The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  The boy dreamed about the wheat at night now. Once he dreamed that he went out across the coulee and there was the grain grown enormously, a wilderness, a woods of wheat, taller than tall, with great fat heads nodding far above him, and he ran back to the house with his mouth shouting words, calling his father to come and see, but when they got back the wheat had shrivelled and blackened and died, and the field looked like a dark and smoky place that fire had passed over. His father flew into a rage and cuffed him for lying, and he awoke.

  As August moved on day by cloudless day, they began to watch the southwest rather than the southeast. The days were hot, with light hot fingering winds that bent the wheat and died again, and in the evenings there was always a flicker of heat lightning. The southwest was dangerous in August. From that direction came the hot winds, blowing for two or three days at a time, that had withered and scorched the wheat last year. They were like Chi nooks, his father said, except that in summer they were hot as hell. You couldn’t predict them and you couldn’t depend on their coming, but if they came you were sunk.

  What a God damned country, his father said.

  The boy heard them talking in bed at night, when they thought he was asleep, but even without that he couldn’t have missed how his father grew darker and more sullen and silent. The good humor was less frequent and never lasted. Even when he proposed a swim down by Pete and Emil he did it as if it were a last resort to keep from flying all apart with worry and impotence. “Let’s get out of here and do something,” he would say. “Sit around here much longer and the roof’ll fall in on us.”

  “It’s just this not being able to do anything,” the boy’s mother said. “It’s this sitting, without being able to do anything but sit ...”

  That was why, the boy knew, she proposed the visit to the Garfields, who had come two years before to take up a homestead four miles east of them. “We ought to know our neighbors better,” she said. “They’ve lived there two years and we’ve never even met them.”

  “I’ve met him,” Bo said.

  “Where?”

  “Down at Cree. He’s a prissy-faced long-nosed Englishman.”

  “Well, but he’s our nearest neighbor. And she might be nice.”

  “Have they got any kids, Ma?” the boy asked.

  “I don’t think so. I wish they had.” She looked at Bo and wheedled him. “You’ll drive us over on Sunday, won’t you?” she said. “Just to be neighborly. It’ll do you good.”

  He shrugged and picked up a magazine, four months old and dog-eared from long use.

  The boy was excited by the visit to Garfields‘. The hot afternoon was still and breathless, the air harder to breathe than usual. He knew there was a change in weather coming, because the ginger-snaps in their tall cardboard box were soft and bendable when he snitched a couple to stick in his pocket. He could tell too by his father’s grumpiness that something was coming. If it was rain everything would be dandy, there would be humming and singing again before breakfast. Maybe his father would let him ride the mare down to Cree for the mail. But if it was hail or hot wind they’d have to walk soft and speak softer, and the crop might be ruined, and that would be calamity.

  He found more than he looked for at Garfields‘. Mr. Garfield was tall and bald with a big nose, and talked very softly and politely. The boy’s father was determined not to like him right from the start.

  When Mr. Garfield said, “Dear, I think we might have a glass of lemonade, don’t you?” the boy saw his parents look at each other, saw the beginning of a smile on his father’s face, saw his mother purse her lips and shake her head ever so little. And when Mrs. Garfield, prim and spectacled, with a habit of tucking her head back and to one side while she listened to anyone talk, brought in the lemonade, the boy saw his father taste his and make a little face behind the glass. He hated any summer drink without ice in it, and kept his own beer at home deep in the cellar hole where it would keep cool.

  But Mr. and Mrs. Garfield were nice people. They sat down in their new parlor and showed the boy’s mother the rug and the gramophone. When the boy came up curiously to inspect the little box with a petunia-shaped horn with a picture of a terrier and “His Master’s Voice” painted on it, and when the Garfields found that he had never seen or heard a gramophone, they put on a cylinder like a big spool of tightly-wrapped black thread, and pushed a lever and lowered a needle, and out came a man’s voice singing in Scotch brogue, and his mother smiled and nodded and said, “My land, Harry Lauder! I heard him once a long time ago. Isn’t it wonderful, sonny?”

  It was wonderful all right. He inspected it, reached out his fingers to touch things, wiggled the big horn to see if it was loose or screwed in. His father warned him sharply to keep his hands off, but Mr. Garfield smiled and said, “Oh, he can’t hurt it. Let’s play something else,” and found a record about the saucy little bird on Nellie’s hat that had them all laughing. They let him wind the machine and play the record over again, all by himself, and he was very careful. It was a fine machine. He wished he had one.

  About the time he had finished playing his sixth or seventh record, and George M. Cohan was singing, “She’s a grand old rag, she’s a high-flying flag, and forever in peace may she wave,” he glanced at his father and saw that he was grouchy about something. He wasn’t taking part in the conversation, but was sitting with his chin in his hand staring out the window. Mr. Garfield was looking at him a little helplessly. His eyes met the boy’s and he motioned him over.

  “What do you find to do all summer, young man? Only child, are you?”

  “No sir. My brother’s in Whitemud. He’s twelve. He’s got a job.”

  “So you came out on the farm to help,” Mr. Garfield said. He had his hand on the boy’s shoulder and his voice was so kind that the boy lost his shyness and felt no embarrassment at all in being out there in the middle of the parlor with all of them looking at him.

  “I don’t help much,” he said. “I’m too little to do anything but drive the stoneboat, Pa says. When I’m twelve he’s going to get me a gun and then I can go hunting.”

  “Hunting?” said Mr. Garfield. “What would you hunt?”

  “Oh, gophers and weasels. I got a pet weasel now. His name’s Lucifer.”

  “Well,” Mr. Garfield said. “You seem a manly little chap. What do you feed your weasel?”

  “Gophers.” He thought it best not to say that the gophers were alive when he threw them in. He thought that probably Mr. Garfield would be a little shocked at that.

  Mr. Garfield straightened up and looked around at the grown-ups. “Isn’t it a shame,” he said, “that there are so many predatory animals and pests in this country that we have to spend our time destroying them? I hate killing things.”

  “I hate weasels,” the boy said. “I’m saving this one till he turns white and then I’m going to skin him. Once I speared a weasel with a pitchfork in the chicken house and he dropped right off the tine and ran up my leg and bit me after he was speared clean through.”

  He finished breathlessly, and his mother smiled at him, motioning him not to talk so much. But Mr. Garfield was still looking at him kindly. “So you want to make war on the cruel things, the weasels and hawks,” he said.

  “Yes sir.” The boy looked at his mother and it was all right. He hadn’t spoiled anything by talking about the weasels.

  “Now that reminds me,” Mr. Garfield said, rising. “Maybe I’ve got something you would find useful.”

  He went into another room and came back with a .22 in his hand. “Could you use this?”

  “I ... yes sir!” the boy said. He had almost, in his excitement, said, “I hope to whisk in your piskers.”

  “If your parents will let you have it,” Mr. Garfield said, and raised his eyebrows at the boy’s mother. He didn’t look at the father, but the boy did.

  “Can I, Pa?”

  “I guess so,” his father said. “Sure.”

  “Thank Mr. Garfield nicely,” his m
other said.

  “Gee,” the boy said “Thanks, Mr. Garfield, ever so much.”

  “There’s a promise goes with it,” Mr. Garfield said. “I’d like you to promise never to shoot anything with it but the bloodthirsty animals, the cruel ones like weasels and hawks. Never anything like birds or prairie dogs.”

  “How about butcher birds?”

  “Butcher birds?”

  “Shrikes,” said the boy’s mother. “We’ve got some over by our place. They kill all sorts of other things, snakes and gophers and other birds. They’re worse than the hawks, because they kill just for the fun of it.”

  “By all means,” said Mr. Garfield. “Shoot the shrikes. A thing that kills for the fun of it ...” He shook his head and his voice got solemn, like the voice of Mr. McGregor, the Sunday school superintendent in town, when he was asking the benediction. “There’s something about the way the war drags on, or maybe it’s just being in this new, clean country,” Mr. Garfield said, “.that makes me hate killing. I simply can’t bear to shoot anything any more, even a weasel.”

  The boy’s father turned cold eyes away from Mr. Garfield and looked out the window. One big brown hand, a little dirty from the wheel of the car, rubbed against the day-old bristles of his jaws. Then he stood up and stretched. “We got to be going,” he said.

  “Oh, stay a while,” Mr. Garfield said. “You just came. I wanted to show you my trees.”

  The boy’s mother stared. “Trees?”

  He smiled. “Sounds a bit odd out here, doesn’t it? But I think trees will grow. I’ve made some plantings down below.”

  “I’d love to see them,” she said. “Sometimes I’d give almost anything to get into a deep shady woods. Just to smell it, and feel how cool ...”

  “There’s a little story connected with these,” Mr. Garfield said. He spoke warmly, to the mother alone. “When we first decided to come out here I said to Martha that if trees wouldn’t grow we shouldn’t stick it. That’s just what I said, ‘If trees won’t grow there we shan’t stick it.’ Trees are like the breath of life to me.”

  The boy’s father was shaken by a sudden spell of coughing, and his wife shot a look at him and then looked back at Mr. Garfield with a light flush on her cheekbones. “I’d love to see them,” she said again. “I was raised in Minnesota, and I never will get used to a place as barren as this.”

  “When I think of the beeches back home in England,” Mr. Garfield said, and shook his head.

  Bo lifted himself heavily out of his chair and followed the rest of them out to the coulee edge. Below them willows grew in a thin belt along the almost-dry creek, and farther back from the water there were perhaps twenty cottonwoods a half-dozen feet high.

  “I’m trying cottonwoods first because they can stand drouth,” Mr. Garfield said.

  Elsa was looking down with all her longing plain and naked in her face. “It’s wonderful,” she said. “I’d give almost anything to have some on our place.”

  “I found the willows near here,” Mr. Garfield said. “Just at the south end of the hills they call the Old-Man-on-His-Back, where a stream comes down.”

  “Stream?” the boy’s father said. “You mean that spring-month trickle?”

  “It’s not much of a stream,” Mr. Garfield said apologetically. “But ...”

  “Are there any more there?” Elsa said.

  “Oh yes. You could get some. Cut them slanting and push them into any damp ground. They’ll grow.”

  “They’ll grow about six feet high,” Bo Mason said.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Garfield. “They’re not, properly speaking, trees. Still...”

  Bo Mason looked at the southwest. “It’s getting pretty smothery,” he said, rather loudly. “We better be getting on.”

  This time Mr. Garfield didn’t object, and they went back to the car with Mrs. Garfield and the boy’s mother exchanging promises of visits. Bo turned the crank and climbed into the Ford, where the boy was sighting along his gun. “Put that down!” his father said. “Don’t you know any better than to point a gun around people?”

  “It isn’t loaded.”

  “They never are. Put it down now.”

  The Garfields were standing with their arms around each other’s waists, waiting to wave goodbye. Mr. Garfield reached over and picked something from his wife’s dress.

  “What was it, Alfred?” she said, peering.

  “Nothing. Only a bit of fluff.”

  The boy’s father coughed violently and the car started with a jerk. With his head down almost on the wheel, still coughing, he waved, and the mother and the boy waved as they went down along the badly-set cedar posts of the pasture fence. They were almost a quarter of a mile away before the boy, with a last flourish of the gun, turned around to see that his father was not coughing, but laughing. He rocked the car with his joy, and when Elsa said, “Oh, Bo, you big fool,” he pointed helplessly to his shoulder. “Would you mind,” he said. “Would you mind brushing that bit o’ fluff off me showldah?” He rocked again, pounding the wheel. “I cawn’t stick it,” he said. “I bloody well cawn’t stick it, you knaow.”

  “It isn’t fair to laugh at him,” she said. “He can’t help being English.”

  “He can’t help being a sanctimonious old mudhen, either,” he said. “Braying about his luv-ly, luv-ly trees. They’ll freeze out the first cold winter.”

  “How do you know? Maybe it’s like he says—if they get a start they’ll grow here as well as anywhere.”

  “Maybe there’s a gold mine in our back yard, too, but I’m not going to dig to see. I couldn’t stick it.”

  “You’re just being stubborn,” she said. “Just because you didn’t like him ...”

  He turned on her in a heavy amazement. “Well my God, did you?”

  “I thought he was very nice,” she said, and sat straighter in the back seat, speaking loudly above the jolting of the springs and the cough of the motor. “They’re trying to make a home, not just a wheat crop. I liked them.”

  “Uh huh.” He was not laughing any more now. Sitting beside him, the boy could see that his face had hardened and that the cold look had come into his eyes again. “So I should start talking like I had a mouthful of bran, and planting trees around the house that’ll look like clothesline poles in two months.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You thought it, though.” He looked irritably at the sky, misted with the same delusive film of haze or cloud that had fooled him for three days. “You thought it all the time we were there. ‘Why aren’t you more like Mr. Garfield, he’s such a nice man.’” With mincing savagery he swung around and mocked her. “Shall I make it a walnut grove? Or a sugar orchard? Or maybe you’d prefer orange trees.”

  The boy was squinting down his gun, trying not to hear them quarrel, but he knew what his mother’s face would be like—hurt and a little flushed, and her chin trembling into stubbornness. “I don’t suppose you could bear to have. a rug on the floor, or a gramophone?” she said.

  He smacked the wheel hard. “Of course I could bear it if we could afford it. I’d love it. But I don’t know what you think is going to give us the dough for things like that if a wind comes up out of that heat-hole over there. And I’d a damn sight rather do without than be like that old sandhill crane.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d like to take me over to the Old-Man-on-His-Back some day to get some willow slips, either.”

  “What for?”

  “To plant down in the coulee, by the dam.”

  “That dam dries up every August. Your willows wouldn’t live till snow flies.”

  “Well, would it do any harm to try?”

  “Oh, shut up!” he said. “Just thinking about that guy and his fluff and his trees gives me the pleefer.”

  The topless Ford lurched, one wheel at a time, through the deep burnout by their pasture corner, and the boy clambered out with his gun in his hand to slip the loop of the three-strand gate. It was then that he s
aw the snake, a striped limp ribbon, dangling on the fence, and a moment later the sparrow, neatly butchered and hung by the throat on a barb. He pointed the gun at them. “Lookit!” he said. “Lookit what the butcher bird’s. been doing.”

  His father’s violent hand waved at him from the car. “Come on! Get the wire out of the way.”

  The boy dragged the gate through the dust, and the Ford went through and up behind the house framed by the fireguard overgrown with Russian thistle. Walking, across that yard a few minutes later, the boy felt its hard heat through his sneakers. There was hardly a spear of grass within the fireguard. It was one of his father’s prides that the dooryard should be like cement. “Pour your wash-water out long enough,” he said, “and you’ll have a surface so hard it won’t even make mud.” Religiously he threw his water out three times a day, carrying it sometimes a dozen steps to dump it on a dusty or grassy spot.

  Elsa had objected at first, asking why they had to live in the middle of an alkali flat, and why they couldn’t let grass grow up to the door. But he snorted her down. Everything around the house ought to be bare as a bone. Get a good grass fire going and it would jump that guard like nothing, and if they had grass to the door where would they be? She said why not plow a wider guard then, one a fire couldn’t jump, but he said he had other things to do than plowing fifty-foot fireguards.

  They were arguing inside when the boy came up the step to sit down and aim his empty .22 at a fencepost. Apparently his mother had been persistent, and persistence when he was not in a mood for it angered his father worse than anything. Their talk came vaguely through the boy’s concentration, but he shut his ears on it. If that spot on the post was a coyote, now, and he held the sight steady, right on it, and pulled the trigger, that old coyote would jump about eighty feet in the air and come down dead as a mackerel, and he could tack his hide on the barn the way Mr. Larson had one, only the dogs had jumped and torn the tail and hind legs off Mr. Larson‘s, and he wouldn’t get more than the three-dollar bounty for its ears. But Mr. Larson had shot his with a shotgun, anyway, and the hide wasn’t worth much even before the dogs tore it.