The Big Rock Candy Mountain (23 page)

In the flash while their eyes met and held, while she crowded Bruce behind her back protectively, she knew that she had never seen Bo so furious. His face and neck were swollen and dark, his eyes glaring, his breath panting between bared and gritted teeth. His voice came in an incoherent, snarling roar.

“Of all the God damn, God damn! Right beside the path where I step in it! And lie about it! Right beside the path and then lie about it ... !”

He was crouched on the threshold as if about to spring, and she backed up a step, holding Bruce behind her. “Bo! For God's sake, keep your temper, Bo!”

The swiftness with which his big body moved paralyzed her for a split second with utter terror that he would kill the child. Before she could put up her arm he had caught her shoulder and pushed her aside, and she fell screaming, trying with both hands to hang onto Bruce, feeling his fingers torn loose from her dress even while she fell, and hearing his thin squeak of terror. She screamed, “Bo, oh my God, Bo ... Bo ... !”

Moving with the same silent terrible speed, he was out the door again with Bruce under his arm, and she scrambled up, silent herself now, to hurl herself after him. Around the side of the tent the child's idiot babble of fear rose to a shriek, broke, rose again, cackled in a mad parody of laughter. In the near-dark she saw Bo bending over, the baby's frantic kicking legs beating out behind him as he shoved the child's face down to the ground, rubbing it around. “Will you mind?” he kept saying, “will you mind now, you damn stubborn little ...

She pulled at him, clawing, but one thick arm, powerful as a hurled log, brushed backward and knocked her down again, and she fell sideways on her half-healed arm. She never even felt the pain. Her mouth worked over soundless words. Like a dog, she screamed at him without making a sound, you treat your child like a dog! Her legs kicked her to her feet again so quickly that she might never have fallen. Bo was still rubbing Bruce's nose into the ground in a savage prolongation of fury.

Hatred flamed in her like a sheet of light. She wanted to kill him. Somehow her hand found a stick of stovewood in it, and with murder in her heart she rushed him. The first blow fell solid and soft across his shoulder. The second stung her hands as it found hard bone. Then she was wrestling with him, sobbing, trying to hit him again, screaming with helplessness and fury when she felt her wrist bent backward and her fingers loosening on the club.

Now finally the long moment when the madness burned out of both of them as suddenly as it had come and they faced each other in the heavy forest twilight with Bruce sobbing on the ground between them and Chester terrified and whimpering at the corner of the tent. Bo stared at her stupidly, his hands hanging. In the dusk she saw his mouth work, and bit her own lip, her body weak as water and her burned arm one long hammering ache. She didn't speak. Gathering the threads of her strength, she stooped and picked up Bruce and carried him into the tent, motioning Chester in after her and bolting the door.

Without pause or thought she went straight to the bed and lay down with Bruce tight against her, holding his moaning into her breast and trying by the very rigidity of her embrace to stop the shudders that went through his body. While she lay there Chester crept against her, so that she rolled a little and put her burned hand clumsily on his head.

There was no sound outside the tent. She caught herself listening tensely, and the anger touched her again like a rod of bare icy metal. The shivering of the child in her arms lessened gradually, but his breath still shook him into shudders, and at every catching intake of air she held him fiercely. Like a dog. Expecting a child to learn all at once, to be told and never afterward make a mistake, never to have any feelings of his own, but to jump like a trained animal. Even a dog he treated better, lessoned with endless patience, rewarded when it did something right. She blinked her dry eyes, scratchy as if they had been blow full of sand.

Poor child, she said. Poor baby! Her hand rubbed up and down his back, and she whispered in his ear. “Don't cry. Don't cry, baby. We won't let him do it any more.”

(What instant outrage that she should have to say such a thing to him! We won't let him do it any more. His father!)

“Are you all right now?” she said finally. “Will you lie here and rest while Mommy lights the lamp?”

His hands clung, and she lay back. “Chet,” she said, “can you light the lamp, do you think?”

He slipped off the bed, and she heard him bump against the table in the dark. Light leaped in a feeble spurt, went out, and he struck another match. Then the steadying glow of the lamp as he brought it back to the bed in both hands, carefully.

“Good boy,” she said. “Set it on the chair.”

Sitting up, she smoothed Bruce's hair back from his forehead and looked at him, and the cry that was wrenched from her came from a deeper well of horror and shame and anger than even the blows she had rained on Bo outside. Bruce's face was smeared with dirt and excrement and tears. Under that filth he was white as a corpse, his face shrunken and sharpened with terror. A nerve high in his cheek twitched in tiny sharp spasms, and his whole head shook as if he had St. Vitus' dance. But his eyes, his eyes ...

“Look at me!” she said harshly, and shook him. “Brucie, look at me!”

The mouth closed on a thin, bubbling wail, the cheek twitched, but the eyes did not change. They remained fixed in mute impossible anguish, twisted inward until the pupils were half lost in the inner corners.

“Ma,” Chester said, “is he cross-eyed, Ma?” He began to cry.

She shook Bruce again, her own eyes blind. “Bruce!”

His cheek twitched and his body shuddered. “Get me a pan of water and a wash cloth,” Elsa said to Chester. She said it quietly, holding her voice down as if throwing all her weight on it. He mustn't be frightened any more, she mustn't shout at him, she must be soothing, soft, safe. Holding him cradled against her bad arm, she washed his face gently with the cloth, ran it over his eyes, pressed it against his forehead under the silky light hair matted with sweat and filth. Minute by interminable minute she washed him, and heard the sobbing smooth out under the stroking, saw the cheek twitch less often, less violently.

Chester was putting wood in the stove, being helpful, his solemn teary face watching his mother and brother on the bed. Elsa took a firm hold on Bruce's shoulders. “Look, Brucie,” she said. “Look at Chet over there, getting supper for us like a big man.”

While she watched, not breathing, Bruce's eyes wavered, rolled outward from that fixed and inhuman paralysis; some of the glaring white eyeballs, streaked with red, slid back out of sight and the whole pupils appeared briefly. Then, as if the strain were too much, as if normal focus were an effort too great for more than a moment, the pupils rolled back again. Elsa caught her breath with a jerky sigh. Maybe tomorrow, after he had slept ...

But oh God, she said, to treat a child that way!

She had just laid him down on the pillow and started to get something to eat for Chester when Bruce was screaming again, eyes frantically crossed and cheek twitching, his hands clawing at his face and his voice screaming, “Mama, Mama, on my face ... on my nose ... !”

There hadn't really been any decision. As she dragged the round-topped trunk up the steps and propped its lid against the table, she was thinking that you never really made up your mind to anything. You simply bent where the pressure was greatest. You didn't surrender, because surrender was annihilation, but you gave before the pressure.

A light rain fingered the canvas over her head, and she knew the move would be unpleasant, sodden, miserable. But it didn't matter greatly. To leave on a sunny day would be inappropriate; a retreat should be made in weather as miserable as the act itself.

There wasn't much to pack. Bo's clothing she stowed in his brown suitcase and put aside. That could be left at the hotel for him, in case he ever came back. Apart from that there were only her own few clothes, the children's things, the bedding and table linen. Mr. Bane would have whatever else the tent contained—stove, beds, table, bureau, dishes. Mr. Bane had been very kind. He didn't really want the things at all. It was only to help her that he bought them.

Oh, and the rabbits. She straightened, brushing back the hair that fell damply on her forehead. What to do with the rabbits? They couldn't be left, and they could hardly be taken to a boarding-house room in Seattle. She shrugged and gave up thinking about them almost before she had begun. They could be taken along part way, perhaps given to someone along the road. Any child would be glad to get them.

Chester staggered in with a quilt huddled against his chest, dragging in front so that he tripped on it. Bruce came after him, also loaded. They were excited. The move to them was adventure. They didn't know it was retreat.

“What else, Ma?” Chester said.

“You'd better go feed your bunnies,” she said. “There's some carrots in the shed.”

Two minutes later they were back, breathless. “Ma, the bunnies are gone!”

“Are you sure?”

“The pen's empty.”

She went to look. The screen had rusted away at one side of the board floor of the hutch, and something, either the rabbits or something digging from outside, had widened the hole. The boys looked up at her, and she hid her feeling of relief. She had to appear to be sorry.

“Why don't you look around the edge of the brush?” she said. “They're tame, they'd stay around. Take the carrots and call them.”

She went back into the tent and packed the remaining things. In the bureau drawer, back under a collection of odd stockings, she found the tintype of her mother, stood looking at it a moment, curiously emotionless, emptied, unable to remember, somehow, the way she had used to feel when looking at that portrait. She snapped the case shut and laid it in the trunk.

She heard the buckboard come into the clearing, and went to the door. Emil Hurla, one of the bus drivers who lived in Richmond, waved from the seat.

“I'm practically ready,” she said. “The trunk's packed now, if you want to get it.”

Hurla, a great, lumbering man with a gray, pock-marked face, climbed down and got the trunk, muscling it through the door on his thighs. Elsa hurriedly crammed the last rags into her telescope and crushed it shut, strapping it tight. Hurla came in and took it off the table. She looked around at the stripped beds, the empty bureau with its drawers hanging open, the trash littered on the floor, discarded socks, frayed collars, hoarded mop-rags, all the souvenirs of flight. Deliberately, under a compulsion that was more than her ingrained neatness, that was something like a defiance in the midst of panic, she took the stubby broom and swept the whole place, dumping the refuse in the stove and setting fire to it. The boys and Hurla stood in the door and watched her.

“Our bunnies got lost,” Chester said.

Hurla put his hands on his knees and bent down. “Is that right, now?” he said. “That's too bad.”

“They got out of the pen,” Chester said. “We hunted, but we can't find them.”

“Well, now,” Hurla said, “Maybe we ought to look once more.” He lifted his eyes to E.lsa as if to ask if they had time, and when she nodded he went out, the boys after him.

She had pulled out the beds and swept up the dust puppies and had stood the broom back of the stove when she heard Bruce crying. She went to the door. Hurla stood with the well cover lifted on edge, and all three were looking down in.

“Ma!” Chester shouted. “Ma, the bunnies are down there.”

Slowly she went out through the drizzle, her feet sinking soggily in the wet mould, the rain like fine mist in her face. At the well-edge she stopped and peered. Ten feet down, floating whitely, close together, their fur spread by the water like the fur of an angry cat, were the rabbits. The holes under the cover, she supposed, had tempted them in.

“Get a rope!” Chester shouted. “Get something. We got to get them out.”

The sight of Bruce's immense, teary eyes as she turned away made Elsa grit her teeth with momentary fury, as if he were to blame. Then she pulled him against her and took Chester's hand. “It's no use,” she said. “Your bunnies are drowned. It's a shame.”

“But we can't leave them in there,” Chester said. “Ma ...”

She drew them away. Hurla let the cover fall, and Bruce burst out in a wild passionate wail. She lifted him into the buggy, letting him cry, ignoring Chester's worried “Ma, we can't ... Ma.” Hurla climbed up and took the lines. The mist had powdered the wool of his cap like a thin coating of flour.

He sawed the team around, and started out of the clearing. Elsa ducked her head to avoid the first low branches of the old tote road. She did not look back, but she could see in her mind every bush and stump in the clearing, every stain on the canvas roof, every detail of the place that had been home for a year and a half, that had still been home even after Bo ran off to Canada, that she had been fiercely determined to make home. But it was too much, she thought. She couldn't have tried any harder.

Behind her she heard Bruce's crying, furious now because she had not comforted him, and she felt in Chester's silence his grief for the death they left behind them in the well. She couldn't blame them any more than she could help them. There was too much that lay dead behind her. That well and clearing and abandoned tent-house neatly swept and locked against intrusion was a grave-stone in her life. There had been other gravestones, but this was the worst, because it was more than a hope or a home that lay dead there. It was her marriage. Though she had not admitted it before, she knew that one reason she had tried so hard to keep the café going and to hold to the clearing was the hope that some day Bo would come back.