The Big Rock Candy Mountain

by Wallace Stegner

  Still feeling good, bubbling with the sun and wind and the freedom of movement, the smell of the burning oil in the motor like a promise of progress to his nostrils, he let himself envy the people who had all those things under one roof. To belong to a clan, to a tight group of people allied by blood and loyalties and the mutual ownership of closeted skeletons. To see the family vices and virtues in a dozen avatars instead of in two or three. To know always, whether you were in Little Rock or Menton, that there was one place to which you belonged and to which you would return. To have that rush of sentimental loyalty at the sound of a name, to love and know a single place, from the newest baby-squall on the street to the blunt cuneiform of the burial ground ...

  Those were the things that not only his family, but thousands of Americans had missed. The whole nation had been footloose too long, Heaven had been just over the next range for too many generations. Why remain in one dull plot of earth when Heaven was reachable, was touchable, was just over there? The whole race was like the fir tree in the fairy-tale which wanted to be cut down and dressed up with lights and bangles and colored paper, and see the world and be a Christmas tree.

  Well, he said, thinking of the closed banks, the crashed market that had ruined thousands and cut his father’s savings in half, the breadlines in the cities, the political jawing and the passing of the buck. Well, we’ve been a Chrstmas tree, and now we’re in the back yard and how do we like it?

  How did a tree sink roots when it was being dragged behind a tractor? Or was an American expected to be like a banyan tree or a mangrove, sticking roots down everywhere, dropping off rooting appendages with lavish fecundity? Could you be an American, or were you obliged to be a Yankee, a hill-billy, a Chicagoan, a Californian? Or all of them in succession?

  I wish, he said, that I were going home to a place where all the associations of twenty-two years were collected together. I wish I could go out in the back yard and see the mounded ruins of caves I dug when I was eight. I wish the basement was full of my worn-out ball gloves and tennis rackets. I wish there was a family album with pictures of us all at every possible age and in every possible activity. I wish I knew the smell of the ground around that summer cottage on Tahoe, and had a picture in my mind of the doorway my mother will come through to meet me when I drive up, and the bedroom I’ll unload my suitcases and books and typewriter in. I wish the wrens were building under the porch eaves, and that I had known those same wrens for ten years.

  Was he going home, or just to another place? It wasn’t clear. Yet he felt good, settling his bare arm gingerly on the hot door and opening his mouth to sing. He had a notion where home would turn out to be, for himself as for his father—over the next range, on the Big Rock Candy Mountain, that place of impossible loveliness that had pulled the whole nation westward, the place where the fat land sweated up wealth and the heavens dropped lemonade...

  On the Big Rock Candy Mountain

  Where the cops have wooden legs,

  And the handouts grow on bushes,

  And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs,

  Where the bulldogs all have rubber teeth

  And the cinder dicks are blind—

  I’m a-gonna go

  Where there ain’t no snow,

  Where the rain don’t fall

  And the wind don’t blow

  On the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

  Ah yes, he said. Where the bluebird sings to the lemonade springs and the little streams of alcohol come trickling down the rocks. The hobo Heaven, the paradise of the full belly and the lazy backside. That was where his family had been headed for all his life. His father had never gone off the bum. That Bo Mason who had gone bumming in his youth out from Rock River, seeing the big towns and resting his bones in knowledge boxes and jun gling up by some stream where the catfish bit on anything from a kernel of corn to a piece of red flannel, was simply an earlier version of the Bo Mason who now fished for big money in a Reno gambling joint and rested his weekend bones among the millionaires on Lake Tahoe.

  So when, he said, do we get enough sense to quit looking for something for nothing?

  He looked up the straight road running clean and white westward between elms and wild plum thickets, cleaving the wide pastures and fields. The sky to the west was a clear blue, not as dark as it would be beyond the Missouri, and paling to a milky haze at the horizon, but clean and pure and empty, as if there were nothing beyond, or everything. If he hadn’t known that beyond the rise limiting his view there was western Minnesota and then Dakota and Wyoming and Idaho and Oregon, if he had been moving through waist-high grass with nothing in his mind but the dream and the itch to see the unknown world, he could easily enough have been a chaser of rainbows. It was easy to see why men had moved westward as inevitably as the roulette-ball of a sun rolled that way. What if the ball settled in the black, on the odd, on number 64? There were so many chances, such lovely possibilities. And if you missed on the first spin you could double and try again, and keep on doubling till you hit it. You could break the bank, you could bust the sure thing, you could, alone and unarmed, take destiny by the throat.

  Oh yes, he said. If you don’t recognize limits. But that’s all over now. That went out with the horse car.

  Oh lovely America, he said, you pulled the old trick on us again. You looked like the Queen of Faery, and your hair smelled of wind and grass and space, and your eyes were wild. Oh Circe, mother of all psycho-analysts, you can shut the gates of the sty now. We are all fighting for the trough, and the healing fiction is fading like a dream. Oh Morgain, bane of all good knights, click the iron in the stone, for we know now that what we took for fairy was really witch, and it is time we planned our dungeon days while making friends with the rats and spiders. Oh Belle Dame sans Merci, do you enjoy our starved lips in the gloam?

  The music from behind the moon was silent, the lemonade springs were dry, along with half the banks in America. The little streams of alcohol that used to come trickling down the rocks were piped now into the houses of the great, and the handout bushes didn’t bear any more and the hens had the pip and the bulldogs had developed teeth and the cinder dicks had x-ray eyes and the climate had changed. So what did you do, if you didn’t want to get caught as Bo Mason had been caught, pumped full of the dream and the expectation and the feeling that the world owed you something for nothing, and then thrown into a world where expectations didn’t pay off?

  He sang again,

  You’re in the army now

  You’re not behind the plow

  You’ll never get rich,

  So marry the witch,

  You’re in the army now.

  Oh beautiful, he said, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties, and penury, and pain.

  Don’t you think, he said, that this has gone about far enough? Who are you to philosophize about the problems of a nation? For all the part you or your family have taken in this nation’s affairs, you might as well have been living like Troglodytes in a cave. Who are you to mouth phrases, when you don’t even belong to the club?

  All right, he said, I’ll shut up. But I’d still like to join the club, in spite of the Ford Motor Company and the Standard Oil of Indiana and the murder of Sacco and Vanzetti and the emptiness of Main Street. I don’t want to bet my wad. I just want to ante.

  Oh let us sing, he said, of Lydia Pinkham...

  Nuts to Lydia Pinkham. Let us sing. Oh what? Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste? No. Arms and the man, who first, pursued by Fate, and haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate? Arma virumque canuts. Let us sing of purple mountain majesties. That’s what we’ve always been best at, the land.

  The roadside cabins with Simmons beds, Flush toilets, Private showers,

  The barns and cribs and coops and sheds, the houses buried deep in flowers,

  The towns whose names are Burg and Ville, whose maximum speed is Twenty Mi.

  Whose signs point in
to the business block to lure the tourists who might shoot by.

  “We love our children. Please drive slow.” We’re also proud of our hybrid corn.

  “Registered Rest Rooms. Road maps free. Snappy Service—just toot your horn.”

  Ma’s Home Cooking and Herb’s Good Eats, Rotary every Thursday noon,

  Lions Friday. Then straggling streets, the foot on the throttle, the outskirts soon

  And the corn again, and the straight flat road, and the roadside, split with the wedge of speed,

  And the wind of a hurrying car ahead blowing the flat green tumbleweed.

  The kids by the roadside who yell and wave. Texaco. Conoco. Burma-Shave: Blighted romance

  Stated fully.

  She got mad when

  He got woolly.

  I’ll take it, he said. I love it, whatever good that does. Even if I don’t know where home is, I know when I feel at home.

  At the next service station where he stopped he felt it even stronger, the feeling of belonging, of being in a well-worn and familiar groove. He felt it in the alacrity with which the attendant shined up his windshield and wiped off his headlights and even took a dab at the license plates, in the way he moved and looked, in the quality of his voice and grin. Anything beyond the Missouri was close to home, at least. He was a westerner, whatever that was. The moment he crossed the Big Sioux and got into the brown country where the raw earth showed, the minute the grass got sparser and the air dryer and the service stations less grandiose and the towns rattier, the moment he saw his first lonesome shack on the baking flats with a tipsy windmill creaking away at the reluctant underground water, he knew approximately where he belonged. He belonged where the overalls saw the washtub less often, where the corduroy bagged more sloppily at the knees, where the ground was bare and sometimes raw and the sand-devils whirled across the landscape and the barns were innocent of any paint except that advertising Dr. Peirce’s Golden Medical Discovery. The feeling came on him like sun after an overcast day, and in pure contentment he limbered his knees and slouched deeper against the Ford’s lefthand door.

  At sunset he was still wheeling across the plains toward Chamberlain, the sun fiery through the dust and the wide wings of the west going red to saffron to green as he watched, and the horizon ahead of him vast and empty and beckoning like an open gate. At ten o‘clock he was still driving, and at twelve. As long as the road ran west he didn’t want to stop, because that was where he was going, west beyond the Dakotas toward home.

  5

  The summer cottage nestled back in a bay in the tall cedars and pines on the east slope of the Big Rock Candy Mountain. The water in front, beyond the strip of gravelly beach, was in the mornings clear emerald, and sometimes at moonset clear gold. Strung out along the shores were the summer homes of the wealthy and comfortable, and of the not-so-wealthy and not-so-comfortable who wished to appear so. A few miles up the road toward the summit was the monument to the Donner Party, symbol of all the agony in the service of dubious causes, archetype of the American saga of rainbow-chasing, dream and denouement immortalized in cobble-rock and granite, its pioneer Woman and unconsciously ironic portrait of endurance and grief.

  In the cottage, still not finished, its bedrooms only partly partitioned off, its windows still stopped with bent nails, its yard littered with a half-raked-up mess of shavings, nail kegs, ends of two-by-fours, and chips, Bruce and his mother lived for a while a summer idyll.

  His mother was proud of the cottage. “Pa built most of it himself,” she said. “He had some carpenters put up the studding and the frame, but he sheathed the whole thing, and shingled the roof, and framed the windows and doors, and even made all the inside doors and cupboards, in his spare time. He’s been working like a horse every minute—too much, but I think he liked it. Didn’t you, Papa?”

  “There’s still plenty to do,” his father said. “You can take off your shirt any time and fall to. Soon as we finish up the inside here we can start landscaping.”

  He was heavier than when Bruce had last seen him. His cheeks sagged a little, his mouth was rarely without a cigar in it, his columnar neck had softened and whitened, and he had obviously been cultivating a hearty laugh. His plans for the cottage were grandiose. What they had here was just a beginning, turn out to be the servants’ wing when they got steaming along. This big room here, with the fireplace, would stay the main living room, but sooner or later they’d build a wing straight off the back, and another wing off that to make a sort of enclosed court—pave it with flagstones for outdoor dining, looking out on the lake. The kitchen and storeroom and laundry room could be built off the other way, where the view was blocked by the woods. Then they’d have some guy come up and plow the yard up and dump on loam, and sow a lawn, and shine the whole grounds up, put in plenty of shrubs and flowers, maybe a little stone terrace. Make it the snappiest place on the lake.

  “What do you want to do, make a mansion out of it?” Bruce said. “What’s the matter with pine needles for a yard?”

  “Hell with that,” his father said. “This isn’t just any old shanty in the woods. This is a house. Once we get the driveway scraped off and gravelled we can live up here most of the winter, put in a woodburning furnace. If it gets too cold we can run over to the coast for a couple of months of the year.”

  “Well,” Bruce said. “Give me my orders. I haven’t done anything with my hands for so long I’ve about forgotten how.”

  Thereafter the two of them worked every morning, nailing in window stops, fitting shutters to the outside frames, lining the interior with wallboard. Bruce protested at the wallboard. “What can you do with it after it’s in?” he said. “You can only paint it, and then it’ll look like a cheap imitation of a town house. Why not leave the studs showing? It looks more like what it is, then.”

  “You don’t know the seat of your pants from ten cents a week,” his father said amiably. “How can you make a room look like anything as long as it’s unfinished? You want this place to look like the homestead?”

  “That’s all right up in the woods.”

  “Not for me,” his father said. “You can build yourself a ratty little shack somewhere if you want. I’m making this one snappy.”

  “Why not make it really finished, then? Plaster it, put on mouldings, cover the floors, lay in parquetry, go in for indirect lighting and picture windows.”

  His father made a sound of disgust. He wanted a snappy place, not a shack. But he wasn’t going to blow his whole roll on it, either. He’d use his own labor and wallboard instead of lath and plaster, and he would get, Bruce assured him, exactly what he wanted—a compromise, a half-baked thing.

  Elsa stayed out of it. She told Bruce that she was saying nothing whatever about how the house should be made unless Bo asked her. He was having so much fun puttering that she’d rather let him jazz the whole place up than protest. He loved building things, it took his mind off Chet and business. Not that he had many business worries. The .gambling house was coining money, even with expenses over twenty thousand a month. “He’s in the money,” she said. “That’s where he’s always wanted to be. Let him play with it any way he wants. It isn’t worth an argument. The lake is so lovely no kind of house can spoil it.”

  “It’s just silly, that’s all,” Bruce said. “Wallboard isn’t necessary at all, but he spends a couple hundred dollars for it that he might have put into something good. Then he has to buy panel strips to cover the cracks. Then he has to buy paint. He just builds up a lot of unnecessary expense. First thing you know he’ll be putting in crystal chandeliers.”

  His mother smiled. “I wouldn’t be surprised. What harm does it do?”

  Bruce shrugged and let it go. But he couldn’t keep from arguing again when his father came out from town with a five-gallon pail of brown paint. “Good Lord,” he said, “what do you want to paint it for? Those shakes will weather the loveliest soft gray in about two years.”

  But within an hour he was swingi
ng a paint brush, and he swung it rebelliously for the next week, putting two coats of oak-leaf brown over the shakes that he would much rather not have touched. He was maliciously pleased at how bad it looked, but his father found nothing wrong with it. He came out, looked it over with approbation, and produced a pail of white for the trim. “How’s your painting arm?” he said.

  Bruce shrugged. “Now that the place is ruined this far, we might as well finish it.”

  His father shot him a quick, suspicious glare. “Oh, ruined!” he said. “You got a lot of funny ideas in college. Don’t colleges believe in paint?”

  “Not in the wrong places. But I’ll paint it. It needs it now, as far as that goes.” He ducked out of the argument, because every word he said betrayed to the old man the chasm that separated them. It wasn’t worth it. He kept his mouth shut when it came time to mix saffron and green shingle stain for the roof. He didn’t even open it to squawk at the line of round niggerhead stones that his father one Sunday laid neatly along the edge of the drive, and he was not at all surprised when his father came out the next morning with a paint bucket and painted them all white.

  “Give him another week and he’ll be putting blue spots on them,” he told his mother. “The more he works on this place the more it looks like Camp Cozy.”