The Big Rock Candy Mountain (7 page)

That was in the summer of 1899. Now it was 1905.

 

In September the roads were full of wagons, and on mornings when she worked around the house with doors and windows open Elsa could hear the shunt and crash of boxcars being backed under the spouts of the elevators. When the jolting and puffing stopped she could, by listening intently, hear the swishing rush as the dipped spout let go its river of wheat into the cars. Harvest excited her, as it had always excited her at home, and one afternoon, on an impulse, she left the house and went down.

There were dribbles of golden wheat below the spout, and at the bottom of the elevator wall a shining gold cone. She scooped her hand full and stood back watching, chewing and crunching the wheat kernels till they were sweet, rubbery gum in her mouth.

The last car was just being pulled away. Inside the elevator she heard the grunting of a separator engine and the occasional thud of a sack being thumped on the floor. She peeked in. A man she did not know, probably Bill Conzett's hired man, was separating seed flax, and Jud Chain, immaculate, dandified, wearing coat and vest even in the fall heat, leaned one shoulder negligently against the wall. He had his hat off, and a streak of sun through the elevator roof glinted on his blond hair.

“Hello,” Elsa said. “I didn't expect to see you in an elevator.”

“Come down a good deal,” Jud said. “Bo and I are turning grain speculators. Buying flax this fall.”

“Well,” she said, and could think of nothing else to say to him.

“I'm daffy about flax anyway,” Jud said. “Something about it makes me feel good. It's so slick and silky to feel.” He ran his hand into the mouth of a sack and wriggled his fingers.

“We never grew it at home,” Elsa said.

“Feel.”

She pushed her hand into the brown flaky seeds. They slipped smoothly up her wrist, cool and dry, millions of polished, purple-brown, miniature guitar picks. She moved her hand and the flax swirled like heavy smooth water against her skin.

“That's nice,” she said.

“It's something to see in flower, too,” Jud said. “Acres of blue-bells.”

Her quick look acknowledged something sensitive, almost feminine, in the expression of his face as he caressed the flax with his fingers. “It's like everything else that's lovely,” Jud said. “Dangerous. Boy was drowned in a flax bin here a year ago. Fell in and it sucked him down before anybody could get to him. We had to empty the whole bin to get him.” He rubbed his wrist with a flat white hand. “Nice boy, too,” he said. “That's the kind things always happen to. A mean, tough kid, now, he'd never know enough to appreciate the feel of flax, and he'd never get caught in it.”

“I guess so,” Elsa said. She let her fingers move in the satiny, treacherous seeds.

“Seen Bo lately?” Jud said.

“Not for three or four days.”

“I thought he spent all his time on your front porch.”

“Oh, go along!” she said.

Jud lifted an amused eyebrow; his mouth puckered into an expression almost arch. “Don't make out that you don't know the conquest you've made,” he said.

She blushed. “Oh, fiddlesticks!”

“Laugh,” Jud said. “You've got poor old Bo roped and hogtied. You know what he's been like for the last three weeks? When the kid that sets them up in the alleys gets his pins up, he has to jump out of there and beat it over to rack the pool balls, and then fly up to serve somebody a drink, and then hike back to the alleys to set them up again. You know why? Because Bo is standing all that time out by the door watching to see if you won't be coming down the sidewalk.”

Elsa's face was hot. “Oh yes,” she said sarcastically. “He's just been a regular
preste-rompe.”

“What's a preste romper?”

“Preacher's tail. Somebody that's always tagging along. Like Bo.”

“You don't mind, do you?”

“Oh no,” she said. “I always feel sorry for strays. I pat him on the head once in a while.”

His laugh was deep, moist, cavernous, like something alive down a cistern, a laugh that matched oddly with his polished and almost effeminate manners.

“Has Bo asked you anything lately?” he said.

She was startled. “No. What?”

“I guess he's been pretty busy,” Jud said. “I know he's got it on his mind.”

“Now you've got me curious.”

“Oh well,” Jud said. “I don't know why I shouldn't ask you. He'd get all tangled up in his tongue. How'd you like to go to Devil's Lake next Saturday?”

“Fine,” she said. “What for?”

“State trap shoot. Bo's entered in the singles—would be in doubles too, but he can't stay away that long. We thought you and Eva might come along for the day. The fair's on, and there's a carnival in town. Big excitement.”

“It sounds like fun,” she said. “What if Bo forgets to ask me, now?”

“That,” Jud said, “is the last thing he'd forget. He might forget his shotgun, maybe, but not you.”

She saw him, from the parlor window, come up the walk with his derby already in his hand, and because they had a twenty-mile drive to make, and the shooting began at ten, she hurried to meet him at the door. He took the lunch box from her hand and held her elbow while she gathered her skirts for the step up to the axle of the buggy. “Here we go,” he said, “if these old plugs can make it.”

Settling herself, she said in surprise, “Why that's a beautiful team.”

“Best old Handley had,” Bo said. “If they ever caught up with the times in this burg they'd have horseless carriages for rent.” He flicked the lines and the horses snapped into their collars; their trotting feet beat light and swift on the dust. Elsa knew they could make that twenty miles in two hours, easily. But it was like Bo to disparage anything he was proud of. Either he or Handley had worked over those horses. Their gray hides shone, their manes were roached, their forelocks tied, their tails curried smooth and glossy. She was glad they weren't docked; a docked horse was a pitiful thing when the flies were bad.

Jud was waiting in front of the hotel. Bo didn't slow down. Jud's great flat hand hooked the rail, his leg swung up, and he slid into the rear seat on the fly. The smell of bay rum came with him. “Must be in a hurry,” he said. He breathed on the ruby ring on his left hand, rubbed it on his sleeve.

“Pony Express doesn't stop for anything,” Bo said.

But they stopped for Eva. In front of her house Bo whistled and Jud whistled, but nothing happened. “Still snoring,” Bo said. “Go on up and break the door down, Jud.”

Jud climbed out. “Not Eva's door,” he said. “I prize my health.” He went up and rapped, bending to listen for movement inside.

“Make some noise, for God's sake,” Bo said. He lifted his voice in a bellow that shocked down the quiet, weedgrown street. “Hey, EVA!” The echo bounced off Sprague's barn.

Jud knocked again. “Must be asleep,” he said.

“That's just what I think,” Bo said. “Eva! Hey, Eva! Wake up!”

An upstairs window opened and Eva stuck her head out. Her left hand held a flowered kimono close to her chest. “Shut up, you big loon,” she said. “You'll wake Ma.”

The window slammed. They waited five minutes, ten. Jud wandered across the porch, cut off a twig from a shrub with his knife, and began peeling it. In the buggy Bo looked at Elsa, then at his watch. “Fifteen minutes,” he said, and muttered indistinguishable things under his breath.

“Maybe she misunderstood the time.”

“Maybe my hip pocket is a gold mine. She just likes to keep people waiting.”

At six-thirty Eva came out in a white pleated shirtwaist and a dark sport skirt that just cleared the ground. Her mouth was very red, and she walked briskly, as if unaware that she had delayed anyone. Jud helped her in, waited while she got over her despairing little laughs and helpless attempts to get her skirts arranged. Bo sucked a back tooth and looked bored, but Elsa reached back and gave Eva a hand. Men ought to consider that a girl with her waist squeezed at least four inches too small couldn't move very freely. Still, she supposed Eva could have left the corset a little looser.

“Get all prettied up?” Bo said.

“I didn't even stop to eat,” Eva said. “Just on account of you and your noise.”

“What were you doing, then? You had time for a ten course meal.”

“You needn't act so nasty,” Eva said. “I didn't keep you waiting long.”

Bo clucked to the team, lifted his derby and ran a hand over his hair, tipped the derby on again at a cocky angle. “No trouble at all. Do the horses good to have that hour rest.”

“Oh, an hour!”

“Cut it out,” Jud said genially. “We're moving, aren't we?”

He moved Bo's shotgun case from under Eva's feet and folded the buffalo robe on the floor so that her feet wouldn't dangle. Eva was always complaining that all seats were made too high for short people.

As they drove along the road the mist was rising from a slough on the left, and a half dozen ducks turned and swam away into the tules as if pulled on wires. “Getting close to bird season,” Bo said, and watched them with a nostalgic eye.

The grays lengthened out in a mile-eating trot across the flats. Flickertails jerked and ran and sat up with absurd little hands hanging on their chests. The light cloud of dust behind them hung a long time in the still air, so that turning at section corners they could see it for a quarter of a mile behind. They sang, the grays went crisply, perfectly matched, heads up and tails arching a little, the mist melted from above the sloughs and the sun burned warmer. They were pulling into the carnival grounds at Devil's Lake at nine-thirty.

Jud lifted Eva down, straightened his vest. “I don't suppose there'll be anything doing till later,” he said, and looked at Bo.

“I wouldn't think so,” Bo said. “Not till afternoon, anyway.”

“I thought you started shooting at ten?” Eva said.

Bo wagged his jaw at her. “What? Little Eva remembering the time something starts?”

“How about a stroll through the carnival?” Jud said.

Eva looked around her at the long grass. “It looks wet,” she said.

Jud kicked into it, inspected his toe. There were tiny drops of water across the waxed yellow shoe. Under the trees there was still a dewy early-morning smell. “I'll carry you,” he said. “Over in the grounds it's dry.”

Eva giggled. “I don't trust you. You're so lackadaisical you'd probably drop me in a puddle.”

“You've got us mixed up,” Bo said gravely. “That's what I'd do if I was carrying you.”

Eva stiffened, but his face was bland. “Come on then,” she said, and stuck her hand in Jud's high elbow.

Absurdly short and imposingly tall, they stepped through the grass toward the packed carnival street and the tents set in a long semicircle around the fringe of cottonwoods. Elsa, watching them, heard the early shouts of barkers, the sodden thump of a maul on a stake. She saw the gaudy flashes of color from kewpie dolls and pennants and prizes in a concession tent open to the sun. A merry-go-round squawked for a minute into a fast two-step and then stopped, and there were six shots, sharp and steady, from an unseen shooting gallery. Along the road from town people were beginning to come on foot and in buggies.

“You shouldn't tease her like that,” Elsa said.

“Why not?”

“She might think you meant it.”

“I do.”

“That's all the more reason for not saying things like that.”

Bo grunted. “She gives me a pain. Just because Jud gives her a little whirl, she thinks she's got a lifetime lease on him.”

“Jud doesn't seem to mind.”

“He never minds anything. If you went up and kicked him he'd turn around and beg your pardon for having his back turned on you.”

“Oh well,” Elsa said. “What do you have to do now?”

“Just have to register and get a number. There's a half hour yet.”

“Let's go get it done,” she said. “Jud says you're going to win a prize.”

“I guess not. Too many good shooters here.”

“You're a good shooter too.”

He grinned. “Got confidence in me, hey?”

“Of course,” she said.

With the shotgun case under one arm, he steered her toward the screened street of carnival tents. Though she was tall herself, she felt his size beside her, and it pleased her to be walking with him. It wasn't just his size, either. It was the width of his chest, the smooth nut-brown of his skin, the way he walked as if everything in him moved on ball bearings. She hummed, almost skipping, and laughed when he looked at her.

At the white tent marked “Shooting Headquarters,” under a limp American flag, she waited while he registered. He came back with a big paper 13 pinned on his back. “Slipped me the unlucky number,” he said. One eyebrow was raised in an expression of querulous protest.

“Why, are you superstitious?”

“No, but I'd just as soon have another number.”

“Friday the thirteenth is my lucky day,” she said. “I'll loan you my luck.”

His shoulder bumped hers as he swung to look around at the white and brown and yellow tents, the sheds housing fair exhibits, the banners of linen-paper, the pennants, the flags. The barkers were opening up all down the street, the calliope had started again, the little painted horses of the merry-go-round were rising and falling through the yellowing leaves of the cottonwoods. At the far end of the grounds a great wheel began to turn, curving up against the cloudless sky, and a girl's squeal cut through the jumble of crowd-sound.