The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  Too furious to think, she went and sat on her bed upstairs, stooped to run icy hands through the mass of her hair. Quite suddenly, not knowing she was going to do it, she began to cry.

  He appeared so suddenly that there was no way to avoid him. It was eight o‘clock. She had finished the supper dishes and was sweeping the kitchen, aware of the pipe smell from the parlor where Karl was reading, aware dimly that it had started to drizzle outside, and that she ought to shut the kitchen door. But she finished sweeping first, stooping with the dustpan, and when she rose he was in the doorway, rain dripping from the curled brim of his derby and the shoulders of his coat dark with wet.

  For a moment she confronted him, dustpan in hand, as if he had been a burglar. He leaned against the jamb and said nothing, but his eyes were steady and his face serious. There was no trace around his mouth of the toughness she had seen that afternoon. She looked for it in the instant she faced him, but it was his nice face she saw, the smooth skin dark and healthy looking, the jaw square, the gray eyes lighted with somber warmth. She dropped her eyes to his hand, the hand that had been a brutal fist that afternoon, hooked in his lapel: a square brown hand with long square-ended fingers, a strong, heavy wrist.

  With a twist of his body he straightened away from the jamb. “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello,” she said. She stepped to the door, brushing him as she went by, and dumped the dustpan in the can, came back and shut the door, folded the tablecloth and put it away.

  “I thought I’d better come over,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “I thought maybe I ought to do a little explaining.”

  “Is there anything to explain?”

  “There’s plenty to explain. You saw me hit that guy.”

  She faced him then, furiously. “Yes, I saw you hit him! I saw you hit him when he wasn’t fighting back and was begging you not to.”

  Annoyance brushed his face, was smoothed away again. His voice was quiet, as if he were maintaining his patience and explaining something to a child. “There’s only one way you can treat those guys,” he said.

  “He said he’d pay you back for whatever it was he did.”

  “Sure. Sure he’d pay me back, long as I had him. And you know what he’d do? Next place he went into he’d slug some other machine. Guys like that will go on slugging machines till someone shows them it isn’t healthy.”

  “I suppose you did it just to teach him a lesson!”

  Bo flushed. Leaning against the door, he breathed through his nose, pressing his lips together. She couldn’t keep her temper now; she had to tell him what she thought of him. “What if he did slug a machine?” she said. “It’s a gambling thing, isn’t it?”

  “Sort of.”

  She took her hands from her apron pockets, shoved them back in again hard because she couldn’t keep them from shaking. “Remember what you told me at the carnival?” she said. “Remember what you said about it was all right to take advantage of a gambling game because any game like that was crooked? Any gambling game is crooked. Jud said so himself. What that tramp did was just what you and Jud did when you both threw at once.”

  “It isn’t the same,” Bo said. “It isn’t anything like the same.”

  “I don’t see any difference. You bullied the man at the carnival when he objected. What if the tramp had bullied you the same way?”

  “He’d have got his head knocked off.”

  “He did anyway.” Elsa opened her hands inside her pockets. They were sweating in the palms.

  “I explained to you,” Bo said. “You let these guys get away with things like that and they’ll cheat everybody up and down the line.”

  She couldn’t see him any more because her eyes were blurry. “That was the most brutal thing I ever saw,” she said.

  He did not speak for a moment, but when he did his voice was rougher. “You shouldn’t have been around there,” he said. “That’s a man’s place. It’s no place for a woman.”

  She looked at him, almost stammering. “Excuse me,” she said. “I didn’t know the sidewalks were some place I shouldn’t go. But I suppose you have to have them clear so you can beat somebody up every once in a while!”

  “Listen, Elsa ...”

  “Listen nothing! I thought you were big and strong and fine, and now I find out that all you use your strength for is to hit people who beg you not to. If you’d shown any mercy at all, the least bit of pity ...”

  “Just because I sock a damn tinhorn that slugs my machine, I’m that bad.”

  “You’re worse.”

  He laughed, the short, choppy, contemptuous sound that meant he was disgusted. “All right,” he said briefly. “That’s the way you feel about it.” He pulled down his derby and ducked out into the drizzle.

  Very slowly the fury drained out of her. Weakness wobbled her knees. She sat down at the table and bit her knuckles and stared at the wall. After a while she picked up the lamp and made her way through the parlor past Karl, who looked up with a discreet question in his eyes that she ignored.

  7

  Helm stood spraddle-legged, resting her weight evenly on both feet before the kitchen table she was using for an ironing board. The room was full of the smell of steam and starch. Helm’s great bare arm, solid as a sawlog, moved with weight and authority back and forth, and her tongue moved just as heavily, just as authorita tively, with the same kind of bludgeoning dislike.

  “Now this,” she said, “is the shirt of Mr. Gerald Witwer, the druggist. Look at it. French flannel, fine enough to wrap a baby in. Summer times he wears silk and madras. His old lady never sends his underwear, and there are only two possible reasons why. Either she don’t want to give away that he wears silk panties, or he can’t hang onto himself and she’s ashamed to send them with the wash. I don’t know which choice I’d rather take. Maybe both.”

  She finished the shirt and folded it onto the pile in the basket. “Sometimes.” she said, “I think I’d rather sit out in front of Bo’s poolhall with a patch over my eye and a tincup strapped on my leg than wash the dirt out of clothes for people like them. Even when they’re clean, those clothes are dirty. There’s some kinds of hypocritical dirt you can’t get out.”

  Elsa was only half listening. She sat by the window looking out, thinking that fall wasn’t the pleasant season here that it was at home. There weren’t any trees to change, for one thing. The land just got brown and then gray, and one night it froze, and then it rained, and froze again so that the roads were ridged with hardened tracks, and every change from summer to winter made the place look more desolate than it had before. And the wind blew interminably, holding you back, hustling you along, sweeping at you from around corners. You weren’t free of it even inside, for it whined in the eavespouts and slammed doors and eddied down the chimney and made the stove smoke. It kept you tense all the time...

  The realization that Helm had stopped speaking made her look up, Helm was watching her, smiling with her blackened teeth, her eyes soft and shining. “Honey,” Helm said, “ain’t you made it up with Bo yet?”

  Elsa shook her head.

  “Ain’t you going to?”

  Elsa shook her head again.

  “It isn’t like you to hold a grudge,” Helm said.

  “It isn’t a grudge!” Elsa said. “I just can’t like him after what he did.”

  “Well, what did he do?” Helm said. “He knocked down a tramp that had slugged a slot machine. That isn’t anything to break your heart over, honey. If you try to find a man that never knocked another man down you’re going to be left with nothing but guys like Gerald Witwer to pick from. I’d rather have one that could knock somebody else down, even if he had to do it once in a while to keep in practice.”

  “He did it in cold blood,” Elsa said stubbornly. “That was what ...”

  “Bo hasn’t got a drop of cold blood in him,” Helm said. “Tell me he’s got too wild a temper and gets disgusted too quick and despises people if they’r
e clumsy or puny or hypocritical, but don’t tell me he’s cold blooded.”

  “He was that day. I saw him.”

  Helm released the catch and dropped a sadiron onto the stove, picked up another, upended it, spat on the smooth bottom. “Well, it sure hasn’t helped your disposition, either one of you,” she said. “You mope around like you didn’t care whether you lit butter-side up or down, and Bo goes snarling around the place like a dog that’s been kicked around too much and is going to bite the next guy tries it. Why don’t you call it quits and give your friends a rest?”

  “I’m sorry,” Elsa said, and rose. “I don’t want to be grumpy and bad company. It’s the darned weather. I never saw weather stay so gray and disagreeable. I never could be cheerful in bad weather.”

  “Honey,” the big woman said, “you’re talking right through the top of your hat.”

  But Helm didn’t know everything, Elsa thought on the way home. She hadn’t seen Bo hit that man. Besides, Helm, for all her big heart, was used to rough men. She thought a man ought to be rough. But he oughtn’t. A man could be strong and full of courage and still be generous and kind.

  But what on earth shall I do? she said, and looked with distaste at the weedy vacant lot she was passing. While she had been dreaming her idiotic dreams about Bo Mason, Hardanger had been a vivid and exciting place, but now that those were put away it was a dreary little village on the desolate flats. And the only people she knew in it were in some way tied up with Bo. The Witwers and the Schantzes and the more “respectable” part of town kept to itself; there wasn’t a friend to make the place bearable except those friends who were also friends of Bo‘s, and she never went to Helm’s any more without dreading to find him there.

  She heard the train whistle forlornly as she turned in at Karl’s house. She felt as lonely as the train sounded, but inside the hall she took off her coat almost angrily. What she needed was work; if she didn’t do something she’d be pitying herself until she blub bered.

  When she went to the kitchen and started in she found the four mallards on the table. There was no note with them, but she knew instantly who had brought them. Karl never went hunting. Neither did Jud. There was only one other person who would have left them.

  Well, she thought, if he thinks he can wheedle me out of it that way! But that was the second thing that came into her mind. The first was pleasure: the very sight of the ducks lying there, and the instant recognition of their giver, was a pure warm pleasure.

  Three days later, when she opened the front door to sweep the first dry snow of the year off the porch, there were four more ducks hanging on the doorknob. They had not been there more than a few minutes, for their webbed feet were barely stiff, and the bodies of the ducks when she plucked them were still faintly warm. The tracks that led to and from the porch were large tracks, the imprints corrugated like the rubber sole of a wader boot.

  Karl raised his eyebrows when he saw her plucking the second batch of birds. But she gave him no explanation. There wasn’t any explanation she could give him. She told herself that she was not softening one bit, that he could go on leaving ducks as long as he chose and she would not change her mind about him. Still, she looked at both front and kitchen door every morning to see if anything else was there. On the Sunday following the first mallards there was a great Canada goose.

  “Don’t you think we ought to have company for supper?” Karl said. “It this buck Indian or whoever he is keeps leaving game in front of the wigwam we ought at least to let him come and eat some of it, hadn’t we?”

  Elsa was on the point of saying yes, and letting her anger and her dislike evaporate, but when she looked up into Karl’s little knowing round blue eyes she shook her head. “I’d rather not, Uncle Karl.”

  He shrugged and let it go, and after he had left for the store she wondered if Bo had put him up to that question. It would be just like him, and then he could come swaggering in, on her invitation. If she made the first move then his pride would be saved. But the first move had already been made, she reminded herself, and he had made it.

  Oh, I don’t know! she said in vexation, and stormed through the house doing her housework as if every pillow were a face to be slapped. He did hit that man in cold blood, she said, but she couldn’t fix the image of the sprawling body and the bloody mouth as definitely as she would have liked. Bo’s eyes kept coming in over it, gray and steady and somberly warm, and once during the morning she found herself mentally moulding the blunt angle of his jaw, almost as if she were running her fingers along it.

  The postoffice was at the far end of town, a frame shanty with a wall of boxes and a stamp window. Within the past two weeks the winter stove had been set up in the center of the room and a great pile of lignite dumped against the back wall outside. There were almost always two or three men sitting around on the bench, because on these cold days the postoffice was snug.

  Elsa found herself anticipating that hot, tobacco-smelling cubbyhole as she walked through the light snow. Even the few blocks’ walk from Karl’s house could redden her nose and whiten her breath these days. She walked fast, noticing that all the houses were banked with dirt or had tarpaper tacked along the foundations; the smokes from all the chimneys had a warm, intimate look, and the town seemed friendlier now that its ugly weed grown lots were covered with snow. There were stubby icicles hanging from the eaves of the postoffice.

  She was not thinking about Bo at all when she opened the door and stepped in. If she had been, she might have been better prepared. As it was, she stopped dead still just inside the door, with her hand still on the knob.

  “Morning,” he said.

  A swift look showed her no one else in the room except old Mr. Blake, puttering in the room behind the window.

  “Hello,” she said briefly, and went to Karl’s box. He was right behind her; she felt his presence with a kind of stage fright.

  “Look,” he said. She took the one white envelope from the box, her mind automatically registering that it was from Indian Falls, in her father’s spidery, old-world hand, and with the letter held helplessly in her fingers, she looked. His eyes were so sober, so warm, so compelling, that she was confused. She ought to walk right on out, bid him good morning and open the door ...

  “Call it quits?” Bo said.

  “I ...” Her confusion deepened. He was too direct and blunt. She fought the blood back from her face.

  “I’ll apologize,” he said. “I’ll admit I was wrong, if that’s what you want.”

  “That wouldn’t make it good to the poor man you hit,” she said.

  “I already made that good.”

  “You did?”

  “As much as I could. I took him in and fed him and gave him money to get out of town.”

  “When?”

  “Right after I saw you down there, right after it happened.”

  “But you didn’t tell me,” she said.

  “You never gave me a chance.”

  “I ...” Elsa said again.

  “I still think there’s only one way to treat a tinhorn,” Bo said, “but after the way you looked I got worrying about him and went put and brought him in. I guess maybe I was already mad when I spotted him. Karl had been giving me the currycomb for a half hour.”

  “What about?” she said curiously. She couldn’t imagine Karl doing anything of the kind.

  “You.”

  “Me!”

  “You,” Bo said. “He’d got a letter from your father telling him to get you out of my clutches.”

  “Oh!” Elsa said furiously. She turned half away from his intent stare. The letter in her fingers was like a match held too long. She looked at it, wanting to drop it as she would have dropped the match before it burned her, but she did not drop it. When she looked up Bo was looking at it too.

  “That another one from him?” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Kind of upset, isn’t he?” he said, and laughed. In spite of her rage, she had to l
augh with him.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “I could ...”

  “He made me a little mad myself,” Bo said. “I guess I took it out on that bum. Shall we call it quits?”

  Elsa looked into his face, dark and square, a little curl of smile at the corners of his mouth, his eyes smoky and glowing. “All right,” she said. “I ...” She shook her head. “Everything is such a mess,” she said.

  Bo held up his hand, and she saw that he too had a letter. He was grinning. “Between your family and mine,” he said, “we’ve got a nice combination.”

  “Your family?” she said. “I didn’t know you ever heard from your family.” She craned to read the return address in the corner of the envelope: Hattie Mason, Black Hawk, Illinois.

  “My sister’s the only one ever writes. I don’t even know where any of them are now, except her and Ma.”

  “Are they ... well?” Elsa said. It was a silly thing to say, but she didn’t want him to stop talking about them.

  “They must be, the way their appetites hold out.”

  “You mean you support them?”

  “No. They pull the hard luck story out of the bag about half a dozen times a year, and I send them something.”

  “I shouldn’t think they’d have the nerve, after the way they treated you.”

  He was amused. “They treated me all right. Where’d you get that idea?”

  “But you ran away from home.”

  “I ran away from the old man,” Bo said. “He’s been dead for ten years.”

  “Oh.” She couldn’t think of anything else to ask him, and they stood in the room’s heat looking at each other. Mr. Blake stuck his gray head through the window, looked around, pulled it back in with a slow munching of toothless jaws. Bo put out a hand and touched her fur collar. “Thanks,” he said. “You’re a sport. I haven’t felt as good as this for two weeks. That feud was getting my goat.”