Bruce was a better scholar than Chet, but Chet was a better singer, and in all the cantatas the school gave. Chet was strong, too, and had licked Weddie Orullian and Pete Purcell and had almost licked Tad McGovern.
Town was things that had happened, like the time he had shot himself through the toe with Chet’s .22, the numb moment before he knew he was hurt, when he thought somebody had hit him in the foot with a rock, and stood there with the .22 in his hand wondering what had made the noise, until he saw the sole ripped clear off his shoe, and the leather bloody.
Town was winter, the river ice full of air bubbles like silver coins, and the wonder of a Chinook in the midst of bitter cold, when he woke to the wail of a blizzard and looked out to see no blizzard at all, but a thaw, the eaves of Chance’s house dripping, the roof melted black, the ground a lake of slush and water, and the wind coming through the three little portholes of the storm windows warm as milk. Town was the four-gabled white house his father had built when the town was first settled in 1914, the room where he and Chet lay in bed making pictures of dragons and trains and animals and angels among the blotches left by the fire-men’s chemicals when the attic had caught fire. It was the parlor downstairs, the piano his mother was so fond of, the big-bellied Round Oak stove with the asbestos pad underneath and the scuttle of lignite behind it.
It was his mother darning, and sometimes his father reading or reciting Robert W. Service:This is the law of the Yukon, and ever she makes it plain.
Send not your foolish and feeble, send but your strong and your sane...
Sometimes too it was stories, when his father was feeling good, exciting stories about the Wisconsin woods and the Terrible Swede and little Pete the Wanigan boy and Paul Bunyan and Hot Bis- . cuit Slim. When the boys were finally shooed off to bed, going reluctantly up the cold stairs and looking back wanting more, Bruce always had a strong feeling of home and warmth and security on nights like that, when his father was jovial and full of yarns. He knew his mother liked those too. She never had the tired look in her shoulders, the puckery squint around her eyes, the habit of looking as if she saw something through the wall.
His mother’s hand touched him, and she said, “Well, son, there’s the big city.”
He sat up and looked. They were starting down the dugway. Below them lay the river valley and the looping bends, and at the top of the big U-bend the houses of Whitemud. He pushed his hat back and watched as they went down carefully, the wooden brake shoes sizzling on the tires like sandpaper, the horses’ rumps hunched back, braced into the breeching against the push of the load. The colt limped along beside Daisy, fell behind, trotted tiredly to catch up.
“Poor little thing,” Elsa said. “That’s an awful trip for a poor little colt.”
Bruce snapped his fingers and whistled at the lagging colt. “Come on, Peggie,” he said. “We’re pretty near there.”
“Glad?” his mother said.
“Uh huh.”
“So am I,” she said, and laughed. “Or I would be if I knew what we were going to live on this winter.”
V
What, said Bo to himself, sitting and thinking, trying to figure away the winter that stretched ahead, would an Indian do to make sure of eating for those seven months? How would some pioneer off in the wilderness provide for his family?
There were the cows and the chickens. He had already figured them, one cow fresh and one due to freshen in two months. There might be a little milk to sell, and there might be a few extra eggs from their dozen hens. But that was almost all. The jobs he could do he had done. He had spent three frantic weeks cutting fall hay on the north bench, had borrowed a baler so that he’d be able to get more into the small loft he had. There might be some of that to sell, if he turned the horses loose on the range and kept only the cows and the colt inside. And he had hauled five wagon-loads of lignite from the hillside west of the railroad bridge, enough to keep them warm for the winter. It was lousy fuel, half ash and half rock, but it was better than nothing, and it was free.
So, he said, figuring, they could keep warm and they could depend on milk and eggs. They might make a dime a day from their extra milk, maybe thirty cents a day when the muley freshened. There might be thirty or forty dollars’ worth of extra hay. The town owed him ten dollars for his annual job of taking out the footbridge before the river froze over.
And that was all. That was absolutely, by God, he thought angrily, that was absolutely all. The little money he had got from the wheat would pay their bills and buy a few necessities, but there wouldn’t be anything left in the spring for seed, for summer supplies, for anything.
Grind your own wheat? he said. Slaughter your own hogs? If you had a hog. Might be a good idea to try picking one up, even this late. It was cheaper on the hoof than it was in Heimie’s shop. A beef was out, but he might find some farmer who was slaughtering and had a quarter to spare. But what else? There had to be some .thing else. What would an Indian do?
Game? He considered it, weighing the cost of shells against the possible addition to the food supply. In Dakota they had sometimes frozen ducks and geese down. And fur. There were all those traps of the kids‘, and the north bench was full of muskrat sloughs. And fur was high. It would be small pickings, maybe, but better than sitting on your pratt.
He rose from the table, went to the window and looked into the square of front yard that two years ago had been hopefully seeded to lawn. The two spruces that he had gone clear up to the Cypress Hills for stood withered and dead at the corners of the house. That was the way with everything in the whole damn town. It started out big and just dwindled away.
He compressed his lips, breathed in a great lungful of air, went to the cellarway and took out his shotgun. The hell with just sitting around wondering and figuring. He would fill that bath house so full of meat, by God, that they’d eat duck three times a day and have some left over for the Fourth of July.
So through the waning days of mid-October, in the chill, leaden, snow-spitting weather, he spent days on the north bench after ducks. He built a blind and sat patiently for whole mornings at a time with his feet slowly going dead through the heavy socks and waders, watching the sky and the bobbing decoys riding the shallow, riffled water. He sat in the wind with the mangy dogskin coat around his ears, and when a flock circled and came back he crouched lower, shaking the coat off onto the packed damp tules, and as they came in he let them have it, taking no chances, trying no fancy shots, letting them come clear down even, shooting sitting birds, because there was no limit in this kind of hunting. He was after a winter’s meat.
The first day, red-nosed and windburned, he brought in fourteen ducks. The next day he got only eight. The day after that he had a carful of teal and mallard and spoonbill, and one goose. In a week he brought in over a hundred birds. They had eaten duck until the very sight of one turned their stomachs, Elsa and the boys had plucked ducks until their fingers were sore (because duck down, Bo said, made good pillows, and pillows were things people always wanted. Elsa could get some ticking and make a lot of pillows and you ought to get a buck apiece for them).
He was driven by such a furious compulsion to fill the house with game that Elsa laughed at him, asking him when he was going to start saving tea-lead and string, and he was irritated and hurt that she couldn’t see how necessary it was to save every penny. For himself, he was a miser. The thought of all the money he had squandered in the past ten years tortured him. The necessity of saving everything, making use of everything, living off the land, was an obsession that hardly let him sleep. Elsa tried to make him stop. People were talking about the flu that was spreading around the country. John Chapman said that if it came anywhere close he was hitting for California. It would be a hard and cold and long winter even if the flu didn’t get to them, and Bo’s going out and catching pneumonia in a slough wouldn’t make it any easier.
She might as well have saved her breath. He kept up his hunting, she picked a dozen or two dozen ducks
every day, there were gunny sacks full of duck feathers waiting to be made into pillows when she got time. The ducks themselves they hung out to freeze, and then strung up in long lines in the bath house, but it was early in the season for freezing down meat, and Elsa eyed them du. biously, afraid they might all spoil.
They did. The weather turned warm, the frozen ground softened and turned to mud. Bo was in a frenzy. A hundred ducks out there, enough for fifty meals, two months’ meat, and the damned ther. mometer jumped up to forty-five degrees. He rushed down to Heimie Gross to see if they could be packed in Heimie’s ice-house, but Heimie’s ice-house was nothing but damp sawdust. There wouldn’t be any ice until the river froze.
“God damn!” Bo said. He stood for a minute, thinking, and then started toward home, took the key from the kitchen door, and went out to the bath house. It felt cold inside when he stepped in, but not cold enough. He felt one of the ducks hanging from the wire. Beginning to soften. He swore again, his eyes darting around the bare room with the benches, the dirty inscriptions, the nails where clothes and bathing suits were hung in the summer.
There was a step outside, and Elsa looked in. “How are they?” she said. She held her hand up, feeling the air. “It feels pretty cold yet. Maybe they’ll last till night, and it’ll get colder then.”
He shook his head, looking at the strings of ducks, fat, meaty, their necks stretched from hanging and their webbed feet dangling. “Have you got any empty fruit sealers?”
“A dozen or so, maybe.” She looked doubtfully at the ducks. “Would that work?”
“Well, something’s got to work!” he shouted at her. “Have you got any better ideas?”
“It seems a shame,” she said. “The jars I’ve got wouldn’t save more than a few.”
“I know that.” He clicked his teeth, wanting to cut loose and kick the bench away from the wall. Violent impulses jumped in his hands and feet, and he went abruptly outside. Elsa came after him.
“I’ll go get the jars boiling,” she said hurriedly, and with a side glance at him went back to the house.
Bo stood where he was, looking out over the cutbank, across the river to the low thick scrub of willow and alder and black birch. It never failed. You worked your head off and then something went sour. His mind groped for an object to curse, something to vent his anger on. A tin can lay at his feet, and with one swing he booted it thirty feet into the river.
Well, there were only four ways of preserving meat that he knew of. Freezing was out because of the thaw, canning would take care of only a few ducks, and jars were too expensive to buy. Drying was out of the question in this weather. So there was only smoking left. He had never heard of smoked duck, but by God there was going to be plenty of smoked duck this winter. He locked the bath house door, and lurching in his haste, started for the barn to get tools and boards to knock together a smoke-house.
At the end of five days he gave up. The ducks which had hung in the smoke, wizened, dried, blackened things, were rubbery and evil-tasting. The combination of gamy flavor and smoke was enough, he said, to turn the stomach of a vulture. He tasted them raw, and they sickened him. He boiled one, and the smell drove him from the house. Finally he threw the whole lot of them in the river, and all they had from his furious hunting was a dozen jars of canned duck and a few of duck soup.
By October 28 the river was filmed with brittle ice under the wagons coming down from the bench and fording below Purcell’s. There were many wagons. Bo, driven to prowl the town and sit in Anderson’s poolhall, saw two dozen men he did not recognize, and the street was full of strange women and children. The town wore a look of unaccustomed activity, as if for Thanksgiving or Christmas, but there was little holiday feeling. Faces were long and talk somber, and they talked of three things: the war, the price of food, and the flu.
Bo had been too busy to pay any attention to the flu, but listening to the farmers who hung around the poolhall he heard the fear in their talk. Out on the prairie, miles from town or a doctor, a man got thinking. There was never a winter that some homesteader didn’t get snowed in, or break his leg or cut himself with an ax and then sit there in his shanty unable to help himself, sitting with his sheepskin on and all his blankets over that, hoarding his fuel, while his wound festered and swelled and the shack got colder, and almost every spring some such homesteader was found frozen stiff. Suppose, then, a whole family got sick with this flu, and no help around, and winter setting in solid and cold three weeks early?
It was supposing things like this that drove in the homesteaders in wagons piled with goods, to settle down on some relative or friend or in vacant rooms. Three families had gone together and cobbled up a shack, half house and half tent, in the curve of the willows east of the elevators. Even a tent in town was better, in these times, than a house out on the bitter flats.
The papers they read didn’t reassure them. On both coasts the hospitals were jammed, the army camps were crowded with sick soldiers, whole inland parts of the country were virtually isolated. Because there was no safe place to run to, people stayed, but they took it easy about going outdoors, they doctored colds as if they were pneumonia, they kept their children home from school if a sniffle was heard in the primary room, they soused their handkerchiefs with the eucalyptus oil that Henderson the druggist said was a preventative. And they sat in Anderson’s poolhall and talked.
Once Bo sat for a solid hour hearing how the disease turned you black as ink just before it killed you, and how people in the last stages rose from their beds and ran screaming and gibbering through the streets, foaming at the mouth and biting anyone who got in their way. Bo hawked in disgust and got up to take a drink from the waterpail in back. As he lifted the dipper he saw the yellow-green moss coating the tin bottom, and dumped the water angrily on the floor. With his fingernail he traced a skull and crossbones in the bottom of the dipper, digging the scum off clear to the stained metal, and hung the thing up again. No wonder these guys were scared of the flu. They had a right to be, with things like that left around to drink out of.
Back at the bar, sticky and smelling sweetly of strawberry pop, he drummed his fingers on the counter and looked at Ed Anderson. Ed had had an eye knocked out by an exploding pop bottle the year before, and wore a black patch. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a bottle of beer in the joint,” Bo said.
Mopping off the counter, Ed turned to spit at a hidden spittoon. “I would if I could, boy,” he said. “You just can’t get it, even if the cops would let you sell it.”
Bo drummed again, looking out the dirty windows into the street. He turned his head and inspected the half dozen men hanging around the front end, and cleaned his teeth with his tongue. Bunch of dung-footed dirt farmers. He contemplated them with contempt, wondering if it would do any good to try getting up a little stud game. But he gave it up immediately. If they were too leaded to play pool, they wouldn’t play poker. They didn’t even have spirit enough to crab about the prohibition law that kept them from having a schooner of beer.
“What’s the matter with this town?” he said irritably. “Isn’t there anybody in it with gumption enough to start a blind pig, even? What’s the matter with you, Ed? You don’t look like a Christer.”
“I ain’t any Christer,” Ed said. “But I’m telling you, you can’t get it. Where’d I buy it?”
“There must be somebody got it for sale. When I was selling beer on the road in Dakota I did my whole business with blind pigs.”
The half dozen loungers were all looking at him. “What I wish,” one said, “is that you could get a bottle of good strong liquor-sauce in this place. If that old flu lights around here I want to crawl in bed with a bottle.”
“Ain’t it the truth,” Ed said. “If I had ten cases behind this bar I could sell out in three days.”
“You could get five bucks a bottle for it, too,” Bo said.
Ed’s one eye, pale, with strained red streaks in it, opened in agreement, and he jerked his head sideways
to shoot at the spittoon again. “You tell ‘em,” he said. “If a guy wants something bad enough, he’ll pay anything.”
Bo stood up. “Well,” he said, “if bullshitting around would get a man a drink, I’d be stiff as a plank now. Anybody want to shoot a game of pool?”
Nobody did. Dissatisfied and aimless, he got into the dogskin and wandered outside. Weddie Orullian’s great wife, thick and pillowy and wide as a sidewalk, the mother of nine children and enormous now with her tenth, went up the street on the other side and waved a bulky arm, grinning and yelling at him. Bo waved back. That old squaw, common as manure, but she had fun. About the only cheerful thing in the whole damn town.
He was disgusted, vaguely grouchy, irrationally sore at the farmers who sat around Anderson’s all day and couldn’t think of anything to do but tell bear stories about the flu. Every one of them wanted a drink or a bottle, but would they do anything to get it? They’d sit on their behinds and cry, that was all they’d do. It was only a hundred miles to Chinook, less than that to some of the smaller Montana towns. If they wanted a drink as bad as they said, they could drive over any time, get a carload, bring it back into Canada over any of a hundred little unwatched wagon-track trails ...
In the middle of the plank sidewalk he stopped short. An incredulous laugh burst out of him. “Holy jumping Jesus!” he said softly. “I’ve been sitting right on top of a gold mine!”
Briefly, automatically, he wished for Jud. Jud was the only partner he had ever had, a guy you could depend on to come in on anything worth a gamble. But Jud was dead in Alaska, and there was nobody in town he could go to for money, nobody he wanted to cut into this proposition. The only possibility was Chapman, at the bank, and Chapman would have to be talked to like a Dutch uncle.
The Big Rock Candy Mountain Page 33