The Big Rock Candy Mountain (38 page)

“Well!” said Elsa in relief. “Who would have thought of coming up backwards.”

“Got more power in reverse,” Bo said. “Can't make it one way, try another.”

“Yay!” the boy said. He was standing up, watching the deep insides of the earth appear behind the angled rock, and his mind was soaring again, up into the heights where a hawk or eagle circled like a toy bird on a string.

“How do you like it?” his mother shouted at him. He turned around and nodded his head, and she smiled at him. She looked excited herself. Her face had color in it and the varnished grapes on her hat gave her a reckless, girlish look.

“Hi, Ma,” he said.

“Hi yourself.” He lifted his face and yelled with the pressure of happiness inside him.

 

They lay on a ledge high up on the sunny east slope and looked out to the north through a notch cut as sharply as a wedge out of a pie. Far below them the golden plain spread level, golden-tawny grass and golden-green wheat checkerboarded in a pattern as wide as the world. Back of them the spring they had followed up the slope welled out of the ledge, spread out in a narrow swampy spot, and ran off down the hill. There were trees, a thick cluster of spruce against the bulge of the wall above, a clump of twinkling, sunny aspen down the slope, and in the canyon bottom below, a dense forest of soft maple. His mother had a bouquet of leaves in her hand, a bunch of spruce cones on the ground beside her. The three lay quietly, looking down over the steeply-dropping wall to the V-shaped door, and beyond that to the plain.

The boy wriggled his back against the rock, put his hand down to shift himself, brought it up prickled with spruce needles. He picked them off, still staring down over the canyon gateway. They were far above the world he knew. The air was clearer, thinner. There was cold water running from the rock, and all around there were trees. And over the whole canyon, like a haze in the clear air, was that other thing, that memory or ghost of a memory, a swing he had fallen out of, the feel of his hands sticky with blackberries, his skin drinking cool shade, and his father's anger—the reflection of ecstasy and the shadow of tears.

“I never knew till this minute,” his mother said, “how I've missed the trees.”

Nobody answered. They were all stuffed with lunch, pleasantly tired after the climb. Bo lay looking off down the canyon, and the sour smell of his pipe, in that air, was pleasant and clean. The boy saw his mother put the stem of a maple leaf in her mouth and make a half-pleased face at the bitter taste.

Bo rose and dug a tin cup from the picnic box, walked to the spring and dipped himself a drink. He made a breathy sound of satisfaction. “So cold it hurts your teeth,” he said. He brought Elsa a cup, and she drank.

“Brucie?” she said, motioning with the cup.

He started to get up, but his father filled the cup and brought it to him, making believe he was going to pour it on him. The boy ducked and reached for the cup. With his eyes on his father over the brim he drank, testing the water to see if it really did hurt his teeth. The water was cold and silvery in his mouth, and when he swallowed he felt it cold clear down to his stomach.

“It doesn't either hurt your teeth,” he said. He poured a little on his arm, and something jumped in his skin. It was his skin that remembered. Something numbingly cold, and then warm. He felt it now, the way you waded in it.

“Mom,” he said.

“What?”

“Was it in Washington we went on a picnic like this and picked blackberries and I fell out of a swing and there were big trees, and we found a river that was half cold and half warm?”

His father was relighting his pipe. “What do you know about Washington? You were only knee-high to a grasshopper when we lived there.” He looked at Elsa, and she made a curious puzzled, almost-warning face. They were both watching him.

“Well, I remember,” the boy said. “I've been remembering it all day, ever since you sang that song about building the Rocky Mountains. You sang it that day, too. Don't you remember, Mom?”

“I don't know,” she said doubtfully. “We went on picnics in Washington.”

“What's this about a river with hot and cold running water?” his father said. “You must be remembering some time you had a bath in a bathtub.”

“I do not!” the boy said. “I got blackberries mashed all over my hands and Mom scrubbed me off, and then we found that river and waded in it and half was hot and half was cold.”

“Ohhhh,” his mother said. “I believe I do.... Bo, you remember once up in the Cascades, when we went out from Richmond with the Curtises? And little Bill Curtis fell in the lake.” She turned to the boy. “Was there a summer cottage there, a brown shingled house?”

“I don't know,” the boy said. “I don't remember any. Curtises. But I remember blackberries and that river and a swing.”

“Your head is full of blackberries,” his father said. “If it was the time we went out with the Curtises there weren't any blackberries. That was in the spring.”

“No,” Elsa said. “It was in the fall, just after we moved to Richmond. And I think there was a place where one river from the mountains ran into another. from the valley and they ran .alongside each other in the same channel. The mountain one was a lot colder. Don't you remember that trip with the Curtises, Bo?”

“Sure I remember it,” he said. “We hired a buckboard and saw a black bear and I won six bits from Joe Curtis pitching horseshoes.”

“That's right,” the mother said. “You remember the bear, Brucie.”

The boy shook his head. There wasn't any bear in what he remembered. Just feelings, things that made his skin prickle.

His mother was looking at him, a little puzzled wrinkle between her eyes. “It's funny you should remember such different things than we remember,” she said. “Everything means something different to everybody, I guess.” She laughed, and the boy thought her eyes looked very odd and bright. “It makes me feel as if I didn't know you at all,” she said.

She brushed her face with the handful of leaves and watched Bo gathering up odds and ends and putting them in the basket. “I wonder what each of us will remember about today?”

“I wouldn't worry about it,” he said. “You can depend on Bub here to remember a lot of things that didn't happen.”

“I don't think he does,” she said. “He's got a good memory.”

He picked up the box. “It takes a good memory to remember things that never happened. I remember once a garter snake crawled into my crib and I used it for a belt to keep my breech-clout on. They took it away from me and I bawled the crib so full of tears I had to swim for shore. I drifted in three days later on a checkerboard raft with a didie for a sail.”

The boy stood up and brushed off his pants. “You do too remember that river,” he said.

His father grinned at him. “Sure. Only it wasn't quite as hot and cold as you make it out.”

It was evening in the canyon, but when they reached the mouth again they emerged into full afternoon, with two hours of sun left them. Bo stopped the car before they dipped into the gravelly wash between the foothills, and they all looked back at the steep thrust of the mountains, purpling in the shadows, the rock glowing golden-red far back on the faces of the inner peaks. Elsa still held the bouquet of maple leaves in her hand.

“Well, there go the Mountains of the Moon,” she said. The moment was almost solemn. In the front seat the boy stood up to look , back. He felt the sun strong against the side of his face; the mountains sheering up before him were very real and solid. In a little while, as they went north, they would begin to melt together, and the patches of snow would appear far.up on the northern slopes. His eyes went out of focus so that he saw the mountains as they would appear from the homestead on a clear day, a ghostly line on the horizon.

He felt his father twist toward him, but the trance was so strong that he did not look down. When he finally did, he caught his mother and father looking at each other, the look they had for moments when he had pleased them or made them proud of him.

“Okay,” his father said, and stabbed him in the ribs with a hard thumb. “Wipe the black bears out of your eyes.”

He started the car, and as they bounced down the rocky trail toward the road he sang at the top of his voice, bellowing into the still, hot afternoon:

The boy looked up at his father, his laughter bubbling up, everything wonderful, the day a swell day, his mother clapping hands in time to his father's fool singing.

“Aw, for gosh sakes,” he said, and ducked when his father pretended he was going to swat him one.

There were days in July when they went out together along the wheat field, the long narrow strip stretching almost a mile from the pasture fence to the Montana line. They all carried pails of wheat wet and swollen and sweet-smelling from strychnine, and dropped a tablespoonful at every gopher hole they found. This was the crucial time, as far as the gophers were concerned. The wheat was a foot high, and the gophers liked it best at that stage, when they could break down the spears and get at the tender joints. Already, in. spite of the boy's trapping and snaring and poisoning, there were patches as big as a table along the edges of the field where the wheat was broken and eaten down close to the ground.

“You ought to get out here with your traps more,” Bo said. “You spend too much time in the pasture, where it doesn't matter.”

“They come down for water, though,” the boy said. “There's one hole by the dam where I've caught nineteen already.”

“Well, you aren't catching them all,” said his father. “If this poison doesn't thin them down you'll have to trap all up and down this field.”

“I'll get ‘em. I sort of hate to poison them because then I don't get the tails.”

“Forget about the tails. You've got to keep this field from look. ing as if it had the mange.”

They went clear to the line, to the heavy iron post that marked the international boundary, along the foot of the field, and back up the other side between the wheat and the flax. Bo was sweating heavily under his wide straw hat. “I was a sucker to make that field so long and narrow,” he said. “It'd be a lot handier if it was wider and not so long.”

Elsa looked at him and smiled. “You wanted to plow a furrow a mile long and straight as a string,” she said.

“Well, I plowed her. Maybe I'm no farmer, but I plowed her a mile long and six inches deep and straight as the team could walk.”

“I know,” she said, and lifted her straw hat from her red hair tc let the wind cool her. “You've done fine with it.”

Reaching down for a clod, he crumbled it between his fingers. “Dry pretty far down,” he said. “We could stand a rain.”

“It'll rain,” she said. “It has to. Even so, I think the wheat looks awfully good.” She wiped her forehead on her sleeve and smiled.

“It better,” he said. He looked down the green shimmer of the field and set the edges of his teeth precisely together. “By God,” he said, “if it doesn't make for us this year I'll ...” He could think of nothing bad enough to do. “It sure better rain,” he said. “With wheat two and a half a bushel it better rain.”

“If we get a crop will you fix up the house a little?” she said.

“Fix it up how?”

“Paint it, maybe. And rig some kind of water system so I could plant flowers and things.”

“Old Mama,” he said. “Wants a cottage with roses round the door.”

“Well, I do. It's so barren the way it is. It's like camping in the place. Ever since we went to the mountains I've had the itch to fix it up.”

“I tell you one thing,” he said, “if we don't make it this year we won't even be camping in it. We'll be going some place where we can make a living.”

“We've made a living. Even with the drouth last year and the rust the year before we made a living.”

He stooped to lay a spoonful of poison at a gopher hole. “When we came up here,” he said, “we didn't come up just to make a living. We came up to make a pile.”

 

They watched the sky those days, watched the southeast where the June rains had come from. Nothing but the fitful glare of heat lightning rewarded their watching, but even without rain the wheat grew strongly. From day to day the boy thought he could see the difference, for the days were warm and endless, and when he dug into the ground it was warm for five or six inches down.

The gophers were under control, though there were still hundreds of them. He had almost fifteen hundred tails in the cigar box, tied into bundles of a hundred so that he didn't have to spend all afternoon counting them. And he had taken to drowning out gophers along the coulee by the dam. There were always some there, now that the dry spell was on, and it was fun to sic Spot on the hole while he ran with buckets. Spot learned fast. He would stand quivering with excitement, with his nose down the hole, while the boy was gone, and when the water came he backed up one step and waited, whining and watching the hole. When the gopher popped out, wet and slick and dark with the water, Spot would snap once, and that was the end of Mister Gopher.