The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  The noise stunned her, the recoil threw her hands into the air and stabbed her arm with knives of pain. Slowly she let her hands come down with the gun, her mind still dazzled by the flash and the report and something else—the wild howl that still shivered against the ring of trees, an almost human howl. Before she realized that she had heard it, that the prowler had been real and that she had shot at it, perhaps hit it, she was back inside the tent leaning weakly against the slammed and bolted door.

  Both boys were sitting up in bed, tousled and sleepy, shocked upright before they had had a chance to awaken. “What was it, Ma?” Chester said. His eyes, round with sleep and wonder, were on the gun hanging from her hand. Bruce whined, dug with his knuckles at the lingering sleep in his eyes. Then he too saw the gun, and his baby face slackened with the imminence of tears.

  Elsa laughed, a squeaky, hysterical cackle. Forcing casualness over her panic like a tight lid over a saucepan, she went over and put the gun back on the shelf. “It was just an old skunk snooping around your rabbit pen,” she said.

  Chester knew about skunks. He sniffed.

  “I scared him off before he had a chance to make a smell,” his mother said, and laughed again, more naturally.

  “D‘you shoot him?”

  “You bet I did. We don’t want any old skunks bothering our rabbits, do we?”

  Their solemn heads shook. “No.”

  “All right,” she said, and went to tuck their covers back. “You go to sleep. If Pa comes home and finds you- still awake he’ll skin you alive.”

  They lay down again, punched one another for sleeping room, whispered together with secret giggles, and finally fell asleep. But Elsa, after playing at going back to bed, just to fool them, got up again and dressed, and she was sitting by the table with the light turned up bright when Bo’s feet scraped on the steps.

  She met him at the door with her finger on her lips, and when she told him what had happened he whistled low. “Scare you?”

  She held up her left hand, trembling again now that everything was over and Bo was back. She could even laugh a little. “Half to death,” she said.

  “Did you hit him?”

  “I don’t know. He screeched bloody murder and ran away. I didn’t even see him, just a kind of rush in the dark.”

  “Maybe you were seeing shadows.”

  “He was not a shadow! He yelled like old Nick. He was in the shed.”

  “How’d he get in there?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I left the door open.”

  “Even if you did there’s a thumb latch.”

  “I heard the latch rattle. Maybe the door wasn’t caught.”

  He reached down the gun from the shelf, picked up the lamp, and took her arm. “Well, let’s go see if we’ve got a cougar rug.”

  While Elsa held the lantern high, Bo, with the brighter light of the lamp, went into the shed and looked. Immediately his voice came, excited. “By God, there was something in here. Stuff’s all scattered around.”

  “Did you think I was imagining things?”

  “I did, sort of,” he said. He came out and searched for tracks, but the ground was so littered it wouldn’t have taken a clear print. Then Elsa stooped and picked up a chip at the corner. On one edge was a dark spatter, and when Bo rubbed it with his thumb it came off red. He looked at her. “You winged him, anyway.”

  He searched, stooping, the light silhouetting his head and shoulders and shining yellow on the side of his intent face. He seemed to sniff like a hound; there was excitement in him. Twenty feet from the corner he found another spatter of blood on a spruce twig. After that he found nothing. “I’ll get up early and try it in the morning,” he said. “No use in the dark.”

  His arm went across her shoulders, and she giggled without knowing she was going to, a sound as involuntary as a hiccough. “Old Mamma,” he said. “Pops off a lion with one shot. How’d you ever get the nerve to go right out after him?”

  “I wanted to scare him good, or kill him, so he’d never come back.”

  He paused, stooping for a last look. “This is the best place for tracks, where there’s dust,” he said. The wind flawed in the light, and he cupped a hand over the chimney. There were footprints all around in the dust, but no sign of animal tracks. Then Bo bent closer. “Ha!” he said.

  “What?”

  “Look.”

  He pointed to a large footprint, set his own foot down beside it and made a track. His print was an inch longer than the other. They stared at each other. The light spread around them dimly, shone on the side of the shed, was cut, off at the corner as if a knife had sliced it. The woodpile was a jumbled and criss-cross pile of shadows.

  “If that was a cougar you shot,” Bo said, “he was wearing number nine shoes.”

  There was little sleep for her that night. In spite of Bo’s reassurances that no court would hold her a minute, even if she had killed the prowler, the thought of having shot a man left her weak and sick. She imagined him out in the dark, hungry maybe, rummaging among the things in the shed while he listened for noises from the tent as fearfully as she listened from her bed. Then the shout out of the dark, the terror of discovery, the desperate running, the shot, the pain, the mouth wide on a scream. She imagined him dragging himself off into the woods, perhaps to die.

  There was nothing she could do, because Bo said flatly he wasn’t going to lose a night’s sleep hunting for him in the dark. Besides, he might be dangerous, and as for his bleeding to death, there would have been more blood than they had found if she had hit him badly. The hell with going sleepless and maybe getting shot at out of pity for any burglar. She knew that he wasn’t in the least afraid to go out, that he was merely tired and needed sleep, but she could not go to sleep as he did.

  Five minutes after they were in bed he had started kicking the covers off his feet—and hers. His muscles twitched as he slept. In the other bed one of the children whimpered. Dreaming. It was comforting to know that nothing worse than dreams would touch him tonight. She should try to get to sleep. Bo rolled over, the bed sagging away under his weight, and she fought him for the covers. He was like an elephant in bed. You couldn’t wake him up, and whenever he moved he stripped the whole bed bare. It took savage jabs in the ribs before he would even grunt and squirm and give you enough slack to pull over you.

  The child whimpered again. Which one? Bruce? You couldn’t tell. Never mind. Let yourself go, feel your weight relaxing into the bed ...

  The scream brought her out onto the floor in a single leap, confused, her heart shuddering after its first great bound. Where? What? The baby. He was screaming insanely, babbling, clopping his lips. Even when she felt across Chester and found Bruce backed against the wall, and took him up to hold his face against her shoulder and comfort him, he still choked and cried. As hard to waken as a mummy, Bo stirred and grumbled a question, but she didn’t answer because she was busy crooning to Bruce, running her hand up and down his shivering wet back.

  “There there there,” she said. “It was just a dream. Nothing’s going to hurt you. Mommy’s got you safe.”

  He pressed against her and locked his arms around her neck. “Cougar!” he said. “Great big old cougar had me.”

  Finally, to quiet him, she lay down between the two boys and they jackknifed their little bottoms into her body and went to sleep again, but she lay as wakeful as ever, staring upward. That fool business of loading the gun and making such a fuss. It had already caused Bruce to be afraid of going fifteen feet from the tent, had made her shoot a man, had wakened the baby from his sleep drenched with nightmare sweat. Just once, it would be pleasant to live in a place where you felt safe and secure and permanent.

  The canvas roof was dingy gray, and the birds were beginning off in the woods, before she fell asleep.

  4

  It was broad daylight when she awoke. The children were running naked in and out of the tent, and Bo was getting breakfast on the little iron stove. The good sme
ll, mingled with the clean scent of the woods that blew in the open door, filled the tent. There was a golden patch of sun on the floor, and the roof was dappled with gold. For a moment, not remembering, she stretched luxuriously. It was good of Bo not to wake her early, because when you woke of your own accord there was pleasure in wakening. Every detail of the tent-house was intimate and precious, the four-foot board walls, the canvas patched near the ridge with two neat, seamanlike patches, the table and bench and stools and bureau, all of which Bo had made, the light pine wood worn smooth by the rubbing of hands and clothing. The whole day ahead was full of comfortable chores, home chores.

  She watched Bo at the stove. He was a good cook—better than she was at some things, and he seemed to like to sneak out of bed before anyone was up. He turned the bacon, tipped the lid of the coffee pot to look in, flipped it down again with a light clank of metal. He was whistling under his breath. Still not aware that she was awake, he turned to watch the boys scuffling in the corner over a toy boat, and she saw the skin around his eyes wrinkle. As he turned back to the frying pan his whistle turned into a hum, the hum into a song,

  My sweetheart’s a mule in the mines,

  I drive her without any lines,

  Behind her I sit and tobacco I spit

  All over my sweetheart’s behind.

  Just that little excitement last night could make him this way, she thought. Just one unusual thing, one break in the monotony, and he chirped like a bird. His movements were quick, almost jigging, like the movements of a Negro she had seen working on the docks at Seattle, as if at any minute he might break into a dance. The coffee pot began to steam, and Bo opened the lid so that a damp flaw wavered and clanged against the stovepipe like the “witch” in the throat of a fireplace. He sang,

  Once upon a time, boys, an Irishman named Daugherty

  Was elected to the Senate by a very large majarurity ...

  The bacon fizzed, and he turned it over, the song breaking and emerging again further on,

  Oh they ate up everything that was upon the bill-of-fare, And then they turned it over to see if any more was there. There was blue fish, green fish, dried fish, and pa‘tridges, Fish balls, snow balls, cannon balls, and ca’tridges ...

  Then she remembered. “Bo!”

  He turned around with a grin.

  “Shouldn’t we go out and look?”

  He let his voice sink to sepulchral depths. “While you snored like a pig I already looked,” he said. “I plow deep while sluggards sleep.”

  “Was there ... ?”

  “Not a sign,” he said. “You couldn’t have done more than scratch his hide. I’ve been all around clear out to the road.”

  “I guess I didn’t get to sleep till pretty late,” she said. She swung her legs over the side of the bed, saw Bruce watching her, and said, “You didn’t help either, you little punkin. You had a nightmare and screamed as if you were being murdered.”

  Looking at Bruce, Bo said, “What’d give him nightmares?”

  “You,” she said, popping her head into her dress. “You and your fool guns and stories about cougars.”

  “He’s got teeth,” Bruce said. “He woars!”

  Bo laughed. “He woars, does he?” Standing spraddle-legged, he winked at the child. “Tell you what. When you see that cougar poke his nose into the open, you sail right up to him and when he opens his mouth to eat you, stick your arm down his throat and grab his tail and yank him inside out.”

  Bruce’s round face wavered in a grin. “He can’t eat me,” he said. “I’ll kill him right down.”

  “That’s the ticket,” his father said. “Kill him right down. Pull off his leg and beat him over the head with the bloody end of it.”

  “You’ll have them talking like toughs,” Elsa said.

  Bo was sitting down, cramming his mouth with bacon and fried bread. “Do ‘em good. Make ’em so tough a cougar’s teeth’d clinch right over if he tried to bite ‘em.” He made motions as if his jaws were glued together, frowned, pawed at his face, put his head down and bucked up and down in his chair, puzzled and wrathful. Both boys laughed. Bo winked at them, took a knife from the table, pried his jaws open, gulped half a cup of coffee and stood up. “Got to hustle,” he said. “I’m late now.”

  This was her morning to go in and see the doctor. At ten o‘clock she had the children washed and cleaned up, and started with them down the path toward the macadam road. They walked for a half mile under a roof of horizontal limbs, almost uniformly a dozen feet from the ground and so tightly laced over the old tote road that on rainy days it was possible to walk almost dry from the road to the tent. In that tight shaded aisle, and in the woods that thickened in brown tangles on both sides, there were no flowers brightening the mat of needles, but in the openings where the sun reached the color was spread in bright patches, flowers unfamiliar to her childhood, but looking as if they might be relatives of the windflowers and cornflowers of home. There was even one that looked like a furry-stemmed pasque flower. The boys had names for all of them, many of them the product of Bo’s foolery. There was a little delicate blue blossom as low and hidden as a violet, that he had taught them to call a hocus-pocus crocus, and another, a rose blossom that grew on a sort of berry bush, which he called a blush-of-shame-for-a-life-ill-spent. If the boys ever did learn the names of things they would have to unlearn a lot of his teachings first.

  Chester ran ahead, picking up cones and bending back the scales to look for seeds, but Bruce stuck close by her side, and she realized with a strange feeling of helplessness how the fear of the woods had taken hold of him. He had always been afraid of everything—horses, cows, streetcars, strange people, even the Santa Claus in the Bon Marche toy department in Seattle. Dark terrors seemed to drive him sometimes into propitiatory rituals, sending him round the tent before a meal touching with solemn babyish pats the bench, the bureau, the leg of the stove, the headboard of his bed. If he were hustled to his chair to eat, he lost his head completely, squalled, fought to get back and finish his compulsive ritual. Or he would turn against foods without warning so that one would have thought he was being offered offal, and not coaxing, not scolding, not spanking could make him eat one day what he had been ravenous for the day before.

  He was a strange child. Now he clung to her skirts so closely that he hampered her walking, and she laid her hand on his head and kept it there because she knew that somewhere deep down in his prematurely old mind he lived with fear.

  They came down onto the sun-dazzled. white band of the macadam, and she pushed him on ahead to run with Chester, squared her own shoulders and stepped out briskly. It would be hard to know what to do with the children when she got well and went back to work, unless they could work out shifts that would let one of them be always at home. With Bruce this way, he couldn’t be left alone. But she suspected that he shouldn’t be left alone with Bo either. Bo wouldn’t have any patience with his terrors. Maybe Bo could get permission to put an extension onto the café, and they could live there. The lumber company owned the whole town, and they hadn’t been able to get any place before until Mr. Bane at the stage office let them camp on his timber tract. But if they could ...

  Oh fiddle, she said. It will all come out in the wash.

  At the fork where the sawmill road turned off, she cut across the spongy meadow and entered the dirt road that ran straight as a yardstick through heavy timber. The doctor’s office was visible an eighth of a mile down, a little frame shanty that he had put up midway between town and mill so as to be available to both. Just as she came into the road, a man went into the office door. That meant she would have to wait. She told the boys to play outside.

  The little waiting room was empty, but the doctor poked his head around the inner door and said, “Good morning. I’ll be just a minute.”

  She heard the noise of his moving around inside, and the mutter of voices. A high, nasal voice said, “Ow, for Christ sake!” and the doctor laughed. An instrument clinked in
a pan, and after a few minutes the doctor’s matter-of-fact voice again: “Leave that bandage on a couple of days, and then take it off and put on a clean one. Bake it in the oven if you can’t get it sterile any other way. If it shows any signs of infecting, keep a warm wet pack on it.”

  The patient said nothing. The door opened and he came out, one ear and the side of his face along the temple swathed in bandage. He was a tall thin man with a peeled-looking skin and a bald head. The doctor, very young and growing a pale mustache to make himself appear older, leaned against the door and looked after him and laughed.

  “How did he get hurt?” Elsa said.

  “One ear hanging by a string,” the doctor said. “These stiffs come in with some tall stories sometimes. An obvious bullet wound, a nice neat groove that creased his face and tore his ear half off, and he tries to tell me he snagged it on a nail in the dark, getting up to see what some disturbance was.” He laughed again. “He’d have had to be going thirty miles an hour to do that on a nail.”

  Elsa was staring. “Do you know him?”

  “No. He isn’t one of the boys from the camp or the mill. Just a bum passing through. Some day he’ll get shot and won’t come out so lucky.”

  “Oh, I’m glad!” Elsa said.

  “Glad?”

  “You see,” she said, and looked at him so radiantly that he batted his eyes. “You see, I shot him.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “Really. He broke into our shed last night and I thought he was a cougar.”

  The doctor leaned out to look up the road. “Do you want him pinched? We could still catch him, probably.”

  She shook her head, and he motioned her into the inner room. “Left handed?” he said as he began unwrapping her bandage. “I knew that bum was lucky. If you’d had the use of both hands he’d be worms’ meat now.”