The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  She laughed. “My goodness, I can’t eat all that.”

  Bo Mason wagged his head, and Bruce hated him for his fumbling bulk, his stupid, vague embarrassment. “You want to eat,” he said, and catching Bruce’s eye he almost flushed.

  At least he feels it, Bruce said. At least he feels frozen out. Nobody wants him around, and he knows it. And by God he’s earned it.

  “Well,” the old man said, and looked out the window again. “Going to be a nice day.” He moved toward the door. “Anything you want from town?”

  “Are you going down already?” she said. “You haven’t had breakfast yet.”

  “I can get something downtown.”

  “There’s plenty of stuff here,” Bruce said. “I’ll fix something in a minute.”

  Nothing to do, he thought. No place to go. But he has to rush out of here before breakfast, just so he can hang around cigar stores and hotel lobbies all day.

  He watched his mother sip her orange juice. “Come on,” he said, “let’s get out of here and let Mom eat in peace.” He went into the kitchen and started breakfast. He was just‘putting the toast in the toaster when he heard his mother in the bedroom, and ran in. Leaning back against the pillow wiping her lips, she gave him a weak, apologetic smile. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t keep it down.”

  “Feel all right now?”

  She nodded, and he took the pail into the bathroom. Not even her orange juice this morning. Worse and worse.

  “Pa,” he said when he came back, “I think we ought to get a nurse for Mom, till she gets back on her feet.”

  “You’re better than any nurse,” his mother said. “Unless you get tired of taking care of me.” She wiped her lips, puckered her eyes at him. “You’re stuck in this apartment too much,” she said. “But I don’t need a nurse. I guess I can still do a few things for myself.”

  “And tire yourself all out,” Bruce said. “I don’t know how to take care of you right.”

  “You take care of me beautifully,” she said. “A nurse would be expensive, too.”

  “Only six dollars a day.”

  “Six dollars a day!” his father said. He seemed suddenly angry, the indecision and helplessness dissolved in violence. “My God, doesn’t that show you? The minute anybody gets sick. there’s ten million vultures waiting to pounce. What makes a nurse worth six dollars a day?”

  “See?” Elsa said. “It’s out of the question. Now why don’t both of you go out and get some fresh air? You don’t want to stick around with me all day.”

  “Yeah?” Bruce said. “What if you got a pain?”

  “I guess I could stand it. Maybe you could pull the telephone close, and if I need anything I could call Mrs. Welch.”

  “What does she know about giving hypos?” He looked at his father, and it was with difficulty that he kept his voice down. “If you were sick yourself you’d think a nurse was worth six dollars a day,” he said.

  His father threw up his hands and walked to the door. “Fifteen dollars a shot for x-rays,” he said. “The doctor coming here three or four times a week at five bucks a throw. Medicine to buy. Syringes to buy. God Almighty, we’re not made of money. We have to eat, too, you know. I’ll play nurse myself, if we need a nurse.”

  “You’d be a lot of good,” Bruce said between his teeth.

  “Please!” Elsa said. “I don’t need a nurse, Bruce. Really. We’re getting along just fine.”

  The old man came over to the bed, stooped to kiss her. His face was sober and tired and his eyes redder than ever. “Don’t think I don’t want you to have the best care,” he said. “It’s just so damned quiet now, all out-go and no income. How’d it be if I got some good woman who could cook and clean and do things for you?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m an awful expense. I’m sorry.”

  He stared at her with whipped, bewildered eyes, rolled his shoulders, winced. “I’ve got a damn boil coming on my back,” he said. “Every time I move it half kills me.”

  “Oh dear!” she said. Her instant sympathy, the spectacle of her lying there in the bed she would die in, crucified by unbearable pain every few hours, and wasting sympathy on a great booby’s boil made Bruce so furious he couldn’t stay in the room. When his mother called him to fetch iodine and a bandage he brought them sullenly, looking sideways at his father’s milk-white body stripped to the waist, the angry red swelling between his shoulder blades, and his mother propped on one weak arm, all her attention and strength focussed on painting and dressing the boil. He couldn’t stand it. He escaped again.

  Boils, he said. Wouldn’t it be just like him to have boils, the dirtiest, messiest kind of affliction he could get, and then come running to let his half-dead wife waste her strength babying him! Oh my God, he said, if he was only the one on that bed, and she the one on her feet!

  And he knew that that too was wrong. It would have been obscene to see him have to bear the things she bore.

  When his father came out, shouldering himself gingerly into his coat, Bruce went out into the hall with him and confronted him there. “Mom just simply has to have a nurse,” he said. “I can’t do the things to make her comfortable that a nurse could.”

  His father sighed. “If you can tell me how we can afford six dollars more a day ...”

  “Go in debt!” Bruce said. “She’s dying in there, can’t you get that through your head?”

  His father’s eyes were glassy. He looked dazed, as if he had not slept for a long time. The outburst of irritability a few minutes ago had gone completely..“None of it can save her,” he said. “That’s just it. Do you think if she had a chance I wouldn’t do everything, spend every cent we’ve got?”

  “All right,” Bruce said. “She’s dying, so let’s let her die. I’ll cut out the orange juice. That’ll save fifty cents a day.”

  For an instant, watching his father’s hand clench, he thought they were going to have a fight there in the hall. He stood up to it, so furious himself that his stomach was a sick fluttering. Then the dark face of the old man twitched, his hands loosened, and without a word he turned and went out.

  “You mustn’t be too hard on your dad,” his mother said later. “He never was any good in sickness, his own or anybody else’s.”

  “No,” Bruce said. “Witness his boils.”

  “Boils are painful,” she said. “There’s hardly anything worse than a boil.”

  “You’re having a little pain yourself,” he said. “Why should you have to tend that big baby? What does he do for you when a pain hits you, except stand around looking helpless?”

  “He wants to help,” she said. “He just can’t stand to see anybody in pain, that’s all. It drives him frantic. I remember when I scalded my arm, he was ten times more scared than I was. He almost cried.”

  “If he wants to help so bad,” Bruce said, “why won’t he let me get a nurse? If he’s so broke he can’t afford a nurse for a couple weeks he ought to apply for charity.” He went to the window and tried to make the shade roll higher, to let in a little more light. “Broke!” he said. “He’s rolling in money. Twenty or thirty thousand dollars, and he can’t even ... !” He turned on her. “You’re going to have a nurse, whether he’ll pay for her or not.”

  “Bruce,” she said strongly, “I won’t let you spend your money for a nurse. It’s silly. I don’t need one.”

  He made a bitter mouth at her. “Do you think you wouldn’t have one now if I had any money? I haven’t got ten dollars to my name.”

  He went out to wash the dishes and clean up the house, and when he came back she was in pain. She didn’t want a hypo. It wasn’t bad yet. But he gave her one anyway. “The object of a hypo,” he said, “is to keep you from having any pain at all.”

  “You’ll make a dope-head of me.”

  “I guess we can take that chance.”

  A few minutes after the hypo she dropped off into a heavy. sleep, and when she awoke, an hour or so after noon, he got her to d
rink a little grape juice. She wasn’t hungry enough to take more.

  For a while he read to her. He had filled a shelf with books from the library, but they were law books, history, things she wouldn’t have liked or understood. So he started again on South Wind, which he had half finished, and she lay quietly like a dutiful child being read to. When he came to Miss Wilberforce his mother giggled.

  He lowered the book to his lap. “Like it?” he said, pleased.

  “It’s good,” she said. “That Miss Wilberforce reminds me of Edna Harkness. You remember Edna.”

  “Sure. I didn’t know she was a drunkard, though.” “Edna was lonesome,” she said. “She used to sit alone drinking until she couldn’t stand it, and then she’d come over to our house to cry. She tried to commit suicide there once.”

  “What for?”

  “She was in love with somebody—not Slip, he was just a piece of saddle-leather as far as she was concerned—but another man, a Catholic. He wouldn’t marry her unless she turned Catholic, and if she turned Catholic then she couldn’t get a divorce from Slip. She used to take off her clothes too, sometimes.”

  “In Whitemud?”

  “It sounds funny, doesn’t it? Three or four times. She kept saying she wasn’t ashamed of her shape. She was so dreadfully afraid of getting old and homely.” Smiling, she shook her head. “Poor Edna.”

  Seeing the life he had known as a small boy now strangely re-focussed through his mother’s eyes, remembering Edna Harkness as a somewhat sallow and sagging woman married to a Texas cowpuncher, Bruce felt for a moment the strangeness of that past, those almost-twenty-three years that were behind him now, irrecoverable, but more real than many things that happened in the present. Edna Harkness, with troubles that were silly and self-begotten, coming to his mother for sympathy and consolation. They had always come that way, every lost sheep they had ever known had fed on her.

  While he groped back in that past, watching his mother’s face, he saw the sweat pop in tiny beads on her forehead and lip as if it were something squeezed through porous cloth, and saw her lips even in the midst of a wry smile for poor Edna go white and stiff. The blue eyes looked straight upward. Bruce dropped the book and stood up.

  “Pain?”

  She nodded, still in the throes. Her legs moved slightly under the spread.

  “How long?”

  “It’s been coming on for a little while.”

  “Why in God’s name didn’t you tell me?” he said.

  “I didn’t want to interrupt. I thought it might go away.” She grunted, a startled sound as if someone had knocked the wind out of her, and rolled half on her side.

  Full of the anger and panic that came over him when he saw her stricken with the pain, he ran into the kitchen, flipped on a burner on the stove, dissolved a codine tablet in a half teaspoon of water and held it over the blaze. In a moment the water sizzled around the edges, the tablet dissolved brownly, the mixture bubbled. Then fit the syringe together, draw the cooled mixture into it, press out the air bubbles carefully, and hurry back to the bedroom, for your mother is in agony and this little weapon will straighten her cramped body, put her to sleep for a while, stall off the pain until next time, until this evening maybe.

  The first paroxysm had passed, and she lay on her back again. “Arm or leg?” he said.

  “Make it ... leg,” she said, and stiffened. He tore back the covers, found an unpunctured spot above her knee, a clear patch on the blue-punctured skin, swabbed with the wad of alcohol-soaked cotton, laid the needle against her skin, slanting, and jabbed. The codine made a tiny bluish bump under the skin, and the needle-hole wept one colorless tear as he swabbed again and covered her.

  “Feeling better?”

  “In a minute.” Her smile was so strained that he bent over her. “Why don’t you cry?” he said. “It’d be easier.”

  She let out a shuddering breath, as if exhaling the pain with the air. “I guess I’ve forgotten how,” she said, quite seriously. “I try sometimes. I can’t.”

  For a few moments he stood over her watching. The tightness went gradually out of her face, the forehead smoothed out. “Want to take a little sleep?” he said.

  She nodded, and he opened the window, pulled the shades down, straightened the sheet under her chin, kissed her, and went out. In the other room he tried to read, but he couldn’t concentrate. Once, reading through a discussion of riparian rights, his eyes distinctly saw, in print, the words: “Codine at nine o‘clock. Codine again at two. Only five hours between pains now.” Tiptoeing to the half-open door, he saw that his mother was asleep. On an impulse he slipped into the hall and up to the apartment of Mrs. Welch, the only person they knew in the building.

  “I wonder if you could do me a favor?” he said. “Are you going to be busy for the next hour or two?”

  “No,” she said. “What is it?” She was a fat, comfortable woman, too sympathetic and too-continuously ready to weep, but she would do.

  “Could you sit with mother? She’s asleep, and ought to sleep a couple of hours. I have to go uptown for a few minutes.”

  “Why sure,” she said. She gathered up her magazine and came along, and Bruce put on his coat and went out into the air.

  Dr. Cullen sat at his desk twirling a swab stick between his palms. “Anything wrong at home?”

  “There’s nothing much very right.”

  “Mother worse?”

  “Oh, I don’t know!” Bruce said. “About the same, I guess. Maybe she’s worse. The codine doesn’t seem to have the effect it used to. She had to have a hypo at nine and another one at two.”

  “Yes,” the doctor said. “We have to expect that.” He scribbled a prescription on the pad and tore it off, holding the sheet by the corners and blowing on it gently so that it rotated. His face was smooth and impassive, and his voice was the careful, flat, guarded voice Bruce remembered from the operating room.

  “How is she eating?”

  “Not at all. She can’t even keep fruit juice down now.”

  “Um,” Cullen said. He blew the prescription sheet. “If you want to,” he said, “we can feed her by bowel. It would mean prolonging her life a week, two weeks.”

  “Would it make her any stronger?” Bruce said. “Would it help her stay stronger right to the end, even if she has to be full of dope, so she won’t just dwindle away ... ?”

  He felt his face twisting, and forced himself to look straight at the doctor. “It’s that dwindling that’s hard to watch,” he said. “She gets smaller and thinner every day.”

  “Bowel feeding would help that,” Cullen said. “You couldn’t do it very well, though.”

  “That’s what I came to see you about,” Bruce said. It was difficult to talk. The office was too padded, too quiet, the doctor’s voice too carefully controlled. He knew Cullen liked and admired his mother, and that made it harder to talk to him. “I spoke to the old man this morning about a nurse,” he said. “He says it’s too expensive.” With fascinated helplessness he heard himself shouting. “I can’t stand to sit around there and watch her die cheaply!” he said. “She’s got to have a nurse. I’ll mortgage any money I ever make ...”

  “No,” Cullen said: “I wouldn’t want to see you do that.” He looked out the window, and Bruce dabbed furiously at his wet eyes. Crying, sitting here bawling like a baby ...

  “I know a woman,” the doctor said, turning. “I’ll send her over tonight. And don’t worry about the bill. I’ll have Miss Ostler pay it and then add it to my bill. Your father can think I’m a hold-up man.”

  “Thanks,” Bruce said. He took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. “I’m sorry I blew up. I just get so ...”

  Cullen rose and laid the prescription in Bruce’s hand. “What are you going to do,” he said. “Afterwards?”

  “I don’t know. Go back to school, I suppose, if I can find any way to work it out.”

  “Coming back here to practice after you get your degree?”

 
; “I hadn’t thought much about it.”

  “Don‘t,” the doctor said.

  “What?” Bruce said.

  “I’m a busy-body,” Cullen said. “I’m giving you advice. I’ve known your family for a good many years, and I can’t help knowing a few things. Give yourself a chance. Get away from all that history.”

  “I suppose that’s right,” Bruce said.

  “I might as well say my piece out,” Cullen said. “Stop me if you want.” He paused, and Bruce made a little motion with his hand. “Your mother is an exceptional woman,” Cullen said. “I don’t imagine she ever had any opportunities at all, but she’s arrived at something without them. She’s wise and brave and decent. But she’s going to die, and there’s nothing we can do for her except make her comfortable. When she does, clear out, and if there ever comes a time when your father wants to use you, live on you, get anything from you, keep out of it. He could spoil your life.”

  He laid his hand on Bruce’s shoulder. “I’ll drop by in the morning,” he said as he went.

  Bruce stayed in the room for five minutes with his back to the hallway, looking out the windows into the paved court. Even though you knew it, even though you were watching it every day, it came hard to hear the doctor say she would die. He remembered looking at the pictures of her lungs with the roentgen ologist, the scientific finger pointing out the blurred and darkened places in the web of ribs and organs that was his mother. “She’s doomed,” the x-ray man said that day, and his big voice, too big for so small a man, boomed in the hollow office. He could hear it now.

  The nurse and another patient came in. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought Dr. Cullen had finished with you.”

  “He has,” Bruce said. He brushed by her and went out.

  The coming of Miss Hammond, the nurse, changed the quality of living in the apartment; it gave to his mother’s dying a dignity it had not had before, a professional neatness, an air of propriety and authority. Miss Hammond was a neat and efficient and tireless young woman. She took complete charge of the place, cooked the meals, made the beds, fed and bathed and changed her patient. She even, when Bo Mason came in the next morning to have Elsa dress his boil, took charge of that too, in spite of his grumbling and distrust.