The Big Rock Candy Mountain

  While she watched, not breathing, Bruce’s eyes wavered, rolled outward from that fixed and inhuman paralysis; some of the glaring white eyeballs, streaked with red, slid back out of sight and the whole pupils appeared briefly. Then, as if the strain were too much, as if normal focus were an effort too great for more than a moment, the pupils rolled back again. Elsa caught her breath with a jerky sigh. Maybe tomorrow, after he had slept ...

  But oh God, she said, to treat a child that way!

  She had just laid him down on the pillow and started to get something to eat for Chester when Bruce was screaming again, eyes frantically crossed and cheek twitching, his hands clawing at his face and his voice screaming, “Mama, Mama, on my face ... on my nose ... !”

  5

  There hadn’t really been any decision. As she dragged the round-topped trunk up the steps and propped its lid against the table, she was thinking that you never really made up your mind to anything. You simply bent where the pressure was greatest. You didn’t surrender, because surrender was annihilation, but you gave before the pressure.

  A light rain fingered the canvas over her head, and she knew the move would be unpleasant, sodden, miserable. But it didn’t matter greatly. To leave on a sunny day would be inappropriate; a retreat should be made in weather as miserable as the act itself.

  There wasn’t much to pack. Bo’s clothing she stowed in his brown suitcase and put aside. That could be left at the hotel for him, in case he ever came back. Apart from that there were only her own few clothes, the children’s things, the bedding and table linen. Mr. Bane would have whatever else the tent contained—stove, beds, table, bureau, dishes. Mr. Bane had been very kind. He didn’t really want the things at all. It was only to help her that he bought them.

  Oh, and the rabbits. She straightened, brushing back the hair that fell damply on her forehead. What to do with the rabbits? They couldn’t be left, and they could hardly be taken to a boarding-house room in Seattle. She shrugged and gave up thinking about them almost before she had begun. They could be taken along part way, perhaps given to someone along the road. Any child would be glad to get them.

  Chester staggered in with a quilt huddled against his chest, dragging in front so that he tripped on it. Bruce came after him, also loaded. They were excited. The move to them was adventure. They didn’t know it was retreat.

  “What else, Ma?” Chester said.

  “You’d better go feed your bunnies,” she said. “There’s some carrots in the shed.”

  Two minutes later they were back, breathless. “Ma, the bunnies are gone!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “The pen’s empty.”

  She went to look. The screen had rusted away at one side of the board floor of the hutch, and something, either the rabbits or something digging from outside, had widened the hole. The boys looked up at her, and she hid her feeling of relief. She had to appear to be sorry.

  “Why don’t you look around the edge of the brush?” she said. “They’re tame, they’d stay around. Take the carrots and call them.”

  She went back into the tent and packed the remaining things. In the bureau drawer, back under a collection of odd stockings, she found the tintype of her mother, stood looking at it a moment, curiously emotionless, emptied, unable to remember, somehow, the way she had used to feel when looking at that portrait. She snapped the case shut and laid it in the trunk.

  She heard the buckboard come into the clearing, and went to the door. Emil Hurla, one of the bus drivers who lived in Richmond, waved from the seat.

  “I’m practically ready,” she said. “The trunk’s packed now, if you want to get it.”

  Hurla, a great, lumbering man with a gray, pock-marked face, climbed down and got the trunk, muscling it through the door on his thighs. Elsa hurriedly crammed the last rags into her telescope and crushed it shut, strapping it tight. Hurla came in and took it off the table. She looked around at the stripped beds, the empty bureau with its drawers hanging open, the trash littered on the floor, discarded socks, frayed collars, hoarded mop-rags, all the souvenirs of flight. Deliberately, under a compulsion that was more than her ingrained neatness, that was something like a defiance in the midst of panic, she took the stubby broom and swept the whole place, dumping the refuse in the stove and setting fire to it. The boys and Hurla stood in the door and watched her.

  “Our bunnies got lost,” Chester said.

  Hurla put his hands on his knees and bent down. “Is that right, now?” he said. “That’s too bad.”

  “They got out of the pen,” Chester said. “We hunted, but we can’t find them.”

  “Well, now,” Hurla said, “Maybe we ought to look once more.” He lifted his eyes to E.lsa as if to ask if they had time, and when she nodded he went out, the boys after him.

  She had pulled out the beds and swept up the dust puppies and had stood the broom back of the stove when she heard Bruce crying. She went to the door. Hurla stood with the well cover lifted on edge, and all three were looking down in.

  “Ma!” Chester shouted. “Ma, the bunnies are down there.”

  Slowly she went out through the drizzle, her feet sinking soggily in the wet mould, the rain like fine mist in her face. At the well-edge she stopped and peered. Ten feet down, floating whitely, close together, their fur spread by the water like the fur of an angry cat, were the rabbits. The holes under the cover, she supposed, had tempted them in.

  “Get a rope!” Chester shouted. “Get something. We got to get them out.”

  The sight of Bruce’s immense, teary eyes as she turned away made Elsa grit her teeth with momentary fury, as if he were to blame. Then she pulled him against her and took Chester’s hand. “It’s no use,” she said. “Your bunnies are drowned. It’s a shame.”

  “But we can’t leave them in there,” Chester said. “Ma ...”

  She drew them away. Hurla let the cover fall, and Bruce burst out in a wild passionate wail. She lifted him into the buggy, letting him cry, ignoring Chester’s worried “Ma, we can’t ... Ma.” Hurla climbed up and took the lines. The mist had powdered the wool of his cap like a thin coating of flour.

  He sawed the team around, and started out of the clearing. Elsa ducked her head to avoid the first low branches of the old tote road. She did not look back, but she could see in her mind every bush and stump in the clearing, every stain on the canvas roof, every detail of the place that had been home for a year and a half, that had still been home even after Bo ran off to Canada, that she had been fiercely determined to make home. But it was too much, she thought. She couldn’t have tried any harder.

  Behind her she heard Bruce’s crying, furious now because she had not comforted him, and she felt in Chester’s silence his grief for the death they left behind them in the well. She couldn’t blame them any more than she could help them. There was too much that lay dead behind her. That well and clearing and abandoned tent-house neatly swept and locked against intrusion was a grave-stone in her life. There had been other gravestones, but this was the worst, because it was more than a hope or a home that lay dead there. It was her marriage. Though she had not admitted it before, she knew that one reason she had tried so hard to keep the café going and to hold to the clearing was the hope that some day Bo would come back.

  She did not look behind her, but she knew exactly how Bruce and Chester felt when they knelt at the lip of the well and saw the white, furred-out shapes of their pets floating, lifting motionless to the motionless lifting of earthbound water in a dark, earth-smelling hole under the rain.

  III

  Bo came out of the Half-Diamond Bar bunkhouse with Big Horn, the foreman, and stood picking his teeth in the watery October sun. Rusty, third son of a British earl, was stapling a broken bridle at the corner of the house. Another remittance man, the boy they called Slivers, was sprawled against the horse corral playing his mouth organ. Louis Treat, a half-breed Assiniboine, lounged against a low, rock-weighted stack of prairie hay and braided at a
horsehair rope. A hundred yards up through the light, leafless growth of black birch and cottonwood, the stone mansion of Jim Purcell showed. Bo spat on the ground.

  “How much money has old Purcell got, anyway?” he said.

  Big Horn shrugged. “He’s loaded with it. He give the C.P.R. ever’ other house lot to survey a townsite here, and even if he’d of give ‘em nine tenths of it it’d still have been a good proposition for him.”

  “How many head of cattle does he run?”

  “ ‘Bout eight thousand.”

  “He’ll have to cut that out, though, when the range gets homesteaded.”

  “Hell, he don’t care about that,” Big Horn said. “He must own forty thousand acres up the river. He was smart. He was buyin’ land long before the road started down through.”

  “You’ve got to hand it to him,” Bo said. “Still, he had the breaks, too.”

  Big Horn turned on him and laughed. “What’s matter? You sore because you didn’t think of it first?”

  “I wasn’t on the ground,” Bo said. “That makes a hell of a lot of difference.”

  “Hell, if I had your bunkhouse business I wouldn’t kick.”

  “I’m not kicking,” Bo said. “I’m just wishing Purcell had left a little cream for the rest of us.. That bunkhouse business won’t last forever.”

  “Give you a job, thirty a month and grub,” Big Horn said. “Christ A‘mighty, what if you had to work? How’d you like ridin’ line in a forty-below blizzard?”

  “I told you I wasn’t kicking,” Bo said. “I’m just trying to figure some way a man could make a good thing out of this town Purcell’s got started. There isn’t much doubt it’s going to be a town.”

  “Oh, it’ll be a town, all right.”

  “Look at that Syrian peddler that’s squatted here,” Bo said. “Those guys are smart. They don’t settle any place unless they see money in it.”

  “Tell me the Grain Growers’ Association is going to build a elevator,” Big Horn said. “Sure it’ll be a town.”

  “There isn’t anything it hasn’t got,” Bo said. “All that flat between the bends, that’s plenty of room to grow in. Hills full of lignite, plenty of water. Hell, it’ll draw trade for thirty miles around.”

  “Big as Chicago in ten years,” Big Horn said comfortably. He yawned. “When it gets about as big as Shaunavon I’m movin’ on. You and the rest of the promoters can run it then.”

  “Kiss my ass,” Bo said. “You’re scared it’ll get big enough to support a cop.”

  “Cops don’t bother me,” Big Horn said. “Not Canadian cops. They’re putting more Mounties at the post this winter, did you know that?”

  “Sure?”

  “Sure. Heard the old man talking about it the other day.”

  “Then that settles it,” Bo said. “They aren’t sticking in any new Mounties unless they’re sure the place is going to grow.” He looked through the trees at Purcell’s stone house. There was the guy that had used his bean, gathered everything all in to himself. Stone house, forty-thousand-acre ranch, eight thousand head of cattle, real estate to hell and gone, Chink houseboy, big shots stopping in on the stage all the time to talk to him. “By God,” he said, “I wish I owned about twenty lots in the middle of that flat.”

  Big Horn yawned. “It must be oncomfortable to be ambitious,” he said. “Jaspers gnawin’ at your pants all the time. Whyn’t you leave all that ambition to the guys with a pack of kids to raise?”

  Bo looked at him. “Maybe I have got a pack of kids to raise.”

  “Maybe you have,” Big Horn said. “How would I know?”

  Two cowpunchers, Slip and Little Horn, came across the open space between the saddle shed and the corral and stopped to listen to Slivers blow on his mouth organ. He was playing something sad and shivery, flapping his fingers to get a tremolo. Out of nowhere, apparently, a small boy appeared, a dark, black-eyed boy of about eight, with a dark birthmark on the very end of his nose. Little Horn said something to him, and he looked up with an impish, white-toothed smile.

  “That’s Orullian’s kid, one of ‘em,” Big Horn said. “He’s the guy with a pack of ’em. Must have six or seven.”

  “He’ll raise ‘em, too,” Bo said. “I never saw a Syrian yet that couldn’t make money if there was any to be made.”

  “There you go again,” said Big Horn. “Why in hell don’t you open a grocery store, if you think it’s such a good thing?”

  “I’m after something better than grocery stores.”

  The Orullian boy cackled loudly at something one of the hands said. Little Horn put his hand on the boy’s head, and the boy ducked away with a scornful mouth. Little Horn laughed and started away toward the corral half hidden behind the saddle shed. In three minutes he was back dragging a lassoed calf, hauling it along with upturned muzzle and braced legs. The Orullian boy stood and watched. So did Bo and Big Horn.

  Little Horn went and brought an old saddle girth, threw the calf and fastened it around him like a surcingle. The calf blatted and Little Horn let it up, holding it by the ears.

  “Okay, cowboy. Lessee you ride him.”

  The boy approached carefully, sidling; hesitated as the calf backed away; tried to get around to the side. Slip braced himself against the calf’s haunches and Little Horn held its head. “Climb aboard, cowboy,” Little Horn said.

  The boy leaned across the calf’s back and scrambled and kicked himself up. His eyes were enormous and he hung tightly to the surcingle. The two punchers jumped back and yelled, and the calf went pitching across the lot. The boy hung on for about three jumps before he sprawled headlong. For a moment he lay where he fell, while the calf bucked off toward the river. Then he pushed himself up from the ground with his mouth drawn down in a tough leer. Little Horn, before he went after the calf, shook his hand and said he’d stayed sixty seconds. Then Slip shook his hand, then Slivers. The boy was very proud.

  “Pretty tough kid,” Bo said. Abruptly he threw away his toothpick and pulled down his hat. “Guess I’d better go see if my Chink has burned up the joint,” he said, and walked away. It was some time before he could shake out of his head the memory of the way Chet used to swagger and leer when he had done something he thought he ought to be proud of. Chet was a good kid, full of beans. He’d be just about the Orullian kid’s age now, maybe a little younger.

  He walked across the mouth of the east bend, cut through a straggly patch of willows, and came out on the flat where the town would be. There were already three bare frame shacks, and two derailed dining cars set up along what would eventually be a street. The raw earth where the scrapers had been working showed against the foot of the south hill, and a hundred yards on from the end of the grade was his bunkhouse, sheathed with lathed-on tarpaper. Smoke rose from the stovepipes at both ends.

  Inside, he found the Chink Mah Li sitting with his hands comfortably folded in his lap. The bunks were all neatly made, there was a full scuttle of lignite by each stove. Nobody else was in the place except old Hank Flynn, sick in the lungs. The crew would begin to come around after supper, which they took at McGranna han’s boarding house a quarter of a mile back up the line.

  Mah Li smiled his beaming, wrinkle-eyed smile and pointed upward. “Light all bloke,” he said.

  Bo looked up. The mantles on the three hanging gasoline lamps were all in shreds. “How the hell did that happen?”

  “Open door,” Mah Li said. “Wind blowee, all bloke.”

  “Well, for Christ sake keep the door shut, then,” Bo said. He found a package of mantles and climbed on a chair to take the first lamp down. Hank Flynn watched from his bunk.

  “I seen what was goin’ to happen when they started swingin‘,” Flynn said, “but there wasn’t nothin’ I could do, sick like this. I hollered at the Chink, but he didn’t savvy.”

  Bo said nothing. He was carefully tying new mantles around the rings, evening the tucks so that no metal touched them. He scratched a match on his foot and touched
it to first one mantle, then the other. The stink of burning cloth rose. When the mantles were shrunken and ash-white, he climbed the chair again and carefully hung the lamp on its wire.

  “God this is a lonesome hole,” Hank Flynn said, and rubbed his gray-bristled face. “I wisht there was some place a guy could go, poolroom or something. I ain’t seen a soul since the boys left this morning, ‘cept the Chink.”

  “You couldn’t go out any place even if there was a place to go,” Bo said.

  Hank Flynn coughed. “Ain’t it a hell of a note?” he said. His voice was a thin whine that grated on Bo’s nerves. “Guy gets old and sick, when he’d ought to have a place of his own and a wife and kids to look after him, and what happens but he has to lie around a damn drafty bunkhouse all day without anybody but a Chink to talk to, and he can’t talk.”

  “If you don’t like the bunkhouse why don’t you move to the hotel?” Bo said.

  “Oh hell, it ain’t the bunkhouse,” Flynn said. “This is all right, all you could expect. It’s not havin’ anybody give a damn whether you’re sick or not. I could lay here and die and rot and nobody’d even move my bones.”

  “Cheer up,” Bo said. “We’d move you when you started to smell.”

  “That’s right,” Flynn said. “By God, that’s about the only reason anybody’d give a damn whether I lived or died.”

  Bo had tied the mantles on the second lamp, and scratched another match. Through the windows along the east side he could see the crew streaming across the scraped and naked earth on the way to Mrs. McGrannahan’s. The light outside was bleak and cheerless, a cold, early twilight. He wished Flynn would stop his whining. It was tough to be laid up, but that was no reason to crab and grouse all day. Nobody liked to hear a guy crab all the time.

  “I prob‘ly will die here,” Flynn said. He sat up and rubbed at his face again, sitting with his head hanging and his elbows on his knees. “I sure never thought I’d wind up in the middle of nowhere without a friend or a soul that give a damn,” he said. “I sure never did. I used to be strong as anybody. Ten years ago I could-a throwed anybody in that crew, straight wrastling, Marquis of Queensberry, or anything. You can sure see what sickness can do to a man. I used to have an arm on me ...” He slipped up the sleeve of his winter underwear and pulled it high on his upper arm. “See that?” He flexed his muscle, and a hard white knob jumped under the skin. “It looks strong yet, by God,” Hank said, staring at his muscle. Then he pulled the sleeve down and flinched his shoulder irritably, as if at a draft. “But it ain’t,” he said. “I ain’t got enough stren‘th left to pull my tongue out of the sugar barrel.