The Big Rock Candy Mountain (31 page)

“It looks ...” she said. “It looks as if it had been opened.”

“Customs,” George said. “They'd have to open anything coming in from Canada.”

“Oh,” she said, relieved. Her fingers unrolled the paper. A pair of overshoes came in sight, and her eyes went blurry, her whole body stiff with disappointment, as she looked at them. On her knees, the children over her shoulder, she hung as if clinging for her life. The overshoes were smeared with yellow mud from top to sole.

Frantically, telling herself it was a joke, a bad joke, but meant to be funny, she unrolled the second package. Another smaller pair of overshoes, smeared like the first ones. Bruce's voice, shrill, angry at being cheated, cut through the room. “Why they're old!” he said.

Elsa's face was hot as fire, her blood so wild with rage that she felt smothered. Violently she tore the paper off the third parcel and shook out the contents. It was a coat with a fur collar. There was mud spattered on it, and the collar, ripped half off, hung askew.

Not a person in the room said a word as she stood up. She fought to smile, fought to make her voice bright. “All right,” she said. “That's all. They,must have got dirtied by the customs inspectors. We'll wash them off tomorrow. Time for bed, now.”

Henry Mossman picked up one of the overshoes and rubbed with his fingers at the dried mud. “That's about the worst I ever saw,” he said. “Open packages and ruin everything in them.” He looked at Elsa, and his eyes dropped. “I'll wash them off at the pump,” he said. “They must have thrown them down in a puddle and stamped on them.”

“Thank you, Henry,” Elsa said. The stiff smile still on her face, she motion to Chet and Bruce. Chet looked at her solemnly, hanging to the handlebars of his tricycle. “Is that all Pa sent?” he said. “Is that all, Ma?”

Sick and humiliated, furious at the people in the room who sat silently and watched her shame, she herded them off to bed. She did not come down again, but went to bed to lie wakeful, bitter and raging, cringing at the thought of facing all of them tomorrow, beating against the brutal, unanswerable question of why he had sent things like that for Christmas gifts. Because she didn't believe, any more than the people downstairs did, that the customs inspectors were responsible.

Even the explanation, when it came, only made her bite her lips in vexation. That was the way Bo was, and there was no changing him. Everything he did was characteristic, blind, yet from one point of view reasonable, practical, full of insensitive logic.

The letter came two days after Christmas. The envelope had been stamped “Return to Sender,” and stamps had been stuck on over the post office lettering. It was meant to reach her before the package, but he had forgotten the stamps, again characteristically.

She read it coming home from town, where she had fled to escape the house, get clear of Sarah's closed and vindicated tace and the children's sullen reluctance to wear their scrubbed overshoes. The day before, she had sat a long time mending the ripped collar of the coat, and her whole mind had been one impossible question, Why? It was a nice coat, with a fox collar. It had cost a good deal. But the smears of mud, the rips. To buy new things and then spoil them before putting them in the mail.

Dear Elsa, the letter said.

 

There hasn't been any answer to my letter except that post card saying you were staying at home. What's the matter, honey? I've been up here working my head off to get a stake, and you won't even write more than a post card. I know you had a tough time in Richmond, but I honestly thought the joint would give you a living. Anyway I'm sorry, but I told you that before. You don't know how lonesome a place like this can be, just sitting around the stove and spitting in the door with a lot of section hands that don't know their behinds from thirty cents a week. The place is dead as a doornail, with winter here, and so cold you can't stick your nose out without freezing it off. The foreman of the Half Diamond Bar and I got the Chink cook to stick his tongue on a cold doorknob the other day and he like to tore all the hide off it trying to get away. You never heard such a jabber. But there isn't much doing. I've been drawing plans for a house I might build if you don't spoil everything by staying mad. Four gables, a bedroom in each one, and a big verandah. I've got three lots along the river on the high side where it won't ever flood out, and I'm sort of reserving one for us. You and the kids would like it up here. It's a swell climate in summer, sunshine sixteen hours a day.

I sent a box for Christmas today. When you open it you'll find the overshoes dirty and the coat torn a little, because I found out that new clothes sent across the line had a big duty slapped on them, but you can send second-hand ones without any duty. Money don't grow on trees so thick that I could, afford to miss foxing the customs guys. The collar ought to sew right back on, and you can wash the mud off the boots easy. I got the coat when I came through Moose Jaw after I left Seattle. The collar is gray fox. I hope you think of me once in a while when you wear it, and that you'll write me a decent letter and say you'll come up here in the spring.

Love,
Bo

 

P.S. Merry Christmas. Tell the kids Merry Christmas too. If Chet is in school now maybe he has learned to write and can write his old man a letter.

 

Elsa leaned against a tree and sighed, and laughed aloud, and crushed the letter in her hand. Every word from him was full of the tangle of emotional pulls that had wearied her mind for months. He missed her, he missed the boys, he would love a letter from Chet—she could imagine his pride as he showed such a letter around—he honestly wanted her back, he would promise anything. And he sent her gifts that were not gifts, but slaps in the face that shamed her for him in front of everybody, yet the gifts had been well meant. It was only the saving of a few miserable dollars of duty that had made him spoil them. And his optimism, his incurable conviction that this time he was going to make his pile, the old, endless, repetitive story of his whole life ...

A letter from him always weakened her resolution, made her wonder if she were doing right to stay away from him. Before she could soften herself too much with thinking she went home and wrote him a letter, a letter she could not help making kind. But she couldn't come back. The boys were coming out of their kinks, they had something like a home for the first time, they had friends and playmates and were healthy and happy. She was dreadfully sorry and unhappy, but she couldn't risk their futures any more. If he wanted a divorce she would agree, because she couldn't expect him not to want to be free under the circumstances. She had used the two checks he sent for the boys, and was keeping what was left to be spent on them when they needed things. He needn't feel any responsibility for her. The kids talked about him a lot, they hadn't forgotten him.

Across the bottom she wrote her thanks for the Christmas gifts, and she could not bring herself to mention how they had been received. It was a lovely coat, the overshoes were very useful in the deep snow they were having. The thought of how much he might be hurt if she told him the truth, how he had spent a lot of money on the coat and was staying up in a lonesome village hoping she might come back to him, kept her pen in the easy platitudes of thanks. She would lie before she would hurt him that way.

It was almost as if the necessity of protecting him, of keeping from him the knowledge of what a catastrophe his gifts had been, made the problem of living under the shadow of her family's unspoken condemnation harder to bear. She found herself on the brink of flaring out and defending him a half dozen times when their talk or their gestures or their very silence steered close to the disapproval they felt. They had known it all the time, their silence said, and now they were half pleased to have their judgment vindicated. Sometimes she felt like shouting at them, and as Kristin's marriage came closer she felt more and more how impossible it would be to stay on after her one friend was gone from the house. If it hadn't been for the children, she would not have stayed a week.

Then in mid-April Kristin was married, and after she and George had fled in a shower of rice and old shoes for a honeymoon in Florida that made Sarah lift her eyes in deprecation of such ungodly extravagance, the house was the dull burying ground she had known it would be. Her life went on from day to day by sufferance, not by any will or direction of its own. The weeks crept through their routine of housework and Sunday quiet, Sarah went beside her through the house like a mute, walked the four blocks to and from church like an automaton, spoke hardly ten words a day. Even the lavish flowering of the wild plum tree by the side of the house, and the misty green spread below her bedroom window, were tinged with the melancholy of something long-lost and past reclaiming. Her heart was no longer in this house, there was nothing for her here.

On the last day of April, when she was sweeping the porch, Henry Mossman came by and stood with his hat in his hand and asked her if she would like to bring the boys and come on a picnic the next Saturday afternoon. He asked her lamely, not knowing how she, a married woman, would feel about going out with him, humbly ready to assume that probably she wouldn't want to.

“I just remembered that other picnic we went on once,” he said. “Pretty near ten years ago. When we had the buggy race and your dad walked on his hands.”

“That was a lovely,day,” she said. “I've never forgotten it.”

“Like to come this time? We might be lucky and get another perfect day.”

“I shouldn‘t,” she said. “I might get you talked about, Henry.”

“That's what I was wondering,” Henry said. “Not about me, about you.”

“It wouldn't bother me.”

“Then let's go,” Henry said. “Nobody who ever knew you would talk about you a minute, and the rest of them don't matter.” He lifted his face and smiled. She noticed how fine his eyes were, what a sweet and quizzical and gentle expression he always wore.

“The boys ought to have fun,” Henry said. “I'll come around about one, then.”

Standing with her back to the unfriendly house she felt the sudden trembling as if tears were fighting to emerge. She said, “I guess I've never known anyone as kind as you, Henry.”

Henry quirked his lips in his half-humorous, self-derogatory smile. “I'd rather hear you say that than anyone I can think of,” he said.

That was on Wednesday. On Friday the boy from the station came up with a telegram for Elsa Mason. It was from Bo, and he was in Minneapolis. He wanted her to meet him there Saturday afternoon.

 

“I'm dreadfully sorry, Henry,” she said. “It's just that ... he's come a long way ...”

“Sure,” he said. “Of course. You want to go.”

He stood behind the counter of his hardware store in a black alpaca jacket, stroking the ends of his mustache, and her own uncertain state made her clairvoyantly sensitive to the stages by which he put away his disappointment,

“You were banking on it,” she said. “I'm awfully sorry.”

Henry reached out and swung the handles of three rakes hanging from the rafter. “Well, I won't say I'm glad he came just when he did.”

She felt driven to explain, to justify Bo and herself. “I guess he won't come down here,” she said. “He knows they don't like him. But when he comes all that way I can't just ...”

“Why sure,” Henry said. “You want to go right up. Don't worry about me.”

Full of obscure and stubborn shame, Elsa started for the door. “Thank you, Henry,” she said. She always seemed to hurt him, no matter how hard she tried not to. It always came down to a choice, and she always chose against him.

Henry came around the counter and followed her to the entrance. The street outside lay sleepily dead, a tired horse drooped on three feet a few doors down. “Elsa,” Henry said.

She stopped.

“I want to tell you something,” Henry said. “I had a half idea I might tell you at the picnic, sort of reproduce that one ten years ago.” He was perfectly serious, perfectly self-assured. The awkwardness had fallen away, even his stoop wasn't noticeable. “I don't want to butt into anything that isn't my business,” he said, “but I can't help knowing a few things. Maybe what I've heard is right and maybe it isn't. I don't care. I just want you to know what I think.”

She watched him. “One thing I want to tell you,” he said, “is that no matter what other folks think of your husband, I always liked him. I never saw Mr. Mason except that one winter a little, but I liked him.”

Elsa wet her lips. “It's kind of you to say that.”

“I don't know what's the trouble between you and Mr. Mason. That's none of my business either. Sarah said something once, but I didn't listen much.” He looked out into the street. “I don't know what the trouble is and there's no reason I should know. Sarah said you wanted to get a divorce and couldn't. I don't know. But if you did do anything like that, and you didn't want to stay on with your folks ...”

His face turned to meet hers. “I'm no better than I was ten years ago,” he said, “and I'm not any younger. But I'd be proud to ask you the same thing I did then, if you should find yourself free.”

Elsa bent her head. Every little thing lately seemed to make her cry.

“I like Mr. Mason,” Henry was saying, “and you know I'm not prying at you to get you to divorce him. I just wanted you to know, just in case, so you would have it in mind as a possibility.”

She was crying quietly with her head down.

“Don‘t,” Henry said. “Please, Elsa. You don't have to say anything, or make up your mind, or anything. You go on up on Saturday and see him and I'll take the kids to the picnic.”