good guy, a good friend.

  He moved a spittoon with his foot so that he could sit down on the leather bench by the window. The pane was so streaked that he could barely see out. What he could see looked like Nebraska. Farms, windmills, occasional trees, fields and fences, a strip of ghostly highway and a car on it, its lights still on. He put his hand in his overcoat pocket, felt the paper, drew it out yellow and crumpled, read it again.

  “Chester passed away this morning wiring you train fare love. Harry Mason.”

  Harry Mason, Bruce thought. Not “Dad.” Not “Father.” Harry Mason. As if he didn’t dare use any familiar word, or were so confused he didn’t know quite what he was doing. Or as if the loss of his one son had made him realize what a bottomless gulf lay between himself and the other. A stiff and formal telegram. Chester passed away this morning ...

  Oh Jesus, Bruce said, poor mother!

  Tears squeezed between his lids, and at the sound of a step in the aisle he rose quickly and washed his face again. The brakeman looked through the curtain, nodded, and went on. Bruce went back to his seat and lay down, his eyes close to the smeared window, staring out across the flat land. It couldn’t be Nebraska. It had to be Minnesota or Iowa. They weren’t due in Omaha till sometime around six. Then a thousand miles of Nebraska and Wyoming and Utah. He’d get into Salt Lake at the worst possible time, two or three in the morning.

  Chet is dead, he said. Your brother has died suddenly, and you are on your way back to his funeral. Your father has sent you a telegram and a money order. You change at Omaha to the Union Pacific and you will arrive very early in the morning in Salt Lake. You will see your mother with the knife in her. You will see Chet’s wife, whom you do not much like, parading her grief, and his little girl bewildered and whimpering. You will also see your father, whom you hate, and how will he be taking it? He always liked Chet better than you, even though he treated him harder.

  And Chet, he said, is dead. His life is finished at twenty-three, before it had a chance to begin. Never, he said. Not ever. He was, and now is not.

  Suddenly he was flooded by memories of terrifying clarity, he and Chet trapping muskrats together on the river in Canada, playing soldier down in the burnouts on the homestead, singing together in school cantatas, getting into fights over the Erector set, swimming in the bare-naked hole down by where Doctor O‘Malley’s tent used to be pitched, playing map games on the long ride down from the Canadian border to Utah. The smell of gasoline from the auxiliary can in the hot grove near Casper, the mourning doves that cooed all that morning from the cottonwoods, and the ledge up behind, where they killed the rattlesnake. The pride he had felt, the tremendous exuberant exultation, when Chet caught the pass in the last quarter to beat Provo, and himself running out on the field hysterical with “school spirit,” pushing through players slimed with black mud from head to foot, only their eyes unmuddied, to grab Chet’s hand and pound him on the back, and the way Chet had grinned almost in embarrassment behind his mask of mud, still holding the ball in his big muddy hands ...

  It had never seemed that he and Chet had much in common, that they had ever run together much. Chet had been above and beyond him, with the big gang. But there were thousands of ties, millions, so many that he was amazed and saddened. They were brothers, something he had never really considered before.

  Had been, he said. Had been brothers. That was all gone. Everything that had force to make them brothers was already done. If he wanted to find a brother now he had to find him in the past, in recollections that he hadn’t even known were there.

  He bit his lips together and bent his forehead against the cold windowpane. But he did not cry much. His eyes were dry when they ran through the shacktowns and suburbs of Council Bluffs and across the river and into Omaha.

  For two hundred miles across Nebraska he thought of nothing except how clean the Union Pacific kept its trains. At Kearney he bought a newspaper and read it through painstakingly, knowing what he was looking for and completely aware that it was not there. People died everywhere, all the time. Why should anyone in Omaha take note that Chet Mason had died suddenly in Salt Lake City? Who was Chet Mason that anyone should mark his death? Yet the strange lethargy that held him, the torpor waiting on complete realization, did not believe that slip of yellow paper in his overcoat pocket, and the absence of any notice in the paper was almost comforting. He knew he would not believe Chet was dead until he had more proof than the telegram.

  At North Platte he bought another paper. At Cheyenne he bought another. From Cheyenne clear on across the plateau to Rock Springs he sat in the club car playing poker with three drummers, and won eighty cents. When they hiked the ante he left the game and went back to his seat to try to sleep. Out past the panes of double glass the moon silvered the empty waste of the Wyoming Plateau, and the telegraph poles were like the ticking second-hand of a watch, the muted racket of the wheels the grinding of a remorseless mechanism carrying him closer and closer to the time when he had to wake up.

  When the train swung out of the canyon in a long curve and backed into the yards at Ogden he roused himself and got off for a cup of coffee. Forty miles to go. In the station washroom he washed and combed his hair, and at the newsstand he bought a Salt Lake paper.

  He didn’t look into it until the train started again. Then he went back to the men’s room and sat down. He found it immediately, a little three-inch story on the local page, and the fact that Chet was not stuck away in a column of nameless and unimportant deaths brought him an instant of fierce pride. “Former High S
chool Athlete Dies,” it said. So Chet was not entirely unknown. Some of the people reading that three-inch notice would recall games he had starred in, plays he had made spectacularly.

  Why try to fool yourself? he said. Why pretend that Chet was anything, amounted to anything? Why back up your grief by making believe Chet mattered to anyone outside his family? He mattered to you, isn’t that enough? Does he have to be important to other people before you’ll think him worth a tear?

  But those three inches of type helped, nevertheless. He was more calm when he stepped off the train than he had been all day, and when he saw his mother, alone, coming toward him with her face twisting toward tears, he did not break down. He spread his arms and she came into them.

  “Ah, Bruce,” she said.

  He held her tightly, looking over her head at the people moving toward the exits. “Mom,” he said.

  She was back out of his arms, shaking tears from her eyes, trying to smile. “You’ve got an overcoat,” she said. “I imagined you coming through in this cold weather without either hat or coat.”

  “I borrowed it,” he said. “Where’s Pa?”

  His mother looked at him. “He ... couldn’t come.” Bruce put his arm around her and led her toward the exit. “Let’s not talk,” he said. “Let’s not try to explain anything.”

  “I came down in a taxi,” she said. “Your dad is terribly broken up. He’s like a madman. Just walks and walks. He hasn’t slept at all.”

  She took a handkerchief out of her purse and fumbled with it while he called a cab. In the car she held his hand hard without saying anything. Bruce stared stonily at the back of the driver’s neck.

  At home Bo Mason met them at the door, shook Bruce’s hand, stared into his face a moment, and swung around to disappear into his bedroom. He did not come out again, but later, as he lay sleeplessly staring upward in the bed that he and Chet had, shared during the Christmas vacation less than a month ago, Bruce heard a sudden cry from the room down the hall, a smothered scream and the thud of feet heavy on the floor, and his mother’s voice saying, “Bo, Bo, please! Bo, you mustn’t ! Get back into bed, please.” After that there was a sound that made Bruce grit his teeth in the dark, the sound of his father sobbing, a muffled, uncontrolled weeping, a little shameful and completely shattering.

  When Bruce got up his father had already gone. “He had to get out,” his mother said. “He can’t stand to be still a minute.”

  She waited on Bruce at breakfast, even tried to butter his toast. She was pale but perfectly composed. On an impulse, while he was eating, he reached out and covered her hand with his. “Mom,” he said, and his smile was so great a strain that it hurt. “You’re taking it like a Trojan.”

  “What else can you do?” she said.

  “Would it help to tell me about it?”

  “If you like,” she said, her eyes steady and clear. “I guess there are ... two or three things I ought to tell you.”

  “Where are Laura and the baby?”

  “That’s part of it,” she said. “Laura left him, you know. She took the baby and left to live with her family just a few days after you went back.”

  “But you said in your letters ...”

  “I didn’t want to bother you with it,” she said. “I thought it might straighten out.”

  “They were fighting pretty much at Christmas,” Bruce said. “Did she... when he got sick ... ?”

  “When he got bad. It went so fast. He was only in the hospital two days. Afterwards she went all to pieces. She’s in bed now.”

  “It’s a little late, isn’t it?” he said. “She might have shown a little of that when it would do some good.”

  Her eyes were steady and very blue. “You’re thinking about your dad too.”

  “Maybe I am. Maybe I’m thinking about myself. Everybody but you.”

  “Don‘t,” she said. He watched her, thinking that there was a dignity, a nobility almost, in the clean bony curve of her temple, the way her hair went back from her forehead, the way her mouth could be firm without being hard or bitter. “Please don’t even hint anything like that to your dad,” she said. “That’s what makes him crazy, almost. He blames himself for everything.” She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s everybody’s fault. Chet’s too. We tried to do something for him, tried to get him to go to business school. He started for a while, you know, and then he quit. I found out after three weeks that he’d never been near the place after the first few days, and had got his tuition money back.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “It’s such an unhappy, tangled mess,” she said, and shook her head again. “Chet was having trouble with Laura, and she kept throwing it up to him that she was working and all he could do was drive a taxi, and I think ...” She laughed a little as if in pain. “I’ve never talked to you like this. I think she wouldn’t let him come to bed with her. For a long time. You know how Chet was. He got sullen and swore he’d find somebody else, and they had a fight.”

  Very carefully Bruce said, “Was he running around with another woman, then?”

  “You mean about the tuition money.”

  “Yes.”

  “He didn’t have any other woman,” she said. “He just...” Her face flushed, and she bit her lips. “That taxi job was no good,” she said. “It threw him in with a lot of no-good people.”

  There were tears in her eyes. “He never did get a decent break,” Bruce said.

  “Oh, let’s be honest,” she said, almost violently. “Chet was a good boy, he always was, but he was impulsive, and I’m afraid he was a little weak. He made a lot of mistakes, but you couldn’t blame him for them because he was such a nice boy really. He just ... I guess Chet didn’t have much backbone.” She stared at him, her eyes bright with the tears that swam in them. “It hurts me to say it, and I don’t say it to blame him,” she said. “He was decent, and generous, wasn’t he? But he didn’t have much backbone. He got hurt too easily.”

  “It might take a lot of backbone to live with Laura,” Bruce said.

  “Oh, let’s not blame her either,” she said. “Chet had bad luck. If he’d been stronger he could have come out of it, but it whipped him.” She turned her face half away and sat with her hand pressed against her mouth.

  Bruce stood up and went around the table to put his hand on her shoulder. “It sounds like sentimental hypocrisy,” he said slowly, “but maybe Chet’s better off. Maybe he couldn’t ever have got back.”

  “You know what he said to me just before he died?” she said. “I talked to him just an hour or two before, when he came out of the coma. He knew then that he was going to die, and I think he was almost glad. It was as if just then he was more peaceful than he’d been any time in years. Just as I was leaving he took hold of my hand and said, ‘I’m leaving you the dirty work, Mom. I’m sorry. That was the last thing he ever ...

  Bruce’s jaws were locked, but he couldn’t break down. The old man was already doing too much of that, throwing more strain on her. Chet, sick and lost, had already done too much of that. He stood with his face stiff and dry as paper, with his hand on her shoulder.

  “Bruce,” she said, “do you believe in a Heaven, a hereafter? That we might see Chet again?”

  For a long minute he did not reply. When he did he almost whispered, he was so afraid of taking something away from her. “No,” he said.

  “I guess I don’t either,” she said. “Ever since he died I’ve been wondering if I still believed that, but I really don’t. It’s too much to wish for. It would be too good. I guess I’ve about come to believing that anything we wish for too much is bound never to happen. Probably it’s better that way.”

  “What can I do?” Bruce asked later. “Are there any arrangements I can take care of?”

  “Everything’s done.”

  “Would you like to go down with me, to see him?”

  “No,” she said. “I’ve said goodbye. I’d rather you saw him alone.”
>
  “I don’t like to leave you.”

  “You go,” she said. “I’ll be all right. I’ll be getting lunch.”

  “Why don’t we go out to eat?”

  “It’s better when I have something to do,” she said.

  He took a streetcar to the funeral parlor, spoke Chet’s name to the girl in the office, and was directed to the third room on the right. His feet dragged in the deep carpet. Panic mounted in him as he passed the first door, the second. Quick glances, as if he shouldn’t look in at all, showed him empty rooms like sitting rooms. The third door was also open. He came up to it slowly, stopped outside, and looked in.

  He had had no previous acquaintance with death, and he did not know how it can make an outsider of a living person. From the moment he looked in the door he was ill at ease, an intruder, and the emotion that made him move on tiptoe was not so much grief or fear as embarrassment. Chet lay fully dressed, ready for burial, on the wheeled table under the windows. There were three or four baskets of flowers in the room, and the quiet was so deep that his own breathing bothered him.

  For a long time he stood beside Chet simply looking. This was the end of it, then. This was the way you said goodbye, when he was already beyond all goodbyes, beyond hearing you when you said you wished you’d been a better brother, had understood better, had given him a hand when you could. Now that it was too late you wished you could tell him how you’d felt about that cigarette lighter at graduation, when you knew really, without his ever saying so, that he was desperate and sick and lonely, down to his last dime and quarreling with his wife and ashamed of having come crawling back. You wished you believed that he could understand you now as you stood thinking it, how you had really felt that gift, how you had known he was reaching out for you, trying to indicate a love that neither you nor he could ever indicate, and how you were really his friend and brother, you’d stick to him as he was asking you to. This was the way it was, all of it too late. There was that in death which made the living humble and ashamed.