The Big Rock Candy Mountain (81 page)

Maybe it's Minnesota, because my mother came from here. Certainly I picked Minnesota as a school to go away to, partly because it seemed that I knew it some, having a grandfather in Indian Falls and an aunt and uncle and cousins in Minneapolis, and second and third cousins, and great-aunts and great-uncles, in a dozen towns where Norwegian is still spoken as much as English. Does that make Minnesota home? Maybe I'm going away from home, not toward it.

Or maybe I've never been home. Maybe I'd recognize the country along the Rock River where the old man came from, maybe I'd feel it the minute I saw it. Or maybe I belong back in some Pennsylvania valley, where the roots first went down in this country, where the first great or great-great grandfather broke loose from his Amish fireside and started moving rootless around the continent.

He bounced into the streets of Faribault talking to himself. On a corner he saw a young man squiring two dressed-up girls—altogether too dressed up for this hour of the morning—across the intersection. The earnestness of the young man's attempt to be scrupulously. impartial, to offer an arm to each, to keep his head turning on a metronome swing from one to the other, made Bruce laugh.

“There were two pretty maidens from Faribault,” he said, and nursed the rhymes along as he edged the Ford through the morning traffic and out onto the highway again.

Nuts, he said. You ought to go into the Christmas card business. But thereafter he made up limericks for every town he passed through, intoxicating himself on names.

It was me, he said, just a boll weevil lookin' for a home. Do I belong in Minnesota? Do I belong in Albert Lea where Kristin went to school? Do I belong in Minneapolis where I go to school and have relations? If I did I wouldn't be so glad to get out of here.

Or is it North Dakota? he said. That's where I was born. Grand Forks, North Dakota, behind the bar in a cheap hotel. I ought to go back some day and put up a fence around that old joint and charge admission to see the birthplace of the great man. What would Jesus Christ have amounted to if he'd been born in a commercial hotel in Grand Forks, North Dakota, instead of in a barn in Bethlehem? Suppose his earliest visitors had been barflies with whiskey breaths instead of sheep and kine with big wondering eyes and breaths of milk and hay? Suppose the Gifts had been brought by drummers instead of wise men?

In a minute he was back on limericks again.

Well, where is home? he said. It isn't where your family comes from, and it isn't where you were born, unless you have been lucky enough to live in one place all your life. Home is where you hang your hat. (He had never owned a hat.) Or home is where you spent your childhood, the good years when waking every morning was an excitement, when the round of the day could always produce something to fill your mind, tear your emotions, excite your wonder or awe or delight. Is home that, or is it the place where the people you love live, or the place where you have buried your dead, or the place where you want to be buried yourself? Or is it the place where you come in your last desperation to shoot yourself, choosing the garage or the barn or the woodshed in order not to mess up the house, but coming back anyway to the last sanctuary where you can kill yourself in peace?

Still feeling good, bubbling with the sun and wind and the freedom of movement, the smell of the burning oil in the motor like a promise of progress to his nostrils, he let himself envy the people who had all those things under one roof. To belong to a clan, to a tight group of people allied by blood and loyalties and the mutual ownership of closeted skeletons. To see the family vices and virtues in a dozen avatars instead of in two or three. To know always, whether you were in Little Rock or Menton, that there was one place to which you belonged and to which you would return. To have that rush of sentimental loyalty at the sound of a name, to love and know a single place, from the newest baby-squall on the street to the blunt cuneiform of the burial ground ...

Those were the things that not only his family, but thousands of Americans had missed. The whole nation had been footloose too long, Heaven had been just over the next range for too many generations. Why remain in one dull plot of earth when Heaven was reachable, was touchable, was just over there? The whole race was like the fir tree in the fairy-tale which wanted to be cut down and dressed up with lights and bangles and colored paper, and see the world and be a Christmas tree.

Well, he said, thinking of the closed banks, the crashed market that had ruined thousands and cut his father's savings in half, the breadlines in the cities, the political jawing and the passing of the buck. Well, we've been a Chrstmas tree, and now we're in the back yard and how do we like it?

How did a tree sink roots when it was being dragged behind a tractor? Or was an American expected to be like a banyan tree or a mangrove, sticking roots down everywhere, dropping off rooting appendages with lavish fecundity? Could you be an American, or were you obliged to be a Yankee, a hill-billy, a Chicagoan, a Californian? Or all of them in succession?

I wish, he said, that I were going home to a place where all the associations of twenty-two years were collected together. I wish I could go out in the back yard and see the mounded ruins of caves I dug when I was eight. I wish the basement was full of my worn-out ball gloves and tennis rackets. I wish there was a family album with pictures of us all at every possible age and in every possible activity. I wish I knew the smell of the ground around that summer cottage on Tahoe, and had a picture in my mind of the doorway my mother will come through to meet me when I drive up, and the bedroom I'll unload my suitcases and books and typewriter in. I wish the wrens were building under the porch eaves, and that I had known those same wrens for ten years.

Was he going home, or just to another place? It wasn't clear. Yet he felt good, settling his bare arm gingerly on the hot door and opening his mouth to sing. He had a notion where home would turn out to be, for himself as for his father—over the next range, on the Big Rock Candy Mountain, that place of impossible loveliness that had pulled the whole nation westward, the place where the fat land sweated up wealth and the heavens dropped lemonade...

Ah yes, he said. Where the bluebird sings to the lemonade springs and the little streams of alcohol come trickling down the rocks. The hobo Heaven, the paradise of the full belly and the lazy backside. That was where his family had been headed for all his life. His father had never gone off the bum. That Bo Mason who had gone bumming in his youth out from Rock River, seeing the big towns and resting his bones in knowledge boxes and jun gling up by some stream where the catfish bit on anything from a kernel of corn to a piece of red flannel, was simply an earlier version of the Bo Mason who now fished for big money in a Reno gambling joint and rested his weekend bones among the millionaires on Lake Tahoe.

So when, he said, do we get enough sense to quit looking for something for nothing?

He looked up the straight road running clean and white westward between elms and wild plum thickets, cleaving the wide pastures and fields. The sky to the west was a clear blue, not as dark as it would be beyond the Missouri, and paling to a milky haze at the horizon, but clean and pure and empty, as if there were nothing beyond, or everything. If he hadn't known that beyond the rise limiting his view there was western Minnesota and then Dakota and Wyoming and Idaho and Oregon, if he had been moving through waist-high grass with nothing in his mind but the dream and the itch to see the unknown world, he could easily enough have been a chaser of rainbows. It was easy to see why men had moved westward as inevitably as the roulette-ball of a sun rolled that way. What if the ball settled in the black, on the odd, on number 64? There were so many chances, such lovely possibilities. And if you missed on the first spin you could double and try again, and keep on doubling till you hit it. You could break the bank, you could bust the sure thing, you could, alone and unarmed, take destiny by the throat.

Oh yes, he said. If you don't recognize limits. But that's all over now. That went out with the horse car.

Oh lovely America, he said, you pulled the old trick on us again. You looked like the Queen of Faery, and your hair smelled of wind and grass and space, and your eyes were wild. Oh Circe, mother of all psycho-analysts, you can shut the gates of the sty now. We are all fighting for the trough, and the healing fiction is fading like a dream. Oh Morgain, bane of all good knights, click the iron in the stone, for we know now that what we took for fairy was really witch, and it is time we planned our dungeon days while making friends with the rats and spiders. Oh Belle Dame sans Merci, do you enjoy our starved lips in the gloam?

The music from behind the moon was silent, the lemonade springs were dry, along with half the banks in America. The little streams of alcohol that used to come trickling down the rocks were piped now into the houses of the great, and the handout bushes didn't bear any more and the hens had the pip and the bulldogs had developed teeth and the cinder dicks had x-ray eyes and the climate had changed. So what did you do, if you didn't want to get caught as Bo Mason had been caught, pumped full of the dream and the expectation and the feeling that the world owed you something for nothing, and then thrown into a world where expectations didn't pay off?

He sang again,

Oh beautiful, he said, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties, and penury, and pain.

Don't you think, he said, that this has gone about far enough? Who are you to philosophize about the problems of a nation? For all the part you or your family have taken in this nation's affairs, you might as well have been living like Troglodytes in a cave. Who are you to mouth phrases, when you don't even belong to the club?

All right, he said, I'll shut up. But I'd still like to join the club, in spite of the Ford Motor Company and the Standard Oil of Indiana and the murder of Sacco and Vanzetti and the emptiness of Main Street. I don't want to bet my wad. I just want to ante.

Oh let us sing, he said, of Lydia Pinkham...

Nuts to Lydia Pinkham. Let us sing. Oh what? Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste? No. Arms and the man, who first, pursued by Fate, and haughty Juno's unrelenting hate? Arma virumque canuts. Let us sing of purple mountain majesties. That's what we've always been best at, the land.

 

I'll take it, he said. I love it, whatever good that does. Even if I don't know where home is, I know when I
feel
at home.

At the next service station where he stopped he felt it even stronger, the feeling of belonging, of being in a well-worn and familiar groove. He felt it in the alacrity with which the attendant shined up his windshield and wiped off his headlights and even took a dab at the license plates, in the way he moved and looked, in the quality of his voice and grin. Anything beyond the Missouri was close to home, at least. He was a westerner, whatever that was. The moment he crossed the Big Sioux and got into the brown country where the raw earth showed, the minute the grass got sparser and the air dryer and the service stations less grandiose and the towns rattier, the moment he saw his first lonesome shack on the baking flats with a tipsy windmill creaking away at the reluctant underground water, he knew approximately where he belonged. He belonged where the overalls saw the washtub less often, where the corduroy bagged more sloppily at the knees, where the ground was bare and sometimes raw and the sand-devils whirled across the landscape and the barns were innocent of any paint except that advertising Dr. Peirce's Golden Medical Discovery. The feeling came on him like sun after an overcast day, and in pure contentment he limbered his knees and slouched deeper against the Ford's lefthand door.