The Big Rock Candy Mountain (40 page)

“When I think of the beeches back home in England,” Mr. Garfield said, and shook his head.

Bo lifted himself heavily out of his chair and followed the rest of them out to the coulee edge. Below them willows grew in a thin belt along the almost-dry creek, and farther back from the water there were perhaps twenty cottonwoods a half-dozen feet high.

“I'm trying cottonwoods first because they can stand drouth,” Mr. Garfield said.

Elsa was looking down with all her longing plain and naked in her face. “It's wonderful,” she said. “I'd give almost anything to have some on our place.”

“I found the willows near here,” Mr. Garfield said. “Just at the south end of the hills they call the Old-Man-on-His-Back, where a stream comes down.”

“Stream?” the boy's father said. “You mean that spring-month trickle?”

“It's not much of a stream,” Mr. Garfield said apologetically. “But ...”

“Are there any more there?” Elsa said.

“Oh yes. You could get some. Cut them slanting and push them into any damp ground. They'll grow.”

“They'll grow about six feet high,” Bo Mason said.

“Yes,” said Mr. Garfield. “They're not, properly speaking, trees. Still...”

Bo Mason looked at the southwest. “It's getting pretty smothery,” he said, rather loudly. “We better be getting on.”

This time Mr. Garfield didn't object, and they went back to the car with Mrs. Garfield and the boy's mother exchanging promises of visits. Bo turned the crank and climbed into the Ford, where the boy was sighting along his gun. “Put that down!” his father said. “Don't you know any better than to point a gun around people?”

“It isn't loaded.”

“They never are. Put it down now.”

The Garfields were standing with their arms around each other's waists, waiting to wave goodbye. Mr. Garfield reached over and picked something from his wife's dress.

“What was it, Alfred?” she said, peering.

“Nothing. Only a bit of fluff.”

The boy's father coughed violently and the car started with a jerk. With his head down almost on the wheel, still coughing, he waved, and the mother and the boy waved as they went down along the badly-set cedar posts of the pasture fence. They were almost a quarter of a mile away before the boy, with a last flourish of the gun, turned around to see that his father was not coughing, but laughing. He rocked the car with his joy, and when Elsa said, “Oh, Bo, you big fool,” he pointed helplessly to his shoulder. “Would you mind,” he said. “Would you mind brushing that bit o' fluff off me showldah?” He rocked again, pounding the wheel. “I cawn't stick it,” he said. “I bloody well cawn't stick it, you knaow.”

“It isn't fair to laugh at him,” she said. “He can't help being English.”

“He can't help being a sanctimonious old mudhen, either,” he said. “Braying about his luv-ly, luv-ly trees. They'll freeze out the first cold winter.”

“How do you know? Maybe it's like he says—if they get a start they'll grow here as well as anywhere.”

“Maybe there's a gold mine in our back yard, too, but I'm not going to dig to see. I couldn't stick it.”

“You're just being stubborn,” she said. “Just because you didn't like him ...”

He turned on her in a heavy amazement. “Well my God, did you?”

“I thought he was very nice,” she said, and sat straighter in the back seat, speaking loudly above the jolting of the springs and the cough of the motor. “They're trying to make a home, not just a wheat crop. I liked them.”

“Uh huh.” He was not laughing any more now. Sitting beside him, the boy could see that his face had hardened and that the cold look had come into his eyes again. “So I should start talking like I had a mouthful of bran, and planting trees around the house that'll look like clothesline poles in two months.”

“I didn't say that.”

“You thought it, though.” He looked irritably at the sky, misted with the same delusive film of haze or cloud that had fooled him for three days. “You thought it all the time we were there. ‘Why aren't you more like Mr. Garfield, he's such a nice man.'” With mincing savagery he swung around and mocked her. “Shall I make it a walnut grove? Or a sugar orchard? Or maybe you'd prefer orange trees.”

The boy was squinting down his gun, trying not to hear them quarrel, but he knew what his mother's face would be like—hurt and a little flushed, and her chin trembling into stubbornness. “I don't suppose you could bear to have. a rug on the floor, or a gramophone?” she said.

He smacked the wheel hard. “Of course I could bear it if we could afford it. I'd love it. But I don't know what you think is going to give us the dough for things like that if a wind comes up out of that heat-hole over there. And I'd a damn sight rather do without than be like that old sandhill crane.”

“I don't suppose you'd like to take me over to the Old-Man-on-His-Back some day to get some willow slips, either.”

“What for?”

“To plant down in the coulee, by the dam.”

“That dam dries up every August. Your willows wouldn't live till snow flies.”

“Well, would it do any harm to try?”

“Oh, shut up!” he said. “Just thinking about that guy and his fluff and his trees gives me the pleefer.”

The topless Ford lurched, one wheel at a time, through the deep burnout by their pasture corner, and the boy clambered out with his gun in his hand to slip the loop of the three-strand gate. It was then that he saw the snake, a striped limp ribbon, dangling on the fence, and a moment later the sparrow, neatly butchered and hung by the throat on a barb. He pointed the gun at them. “Lookit!” he said. “Lookit what the butcher bird's. been doing.”

His father's violent hand waved at him from the car. “Come on! Get the wire out of the way.”

The boy dragged the gate through the dust, and the Ford went through and up behind the house framed by the fireguard overgrown with Russian thistle. Walking, across that yard a few minutes later, the boy felt its hard heat through his sneakers. There was hardly a spear of grass within the fireguard. It was one of his father's prides that the dooryard should be like cement. “Pour your wash-water out long enough,” he said, “and you'll have a surface so hard it won't even make mud.” Religiously he threw his water out three times a day, carrying it sometimes a dozen steps to dump it on a dusty or grassy spot.

Elsa had objected at first, asking why they had to live in the middle of an alkali flat, and why they couldn't let grass grow up to the door. But he snorted her down. Everything around the house ought to be bare as a bone. Get a good grass fire going and it would jump that guard like nothing, and if they had grass to the door where would they be? She said why not plow a wider guard then, one a fire couldn't jump, but he said he had other things to do than plowing fifty-foot fireguards.

They were arguing inside when the boy came up the step to sit down and aim his empty .22 at a fencepost. Apparently his mother had been persistent, and persistence when he was not in a mood for it angered his father worse than anything. Their talk came vaguely through the boy's concentration, but he shut his ears on it. If that spot on the post was a coyote, now, and he held the sight steady, right on it, and pulled the trigger, that old coyote would jump about eighty feet in the air and come down dead as a mackerel, and he could tack his hide on the barn the way Mr. Larson had one, only the dogs had jumped and torn the tail and hind legs off Mr. Larson‘s, and he wouldn't get more than the three-dollar bounty for its ears. But Mr. Larson had shot his with a shotgun, anyway, and the hide wasn't worth much even before the dogs tore it.

“I can't for the life of me see why not,” his mother said inside. “We could do it now. We're not doing anything else.”

“I tell you they wouldn't grow!” his father said, with emphasis on every word. “Why should we run our tongues out doing everything that mealy-mouthed fool does?”

“I don't want anything but the willows. They're easy.”

He made his special sound of contempt, half-snort and half-grunt. After a silence she tried again. “They might even have pussies on them in the spring. Mr. Garfield thinks they'd grow, and his wife told me he used to work in a greenhouse.”

“This isn't a greenhouse, for Chrissake. Go outside and feel that breeze if you think so.”

“Oh, let it go,” she said. “I've stood it this long without any green things around. I guess I can stand it some more.”

The boy, aiming now toward the gate where the butcher bird, coming back to his prey, would in just a second fly right into Dead-eye's unerring bullet, heard his father stand up suddenly.

“Abused, aren't you?” he said.

His mother's voice rose. “No, I'm not abused! Only I don't see why it would be so awful to get some willows. Just because Mr. Garfield gave me the idea, and you don't like him ...”

“You're right I don't like him. He gives me a pain right under the crupper.”

“Because,” his mother's voice said bitterly, “he calls his wife ‘dear' and puts his arm around her and likes trees. It wouldn't occur to you to put your arm around your wife, would it?”

The boy aimed and held his breath. His mother ought to keep 225 still, because if she didn't she'd get him real mad and then they'd both have to tiptoe around the rest of the day. He heard his father's breath whistle through his teeth, and his mincing, nasty voice: “Would you like me to put my arm around you now, dear?”

“I wouldn't let you touch me with a ten-foot pole,” his mother said. She sounded just as mad as he did, and it wasn't often she let herself get that way. The boy squirmed over when he heard the quick hard steps come up behind him and pause. Then his father's hand, brown and meaty and felted with fine black hair, reached down over his shoulder and took the .22.

“Let's see this cannon old Scissor-Bill gave you,” he said.

It was a single-shot, bolt-action Savage, a little rusty on the barrel, the bolt sticky with hardened grease when he removed it. Sighting up through the barrel, he grunted. “Takes care of a gun like he sets a fence. Probably used it to cultivate his luv-ly trees.”

He went out into the porch, and after a minute came back with a rag and a can of machine oil. Hunching the boy over on the step, he sat down and began rubbing the bolt with the oil-soaked rag.

“I just cawn't bear to shoot anything any more,” he said, and laughed suddenly. “I just cawn't stick it, little man.” He leered at the boy, who grinned back uncertainly. Squinting through the barrel again, his father breathed through his nose and clamped his lips together, shaking his head.

The sun lay heavy on the baked yard. Out over the corner of the pasture a soaring hawk caught wind and sun at the same time, so that his light breast feathers flashed as he banked and rose. Just wait, the boy said. Wait till I get my gun working and I'll fix you, you hen-robber. He thought of the three chicks a hawk had struck earlier in the summer, the three balls of yellow with the barred mature plumage just showing through. Two of them dead before he got there and chased the hawk away, the other with its crop slashed open and wheat spilling from it to the ground. His mother had sewed up the crop, and the chicken had lived, but it always looked droopy, like a plant in drouth time, and sometimes it stood working its bill as if choking.

By golly, he thought, I'll shoot every hawk and butcher bird in twenty miles. I'll ...

“Rustle around and find me a piece of baling wire,” his father said. “This barrel looks like a henroost.”

Behind the house he found a piece of rusty wire, brought it back and watched his father straighten it, wind a piece of rag around the end, ram it up and down through the barrel, and peer through again. “He's leaded her so you can hardly see the grooves,” he said. “But maybe she'll shoot. We'll fill her with vinegar and cork her up tonight.”

Elsa was behind them, leaning against the jamb and watching. She reached down and rumpled Bo's black hair. “The minute you get a gun in your hands you start feeling better,” she said. “It's just a shame you weren't born a hundred years sooner.”

“A gun's a good tool,” he said. “It hadn't ought to be misused. Gun like this is enough to make a guy cry.”

“Well, you've at least got to admit it was nice of him to give it to Bruce,” she said. It was the wrong thing to say. The boy had a feeling that she knew it was the wrong thing to say, that she said it anyway just to have one tiny triumph over him. Even before he heard his father's answer he knew Pa would be mad again.

“Oh sure,” he said. “Mr. Garfield's a fine man. He can preach a better sermon than anybody in Saskatchewan. God Almighty, I get sick of hearing his praises sung. If you liked it so well why don't you move over there?”

“If you weren't so blind stubborn ...”

He rose with the .22 in his hand and brushed past her into the house. “I'm not so blind,” he said heavily in passing. “You've been throwing that bastard up to me for two hours. It doesn't take very good eyes to see what that means. It means I'm no good, I can't do anything right.”

She started to say, “All because I want a few little ...” but the boy cut in on her, anxious to help the situation somehow. “Will it shoot now?” he said.

His father said nothing. His mother looked down at him, sighed, shrugged, smiled bleakly with a tight mouth. She moved aside when his father came back with a box of cartridges in his hand. He ignored her, speaking to the boy alone in the particular half-jocular tone he always used with him or with the dog when he wasn't mad.