The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  In formal meeting, the town council voted to collect money for a bronze plaque to be erected in the firehouse in honor of the four local boys who had died in the war and the eleven others who had served. The Reverend Charles Evans, successor to the Reverend John Morrison who had died of the flu, bought a half column of space in the Whitemud Ledger to deplore, more publicly than he could from his pulpit, the falling away of Sunday school and church attendance.

  Early in April Howard Palmer, who had hung up a shingle reading “Barrister” two years before, stood up in church to denounce the wickedness of the town. He thundered, his head shook, his eyes went bloodshot with passion, foam gathered at the corners of his mouth. He called down hellfire on three sinful women, and named their names. He blasted the person who had brought liquor in in defiance of provincial law, and named his name. He took a passing swipe at Ed Anderson’s billiard hell and the Pastime Movie Theater. When he had cracked his damnation blacksnake over most of the town’s backs, he fell down between the pews in a fit, and that night, while Bo Mason was.winning a pearl-handled jack-knife for figure skating at the annual ice carnival, they carted the barrister off to Saskatoon to the bughouse, and that was a nine-days’ wonder.

  Until finally there came a time when the sun was up before most of the townspeople, and by the time breakfasts were over the eaves began to drip. They dripped all day, and after a day or so women emerged on front porches and swept out the accumulated rubbish of the winter. The nights froze hard, but before eight in the morning water was running again, and anyone walking below the bench hills was likely to break through the sodden crust and fill his shoes with icewater, and if he stood quietly and listened he could hear the streams under the snow. Thermometers stood at forty-five, ninety degrees above where they had stood a time or two during the winter. Dogs ran dirty-footed through the town, boys felt the misty, warming air on their faces and hated school. Because this was it: this was the real spring thaw. It might freeze every night, it might even snow again, but the weather had broken. The awakening was like a sunny morning after long rain, or light after long darkness, and the blood leaped to the sound of the spring freshets coming down the gullies from the hills.

  After a week of thaw Bo went downtown and brought back the Ford from Bert Withers’ garage, where he had left it to get a new radiator put on. Three days later, as soon as the sun had dried the roads a little, he was ready to go.

  “Keep an eye on Daisy,” he said to Elsa. “She’ll throw her colt any time now. I asked Jim Enich to come around every other day or so.”

  “Are you going to be gone long?”

  “I might be gone ten days.”

  “But why? With the car ...”

  “I’m going to peddle this in the other towns,” he said. “The quicker I get rid of this the fatter the stake gets. I want to build up a good one before two or three other guys get the idea the roads are passable.”

  “Is there anything you want me to do?” she said.

  He looked at her quickly. “Like what?”

  “Like selling any stuff you’ve got left over.”

  “I thought you didn’t want anything to do with it?”

  “I didn‘t,” she said. “But I’d rather be in it with you than have you going off on these trips without telling me anything. We always did things together, till now.”

  “Old Mama,” he said, and put his arm around her. “Now you’re playing ball.”

  An hour later he climbed into the Ford and drove out toward the bench, his tracks like parallel wriggling ditches in the thick gumbo mud.

  For eleven months of the year the Whitemud River was a sleepy, slow, clear stream, looping in wide meanders between the bench hills, shallowing to brief rapids, deepening along the cutbanks in the bends. But for a week or two around the end of April it was a flood thirty feet deep, jammed with ice cakes and driftwood and the splintered timbers of bridges. It completely covered the willows across the channel from the Mason house, and what had been a wilderness of brush and scrub was a chocolate expanse of water, moving in places with terrible quiet speed, stalling at others into eddies and backwashes.

  It began with the first sudden thaw, when every little drainage gully from the hills began pouring water down onto the river ice, and it kept on until the channel was gorged and overflowed by this new river on top of the old. In the sun, in the wet, exciting wind, groups of people lined the banks waiting for the breakup. Somebody reported that she was going below the dam; in ten minutes there was word that ice was backed twenty feet high behind the upper railroad bridge. By the time the townspeople arrived, a section gang Working cautiously from a handcar was dropping dynamite into the moving, sliding, ponderous pressure of the pack. They might as well have dropped firecrackers.

  After one look, some of the men went home for pikepoles. In a timberless country, those forty- and fifty-foot piles and those heavy hemlock timbers were worth fishing for.

  Bruce, coming home from school at four, was told to take Daisy out and picket her for a couple of hours, give her a breath of air and some exercise. He led her out, rubbing down along her shoulder, working off some heavy winter hair. He wished she would hurry up and have her colt, so he could feed it and try to teach it tricks.

  He led Daisy down into the northward loop of the river, drove in the picket pin, and snapped the chain into her halter ring. I, “Okay,” he said. “You take a little stroll around and get a bite of grass and I’ll come for you about dark.” He slapped her haunch and rubbed her poll when she poked her head at him. She was so round with her colt that her legs spraddled.

  Coming back, he heard the blasting out by the bridge, and saw the people moving that way. Harvey Chance was just starting to sprint down the muddy road. “Come on,” he said, and jumped up and down waiting. “The bridge is going!”

  Together they raced past Van Dam‘s, through the south pasture fence, out toward the abandoned oil derrick on the town side of the bridge. There were boys on the derrick’s top, the bank was black with people, men with pikepoles were posted along the lower side.

  “There she goes!” The crowd’s voice rose, an enormous, exciting, soaring yell. Bruce and Harvey ducked in to the cutbank edge just in time to see the handcar scuttle off the bridge. The spindly structure was already buckling and kneeling above the white ice and brown water. Timber groaned. A cake of ice was hurled against the yielding piles of the upper side, snapped two of them off, and split in two, falling with a heavy double crash. The bridge buckled more, the right rail split loose from a half dozen ties and snapped straight, the left one was bent inexorably downward. From then on the measure of the bridge’s yielding was that widening rift between the rails. The ice growled heavily upstream. A few cakes, released by the snapping of the two piles, slid through edgewise and splashed in the open water below.

  There was another heaving, straining, wood-splitting, nail-and-spike-bending, ice-burdened groan from the bridge. The left hand rail broke loose and snapped almost upright, humming like a mighty tuning fork, and the crowd sighed, a noise like a sudden wind, as the ice mounted the upper piles and the whole toothpick structure bent over very slowly toward the river, held together momentarily against the seethe of edgewise, endwise, flatwise, twisting and righting and grinding and overflowing icepans and dirty floodwater. Then the whole middle section fell apart, went out in a spider-legged tangle of timbers. The townward side held except for three cabled-together piles that were gnawed off by the ice. But the excitement by then was gone from the bridge. The excitement was in the log fishing downriver. The whole crowd fled, even the impotent section gang, to help the men with pikepoles.

  One man, hanging to a willow bush, his feet on the slippery edge of the rising water, leaned far out and hooked a pile with his pike-pole, hauled it closer, lost it to a driving ice cake and yelled to the next man downstream, who hooked it and snaked it halfway in, where a dozen hands laid hold and dragged it up the bank.

  “God bless the C.P.R.!” somebody yelled.
There was laughter and noise, more yells as someone else snaked in a pole. A detachment left for the next bend, racing the pounding icepans and the matchlike logs, to fish in less troubled water farther down.

  They stayed for hours, virtually the whole town, men, women, children, and dogs. The bigger boys went along the cutbanks kicking great undermined blocks of earth into the river. Women went home at supper time and came back with coffee and sandwiches. Men split firewood and built up a bonfire. Every ten minutes the bridge would obligingly drop off another timber or group of timbers, and they were dragged out of the water and ice with a “Heave! Heave! Heave!” and yells of laughter. It was a picnic, a spontaneous spring overflowing. It was ten o‘clock before Bruce and Chet and their mother walked home all together, arm in arm, singing.

  Bruce went to bed late, drunk and exhausted with excitement. Through his sleep, a faint and disturbing titillation of his ear-drums, he heard the noise, and when he stirred and woke in the morning he realized that he had not been dreaming it. The window, open clear to the top of the sash for the first time in months, let in a shivery draft of fresh damp air, and with it the faint yelping, far off.

  Chet was already up and gone. When Bruce got dressed and went down into the kitchen the dogs were still yapping down in the bend.

  “What’s the matter with all the pooches?” he said. “Where’s Spot?”

  “He’s out running with them,” his mother said. “Probably they’ve got a porcupine treed or something. Dogs go crazy in the spring.”

  “It’s dog days they go crazy.”

  “They go crazy in the spring, too,” she said, and hummed a little as she set his breakfast out. “You’d better run out quick and feed the horses. I told Chet to, but he went right on by the barn as if he’d never seen it.”

  Bruce stood still in the middle of the kitchen. “Oh my gosh!” he said. “I left Daisy out all night!”

  He saw from his mother’s face that it might be serious. “Where?” she said.

  “Down in the bend.”

  “Where those dogs are?”

  “I think it was higher up,” he said, but he was sick and afraid. In a minute they were both running. Bruce broke ahead, around Chance’s shed, and searched the brown wet meadow at the head of the U. No sign of the mare where he had left her. He opened his mouth, half-turned, running, to shout at his mother coming behind him, and sprinted for the bottom of the bend.

  As soon as he rounded the bay of brush fringing the cutbank behind Chance’s he saw the mare, a brown spot against the gray brush, and on the ground beside her another smaller spot. There were six or eight dogs leaping around, barking, sitting in a circle. He saw his own dog and the Chapman’s airedale..

  Shouting, he pumped on. At a gravelly patch he stooped and clawed and straightened, still running, with a handful of small pebbles. In one pausing, spraddling, aiming motion, he let fly at the distant pack. The rocks fell far short, but the dogs drifted out in a widening circle, sat on their haunches and let out defiant short barks, each bark a sharp muscular contraction of their whole bodies. Bruce yelled and threw again, watching the colt at Daisy’s feet. The colt jerked its head up and down; the mare’s ears were back and her eyes rolled. She pricked her ears once at Bruce and laid them back again.

  As Bruce came up slowly the colt struggled, raised its head with white eyeballs showing, spraddled its white-footed legs, and tried to stand. It was sitting like a dog on the ground when Elsa came up, getting her breath, her hair half down. Bruce reached out and succeeded in touching the blazed face. “Gee!” he said. “Isn’t he a pretty colt, Ma?”

  He patted Daisy, slapped her wet neck, scratched under her mane and felt her tremble. She must have got chased hard. But there was the colt, sitting comically on the ground, and his happiness that nothing had gone really wrong bubbled out of him. “Lookit his feet,” he said. “He’s got four white feet, Ma. Let’s call him Socks. Can I? Isn’t he a nice colt, though?” He reached down to pull the colt’s forelock, and the colt bobbed his head away.

  Then Bruce saw his mother’s face. It was quiet, too quiet. She hadn’t said a word to all his jabber. Instead she was kneeling about ten feet in front of the squatting colt and staring at it. Bruce’s eyes followed hers. There was something funny about the way ...

  “Ma!” he said. “What’s the matter with its feet?”

  He left Daisy’s head and came around. The colt’s pasterns looked bent—were bent, so that when its weight came on the front hoofs the whole pastern touched the ground. His shifting frightened the colt, and with a flopping effort it floundered to its feet and pressed against its mother. And it walked, Bruce saw, flat on its fetlocks, its hoofs sticking out in front like a comedian’s too-large shoes.

  Elsa pressed her lips tight, shook her head, stood up, moving so gently that she got her hand on the colt’s poll. He bobbed against the pleasant scratching. You poor little broken-legged thing, she said. You poor little friendly ruined thing! Still quietly, she turned on the circle of dogs, sitting with hanging tongues out of range, even Spot staying away as if he knew he had outlawed himself. God damn you, she said, God damn your wild hearts, chasing a poor mother and a newborn colt.

  To Bruce, standing with trembling lip, she said just as quietly, “Run and find Jim Enich. Tell him to bring a wagon or a democrat. And don’t cry. It isn’t your fault.”

  Bruce bit his lip and drew his face down tight, trying to keep his eyes from spilling. “It is too my fault!” he said, and turned and ran.

  Jim Enich was a bandy-legged little man who had been a horse wrangler for Purcell for many years. He was slow, gentle, mild; there were deep creases down each side of his mouth, with a brown mole hiding in one of them. He had Bruce wait while he hitched up, and they drove down together past the picnic ground and the ballfield and the swings. Bruce’s mother had the colt on the ground again, and the mare was nosing her impatiently.

  Enich climbed out, walked around the mare. He squatted by the colt’s head and scratched between its ears. His fingers went down to press and probe and bend the broken arch of the pasterns. He whistled. tunelessly between his teeth while Bruce stood around with his feet on fire, aching to do something, ask something, but not daring to interrupt Enich’s deliberate professional concentration.

  Without saying anything, Enich examined the mare, still whistling..

  “What do you think?” Elsa said.

  “Mare’s all right.”

  “What about the colt?”

  “Lessee him try to stand up.”

  With one hand in the colt’s topknot, he helped it to its feet. It spraddled wide, fetlocks sunk to the ground. The dropping of the weight there threw its fine, long-legged body out of proportion. Enich plucked a blade of short new grass and chewed it and shook his head..

  “Ruined?” Elsa said.

  “ ‘Fraid so.”

  She grimaced, and her hand tightened on Bruce’s. He hadn’t realized till then that he had been holding her hand. “Well, let’s get them back to the barn, at least,” she said.

  Enich tied the colt’s feet, heaved and pulled and pushed it into the wagon. It lay there with terrified white eyes rolling, and the mare toe-danced behind the endgate, butting Enich around with her nose.

  “All right, gal,” the wrangler said. “You can put your face right in, if you’re that worried.”

  When they started, Daisy was left momentarily standing. She chuckled with instant apprehension, trotted quickly after the wagon, stuck her neck over the endgate and touched the colt, the breath vibrating in long wheezy solicitous nickerings in her throat.

  Bruce sat between his mother and Enich, his head twisted back to watch. Every time they hit a bump and the colt’s raised head thumped on the boards, he was stricken with pity and contrition. “Gee whiz,” he said. “Poor old Socks.” He tried to reach back and touch the chestnut haunch. His mother put her arm around him to keep him from leaning too far. Absorbed in his pity for the colt, he didn’t watch where
they were going or notice anything ahead of them until he heard his mother say in surprise and relief, “Why, there’s Bol”

  Terror tightened him rigid. He had forgotten and left Daisy out all night. It was his fault that the colt was ruined. From the narrow space between Enich and his mother he watched like a gopher from its burrow. He saw the Ford pulled up beside the barn and his father’s big body leaning into it pulling out blankets and straw. There was mud from top to bottom of the car, mud all over his father’s pants. The boy slid deeper into his crevice.

  Then his father was at the wheel, Jim Enich was climbing down, Elsa with puckered lines in her forehead was saying that Daisy had had her colt while she was staked out, and the dogs had smelled her out and chased her and broken down the colt’s feet. Pa said little. He went around and helped Enich lift the colt out onto the ground, stooped to feel its fetlocks with square muddy hands, looked once at Bruce.

  “Would’ve been a nice colt,” he said. “Damn a pack of mangy mongrels anyway.” He brushed at the mud on his pants and said to Elsa, “How come Daisy was staked out?”

  “I told Bruce to,” she said. “The barn’s so cramped for her, I thought it would do her good to stretch her legs. Then the ice went out, and the bridge, and we all forgot what we were doing ...”

  Bruce heard her trying to smooth it out and take the blame off him, but in his own mind it was perfectly clear, as it had been from the beginning. He was to blame.

  “I didn’t mean to leave her out, Pa,” he said squeakily.

  His father’s somber eyes rested on him briefly, turned to the colt and then to Enich. “Total loss?” he said.

  Enich shrugged.

  Bruce thrust himself into it again, not wanting to, but unable to stay out. “Pa, it won’t have to be shot, will it? Give it to me, I’ll take care of it. I’ll keep it lying down and heal its feet up.”