The Big Rock Candy Mountain

  Elsa shivered. “That’s just what I was afraid of,” she said.

  Bo was alone in the café when she hurried in, and he leaned his elbows on the counter and winked at the boys. “Hi, kids,” he said. “I was just hoping you’d show up.”

  “Why?” they said.

  “Ice cream tastes funny this morning.” He talked to them man-to-man, seriously. “Tastes funny as the dickens, for some reason. I need somebody to tell me what’s the matter with it.”

  Chester’s droll, eyebrowless face dropped open, and then he leered, scenting a hoax. “Which kind is it tastes funny?” he said.

  “Both. Darnedest thing I ever saw. Chocolate tastes funny and vanilla tastes funny. Maybe you can tell me what’s wrong with the stuff.”

  “I can. tell quite a lot about chocolate,” Chester said.

  “Okay. How about you, Brucie?”

  “I can tell more about vanilla,” Bruce said.

  Their father filled two cones and passed them over the counter. “Taste hard,” he said, and waited frowning for their verdict. “Tastes to me as if they might have got a little skunk juice in them. Taste anything?”

  Chester rolled his tongue in his mouth. “There’s a little skunk juice in it, all right.” Bruce was hesitating, not quite sure he wanted any of his.

  “By golly,” Bo said heartily, “that’s just what I thought. Here, I’ll throw them in the garbage pail for you.”

  He reached over the counter. Bruce, hesitating, was about to give his up, but Chester backed away, his eyes big over the suspended cone. “Don’t you want me to throw the nasty thing away?” Bo said.

  Chester took a lick, staying cautiously out of reach. “Aw, you’re foolin‘!” he said, and ran outside. Bruce followed him, the dubious cone still, unlicked in his hand.

  “Bo,” Elsa said, “guess what I just saw?”

  “What?”

  “The man I shot at. He was down in the doctor’s office with his ear half shot off.”

  “No fooling?”

  “Yes. He wasn’t hurt bad. He was a hobo, Miles said.”

  Bo’s eyes across the counter were crinkling, the pupils warming. “Feel better, uh?”

  “I should say so.”

  “Want an ice cream cone to celebrate?”

  “All right.”

  She sat swinging her legs from the high stool, licking the cone, thinking how pleasant it was to drop into your husband’s place of business and talk with him and have an ice cream cone, the way she had always wanted to in Hardanger when Bo ran the bowling alley.

  “I heard something myself this morning,” Bo said.

  She looked at him. He had taken out his knife and was scraping absent-mindedly at the accumulated grease under the metal edge of the counter. The grease came off in a thin, curling strip. “Look at that,” he said. “You’d think it would be clean, washed as much as it is.” He flipped the curling strip in disgust to the floor. Elsa waited, knowing perfectly well that whatever was on his mind, it was not the grease under the counter edge. After a minute his eyes came up.

  “Ever hear of the Peace River country?”

  “Yes,” she said slowly. “Isn’t that that farming country up in Canada somewhere where people were going from Dakota?”

  “Yeah. In Alberta.”

  Elsa had stopped licking her ice cream cone. As if someone had touched her and pointed, she saw the direction of his thoughts, and her muscles tightened with an instinctive antagonism, almost a fear. “What about it?” she said.

  “Nothing about it,” Bo said. “It’s good country, that’s all. About the best farm country anywhere, probably.”

  “Are you wanting to go up there?”

  “Nope,” Bo said deliberately. “It’s all filled up.” He shut his knife and slid it into his pocket. “But I know a place that’s just as good or better that hasn’t got a soul in it.”

  “But you’re not a farmer!”

  “I’m not a fry cook, either,” he said.

  “But where is it? Where is this place?”

  “In Saskatchewan.” They had been staring at each other over the counter almost as if they were about to quarrel. Now Elsa saw his face lose its dead expressionless stillness, the light come into his eyes, the animation appear. “There isn’t a thing there but a few cattle ranches,” he said. “Fella that comes in for breakfast lately was telling me. He was up through there three or four years ago drifting around working on ranches. Just wide open, big as all outdoors. But they’re opening it for homesteaders, see? And the C.P.R. is going to run a branch line down through there from Swift Current. That opens it up, all that land that’s as good wheat land as the Peace River country. See what that means?”

  Elsa said nothing.

  “It means,” Bo said, watching her, “that the boys that get in there early and buy up land at the logical townsites are going to make plenty of money. In ten years there’ll be dozens of towns along that line, and the ones that get in on the ground floor will be sitting pretty.”

  “I should think Dakota would have soured you on that kind of thing,” Elsa said.

  “Oh, Dakota!” he said. “You don’t see the difference. The difference is that this is new, see? It isn’t even scratched.” He grew almost violent, trying to show it to her as he saw it. “Why, God knows what’s up there,” he said. “There might be coal, or iron, or oil, or any damn thing under that ground. Nobody but cowpunchers and the surveyors have ever been over it. And a railroad coming right through it.”

  When she still kept silent, he waved a pencil in the air. “Suppose you were up there and homesteaded a quarter section, somewhere along the right-of-way. And suppose you found coal on that quarter, say. Good God, all you’d have to do is snoop around a little and use your bean, and you could buy up all the likely-looking coal land and be on Easy Street in a year.”

  “What would you buy it with?” she said, not wanting to say it, not wanting really to throw cold water on his visions, but compelled to say it. They couldn’t even afford a wooden house, and here he talked about Easy Street in a country hundreds of miles away, where they would have to start from scratch all over again and might never even get beyond their initial poverty. She saw the irritated jerk of his head when she said it, but she had to say it, and she had to keep insisting on it, because if she didn’t he would drag them all off to some other get-rich-quick spot and they’d be back where they had started seven years ago, or worse.

  “You’ve got about as much imagination as a pancake griddle,” he said.

  “It isn’t a question of imagination,” she said steadily. “It’s a question of getting along. You can’t just leave one place for another without knowing what’s going to turn up in the new place. You wouldn’t trade a sure thing for a gamble.”

  “I’d trade this sure thing,” Bo said. “I’d trade this joint for almost any gamble you could name.”

  “And give up all the work we’ve put into it?”

  “Look,” he said. “I’ve been figuring this sure thing out for an hour, and there hasn’t been a customer to interrupt me, either.”

  He leaned over with a sheet of paper, but she said defensively, before she would glance down at it, “It’s always dead from ten to twelve. The mealtime crowds hold up.”

  “You’d never get rich off ‘em. You know how much we still owe?” He stabbed the pencil on a column of figures. “Six hundred and twenty bucks.”

  “But that’s pretty good,” she said. “That’s only half of what it was. We’ll have it clear in a year or so.”

  “And what’ve we got when we’ve got it clear?” Bo said. “A business that brings you a hundred a month.”

  “It will be more than that when the payments are all finished.”

  “And then you’ll have to spend that much more renovating.”

  “But we can live on it,” she said. “We’ve been living on less.”

  “Out where the cougars sneak around and tramps raid the place and the kids get scared o
f their shadows,” he said. “Do you call that living?”

  He looked at the clock, turned to move a kettle onto the fire, took chalk and wrote neatly on the two-by-four blackboard, “Special Today, Irish Mulligan, bread, coffee, 20C. Ham and Eggs, 2OC. Bacon and Eggs, 20C. Steaks and Chops on Short Order.” He wrote a clean, neat hand, even on a blackboard.

  “I worked on a railroad once,” Bo said. “There’s plenty of jobs for a smart guy if he keeps his eye open. Like bunkhouses. Sometimes the road puts those up, but lots of times they lease out the concession and the guy they lease it to gets it straight out of the men’s pay. All clean, see. Then when the line moves on you knock down your bunkhouse and load it on a flatcar and set it up further down.”

  “I shouldn’t think there’d be much money in that,” she said stonily.

  “That shows what you know about it. You know how many men a road has on a grading or steel-laying crew? Plenty. Two or three hundred. Furnishing bunks for two or three hundred stiffs isn’t chicken feed, even if you flopped ‘em for two bits a night. And when you’re all through, in a new country like that, you can sell your beds and chairs and even your bunkhouse to somebody for almost as much as you paid in the first place.” He was tapping with his finger’ on the counter, watching her. “There’s another angle, too. What do you suppose those stiffs do for amusement at night, after work? There’s no towns to go to. Suppose I wrote Jud to come on along. Don’t you suppose a smart gambler like Jud could shake down a little loose change in a place like that? I just guess he could.”

  “You want to go awfully bad, don’t you?” Elsa said. She felt sad, whipped, dependent. She was a millstone around his neck. That rough new country was where he belonged, really. But it would blow everything she wanted sky-high, uproot her again, take the children into a country where there weren’t even schools.

  Bo was watching her face. “And you don‘t,” he said.

  She shook her head. “No.”

  He shrugged and turned to getting things ready for the noon customers, and after a few minutes she went out to gather up the children and take them back for their own lunch. Bo didn’t like them around eating in the café. They made it look as if they were eating up the leftovers, or something.

  On Sunday Elsa was trying to wash clothes behind the tent. Laundry had piled up since she was hurt, Bo needed fresh shirts, the bed linen was soiled. She was sousing shirts in a tub of water and rubbing them one-handed on the board when she heard steps coming around the tent, and for an instant she froze with the fear of another tramp. Then Bo came in sight with his coat over his shoulder and his sleeves rolled up.

  “Has something happened?” she said.

  “Taking a vacation.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” he said. “It’s about time, isn’t it? I’ve been working sixteen hours a day seven days a week about long enough.”

  He seemed mad, sour, out of spirits. And he did need a rest, there wasn’t any question. “Good,” she said. “Did you just close up?”

  “I made up about two dozen sandwiches and put ‘em in a box and left a tin can with a slot in it on the doorstep,” he said. “Maybe one out of three that takes a sandwich will pay for it. I don’t give a damn if none of them do.”

  “Or if somebody steals the can,” she said. “I don’t either. It’s nice to have you home for once. Soon as I get through maybe we can go for a walk.”

  He hooked his coat on the clothesline post, throwing it from six feet away, took off his shirt and threw it after the coat, and stretched in the sun in his undershirt, a languid, lazy, powerful stretch that moved the muscles under his milky skin. With his dark face and hands he looked like some odd cross-breed. He pushed her away from the tub. “You’re an invalid,” he said. “Let me swing that a while.”

  “I feel all right. It doesn’t hurt.”

  “Go on,” he said, and she had to back away.

  “This is nice,” she said. “I wish you could take a vacation more often.”

  He eyed her obliquely. “I’d just as soon take a good long vacation from that dump.”

  Instead of answering she went inside and got more laundry, and for a while they worked together, he washing and wringing shirts and children’s clothes, twisting them so tight with his heavy wrists that she had trouble shaking them out to hang them up. She was standing on tiptoe at the high post-end of the line with her mouth full of clothespins when he said, “Thought any more about that Canada proposition?”

  She hung the last shirt and took the clothespins out of her mouth. At this moment, when they were together, comfortable, with the sun on them and the children playing quietly in their own yard, wild enough and poor enough, God knew, but their own, he thought of nothing but getting away.

  “Don’t be mad, Bo,” she said. “You asked me that before, and I told you what I thought. The café will keep us. We can clear it and live like other people instead of like gypsies.”

  “Uh,” Bo said, and scrubbed a nightgown up and down the board. He said no more, but when she got the last batch of scrubbed clothes to hang up they were twisted as hard as sticks of wood, almost dry enough for ironing.

  Bruce wandered into sight from the front yard and stood watching. He cocked one foot against his shin, shifted to stand on the other foot. “Ma,” he said. “I got to go.”

  Elsa had a sheet half way on the line, and the wind pulled at it so that she had trouble keeping it in place with one hand. “You go on by yourself this time,” she said over her shoulder. “You can do it.”

  Bruce shifted his feet, looked solemn, squinted his face, but did not move.

  “Go on, bub,” Bo said. “Do as your mother tells you. She’s busy.”

  The boy moved a few feet, stopped, put his hands around the pole that supported the line, and swung on it. His eyes were on his mother. “You take me, Ma.”

  “Go on,” his father said. “Ma’s busy. You get on out there and back like a man. I bet you a penny you can’t be back before I get this water dumped and the tub hung up.”

  Still watching his mother steadily, Bruce went a few feet, stopped to pick a flower and toss its petals into the air with a jerky little motion. He picked the leaves off the flower stem and did the same with them, very concentrated, very busy. He stood knock-kneed, holding his legs together.

  “Now confound you,” his father said sharply, “you move when you’re spoken to! Get on out there before I have to make you.”

  Bruce went slowly out the path, tossing flowers and leaves and sticks into the air with his jerky, invariable motion. At the pile of slashings where the blackberry bushes grew thick he stopped. His father was hanging up the tub in the shed, out of sight. His mother was at the line. But back of him were the bushes, the shadows, and he had to walk another thirty feet into them alone to the privy. He didn’t like the privy anyway. Wind blew up through the opening at the back, and flies crawled on your behind, and you didn’t know what might be down there peeking at you, animals, cougars, snakes, faces with teeth ...

  Swiftly he pulled down his overalls and squatted in the weeds beside the path.

  He had barely ducked when his father’s. yell startled him to his feet again, scuttling with hands clutching his overalls. But his father was after him. Heavy feet pounded the path. He heard his mother call out, but he couldn’t get back to her now. Gasping, he scrambled into the privy and sat up on the children’s hole. He cringed back when his father burst in. In one motion he was yanked upside down and spatted smartly on his bare backside.

  “Now!” his father said, and slammed him back on the hole. “Now you sit there till you’re through, and don’t let me catch you squatting in the yard again.”

  Bruce bawled, and seeing his mother’s face at the door bawled louder. But his father just went out and shut the door on him and he heard their steps going away.

  “He’s frightened,” Elsa said. “That’s why he doesn’t like to come out here.”

  “Seems to me he’s frightene
d of every damn thing in the world,” Bo said. “You can’t let him make a pigpen of the yard.”

  Elsa stopped. “I think I’ll stay here and walk back with him,” she said. “You’ve no idea how ...”

  Bo took her arm. “Let him walk back by himself.”

  “But he’s scared, Bo.”

  “I was scared of water when I was a kid, too,” Bo said. “That didn’t keep my old man from throwing me in when I was about five, where it was ten feet deep.”

  “You never liked your father, either. You’ll have that child hating you like poison.”

  “Then he’ll just have to hate me,” Bo said. “He’s got to be trained if I have to bust his head for him on the way.”

  “You can’t whip a child out of being afraid,” she said in anger. “Bruce is sensitive, that’s all. He’s the most sensitive child I ever saw. But he’s stubborn as a mule, too, just as stubborn as you are. You’ll start something you can’t finish.”

  “Let him keep on being stubborn,” Bo said. “I’ll guarantee to knock that out of him.”

  Still angry, she went back and finished hanging up the clothes, but after Bruce came back sniffling and Bo had started to putter in the shade of the shed, his jaw still set and a look on his face as if something smoldered in him, she didn’t need to ask herself if his rage at Bruce had anything to do with the thing that had been on his mind when he closed up the café and came home for the afternoon, the proposition he had mentioned, glancing at her sideways, and then shut up about when she showed that her mind was still made up the other way.

  Certainly, in the two weeks that followed, he showed less and less interest in the café. He always seemed to get there late in the morning, he closed up earlier at night, he shut up the whole place the following Sunday afternoon and made her come home when she said she would just as soon stay and take care of it. She was taking her regular turn now, relieving him at eleven o‘clock and staying till the evening meal was ready. And while she was at the café, he was at home with the boys. That, she knew before two days had passed, wasn’t good.