The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  He listened to the breaths, up and up and up, painfully, and the wheezy escape of the hard-won air. Miss Hammond came out on tiptoe and laid a sweater across his shoulders, and he pulled it around him, aware that it was chilly. The traffic was less on the street, but the neon light drifted in steadily, like vague blue smoke, a slight tremor in the shadowy room. He heard the court-house clock strike eleven, then twelve. The breathing faltered, strengthened, slowed, went on.

  The vitality, he said, is lowest during the early morning hours. If she lived past three, she might last another day, stubbornly clinging to the life she had already given up. He found himself hoping that she would die, now, and the imminence of the thing he had been watching and fearing for weeks made him move cautiously, straighten his slumped and aching back, thrust one chilled hand into his pocket.

  His mother moved. Her fingers tightened, and her voice, flat and muffled, said, “You’re a good boy, Bruce.”

  He sat thinking of that, thinking of the times for years back when he had been selfish or thoughtless, of the girls he had chased and dated four or five nights a week, never remembering that his mother might be alone, that the old man went off to prowl with his friends or deliver whiskey, leaving her in an empty house. He remembered the few times he had taken her anywhere, to movies, for drives in the canyons, to dinner, and those times seemed so pitifully few and mean that he writhed. You’re a good boy, Bruce.

  Yes, he said, twenty years too late, and overpaid in advance, fifty times in advance, and now paid with gratitude on her death bed.

  Oh Jesus, he said, let her die.

  The clock, heavy and solemn over the sleeping city, gathered itself and struck once. The sound aroused the sick woman. She struggled up on one elbow, her hand hard on Bruce’s fingers. Her head turned to the right, then to the left.

  “Which ... way?” she said.

  “It’s all right, Mom,” he said, and pushed her gently back, pulling the covers to her chin. She lay still, immediately back in the drugged coma, and he sat on in the straight chair, listening to her fighting, impossible breath, holding his own breath when the snore labored to its peak, relaxing again when it was released, counting her breaths, almost, because at any point in the difficult scale her heart might quit like a tired horse in the harness.

  The vitality is lowest during the early morning hours. One fifteen, or thereabouts, and the minutes crawling, and his mother retreating breath by breath. Which ... way?

  His nodding head jerked up. The ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-had stopped, snagged, at the top of the scale. The long pause between inhalation and exhalation was slow, was too long. He yanked on the light.

  “Miss Hammond!”

  She came instantly, it seemed, was shoving him away from the bedside. In the shouting silence he saw her seize his mother’s. shoulders, put a finger in her mouth, jerk it out again to grab a spoon from the table and with the handle pry against his mother’s tongue, pulling it back out of her throat. The legs under the covers moved slightly, the clogged breath gave easily, in three little sighs, and he was staring into the sick face of Miss Hammond, the spoon in her hand free now, and his mother’s eyes closing, very slowly.

  He saw the tears come into Miss Hammond’s eyes as she groped without looking to lay the spoon on the table. The covers were disarranged over his mother’s body, and the nightgown was pulled aside. He saw her breast, the unmutilated one, like a lumpy mummified thing, the nipple retracted, pulled in as if by a terrific suction, and the skin blue-black and withered over her whole side.

  “Oh my God,” Miss Hammond was saying, “Oh my God.”

  He turned, blind and terrified, and fled.

  4

  When he came in again, the light, was on in both front room and porch. Miss Hammond looked up quickly. He could not meet her eyes for more than an instant,. because behind her was the lighted porch, and his mind went around that door and stopped at the foot of the bed.

  Instead of going in, he went to the telephone and called long distance, waiting with the blank wall before his eyes and the receiver against his ear, fixing his mind on the efficient buzzings, the unknown voices speaking crisply, the long regular unmusical ringing on the other end. Death travelled fast. In three minutes he could spread death. He .waited, the receiver humming at his head.

  What would the old man say? Would he pretend grief, he with his cowardice and his kept slut? Maybe she was with him. That would make it just dandy. She could ride back with him, consoling him all the ...

  “Hello,” he said, breaking in on the voice at the other end. It was a man’s voice, probably Patton’s. “Hello,” he said. “This is Bruce Mason. Is my father there?”

  “Yeah,” the voice said surlily, and then quickly, as if remembering, “Yeah, sure. Hold it just a minute.”

  He waited again. Through the open line he could hear steps coming. He looked straight at the yellow wall, his tongue like an unbendable rod in his mouth. “Hello?” his father’s quick voice said. “Hello, Bruce? What is it? Is ... ?” There was a rattling noise, and then his father’s voice again, quick and anxious. “Hello? Dropped the damn phone. What’s the matter?”

  “She’s dead,” Bruce said. “Two hours ago. I thought you’d want to know.”

  There was no answer for so long that he dropped his lips to the mouthpiece to say “Hello, hello,” but as he did so he heard the sigh of his father’s breath, distorted and rasping over the wire, and then his voice, quiet, almost a whisper. “Yeah. I’ll be right home.”

  “All right,” Bruce said. “I’ll make the arrangements.”

  There was another pause, only a kind of panting coming through the receiver. “Was it bad?” his father said. “Did she ... was she in pain?”

  Bruce raised his head. On impulse, out of pure contempt, he lied. “No,” he said. “She just went to sleep.”

  The nurse moved aside, and he stepped past her into the porch. His mother lay with the sheet up to her chin. Her hands, folded on her stomach, made a little draped mound under the sheet. Her hair had been dried and re-braided, and her face was wiped clean of any expression, even the lines rubbed away as an artist might erase lines from a sketch. It was a younger face that lay there, a face completely calm, a prettier face actually than he had known. But it was not his mother. His mother had been wiped away with the lines that living had left on her. She was the shading, not the face itself. In this wax image there was none of her patience, none of her understanding and sympathy, none of her kindness, none of her dignity. This corpse was a thing you could bury without regret, put into the ground beside your brother’s body; and the other things, the qualities that had been mystically your mother, you buried within yourself, you became a grave for her as you were a grave for Chet, and you carried your dead un-quietly within you.

  On the evening of the next day he sat reading in the deserted apartment. He had gone grimly through his duties, half grateful for something to do, half appreciating why the race made a ritual of death. He had bought a casket, feeling that if he left that to his father his father would throw away hundreds of dollars in a useless sacrifice to his own shame and fear. He had talked to Cullen, signed the death certificate, gone to the cemetery and seen the sexton about the grave lot next to Chet’s. After dinner he had said goodbye to Miss Hammond.

  Tomorrow, probably around noon, his father should be back. The funeral was set for three. If the old man was late that was his bad luck. He could be shown where she was buried, that would be all he deserved.

  He looked at the clock on the end table by the sofa. Ten fifteen. He might go to bed, but he knew he couldn’t sleep, even though he was exhausted. He moved the light closer and opened the book again.

  At eleven thirty he stopped reading to listen. Someone was fumbling at the door. He stood up just as his father opened the door and came in, and in the silent apartment, with the fact of death between them, they confronted each other.

  His father’s face was like a dirty dough mask. The unhealthy bags u
nder his eyes had swollen and darkened, his cheeks sagged, his eyes were furtive and haunted. For a moment he stood with his hand on the knob, moistening his lips with his tongue.

  “You got back quick,” Bruce said.

  “I ...” The old man closed the door and took a step or two into the room. His eyes darted past Bruce toward the door of the porch. Without the door to hang to he staggered a little, and put his hand down on the arm of the sofa, lowering himself into it heavily. “I ... got lost,” he said. His lips moved in the parody of a smile, and his eyes went secretly past Bruce toward the porch door again.

  “You couldn’t have stayed lost very long. I wasn’t expecting you till tomorrow.”

  “I don’t know what was the matter,” his father said, rubbing his hand back and forth on the arm of the couch. “I was dazed, I guess. I’ve been over that road a hundred times.” He shook his head. “I left right after you called.”

  Bruce watched him, wondering if he were quite right in the head. He must have driven like a madman.

  “Down around Yermo somewhere,” his father said. “I got out on some God-forsaken road with sand to the running boards. Just ran around in circles in the desert. Didn’t know where I was. Dazed, I guess.” He took out his watch, looked at it, turned it over in his hand two or three times, put it back in his pocket. His eyes came up to Bruce fleetingly, wavered away again.

  “I’ll get you something to eat,” Bruce said. He wondered how long they would play this game of steering away from mentioning her death. The old man came back from a trip and they passed banalities back and forth and had a snack to eat. In the kitchen he almost smiled. The old man was out again, like a bum who has been thrown out of jail and stands with the bars in his hands, wishing he was back in the warmth and light getting three meals a day.

  “What ... time did she pass away?” his father said behind him.

  Even that, Bruce thought. Even “pass away.” But there was such a strained harsh quality in the old man’s voice that he turned around. The watch was in his father’s hand again.

  “A little after one,” Bruce said. “About one fifteen.” He saw the spasm cross the dark heavy face, the. harsh lines contracting as if at a sudden pain.

  “That was twelve fifteen in L.A.,” the old man said. He turned the watch over slowly in his hand, looked at the face. He looked back at Bruce, swaying a little, breathing rapidly through his half-open mouth. “Look,” he said, and passed over the watch with its dangling chain.

  The watch said fourteen minutes past twelve.

  “I was in bed,” the old man said, and his tongue came out to touch his upper lip. “I heard it stop. I thought it needed winding, but it didn’t. It wouldn’t start again.”

  The blank terror in his eyes made Bruce look away, down at the watch. He shook it, held it to his ear.

  “That won’t do any good,” his father said. “I tried everything.” His face contorted again, twisted, softened. He sat down on a kitchen chair and put his face in his hands, and his body shook. After a minute, unwillingly, not knowing exactly why he did it, Bruce laid a hand on the wide, shaking shoulder.

  “It’s no good now,” he said. “We just have to stand it.”

  That was all he could think of to say. He did not believe in his father’s grief. It was not grief, but self-pity and superstitious fear. With his hand on the heavy shoulder, troubled and embarrassed, he kept thinking, “You might have given her a little of this while she was alive.”

  5

  Bo Mason could not stand to stay in the place Elsa had died in. The door of the porch seemed to bother him. His eyes were always wandering to it with the vague, groping, puzzled expression that was now very frequent on his face. Every night he had nightmares, and on the fourth day they moved across the street.

  Bruce, shrugging, carried their little household accumulation across. This move was all of a piece with the rest. The old man couldn’t bear to think of her dead, pitied himself for being left, couldn’t bring himself to mention her except in roundabout euphemisms like “passing away,” and now couldn’t stand to be near the room she had died in. It made little difference to Bruce. In January, if he got back the scholarship he had written about, he would be pulling out for school again, and he would not be coming back.

  He felt so little established in that barren apartment that he didn’t even unpack his suitcases completely, but left them propped open on chairs in the bedroom. And this was what it finally came to. For thirty years his mother had tried to break the old man to family life, had wanted to make something rooted and continuous that would bridge the dissonant generations, and in the end, with her death, it came down to an apartment in which he and his father, the survivors, lived together in perpetual armed suspicion, with half-packed suitcases in the bedroom ready for instant flight.

  He got a few jobs through friends at the university, typing theses and reading papers, and the money from those jobs he hoarded like a miser. There would be little enough to live on once he broke away, and he would ask nothing from the old man. Meantime, if he was keeping the house, he was entitled to anything he could save out of the expense money. He pinched nickels and dimes like a houswife hoarding for Christmas, spent little and went out little. In the time he had free from his jobs he sat in the apartment and read, read with lunch, read with dinner, read in bed, woke to read with breakfast. His friends he never called, even Joe Mulder; they would have tried to take him out and cheer him up. When he saw his father watching him, he made no sign, buried himself in a book, until the old man put on his new black hat and went out. For whole days, sometimes, there were not twenty words between them.

  October slipped into the shortening, smoky days of November, and the color faded from the scarp of the Wasatch. In the afternoons the sun hung like a monstrous orange over the Oquirrhs, and the night air was bitter with smoke. On one such night Bo Mason tried to blunder through the barrier of suspicion that lay between him and his son.

  He had come home for dinner, which was unusual, and after dinner, instead of going out again, he sat in the living room looking at a magazine. Every few minutes he looked over as if inviting conversation, but Bruce kept still. Finally his father said, slapping the magazine down on his lap, “By God, I don’t see what a man can do.”

  “What’s the trouble?” Bruce said.

  “Everything’s the trouble,” the old man said. “Nobody’s got a dime, there’s no business, the place is dead as a doornail. There isn’t a damn thing stirring, not a thing.”

  “Haven’t you got enough from the sale in Reno to hold you till things pick up?”

  “That wouldn’t last,” the old man said. “I’ve only got six thousand out of that so far. The rest is tied up in notes. And with nothing coming in you can’t live on the interest on a few thousand.”

  Bruce shrugged.

  “I’ve been talking with some guys down at the Newhouse,” his father said. “They’ve got a proposition they want me to come in on.”

  Something stirred in Bruce like a quick wind moving the leaves and then dying again. The old man was repeating the performance he had gone through with his wife every time a new bug hit him, asking advice, coming around and hinting and opening it up little by little. Only it wasn’t advice he wanted. It was justification, encouragement.

  “What sort of proposition?” Bruce said.

  For a moment his father’s eyes were quick and clear, the vague look gone from them. “A mine,” he said. “Looks like a pretty good thing.”

  “A lot of mines look like pretty good things,” Bruce said. “Only when you take a good look you find that the good things have been blown into them with a shotgun.”

  “All right,” his father said. “You know it all.”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” Bruce said. He felt himself flushing, and for a moment their dislike was hard and ugly, in the open. “I’d just be suspicious of any mining deal, on principle. The Utah Copper and the International and the Apex and all the
other big mines have got every prospect in the state tagged, just waiting till it will pay them to open them up.”

  “This mine,” his father said, “isn’t even in Utah. It’s in Nevada. And it’s got gold enough in it to be damn well worth looking at.”

  “Then look at it,” Bruce said. “I wasn’t trying to knock it. I’m just suspicious of any kind of scheme that’s going to make you rich overnight.”

  “Uh,” his father said. The groping look had come back, and two little dewlaps of skin sagged below his jaw. He fumbled in his inside coat pocket and brought out a bundle of papers. “This is a fairly low-grade lead,” he said. “It’d take money to develop it, need a stamp mill and one thing and another. But it’s a big lead, a vein twenty feet wide. We can get this fellow’s claim and options on four claims joining it.”

  “Have you had an assay?”

  “Four ounces of gold to the ton,” the old man said. “Some silver, some lead.”

  “How do you know the samples came out of that hole?”

  “Paul Dubois has been down looking it over. He knows a sound mine when he sees one.”

  “What do they want of you?”

  “Want me to come in for a third. We could put up three or four thousand apiece, enough for some development. Then we incorporate and capitalize for a hundred thousand or so, sell enough stock to put in the mill. Once it gets producing we can either work it ourselves or sell out for a fat price to some big outfit.”

  “Make a million dollars,” Bruce said. He laughed. “I’d sure want to take a good geologist down with me before I dove in a hole like that. And I’d want to know about water, and transportation, and a lot of other things.”

  “There isn’t time for much of that,” his father said. “Hartford Consolidated is snooping around. They had a prospector out there last month. And there’s a tunnel going in on the other side of the hill, about three miles off. If we want to get the jump, we’ve got to move fast.”