The Big Rock Candy Mountain (14 page)

“How about some supper, wife?” he said.

They got into aprons and played housekeeping. It was six thirty by the time they had finished eating, and still Karl had not come. Elsa kept holding up her hand to listen for sounds. There was never anything but the pounding of the wind and the restless fluttering of the stove.

“Quit worrying,” Bo said. “Karl's too wise a bird to start out in this. He'll stay snug in the store till it stops.”

He was laughing, warm-eyed, the corners of his lips twitching with mirth. His big hands lay on the edge of the table before him.

“That isn't all I'm worrying about.”

He leaned across the table to kiss her. “What else?”

She forced herself to meet his eyes. “If he doesn't come home, we'll be here together all night.”

He laughed aloud. “Why not? We're going to be married pretty soon. And nobody can talk if people get marooned in a blizzard. It happens all the time.”

He came around to her, put his hands under her chin, bent over her from behind. “It's been just like we've been married ever since this morning,” he said. “Why should we worry if it keeps on?”

She shook herself loose and stood up, her chest tight and her face wrinkled as if with a pain. “Don't blame me,” she said. “I ... things come so fast, somehow. I seem to change my ideas about things from one day to the next.” She put her hand on his arm. “It seems all right to me, now,” she said. “Honestly it does. But can't you see what it would mean? After that letter from Pa, and the way he thinks you're not the right sort, for some reason? We'd just be giving him and people like him a chance to talk and say I told you so.”

“I could slide out,” Bo said. “When the storm started to let up I could vanish.”

“Would you want me to be like Eva?” she said. “Do you want to be like Jud?”

For a moment he watched her face. Then he shrugged. “All right. But what if we can't help being cooped up here?”

“I don't know,” she said helplessly.

His laugh chopped out, a short, mirthless recognition of the irony of what he had to do. “If I get my directions crossed and come back feet first you'll wish you'd been a little more tender-hearted,” he said.

“What are you going to do?”

“Go get Karl, what'd you think?”

“Bo, you can‘t! You'd get lost, or frozen stiff.”

“Probably will,” he said amiably. “Got any rope around here?”

While she hung on his arm crying that he was insane, that he wouldn't get to the corner, that she never meant he should go out into the blizzard, she didn't know what she meant, he towed her around the kitchen poking into cupboards and drawers for rope. He was as stubborn as a mule. He was an idiot. He would die in the storm, and then how would she feel?

With a length of clothes line in his hand he looked at her quizzically. “When you convince me,” he said, “you convince me for good.”

“There must be some other way. Couldn't you go over to Conzett's? That's closer.” Then her temper let loose. “Anyway, I should think you'd be able to control yourself even if we were marooned.”

He shook his head with a hanging, mocking grin. “Wouldn't promise a thing,” he said. “Us undesirable characters can't be trusted.”

“All right, then,” she said, and let go of his arm. “Go on out and freeze to death.”

She even went into the cellar hole and found him twenty feet of rope and a length of picket chain. But when he started out the front door (he had to put his shoulder against it and heave to move the storm door through the accumulated drift) she threw herself against the dogskin coat and clung. “Oh, be careful, Bo! If you can't find your way don't try too long.”

By now, she saw, his stubbornness and recklessness wouldn't have let him stay even if she had begged him to. He grinned, kissed her, throttled her with an enormous bear hug, put his head down, and ran.

He must have run, she decided afterward, all the way to the store, taking a direction and plowing ahead blind. Probably he wanted to get there and back before she had time to worry; probably he also wanted to impress her with how fast he could do it. She was surprised; she was even startled, the stamping came on the porch so soon. She ran to open the door. Karl, his face muffled in a felt cap with earlaps and a broad chin band, with a yellow icicle in each nostril and his eyebrows stiffly iced, stumbled in. The rope around his waist was a smooth, velvety white cable.

The hall was full of wind and drift.
“Herregud!”
Karl said, and grabbed the storm door to keep it from blowing off its hinges. Bo loomed through the opaque, white-swirling darkness like a huge hairy animal.

When she had untied their lifeline she led them in, inspected them under the light for signs of frostbite, rushed Bo out into the hall while she scooped up snow and held it again the leprous spots on his cheekbones. He bit at her fingers, and she slapped him on the nose.

“That's a heck of a way to welcome a guy that's just risked his neck to go get a worthless old tumblebug like Karl.”

“You hold still,” she said. She scrubbed his face with snow till it glowed, looked to make sure all the spots were gone, and relaxed with a noisy sigh. “Oh, I'm glad you're back!” she said, and reached up to kiss his wet, beefy, ice-cold face, right in front of Karl. “How'd you ever make it?”

“Just spread my sails and coasted down. Wind lifted me right up and set me down square in front of the alleys. Ask Karl how we got back.”

Huddling close to the stove with his neck still pulled into his shoulders, Karl grumbled. “Ask me!” he said. “Pulled me along like a steer. My belly'll be sore for a week.”

Tall in the doorway, full of pride, Bo grinned at her. “Once,” he said, “Karl got off the path and started off toward Fargo somewheres. I thought he was stuck in the snow, when it was only the rope caught around a telegraph pole, and I yanked him half in two before he backtracked and got straight again.” He put an icy hand on the back of Elsa's neck. “Satisfied now?”

She squeezed the heavy muscles of his arm. Karl went into the kitchen, and she followed to get him his supper. Bo wandered after her. “What's the use of postponing this marriage till New Year?” he said. “Why don't we get a preacher and get it over with?”

“You sound as if it was like moving the furniture, or something,” Elsa said. She couldn't get married in a rush like that. There wasn't anything ready, no towels, no sheets, no clothes, no anything to keep house with. But as she looked at his cold-reddened face and his smoky, laughing eyes, and thought how nice he'd been, really, to go out in a storm like that and bring Karl back just so she wouldn't get talked about, and because she wanted him to ...

“I guess we can at least wait till the blizzard's over,” she said.

It was almost the first time she had heard real mirth in his laughter, the first time it had sounded exuberant and full instead of short and half impatient. He pulled her onto his lap on the kitchen chair, while Karl grunted and grumbled over his supper, and scuffled with her, trying to take a toothy bite out of her between the neck and shoulder, where she was most ticklish. He was so boisterous and rough and strong that she struggled, but he held her arms and reduced her to helplessness.

“Hear that, Karl?” he said. “You can give the bride away about day after tomorrow.”

“I'll be giving her away, all right,” Karl said. “Might as well throw a girl to the lions.”

“I'm tame,” Bo said. “I'm completely house-broke. You tell him, Elsa.”

“About like a dancing bear,” she said. He set her suddenly on her feet and stood up.

“We have to consult the oracles,” he said. “See if this marriage is going to be a success. I'll play you eleven games of casino to see who's going to wear the pants in the family. And if I win I'll play you eleven more for the championship of the Chicago stockyards.”

Even after Karl had been long in bed and the kerosene in the parlor lamp had given out, and the lamp had dimmed, flared, sunk, flared up again, and gone out in a stink of coal oil; even after they had quit fooling around playing cards and had settled on the sofa with the rattle of granular snow on the windows and the house shuddering under the whining strength of the wind, there was a golden light over her mind, and her senses swayed with the swaying of a ghostly hammock in an idyllic grassy backyard with hollyhocks tall against a whitewashed fence, and a redbird was nesting in the grape arbor.

II

In one way the accident was a blessing, for now, after she had swept the broom awkwardly, one-handed, across the tenthouse floor, had soused the dishes and set them to dry, and had stooped and pulled, making the beds, while the blood rushed painfully into her injured arm, there was good time to rest. For an hour or more in the mornings and for long quiet periods in the afternoons she could sit on the plank platform before the door and let the children run in the clearing and simply relax, her mind still and her senses full of the sounds and smells that the woods had always had but that she had never had time to notice before.

Cradling her right arm, spiralled with thick bandage, in her lap, she could close her eyes and hear the tapping of woodpeckers off in the forest, and sometimes the drumming of a grouse. Her lungs loved the balsam air, and her body soaked up warmth, infinitely pleasant after the weeks of rain. It was as if a blessing had fallen suddenly on the half acre of stumpy ground. For five days there had been fine weather: every morning the sun tipped the firs and poured into the open, creeping from chip to chip until it filled the clearing, leaned its friendly weight on the tenthouse door. By the time Bo went to work at seven the shadows had all pulled themselves back toward the ring of woods, and while she did her housework she could feel the warmth growing on the canvas roof. When she handed out the carrots and greens for the two boys to feed to their rabbits, and came out to stand in the full sun, it was with a sense of peace and permanence so alien that she had to smile at her own perception of it.

More than anything else, it was the rabbits that gave her that feeling of home—they and the children digging in the dirt around a big stump. Home, as she imagined it and remembered it, had always meant those things, children, permanence, the recurrence of monotonous and warmly-felt days, and animals to care for. More than once, leaning her back against the wall, she fingered the bandage caressingly. It was odd you never realized how tired you were until something made you take a rest.

Even the pain beating in her arm from wrist to elbow with a steady nagging ache was good, because it reminded her that now there was a kind of fulfillment. The pain was like something left over from the rainy winter, lying in her like the things that she could not forget. But it would pass, and the things she had thought she could never forget she would forget. Unless she stirred too fast, or got impatient at her crippling, when it would leap instantly to an immense and throbbing pressure against the tight bandage, it was even a half-pleasant kind of pain. It would pass, but the peace would not pass. While you lay against the tent wall in the sun and the children dug endlessly and happily in the dirt Bo was working, and when the arm was better you would go back to work too, and the tenthouse would not always be a tenthouse. As you got ahead a little further it would become a house, with a barn behind at the edge of the firs, and the café would bring in a little money and you could have a garden and a few animals, a cow and some chickens, and that would be a good life.

In the sun, her face tipped back and her burned arm in her lap, she let down her hair and shook it over her shoulders, as thick and wavy and richly tinted as ever, lavish and rich and good to feel when it was well brushed. That was an odd thing too. In your childhood everybody teased you about your hair and yelled, “There comes a white horse, kid!” but now everybody seemed to think it was beautiful. You got more compliments on your hair than anything. As she brushed evenly down, pulling the hair over her breast to get at it with her good hand, she thought much about how their lives would be now, how Bo seemed to be over his disappointment and his restlessness. Seven years of hard times, and the crash of 1907, had humbled his ambitions. Perhaps that was good too. It didn't do to expect too much.

It was that hotel, she thought. Five years of butting our heads against that wall! Idly she watched a half dozen chickadees fussily busy at a crust of bread one of the boys had dropped. Her brush handle lay smooth and rounded and solid in her hand. She felt it there, something she could put down if she chose, but she did not put it down. She liked its solid familiar feel. That was the way with things you remembered. You could put them down if you chose, but you didn't quite choose. Every once in a while you took them up and found them familiar and well worn and intimate, and you kept them where you could touch them when you wanted to.

But that hotel. There was little you wanted to remember about that. The musty smell of the halls, the unpleasant work of cleaning rooms after the bank went and the help had to be let go, the unfriendly masculine atmosphere of the lobby, with its faint sour smell of whiskey from the bar that had gone in in spite of her protests (How can you run a commercial hotel without a bar?). It was funny, but the things you felt most vividly about that hotel, even more vividly than you felt the birth of Chester and Bruce in the first floor front suite where you lived, even more than you felt the loss of the first one, the girl baby born dead, were the evenings when Bo played solitaire and the time Pinky Jordan came around. Those things had weight in the memory; those were what was left when you boiled down six years in your mind.