The Big Rock Candy Mountain (32 page)

It was that last kindness that put her to flight. She nodded and walked away before everything flew out of control.

 

It was different, telling Sarah. She simply announced that she was going up to see Bo in Minneapolis. Sarah stared at her, her placid, smooth face the color of dough, her slightly-bulging gray eyes hard and disapproving. She looked, Elsa thought, twenty years older than her real age, ‘she looked unhealthy, like a fungus.

“Your father won't like it,” Sarah said.

“I'm sorry,” Elsa said. “Why should he object?”

“You know he doesn't want you to have any more to do with that man.”

“Then why wouldn't he help me get a divorce?”

“You know why. You didn‘t, or said you didn't, have the Reason.”

Elsa laughed, and she heard her laugh unpleasantly harsh in her own ears. “I had reason. I just didn't have the little narrow reason the church recognizes.”

“Elsa!”

“Don't shout at me,” Elsa said. “I don't know what you want me to be. I'm nothing the way I am. You won't help me divorce him, and you don't want me to go back to him, but still you act as if I were unclean when I come home to stay.”

“I'm sorry,” Sarah said stiffly. “We've been as kind as we know how to be.”

“With a poker up your back,” Elsa said. “You hush-hush around me as if he had given me some awful disease.”

“He's not a good man,” Sarah said.

Elsa sighed and shrugged. “Maybe not. I don't know what a good man is any more. But he wasn't all to blame. He ...”

She stopped, looking at Sarah's faded hair, the plump colorless face, the quenched and somehow petulant look in the eyes. She said before she thought, “I loved him once, we were awfully happy at first.”

Sarah turned away and went into the kitchen, and Elsa looked after her, thinking. As she went upstairs to dress for the train trip she knew that unhappy as she was she was not as unhappy as Sarah, and that seemed a strange thing.

 

She saw him before the train had fully stopped, and as people began crowding to the ends of the car she sat in the seat gripping the handle of her suitcase. Slowly, with a vise on her mind, she stood up. A porter took her bag and she let it go, though she would have liked it to hang to. The steps, the black hand helping her down, the momentary confusion of turning and searching among the crowd, and then Bo's eyes, gray and sober and intent. He stepped a half step forward, as if unsure of himself, started to speak and stopped, and then lifted her and held her close. His voice was whispering in her ear, “Oh, Elsa, Elsa!”

She shook her head, pulling away from him. Through the weak tears that came to her eyes she saw that he was well dressed, really handsome again in a good gray suit, and when she bent her head to blink the tears away she saw his hand, brown, scarred with signs of labor, still holding her elbow. The hand was more definitely Bo than the handsome man in the gray suit. She knew his hands, lovely big square long hands.

He drew her aside, she mindless and voiceless and almost without power to move her feet, rescued her bag from the porter, and stood her against a post to look at her. His eyes were warming, he was beginning to smile. “Ah, Elsa,” he said, “you had me scared to death!”

She wet her lips, trying to grope back among the fragments of what she had been going to say to him. “Bo.”

“Don't tell me you meant it,” he said, and laughed. “Maybe you meant it when you wrote it, but you don't now. Where are the kids?”

“I left them at home. But Bo ...”

“Come on,” he said. “We've got a lot of talking to do. We're going to talk so much your tongue'll be tired for a month. You know what I've been doing the last three weeks?”

She wanted to tell him that he was taking too much for granted, that she was still determined, that she couldn't come back, but all she said, feebly, was “What?”

“Ever since the frost started working out of the ground,” Bo said, “I've been building a house.”

“A house!” She still had the feeling of idiocy, as if all she could say was senseless sounds, monosyllables, parrotings of his words.

“A two-story, eight-room house. When I left the foundation was in and the frame up. Full cement basement. Four bedrooms upstairs, living room, dining room, kitchen, big front hall. I sold the two lots and kept the best one for us.”

“But Bo, I wrote you ...”

They were outside the station. Bo raised his arm at a taxi and it pulled up to the curb. The street was of cement, and when they got in and started riding Elsa sat marvelling idiotically at how smoothly they went, not a bump or a sway. She brushed her hand across her mouth, trying to get hold of herself, forget how things had started falling in her mind the instant she saw him. But his voice was in her ears, warm, reassuring, and his arm lay across the seat above her shoulders.

“Look, honey,” he said. “I started building the house in spite of your letter. We might have had a lot of hard luck, and what we did and said, me especially, might not be very pretty. But we're going to start all over, see? That's why I got the house going, just for a kind of guarantee.”

“I don't know,” she said. “I don't think...”

“I'll tell you something,” Bo said, and pulled her around to face him. The taxi stopped in front of a hotel, but Bo paid no attention. “I'll tell you something. When I left Richmond I thought I was leaving you for good. I thought I really was, after that night. You know how long it lasted? About three weeks. I've been so lonesome and sick for you I can't sleep. Then when I thought I had a good start I came back for you and you weren't there.”

He tightened his hold on her shoulders, and his eyes were so urgent that she wavered. “I just can't live without you,” he said. “That sounds dippy, but it's true. And you can't live without me, either. Can you?”

She did not answer.

“Can you?”

“I . ...”

“How do the kids feel about it?”

“I don't know. Kids forget so quick.”

“Meaning you can't forget,” he said. His hands loosened, and he sat back. The little thing like a clock went on ticking in the taxi. The driver was looking straight ahead, whistling through his teeth.

“I'll tell you something else,” Bo said. “I'll never let myself go like that again, as long as I live. I got on top of all that when I found out how much I missed you.”

“But how can you promise a thing like that?” she said. “You'll forget, and lose your temper again, and there you'll be.”

“All I can do is promise and mean it.”

Because she needed time to think, and because she didn't like talking in front of the driver, she opened the door. Bo paid the driver and led her into the hotel lobby. It was one thirty by the clock over the desk.

“How about dinner?”

“I ought to be getting back,” she said, and for an instant, looking at his face with her own absurd words slowly making their meaning plain, she laughed.

“What did you bring the suitcase for, then?”

She looked at the bag. In it she had packed nightclothes, a change of clothes, stockings, clean underwear. Her mouth was open and dry, and she swallowed. “I don't know,” she said.

In the middle of the lobby he burst into loud, triumphant laughter, the kind of full, deep-chested laughter he so seldom voiced. “See?” he said. “I told you you didn't mean it. You're coming back with me tomorrow.”

“Oh no,” she said. “No, I couldn't.”

“Why not?”

There were a dozen reasons why not. She had been over them a hundred times. But when she opened her mouth her treacherous tongue betrayed her again. “Chester couldn't just leave school,” she said.

Bo motioned her toward the dining room and she went as if sleepwalking. The waiter pulled out a chair for her and she sat down in it as if afraid it would collapse the way everything else had collapsed. Bo's eyes across the table were full of mirth, but warm, excited, loving, a look like those she remembered from years back, like the day they had become engaged, when they went walking in the snow and fell down in the middle of a field and sat laughing and kissing. “You've got a nice mouth,” she had told him then, “a nice mouth and dappled eyes.”

“Ah, Bo,” she said, smiling at him, unable to think of a single one of the things she had been so resolutely going to say.

“If you come in June,” he said, “I can have the house all finished for you.” He reached for her hand across the table, and his face was twisted with a smile that looked as if it hurt him. “Lordy,” he said, “you don't know how much you had me scared.”

“Is it really good up there?” she said curiously. “Do you really think we can make some kind of a home there?”

“Listen,” he said. “Canada's in a war, and they're howling for more wheat, more wheat, all the time. Homesteaders are already coming into that place by the hundreds. Know what I did? I homesteaded a quarter and pre-empted a quarter right next to it. That's a half section of wheat land, and wheat is going to be worth its weight in gold.”

“But what about the railroad? I thought ...”

“Oh, the railroad,” Bo said. “That's died. Saving steel for war factories. The steel came into Whitemud and stopped. But it's all right. We've got a start, and a house and lot, and a farm. Wait till wheat gets to be three bucks a bushel and we have two hundred acres in and get sixty bushel to the acre.”

 

In early June, 1914, Elsa loaded the children into the train under the brown eaves of the station, said goodbye to Sarah and George and Kristin and Erling and her father, all attending her dutifully as they would have attended her funeral, shook hands with Henry Mossman, holding his fingers in one last relinquishment of what he stood for and had offered her, and set her feet on the iron steps. The boys were already climbing on the seat inside and sticking their tongues out against the glass. For the third time (and each time forever, each time certain she would never return) she left home to hazard herself and her hopes in a new and unknown country.

And oh God, she said, looking through the windows at her family, Kristin with her handkerchief out, her father straight and grim with his hat formally off, Sarah placid with pursed mouth and hands folded across her stomach—oh God, let it be final this time! Let the house Bo is building be the place we'll stay in the rest of our lives, let it be the real home that the boys can look back to without a single regret.

Because she knew she was surrendering completely this time. She knew that she would stick to Bo now no matter what came. She had made her bed, and this time she would lie in it.

The train jerked. She waved, and as they moved up the platform she seized the window catches and shoved up the glass, and with her arm outside the window waved once more, the last time, at the place that had been home.

IV

In the summer it was the homestead,
the little round-roofed shack that looked like a broad freight car with one side extended into a sleeping porch where the two beds were, the single room with the kerosene stove against one wall and the cupboards built up beside it, the table and the benches and the couch where the cat slept all day long, curled up dozing, but sleeping so lightly that a finger placed on one hair of him, anywhere, would bring him instantly awake with a pr-r-r-rt!

The homestead was the open, flat plain, unbroken clear to the horizon on every side except the south, where the Bearpaw Mountains, way down across the line in Montana, showed in a thin white line that later in summer turned to brown. In August, when the heat was intense, the mountains faded out of sight in the haze and heat waves, but almost any day in June and early July they could be seen, and they were an important part of the farm.

There were other important things about the farm, the intimate parts like the pasture, a half mile long and two hundred yards wide, fenced with three tight strands of barbed wire on peeled cedar posts, the whole thing a pride to Bruce because there was no fence anywhere near as tight and neat on the other farms nearby. His father was a thorough man on a job; when he put in a fence he put in a fence that he need not be ashamed of, he set the posts deep in the ground and tamped them in tight, he bought a wire-stretcher and strung the strands like guitar strings.

The pasture was cut diagonally by the coulee, and just below the house was the reservoir, and across the reservoir and through the fence was the long sixty-acre wheat field and the smaller field of flax, and the end of those fields was both the south line of their property and the international boundary. The farm was that feeling, too, the sense of straddling two nations, so that even though you were American, living in Canada, you lost nothing by it, but really gained, because the Fourth of July was celebrated in Canada and Canadian holidays like Victoria Day and the King's birthday were celebrated in Montana, and you got in on both. And you lived in Saskatchewan, in one nation, but got your mail in Montana, in another.

The farm was every summer between June and September. It was the long trip, in the first year by wagon but later by car, from Whitemud out; it was the landmarks on that trail, the Frenchman's house with a dozen barefooted children streaking for the barn, the gates that had to be opened, the great horse ranch where they travelled hours without seeing a living thing except herds of horses as wild as coyotes. It was Robsart, a little clot of dwellings with a boarding house that they generally tried to make for the noon meal, and then scattered farms again along‘the grass-grown wagon-track, and a couple of little streams to ford, and Gadke's where they always stopped while Pa talked things over with Mr. Gadke because Mr. Gadke was a smart dry-farmer, until finally the last gate and the last ford just past the twin tarpapered shacks that all the homesteaders called Pete and Emil, and then their own house, and the familiar-unfamiliar look of the fence and fireguard and pasture the first time in the spring.