The Big Rock Candy Mountain (18 page)

Inactive days, haunted nights, wore out his patience and drove him against the shut doors that he wanted to burst open. He cursed Jud for not finding anyone to buy the hotel. One day he cursed the piddling nincompoop who had offered a measly three thousand, and the next he cursed Jud for not having the sense to take it. He didn't care how much they lost, as long as they got a stake to go north on.

One day he sat in the kitchen and petted the gray housecat, rubbing behind its ears, stroking under its lifted chin, pulling its whiskers gently while it blinked and rubbed and purred. Elsa, turning at the stove to reach for the salt shaker, saw Bo's hand move down the crackling fur. The tom arched his back and tiptoed as the fingers stroked clear from ears to lifting haunches, up the raised and electric tail. Bo's face was passive, almost expressionless, and his eyes were half closed. Then the heavy thumbnail dug into the cat's tail with abrupt savagery. The cat yowled a startled, fighting yowl, turned and clawed and leaped free.

“God damn!” Bo was on his feet, his face dark with a wash of blood. “Claw me, you damn ...

The cat stood watchfully, yellow slit eyes on him, back humped, tail furred out and straight up. It leaped away from Bo's kick, slipped through the dining room door, dodged another kick, and vanished down the cellar stairs. Bo stood irresolute, fingering his scratched wrist. “Damn cat clawed the hide off me,” he said, and sucked at the blood.

“You started it. You pinched his tail.”

“Oh, the hell I did!”

“Bo, you did too. I saw you.”

His heavy face, snarling, bullying, swung toward her. “And I say I didn‘t!”

Her blood jumping with anger, she turned away from him. She had seen his face when he pinched, the sudden, convulsive tightening of his mouth.

Through February and into a bitter March his irritability drove him from the house as if he couldn't bear to stay under a roof. He took to walking alone through the cornfield and down to the muddy little rill of water buried under the mounded snow in the creek bed, carrying a trap or two and looking for muskrat or fox or skunk sign. But all he caught was a half dozen muskrats and two skunks, and coming home from his fruitless prowling he would sit staring gloomily out the window, or try to lure Erling into a blackjack game, or get a deck and lose himself in solitaire. The sheets of tablet paper appeared again, and the strings of penmanlike signatures and figures,
Harry G. Mason, Harry G. Mason, Mr. Harry G. Mason, Mr. Harry G. Mason, Esq.,
with arabesques and flourishes, and pages of pictures of animals with bodies like frame houses and heads like gables and tails like chimneys with curls of smoke rising. The boys pounced on those whenever they found them, but the sight of them made Elsa feel cold and a little sick.

 

Brooding, the book forgotten in her lap, Elsa watched the children riding switches among the stumps, and even in the midst of the deep bird-twittering quiet she felt the frustration and restlessness of that winter. All that energy bottled up without a thing to occupy it. And then the spring, and the sale, and that wonderful week or two when they were really on their way and the world opened out westward into hope.

She pursed her lips and shook her head. You mustn't think about it, she said, and looked around startled to see if she had spoken aloud and the boys had heard. They were still playing horse among the stumps. But she mustn't think about it, anyway. It did no good to worry over things that were done and gone. But she wished with all her heart that it hadn't happened, that they had caught the boat as they intended, that Bo were doing what he would have loved to do, playing wild man in the wilderness. She didn't like to think of herself and the children as a hoodoo and a handicap.

That night after the boys were in bed she put the lamp on the table and sat down to read. But the light, reflected off the oilcloth, hurt her eyes, and before nine she was preparing for bed herself. After the light was out she opened the door and stood for a minute breathing the balsam air. It was very dark, the heavy trees a black impenetrable wall across the lighter cleared ground, their tops triangular blacknesses against the sky. She shivered. So lonely a place. The Klondike couldn't have been any lonelier. Ever since her marriage she had wanted for neighbors, in the hotel and on her father's farm and later in Seattle when they knew no one, but now for a moment the desire to have people nearby was like a muscular ache. If there were only a smoke in the daytime, a light at night.

Very carefully she bolted the door, looked at the unseen flimsy canvas roof overhead, listened for a moment to the easy breathing of the children, and slipped into bed.

No noises after dark, at least none like the sounds in a town, the hoarse calling of trains, the rattle of wheels and clack of hoofs and squeak of a dry axle in the street, the unfamiliar roar of an automobile coming around a corner and diminishing, softening, disappearing again down another street you could imagine, tree-lined, pooled with shadows, perhaps a single light in the gable of some house, and the dark pitch of roofs cutting off the stars. Nothing here but the soft continuous murmur like a sigh from the trees crowding the clearing, nothing but the padded blow of an erratic, tree-broken wind on the canvas roof, the faint rustle of needles falling from the fir at the back corner of the tent and skating down the canvas incline. No noises but inanimate creak ings and rustlings that you strained to hear and were never satisfied with, stealthy noises that eluded identification and kept you straining for their repetition, noises too soft to be comforting, noises without the surety and satisfaction of trains calling or freight cars jarring as they coupled in the yards beyond the dark. You lay rigidly in bed and made your breath come shallowly, noiselessly, through your mouth, and your blood slowed and pounded until you felt its pressure like monotonous light blows on your injured arm. When you had listened for a sound until you were tightened to an unbearable tension, you heard it again, and it was only the needles falling, the sigh of the moving trees, and you relaxed in the bed and breathed once more. It seemed to you then that your present was a static interval like the pause between heartbeats, and when you lay thinking you thought of the past inevitably, because you couldn't help it, because the present was without the meaning of either past or future, because the past was the thing you knew well, in image and idea, because in the past your future lay.

 

You remembered how the future had looked on that trip west, close and touchable and warm as it had been only once before, in the early weeks of your marriage. You remembered the oceanic plains pouring behind, the mountains, the Elbow Pass above Banff and the Three Sisters immaculate in snow behind the smoky windows; the strange smothery feeling in the tunnels, and the way the children's noses bled in the altitude, and then Seattle, with Mount Rainier floating like a great smooth cloud high above where any mountain should be.

Everything about those days was full of a kind of drunkenness; it reeled in the memory. Even the cheap boarding house where you and Eva and the children stayed while Jud and Bo went to arrange passage, even Eva forgetting to have her pains, full of laughter. The things sweet to remember—the terrier puppy you bought for the boys, and the pictures you had taken to send back to Indian Falls: Chester with a clay pipe in his mouth, looking droll and eyebrowless, holding the puppy in his arms; the two boys posed behind a cardboard screen painted to represent the cutwater of a boat, with spray V-ing out on both sides and Bruce's hands on an artificial wheel, the whole thing so convincing to the boys later that Bruce's greatest boast even yet was that he had run a big motor boat all by himself.

The day when passage was arranged and the dog assured of a trip in the hold, and the actual tickets in Bo's hands to prove that it was really going to happen. He was exalted with excitement, jumpy, full of sudden exuberances. He stood by the window looking out to where workmen with great firehoses were washing away a whole hill to make way for a street, looking out and humming, breaking into song,

Breaking into song, standing with his hands in his pockets staring out at the activity of the city and having crazy tunes come to his lips without warning, singing,

When a hurdy-gurdy man came by under the window, you remembered him breaking from the window to wheel you in a clumsy waltz around the room, catching heels in the old Brussels carpet, stumbling, roaring with laughter, singing,

Teasing the kids, wrestling the puppy, going out in the evening for pails of beer, and you all sat around in the scrawny room, full of fun and stories and songs, growing silent once in a while as you thought of the Promised Land. You remembered evenings when Jud and Eva had gone to their room, and those nights were full of warm, low talk in bed, and lovemaking like a second honeymoon.

Ah, that dream of escape, you thought now, lying in the dark tent hearing the whisper of needles and the light breathing of the boys. That dream of taking from life exactly what you wanted—you too, not merely Bo and Jud, but all of you, drunk on that dream. Then the fall, the cracking away of the well-brink just as you were climbing out. Ding, dong, bell, pussy's in the well, you thought, and made your face smile in the dark. Whose fault? Who put her in? Who,pulled her out? You knew of no one responsible, unless whoever or whatever ran the world was really what it seemed sometimes, a mean, vindictive force against which you beat yourself to rags, so that sometimes you felt like a drowning. sailor trying to climb into a lifeboat and having your fingers hammered off the gunwale time after time, until there was nothing to do except go down or make up your mind to stay afloat somehow, any way you could.

There was Bo's face the day he came back from buying supplies for the voyage that would start now in two days, and found you tending Chester, sick and whining with a sore throat—the swift, hot, suspicious look, the look of outrage, the look as you traced it over now almost of certainty, as if he had known all along that something would happen. “God damn it,” he shouted, “he
can't
get sick now!”

But he did. The next morning there was red rash in his throat. By noon it had spread all over his chest. By afternoon the man was tacking up Scarlet Fever signs on the boarding-house door, and most of the boarders had fled, and the landlady was bitter and Bo, hearing the doctor's words, had flung out of the house like a madman, the doctor shouting after him.

You expected then that he would go without you, and were bitter at him, yet even then you couldn't have blamed him much. He had set his heart so on that voyage. You sat all afternoon and evening, and late at night he came back, his footsteps creaking on the stairs, the anger gone from him and only a look of such hopeless defeat in his face that it shook you with pity. You begged him then to go, to get Jud and Eva and go, and you would join him when Chester was well, but he wouldn't. He had fought it out with himself walking, and he would stick. Maybe they could go later, all of them. But the quarantine would be six weeks, and six weeks cut half the season away. Instead of agreeing to go, he went out to find another boarding place. In the morning he would look for a job. Should he get a nurse, he asked before he left. Could you get along with both kids to mind? But you didn't want a nurse. You didn't want to add that expense to what was already bound to be a disaster. You would stay afloat till another lifeboat came by.

But no more boats. Empty ocean with a fog on it. Chester sick only a week when Bruce came down, and the quarantine lengthening through two weeks, three, four, six, seven. Bruce was barely through peeling when his ear became infected and he howled with pain so that no one slept. You remembered Bo's coming one night, slipping in after his shift of running a streetcar was done, and you sat almost wordless, beaten and tired, though you hadn't seen him for almost a month.

Even then you still talked as if you might go. You would have exposed the children to any amount of cold winter if you could have gone that fall. But Bo had turned in the steamer tickets; doctors bills and living expenses had cut down their money. And then came Jud's first letter. It was a cautious letter. It didn't say definitely that there was nothing stirring. It said merely that from all Jud could find out, the way to get in on either the gold or the fur was to go way back in the wilderness, and Eva didn't like that idea much. Living was high as a kite. Just to fill in till he had located some likely proposition for them, Jud was dealing poker in a joint. If he kept his ears open, he expected that pretty soon he'd hear of something that was worth plunging on. Until then, Jud suggested that with a family to take care of Bo might do better to stay in Seattle. It was a hell of a lot cheaper to get along there than in Seward.

You saw, with the kind of slow, inevitable movement that a high wall makes in falling, that Bo's face lost its eagerness, sagged, set hard. He crushed the letter and threw it at the wall. After a while he picked it up again, smoothed it out and read it again, and broke into a fit of foul swearing, and looking at his eyes and mouth you knew he wanted to cry.

He wore that bitterness around his mouth for months, until he heard about the little café for sale in Richmond, out in the timber, and the prospect of getting away from the carline, from the rocking platform and the swollen feet and the irritation of working for someone else, checking in and checking out, keeping still when inspectors bawled him out, was too tempting to resist. He never looked into the café at all carefully. He simply quit his job and took what little money they had and bought it, spent ten days furiously painting and cobbling and cleaning up, bought new stools and coffee urn and equipment. You flicked the shutter open on that cafe, and your eye saw it as you had seen it for six months, clean and painted and neat outside, where the customers saw it, its poverty plain where the poverty wouldn't show. You saw the scuffed, softened, splintery fir floor behind the counter, the floor whose slivers found the holes in your shoes and drove in, stopping you sometimes as if you had stepped in a trap; the old cupboards that no amount of soda and scrubbing would sweeten.