The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  He reached out and touched one of the stiff inhuman hands. “So long, boy,” he said softly, and backed out. He was so shaken that he had to go into one of the empty rooms and stand looking out into the dirty snow for a long time before he dared go out through the hushed office and into the street.

  The funeral was set for two-thirty. At twelve-thirty Bruce and his mother sat down to lunch alone. “It’s probably no use waiting for Pa,” she said. “He couldn’t eat anyhow.”

  In the middle, of the meal he came in, his eyes bloodshot, his face sallow and sagging, his hands curiously fumbling and helpless. He sat down and began eating as if he tasted nothing.

  “Anybody call?” he said.

  “Harry Birdsall,” Elsa said. “And Mrs. Webb, a woman I met up at Brighton that summer. I haven’t heard from her since. It was nice of her to call now.”

  “None of Chet’s friends?”

  “No,” she said. “Now Bo, don’t...”

  He was already standing, half shouting. “What’s the matter with them? Don’t they care?”

  “They probably don’t even know,” she said. “Please, Bo.”

  “Why don’t they know?” he shouted. “It’s been in the papers, hasn’t it? The funeral’s been listed in the papers. There won’t be ten people there.”

  “They’d all come if they knew,” she said. “Chet had lost touch, that’s all, he’d been away so long.”

  He sat down again, heavily, the outburst dying in a kind of groan. He stared down at the dishes on the table, picked up his fork, laid it down again. His eyes came up to Elsa’s with a glazed, terrified glare.

  “He didn’t have a friend in the world,” he said.

  “Please!” she said again, and put her hand on his. She shot a look at Bruce that asked him to say something, start some conversation, and Bruce grabbed at the first lie he could think of.

  “I saw Ham Roberts downtown this morning,” he said. “He didn’t know, but he’s coming. He was pretty badly shocked to hear...”

  His father’s dull voice cut in on him. “I went down to the mortuary,” he said. “There were no more flowers there than there were yesterday. Three or four little handfuls.”

  His face twisted, he stood up again holding the napkin in shaking hands. “I’m going back down now,” he said. “If there aren’t any more flowers there now I’m going to buy three hundred dollars’ worth!”

  He had lurched into the hall and got his hat and coat and gone before either of them could speak. The outside door slammed. Bruce looked at his mother. She had her hand over her face.

  3

  Salt Lake City

  Feb. 14, 1931

  Dear Bruce,

  I suppose that by now you must be taking the examinations you missed by coming home. I hope everything goes well—I know it will. It has been very quiet and lonely here since you left. Neither of us has much heart to do anything. Your dad is better, but he still wakes me sometimes sweating and screaming. He blames himself so much. He’s wanted for a long time to do something for Chet and get him back on his feet, but he never did know what it should be, until the sporting goods store came up. He wanted that for Chet, because he thought even an inside job, if it was handling guns and sporting equipment, would suit him. I think it would have, myself. There are so many things we would do, and so many we wouldn‘t, if we could do it over.

  We’re leaving Salt Lake for a while to go to Los Angeles. I think it is a good idea, your dad is so miserable here, and everything reminds us both too much of what has happened. We have enough money put away so that we can afford a vacation. Pa is blessing his stars he bought his stocks outright instead of on margin. Everybody we know is losing money hand over fist, and getting sold out. We’ve lost some, but not everything by any means. I wish ... but I guess you know what I wish without my telling you.

  I’m sending a sweater and some cigarettes for your birthday. We’ll go within a week, I think. As soon as we get settled anywhere I’ll send you a postcard.

  Be careful of yourself, Bruce, and don’t work too hard. I know what you’re likely to do when there’s nobody there to boss you around. It’s just possible that when you come back we may be living permanently in Los Angeles. Your dad talks that way sometimes. He has visions of an orange ranch, but probably those are like the other visions. I guess I must be getting cynical about visions. Still, it would be pleasant to have a home in an orange grove, wouldn’t it? I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

  All my love,

  Mother

  Los Angeles, March 12, 1931

  Dear Bruce,

  Well, put the vision of the orange grove away with the others. That would have been too tame for Pa anyhow. He’s got a new bug now. In the last couple of weeks he’s been feeling much better, and just sitting around has made him nervous. But one thing seems to be pretty well settled. He’s going to get out of the liquor business. I suppose I should be glad, and of course I am, that he’s pulling out, but what he’s probably going into now doesn’t make me exactly happy. He’s been having conferences for a week with a couple of men from Reno, one of them a Frenchman named Laurent and the other a Basque whose name I can’t even pronounce, much less spell. They’ve got a big deal brewing to open a gambling place in Reno.

  Honestly, Bruce, when he comes to me with his plans I don’t know what to say. He wants to be encouraged, but how can I encourage him to open a gambling house? I guess I hurt his feelings. I said it looked to me like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. Then he got mad and said I’d been after him long enough to quit the whiskey business, I ought to be tickled to death.

  Maybe I want too much, I don’t know. Everything that attracts him seems to be on the wrong side of the law. Of course gambling is legal in Nevada, but there are so many other things that go along with gambling that even though we don’t have that fear hanging over our heads all the time we may have something just as bad. Still, it may be some improvement. The trouble is, he’d have to put into it most of what we’ve saved in the last ten years, and your dad isn’t as good a plunger as he used to be. He gets thinking about what might happen if things went wrong, and he goes half crazy worrying. But I think he’s about ready to plunge, so I suppose I’d better start getting reconciled to gambling. It isn’t a business to be very proud of, but at least its legal, and Pa thinks it will make us a lot of money. If it will, he’ll be happy, and that’s something. But sometimes I wish we lived on a salary of a hundred dollars a month and never had any hope of more. We might be a whole lot more comfortable in our minds.

  So now when he comes around and asks me for the thousand dollars’ worth of Utah Power and Light preferred stock he gave me for Christmas two years ago I guess I won’t make much of a fuss. He’s already been hinting that he’ll need them. He can have them, for all of me. I never did think of them as mine, and he never did think he was really giving them to me. The only thing I wanted them for was for you or Chet, and if you get to the point where you need them I’ll get them back. Just to tease him, I’m going to make him sign a note for them, or cut me into the profits of the gambling house, or something. Do it all up with legal red tape. I must be getting mean in my old age.

  You’ve been good about writing. And we’re both anxious for the time when school is out, so we can get acquainted with our family lawyer.

  All love,

  Mother

  Reno, April 8, 1931

  Dear Bruce,

  Pretty soon you won’t be able to keep track of us at all, we move around so fast. We came on up here to look over the proposition your dad’s got on the fire. It was really a nice trip, and I wished all the time that you could have been along. We drove up the coast as far as Monterey, and then over to Merced and up to Yosemite just for the fun of it, to see the gorge in the snow. We stayed all night at the Ahwahnee Hotel (ten dollars apiece per day. I never felt so extravagant!). The snow was going in the canyon, but the cliffs were marvellous and the waterfalls looked as if they burst right o
ut of a glacier. From Yosemite we went back to Merced and then up to Sacramento and the Emigrant Pass and on to Tahoe. There was a lot of snow there, higher than the car in the pass, but the sun was as warm as late spring, and it was lovely. We stopped in another fancy hotel there, where most of the people came down to dinner in tuxedos and evening gowns. I tried to get Pa to stop somewhere else, but when he gets a streak like that there’s no holding him, so we dressed up as well as we could and played millionaire. I swear that if your dad had had a tuxedo he would have worn it all the time we were there, breakfast and all. Yesterday afternoon we came down here to Reno and this morning your dad is out looking things over. He’s all excited about the deal now. So many divorcees are around, most of them with too much money to spend and too much time to kill, so that the night clubs and gambling houses run twenty-four hours a day. But it’s a big gamble. Each of the three will have to put up between fifteen and twenty thousand, cash, and that’s a lot of money for us. It will mean selling most of our stock when it’s low. Even if we make money, I doubt if this gambling is going to do your dad any good. He thinks it would be pretty dandy to roll in money and hobnob with movie stars and prize fighters, but he wouldn’t be comfortable in that kind of company, and I think he knows it at bottom. It’s a funny thing, but I keep remembering how contented and good-natured he was all the time he was building that house on the homestead. He went around whistling, and he could get absorbed in his job for hours. Ever since we started making money more than five dollars at a time he acts as if somebody were behind him all the time. But how can you tell him that you think he’d have been three times as happy if he’d stayed a carpenter? And what good would it do now?

  He’s haying fun laying plans, anyway. We’ll live in this tourist cottage for a while, but when things get moving he’ll buy a lot up on Tahoe or Donner Lake and build us a summer house where I’ll stay all the time and he’ll come up when he’s off shift. It’s only a couple of hours up there from here. When he’s resting from looking at catalogues of roulette wheels and chuck-a-luck cages and wheels of fortune and crap tables, he’s already started looking at motor boat catalogues. The summer home of the well-known millionaire sportsman Harry Mason is already taking shape.

  Oh Lord! I guess my main impulse is to laugh. But I’d be glad of a place on Tahoe, so I can’t laugh too loud. I don’t think I’d do very well as the Madame of a gambling joint.

  Sometimes the way we live reminds me of Bill Glassner. Remember him? He used to come around the house a good deal four or five years ago. His whole stock of conversation was “Never a dull moment, eh Bo?” When. he got drunk he used to imagine that he was somebody named Scissor-Bill who had pushed Buffalo Bill Cody in the Platte. Never a dull moment, no fooling.

  Anyway, if we do build a place on Tahoe, you might have a nice summer. I don’t know why you couldn’t ask a friend or two from Salt Lake to come down. That might be one blessing of being out from under the law. We could have friends again.

  Now I sound like your dad, laying little plots and plans. But maybe this will turn out. It’s funny what a few weeks free from pressure will do. I’m ashamed sometimes at how good I feel, when I think of Chet. Laura, I hear, has bought a car with Chet’s little insurance money, and has a job as a stenographer. I don’t know why she shouldn’t buy a car, but it made your dad mad. He thought she owed that to little Anne. But I don’t know. Hard as it is to get used to the idea that Chet is dead, I can’t help thinking that we owe the living more than we do the dead. I must always have thought that. When my mother died I could have died too, because I loved her more than anyone, but there were Erling and Kristin and Dad and even me, and we were all alive and needed to live. Laura is still young, and has her own way to make now, and she ought to be the best judge of how to do it. Chet is at peace finally. I try to keep remembering that. Pa and I don’t talk about it much any more. He’s afraid, somehow.

  Here comes Pa now. I suppose we’re going out and dine in style at some night club. I’d rather get groceries and cook meals here, but he has to throw his money around for a little while longer. By the time the place opens he’ll have a fit of stinginess and I’ll probably be taking in washing. Never a dull moment.

  All my love,

  Mother

  4

  When Bruce drove west in June, after the frenzy of examinations and the rush to clear out his room, settle his bills, pack the Ford, have a last round of beers with the Law Commons boys, he drove directly from rainy spring into deep summer, from prison into freedom. That day was the first bright warm day in two weeks, and the year was over, he was loose. He watched the sun drink steam from the cornfields, heard the meadowlarks along the fences, the blackbirds in the spring sloughs. Even the smell of hot oil from the motor could not entirely blot out the lush smell of growth.

  It was the end of his first year away from home, and he was going back. Ahead of him was the long road, the continental sprawling hugeness of America, the fields and farmhouses, the towns. Northfield, Faribault, Owatonna, Albert Lea, and then west on Highway 16—Blue Earth, Jackson, Luverne, and the junction of Big Sioux and Missouri. Then Sioux City, Yankton, Bridgewater, Mitchell, Chamberlain, Rapid City, the Badlands and the Black Hills breaking the monotonous loveliness of the Dakota plain. Then the ranges and the echoing names: Spearfish, Deadwood, Sundance, the Wyoming that was Ucross and Sheridan and Buffalo and Grey-bull and Cody, the Yellowstone of dudes and sagebrushers, the Idaho that was the Mormon towns along the Snake: St. Anthony, Rexburg, Sugar City, Blackfoot, Pocatello, and the Utah of Cache Valley and Sardine Canyon and the barricade of the Wasatch guarding the dead salt flats and the lake.

  The names flowed in his head like a song, like the words of an old man telling a story, and his mind looked ahead over the long road, the great rivers and the interminable plains, over the Black Hills and the lovely loom of the Big Horns and the Absaroka Range white against the west from Cody.

  It was a grand country, a country to lift the blood, and he was going home across its wind-kissed miles with the sun on him and the cornfields steaming under the first summer heat and the first bugs immolating themselves against his windshield.

  But going home where? he said. Where do I belong in this? Going home to Reno? I’ve never been in Reno more than six hours at a time in my life. Going home to Tahoe, to a summer cottage that I haven’t ever seen, that isn’t even quite completed yet? Or going home to Salt Lake, only to go right on through across the Salt Desert and the little brown dancing hills, through Battle Mountain and Wells and Winnemucca and the dusty towns of the Great Basin that are only specks on a map, that have no hold on me? Where do I belong in this country? Where is home?

  Maybe it’s Minnesota, because my mother came from here. Certainly I picked Minnesota as a school to go away to, partly because it seemed that I knew it some, having a grandfather in Indian Falls and an aunt and uncle and cousins in Minneapolis, and second and third cousins, and great-aunts and great-uncles, in a dozen towns where Norwegian is still spoken as much as English. Does that make Minnesota home? Maybe I’m going away from home, not toward it.

  Or maybe I’ve never been home. Maybe I’d recognize the country along the Rock River where the old man came from, maybe I’d feel it the minute I saw it. Or maybe I belong back in some Pennsylvania valley, where the roots first went down in this country, where the first great or great-great grandfather broke loose from his Amish fireside and started moving rootless around the continent.

  He bounced into the streets of Faribault talking to himself. On a corner he saw a young man squiring two dressed-up girls—altogether too dressed up for this hour of the morning—across the intersection. The earnestness of the young man’s attempt to be scrupulously. impartial, to offer an arm to each, to keep his head turning on a metronome swing from one to the other, made Bruce laugh.

  “There were two pretty maidens from Faribault,” he said, and nursed the rhymes along as he edged the Ford through the morning traffic and out onto the
highway again.

  There were two pretty maidens from Faribault

  Who agreed they would willingly share a beau.

  But one beau to a pair

  Was no better than fair.

  It was worse than just fair, it was taribault.

  Nuts, he said. You ought to go into the Christmas card business. But thereafter he made up limericks for every town he passed through, intoxicating himself on names.

  A maiden from Alibert Lea

  Thought her knee had been bit by a flea.

  She lifted her skirt

  To see what had hurt,

  But it wasn’t a flea, it was me.

  It was me, he said, just a boll weevil lookin’ for a home. Do I belong in Minnesota? Do I belong in Albert Lea where Kristin went to school? Do I belong in Minneapolis where I go to school and have relations? If I did I wouldn’t be so glad to get out of here.

  Or is it North Dakota? he said. That’s where I was born. Grand Forks, North Dakota, behind the bar in a cheap hotel. I ought to go back some day and put up a fence around that old joint and charge admission to see the birthplace of the great man. What would Jesus Christ have amounted to if he’d been born in a commercial hotel in Grand Forks, North Dakota, instead of in a barn in Bethlehem? Suppose his earliest visitors had been barflies with whiskey breaths instead of sheep and kine with big wondering eyes and breaths of milk and hay? Suppose the Gifts had been brought by drummers instead of wise men?

  In a minute he was back on limericks again.

  A Jesus from Grand Forks, No. Dak.

  Went hunting his home with a Kodak.

  There were plenty of mansions

  And suburban expansions,

  But no home, either No. Dak. or So. Dak.

  Well, where is home? he said. It isn’t where your family comes from, and it isn’t where you were born, unless you have been lucky enough to live in one place all your life. Home is where you hang your hat. (He had never owned a hat.) Or home is where you spent your childhood, the good years when waking every morning was an excitement, when the round of the day could always produce something to fill your mind, tear your emotions, excite your wonder or awe or delight. Is home that, or is it the place where the people you love live, or the place where you have buried your dead, or the place where you want to be buried yourself? Or is it the place where you come in your last desperation to shoot yourself, choosing the garage or the barn or the woodshed in order not to mess up the house, but coming back anyway to the last sanctuary where you can kill yourself in peace?