The Big Rock Candy Mountain (29 page)

“You're wonderful at sewing, Else,” Kristin said once. “Why don't you make things for yourself, instead of helping me all the time? You could stand some new clothes.”

Elsa bit off a thread, threaded the needle, and pulled the end down. “I don't need any new clothes.”

“You do too.”

“What for?”

There was no answer to that.

But even the unfailing recourse of sewing for Kristin could not occupy more than her hands, and to keep from thinking she often sang. Sometimes in the midst of a song she would break off abruptly, wondering why she sang at all. She wasn't happy enough to sing, certainly, only dormant, as if half of her slept. She remembered times when she had been happy enough to sing, the old days when she had sung alto in the church choir, evenings in Hardanger, even in Grand Forks, so miserably burdened with the weight of that hotel. She remembered evenings coming home from somewhere in the buggy, when she and Bo had sat together with their voices going up in old tunes. Bo had a nice voice, she thought wanly, full and rich. She remembered the nodding tip of the buggy whip against the sky, the windy freshness of the air of those lost evenings, and Bo's laughter, his rich, warm, possessive laughter, and the fool songs he knew, dozens of them, as if his mind were flypaper to catch all sorts of buzzing tunes. When she got that far in her remembering she always broke off, sang some other song, one that had no echoes except those that sounded down the green avenue of her childhood.

Sometimes Henry Mossman came to call, and everybody always assumed that he came to see Nels Norgaard, and the two men sat in the parlor while the-women worked or darned or chatted in the dining room. But Elsa knew why he came, and she sat sometimes studying his stooped, apologetic figure with a kind of regret, remembering that once he had wanted to marry her, that if she had she might have got what she now so desperately wanted. With a little shake of the head she would let amazement run through her mind at the way people changed. Nine years ago, silly and young and full of confidence that she knew just what she wanted to do with her life, she had run away from Indian Falls and Henry Mossman and the stodgy uneventful life of the town, and now she almost wished she had chosen the other way.

Henry was so mild and inoffensive and docile, so unwilling even to say straight out that he came to see her, not her father, and he sat in the parlor half a dozen evenings talking to Nels Norgaard and saying hardly more than ten words to Elsa. He was steady, incapable of a harsh word to anybody, kind, unattractive, dependable. She wished once, with a sigh, that Bo, with all his arrogant ease, his sharpness, his powerful and well-tuned body, might have had just a touch of Henry's dependable quietness. But before she had half thought it she was thinking almost proudly that Bo could never be like Henry. He wasn't a domestic animal, he wasn't tame, he couldn't like halters, no matter how hard he tried—and he did try, had tried, often. It just wasn't in him; she had probably helped along his unhappiness and her own by trying to turn him into something he was never cut out to be. Just by marrying him she had done that. Karl had known it, right from the beginning. Bo was a rambler, and the responsibilities of marriage would never sit easily on his back.

 

George Nelson, blond, laughing, very much in love with Kristin, came down from his Minneapolis law office and stayed for two days at Thanksgiving, and when he was gone Kristin folded up and put away the dress she had stolen out of her trousseau and threw herself into crocheting pillow-slip lace.

“You must be planning to spend all your life in bed,” Elsa said. “You've already got six or eight pairs done.”

Kristin blushed, let her hands stop, and looked up with her face strained as if she were about to cry. “I should think you'd hate me, Elsa.”

“For goodness' sake, why?”

“Because I'm so happy.”

Sympathy again, Elsa thought. Poor Elsa. But she wasn't angry. Kristin was so full of her happiness and she had to be spendthrift, share it with everybody. “I'm as glad as I can be,” Elsa said.

They were on the edge of the old forbidden ground. A silence like a drawn curtain came between them.

“You like George, don't you?” Kristin said from the other side of the curtain.

“Very much. I always did.”

“You think he'll make a good husband, don't you?”

“I don't know anyone I'd rather see you marry,” Elsa said.

Kristin picked at a knot in the lace, her eyes hiding. “I think he's wonderful,” she said.

“So do I,” Elsa said, crocheting steadily. “Not as wonderful as you do, but wonderful enough.”

“I suppose every bridegroom seems wonderful to the bride,” Kristin said. “Oh Elsa, I wish ...”

“What?”

“I wish you were as happy as I am. You deserve such a lot, and you never got a thing.”

“Maybe I don't deserve very much,” Elsa said, “and how do you know I never got anything?” She straightened a square of lace and laid it aside. “That's fourteen,” she said. “Eighty-two more and you'll have your bedspread.”

Kristin stood up. “I've got to run down to the postoffice. George said he'd write the minute he got back.”

She stood in the doorway, struggling into her coat. “Don't you think it's cute the way his hair curls up above his ears?” she said. She went out, letting the storm door bang.

In a few minutes the door slammed again, and Kristin blew in in a cloud of snow. She was some time taking off her coat and hanging it in the hall. Out in the kitchen Sarah was rattling pans. Then Kristin came in.

“Get your letter?” Elsa asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“You don't seem very excited. Didn't he put any kisses at the bottom?”

“Oh, it's a nice letter,” Kristin said. She went to the table and ruffled through the papers there.

“Is anything wrong?”

“No.” Kristin turned around. “There's a letter for you, that's all.” She took it out of her pocket.

“For me?” Elsa's hand came out halfway. Her eyes jumped to meet Kristin's.

“From him,” Kristin said. She seemed unwilling to give it up. “Oh, I wish he'd yet you alone!” she said. “When it's all over with, he ought to have decency enough ...”

She threw the letter at Elsa and went out into the kitchen, leaving Elsa alone with the envelope a warm, speaking, dangerous thing under her fingers. The letter was postmarked Seattle. He had come back to Washington, then, and found her gone. She tore open the end and very slowly drew out the letter, a fat one. There was a money order folded into it. Two hundred dollars. Straightening the sheets, she read:

Dear Elsa,

If this letter doesn't reach you I don't know what I'll do. I've been about crazy since I came down here a week ago and found out you'd left the place in Richmond a long time back. I've been hunting all over Seattle, had a detective on the job and everything, and finally I found out you'd worked in that store, and got your address from a guy there, but the landlady said she didn't know where you'd gone. So I just have to shoot in the dark and hope you went home. You should have written me and told me about the cafe. I thought you'd make out there all right, and after you shut me out that night I was so mad and sick I didn't know what I was doing. I wrote a letter a month ago, with a check in it. Did you get it? Oh, damn it, Elsa, I don't know what to say. I'm getting along fine up in Canada, bought some real estate and ought to make some dough in the spring, but I'm lonesome for you and the kids all the time. If you've gone home to stay with your folks I wish you'd think it over, and in the spring come up here with me. I'm really in on the ground floor here, even if Purcell does own the whole valley. This road is opening up a country as big as Dakota, and there's plenty of homestead land open yet. I'm looking out for a half section in a good place, with water. Sometimes you can pre-empt another quarter along with the homesteaded quarter if the guy who
homesteaded
it first hasn't made his improvements. This land will grow wheat six feet high, and if we could get into some business in town and have a half section for farming in the summer we'd be set. This town, or this place where they will be a town, is going to have a lot of opportunities in it. As we get rolling we could buy up more land in the townsite and clean up a bbl. of money from the people who'll be flocking in here in six months. There is white clay along the river that a fellow from Medicine Hat says is just right for pottery. Coal too, lignite, the hills are full of it, and some fellows were around there when I left, snooping for oil. If we owned some land and oil was struck on it we'd be on Easy St. for life. We can't make any mistake on this place. It's what I've been looking for all my life. It isn't all skimmed off, and gobbled up.

Elsa, I miss you and the kids, and this proposition looks so good I hate to think that now we stand a chance to make some money you aren't with me any more. Its no satisfaction to make money just for yourself. I can't seem to get steamed up about it alone. I guess if you're really set on leaving me I can't kick, because I had it coming the way I acted, but I wish you'd think it over. In a new country like that we could start all over. This town will be a nice place to live. It's on the Whitemud River, and there'd be swimming and hunting and riding for the kids, and plenty of brush for them to run in. The country reminds me some of my old home town in Illinois, only there aren't any trees except in the river valley. I caught four beaver and a half dozen muskrats in traps in the week before I came down to the States. That shows you how wild it still is. Beavers swim right out in the river under the railroad bridge.

You think it over, Elsa. We don't want to go breaking up the family and not give the kids a chance. I have to go back to Whitemud right away, but if you get this, write me and let me know you're all right. I'm sending on some money, if you need more let me know and I can rake it up. I was going to invest this two hundred in another lot, but then I thought you'd probably need it, especially when I found out you hadn't been able to make the cafe go. And you'd better decide to come up here in the spring. I promise you nothing like that other will happen any more. I guess I learned something from that night.

All my love,
Bo

 

P.S. I want to send on something for a Christmas package. Can't tell much what you need, but I'll try to find something useful. I know you never did like jewjaws.

 

So he had finally struck something that promised to pay off. She had always believed that some day he would. If you tried enough things, sooner or later something was bound to turn out. But she mustn‘t, she thought almost desperately, she mustn't let herself be softened. It was a nice letter, and it made her want to do just what she knew she shouldn't do. But she would hang onto what she knew: she knew he couldn't promise to change what he was. The thing she feared in him, the thing that had made her shut him out that night, was still there, deep in his violent and irritable and restless blood.

Or was it? Was there a chance that only poverty, bad luck, dissatisfaction, brought that out in him? Was there a chance that in a new place, living the way he wanted to, making enough money to satisfy him, that side of him would never come out any more?

She looked up to see Kristin standing in the sliding doors between dining room and parlor. Her eyes were accusing. Pugnaciously she came in and sat down, her whole expression saying that she was not going to get up again until this thing was talked over and settled. Elsa sat still.

“What did he say?” Kristin said.

Elsa shrugged. “Sent some money. Wants me to come up to Canada in the spring.”

“He would,” Kristin said. “That's the kind he is. He'd abuse you for eight or nine years and,then expect you to come crawling back for more. I wouldn't even have opened his letter.”

“He's still my husband,” Elsa said. “I wrote Dad once about helping me get a divorce, but he wouldn't do anything unless I had the one reason the church accepts. And Bo's never looked at another woman. You dislike him too much, Kris. He sent me two hundred dollars in this letter.”

“It's a bribe!” Kristin said. “He'll send you money to get you back and then you'll have rags and beatings again.”

“Beatings!”

Sitting forward on the edge of her chair, Kristin let her eyes bore into Elsa's. “He did beat you, didn't he?”

“My goodness, no.”

Kristin sat back reluctantly, only half believing. “But you aren't going back to him, are you?”

“I was just wondering,” Elsa said. She stared at the cherry-red mica squares in the door of the parlor heater and shook her head tiredly. “No, I don't think so.”

“Because you don't know what he's done to you,” Kristin said. “When you went away you were young, and pretty, and healthy, and everything, and you come back with your arm hurt so it'll always show, and without decent clothes, and ...”

“And looking like an old woman,” Elsa said.

“That isn't what I meant. You're pretty yet, only you look so tired, and thin. Sometimes when you don't know anybody's looking at you you look so worn out you scare me. Elsa, you look ... just the way I remember Mal”

She gave the spring handle of the poker a hard kick, and it rattled against the stove legs.

“I guess I can still manage to get around,” Elsa said. “People . needn't wear themselves out worrying about me.”

“He's taken the heart out of you,” Kristin said helplessly. “Even if he didn't beat you or burn your arm, he led you such a life that he's taken the heart right out of you. You used to be so spunky and independent, and make Erling and me toe the mark, and now you're so quiet and kind you make me want to cry!”