The Big Rock Candy Mountain (90 page)

That was one. That was one of many. They were not all visual images, he discovered, sorting them out. There were smells and sounds and old tunes sung over and over until they gathered to themselves all the associations of the places and times in which they had been sung.

His mother's snoring breath went up catchily, grating in the sick lungs to its tremulous climax, paused, came out in the windy sigh. Bruce shut his mind on it, turned away, fled, just as he had lain still and pretended to sleep as a child, when the windstorms blew the slatted curtains and tubs and buckets began tumbling in the homestead yard: he had lain snug and warm, hearing the padding of feet and his father's grumbling, and he had known he should get up to help, but the sheets were warm, the bed was comfortable, sleep lay just around the corner where he had left it ...

A childhood-hunter, a searcher for old forgotten far-off things and battles long ago, a maunderer. He knew it. Yet the words of life were in those songs and those smells and the green dreams of childhood; in his life there had been the death of too many things.

He shifted in the bed, realizing that not anything he had been thinking of had cut off the sound of his mother's breathing. Oh Christ, he said. I wish ...

He sat up. The light had gone on in the bedroom, and the breathing was broken. In three steps he was through the door, the fear like a hand clenched in his shirt. His mother lay moving her head weakly from side to side, her forehead puckered, her face and neck wet.

“Will you turn ... on the light?” she said.

He stared at her. She was looking straight up into the brightness of the lamp.

“Sure,” he said, from a dry mouth. “I should have put a string on that switch.” He rattled the metal pull of the lamp. “Better?”

She did not answer directly, but moved her hand toward the water glass. The bewildered look was fading from her face. He helped her take a sip of water, wiped her face with a towel, turned her pillow. When Miss Hammond appeared in the doorway he told her to go and lie down again. He would sit up a while. It was still early.

His mother lay back, the light stark on her sunken cheeks and wet skin. “It was so dark,” she said fuzzily. “I thought everyone ... had gone.”

“Try to go back to sleep,” he said. “I'll sit here with you a while.”

Her fingers found his and clung, and with her hand alternately clenching and relaxing on his she appeared to doze. The agonized fight for breath went on. After a few minutes he pulled off the light. The neon blue fluttered for a moment through the venetian blinds, steadied to a pale laddered glimmer. The tires of passing cars whispered and hissed in the rainy street.

This is it, Bruce said, sitting still, sitting quietly, unwilling to shift his cramped body for fear of disturbing her. Any breath may be her last one.

He bent his head on his hand and let himself slump, tired, ready to fall asleep but fighting sleep and hating his tiredness because they were treachery, because she was dying now, tonight. At any minute the worn heart might go, the breathing shiver to a stop.

He listened to the breaths, up and up and up, painfully, and the wheezy escape of the hard-won air. Miss Hammond came out on tiptoe and laid a sweater across his shoulders, and he pulled it around him, aware that it was chilly. The traffic was less on the street, but the neon light drifted in steadily, like vague blue smoke, a slight tremor in the shadowy room. He heard the court-house clock strike eleven, then twelve. The breathing faltered, strengthened, slowed, went on.

The vitality, he said, is lowest during the early morning hours. If she lived past three, she might last another day, stubbornly clinging to the life she had already given up. He found himself hoping that she would die, now, and the imminence of the thing he had been watching and fearing for weeks made him move cautiously, straighten his slumped and aching back, thrust one chilled hand into his pocket.

His mother moved. Her fingers tightened, and her voice, flat and muffled, said, “You're a good boy, Bruce.”

He sat thinking of that, thinking of the times for years back when he had been selfish or thoughtless, of the girls he had chased and dated four or five nights a week, never remembering that his mother might be alone, that the old man went off to prowl with his friends or deliver whiskey, leaving her in an empty house. He remembered the few times he had taken her anywhere, to movies, for drives in the canyons, to dinner, and those times seemed so pitifully few and mean that he writhed. You're a good boy, Bruce.

Yes, he said, twenty years too late, and overpaid in advance, fifty times in advance, and now paid with gratitude on her death bed.

Oh Jesus, he said, let her die.

The clock, heavy and solemn over the sleeping city, gathered itself and struck once. The sound aroused the sick woman. She struggled up on one elbow, her hand hard on Bruce's fingers. Her head turned to the right, then to the left.

“Which ... way?” she said.

“It's all right, Mom,” he said, and pushed her gently back, pulling the covers to her chin. She lay still, immediately back in the drugged coma, and he sat on in the straight chair, listening to her fighting, impossible breath, holding his own breath when the snore labored to its peak, relaxing again when it was released, counting her breaths, almost, because at any point in the difficult scale her heart might quit like a tired horse in the harness.

The vitality is lowest during the early morning hours. One fifteen, or thereabouts, and the minutes crawling, and his mother retreating breath by breath. Which ... way?

His nodding head jerked up. The
ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-had
stopped, snagged, at the top of the scale. The long pause between inhalation and exhalation was slow, was too long. He yanked on the light.

“Miss Hammond!”

She came instantly, it seemed, was shoving him away from the bedside. In the shouting silence he saw her seize his mother's. shoulders, put a finger in her mouth, jerk it out again to grab a spoon from the table and with the handle pry against his mother's tongue, pulling it back out of her throat. The legs under the covers moved slightly, the clogged breath gave easily, in three little sighs, and he was staring into the sick face of Miss Hammond, the spoon in her hand free now, and his mother's eyes closing, very slowly.

He saw the tears come into Miss Hammond's eyes as she groped without looking to lay the spoon on the table. The covers were disarranged over his mother's body, and the nightgown was pulled aside. He saw her breast, the unmutilated one, like a lumpy mummified thing, the nipple retracted, pulled in as if by a terrific suction, and the skin blue-black and withered over her whole side.

“Oh my God,” Miss Hammond was saying, “Oh my God.”

He turned, blind and terrified, and fled.

When he came in again, the light, was on in both front room and porch. Miss Hammond looked up quickly. He could not meet her eyes for more than an instant,. because behind her was the lighted porch, and his mind went around that door and stopped at the foot of the bed.

Instead of going in, he went to the telephone and called long distance, waiting with the blank wall before his eyes and the receiver against his ear, fixing his mind on the efficient buzzings, the unknown voices speaking crisply, the long regular unmusical ringing on the other end. Death travelled fast. In three minutes he could spread death. He .waited, the receiver humming at his head.

What would the old man say? Would he pretend grief, he with his cowardice and his kept slut? Maybe she was with him. That would make it just dandy. She could ride back with him, consoling him all the ...

“Hello,” he said, breaking in on the voice at the other end. It was a man's voice, probably Patton's. “Hello,” he said. “This is Bruce Mason. Is my father there?”

“Yeah,” the voice said surlily, and then quickly, as if remembering, “Yeah, sure. Hold it just a minute.”

He waited again. Through the open line he could hear steps coming. He looked straight at the yellow wall, his tongue like an unbendable rod in his mouth. “Hello?” his father's quick voice said. “Hello, Bruce? What is it? Is ... ?” There was a rattling noise, and then his father's voice again, quick and anxious. “Hello? Dropped the damn phone. What's the matter?”

“She's dead,” Bruce said. “Two hours ago. I thought you'd want to know.”

There was no answer for so long that he dropped his lips to the mouthpiece to say “Hello, hello,” but as he did so he heard the sigh of his father's breath, distorted and rasping over the wire, and then his voice, quiet, almost a whisper. “Yeah. I'll be right home.”

“All right,” Bruce said. “I'll make the arrangements.”

There was another pause, only a kind of panting coming through the receiver. “Was it bad?” his father said. “Did she ... was she in pain?”

Bruce raised his head. On impulse, out of pure contempt, he lied. “No,” he said. “She just went to sleep.”

The nurse moved aside, and he stepped past her into the porch. His mother lay with the sheet up to her chin. Her hands, folded on her stomach, made a little draped mound under the sheet. Her hair had been dried and re-braided, and her face was wiped clean of any expression, even the lines rubbed away as an artist might erase lines from a sketch. It was a younger face that lay there, a face completely calm, a prettier face actually than he had known. But it was not his mother. His mother had been wiped away with the lines that living had left on her. She was the shading, not the face itself. In this wax image there was none of her patience, none of her understanding and sympathy, none of her kindness, none of her dignity. This corpse was a thing you could bury without regret, put into the ground beside your brother's body; and the other things, the qualities that had been mystically your mother, you buried within yourself, you became a grave for her as you were a grave for Chet, and you carried your dead un-quietly within you.

 

On the evening of the next day he sat reading in the deserted apartment. He had gone grimly through his duties, half grateful for something to do, half appreciating why the race made a ritual of death. He had bought a casket, feeling that if he left that to his father his father would throw away hundreds of dollars in a useless sacrifice to his own shame and fear. He had talked to Cullen, signed the death certificate, gone to the cemetery and seen the sexton about the grave lot next to Chet's. After dinner he had said goodbye to Miss Hammond.

Tomorrow, probably around noon, his father should be back. The funeral was set for three. If the old man was late that was his bad luck. He could be shown where she was buried, that would be all he deserved.

He looked at the clock on the end table by the sofa. Ten fifteen. He might go to bed, but he knew he couldn't sleep, even though he was exhausted. He moved the light closer and opened the book again.

At eleven thirty he stopped reading to listen. Someone was fumbling at the door. He stood up just as his father opened the door and came in, and in the silent apartment, with the fact of death between them, they confronted each other.

His father's face was like a dirty dough mask. The unhealthy bags under his eyes had swollen and darkened, his cheeks sagged, his eyes were furtive and haunted. For a moment he stood with his hand on the knob, moistening his lips with his tongue.

“You got back quick,” Bruce said.

“I ...” The old man closed the door and took a step or two into the room. His eyes darted past Bruce toward the door of the porch. Without the door to hang to he staggered a little, and put his hand down on the arm of the sofa, lowering himself into it heavily. “I ... got lost,” he said. His lips moved in the parody of a smile, and his eyes went secretly past Bruce toward the porch door again.