The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  Until finally they stopped, the horses blowing, the boy white and tearful and still, the father dangerous with unexpended wrath. The boy slipped off, his lip bitten between his teeth, not crying now but ready to at any moment, the corners of his eyes prickling with it, and his teeth locked on his misery. His father climbed over the side of the Ford and stood looking as if he wanted to tear it apart with his bare hands.

  Shoulders sagging, tears trembling to fall, jaw aching with the need to cry, the boy started toward his mother. As he came near his father he looked up, their eyes met, and he saw his father’s blank with impotent rage. Dull hopelessness swallowed him. Not any of it, his mind said. Not even any of it. No parade, no ballgame, no band, no fireworks. No lemonade or ice cream or paper horns or firecrackers. No close sight of the mountains that throughout four summers had called like a legend from his horizons. No trip, no adventure, none of it, nothing.

  Everything he felt was in that one still look. In spite of him his lip trembled, and he choked on a sob, his eyes on his father’s face, on the brows pulling down and the eyes narrowing.

  “Well, don’t blubber!” his father shouted at him. “Don’t stand there looking at me as if I was to blame for your missed picnic!”

  “I can‘t—help it,” the boy said, and with terror he felt the grief swelling up, overwhelming him, driving his voice out of him in a wail. Through the blur of his crying he saw the convulsive tightening of his father’s face, and then all the fury of a maddening morning concentrated itself in a swift backhand blow that knocked the boy staggering.

  He bawled aloud, from pain, from surprise, from outrage, from pure desolation, and ran to bury his face in his mother’s lap. From that muffled sanctuary he heard her angry voice. “No,” she said. “Go on away somewhere till he gets over it.”

  She rocked him against her, but the voice she had for his father was bitter. “As if he wasn’t hurt enough already!” she said.

  He heard the heavy quick footsteps going away, and for a long time he lay crying into the voile flowers. When he had cried himself out, and had listened apathetically to his mother’s soothing promises that they would go in the first chance they got, go to the mountains, have a picnic under some waterfall, maybe be able to find a ballgame going on in town, some Saturday—when he had listened and become quiet, wanting to believe it but not believing it at all, he went inside to take his good clothes and his shoes off and put on his old overalls again.

  It was almost noon when he came out to stand in the front yard looking southward toward the impossible land where the Mountains of the Moon lifted above the plains, and where, in the town below the peaks, crowds would now be eating picnic lunches, drinking pop, getting ready to go out to the ball ground and watch heroes in real uniforms play ball. The band would be braying now from a bunting-wrapped stand, kids would be playing in a cool grove, tossing firecrackers ...

  In the still heat his eyes searched the horizon for the telltale watermark. There was nothing but waves of heat crawling and lifting like invisible flames; the horizon was a blurred and writhing flatness where earth and sky met in an indistinct band of haze. This morning a stride would have taken him there; now it was gone.

  Looking down, he saw at his feet the clean footprint he had made. in the early morning. Aimlessly he put his right foot down and pressed. The mud was drying, but in a low place he found a spot that would still take an imprint. Very carefully, as if he performed some ritual for his life, he went around, stepping and leaning, stepping and leaning, until he had a circle six feet in diameter of delicately exact footprints, straight edge and curving instep and the five round dots of toes.

  3

  His father’s voice awakened him next morning. Stretching his back, arching against the mattress, he looked over at his parents’ end of the porch. His mother was up too, though he could tell from the flatness of the light outside that it was still early. He lay on his back, letting complete wakefulness come on, watching a spider that dangled on a golden, shining thread from the rolled canvas of the blinds. The spider came down in tiny jerks, his legs wriggling, and then went up again in the beam of sun. From the other room his father’s voice rose loud and cheerful:Oh I’d give every man in the army a quarter

  If they’d all take a shot at my mother-in-law.

  The boy slid his legs out of bed and yanked the nightshirt over his ears. He didn’t want his father’s face poking around the door, saying, “I plow deep while sluggards sleep!” He didn’t want to be joked with. Yesterday was too sore a spot in his mind. He had been avoiding his father ever since the morning before, and he was not yet ready to accept any joking or attempts to make up. Nobody had a right hitting a person for nothing, and you bet they weren’t going to be friends. Let him whistle and sing out there, pretending that nothing was the matter. The whole awful morning yesterday was the matter, the missed Fourth of July was the matter, that crack on the ear was the matter.

  In the other room, as he pulled on his overalls, the bacon was snapping in the pan, and he smelled its good morning smell. His father whistled, sang:In the town of O‘Geary lived Paddy O’Flanagan

  Battered away till he hadn’t a pound,

  His father he died and he made him a man again,

  Left him a farm of tin acres o’ ground.

  Bruce pulled the overall straps up and went into the main room. His father stopped singing and looked at him. “Hello, Cheerful,” he said. “You look like you’d bit into a wormy apple.”

  The boy mumbled something and went out to wash at the bench. It wasn’t any fun waking up today. You kept thinking about yesterday, and how much fun it had been waking up then, when you were going to do something special and fancy. Now there wasn’t anything to do except the same old things: run the traps, put out some poison, read the Sears Roebuck catalogue.

  At breakfast he was glum, and his father joked him. Even his mother smiled, as if she had forgotten already how much wrong had been done the day before. “You look as if you’d been sent for and couldn’t come,” she said. “Cheer up.”

  “I don’t want to cheer up.”

  They just smiled at each other, and he hated them both.

  After breakfast his father said, “You help your Ma with the dishes, now. See how useful you can make yourself around here.”

  Unwillingly, wanting to get out of the house and away from them, he got the towel and swabbed away. He was rubbing a glass when he heard the Ford sputter and race and roar and then calm down into a steady mutter. His mouth opened, and he looked up at his mother. Her eyes were crinkled up with smiling.

  “It goes!” he said.

  “Sure it goes.” She pulled both his ears, rocking his head. “Know what we’re going to do?”

  “What?”

  “We’re going to the mountains. Not to Chinook—there wouldn’t be anything doing there today. But to the mountains, for a picnic. Pa got the car going yesterday afternoon, when you were down in the field, so we decided then. If you want to, of course.”

  “Yay!” he said. “Shall I dress up?”

  “Put on your shoes, you’d better. We might climb a mountain.”

  The boy was out into the porch in three steps. With one shoe on and the other in his hand he hopped to the door. “When?” he said.

  “Soon as you can get ready.”

  He was trying to run and tie his shoelaces at the same time as he went out of the house. There in the Ford, smoking his pipe, with one leg over the door and his weight on the back of his neck, his father sat. “What detained you?” he said. “I’ve been waiting a half hour. You must not want to go very bad.”

  “Aw!” the boy said. He looked inside the car. There was the lunch all packed, the fat wet canvas waterbag, even Spot with his tongue out and his ears up. Looking at his father, all his sullenness gone now, the boy said, “When did you get all this ready?”

  His father grinned. “While you slept like a sluggard we worked like a buggard,” he said. Then Bruce knew that everyth
ing was perfect, nothing could go wrong. When his father started rhyming things he was in his very best mood, and not even flat tires and breakdowns could make him do more than puff and playact.

  He clambered into the front seat and felt the motor shaking under the floorboards. “Hey, Ma!” he yelled. “Hurry up! We’re all ready to go!”

  Their own road was a barely-marked trail that wiggled out across the burnouts along the east side of the wheat field. At the line it ran into another coming down from the homesteads to the east, and at Cree, a mile inside the Montana boundary, they hit the straight section-line road to Chinook. On that road they passed a trotting team pulling an empty wagon, and the boy waved and yelled, feeling superior, feeling as if he were charioted upon pure speed and all the rest of the world were earth-footed.

  “Let’s see how fast this old boat will go,” his father said. He nursed it down through a coulee and onto the flat. His finger pulled the gas lever down, and the motor roared. Looking back with the wind-stung tears in his eyes, the boy saw his mother hanging to her hat, and the artificial grapes bouncing. The Ford leaped and bucked, the picnic box tipped over, the dog leaned out and the wind blew his eyes shut and his ears straight back. Turning around, the boy saw the blue sparks jumping from the magneto box and heard his father wahoo. He hung onto the side and leaned out to let the wind tear at him, tried to count the fenceposts going by, but they were ahead of him before he got to ten.

  The road roughened, and they slowed down. “Good land,” his mother said from the back seat. “We want to get to the Bearpaws, not wind up in a ditch.”

  “How fast were we going, Pa?”

  “Forty or so. If we’d been going any faster you’d have hollered ‘nough, I guess. You were looking pretty peaked.”

  “I was not.”

  “Looked pretty scared to me. I bet Ma was hopping around back there. like corn in a popper. How’d you like it, Ma?”

  “I liked it all right,” she said comfortably. “But don’t do it again.”

  They passed a farm, and the boy waved at three open-mouthed kids in the yard. It was pretty good to be going somewhere. The mountains were plainer now in the south. He could see dark canyons cutting into the slopes, and there was snow on the upper peaks.

  “How soon’ll we get there, Pa?”

  His father tapped his pipe out and put it away and laughed. Without bothering to answer, he began to sing:Oh, I dug Snoqualmie River

  And Lake Samamish too,

  And paddled down to Kirkland

  In a little birch canoe.

  I built the Rocky Mountains,

  And placed them where they are,

  Sold whiskey to the Indians

  From behind a little bar.

  It was then, with the empty flat country wheeling by like a great turntable, the wheat fields and fences and the weathered peak of a barn rotating slowly as if in a dignified dance, wheeling and slipping behind and gone, and his father singing, that the strangeness first came over the boy. Somewhere, sometime ... and there were mountains in it, and a stream, and a swing that he had fallen out of and cried, and he had mashed ripe blackberries in his hands and his mother had wiped him off, straightening his stiff fingers and wiping hard.... His mind caught on that memory from a time before there was any memory, he rubbed his finger tips against his palms and slid a little down in the seat.

  His father tramped on both pedals hard and leaned out of the car, looking. He swung to stare at the boy as a startled idiot might have stared, and in a voice heavy with German gutturals, he said, “Vot it iss in de crass?”

  “What?”

  “Iss in de crass somedings. Besser you bleiben right here.”

  He climbed out, and the boy climbed out after him. The dog jumped overboard and rushed, and in the grass by the side of the road the boy saw the biggest snake he had ever seen, long and fat and sleepy. When it pulled itself in and faced the stiff-legged dog he saw that the hind legs and tail of a gopher stuck out of the stretched mouth.

  “Jiminy!” he said. “He eats gophers whole.”

  His father stooped with hands on knees to stare at the snake, looked at the boy, and wagged his head. “Himmel!” he said. “Dot iss a schlange vot iss a schlange.”

  “What is it?” the mother said from the car, and the boy yelled back, “A snake, a great big snake, and he’s got a whole gopher in his mouth.”

  His father chased the pup away, found a rock, and with one careful throw crushed the flat head. The body, as big around as the boy’s ankle, tightened into a ridged convulsion of muscles, and the tail whipped back and forth. Stooping, Bo pulled on the gopher’s tail. There was a wet, slupping noise, and the gopher slid out, coated with slime and twice as long as he ought to have been.

  “Head first,” Bo said. “That’s a hell of a way to die.”

  He lifted the snake by the tail. “Look,” he said, “he’s longer than I am.” But Elsa made a face and turned her head while he fastened it in the forked top of a fencepost. It trailed almost two feet on the ground. The tail still twitched.

  “He’ll twitch till the sun goes down,” Bo said. “First guy that comes along here drunk is going to think he’s got d.t.’s.” He climbed into the car, and the boy followed.

  “What was it, Pa?”

  “Milk snake. They come into barns and milk cows dry, sometimes. You saw what he did to that gopher. Just like a suction pump.”

  “Gee,” the boy said. He sat back and thought about how long and slick the gopher had been, and how the snake’s mouth was all stretched, and it was a good feeling to have been along and to have shared something like that with his father. It was, a trophy, a thing you would remember and tell about. And while he was thinking that already, before they got to the mountains at all, he had something to remember about the trip, he remembered that just before they saw the snake he had been remembering something else, and he puckered his eyes in the sun, thinking. He had been right on the edge of it, it was right on the tip of his tongue, and then his father had tramped on the pedals. But it was something a long time ago, and there was a strangeness about it, something bothersome and a little scary, and it hurt his head the way it hurt his head to do arithmetical sums without pencil and paper. When . you did them in your head something went round like a wheel, and you had to keep looking inside to make sure that you didn’t lose sight of the figures that were pasted up there somewhere, and if you did it very long at a time you got a sick headache out of it. That was the way it felt when he almost remembered, only he hadn’t been able to see what he knew was there ...

  By ten o‘clock they had left the graded road and were chugging up a winding trail with toothed rocks embedded in the ruts. Ahead of them the mountains looked low and disappointing, treeless, brown. The trail ducked into a narrow gulch and the sides rose up around them, reddish gravel covered with bunch grass and sage.

  “Gee whiz,” the boy said. “These don’t look like mountains.”

  “What’d you expect?” his father said. “Expect to step out onto a glacier?”

  “But there aren’t any trees,” the boy said. “Gee whiz, there isn’t even any water.”

  He stood up to look ahead. His father’s foot went down on the low pedal, and the Ford growled at the grade. “Come on, Lena,” his father said. He hitched himself back and forth in the seat, helping the car over the hill, and then, as they barely pulled over the hump and the sides of the gully fell away, there were the real mountains, high as heaven, the high slopes spiked and tufted with trees, and directly ahead of them a magnificent V-shaped door with the sun touching gray cliffs far back in, and a straight-edged violet shadow streaming from the eastern peak clear to the canyon floor.

  “Well?” his father’s voice said. “I guess if you don’t like it we can drop you here and pick you up on the way back.”

  The boy turned back to his mother. She was sitting far forward on the edge of the seat. “I guess we want to come along, all right,” she said, and laughed as if she migh
t cry. “Anything as beautiful as that. Don’t we, sonny?”

  “You bet,” he said. He remained standing all the way up over the gentle slope of the alluvial fan that aproned out from the canyon’s mouth, and when they passed under the violet shadow, not violet any more but cool gray, he tipped his head back and looked up miles and miles to the broken rock above.

  The road got rougher. “Sit down,” his father said. “First thing you know you’ll fall out on your head and sprain both your ankles.”

  He was in his very best mood. He said funny things to the car, coaxing it over steep pitches. He talked to it like a horse, scratched it under the dashboard, promised it an apple when they got there. Above them the canyon walls opened out and back, went up steeply high and high and high, beyond the first walls that the boy had thought so terrific, away beyond those, piling peak on peak, and the sun touched and missed and touched again.

  The trail steepened. A jet of steam burst from the brass radiator cap, the car throbbed and labored, they all sat forward and urged it on. But it slowed, shook, stopped and stood there steaming and shaking, and the motor died with a last lunging gasp.

  “Is this as far as we can get?” the boy said. The thought that they might be broken down, right here on the threshold of wonder, put him in a panic. He looked around. They were in a bare rocky gorge. Not even any trees yet, though a stream tumbled down a bouldered channel on the left. But to get to trees and the real mountains they had to go further, much further. “Are we stuck?” he said.

  His father grunted. “Skin down to the creek and get a bucket of water.” The boy ran, came stumbling and staggering back with the pail. His mother had climbed out and put a rock under the hind wheel, and they stood close together while Bo with a rag made quick, stabbing turns at the radiator cap. The cap blew off and steam went up for six feet and they all jumped back. There was a sullen subterranean boiling deep under the hood.