The Big Rock Candy Mountain (88 page)

Then he had it. The Bearpaws, the picnic they had taken from the homestead when he was very young, the afternoon on the wooded shelf beside the spring, with the whole Montana plain under them. His mother had carried armfuls of leaves back with her from that picnic, in love with their cool feel and the memories they stirred in her of Minnesota. Maple leaves, pointed like a spread hand. And he himself, then as now, had been smothered by a memory, had been groping all afternoon to remember something from still another time in the mountains when he was very young indeed, barely out of infancy. This haunting sense of familiarity, this dream. within a dream...

For a moment his brain whirled. Memory was a trap, a pit, a labyrinth. It tricked you into looking backward, and you saw yourself in another avatar, smaller and more narrow-visioned but richer in the life of the senses, and in that incarnation too you were looking back. You met yourself in your past, and the recognition was a strong quick shock, like a dive into cold water.

If you could pass that door, if you could look back through many funneling memories instead of one or two, you might be able to escape the incommunicable identity in which you lay hidden. You might remember your mother's memories, or your father‘s, contain within yourself the entire experience of your family, going back and back in time, a succession of diminishing images like the images in double mirrors, go back and beyond in time as the ranges went back and beyond in distance past the cobalt line of the lake.

He was not Bruce Mason, but a girl of eighteen named Elsa Norgaard, and he was sick in his mind to escape from the prison that home had become. And he was a boy named Harry Mason, running away from home at fourteen, the world wide ahead of him and at his back a house full of hatred and bad treatment.

He opened his eyes wide and breathed his lungs full and shook his head to clear it. He felt drunk, dizzy, but he thought he knew something that he hadn't known before. That was the way it went. The dog-wolf killed its young, the young wolves turned on the strength which begot them. You hate your father and I'll hate mine, in a circling, spiralling continuity up from the time-hazed past. You honor your mother, I'll honor mine. The varieties of family experience, he said, and thought of Proust, the sick man, crawling backward among the obscenities of recollection, and of Samuel Butler, so cursed in his heritage that he would never marry and have children to dominate and tyrannize over.

Sick and cursed, he said. As sick as Proust and as cursed as Butler. But he didn't exactly understand what he meant by it, and his mind shied away, wary after that tottering moment when memory had opened under him like a gulf and the solidities of the known world, the comfortable assumptions of his own identity. had slipped out of reach and left him poised on the brink of the unknowable.

Carefully, his mind as cautious and deliberate as his feet, he started climbing down the rocky slope with the bundle of brilliant leaves in his arm.

October first was his mother's birthday. On that morning, because he had time now to go and come as he wanted, he went downtown and with part of his few dollars bought her a quilted satin bed jacket. She had visitors sometimes. She ought at least to look nice, as if she were being taken care of.

When he gave it to her she looked as if she were going to cry. She fumbled with the wrapping, and when she had it open her fingers lay on the satin quietly. “Bruce, you shouldn't have,” she said. “I won't ...”

“Hush,” he said. “You needed it. And I couldn't let your birthday go by. There's something important about birthdays.”

“I guess I haven't forgotten how to cry after all,” she said, and squeezed his hand.

At eleven she had a bad pain, and the hypo, morphine now instead of codine, put her almost immediately to sleep. Miss Hammond went out for a walk and Bruce read. When she came back she said immediately, “I've got a suggestion, if you won't think I'm butting in.”

“No. What?”

“I was just talking to the landlord. There's an apartment vacant on the other side, much lighter than this, with plenty of sun.”

“Is it clean? Ready to move into?”

“It's just been all cleaned and redecorated.”

“I'll go see about it,” he said. “Will you help? If it's all right, could we do it alone?” He paused, looking at the bedroom door. “How about moving her?”

“If you carried her. It would be much pleasanter on the other side.”

In ten minutes he was back. The new apartment was five dollars a month more, but he would let the old man worry about that. “Come on,” he said. “Let's get this done before she even wakes up.”

At five his father wandered in, stood in the door of the stripped apartment staring. “What's going on?” he said.

Coming out of the kitchen with the last bags of condiments, odds and ends, spices, groceries, Bruce said, “We're moving downstairs and across the hall.” He half expected his father to be enraged at the way all initiative had been taken from him, all decision in his own house, but the old man simply moved aside as he came through the door, stood a little stooping with the pain of his boil, his face slack and tired.

“Sunnier down there?” he said.

“A lot.” Bruce stopped with his arms full, willing for just that minute to let him back into her family. “Did you remember Mom's birthday?”

“Birthday? Is it her birthday?”

“Today,” Bruce said.

“I forgot, I guess,” his father said.

“You could do something nice for her.”

The quick, suspicious look stopped him. His father, for all his fumbling helplessness now, was no fool. He knew he was an outsider, but he wouldn't be pushed around and told what to do. Bruce started to go on, but his father stopped him. “What?” he said.

“It'd be nice if she had some flowers when she moved in. I'd have got some, only I didn't have any money.”

His father's answer was so prompt and hearty that it surprised him. “I'll get some,” he said. “You got all the stuff down?”

“We'll be through in about fifteen minutes.”

As if his tiredness had left him suddenly, the old man went down the steps and outside. When he came back he had his arms full of flowers, a great sheaf of gladioli, a bundle of bronze and yellow chrysanthemums, a potted geranium and a big potted fern. He gave them up gingerly to Miss Hammond, walked all through the apartment looking it over, stepped into the sleeping porch, glassed on three sides, with venetian blinds for privacy, where the sick woman would be put.

“It's better, don't you think?” Bruce said.

“Yes,” the old man said. “Is your mother asleep?”

“She was a few minutes ago. The hypo before lunch laid her out.”

“Yuh,” his father said. His eyes were vague, wandering, looking anywhere but at Bruce, and his cheeks were thinner than Bruce ever remembered them. He looked sick himself. “Have you noticed about her lately?” he said. “That dope is getting her. She's so far off all the time, as if she didn't know where she was.”

“I haven't noticed it.”

“No?” His father jingled change in his pocket. “Well ...” He turned toward the door. “We might as well bring her down.”

She was awake, but still dreamy and thick-tongued. Her face and throat were wet with perspiration, and the pillow case under her head was soaked. As they entered, all three at once, she turned her head to smile, a smile in which sweetness and wry apology were mixed. She held one braid in her hand, back on the pillow.

Bo approached tiptoeing, and the way he moved made Bruce mad. Why did he have to act as if she lay there with candles at head and feet and the death-house hush already in the room? He stooped to kiss her, and she made a face. “I'm ashamed,” she said. “I sweat so, and my hair gets so sour. I couldn't have a shampoo could I, Miss Hammond?”

“I'm afraid not,” the nurse said. “I'll get a towel and dry it for you.”

“I'll get you some perfume tomorrow,” Bo said. “Make you smell like a flower garden.” He picked up the quilted jacket that lay on the foot of the bed. “Where'd this come from?”

“Bruce gave it to me. Isn't it lovely?”

“Yuh.” His eyes wandered. Stymied again, Bruce thought. Too slow to think of her birthday himself, but resentful of having anyone else do it. “You're having quite a birthday,” he said. “Moving, and everything.”

“Moving?”

“Didn't you know?”

“No. Moving where?”

The vague and wandering look on his face gave way to a look sly and sidelong. His eyes caught Bruce's. At least I'm in on this, they said. Here's one thing you haven't shut me out of. “We've got a little surprise for you,” he said, and the “we” was a clear insistence on his right to have a place in his own family. But the sick woman's eyes, Bruce noticed, turned away from him, turned to Bruce himself, for an explanation, and that was triumph of a sort.

Miss Hammond came in with a bath towel, unbraided the damp hair, helped the sick woman to sit up, and began drying her hair, rubbing handfuls of it between folds of the towel until it stood out all around her head. It was like a light in the room, like the brilliant leaves, curling and dry now, that were still banked in a vase between the windows. Miss Hammond began smoothing the hair down with a brush, but when she took hold of it to rebraid it Bo Mason said, quite unexpectedly, “Leave it down a while. Let her look pretty for her birthday.”

“Pretty!” she said drowsily. “I'll bet I look pretty!”

“You do,” Bruce said, and now he was trying just as his father had to intrude on something that was between the other two. Her prettiness had been the old man‘s, not his. All his own memories of her were worn like an old tintype, the shadow of pain and resignation lying behind the calm face so that many times he had had the impression that his mother's face was sad, though there was nothing tangible to base that impression on. Her mouth did not droop, her eyes had light crowsfeet of laughter at the corners, there were no bitter lines. “You do look pretty,” he said in a kind of desperation, hating his father for seeing and saying it first. “You've got a glow on you.”

“It's her hair,” Miss Hammond said. “She's got lovely hair.”

“It's because everybody is so nice to me,” Elsa said. “If you baby me I might cry.”

Miss Hammond held the jacket for her to slip her arms into, tied the foolish pom-pom strings at the wrists. “Doesn't she look pretty!” she said. Elsa made another face, the color higher in her cheeks, as if they had caught a reflection from the gorgeous hair.

“Well,” Bo said. “Ready to move?”

“Where are we going?” She looked at Miss Hammond with crinkling eyes. “All my life he's been moving me around,” she said. “I can't even get sick and stay quietly in bed. He has to move me within a month.”

“You'll like this move,” Bo said. Again Bruce felt a twinge of irritation at the way the old man butted in and took credit for something he would never have thought of for himself. Then he remembered that he hadn't thought of it either. Miss Hammond had thought of it. He lifted the dried leaves from the vase and stuck them crackling into the waste basket.

“Bruce!” his mother said. “My nice leaves!”

“They're all dead. There's something better where you're going.” His eyes held his father's in ironic renunciation of his part in the birthday change. Let him have it. He couldn't hold it anyway. And at least he was being pleasant, he had had the inspiration or the good luck to call his wife pretty, and bring a bloom on her. Let him have it, as long as she was pleased.

“How are we going to do this?” she said. “Is it far?”

“Just a step,” Bo said. “I'll carry you.”

“Carry me! I can walk.”

“In a pig's eye,” he said. “Here.”

He bent over, and as the coat tightened across his broad back he stopped as if paralyzed. A grunt of pain escaped him, and her eyes jumped to his face in alarm. “What is it?”

“My God damned boil!” he said between his teeth. He straightened up carefully, moving his shoulders as if to tempt the pain into revealing its location. Bruce stepped forward.

“You'd better not,” he said. “I'll carry her.”

But his father blocked his way. “I'll take her,” he said. “Keep your shirt on.”

He bent again, slowly. “Bo,” Elsa said, “do you think you'd better? There's no need to hurt yourself.”

“I'll carry you!” he said harshly. “Take hold of my neck.”

She put her arms around his neck. “I'm pretty heavy,” she said anxiously. Bruce, watching, saw his father set his teeth and lift, saw the pain hit him and his mouth tighten. And he saw something else. The sick woman's body came up lightly, easily, and the old man staggered a little as a man expecting another step in the dark staggers when his foot finds none. Bruce knew. He had lifted her in bed. She had wasted away to nothing. But he saw in the instant of his father's lifting that the old man hadn't known, that he was surprised and shocked.

His right arm was under her knees, and her white feet trailed out from the nightdress. Her arms were around his neck, her hair falling down the back of his coat.

“Okay,” the old man said grimly. “Here we go.” He shot one look at Bruce, a look with pain and triumph and horror in it, and stepped out through the door, swinging her feet carefully to avoid bumping them. Miss Hammond darted ahead to make the bed ready. Bruce followed behind.

“Hurting you?” Bo said.

“No,” she said. “How about you?”