The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  “Oh Lord!” Elsa said. “Did they?”

  “Naw. Angus come along and put it out.” Jewel fished up a bent cigar. “I wouldn’t worry, Elsa. Chet wasn’t the only one. We got the gun back, and if you give Angus four-five dollars damages everything’s all right.”

  “Who are the others?”

  “I don’t know. Chet wouldn’t tell.”

  “But he stole the gun himself.”

  “I guess so. He had it on him.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll give you five dollars for Angus. Chet was the ringleader. He always is. I want him to spend the night in jail.”

  “Oh now, that ain’t necessary,” Jewel said.

  “I want him to stay in jail anyway,” Elsa said. “I want him to learn what it means to break laws and get in trouble.”

  She met Jewel’s queer, sidelong look steadily. “Now can I see him a minute?” she said.

  He led her into the little cell back of the firehouse, where Chet slumped on a bench. He rose when the door opened, and Elsa felt a pang at the sight of his face, white and set and too old for him. Like father like son, she thought. Shame and sullenness and eagerness for sympathy and determination to act like a man whatever happened—his face said exactly the same things as Bo’s letter.

  “Well, Chet,” she said.

  “Hello, Ma.”

  “I never expected to see you in a jail,” she said.

  He stood sullenly silent. He would not, she saw, attempt to deny his guilt or plead with her. There again he was like Bo. He was what he was, and he wouldn’t pretend to be anything else. Bruce would have lied, in the same situation. Chet might much more likely go clear wrong, but he’d go in his own way, with a kind of pride.

  “I hope you realize what you’ve done,” she said. “I wouldn’t like to see a boy of mine grow up a thief.”

  She stopped then, because she didn’t want to add the humiliation of tears to his punishment. “Mr. King will let you out in the morning in time for breakfast,” she said. “You come home and eat and get ready for school.”

  Chet turned and sat down on the bench, and to keep from crying herself she brushed past Jewel and went outside. “I’d rather spend the night in there myself than make him do it,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Jewel said. “Well, I’ll see that Diamond Dick gets back home all right. Don’t worry about the jail. That’s a good clean jail. No bugs or anything.”

  “Will he have to sleep on that bench? I didn’t see any bed.”

  “Bed in the firehouse part,” he said. “He’ll be okay.”

  “All right.” She looked hard at Jewel. “But don’t you be too easy on him. Don’t give him the idea that what he’s done is smart, or manly, or anything. I want him to know that being in jail is a disgrace.”

  So now there would be waiting again, as it seemed to her she had waited all the time she had known Bo. Now there would be sitting day after day busying herself with little unimportant things, but jumping at the slightest noise, running to the window at the slightest flash of movement along the south road. There would be getting through the day somehow, anyhow, getting the boys to bed, sitting in the evenings to do fancy work or to read, and her ears twice as alert as in daylight, her mind twice as receptive to frettings and worry. There would be dragging off to bed with the worries waiting for her to lie down, hanging over her like mosquitoes on a warm night.

  There would be the escapes she had used before, the daydreams and the memories of childhood that sometimes were so similar that they confused her: pictures of quiet streets, apple trees heavy with fruit or white with blossoms in a green back yard, her children scuffling leaves under the maples and running to greet Bo when he came down the sidewalk on ‘a summer evening, coming from work with his coat on his arm and the six-o’clock sun on his face. That dream expanded indefinitely: neighbors dropped in for rootbeer and whist, Bo told stories, did card tricks, sang songs, kept them all laughing. There were good nights of tenderness and love, and in the mornings Bo’s voice singing a fool song.

  She didn’t want much. Yet it seemed to her sometimes as if life had conspired to keep from her exactly that one thing that she desired, and as if her husband and her children, who were the single indispensable part of her day-dreams, should be the ones to destroy what she had been working for.

  One night she sat reading a novel that someone had loaned her. It was all about castaways on a cannibal island, and war with wooden swords between the tribes, and it was romantic and exciting and a little silly, but she kept at it because if she didn’t she would have to think. Once her head lifted: it sounded like someone out behind. But there had been too many of those false alarms lately. Her ears were like the ears of a dog pricking in sleep at phantasmal noises.

  Then she heard it again, distinctly. She stood up just as the door between dining room and kitchen opened and Bo’s grinning face looked in.

  She dropped the book and ran to him, was swept into his bear-hug. When he set her down and she could look at his face his eyes were sly and warm.

  “Hi, Mama,” he said. “How’ve you been?”

  “Oh, all right,” she said. She had him by the arms, looking him over. There was something different about him, something gayer and younger. His clothes ...

  “Why, you’ve got a new suit,” she said.

  “Like it?”

  “It’s lovely. But what ... I thought ... How did everything come out?”

  “Did you think they’d hang me?” His laugh was so open and amused that she stared. There was no such shame as she had expected, no hangdog look of creeping home in disgrace, and she realized instantly, though the idea had never entered her head before, that she had been counting on that, expecting to steer him with it as she had steered Chet.

  “What happened over there?” she said.

  He laughed again. “They had to turn me loose. Didn’t have any business pinching me in the first place. The American prohibition law isn’t in effect yet, see? They pinched me on the wrong side of the line. The cops just got all snarled up about what their job was. So after they’d kept me in jail a week or so they had to give me back the car and the load.”

  “But how could they be so stupid? If there wasn’t any law ...”

  “They don’t know what the law is yet, that’s their trouble. Neither did I. I was piping pretty small till my lawyer put me wise. He was a smart little shyster.” He shook her fondly by the shoulders and narrowed his eyes, grinning. “Want to see something?”

  “Sure. What?”

  “Where’s the lantern?”

  “I’ll get it. What’ve you got?”

  “Wait and see.” With an air of great secrecy he lighted the lantern.

  “And you didn’t have to pay a fine or anything?” she said, going out.

  “Nary a nickel. Go on, keep moving, right on out to the shed.”

  The shed doors were open, but Bo muffled the lantern so that she could see nothing. “Open your mouth and shut your eyes,” he said.

  “You’re just like a child,” she said. “Unexpected returns, and surprises, and mysteries. What is this?”

  “Now you can open.”

  She opened. There was a car in the shed that was not the old Ford. It was new, expensive looking. Bo had turned on the headlights, which burned with a white brilliance against the shed wall and reflected back on the gleaming dark green of the body.

  “My goodness!” Elsa said. “Where did you get this?”,

  “Bought it.”

  “Bought it! With what?”

  “With seventeen hundred dollars.”

  “What?”

  “Take it easy,” he said. “There’s plenty more where that came from.”

  “Well, I just don’t understand,” she said. She inspected the mysterious dials on the dashboard, wiggled the gear-shift knob, read the name on the plate: Essex. It was by all odds the finest car she had ever seen. The seats were grained leather, the top was black and rakish as a taut sail. “A
new suit and a car that cost seventeen hundred dollars,” she said. She lifted the blankets in the back of the car and looked under. “And another load!”

  “And that isn’t all,” Bo said. “Come on back inside.”

  He shut off the headlights and locked the shed doors. On the way to the house he laid his arm across her shoulders and shook her again. “Got your eyes bugging out, haven’t I?”

  “You’ve mystified me enough,” she said. “I give up. Now tell me, quick.”

  Inside the kitchen he blew out the lantern with a sharp puff of breath and let the chimney down. In the light of the lamp on the table his eyes were bright as a cat’s.

  “I had almost two thousand when I left here,” he said.

  “And you’ve spent it all.”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself. I put fifteen hundred in a Havre bank and got a load and started back. That’s when they pinched me and took me back to Havre. And in jail I met a guy that put me wise.”

  “The nigger?”

  He looked at her in disgust. “No, not the nigger! All he did was teach me to play coon-can. This was a guy that got pinched in a gambling raid. After I got through talking to him, and they let me out, I went out and traded old Lena in on this boat, and moved the load from one to the other, and bought some more to fill this one up, and there she is.”

  “But if it cost seventeen hundred ...”

  “I got four hundred and fifty for Lena,” Bo said, “and I gave them two-fifty cash. We owe a thousand on her.”

  “But what are we going to use it for? I’d feel silly, riding around this town in a car like that.”

  “Maybe you won’t be riding around this town,” Bo said. “This boat will go twice as fast as old Lena, and she holds half again as much. She’ll pay for herself before you can spit twice.”

  “You’re going on running whiskey,” Elsa said.

  He nodded, watching her. “Till I get so far ahead I can afford to get out,” he said. “You know what we’re going to do?”

  “I can imagine.”

  “We’re going to move.”

  “Where to?”

  “One of the Montana towns. Havre or Great Falls.”

  “And leave the homestead, and this house, and the stock ...”

  “Hell with all of it,” Bo said. “The hell with this little burg, too. Soon as that prohibition law goes into effect in the States there’ll be millions to be made. There is now. Some of the states are already dry, and there’s always a market in a dry state. We’re going to run whiskey where there’s money to pay for it in wholesale lots.”

  Elsa stood quietly, everything in her sagging, as if she had worked all day and saw more work ahead that had to be done before she could rest. “I wish ...”

  “Uh?”

  “What if they had convicted you in Havre?”

  “They didn‘t,” Bo said. “And they won’t ever get the chance again, not as long as I’ve got a fast car.”

  His eyes were steady on hers, as if he dared her to raise an objection, as if he had arguments and statistics and proofs to counteract anything she could say. She sighed and gave it up. Bo seemed to feel the moment when her resistance disintegrated. He swung around the kitchen as if shaking the whole thing from his back, and yelled for food. While she got him something he sat at the table, natty and citified in his new clothes (he told her that he had stopped out on the bench and changed, so as to come in with all flags flying) and watched her slyly. His hand was in his coat pocket. Absently, when she set the food before him, he picked up her left hand and looked at it, bent the knuckles tentatively forward and back, smoothed out the skin. “Nice little hand you’ve got there.”

  “Nice and red and rough.”

  “No,” he said. “You’ve got nice hands.”

  “Now what do you want?” she said.

  “Just want to prettify it a little,” Bo said. He brought a small package out of his pocket. Inside the paper was a jeweler’s plush box, and inside the box was a tiny gold watch. She looked at it, at him, back at it, and suddenly she was crying. Bo came around the table and put his arm around her, whispering into her hair. “Take it easy,” he whispered. “I just wanted you to know how much ... , I appreciate ... you’ve been swell.”

  She said no more that night about the whiskey business she had been determined to steer him out of. She couldn’t. Instead, she sat and listened to him talk about what they were going to do and see, the money they were going to make. He opened up the future like a Christmas package for her delight, and he was so delighted himself that she couldn’t be otherwise.

  “We’ve been stuck in this backwater too long,” he said. “You’re going back where there are lawns and trees and cement sidewalks and automobiles that make that one out there look like a donkey cart. You’re going to have a fur coat and nice clothes—and you aren’t going to make them yourself, either. The kids are going to a high school and I’m smoking nothing but two-for-a-quarter cigars, starting now. We’ve been chasing pipedreams too long. This is the time we make it go.”

  8

  For a week they were a wonder. When Bo drove the Essex downtown and parked it a crowd gathered. Boys ran their hands over the finish, men lifted the hood and bent in over the motor, stood back respectfully when Bo climbed in and stepped on the self-starter. They examined it from front to rear, their faces closed, their eyes veiled. They kicked the tires. They listened to the idling motor. They unscrewed the radiator cap and looked in. They asked, casually, how fast she’d go and how good she was on hills. They commented on her lines, her color, her mechanical perfections. Some said oh hell, she wasn’t anything but a cheap Hudson, but they watched like the others when she went by.

  In that week Elsa had a thousand things to do. There was the house to clean out, clothes to pack, books to box. Bo sold the two cows to Hank Freeze, on the north bench. The horses he couldn’t sell, so he left them with the oldest Heathcliff boy to keep for half the increase. For the house there was no market at all; George McKenna at the store finally agreed to try to sell it for them.

  The wholesale sell-out brought up the question of Bruce’s colt. It was getting no better. As it grew it threw more weight on the broken legs, and its walk was the same floundering lunge it had had when they found it in the bend. Jim Enich came over to see Bo about it, and with Bruce hanging anxiously on the fringes of their talk they looked the colt over.

  Bo’s eyes went to Bruce, rubbing the colt’s neck under the long sorrel mane. He drew Enich aside, but Bruce left his pet and followed. Patting his pockets, Bo pretended to hunt for something. “Run inside and get me a couple cigars.”

  Bruce looked suspiciously from one to the other, hesitated, then turned and darted away.

  “Worth anything at all?” Bo said.

  Enich spat. “Hide.”

  Bo breathed angrily through his nose. “I never should have let the kid get attached to it,” he said. “He’s all wrapped up in it now.”

  “It ain’t a very pleasant thing to do,” Enich said. “I’ll take it off your hands, if you want. The hide’s worth about three bucks.”

  Bruce came running back with the cigars, his eyes swinging from one face to the other. Bo cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “Jim’s willing to make a deal for your colt.”

  “Couldn’t we ... ?” Bruce said. “Couldn’t we take him along? Ship him, or something?”

  “No,” Bo said. “We couldn’t do that. He’ll be better off here. Jim’ll take care of him for you. He’ll give you three dollars for him.”

  “Oh gee!” Bruce said. “I don’t want to sell Socks!”

  “Well, it’s either sell him or give him away,” Bo said. He squatted down and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Look,” he said. “Maybe we’ll be coming back here sometime. Your colt couldn’t get along running with the herd over at Heathcliff’s. So you’d better sell him to Jim, and if we come back you can buy him back.”

  “And he’ll still be mine?”

&
nbsp; “Sure thing,” Enich said.

  Bruce broke loose from his father and went over to the colt. He reached up and hugged it around the neck, and it nuzzled his shirt, leaving flecks of moisture on the cloth. The boy reached up to whisper something private in the colt’s ear. Then he turned and said, “All right, I’ll sell him to you, Mr. Enich. He’d rather stay with you than anybody else. He knows you.”

  He took Enich’s three silver dollars and held them uncertainly in his hand. “Can I come and see him before we go?” he said.

  “I’m taking him out to the ranch,” Enich said. “That’s pretty far.”

  Over his head Bo made a motion at Enich, and Enich went out to drive his wagon around in back. In ten minutes he pulled out again, the half-raised head of the trussed colt showing above the endgate. Bruce ran after the wagon, rubbing the sorrel’s nose, the tears shaking big down his face, until almost the east ford. There he stood waving, seeing through a blur of crying the high-wheeled wagon and the sorrel hide and the blazed white nose and one rolling scared eye over the endgate as the wagon went on down the trail and around the curve behind the willows.

  , They gave Spot to the Chance boys. Old Tom was wheeled away one morning in a doll buggy by three excited little girls who had dressed his languid, sleepy gray body in petticoats and tucked him under the covers, where he lay in a most uncatlike position, flat on his back, and purred like a teakettle.

  “I hate to see old Tom go,” Elsa said. “He was such a comfortable, sleepy old cat.”

  “Except when a dog got after him,” Chet said. “Remember when Chapman’s airedale treed him in the barn? He went right up in the air and came down on that old airedale’s back with his claws digging like sixty. He rode him clear up past Van Dam’s.”