The Big Rock Candy Mountain (6 page)

“This town ain't what it used to be when the arsenal was booming,” Dave said to Harry later, “but there's a lot of building going on. Why‘n't you learn a trade? That's where the wages is. Learn a trade and you're set. I haul for two-three lumber yards. Maybe I can get you on with some carpenter. Want to be a carpenter?”

“I don't care,” Harry said. “That's all right.”

A week later he was apprenticed to a carpenter, working for board and room and clothes. He stayed at it two years, and when he quit he was good. Even his crabbed old boss admitted it; he had never seen a kid pick up a trade any faster. He had a knack with tools; they cut straight for him, and he didn't cripple himself or them by their misuse. There was also something stubborn and persistent in him under the veneer of toughness he borrowed from Dave. He double-checked measurements, calculated angles two or three times, drew out a job till he knew what was what. Experienced carpenters seemed to go out of their way to teach him the tricks, and he was earning two dollars a day when he was sixteen.

In the evenings he hung around the fringes of Dave's crowd, learning to drink beer, sitting in now and then on a cheap poker game. From those men, teamsters and roustabouts and left-overs from the almost-vanished river traffic, he heard stories that put an itch in his feet. They knew Iowa and Illinois and Wisconsin, “Chi” and Milwaukee. One or two of them had rafted timber all the way down the Wisconsin from Wausau and down the Mississippi from Prairie du Chien to St. Louis. The life they had lived and the places they had seen and spoke of had space in them. So when the master carpenter on a big mansion job snarled at Harry for taking time off to smoke a stogie, he picked up his coat, went home to the room, shook hands with Dave, stuffed into his pocket the few dollars he had saved, and caught a ride on a shanty boat down the river.

For six months he was on the bum, sleeping in jungles and knowledge boxes, picking up scraps of useful knowledge from hoboes and transient laborers moving with the crops. He visited Chicago, and the sight of that city roaring into incredible size and impressiveness on the shore of Lake Michigan left his mind dazed with grandiose visions. Here was really the big town, here were the gangs of men creating a city out of a windswept slough, here were freight engines, passenger engines, lake boats, nosing in smoking and triumphant from every direction, here was money by the millions, a future as big as the sky. But two weeks in the big town convinced him that the days when you started with nothing and got to the top were gone as far as Chicago was concerned. All the big money was already well grabbed. And when, nosing around the freight yards, he almost got picked up by a cinder dick, he did the most direct and logical thing. He ducked between two moving trains and swung aboard the outside one.

His wanderings took him out through the canal to the Mississippi, and down the river to Natchez on a coal barge. Then he worked north again, picking up a few weeks' work here and there on building jobs, getting offers of steady work but turning them down to hit the road again. By the end of six months he had a belly full for the time being, an ingrained and educated contempt for the law and law-abiding people, a handiness at making himself liked by hardboiled and suspicious men, and an ambition to get somewhere where the cream hadn't been skimmed off, get in on the ground floor somewhere and make his pile. And he had the nickname of Bo.

He took the first job that offered, driving spikes in the new spur of the Illinois Central working westward through Illinois and Iowa. The heavy labor developed him into a man, sheathed his chest and shoulders with muscle, left him hard as a hound. But it brought him again into conflict with authority, with the voice of the boss. The Irish foremen on the line were drivers, loud mouthed and quick with their fists, and Bo was anything but docile. He talked back, sneered at the section boss, made no effort to keep his voice down when he beefed. That came to a climax on the graded roadbed just at the end of the steel.

The crew was bending rails for a gentle curve, locking them in the heavy vises and heaving against them with a surge of muscle. It was hot, back-breaking work in a sun over a hundred degrees. Stripped to the waist, the men launched themselves against the springy steel, relaxed, strained again. McCarthy, the foreman, stood at the end cocking his eye, estimating the curve. He had a hangover, and apparently his cigar was nasty in his mouth, because he threw it away.

“Come on!” he roared suddenly. “Get some beef into it. You ain't bending a willow switch.”

Bo wiped the sweat out of his eyes with his forearm. “I can think of a place I'd like to bend a willow switch,” he said. He heaved with the rest, rocking against the rail. McCarthy stepped three paces closer, dropping his head between his shoulders.

“Where would that be, Squarehead?”

Bo heaved, grunting. “Right across your ass, Shanty-Irish,” he said pleasantly.

As if at an order the men were back from the rail and dropping into a half circle. Bo and the foreman faced each other on the banked gravel, their feet shuffling lightly, their eyes sparring, their hands up.

The foreman lashed out, caught Bo beside the head, took a stiff right cross to the face in return. Like stiff-legged dogs they circled. The foreman dropped his head and rushed, swinging. For a full minute they stood and slugged it out, neither giving an inch. Then McCarthy stumbled and fell on hands and knees, his mouth hanging and his eyes amazed. The watching men howled as Bo, fighting as he had learned to fight on the road, gave him the boots. .McCarthy covered up with his arms and started to roll away, and Bo, tiptoeing like a dancer, followed to crash a kick into the foreman's ribs that shocked him shudderingly still.

There was not a sound as he walked away. The men parted and let him by, and wiping his bloody nose as he went, he walked over to the bunkhouse, his head still singing with the power of McCarthy's fists, his ear swelling, but his blood pounding with a triumph so high and savage that he wanted to yell. The picture of McCarthy lying back there with his ribs caved in was raw alcohol to his soul. He was drunk on it; the toughest Irishman on the crew was back there cold as a clam.

The next day he was on his way to Wisconsin, bound for a logging camp where another section hand had worked the winter before. The food, he said, was good, the work hard but agreeable, the wages fair. They would just about be getting crews ready for the winter's cutting.

Two winters in Wisconsin gave him many skills. Either with rifle or shotgun he was the best shot in camp, so that frequently he got laid off the saw to go hunting for the cook. Those days of prowling the timber with a gun only deepened the wild streak in him as the work on the crosscut deepened his chest. He took to skis and snow-shoes as if he had known them all his life, and he went out of his way to make friends.

He was genial, a good story-teller, a hearty drinker and a ribald companion in the towns where the rafts and the wanigan tied up and the men swarmed ashore for a bender. On winter evenings, when there was nothing doing in the bunkhouse steaming with the thick smell of drying socks and scorched leather and mutton tallow, he often lay on his bunk reading the one book he had found, a volume of Burns, and before the first winter was up he had added the whole volume to his fantastic collection of memorized McGuf fey. He learned Paul Bunyan yarns, or invented them himself, and when half tight would sometimes take off on an extemporaneous ballad or poem that lasted half an hour. And he played poker, for higher stakes.

Those two summers, when the camps were shut down, he worked on a farm out of Portage, simply because he liked being outside better than he would have liked a carpenter's job in town. The Portage baseball team discovered him, and in the end of his second summer he leaped into local notoriety by getting a bid from the Terre Haute team in the Three-Eye League.

That winter he did not go back to the woods, for reasons which he kept to himself, and when he stood in the yard late in April ready to leave for Terre Haute, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the house burst into sudden tempestuous tears and fled to the barn.

“For gosh sakes,” her father said. “What's the matter with her?”

Bo did not enlighten him.

He liked playing ball in Terre Haute. It was a wandering life, full of action, and the adulation of fans put a cocky swagger in his walk. His name in the papers pleased him, the fellowship of the gang he played with was good masculine fellowship, with many afternoons in the icehouse cooling off on beer after a game, and many evenings of quiet, intent poker. He lost money, but he learned much. If it had not been for an accident he might have stayed on as a professional ball player, might even have moved up into the big time, because his hitting was consistent and powerful, and he was a good man behind the plate in the days when catchers worked with a thin fingerless glove. But late in the season of 1896 he tried to stretch a long hit, got tangled up in a plunging fight for the bag with the opposing third baseman, and came up limping with a badly wrenched knee.

That put him on the hospital list for the rest of the season, and he had to get another job. For a while he worked in a glass factory, gave it up because it kept him inside ten hours a day, went back to his old trade as carpenter, and quit that with pleasure at the beginning of the next season. But the third day of training he wrenched his knee again; in spite of bandages it felt as if it might cave under him, and it hindered his swing at the plate. Before the middle of the first month he had been released from the club and was selling beer on the road for a Milwaukee brewery.

His territory took in all of southern Minnesota, western Iowa, and South Dakota, and sometimes was stretched to include an illicit trip into North Dakota to pick off the blind pig trade. North Dakota was then a focal point for armies of immigrants and land seekers. The trains were full of Norwegian and Russian families burdened down with masses of belongings, the station platforms were piled with bundles and boxes and trunks and farm machinery, the station walls were plastered with posters, land was for sale everywhere, new lines were pushing across the fertile Red River country and into the western part of the state.

Something in the bustle of migration stirred a pulse in Bo Mason. He was not a lazy man; his activities had been various and strenuous since he was fourteen. But the boredom of carpentry, of towns, of regular hours and wages every Saturday and orders all the rest of the week, had always made him restless. Here in Dakota there was something else. Here everybody was his own boss, here was a wide open and unskimmed country where a man could hew his own line and not suffer for his independence. Obstacles raised by nature—cold, heat, drouth, the solid resistance of great trees, he
could slog through with almost fierce joy, but obstacles raised by
institutions and the habits of a civilized community left him prowling and baffled.

That was partly why he loved the feel of life in Dakota. Frequently he stopped over for a day or two to go bird shooting, coming home from the wide grasslands and sloughs with a buggy full of prairie chickens, sage hens, grouse, ducks. Those days he remembered, and he remembered the sniff of something remote and clean and active in the prairie wind, the flat country leaning westward toward the Missouri Plateau, the sight everywhere of new buildings, new plowing, new grain elevators rising along the new tracks on the edges of new towns. Saloon conversations were full of tales of fantastic crops. “Sixty bushel to the acre!” men said. “Sixty bushel. I seen it, I was at the spout of that threshing machine. My God, that wheat grows tall as Iowa corn.” And from train windows Bo looked out over fields of flax in flower, acres and acres of blue, and then his brewery job, full of travelling as it was, seemed trivial, picayune, confining. He wanted breath in his lungs and the sight of a flock of prairie chickens rising over his gunsights.

“Things are going on out there,” he told his boss on the next home stop. “Every time I go through there the towns along the line are bigger.”

His boss sat pulling a bushy eyebrow with thumb and forefinger. “You want to quit?” he said.

“How did you know?”

“You've got the itch in you,” his boss said. “I've seen it before. You can stay on if you want, glad to have you. I've got no complaints about your work or sales.”

Bo said nothing.

“Planning to take up a homestead?”

“I don't know. Maybe.”

“Don‘t,” his boss said, and hauled himself straighter in his chair. “You take my advice and stay away from farms. I knew a lot of people went to Dakota and Nebraska in the old days. And the ones that made money weren't the ones that sweated themselves skinny farming. The ones that made money was the storekeepers and bankers and saloon-keepers. I don't suppose you know anything about banking.”

“No.”

“And you wouldn't like running a grocery store.”

“No.”

“Then it looks like a saloon,” the old man said, and grinned. “And saloons are banned in Dakota.”

“Not if you believe my sales reports,” Bo said. They laughed.

The old man set the ends of his fingers together and brooded. “Looky here, son,” he said. “I'll make you a proposition. You go out to some new town and set yourself up a place and I'll help you out. You can draw on me for fixtures and beer, and pay me off when you get going. I think you're the kind of guy might make a go of it.”

“Thanks,” Bo said, and rose. “I'll let you know. I want to go look around a little more first.”

Two months later he wrote from Hardanger, saying that he had a good thing in a new town, no local police or anything to bother. He had bought half a building, was putting in bowling alleys himself, had three pool tables coming. He'd like a thirty-foot bar, mirrors to match it, and a shipment of beer, bottled beer. It was cleaner that way and it could be kept out of sight. “This town is only ten years old,” he said, “and it's twice as busy now as it was two-three years ago. Five years from now I'll be buying out the brewery.”