The Big Rock Candy Mountain

  When she was at home she could take Bruce out to the privy, look after him, soothe his fears, get him interested in something else. But Bo was a martinet. The kid had been babied too much. All right, he would fix that. He made Bruce dress himself in the mornings, feed his rabbit by himself without even Chester’s help, go out in back by himself, wash himself alone before meals. He insisted that Bruce eat exactly what was set before him and clean up his plate; if he didn‘t, it was taken away and he went hungry. When he went a whole day, stubbornly, without eating a mouthful, Elsa protested. Bo was being altogether too hard. It wasn’t Bruce’s fault he was finicky. The boys had been moved around from pillar to post ever since they were born. They weren’t sure of anything, they had never had a home. You couldn’t blame a child for feeling afraid and insecure.

  But her argument got her nowhere. Look at Chester, Bo said. He hadn’t had any different kind of life, and look at him. He wasn’t afraid of anything. She had babied Bruce till he knew he could get anything he wanted, just by whining. Well, he would find out different.

  “But he ‘isn’t even four years old yet,” Elsa said, knowing with a kind of panic that she couldn’t budge him. She could see him day by day getting further into that mood of restless irritability, of sullen, stubborn dissatisfaction, that had made the last months at Indian Falls a nightmare. Only this time, it seemed, it was to be Bruce and not the cat who suffered for it.

  The first result of Bo’s discipline was that Bruce began wetting and soiling himself rather than go out to the privy, though he had been broken of wetting for over a year. That only made things worse. If Bo were at the café, she could keep the accidents quiet, but once, when it happened during her shift, she came home to find the child sniffling against the back wall of the shed, and when she undressed him for bed she found the marks on his buttocks. Bo had used the razor strop on him.

  That made her shout at him. “You can’t spank a child into being dry! Haven’t you any sense at all?”

  He looked at her heavily. “Can’t you see why he.does it?”

  “He does it because you’ve got him so scared he’s half out of his mind.”

  “I can see pretty well,” he said, “and that isn’t what I see. He’s doing it to dare me, by God.”

  “Oh, Bo,” she said in despair. “You were so nice to them for a while, and they got along so well. Why don’t you try being kind?”

  “Sure I’ll be kind, when he learns to do what he’s told. Let him run over you and he’ll run over you all his life. But by God he doesn’t run over me.” The words fell with solid, whacking emphasis, like chunks being chopped from a straight-grained block.

  There was nothing she could do, unless she wanted to yield to what she knew bothered him, and take the children up into a place where Heaven knew, what would turn up. So she kept quiet, but when, a few minutes later, she heard him say, “Well, I guess I’ll go it one,” and saw him take the deck of cards from the bureau and sit down, she wanted to scream. Solitaire was almost worse than bad temper.

  On a Saturday, two weeks after Bo had first closed the café for the Sunday afternoon holiday, he came home at ten thirty in the morning. There was a barbecue over at the mill. Not a chance for a customer all day, he said. He seemed in a good enough humor, but restless. For a while he stood in the yard looking distastefully at the littered clearing. Then he called the boys and started them picking up chips and scraps of paper, piling tin cans over against the woods, straightening up the scattered woodpile. They did it lackadaisically, without thoroughness, but he didn’t scold them. After a while he got hammer and nails and started repairing the porch.

  “What’s all the cleaning up about?” Elsa asked.

  “Well, hell. Place looks like a boar’s nest. If we got to live here the rest of our lives I might as well straighten it up a little.”

  Impulsively she put her fingers down and stirred his black hair. “Poor Bo,” she said.

  “Don’t want to change your mind about Canada, do you?” he said. He hammered in a nail with four quick blows. “I had a letter about it the other day.”

  “Who from?”

  “Friend of this Massey, that told me about it in the first place. I wrote him and asked for the dope.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Said the road was coming through, all right. Already started grading.”

  For a moment she was almost tempted. It might be better, there might be a home there, certainly Bo would be happier if she didn’t hold him back. After the way the Alaska business had fizzled, so that now Jud was still right where he had been at first, dealing in a gambling house, and after the way Bo had given up what had looked like a golden chance because of her and the boys, when Chester got sick, maybe she ought to say yes. But then her own desires would have to be sacrificed again, and the home she wanted for the children’s salvation, for her own salvation, interposed itself like a fence.

  She said, “If it weren’t for the kids I’d say go anywhere.”

  He went on nailing down the loose boards of the porch, and when he had finished that he got up without a word and went to look at the well cover, which had rotted away at one side. He said nothing more about Canada, but she watched him unhappily, knowing that he was trying to do as she wished, and trying to accept the responsibility that his family laid on him, but that he still must feel chained and trapped.

  Even after supper he did not mention the subject. He made an effort to be cheerful, creaking back in his chair with his pipe in his mouth and clipping Chester’s ear with a back-handed cuff.

  “Ow!” Chester said. He held his ear and scowled.

  “Come on and fight,” Bo said. “Anybody hits me, I hit him back. What’s holding you?”

  Chester lowered his head and sailed in, and Bo let him flail a few times before he clipped him on the other ear. As they scuffled, he got hold of Chester’s wrist and bent it back, poking the tight little fist into its owner’s eye. “What you hitting yourself for?” he said. “Hit me. It isn’t good sense to sock yourself.”

  Chester squirmed and swung with the other hand. “You’re doin’ it,” he said. “Let go and I’ll ...”

  At the other end of the table Bruce sidled up to his mother, his eyes fixed steadily on the scuffling, and pulled her dress. She glanced down, saw his lips frame the words, “I got to go.”

  Her quick glance showed Bo still sparring with Chester, grinning, pushing the boy away with a big irremovable hand, holding him by the top of the head while Chester tried to bore in.

  She nodded at Bruce, and led him quietly toward the door. Behind her Bo’s voice came heavy and even. “Hey. Where you going?”

  She turned around with a lie on her very lips before the absurdity of lying about such a thing made her meet his eyes. “Bruce has to go.”

  “Let him go by himself.” Bo had quit sparring, and was holding the still-belligerent Chester at arm’s length.

  “It’s getting dark,” Elsa said.

  “It isn’t dark yet by a damn sight,” Bo said. “He’s been told often enough to go by himself. You just make him worse trying to sneak around and out-fox me.”

  Rebellious and angry, she hesitated. To stand around arguing about such a ridiculous thing! Why shouldn’t she go out with him, if it made him feel safer? Why should he have to go out there alone when he was terrified of the woods and the dark? But Bo sat there, implacable and dominating. And that afternoon she had refused for the third time to do the thing he wanted. If this kept on, they would be at loggerheads over every little thing.....

  “You can go out yourself like a big boy,” she said. “Sure you can: Mommy’s got to do up the dishes.” She hated herself for that lame surrender, and saw Bruce hating her for it too. He twitched away from the door and tried putting his fingers around the lantern base.

  “I don’t need to,” he said sullenly.

  She looked helplessly at Bruce, then at Bo, and started clearing off the table without a word. But Bo half rose, and h
is voice was edged with a threat. “Oh yes you do. Skin on out there, right

  Bruce’s lip jutted, his eyes were dark with rebellion. “I don’t need to.”

  The stool scraped as Bo stood up. “If you want a good hiding,” he said, “just stand around there a minute more seeing how far you can go.”

  The child lingered at the door, his round baby face clouded with passion, but when Bo took two swift heavy steps toward him he bolted. Elsa said nothing. If Bo wanted to make that issue the most important in the world, just to assure himself that he was boss, she supposed he would do it. Bruce was trying enough. He made you want to scream sometimes. But it did no good to bully and spank. That only made the trouble loom bigger, and it was already ridiculously exaggerated. Let Bo go on and earn the hatred of his son. Secretly, she would almost have bet on the child rather than on Bo; Bruce would take scoldings, spankings, brutality, anything, and wail and howl and cry, but they wouldn’t break him. All they would do would be to harden him under the surface fear and callous him to punishment.

  The door opened and Bruce slipped in quickly. He shut the door as if locking something out. Bo took his pipe from his mouth and looked at him, the faint expression of petulance on his face overlaid by surface heartiness. “Get your business done?”

  “Yes.”

  “Weren’t any boogers out there, either, were there?”

  “No.”

  “Sure not,” Bo said. “Not a booger in sight. Even if there was, there’s no call for a big guy like you to be scared. Chet here eats boogers for breakfast.”

  When he turned his chair squarely and fronted the child, his face, to his wife, was a curious mixture, as if the bluff good-natured heartiness with which he treated the children sometimes, and which he was trying to assume now, were an expression worn over at least two others, as if the underlying muscles of his face said at the same time that he was doomed and damned and leg-ironed by family responsibilities, and as if the eyes, quite independently, were appraising his youngest with an acid, prying look of contempt. But his voice was the playful voice of teasing fellowship. “Come on over and get pasted,” he said. “I just toughened Chet up till you couldn’t drive a nail in him.”

  Bruce hung close to his mother by the stove, his eyes sullen and unyielding. “I don’t want to,” he said.

  The look of contempt for a moment obliterated the other expressions on Bo’s face. He looked at Elsa, laughed a short, hard laugh, and stood up. “All right,” he said. “All right, all right! You don’t want to.”

  As he passed the stove on his way out of the tent Bruce crowded back against the box where his mother kept the dishes, and his eyes followed his father until the door shut behind him.

  Elsa sighed. “You ought to play when Pa wants you to,” she said, but Bruce turned his head aside and picked slivers off a stick of firewood with ritualistic care. “I don’t want to,” he said again.

  “If you minded the first time he spoke to you you wouldn’t get into trouble,” she said. “Can’t you try to mind better, Brucie?”

  He went on picking slivers, and she turned from him to get at the dishes. After a few minutes she heard Bo’s steps coming up the path, along the side of the tent. There was a surprised grunt. The footsteps paused while she might have counted five. Then Bo’s voice, strident, high-pitched, insane with rage, was shouting curses. The baby jerked from behind the stove as if he were going to run, but in the middle of the tent he hesitated, his head swinging like a cornered animal’s and his eyeballs distended with terror. Elsa had barely time to gather him in close to her before Bo burst in the door.

  In the flash while their eyes met and held, while she crowded Bruce behind her back protectively, she knew that she had never seen Bo so furious. His face and neck were swollen and dark, his eyes glaring, his breath panting between bared and gritted teeth. His voice came in an incoherent, snarling roar.

  “Of all the God damn, God damn! Right beside the path where I step in it! And lie about it! Right beside the path and then lie about it ... !”

  He was crouched on the threshold as if about to spring, and she backed up a step, holding Bruce behind her. “Bo! For God’s sake, keep your temper, Bo!”

  The swiftness with which his big body moved paralyzed her for a split second with utter terror that he would kill the child. Before she could put up her arm he had caught her shoulder and pushed her aside, and she fell screaming, trying with both hands to hang onto Bruce, feeling his fingers torn loose from her dress even while she fell, and hearing his thin squeak of terror. She screamed, “Bo, oh my God, Bo ... Bo ... !”

  Moving with the same silent terrible speed, he was out the door again with Bruce under his arm, and she scrambled up, silent herself now, to hurl herself after him. Around the side of the tent the child’s idiot babble of fear rose to a shriek, broke, rose again, cackled in a mad parody of laughter. In the near-dark she saw Bo bending over, the baby’s frantic kicking legs beating out behind him as he shoved the child’s face down to the ground, rubbing it around. “Will you mind?” he kept saying, “will you mind now, you damn stubborn little ...

  She pulled at him, clawing, but one thick arm, powerful as a hurled log, brushed backward and knocked her down again, and she fell sideways on her half-healed arm. She never even felt the pain. Her mouth worked over soundless words. Like a dog, she screamed at him without making a sound, you treat your child like a dog! Her legs kicked her to her feet again so quickly that she might never have fallen. Bo was still rubbing Bruce’s nose into the ground in a savage prolongation of fury.

  Hatred flamed in her like a sheet of light. She wanted to kill him. Somehow her hand found a stick of stovewood in it, and with murder in her heart she rushed him. The first blow fell solid and soft across his shoulder. The second stung her hands as it found hard bone. Then she was wrestling with him, sobbing, trying to hit him again, screaming with helplessness and fury when she felt her wrist bent backward and her fingers loosening on the club.

  Now finally the long moment when the madness burned out of both of them as suddenly as it had come and they faced each other in the heavy forest twilight with Bruce sobbing on the ground between them and Chester terrified and whimpering at the corner of the tent. Bo stared at her stupidly, his hands hanging. In the dusk she saw his mouth work, and bit her own lip, her body weak as water and her burned arm one long hammering ache. She didn’t speak. Gathering the threads of her strength, she stooped and picked up Bruce and carried him into the tent, motioning Chester in after her and bolting the door.

  Without pause or thought she went straight to the bed and lay down with Bruce tight against her, holding his moaning into her breast and trying by the very rigidity of her embrace to stop the shudders that went through his body. While she lay there Chester crept against her, so that she rolled a little and put her burned hand clumsily on his head.

  There was no sound outside the tent. She caught herself listening tensely, and the anger touched her again like a rod of bare icy metal. The shivering of the child in her arms lessened gradually, but his breath still shook him into shudders, and at every catching intake of air she held him fiercely. Like a dog. Expecting a child to learn all at once, to be told and never afterward make a mistake, never to have any feelings of his own, but to jump like a trained animal. Even a dog he treated better, lessoned with endless patience, rewarded when it did something right. She blinked her dry eyes, scratchy as if they had been blow full of sand.

  Poor child, she said. Poor baby! Her hand rubbed up and down his back, and she whispered in his ear. “Don’t cry. Don’t cry, baby. We won’t let him do it any more.”

  (What instant outrage that she should have to say such a thing to him! We won’t let him do it any more. His father!)

  “Are you all right now?” she said finally. “Will you lie here and rest while Mommy lights the lamp?”

  His hands clung, and she lay back. “Chet,” she said, “can you light the lamp, do you think?”

  He sl
ipped off the bed, and she heard him bump against the table in the dark. Light leaped in a feeble spurt, went out, and he struck another match. Then the steadying glow of the lamp as he brought it back to the bed in both hands, carefully.

  “Good boy,” she said. “Set it on the chair.”

  Sitting up, she smoothed Bruce’s hair back from his forehead and looked at him, and the cry that was wrenched from her came from a deeper well of horror and shame and anger than even the blows she had rained on Bo outside. Bruce’s face was smeared with dirt and excrement and tears. Under that filth he was white as a corpse, his face shrunken and sharpened with terror. A nerve high in his cheek twitched in tiny sharp spasms, and his whole head shook as if he had St. Vitus’ dance. But his eyes, his eyes ...

  “Look at me!” she said harshly, and shook him. “Brucie, look at me!”

  The mouth closed on a thin, bubbling wail, the cheek twitched, but the eyes did not change. They remained fixed in mute impossible anguish, twisted inward until the pupils were half lost in the inner corners.

  “Ma,” Chester said, “is he cross-eyed, Ma?” He began to cry.

  She shook Bruce again, her own eyes blind. “Bruce!”

  His cheek twitched and his body shuddered. “Get me a pan of water and a wash cloth,” Elsa said to Chester. She said it quietly, holding her voice down as if throwing all her weight on it. He mustn’t be frightened any more, she mustn’t shout at him, she must be soothing, soft, safe. Holding him cradled against her bad arm, she washed his face gently with the cloth, ran it over his eyes, pressed it against his forehead under the silky light hair matted with sweat and filth. Minute by interminable minute she washed him, and heard the sobbing smooth out under the stroking, saw the cheek twitch less often, less violently.

  Chester was putting wood in the stove, being helpful, his solemn teary face watching his mother and brother on the bed. Elsa took a firm hold on Bruce’s shoulders. “Look, Brucie,” she said. “Look at Chet over there, getting supper for us like a big man.”