The Big Rock Candy Mountain (19 page)

But even so, you said, even so. It's better. It's steady, and it does make us a living, and since I've been hurt Bo seems to be willing to stick with it. That accident, unlucky as it seemed at the time, was a point of change, a climax of the bad luck, and since it was over things were better. You remembered old lady Moe at home in Indian Falls, and her belief that whenever she broke a dish she was bound to break three, and you remembered the day you saw her drop a saucer when she was serving afternoon coffee, and how she threw down a cup and another saucer on top of it, not angrily, not in a pet, but quite carefully, as if to finish a job. That was the way the burn was.

You were getting ready for the breakfast customers, you mixing pancake batter, Bo cleaning the coffee urn. He had emptied it, wiped it out, put in the fresh coffee, and heated the water in a pail. As you stirred the batter at the other end you saw him kick a low stool into place and climb up with the steaming water in his hand. He shifted the pail, reached down awkwardly for a dishtowel, wrapped it around his right hand, and took hold of the pail again to lift. The urn was high; he had to strain to hoist the pail. The lip caught under the flange of the urn top, and he hung there, teetering on the precarious stool. “Come here, quick!” he said.

You put down the bowl of batter, wiped your hands on a towel, started. “Hurry up!” he shouted. “This is scalding my hand!”

You were over to him in three steps, looking to see what he wanted you to do. “The stool!” Bo yelled. “The stool, the stool, the stool!” He could have lowered the pail and started over, but that was not his way. Convulsed with fury and strain, he shouted at you and kept the steaming pail jammed as high as he could reach. You grabbed the stool and held its teetering legs back on the floor, and Bo staggered, stuck his hand desperately at the wall, letting go of the bottom of the pail. Hot water slopped over him, and with a yell he dropped it and leaped back to save himself. The whole bucket of scalding water came down across your shoulder and arm.

And then Bo's face again—so many times the memory projected an image of his face, the exact expression. You stood there, your teeth in your lip and your body rigid with the shock. Your bare arm, in the time you could count ten, turned fiery, clear to the fingers. His face fallen in a kind of anguish, Bo stared at the arm and then at your face, and you held yourself rigid, not quite aware yet how badly you were hurt, and looked at him. He burst out as if he couldn't bear what he saw, “Yell! God damn it to hell, yell ! Cry!”

Then he was grabbing the butter can and smearing your arm, roughly, angrily. Under his fingers the skin puffed in great blisters, growing while you watched. By the time Bo closed up the place and routed out a stage driver to take you down to the doctor's little office on the mill road, your arm was twice as big as normal and so hot and painful that you staggered getting out of the stage, and Bo picked you up and carried you into the office.

His face. It was almost as if you touched it, lovingly, seeing how strongly your lives had been welded together in spite of bad luck and bad temper, how behind all the violent irritability and the restlessness and the dissatisfaction you were his wife. You had never known what that meant, really, until you saw how it shook him to see you hurt ...

 

In the bed Elsa stiffened. There was something, a sound not skating needles or sigh of trees or soft blows of wind on canvas. Rigid with listening, she waited. Again, like the stealthy pad of feet at the rear of the tent, a sound as if something were prowling around the little shed where they stored food, the trunk, clothing, everything that overflowed from the tent itself. Her eyes wide upon the sightless dark, her head half lifted from the pillow, she listened, and the heavy pound of blood began in her burned arm. There again ... She strained her ears as she had strained them a hundred times at night noises, tight with fear that was not really fear but only apprehension that wanted to smile at itself, to take a long breath and relax again and know that what had brought it upright listening was only the wind or the settling of timbers in the house or the creak of a swaying door.

A long, furtive silence, the sigh of the wind, and then the noise of a stick of firewood falling on the woodpile.

It was as if a light had flashed on and made abruptly real all the fears that she hadn't really believed in. There was something out there, prowling in the dark, and if it was friendly it wouldn't prowl at this hour. Like a shutter that clicked three times, three swift thoughts went through her mind: the automatic question of what time it was and when Bo would be home, the realization that it couldn't be more than ten o‘clock, and the thought of the cougar. Propped now on her elbow, she still listened. No more wood fell, but the soft sound of steps came through the flimsy canvas, and then unmistakably the rattle of the padlock against the hasp on the shed door.

Very slowly, so as not to make a noise, Elsa laid the covers back and inched her feet over the edge of the bed. The springs squeaked, and she waited with held breath. The noise outside was still there. It sounded as if the cougar, or whatever it was, had gotten into the shed. Even while she stood up she was wondering if she had pad-locked that door, but she couldn't remember. She had been out to hang the ham on its hook just after supper.... For a moment, standing barefooted on the cold board floor, she cocked eyes and ears at the children's bed. Sleeping. She knew what she must do. It froze her with terror, but she knew. She must drive the thing away, frighten it so it would never come back, kill it if she could, for what peace would she ever have now when she had to leave the children alone, as she often had to do when she was helping at the café?

With her hurt arm held across her body she tiptoed to the bureau, felt for the revolver on the high shelf. Her teeth were locked, and her body shivered as if with cold, but she went on, over to the door. There she stooped, laid the gun on the floor, raised up and drew the bolt very slowly with her good hand, stooped again and picked up the gun. It was awkward left-handed, but it was better that way than trying to use the burned one.

On the narrow porch she listened again. Something bumped back in the darkness by the shed. The thing was bolder. All around her the dark ring of woods pressed on the less opaque darkness of the clearing, and she saw the cloudy sky above moving with the wind as silently and almost as invisibly as a thought moves in a mind. For a moment she wondered what she would do if the thing didn't scare, if it turned and attacked her, but she shut her determination down and clenched her teeth upon it. In her bare feet, feeling the needles and tiny twigs digging into her skin, she stepped off into the yard and a dozen steps to the side, to where she could see the blob of shadow that was the shed.

With all her will, knowing she must do it quickly or not at all, she lifted the gun and pointed it at the place where the shed door ought to be. Her hand wobbled, and she braced it with the hurt one. “Bo!” she cried out in a last forlorn hope. “Bo, is it you?”

There was a rush of movement, a half-seen moving shadow. The shed door banged back as the retreating animal bumped it, and with her teeth in her lip Elsa pulled the trigger.

The noise stunned her, the recoil threw her hands into the air and stabbed her arm with knives of pain. Slowly she let her hands come down with the gun, her mind still dazzled by the flash and the report and something else—the wild howl that still shivered against the ring of trees, an almost human howl. Before she realized that she had heard it, that the prowler had been real and that she had shot at it, perhaps hit it, she was back inside the tent leaning weakly against the slammed and bolted door.

Both boys were sitting up in bed, tousled and sleepy, shocked upright before they had had a chance to awaken. “What was it, Ma?” Chester said. His eyes, round with sleep and wonder, were on the gun hanging from her hand. Bruce whined, dug with his knuckles at the lingering sleep in his eyes. Then he too saw the gun, and his baby face slackened with the imminence of tears.

Elsa laughed, a squeaky, hysterical cackle. Forcing casualness over her panic like a tight lid over a saucepan, she went over and put the gun back on the shelf. “It was just an old skunk snooping around your rabbit pen,” she said.

Chester knew about skunks. He sniffed.

“I scared him off before he had a chance to make a smell,” his mother said, and laughed again, more naturally.

“D‘you shoot him?”

“You bet I did. We don't want any old skunks bothering our rabbits, do we?”

Their solemn heads shook. “No.”

“All right,” she said, and went to tuck their covers back. “You go to sleep. If Pa comes home and finds you- still awake he'll skin you alive.”

They lay down again, punched one another for sleeping room, whispered together with secret giggles, and finally fell asleep. But Elsa, after playing at going back to bed, just to fool them, got up again and dressed, and she was sitting by the table with the light turned up bright when Bo's feet scraped on the steps.

She met him at the door with her finger on her lips, and when she told him what had happened he whistled low. “Scare you?”

She held up her left hand, trembling again now that everything was over and Bo was back. She could even laugh a little. “Half to death,” she said.

“Did you hit him?”

“I don't know. He screeched bloody murder and ran away. I didn't even see him, just a kind of rush in the dark.”

“Maybe you were seeing shadows.”

“He was not a shadow! He yelled like old Nick. He was in the shed.”

“How'd he get in there?”

“I don't know. Maybe I left the door open.”

“Even if you did there's a thumb latch.”

“I heard the latch rattle. Maybe the door wasn't caught.”

He reached down the gun from the shelf, picked up the lamp, and took her arm. “Well, let's go see if we've got a cougar rug.”

While Elsa held the lantern high, Bo, with the brighter light of the lamp, went into the shed and looked. Immediately his voice came, excited. “By God, there was something in here. Stuff's all scattered around.”

“Did you think I was imagining things?”

“I did, sort of,” he said. He came out and searched for tracks, but the ground was so littered it wouldn't have taken a clear print. Then Elsa stooped and picked up a chip at the corner. On one edge was a dark spatter, and when Bo rubbed it with his thumb it came off red. He looked at her. “You winged him, anyway.”

He searched, stooping, the light silhouetting his head and shoulders and shining yellow on the side of his intent face. He seemed to sniff like a hound; there was excitement in him. Twenty feet from the corner he found another spatter of blood on a spruce twig. After that he found nothing. “I'll get up early and try it in the morning,” he said. “No use in the dark.”

His arm went across her shoulders, and she giggled without knowing she was going to, a sound as involuntary as a hiccough. “Old Mamma,” he said. “Pops off a lion with one shot. How'd you ever get the nerve to go right out after him?”

“I wanted to scare him good, or kill him, so he'd never come back.”

He paused, stooping for a last look. “This is the best place for tracks, where there's dust,” he said. The wind flawed in the light, and he cupped a hand over the chimney. There were footprints all around in the dust, but no sign of animal tracks. Then Bo bent closer. “Ha!” he said.

“What?”

“Look.”

He pointed to a large footprint, set his own foot down beside it and made a track. His print was an inch longer than the other. They stared at each other. The light spread around them dimly, shone on the side of the shed, was cut, off at the corner as if a knife had sliced it. The woodpile was a jumbled and criss-cross pile of shadows.

“If that was a cougar you shot,” Bo said, “he was wearing number nine shoes.”

 

There was little sleep for her that night. In spite of Bo's reassurances that no court would hold her a minute, even if she had killed the prowler, the thought of having shot a man left her weak and sick. She imagined him out in the dark, hungry maybe, rummaging among the things in the shed while he listened for noises from the tent as fearfully as she listened from her bed. Then the shout out of the dark, the terror of discovery, the desperate running, the shot, the pain, the mouth wide on a scream. She imagined him dragging himself off into the woods, perhaps to die.

There was nothing she could do, because Bo said flatly he wasn't going to lose a night's sleep hunting for him in the dark. Besides, he might be dangerous, and as for his bleeding to death, there would have been more blood than they had found if she had hit him badly. The hell with going sleepless and maybe getting shot at out of pity for any burglar. She knew that he wasn't in the least afraid to go out, that he was merely tired and needed sleep, but she could not go to sleep as he did.

Five minutes after they were in bed he had started kicking the covers off his feet—and hers. His muscles twitched as he slept. In the other bed one of the children whimpered. Dreaming. It was comforting to know that nothing worse than dreams would touch him tonight. She should try to get to sleep. Bo rolled over, the bed sagging away under his weight, and she fought him for the covers. He was like an elephant in bed. You couldn't wake him up, and whenever he moved he stripped the whole bed bare. It took savage jabs in the ribs before he would even grunt and squirm and give you enough slack to pull over you.

The child whimpered again. Which one? Bruce? You couldn't tell. Never mind. Let yourself go, feel your weight relaxing into the bed ...