The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  And there was one version. Harry Mason, that old lush who hung around the Winston lobby and sponged meals and five-dollar loans from anybody he could collar, that old broken-down Big Shot who still dreamed of fantastic wealth out of a Nevada gold mine, was to one woman at least an honest man, a kind man, a misunderstood man, an unhappy man.

  Oh most certainly an unhappy man, he said, and stood in the open door of his father’s room with the tears hot and sudden in his eyes, thinking of that picture in the wallet and of those three or four days when he was kind and gentle and smiling, with a gun in his pocket.

  At eleven thirty he fell into bed at Joe’s and lay sleepless for hours, his eyes burning up into the darkness and his hands and feet feeling immense, swollen, elephantine from the quarts of coffee he had drunk on the road. He threshed it all through and cried hard racking sobs into the dark, and when he finally fell asleep he slept until noon.

  Then there was the undertaker to see, and the discovery, this third time he had used him, that the undertaker was an old whiskey customer of his father’s. He laid out the things taken from Bo Mason’s clothes—a wallet with five dollars in it, a handful of change, an address book, some keys, a couple of pencils—and talked sadly and thoughtfully, drumming with his finger tips on the desk. He had seen Harry around occasionally. No idea he was hard up or in trouble. It was a terrible and mysterious thing. Couldn’t have been money only, because Harry had plenty of friends who would have been glad to see him through a bad spot. He’d have given him a loan himself, if he’d known. He was full of friendship and sympathy and careful avoidances, he made no effort to sell Bruce an expensive casket, he loaned him a car to run errands in. Bruce wanted to despise him for his profession and his careful talk, but he couldn’t despise him. He was too genuinely helpful.

  While he was talking in the office a woman came into the hushed parlor, and through the door, in a tearful whisper, asked if she could see Mr. Mason, asking as if she expected not to be allowed to. She looked at Bruce once, then ignored him, but as she was starting down the hall she turned to look again, stared steadily with an anguished pucker between her eyes. Her face was vaguely familiar.

  “Aren’t you,” she said, coming back a few steps. “You aren’t ... Bruce?”

  “Yes.”

  In an instant she was in his arms, hanging onto him, sobbing, her ravaged and repaired face close to his, crying out that it was terrible, oh my God it was terrible, why did he do it, why did he ever get mixed up with that woman, oh my God she couldn’t believe it. She would have come to him, she would have left her family and everything else, and had told him so, but not while Elsa was alive, she wouldn’t have hurt Elsa for anything in the world, but she could have kept him from that woman, and my God, Bruce, she wished she had, she wished she had.

  Leaning back a little, Bruce said yes, and no, and yes. She mustn’t take it so hard, there was nothing anyone could do now, nobody was to blame.

  She clung to him for a little while, got control of her babbling and her tears, wiped her eyes, blew her nose, looked at him yearningly, and finally went down the hall, and he never did find out who she was or where he had known her or what connection there had ever been between her and his father.

  Next there was the insurance man, Hammond. He too shook Bruce’s hand, asked him about his studies, wanted to know where he was going to hang up his shingle. He too kept his face closed and his mouth discreet, looked up the policy and found that sixty dollars had been borrowed on it. That would have to be deducted from the claim.

  “I got Harry this policy after he got sick a couple years ago,” he said. “Pretty hard to get it through the office. He wasn’t well, he wasn’t well at all. Had some kind of stroke, blood pressure way up.”

  He filled in blanks and asked questions, shook his head as he waited for the ink to dry. Words of condolence, of sympathy, were on the tip of his tongue, and Bruce knew it. The man might even be grieved at Bo Mason’s death. But it was not a death you could talk about. All Hammond could say was “Yes sir, I’ve known Harry for almost fifteen years.” That seemed to express what it was possible to express under the circumstances. He repeated it when he shook Bruce’s hand in farewell and assured him that the policy would come right through, two weeks or so at the most. A graying and not-too-prosperous business man, he stood shaking Bruce’s hand thoughtfully, saying Yes sir, he’d known Harry for fifteen years.

  Not, Bruce thought angrily on his way out, “Yes sir, Harry was a swell guy, one of the best, his death is a loss.” Not that. Not even “Yes sir, Harry and I have been friends for fifteen years.” It took courage to say to the son of a murderer and suicide that you liked him, that he was your friend. It took courage even to talk about the manner of his death. The best you could say was ...

  Damn them, he said, if they can’t say anything good about him why don’t they keep their mouths shut?

  The minister who said the few ritual words in the funeral parlor was obviously embarrassed. He clearly found it difficult to say much over the body of one who had lived and died by violence, and though he was bound to ask God’s grace on this poor sinner, he did it only with half a heart, and spent most of his ten minutes on the afflictions that are visited upon mankind, the trials that come in life, the unhappiness that burdens us from the cradle to the grave. Man is born to sorrow as the sparks fly upward. This little family, for instance, had been grievously stricken. Within three years the mother, the son, and now the father had been struck down. He prayed that God’s mercy would be with them all, and with the young man who survived.

  As he halted on, avoiding direct reference to Bo Mason, making solemn generalities in the solemn padded parlor, talking about a man he had not known, and lamenting for a family he had never heard of until today, Bruce could feel him all the way wanting to make the body of this Bo Mason the subject of a sermon on the wages of sin, holding back because the offices he was conducting prohibited any ill-speaking of the dead; and so, morally indignant and yet unable to speak his mind, limping through his solemn and meaningless ten minutes. As he talked, Bruce’s mind worked in ironic counterpoint:

  This man whom today we consign to the grave, this Harry Mason, was a man whom I and many others have condemned. We have sat in judgment on him, and we have found him guilty of violence, brutality, wilfulness. He was frequently inconsiderate of others, he was obtuse about other people’s wishes. He was a man who never knew himself, who was never satisfied, who was born disliking the present and believing in the future. He was not, by any orthodox standard, a good husband or a good father. He chafed against domestic restraints, ruled by violence instead of love, forced his wife and children to live a life they despised and hated. He broke the law, he blasphemed, he served Mammon, he was completely incapable of anything remotely resembling social responsibility, and with dedicated selfishness he went after the Big Money. He wore out his wife and broke her heart, he destroyed one son and turned the other against him. At the end he degenerated into a broken old man, sponging a bare living and sustaining himself on a last gilded and impossible dream; and when he could no longer bear the indignities which the world heaped upon him, and when the dream broke like a bubble, he sought some way, out of an obscure and passionate compulsion to exonerate himself, to lay the blame onto another, the woman who had been his mistress. He shot her and then turned the gun upon himself, thus ending his life appropriately and fittingly, in violence. God may have mercy on this Harry Mason, but he may also wreak justice. God’s will be done.

  Yet this Harry Mason, violent and brutal and unthinking, this law-breaker and blasphemer, kept for over a quarter of a century the love of as good a woman as ever walked, my mother, and when he appeared to abandon her just before her death, he did so because the prospect of her death was intolerable to him, because in spite of his bullying and self-willed spirit he loved and cherished her, and he knew that the best of himself would die when she died.

  This same father who broke the spirit and spoiled
the chances of his older son took a very great pride in that son’s exploits, had dreams for him as golden as his dreams for himself, shook with nightmares for months after that son died. This same father who turned his second son into an animate cold hatred carried a photograph of that son in his wallet to the morning of his death. This same selfish fortune-hunter was so little cold and calculating that in his last years he was a sucker for the really calculating, the women and promoters who drained off his money and left him sick and broke in a second-rate hotel. This Harry Mason, this anti-social monster, could be nobly generous on occasion, could be affectionate, could weep like a child.

  It is of that child that we should be talking and thinking while we sit here in judgment over the body of Harry Mason, that child with a quick mind and talented hands, a child off on the wrong foot and unable to see that he was wrong, a child with tremendous self-reliance and tremendous energy and a tremendous drive toward the things that seemed to him good. If he went wrong, he was mistaken, not vicious; or if vicious, his viciousness was merely the product of the balking of his will. And let us remember that at the end he did not run or try to hide from himself, he saw himself for a little while honestly, and only the last minute of rage which led him to kill the woman too prevented his death from being a thing almost humble. As it was, he saw near at hand two people who had wronged and betrayed and disgraced him, and as his last act he killed them both.

  Harry Mason was a child and a man. Whatever he did, any time, he was a completely masculine being, and almost always he was a child, even in his rages. In an earlier time, under other circumstances, he might have become something the nation would have elected to honor, but he would have been no different. He would always have been an undeveloped human being, an immature social animal, and the further the nation goes the less room there is for that kind of man. Harry Mason lived with the woman who was my mother, and whom I honor for her kindness and gentleness and courage and wisdom. But I tell you at his funeral, and in spite of the hatred I have had for him for many years, that he was more talented and more versatile and more energetic than she. Refine her qualities and you would get saintliness, but never greatness. His qualities were the raw material for a notable man. Though I have hated him, and though I neither honor nor respect him now, I can not deny him that.

  Into the grave. Into lot 6, block 37, beside Elsa Mason and Chester Mason, and let the bodies of the united family unite more intimately in the deep earth than they ever did in life. There is the makings of a man in that family, and more of it than I ever thought will have to come out of the tissues of my father.

  The preacher stopped. Bruce had not heard him for several minutes. Now he saw him fold his hands and bend his head. From the pews behind, where a sprinkling of acquaintances, nondescript pall-bearers recruited from his father’s old intimates, banker and broker and bootlegger and pimp, sat and listened to the preacher’s words, there came a light sniffle. The attendants came to the edge of the curtains and stood ready. The minister finished his short prayer, the chapel organ began to cough and mourn. Dry-eyed, Bruce stood up and stepped three steps forward to where the coffin lay open. He had not yet brought himself to look at his father’s body.

  The heavy square hands were crossed on the neatly-pressed coat-front. The thinning hair was brushed back, and the right temple, where the bullet had entered, was so smoothly patched with wax that only a knowing eye could have detected it. The mouth was gentle, almost humorously curved; the jaw was blunt and strong. Whatever violence had been in the face had been erased.

  But what he noticed most strongly, before the attendants stepped forward and lowered the lid of the casket, was the enormous, powerful arch of his father’s chest, and the width of the shoulders in the satin-lined box.

  As he followed the handful of people out through the entrance into the sun of the court, he could feel no grief for his father, nor for his mother and brother whose graves were grassy beside the new raw hole at the cemetery. He could think only of the brightness of the sun, an excessive sparkling brightness, as if there were some meaning in it, or a blessing, and he saw the sweep of the spring-green slopes up to the worn peaks above Dry Canyon. His past was upon him, the feeling he had had two or three times that he bore his whole family’s history in his own mind, and he remembered the time when he had gone with his mother and father on a picnic to the Bearpaw Mountains, the wonder and delight of his childhood, and the shadow behind it of the things that his mind had caught from infancy, from other times, from some dim remoteness that gave up its meaning slowly and incompletely. He remembered the great snake his father had killed by the roadside, and the gopher that had come slimy and stretched from the snake’s mouth, and the feeling he had had then was like the feeling he had now: it was a good thing to have been along and seen, a thing to be remembered and told about, a thing that he and his father shared.

  Perhaps that was what it meant, all of it. It was good to have been along and to have shared it. There were things he had learned that could not be taken away from him. Perhaps it took several generations to make a man, perhaps it took several combinations and re-creations of his mother’s gentleness and resilience, his father’s enormous energy and appetite for the new, a subtle blending of masculine and feminine, selfish and selfless, stubborn and yielding, before a proper man could be fashioned.

  He was the only one left to fulfill that contract and try to justify the labor and the harshness and the mistakes of his parents’ lives, and that responsibility was so clearly his, was so great an obligation, that it made unimportant and unreal the sight of the motley collection of pall-bearers staggering under the weight of his father’s body, and the back door of the hearse closing quietly upon the casket and the flowers.

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  More Penguin books by Wallace Stegner, “one of our greatest contemporary writers”—The Washington Post

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  The sequel to the National Book Award—winning The Spectator Bird finds Joe Allston and his wife
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  Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece—the story of a century in the life of an American family and of America itself. “Reading it is an experience to be treasured.”—The Boston Globe ISBN 0-14-016930-X

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  □ THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN

  Stegner portrays more than thirty years in the life of the Mason family in this harrowing saga of people trying to survive during the lean years of the early twentieth century. “Stands out beautifully and unforgettably”—The New Yorker ISBN 0-14-013939-7

  □ COLLECTED STORIES OF WALLACE STEGNER

  Thirty-one stories, written over half a century, demonstrate why Stegner is acclaimed as one of America’s master storytellers. “The reader ... is immediately reminded of an essential America ... a distinct place, a unique people, a common history, and a shared heritage remembered as only Stegner can.”—Los Angeles Times ISBN 0-14-014774-8