The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  When his mother finally sent him off to bed he went unwillingly, undressed slowly to see if the rain wouldn’t stop before he got his shoes off, his stockings off, his overalls off. But when he was in his nightshirt it still rained steadily and insistently, and he turned into his pillow wanting to cry. A big tear came out and he felt it hanging on the side of his nose. He lay very still for fear it would fall off. He strangled the sob that jumped in his throat because that would make the drop fall, and while he was balancing the drop he fell asleep.

  After the night’s rain the yard was spongy and soft under the boy’s bare feet. He stood at the edge of the packed dooryard in the flat thrust of sunrise looking at the ground washed clean and smooth and trackless, feeling the cool mud under his toes. Experimentally he lifted his right foot and put it down in a new place, pressed, picked it up again to look at the neat imprint of straight edge and curving instep and the five round dots of toes. The air was so fresh that he sniffed as he would have sniffed the smell of cinnamon.

  Lifting his head, he saw how the prairie beyond the fireguard looked darker than in dry times, healthier with green-brown tints, smaller and more intimate somehow than it did when the heat waves crawled over scorched grass and carried the horizons backward into dim and unseeable distances. And standing in the yard above his one clean footprint, feeling his own verticality in all that spread of horizontal land, he sensed that as the prairie shrank he grew. He was immense. A little jump would crack his head on the. sky; a stride would take him to any horizon.

  His eyes turned into the low south sky, cloudless, almost colorless in the strong light. Just above the brown line of the horizon, faint as a watermark on pale blue paper, was the tracery of the mountains, tenuous and far-off, but today accessible for the first time. His mind had played among those ghostly summits for uncountable lost hours: today, in a few strides, they were his. And more. Under the shadow of those peaks, those Bearpaws that he and his mother always called the Mountains of the Moon, was Chinook, the band, the lemonade stands, the parade, the ballgame, the fireworks.

  The pup lay watching, belly down on the damp ground. In a gleeful spasm the boy stooped to flap the dog’s ears, then bent and spun in a wild wardance while the pup barked. And when his father came to the door in his undershirt, yawning, running a hand up the back of his head and through his hair, peering out from gummed eyes to see how the weather looked, the boy’s voice was one deep breathing relief from yesterday’s rainy fear.

  “It’s clear as a bell,” he said.

  His father yawned again, clopped his jaws, rubbed his eyes, mumbled something from a mouth furry with sleep. He stood on the step scratching himself comfortably, looking down at boy and dog.

  “Going to be hot,” he said slyly.“Might be too hot to drive.”

  “Aw, Pal”

  “Going to be a scorcher. Melt you right down to axle grease riding in that car.”

  The boy regarded him doubtfully, saw the lurking sly droop of his mouth. “Aw, we are too going!”

  At his father’s laugh he burst from his immobility like a sprinter starting, raced one complete circle around the house with the dog after him. When he flew around past his father again his voice trailed out behind him at the corner. “Gonna feed the hens,” he said. His father looked after him, scratched his knee, laughed suddenly, and went back indoors.

  Through chores and breakfast the boy moved with the dream of a day’s rapture in his eyes, but that did not keep him from swift and agile helpfulness. He didn’t even wait for commands. He scrubbed himself twice, slicked down his hair, hunted up clean clothes, wiped the mud from his shoes and put them on. While his mother packed the shoebox of lunch he stood at her elbow proffering aid. He flew to stow things in the topless old Ford. He got a rag and polished the brass radiator. Once or twice, jumping around to help, he looked up to see his parents looking at each other with the knowing, smiling expression in the eyes that said they were calling each other’s attention to him.

  “Just like a racehorse,” his father said, and the boy felt foolish, swaggered, twisted his mouth down, said “Aw!” But in a moment he was hustling them again. They ought to get going, with fifty miles to drive. Long before they were ready he was standing beside the Ford, licked and immaculate and so excited that his feet jumped him up and down without his own volition or knowledge.

  It was eight o‘clock before his father came out, lifted off the front seat, poked the flat stick down into the gas tank, and pulled it out dripping. “Pretty near full,” he said. “If we’re going to the mountains too we better take a can along, though. Fill that two-gallon one with the spout.”

  The boy ran, dug the can out of the shed, filled it at the spigot of the drum that stood on a plank support to the north of the house. When he came back, his left arm stuck straight out and the can knocking against his leg, his mother was settling herself into the back seat among parcels and waterbags.

  “Goodness,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve been the first ready since I don’t know when. I should think you’d have done all this last night.”

  “Plenty time.” The father stood looking down at the boy. “All right, racehorse. You want to go to this shindig you better hop in.”

  The boy was up in the front seat like a squirrel. His father walked around to the front of the car. “Okay,” he said. “Look sharp, now. When she kicks over, switch her to magneto and pull the spark down.”

  The boy said nothing. He looked upon the car with respect and a little awe. They didn’t use it much, and starting it was a ritual like a firedrill. The father unscrewed the four-eared brass plug, looked down into the radiator, screwed the cap back on, and bent to take hold of the crank. “Watch it, now,” he said.

  The boy felt the gentle heave of the springs, up and down, as his father wound the crank. He heard the gentle hiss in the bowels of the engine as the choke wire was pulled out, and his nose filled with the strong, volatile odor of gasoline. Over the slope of the radiator his father’s brown strained face looked up. “Is she turned on all right?”

  “Yup. She’s on battery.”

  “Must have flooded her. Have to let her rest a minute.”

  They waited, and then after a few minutes the wavelike heaving of the springs again, the rise and fall of the blue shirt and bent head over the radiator, the sighing swish of the choke, a stronger smell of gasoline. The motor had not even coughed.

  The two voices came simultaneously from the car. “What’s the matter with it?”

  His brow puckered in an intent scowl, Bo stood back blowing mighty breaths. “Son of a gun,” he said. Coming round, he pulled at the switch, adjusted the spark and gas levers. A fine mist of sweat made his face shine like dark oiled leather.

  “There isn’t anything really wrong, is there?” Elsa said, and her voice wavered uncertainly on the edge of fear.

  “I don’t see how there could be,” Bo said. “She’s always started right off, and she was running all right when I drove her in here.”

  The boy looked at his mother sitting erect and stiff among the things on the seat. She was all dressed up, a flowered dress, a hat with hard green varnished grapes on it pinned to her red hair. For a moment she sat, stiff and nervous. “What will you have to do?” she said.

  “I don’t know. Look at the motor.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll get out of the sun while you do it,” she said, and fumbled her way out of the clutter.

  The boy felt her exodus like a surrender, a betrayal. If they didn’t hurry up they’d miss the parade. In one motion he bounced out of the car. “Gee whiz!” he said. “Let’s do something. We got to get started.”

  “Keep your shirt on,” his father grunted. Lifting the hood, he bent his head inside. His hand went out to test wires, wiggle sparkplug connections, make tentative pulls at the choke. The weakly-hinged hood slipped and came down across his wrist, and he swore. “Get me the pliers,” he said.

  For ten minutes he probed and monkeyed. �
�Might be the plugs,” he said at last. “She doesn’t seem to be getting any fire through her.”

  Elsa, sitting on a box in the shade, smoothed her flowered dress nervously. “Will it take long?”

  “Half hour.”

  “Any day but this!” she said. “I don’t see why you didn’t make sure last night.”

  Bo breathed through his nose and bent into the engine again. “It was raining last night,” he said.

  One by one the plugs came out, were squinted at, scraped, the gap tested with a thin dime. The boy stood on one foot, then the other, time pouring like a flood of uncatchable silver dollars through his hands. He kept looking at the sun, estimating how much time there was left. If they got started right away they might still make it for the parade, but it would be close. Maybe they’d drive right up the street while the parade was on, and be part of it ...

  “Is she ready?” he said.

  “Pretty quick.”

  He wandered over by his mother, and she reached out to put an arm around him. “Well, anyway we can get there for the band and the ballgame and the fireworks,” he said. “If she doesn’t start till noon we can make it for those.”

  She said, “Pa’ll get it going in a minute. We won’t miss anything, hardly.”

  “You ever seen skyrockets, Ma?”

  “Once.”

  “Are they fun?”

  “Wonderful,” she said. “Just like a million stars all colors all exploding at once.”

  His feet took him back to his father, who straightened up with a belligerent grunt. “Now!” he said. “If the sucker doesn’t start now ...”

  And once more the heaving of the springs, the groaning of the turning engine, the hiss of the choke. He tried short, sharp half-turns, as if to catch the motor off guard. Then he went back to the stubborn, laboring spin. The back of his shirt was stained darkly, the curving dikes of muscles along the spine’s hollow showing cleanly where the cloth stuck. Over and over, heaving, stubborn at first, then furious, till he staggered back panting.

  “God damn!” he said. “What you suppose is the matter with the thing?”

  “She didn’t even cough once,” the boy said, and staring up at his father’s face full of angry bafflement he felt the cold fear touch him. What if it wouldn’t start at all? What if, all ready to go, they had to unload the Ford and not even get out of the yard? His mother came over and they stood close together looking at the car and avoiding each other’s eyes.

  “Maybe something got wet last night,” she said.

  “Well, it’s had plenty of time to dry out,” Bo said.

  “Isn’t there something else you can try?”

  “We can jack up the hind wheel, I guess. But there’s no damn reason we should have to.”

  “Well, if you have to, you’ll have to,” she said briskly. “After planning it for a week we can’t just get stuck like this. Can we, son?”

  Bruce’s answer was mechanical, his eyes steady on his father. “Sure not,” he said.

  His father opened his mouth to say something, looked hard at the boy, and shut his lips again. Without a word he pulled out the seat and got the jack.

  The sun climbed steadily while they jacked up one hind wheel and blocked the car carefully so it wouldn’t run over anybody if it started. The boy let off the brake and put it in high, and when they were ready he sat in the seat so full of hope and fear that his whole body was one tight concentration. His father stooped, his cheek pressed against the radiator as a milker’s cheek touches the flank of a cow. His shoulder dropped, jerked up. Nothing. Another jerk. Nothing. Then he was rolling in a furious spasm of energy, the wet dark back of his shirt rising and falling. Inside the motor there was only the futile swish of the choke and the half-sound, half-feel of cavernous motion as the crankshaft turned over. The Ford bounced on its spring as if its front wheels were coming off the ground on every upstroke. Then it stopped, and the father was hanging on the radiator, breathless, dripping wet, swearing: “Son of a dirty, lousy, stinking, corrupted ... !”

  The boy stared from his father’s angry wet face to his mother‘s, pinched with worry. The pup lay down in the shade and put its head on its paws. “Gee whiz!” the boy said. “Gee whiz!” He looked at the sun, and the morning was half gone.

  Jerking with anger, his father threw the crank.halfway across the yard and took a step or two toward the house. “The hell with the damn thing!” he said.

  “Bo, you can‘t!”

  He stopped, glared at her, took an oblique look at Bruce, bared his teeth in an irresolute, silent swearword. “But God, if it won’t go!”

  “Maybe if you hitched the horses to it,” she said.

  His laugh was short and choppy. “That’d be fine!” he said. “Why don’t we just hitch the team to this damned old boat and pull it into Chinook?”

  “But we’ve got to get it started. Why wouldn’t it be all right to let the team pull it around? You push it on a hill sometimes and it starts.”

  He looked at the boy again, jerked his eyes away exasperatedly, as though he held his son somehow accountable. The boy stared, mournful, defeated, ready to cry, and his father’s head swung back unwillingly. Then abruptly he winked, mopped his head and neck, and grinned. “Think you want to go, uh?”

  The boy nodded. “All right,” his father said crisply. “Fly up in the pasture and get the team. Hustle!”

  On the high lope the boy was off up the coulee bank. Under the lip of the swale, a quarter of a mile west, the bay backs of the horses and the black dot of the cold showed. Usually he ran circumspectly across that pasture, because of the cactus, but now he flew. With shoes it was all right, and even without shoes he would have run. Across burnouts, over stretches so undermined with gopher holes that sometimes he broke through to the ankle, skimming over patches of cactus, soaring over a badger hole, plunging into the coulee and up the other side, he ran as if bears were after him. The black colt, spotting him, lifted his tail and took off in a spectacular stiff-legged sprint, but the bays merely lifted their heads and watched. He slowed, came up walking, laid a hand on the mare’s neck and untied the looped halter rope. She stood for him while he scrambled and kicked himself up, and then they were off, the mare in an easy lope, the gelding trotting after, the colt stopping his wild showoff career and wobbling hastily and ignominiously after his departing mother.

  They pulled up before the Ford, and the boy slid off to throw the halter rope to his father. “Shall I get the harness?” he said, and before anyone could answer he was off running, to come back dragging one heavy harness with the tugs trailing. He dropped it, turned to run again, his breath laboring in his lungs. “I’ll get the other‘n,” he said.

  With a short, almost incredulous laugh Bo looked once at Elsa and threw the harness over the mare. When the second one came he laid it on the gelding, pushed against the heavy shoulder to get the horse into place. The gelding resisted, pranced a little, got a curse and a crack across the nose, jerked back and trembled and lifted his feet nervously, and set one shod hoof on his owner’s instep. Bo, unstrung by the heat and the hurry and the labor and the exasperation of a morning when nothing went right, kicked the gelding in the belly. “Get in there, you damned big blundering ox! Back, back up. Whoa now, whoa!”

  With a heavy rope for a towline and the disengaged trees of the wagon for a rig he hitched the now-skittish team to the car. Without a word he stooped and lifted the boy to the mare’s back. “All right,” he said, and his face relaxed in a quick grin. “This is where we start her. Ride them around in a circle, not too fast.”

  Then he climbed into the Ford, turned the switch to magneto, fussed with the levers. “Let ‘er go!” he said.

  The boy kicked the mare ahead, twisting as he rode to watch the Ford heave forward off the jack as a tired, heavy man heaves to his feet, and begin rolling after him over the uneven ground, jerking and kicking and growling when his father put it in gear. The horses settled as the added weight came on the li
ne, flattened into their collars, swung in a circle, bumped each other, skittered. The mare reared, and the boy shut his eyes and clung. When he came down, her leg was entangled in the tug and his father was climbing cursing out of the car to straighten her out. His father was mad again and yelled at him. “Keep ‘em apart! There isn’t any tongue. You got to keep Dick over on his own side.”

  Now again the start, the flattening into the collars, the snapping tight of the tugs. This time it went smoothly, the Ford galloped after the team in lumbering, plunging jerks. The mare’s eyes rolled white, and she broke into a trot, pulling the gelding after her. Desperately the boy clung to the knotted and shortened reins, his ears alert for the grumble of the Ford starting behind him. The pup ran beside the team yapping, crazy with excitement.

  They made three complete circles of the back yard between house and chicken coop before the boy looked back again. “Won’t she start?” he yelled. He saw his father rigid behind the wheel, heard his ripping burst of swearwords, saw him bend and glare down into the mysterious inwards of the engine through the pulled-up floorboards. Guiding the car with one hand, he fumbled down below, one glaring eye just visible over the cowl.

  “Shall I stop?” the boy shouted. Excitement and near-despair made his voice a tearful scream. But his father’s wild arm waved him on. “Go on, go on! Gallop ‘em! Pull the guts out of this thing!”

  And the galloping—the furious, mud-flinging, rolling-eyed galloping around the circle already rutted like a road, the Ford, now in savagely-held low, growling and surging and plowing behind; the mad yapping of the dog, the erratic scared bursts of runaway from the colt, the boy’s mother in sight briefly for a quarter of each circle, her hands to her mouth and her eyes sick, and behind him in the Ford his father in a strangling rage, yelling him on, his lips back over his teeth and his face purple.