The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  “Me too,” she said, and blushed.

  “Where you headed?”

  “I was going over to Helm’s and give her a loaf of fresh bread,” she said, and lifted the newspaper-wrapped parcel under her arm.

  “I got something to show you.” He regarded her abstractedly, his tongue in the corner of his mouth. “You run on over, and I’ll bust past the hotel and get it and see you at Helm’s. How’s that?”

  “Good.” She smiled at him, couldn’t keep the smile from breaking into a laugh. “I’m so glad we’ve quit fighting!” she said, and started back along the sidewalk. She had gone only a dozen steps when her hat was knocked over her eye by a large soft snowball.

  “One down, one cigar,” Bo said as she turned. He was stooping for another handful. “Where you want this one?”

  “Quit it.” She shielded herself with the bundle of bread. The second snowball plastered itself against the newspapers, and she started for him. Instead of running, as she had expected him to, he grabbed a handful of snow and before she knew where she was had washed her face with it. “Keeps your complexion pretty,” he said.

  Sputtering, she grabbed snow and scuffled with him in the street. Mr. Blake came to the door of the postoffice and stood watching. “Hey,” he said mildly. “What goes on, what goes on?”

  Bo crunched a snowball within three inches of Mr. Blake’s head and Mr. Blake retreated. Elsa, stooping, caught Bo off guard with a double handful of snow, wiped it around his face, grabbed her bread by the string, and ran. The snow melted on her face, and she wiped it off, looking back to make sure that Bo was not after her again. He stood beside the postoffice in a burly black dogskin coat, his teeth white in his dark face, and waved.

  “Well,” Helm said when she came in. “Roses in the cheeks.”

  “That big ape of a Bo,” Elsa said. “He ...”

  She stopped, seeing Helm’s smirk. “That explains everything,” Helm said. “Don’t bother to go on.”

  “He washed my face with snow!” Elsa said. “It isn’t anything like you think.”

  “Don’t bother explaining,” Helm said. “He washed your face, and you’re still mad. I could tell by the way you look you wouldn’t speak to him on a bet.”

  “Oh, go to grass,” Elsa said. “I brought you some bread. In a minute I’ll wish I hadn’t.”

  Still grinning, Helm waddled into the kitchen to put the bread away. When she came back Elsa said, “I didn’t know he was sending money back to his family.”

  “Is he?”

  “Every once in a while. They write and ask him for money and he sends it.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, only I wish I’d known it before. I think it’s nice of him.”

  “Oh, he’s cold blooded that way,” Helm said. “Just sends money home as calmly as if he was cutting somebody’s throat.”

  “Well, why didn’t you tell me?” Elsa said. “You let me just go on ...”

  “Couldn’t anybody tell you anything, last couple weeks,” Helm said.

  There was a stamping on the porch and Bo came in in his dogskin coat, looking as immense as a bear. He was whistling a bar of the rube ballad they had heard at the carnival. He made a pass at Helm and she lifted her great white arm.

  “Feeling pretty horsy, ain’t you?” she said.

  “Isn’t anything particularly wrong, is there?” he said.

  “What’s so right?” Helm said.

  “Well, the Svenske flika has called off her dogs,” Bo said. His mouth drew down as he looked at Elsa. “Then again,” he said, “Jud and me just sold three thousand bushel of flax up twenty-seven cents from where we bought it.”

  “My goodness,” Elsa said. “That’s a lot of money.”

  “Chicken feed,” Bo said. “Wait till we get going.”

  He was so pleased with himself and the world that he couldn’t keep still. He sparred with two of Helm’s boys in the kitchen, captured the pup and rolled him over to scratch his chest until the automatic hind leg was pumping, jumped up from that to go to his coat, thrown over the dining table, and bring out a package. “Forgot what I was going to show you,” he said. “How do you like this?”

  It was a silver shaving mug, ornately carved and moulded, with a grapevine curling around the rolled brim and three heavy clusters of metal grapes hanging down from the vine. In the unorna mented metal on the side was engraved

  Champion of North Dakota

  Singles Traps

  Harry Mason, 1905

  “It’s lovely,” Elsa said, when she had looked it over. “I didn’t know they gave you a cup too.” She handed it back, but he put his hands behind him.

  “Keep your property.”

  “What?”

  “It’s yours. Don’t you spik the English?”

  “Take it, for God sakes,” Helm said, “before you make him cry.”

  Bo scowled at her. “Seems to me there’s an awful lot of low class people around here,” he said. “How about going for a walk?”

  Helm stood with her hands on her hips and watched them get into their coats. She shook her head. “By God, it must be love,” she said.

  His hand under her elbow, Bo steered her down the beaten path in the snow. “Let’s go out on the flats,” he said. “I’ve been inside so much lately I need to get some wind through me.”

  She lifted her skirts and plunged with him, up to her shoetops in snow. The minute they were outside he had seemed to grow somber, and he said nothing all the way out past the last straggling shacks and into the open fields. The silence began to weigh on Elsa.

  “Isn’t Helm a funny old thing?” she said.

  His head turned, his eyes met hers briefly. Then they looked away, ahead, anywhere, across the even white plain. Their feet found ripple-marked crust over a drift that almost held their weight, but not quite, and they staggered through it awkwardly.

  “Funny?” he said.

  “She says such funny things,” Elsa said.

  “She isn’t as silly as she sounds,” Bo said.

  They were walking across the waves of a plowed field, ribbed brown and white. A yellow cat, tender-footed, delicate, obviously disgusted at the feel of snow under its pads, obviously out of place and irritated at whatever errand took it out into the fields on such a day, crossed in front of them, stopped with a lifted forefoot, opened its mouth in a soundless mew, went delicately forward again. Bo pegged a snowball at it and it flattened against the frozen furrow. Another, and it forgot its sensitiveness and leaped across the field in great muscular wild-animal bounds.

  “What on earth would a cat be doing out here?” Elsa said.

  His look was sober and intent, packed with some concentrated meaning she couldn’t read. “I feel about as out of place as the cat,” he said.

  “Why?”

  He stopped and faced her. “I want to ask you something.”

  Over his dogskin shoulder she saw the steely sky, misted, wintry, and back of him, spreading on all sides, the flat and wintry plain, spare yellow grass poking up in places swept clean by the wind, the surface irregular with miniature mounds tailed by flat cones of drift. She couldn’t lift her eyes until he took her by the elbows. His hands were as rough as his voice.

  “How about it?” he said.

  “How about what?” she said, refusing to let herself know what he meant.

  “How about marrying me?”

  Her face cold in the wind, her mind stopped by the enormity of what was happening, she looked up at him. His face was paler than she had ever seen it, and there was no foolery in it. She nodded.

  He moved so suddenly to kiss her that her feet tripped in the scored field and he fell against her awkwardly. They sprawled together. Instantly the constraint was gone; their laughter shouted into the wind, and they sat kissing exuberantly with cold lips in the middle of the waste of snow.

  She held him away to look at him, noticing the subtle mingling of light and dark coloring in the pupil
s of his eyes, and the curving firmness of his mouth. Her shoulders drew up in an uncontrollable shiver. “You’ve got a nice mouth,” she said, tracing it with her finger. “A nice mouth and dappled eyes.”

  It seemed that afternoon, when lunch was over and they had told Karl and had decided to be married right after New Year, and Karl had gone back to the store and left them alone to plan things, that all the trouble with Sarah, her father, Indian Falls, all the sense of uprooting and homelessness and the multiple problems that had invaded her life, were swept backward out of her mind like straw from a thresher spout, and her world was clean and new and spotless, to be made into what she would.

  Bo told her that he was going to sell the poolhall. It didn’t make enough money to satisfy him. Bill Conzett had offered him a price —not high enough, but it might be better to take it and get that money for speculating in grain. And there was the hotel in Grand Forks that he and Jud had been looking over. With that, plus the annual pickings they could make on grain, they ought to make a pile. He would build her a house in Grand Forks as soon as things got rolling good, and meantime, if the hotel deal went through, there was always a place to live.

  She lay with his arm around her, thinking of that house they would build, of the lawn she would plant and the trees that would make it pleasant on warm afternoons in summer, and the roses over the trellis in front and the hollyhocks high against a whitewashed back fence, and the grape arbor....

  “Oh goodness!” she said, and sat up suddenly. “I forgot all about that letter from Pa!”

  She knew what would be in it, how much his world was set against the kind of world he thought she was getting into, and she was grateful when she opened it and saw that it was in Norwegian. Bo, looking over her shoulder, couldn’t read it. All he could do was snort at the spidery hand and the unfamiliar tangle of letters. Outside the wind had risen, and pebbly snow lashed at the storm windows. Bo leaned further to see the cranky letters. “Hen tracks,” he said. “What’s he say?”

  “He ... doesn’t think you’re the right sort of man for me to be going around with,” Elsa said. Her laugh was a little shrill, and she cut it off sharply. “He says anyone with a name like Bo is probably suspicious from the beginning, and Karl told him you ran a bowling alley. He doesn’t want me to get mixed up with any rough crowd of people. Uncle Karl ought to take more care what people I know.”

  “Careful of you, isn’t he?” Bo said.

  “That isn’t all,” she said. “Listen. ‘From what Karl says I do not judge this Mason the proper sort of man for you to marry. If you insist you will be going against my wishes. At the very least I hope you will bring him back here for a visit before you do anything rash.’ ”

  Bo was fiddling with her hand, bending the thumb, releasing it. He looked up from under his upcurved eyebrows. “What’s that mean? Do we take a trip to Minnesota to get looked over?”

  Elsa compressed her lips. If she didn’t do as she pleased now, she would never have the right of making her own decisions. “No,” she said flatly. “He hasn’t any right to have a say in my affairs. We’ll go right ahead and let him lump it.”

  “That’ll mean he’ll disown you, or something else nice and high-minded.”

  “Maybe.”

  He snorted. He strode to the door and threw it open. The wind whipped snow in level, driving lines across his body and through the hall. “Go!” he said, pointing with a stiff finger. “Never darken my door again!”

  Elsa laughed and bit her lip. “Shut the door,” she said. “You’ll have the hall full of snow.”

  “ ‘Tis kind of blowing, at that,” he said. He shut the door and came back to nuzzle in her hair. “Does it matter much?” he said.

  “It’s just exactly what happened to him,” she said. “He was not good enough for Mother, her folks thought, and they threw her out because she insisted on marrying him. Now he acts the same way they did.”

  “I’m perfectly willing to go see him.”

  “No,” she said. “He never asked any of us when he was going to marry Sarah.”

  “So it’s all set,” Bo said. “New Year’s day.”

  She nodded, and his eyes crinkled in the full-lidded smile that hardly moved his lips. “Any idea how good that makes me feel?”

  “No,” she said. “Tell me.”

  “Makes me feel as if I could settle down,” Bo said. “Seems to me I’ve been on the move ever since I can remember. We’ll find some good proposition and dowel ourselves in and keep our nose to the grindstone and make a pile.”

  Later he said he ought to run down to the poolhall and make sure everything was jake. He’d be back for supper if she’d let him. She kissed him long and hard at the door, clenching her fingers in the hairy coat, begrudging even the hour or so he would be gone.

  But he was not gone an hour. He had barely ducked into the wind, which now blew with heavy, gusty force, and she had barely settled down to look at her father’s letter again, when he was back, stamping the snow off his feet, his nose red and leaking, his coat stiff with driven snow.

  “This is going to be a buster,” he said. “You can’t see ten feet. The old poolhall can get along by itself. Getting cold as all billy hell, too.”

  “Can Uncle Karl get home, do you suppose?”

  “He’s a sucker if he tries it.”

  “Maybe we ought to get fixed,” she said. “If it’s going to be a bad storm.”

  “That’s why I came back,” he said. “We might be marooned three days if this keeps on.”

  He shouldered his way out the kitchen door with coal scuttle and bucket. It was five minutes before he came back. “By God,” he said, and wiped the frozen clot from below his nose with a quick side glance of shame. “I got lost between here and the coal shed. This is an old ring-tailed roarer, let me tell you.”

  He dumped the buckets in the box and went out again, and a third time. When the box was full he brought in another load and filled the kitchen range and the heater, went out still once more for a last pair of buckets. Then he sat down in a kitchen chair and hung out his tongue with mock exhaustion, wiping the melting snow off his forehead with the back of his hand. His laugh filled the warm kitchen.

  “How about some supper, wife?” he said.

  They got into aprons and played housekeeping. It was six thirty by the time they had finished eating, and still Karl had not come. Elsa kept holding up her hand to listen for sounds. There was never anything but the pounding of the wind and the restless fluttering of the stove.

  “Quit worrying,” Bo said. “Karl’s too wise a bird to start out in this. He’ll stay snug in the store till it stops.”

  He was laughing, warm-eyed, the corners of his lips twitching with mirth. His big hands lay on the edge of the table before him.

  “That isn’t all I’m worrying about.”

  He leaned across the table to kiss her. “What else?”

  She forced herself to meet his eyes. “If he doesn’t come home, we’ll be here together all night.”

  He laughed aloud. “Why not? We’re going to be married pretty soon. And nobody can talk if people get marooned in a blizzard. It happens all the time.”

  He came around to her, put his hands under her chin, bent over her from behind. “It’s been just like we’ve been married ever since this morning,” he said. “Why should we worry if it keeps on?”

  She shook herself loose and stood up, her chest tight and her face wrinkled as if with a pain. “Don’t blame me,” she said. “I ... things come so fast, somehow. I seem to change my ideas about things from one day to the next.” She put her hand on his arm. “It seems all right to me, now,” she said. “Honestly it does. But can’t you see what it would mean? After that letter from Pa, and the way he thinks you’re not the right sort, for some reason? We’d just be giving him and people like him a chance to talk and say I told you so.”

  “I could slide out,” Bo said. “When the storm started to let up I could vanish.”

/>   “Would you want me to be like Eva?” she said. “Do you want to be like Jud?”

  For a moment he watched her face. Then he shrugged. “All right. But what if we can’t help being cooped up here?”

  “I don’t know,” she said helplessly.

  His laugh chopped out, a short, mirthless recognition of the irony of what he had to do. “If I get my directions crossed and come back feet first you’ll wish you’d been a little more tender-hearted,” he said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Go get Karl, what’d you think?”

  “Bo, you can‘t! You’d get lost, or frozen stiff.”

  “Probably will,” he said amiably. “Got any rope around here?”

  While she hung on his arm crying that he was insane, that he wouldn’t get to the corner, that she never meant he should go out into the blizzard, she didn’t know what she meant, he towed her around the kitchen poking into cupboards and drawers for rope. He was as stubborn as a mule. He was an idiot. He would die in the storm, and then how would she feel?

  With a length of clothes line in his hand he looked at her quizzically. “When you convince me,” he said, “you convince me for good.”

  “There must be some other way. Couldn’t you go over to Conzett’s? That’s closer.” Then her temper let loose. “Anyway, I should think you’d be able to control yourself even if we were marooned.”

  He shook his head with a hanging, mocking grin. “Wouldn’t promise a thing,” he said. “Us undesirable characters can’t be trusted.”

  “All right, then,” she said, and let go of his arm. “Go on out and freeze to death.”

  She even went into the cellar hole and found him twenty feet of rope and a length of picket chain. But when he started out the front door (he had to put his shoulder against it and heave to move the storm door through the accumulated drift) she threw herself against the dogskin coat and clung. “Oh, be careful, Bo! If you can’t find your way don’t try too long.”

  By now, she saw, his stubbornness and recklessness wouldn’t have let him stay even if she had begged him to. He grinned, kissed her, throttled her with an enormous bear hug, put his head down, and ran.