The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  “Yippee!” he yelled. “Powder River, let ‘er buck!”

  The Swede jumped six inches, and his lugubrious, startled face turned. “You tank ve make it?” he said.

  Bo laughed, jamming the Ford recklessly through a drift. “You’re God damned right Ay tank ve make it,” he said. He leaned back, stretching, relaxing his tightened muscles for the twentieth time. The whirl of snow visible through the windshield lifted briefly, showing him a drift deeper than most, long and crested and fringed with blowing tatters of snow. He stepped on the low pedal and dragged down the gas, and then when they were halfway through the drift, slugging through it like a boat through a wave, he saw the fence dead ahead.

  His hands yanked the wheel around and his feet stabbed at brake and reverse at the same time. The Ford shuddered, swung, skidded, caught, hit something big and solid under the drift, and very slowly, as if careful not to hurt or break anything, turned over on its side.

  The Swede’s two hundred pounds came down on Bo, smashing him against the blanket curtain. He felt the snow under the blanket crush and give, heard bottles smash, and then he was fighting back against Ole’s dead weight, reaching out through the clumsy coat and mitts and blanket to turn the switch and cut the motor, still running on its side.

  “Get off!” he roared. “Get your damned dead carcass out of here!”

  3

  Elsa saw the storm coming by mid-morning. At noon, when she was certain it was going to be bad, she sent the boys out after buckets of lignite, and herself went out to the barn, broke open two bales of hay with the pliers, and tumbled the packed dusty slabs down into the mangers. If the wind blew hard for very long she might not be able to get out for a while.

  The wind was up strong when she closed the barn doors; she had to wrestle them with all her weight. Worry about Bo drove her to sit by the kitchen window afterward, staring across the vacant lot toward the south road. The air was striated and thick with driving snow. Sometimes such a gust drove in from the river bend that Van Dam’s house and shed and the low windmill tower were blotted out, and only the madly-whirling blades remained in sight. Jim Van Dam ought to do something about that mill. It would blow to pieces if he didn’t.

  She was about to call Chet and send him over to tell them their mill was up, but another look at the wind and snow outside made her hesitate. And the boys should be kept in because of the flu. She reached for her coat, stooping to see if the blades were still there.

  “I’m going over to Van Dam‘s,” she called into the other room. “You stay in the house, both of you.”

  Her eyes screwed shut, body doubled against the gusts, she made her way across the lot and up to the Van Dam’s kitchen door. Her knock went rattling down the wind. No one could possibly have heard it. She pushed on the knob, and the wind blew her into the kitchen.

  Jim Van Dam, a lumpy quilt around him, was sitting on the oven door with a dishpan between his feet. He did not look up, but his wife, holding his forehead, turned a white face and made a sick grimace with her mouth. Then he gagged and retched, and she clung to him, holding him upright.

  “He just took sick this morning,” Mrs. Van Dam said. “He was all right till after breakfast, and then he said he felt queer and I gave him some calomel, and he’s been throwing up for a half hour.”

  She didn’t say, “Now he’s got it!” but she might just as well have. Elsa took off her coat. “Where’s little Jimmy?” she said.

  “Upstairs. I wouldn’t let him come down too close.”

  “Haven’t you got a couch in the parlor?”

  “Yes.”

  “We ought to get him to bed,” Elsa said. She looked at Jim Van Dam, contracted in a heavy chill. But when she stooped to help Mrs. Van Dam get him to his feet and lead him in to the couch, the other woman’s eyes met hers. “Oh Lord,” Mrs. Van Dam said. “Now you’ve got close to him.”

  “I’d have got close, one way or another,” Elsa said. “None of us can hide away, I guess.”

  She stayed until the sick man was in bed. Then she brought in a good supply of coal and kindling and two buckets of water from the well. The windmill, she saw, was already ruined, its whole broad tail gone. But it was no time to be worrying about windmills. When she sat inside again having a cup of coffee with Mrs. Van Dam she tried not to see the tears that dropped on the oilcloth, or the scrawny thinness of Mrs. Van Dam’s arms. But even more than that she tried not to see the picture that her mind kept trying to uncover, a picture of Bo fighting his way back through this blizzard, maybe sick himself. If Jim Van. Dam was all right at breakfast and was this sick by noon, Bo could have had the same thing happen ...

  “I’ll go call up Doctor O‘Malley,” she said. “He’ll probably want to send a rig to take Jim to the schoolhouse. They’ve got the schoolteachers nursing, and he’d get better care there.” “Thank you,” Mrs. Van Dam said. “I guess that’d be better. I’m no good. When I knew he had it I just went all to pieces. I...”

  “Don’t worry,” Elsa said. “Give him a hot lemonade and some salts when he can hold them down, and I’ll see if I can’t get somebody. They may not be able to get around till tomorrow, if this keeps up, but I’ll run over and see if you need anything.”

  It was not until the odd jobs, the telephoning, the grim preparatory look through the medicine cupboard, were all done that worry crept up on her and stayed. It came obliquely, discreetly, while the wind leaned its weight against the house, howled around the eaves, strained the frame until the walls creaked. No car could get a mile in such weather. She had confidence in Bo, he could get through if anyone could, but that was just the trouble. He might very well have started from Chinook while there was only that pre-storm haze, that ominous coppery blurring over the sun, thinking that he could run through before it broke. And once it broke he wouldn’t stop. He’d butt right ahead, stubborn as a mule, no matter how cold it got or how the wind blew.

  She went to the front window and looked at the thermometer hung on the outside frame. Two below. An hour ago it had been five above, at noon ten above. The longer he drove—if he was driving—the worse it got.

  Her nervousness wouldn’t let her sit still. She went to the sewing machine and got out the dress she was making for Freda Appleton, who was getting married next month. One way to keep from worrying was to stitch buttonholes. But every few minutes during the two hours she sat sewing she kept getting up to stoke the stove, shake down ashes, walk to the window and see the temperature down to four below, to five, to eight. The boys squabbled over the Erector set on the dining room table, and she separated them and punished Chet with only half her mind on what she was doing. If Bo had started after breakfast he ought to be in now. The clock said a quarter to five. Still, he hadn’t promised to be home tonight. He would certainly have stopped along the road, at Cree or Gadke‘s, or maybe at Robsart if he had chosen that road. He was probably sitting by some fire not two hours away from home, waiting for the storm to blow out.

  But suppose the snow blocked the roads and stayed. There would be no moving the car till spring.

  Oh fiddle, she said. He can take care of himself. He could get a bobsleigh or something.

  With all that liquor aboard? her mind said. What would he do with that? Suppose he stopped somewhere and they called in the police ...

  She spun it back and forth, stitching steadily at the monotonous buttonholes that went from neck to waist down the back of the dress. The stove glowed dull red in the corner, but over where she sat under the lamp, needing light now to see, it was cold. Occasionally attention stiffened her body as she thought she heard noises that were not the wind. Once she was sure she heard a car, but the window showed nothing, and when she tried to look out the back door it was nailed fast by the wind. For a minute she stood listening: the sound did not come again. Before she quite gave it up she went out on the front porch, half blocked by an angled drift laid in on the side-swipe of wind, and stood for a minute with the snow buzzing in the air around her, sett
ling on hair and dress.

  He wouldn’t try to come through today. There was no use worrying. Besides, it was time to get the boys’ supper. Shut in, they did nothing but eat. They had been piecing all day, and still they said periodically, every ten minutes, “Ma, when do we eat?”

  Still she went back to the buttonholes for a few more minutes, unwilling just yet to break her listening. But what if, her mind said slyly, Bo stopped somewhere along the road and they had the flu there? Or what if he got so sick on the road he couldn’t make it to shelter?

  For one catastrophic instant she saw the image of cattle frozen by the roadsides in the spring, still frozen but bloated, horrible, obscene as the spring thaws softened them for the final decay, and she gritted her teeth and stood up. It was then that she heard the unmistakable thumping on the porch.

  When she opened the door a short, involuntary cry was wrenched out of her. A man was stretched out on the steps, feet trailing in the broken snow, and another man was pulling at his shoulders, trying to drag him. He turned his head at her cry, and his grim face, only nose and eyes showing from the fur cap, brought her flying out to help him. Together they dragged the heavy figure of the other man into the hallway. The boys were in the door. “Get out of the way!” Bo said harshly, and shouldered through them.

  They laid the man down, and in the light from the front room Elsa recognized Ole Pederson. His cheeks and nose were leprous white, and he had evidently been crying, because his eyelids were stuck fast with ice. Her eyes darted to Bo. “Oh, I was afraid ... I” she said. “Where ... ?” She was noticing twenty things at once —the rattling icicles beaten into the hair of the dogskin coat, the monstrous hulk of Bo’s shoulders, the harsh jut of brows and nose from the fur cap, the way he stood with feet wide apart, swaying, the telltale white patches on cheeks and nose. In one quick glance, while she moved to shut the door on the curving lee-side wind, she saw all those things, and her hands and feet and voice leaped into action all at once.

  “Lie down on the couch,” she said to Bo. “Chet, get a dishpan full of snow. Bruce, run upstairs and get some blankets and quilts, anything.” Reaching outside, she scooped a handful of snow and slammed the door. The boys were still stupidly staring at Ole’s corpse-like body; Bo stood in the hall door, swaying a little and grinning at her. She hustled the boys off, slapped the handful of snow into his face and held it there. He stood for it quietly, and when the last white patch had disappeared, wiped his face clumsily on a towel, his hands still cased in the icy mitts. He was stooping to look at Ole when Elsa got the pan of snow from Chet and came up. He motioned her away.

  “Stay away from him, all of you,” he said.

  Deliberately, as if contemptuous of his own samaritanism, he smeared snow in Ole’s face with a mittened hand, found it clumsy, and held out his hands to Elsa. “Pull these off,” he said.

  The leather was frozen stiff, curved from the wheel, and the mitts came off hard. When they came, Elsa cried out again. Bo’s fingers were white clear to the second joint. She tried to push them down in the pan of snow, but he snarled at her and brushed her away. She watched helplessly while his frozen fingers rubbed snow on the frozen cheeks and nose and chin of the Swede. In a minute she had started forward to pull at him. “Let me,” she said, “if he has to be fixed first.”

  “Get back!” he said. He waved at the boys, crowding on the stairway to look down. “You too. Get away on back.”

  “What’s the matter with him?” she said. “Is he hurt?”

  Bo didn’t answer. He tried to take off Ole’s mittens, could not grip them with his own wooden hands, and ended by pulling them off with his teeth. Ole’s hands were all right.

  On his heels beside the Swede, Bo squatted and washed his hands in the pan. “I don’t know what to do about this big sucker,” he said finally. “I don’t want you tending him. He’s got the flu, I guess.”

  “Chester,” Elsa said without turning her head. “Call up Doctor O‘Malley and tell him if he’s going to pick up Jim Van Dam as soon as the storm stops, he’d better pick up Ole here, too.”

  “Van Dam got it?” Bo said.

  “I was over there helping this afternoon.”

  Their eyes met, and Bo shrugged. “Then I guess there’s no use taking care. I didn’t want to bring him home, but there wasn’t anything else I could do with the guy.”

  “Brucie,” Elsa said, “you start taking off Pa’s moccasins. Chet, soon as you telephone, get a new pan of snow and a bucket of water.”

  Leaving Ole on the floor under a quilt, she led Bo in to the couch. He walked awkwardly, his face fiery red now, and his hair on end. Coming out of the bearish bulkiness of the coat, his head and neck had a curiously frail human look that made Elsa shake her head. You got used to thinking of Bo as capable of anything, but this drive must have been close. She steered her mind away from how close it must have been. His hands and face frozen, maybe his feet ...

  “Hurry!” she said to Bruce. “Hustle!”

  Her own hands were busy kneading his fingers in the pan of snow, working them, stripping them like the teats of a cow, rubbing down the wrists. “Feel anything?” He shook his head.

  “Let’s get a little closer to the fire,” he said. He started to rise, but she pushed him back.

  “You stay away from the fire!” She rubbed at the cold, curved, inhuman fingers, and relief brought tears to her eyes. “Oh Bo!” she said. “You shouldn’t have tried to come through!”

  Bruce was pulling with both hands at the heavy socks, their tops stiff frozen. One came off, and Elsa, looking down, winced. The feet too, waxen and ribbed by the ribs of the socks like something hardened in a mold. She looked at Bo’s red, unshaven face, and he winked at her, drawing down the corners of his mouth. “Too many patients for you, Mama,” he said.

  Elsa dumped snow in Chet’s pail of water, rolled up Bo’s trouser legs, and set both feet in the pail. The water slopped over, but she went on working, shifting from fingers to toes. “Feel anything yet?”

  “Hands a little. I haven’t felt my feet since we tipped over.”

  That brought her head up. “Tipped over? How did you get in then?”

  “I drove in,” Bo said. His mood seemed to have changed suddenly; he looked and sounded savage, as if the very memory made him mad.

  “But,” she said, still rubbing. “If you tipped over ...”

  “I tipped it back up,” he said harshly. “Don’t ask me how. I don’t know how. I don’t know how I got in, either, so you needn’t ask me that. I didn’t know I was here till I ran into the fence.”

  “Oh my Lord,” Elsa said softly. “You’re lucky!”

  He grunted irritably. “Yeah. I’m lucky I ran into that big dumb Ole and had to bring him in. I’m lucky I froze my face and hands and feet. I’m lucky I broke God knows how many bottles of hooch. I’m lucky as hell, all right.”

  She kept still, and later, when the pain came like fire into his hands and feet and he roared at her to let him alone, she did as he asked. There was nothing she knew about the care of frost-bite except to keep it from thawing out too fast, to prevent gangrene. Maybe he’d get gangrene anyway. It had taken a long time to get the blood back into his feet. And all, she said in one spiteful instant, for a load of whiskey and a few dollars!

  Because Bo was in too much pain now to put his weight on his feet, she got the boys to help knock one of the upstairs beds apart and set it up again in the dining room. Ole Pederson came out of his stupor and moaned, and she tugged and dragged and rolled him onto the couch in the parlor. Then she fed the boys and sent them off to bed.

  Curiously, that night was one of almost blissful peace. Her worry was gone, Bo was home and safe. The blizzard whined and howled and pounded around the house, and the thermometer on the porch dropped steadily until at ten o‘clock it hovered around twenty below. But the parlor stove was brick red, there was a comfortable, lazy smell of baking paint from the asbestos mat in the corner. She sat on the edge of th
e bed in the dining room and talked to Bo quietly, remembering the other time she had had to rub his frosted face with snow, the day she and Bo had decided to be married. Ole Pederson, in the other room, drank the duck soup she fixed for him and sank into a light, mumbling sleep, and with the lamp blown out she and Bo talked.

  He told her about Chinook, and the fear that was chasing everybody inside to hibernate.

  “A lot of people wouldn’t have brought Ole in,” she said, and smoothed the hair back from his forehead.

  Bo grunted. “All this running away. If it’s going to get you it’s going to get you.”

  “Funny,” Elsa said. “Once it comes right into your own house you’re not scared any more. It’s just like any sickness, and it doesn’t paralyze you the way it did at first.”

  “If you’re not scared you’re the only person in Saskatchewan that isn’t.” He reached out to pull her down for a kiss, and flinched back. She felt the jerk of his body, and a slow, warm, tender amusement filled her. He could overcome almost anything, do almost anything, but give him a little pain and put him in bed and he was the biggest baby on earth. A woman could stand twice as much. It was like the way the flu seemed to take the biggest and strongest men, as if their very strength was their weakness.

  She moved, and Bo hissed at her through gritted teeth to go easy. When she dragged the covers over his feet that way she liked to killed him.

  “What will you do about the things in the car?” she said. “You can’t walk, and you can’t hold anything in your hands.”

  “I don’t know. Unless maybe you and the kids can get it in. None of it’s very heavy but the keg, and that’ll roll.”

  “We’ll get it,” she said. “Are you sure it’s all right out there tonight? Won’t it freeze, or something?”

  He roared with laughter that clicked off against his teeth when the pain hit him. “Old Mama!” he said. “It’ll freeze about as quick as the thermometer will.”