The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  “You know how much a frenna mine got for one silver fox skin?” the whiskey voice was saying as she drew near the door once with the broom as an excuse. “For one, leetle, skin?” The voice was confidential and dramatic. “Four hunnerd dollahs.”

  There were whistles, clickings against the teeth. “Four hunnerd dollahs,” Pinky Jordan said, “an’ he traded it out of a halfbreed for a flannel shirt and a sheath knife. You wanna make your fortune, genlemen, you go on up to God’s country. Flowin‘th milk and honey.”

  It was nearly supper time when Pinky Jordan, drunk on his own eloquence and the uncounted drinks his listeners had poured for him, wobbled out of the lobby. Bo was at his elbow, telling him confidentially that sometimes they got up a little game in the evenings. Be glad to have him drop in. Just a friendly little game, no high stakes, but pleasant. They’d be glad to have him.

  Pinky Jordan nodded owlishly, winked both eyes so that his naked red scalp pulled down over his brows like a loose slipping skullcap. From the desk Elsa watched him in the horizontal light of evening hesitating on the front sidewalk, a little man with a red bald head and a nick out of his right ear as if someone had taken a neat bite from it. Then he started up the walk, kicking at a crumpled piece of paper. Each time he came up behind it, measured his kick, booted it a few feet, and staggered after it to measure and kick again. On the fourth kick he stubbed his toe and fell into the street, and the men who had been looking after him from lobby and sidewalk ran to set him straight again. He jerked his kingly elbows out of their hands and staggered out of sight.

  Pinky Jordan never returned for the poker game, though Bo tried all the next day to locate him around town. But he had done his work. He left behind him a few dollars’ worth of gold dust in a shot glass behind Bo Mason’s bar. He also left behind him a vision of clean wilderness, white rivers and noble mountains, forests full of game and fabulously valuable fur, sand full of glittering grains. And he left in Bo, fretted by hard times and the burden of an unpaid mortgage and the worry and wear of keeping his nose too long to an unprofitable grindstone, a heightened case of that same old wandering itch that had driven him from town to town and job to job since he was fourteen.

  He was born with the itch in his bones, Elsa knew. He was always telling stories of men who had gone over the hills to some new place and found a land of Canaan, made their pile, got to be big men in the communities they fathered. But the Canaans toward which Bo’s feet had turned had not lived up to their promise. People had been before him. The cream, he said, was gone. He should have lived a hundred years earlier.

  Yet he would never quite grant that all the good places were filled up. There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing. He hadn’t found it in Chicago or Milwaukee or Terre Haute or the Wisconsin woods or Dakota; there was no place and no business where you took chances and the chances paid off, where you played, and the play was profitable. Ball playing might have been it, if he had hit the big time, but bad luck had spoiled that chance. But in the Klondike ... the Klondike, Elsa knew as soon as he opened his mouth to say something when Pinky Jordan was gone, was the real thing, the thing he had been looking for for a lifetime.

  “Let me show you,” he said, and brought the shot glass containing Pinky Jordan’s immortal dust. His mind was whitehot with visions, and he vibrated like a harp to his own versions of Pinky’s yarns. There was a place without these scorching summers that fried the meat on your bones; there was a place where banks didn’t close and panics didn’t reach, where they had no rules and regulations a man had to live by. You stood on your own two feet and to hell with the rest of the world. In the Klondike the rivers ran gold and silver fox skins fetched four hundred dollars apiece and the woods were full of them.

  She was not surprised when he proposed selling the hotel and lighting out. It took him only three or four days to arrive at that plan, but she was ready for it.

  “Do you know what time of year it is?” she said.

  His look was suspicious, as if he suspected her of plotting to throw hindrances in his path. “It doesn’t take any astrologer to know it isn’t Christmas,” he said, and ran a finger inside the sweating band of his collar.

  “No,” she said, “but by the time you sell this place, and get to Seattle, and take a boat to Alaska or wherever it is you go, it will be Christmas.”

  His look this time was as heavy as a hand pushing against her. “What of it?”

  “I believe you’d take those two little kids up there right in the dead of winter,” she said.

  “Winter’s the fur season. Jud and I could go out trapping, and you and the kids could stay in town.”

  “Is Jud going?”

  “Sure, if we do. He’s all hot to go.”

  “Eva too.”

  “I suppose.”

  “So you’ve got it all planned,” she said. “It’s nice of you to come and tell me about it.”

  “Don’t you want to go? Do you want to sit around here growing roots in your tail in this damned old hotel all your life?”

  “That isn’t it,” she said. “I’m thinking about the kids.”

  “Yeah,” he said gloomily. “Well, I don’t know. Probably we couldn’t move this joint with a derrick anyway.”

  But circumstances pushed them faster than they would have pushed themselves. Bo had just got her promise that she would go to Alaska in the spring if they could move the hotel during the winter when the police raided them, closed the blind pig, jailed Jud, and missed Bo only because he was out of the hotel at the time and ducked out of town when he heard. Within two weeks of Pinky Jordan’s meteoric passage Elsa and the two children were on their way to Indian Falls, going back ignominiously to the home she had run away from six years before, accepting whatever stiff charity her father’s letter offered.

  It was Bo who wrote in from where he was staying in a soddy with a homesteader and suggested that armistice with Indian Falls. Now it was a cinch they’d have to get out of the hotel, and they’d need all the money they could scrape together for passage in the spring. Couldn’t they stay on her old man’s farm, maybe, and earn their keep helping run the place?

  Elsa made a bitter face and ruffled the bristles in her hairbrush, trying to decide how she ever humbled herself enough for that surrender, how Bo could have suggested it. It was the dream of what they would do in the spring, she supposed, the fire of that optimism melting everything else down until the only important thing was to get to the promised land. She supposed he would have stolen and cheated and lied to get there. When he slipped aboard the train a hundred miles out of Grand Forks and slid into the seat beside her he did not mention where they were going or remark on how mean it was to come sneaking back after defiance and repudiation to accept as charity what you had once refused as your right. All he said, breathing on the glass and rubbing a place clean to see out of, was that by God he’d never been gladder to get out of any place than he was to get out of that hotel.

  The hairbrush slipped from her knees, and her quick jerk to catch it set the blood to throbbing in her arm. Carefully, with a morbid curiosity about what it looked like today, she unwrapped the bandage. The sight of the arm outraged her, and the smell made her wrinkle her nose in disgust. From above her elbow to her fingers the arm was one red piece of butcher’s meat spotted with watery blisters. At the wrist the bandage stuck, and she yanked it loose; blood oozed in beady droplets from the skinned flesh.

  It didn’t feel better with the bandage off. It felt worse. But somewhere she had read that sunshine was good for hurts of any kind, and so every day she exposed it.

  A burn was a nasty kind of injury, she thought, inflamed and disgusting. Once she had been proud of her arms, but when she stretched them out together now, the one hard, round, white, the other a peeled
monstrosity, she grimaced. Maybe it never would look right again. She turned the other arm over, studying its fitness, and saw a slightly chapped spot on the elbow. She must get some cold cream to put on that. She didn’t want elbows like Harriett Conzett‘s, or a goat’s knees. Or Sarah’s. The last time she saw Sarah she had been like a walking waxwork, submerged, buried, slipping into middle age before she had ever been young.

  I’m only twenty-six, Elsa thought. That isn’t old. And maybe now we’ll be all settled down and get a house built sometime and the boys will grow up and go to school. I’ve got at least forty years ahead of me, she thought. It seemed a wonderful and dangerous idea. She contemplated it, shaking her head and smiling, before she got clean bandage and rewrapped her arm and got up to make the children their dinner.

  2

  The boys had been long in bed when she heard Bo’s steps on the path, and rose to pull the curtain closer around their bed and turn up the lamp. She heard the scuff of his soles on the foot scraper. He was always careful about tracking in mud. Then the door swung inward and he came in with a lantern in his hand, a package under the other arm. As he lifted the chimney and blew out the lantern his big body blocked the door.

  “You’re late tonight,” she said. “Any business?”

  “Chicken feed. How’s your arm?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “Been picking at it any more?”

  “Some more skin came off.” At his frown she added defensively, “It just peels off in sheets. I can’t leave it there.”

  “What’d you take the bandage off for?”

  “It feels better.”

  He dumped the package on the table, keeping one hand on it. “You deserve to get blood poison,” he said. “Let the doc take the skin off, if it needs taking off.”

  “I was just sitting out in the sun. It felt so tight I unrolled the bandage, and there was that loose skin, so I just snipped it off.”

  He looked at her and shook his head as if defeated.

  “Have you eaten anything?” she said.

  “I ate before I closed up.”

  “Well, what happened today?” she said, and settled back comfortably on the bed. This was the way it should be. It should be warm and pleasant and homelike like this, with your husband com ihg home from work and everything snug for the night and plenty of time to talk. Only it was a shame he had to work such long hours now that she was laid up. She saw his hand still protective on the package, and his eyes secret and sly. “What have you got there?” she said.

  “Been bargain hunting.”

  “What is it?”

  “Bombs,” he said, and moved the package away from her reaching hand. “I joined the I.W.W.’s.”

  With a quick grab she hooked her fingers in the string. “Let me see!”

  “Look out. It might go off.”

  “Oh, quit your fooling and let me see.”

  He surrendered the parcel and watched her, grinning, while she undid the string. “Save the store-cording,” he said, and she rolled the string into a coil before unwrapping the package. Inside was a set of books in a red marbled binding, with dark red leather on spines and corners. “Complete Works of Shakespeare,” the lettering on the spine said. Uncertainly she opened one and looked inside. It looked expensive.

  “Well?” Bo said.

  “Where on earth did you get them?”

  “Fella came around. Selling bibles mainly, but I didn’t think you’d want a bible.”

  Under her fingers the leather was smooth and cool. “How much?” she said.

  “What does that matter? Do you like them or don’t you?”

  “Of course I like them.” Her voice was low. “But I bet you paid more than we can afford for them.”

  Bo picked up one of the books and hefted it appreciatively, cracked back the spine in a way that would have infuriated her father, who always went through a book page by page pressing down the sheets so as not to break the binding. “Well, hell,” he said. “I’m sick of not having anything decent around. We’ve got to have some books around the place, kids growing up and everything. I’d like to have a whole roomful.”

  She read him as plain as daylight. He was afraid he had been stung, he was scared she wouldn’t like them, he knew he had been extravagant, but just suggest that the book peddler had skinned him and he’d blow up like a bullfrog.

  “A roomful of books in a tent!” she said, before she thought. Then she saw that he was hurt, and got up and hugged him around the neck. “I love them,” she said. “It was sweet of you to think of getting me something.”

  He pulled her down on his lap. “I don’t like living in a tent any better than you do,” he said.

  “It’s funny,” she said, relaxing against him. “Since I got burned I’d loved it. Everything’s been so settled and quiet it’s like home all of a sudden.” Through his shirt his body was like a stove. She felt warm and comfortable, cradled in affection so sure and easy that she rubbed against him. “You’ve been so nice lately,” she said. “It’s like it used to be before our luck got bad.”

  “It sure isn’t any better now,” he said, and she felt his body stir irritably. “I can’t understand why that joint don’t make money. It ought to, but it don’t.”

  “It makes some.”

  “Some isn’t enough.”

  “Isn’t it?” she said, pulling herself back to look in his face. “Isn’t it enough to make a living and get ahead gradually and make sure of things one after another and settle down in one place?”

  “It’d be all right if you could make enough to live like a human being.”

  “It’s slow,” she said, “but we do make a little all the time, Bo. We’ll have the fixtures paid for in a few more months, and then we’ll make more. If we’re careful we’ll be all right in a year.”

  He grunted. “Being careful is what makes my tail ache. You get kind of sick of being careful after while.”

  “Oh, we’ll make it,” she said. “As soon as I’m well I’ll take over and you can sleep for a week. You’re all tired out.”

  “I’m not tired out. I’m just sick of that dinky little lumber town and seeing the same guys across the counter week in and week out.”

  “When we get the installments paid off we can hire somebody, maybe,” she said. She kissed the side of his face. “Bo,” she said, “you know you haven’t got mad at either of the kids for a week?”

  He grunted, but good-naturedly. “I must have forgot. I’ll take care of it tomorrow.”

  “You watch them,” she said. “They’re three times better when they don’t get punished a lot. They’re as sweet as pie all day.”

  His wide chest swelled and sank under her. “Yeah, I suppose. It’s been so long since I saw either of them I’ll have to be introduced all over again.”

  “You are all worn out,” she said. “I’ll hurry up and get well so you can have a rest.” Suddenly, weakly, she wanted to cry. She put her face against him and laughed instead.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just so happy things are as good as they are, even. After what happened in Seattle I guess I didn’t ever think I could feel happy again.” She smiled into his warming, half closed eyes and hugged him with her good arm. “Did you know you’re a darling sometimes?”

  “I’ve been told so,” Bo said comfortably. “What am I darling about now?”

  “Just being you,” she said. “Just being the nice you.” Her eyes went down to the book he still held in one hand. “Bo?”

  “What?” As if he were methodically ringing doorbells, his fingers went down her back pushing each vertebra.

  “How much did you pay for those books?”

  “Eighteen dollars.”

  “Oh my Lord!” She lay digesting the enormity of the extravagance, but the more it grew in her mind the less she could reproach him. Because she was hurt and shut in, because he felt bothered in his conscience for letting her get burned, because he was gall
ed by the tightness of money and needed to do something to express his contempt for penny-pinching, he spent more in one insane gesture than she had been able to spend on the boys’ clothes all winter. There was nothing you could say to him when he did a thing like that. He never even said outright that they were a present for you, though you knew they were. And even if there had been a hundred presents more useful and acceptable, you had to like this one, and love him for it.

  She got no news from him that night about what was happening in the settlement or the lumber camp, because she forgot to ask, but the next morning she saw him kneeling before the big black bureau he had built. He rummaged and felt in the back of a drawer. “What are you looking for?” she said.

  “The gun.”

  “What do you need the gun for?”

  “Want to load it up for you.” Deliberately uncommunicative, he stooped and grunted, searching. Elsa sat up in bed. “Why should it be loaded for me?”

  The boys, who had been having a pillow fight in their own bed, craned to look as Bo pulled the thirty-eight out of the bureau and slipped cartridges into the cylinder.

  “I’m just going to leave it where you can get at it,” Bo said. “Make you feel a little safer, maybe.” Grinning at her, he laid the gun on a high shelf out of the boys’ reach.

  “Now tell me!” she said.

  “Nothing to be scared of,” Bo said. “There’s been a cougar around prowling the camps, is all.”

  “A cougar!”

  “Never bother a man. They’re scared to death of a man. They just sneak around nights and steal fish and things. If you heard anything around at night you could shoo him away with this. One shot would have him high-tailing it for the next county.”