The Big Rock Candy Mountain (49 page)

He wouldn't try to come through today. There was no use worrying. Besides, it was time to get the boys' supper. Shut in, they did nothing but eat. They had been piecing all day, and still they said periodically, every ten minutes, “Ma, when do we eat?”

Still she went back to the buttonholes for a few more minutes, unwilling just yet to break her listening. But what if, her mind said slyly, Bo stopped somewhere along the road and they had the flu there? Or what if he got so sick on the road he couldn't make it to shelter?

For one catastrophic instant she saw the image of cattle frozen by the roadsides in the spring, still frozen but bloated, horrible, obscene as the spring thaws softened them for the final decay, and she gritted her teeth and stood up. It was then that she heard the unmistakable thumping on the porch.

When she opened the door a short, involuntary cry was wrenched out of her. A man was stretched out on the steps, feet trailing in the broken snow, and another man was pulling at his shoulders, trying to drag him. He turned his head at her cry, and his grim face, only nose and eyes showing from the fur cap, brought her flying out to help him. Together they dragged the heavy figure of the other man into the hallway. The boys were in the door. “Get out of the way!” Bo said harshly, and shouldered through them.

They laid the man down, and in the light from the front room Elsa recognized Ole Pederson. His cheeks and nose were leprous white, and he had evidently been crying, because his eyelids were stuck fast with ice. Her eyes darted to Bo. “Oh, I was afraid ... I” she said. “Where ... ?” She was noticing twenty things at once —the rattling icicles beaten into the hair of the dogskin coat, the monstrous hulk of Bo's shoulders, the harsh jut of brows and nose from the fur cap, the way he stood with feet wide apart, swaying, the telltale white patches on cheeks and nose. In one quick glance, while she moved to shut the door on the curving lee-side wind, she saw all those things, and her hands and feet and voice leaped into action all at once.

“Lie down on the couch,” she said to Bo. “Chet, get a dishpan full of snow. Bruce, run upstairs and get some blankets and quilts, anything.” Reaching outside, she scooped a handful of snow and slammed the door. The boys were still stupidly staring at Ole's corpse-like body; Bo stood in the hall door, swaying a little and grinning at her. She hustled the boys off, slapped the handful of snow into his face and held it there. He stood for it quietly, and when the last white patch had disappeared, wiped his face clumsily on a towel, his hands still cased in the icy mitts. He was stooping to look at Ole when Elsa got the pan of snow from Chet and came up. He motioned her away.

“Stay away from him, all of you,” he said.

Deliberately, as if contemptuous of his own samaritanism, he smeared snow in Ole's face with a mittened hand, found it clumsy, and held out his hands to Elsa. “Pull these off,” he said.

The leather was frozen stiff, curved from the wheel, and the mitts came off hard. When they came, Elsa cried out again. Bo's fingers were white clear to the second joint. She tried to push them down in the pan of snow, but he snarled at her and brushed her away. She watched helplessly while his frozen fingers rubbed snow on the frozen cheeks and nose and chin of the Swede. In a minute she had started forward to pull at him. “Let me,” she said, “if he has to be fixed first.”

“Get back!” he said. He waved at the boys, crowding on the stairway to look down. “You too. Get away on back.”

“What's the matter with him?” she said. “Is he hurt?”

Bo didn't answer. He tried to take off Ole's mittens, could not grip them with his own wooden hands, and ended by pulling them off with his teeth. Ole's hands were all right.

On his heels beside the Swede, Bo squatted and washed his hands in the pan. “I don't know what to do about this big sucker,” he said finally. “I don't want you tending him. He's got the flu, I guess.”

“Chester,” Elsa said without turning her head. “Call up Doctor O‘Malley and tell him if he's going to pick up Jim Van Dam as soon as the storm stops, he'd better pick up Ole here, too.”

“Van Dam got it?” Bo said.

“I was over there helping this afternoon.”

Their eyes met, and Bo shrugged. “Then I guess there's no use taking care. I didn't want to bring him home, but there wasn't anything else I could do with the guy.”

“Brucie,” Elsa said, “you start taking off Pa's moccasins. Chet, soon as you telephone, get a new pan of snow and a bucket of water.”

Leaving Ole on the floor under a quilt, she led Bo in to the couch. He walked awkwardly, his face fiery red now, and his hair on end. Coming out of the bearish bulkiness of the coat, his head and neck had a curiously frail human look that made Elsa shake her head. You got used to thinking of Bo as capable of anything, but this drive must have been close. She steered her mind away from how close it must have been. His hands and face frozen, maybe his feet ...

“Hurry!” she said to Bruce. “Hustle!”

Her own hands were busy kneading his fingers in the pan of snow, working them, stripping them like the teats of a cow, rubbing down the wrists. “Feel anything?” He shook his head.

“Let's get a little closer to the fire,” he said. He started to rise, but she pushed him back.

“You stay away from the fire!” She rubbed at the cold, curved, inhuman fingers, and relief brought tears to her eyes. “Oh Bo!” she said. “You shouldn't have tried to come through!”

Bruce was pulling with both hands at the heavy socks, their tops stiff frozen. One came off, and Elsa, looking down, winced. The feet too, waxen and ribbed by the ribs of the socks like something hardened in a mold. She looked at Bo's red, unshaven face, and he winked at her, drawing down the corners of his mouth. “Too many patients for you, Mama,” he said.

Elsa dumped snow in Chet's pail of water, rolled up Bo's trouser legs, and set both feet in the pail. The water slopped over, but she went on working, shifting from fingers to toes. “Feel anything yet?”

“Hands a little. I haven't felt my feet since we tipped over.”

That brought her head up. “Tipped over? How did you get in then?”

“I drove in,” Bo said. His mood seemed to have changed suddenly; he looked and sounded savage, as if the very memory made him mad.

“But,” she said, still rubbing. “If you tipped over ...”

“I tipped it back up,” he said harshly. “Don't ask me how. I don't know how. I don't know how I got in, either, so you needn't ask me that. I didn't know I was here till I ran into the fence.”

“Oh my Lord,” Elsa said softly. “You're lucky!”

He grunted irritably. “Yeah. I'm lucky I ran into that big dumb Ole and had to bring him in. I'm lucky I froze my face and hands and feet. I'm lucky I broke God knows how many bottles of hooch. I'm lucky as hell, all right.”

She kept still, and later, when the pain came like fire into his hands and feet and he roared at her to let him alone, she did as he asked. There was nothing she knew about the care of frost-bite except to keep it from thawing out too fast, to prevent gangrene. Maybe he'd get gangrene anyway. It had taken a long time to get the blood back into his feet. And all, she said in one spiteful instant, for a load of whiskey and a few dollars!

Because Bo was in too much pain now to put his weight on his feet, she got the boys to help knock one of the upstairs beds apart and set it up again in the dining room. Ole Pederson came out of his stupor and moaned, and she tugged and dragged and rolled him onto the couch in the parlor. Then she fed the boys and sent them off to bed.

 

Curiously, that night was one of almost blissful peace. Her worry was gone, Bo was home and safe. The blizzard whined and howled and pounded around the house, and the thermometer on the porch dropped steadily until at ten o‘clock it hovered around twenty below. But the parlor stove was brick red, there was a comfortable, lazy smell of baking paint from the asbestos mat in the corner. She sat on the edge of the bed in the dining room and talked to Bo quietly, remembering the other time she had had to rub his frosted face with snow, the day she and Bo had decided to be married. Ole Pederson, in the other room, drank the duck soup she fixed for him and sank into a light, mumbling sleep, and with the lamp blown out she and Bo talked.

He told her about Chinook, and the fear that was chasing everybody inside to hibernate.

“A lot of people wouldn't have brought Ole in,” she said, and smoothed the hair back from his forehead.

Bo grunted. “All this running away. If it's going to get you it's going to get you.”

“Funny,” Elsa said. “Once it comes right into your own house you're not scared any more. It's just like any sickness, and it doesn't paralyze you the way it did at first.”

“If you're not scared you're the only person in Saskatchewan that isn't.” He reached out to pull her down for a kiss, and flinched back. She felt the jerk of his body, and a slow, warm, tender amusement filled her. He could overcome almost anything, do almost anything, but give him a little pain and put him in bed and he was the biggest baby on earth. A woman could stand twice as much. It was like the way the flu seemed to take the biggest and strongest men, as if their very strength was their weakness.

She moved, and Bo hissed at her through gritted teeth to go easy. When she dragged the covers over his feet that way she liked to killed him.

“What will you do about the things in the car?” she said. “You can't walk, and you can't hold anything in your hands.”

“I don't know. Unless maybe you and the kids can get it in. None of it's very heavy but the keg, and that'll roll.”

“We'll get it,” she said. “Are you sure it's all right out there tonight? Won't it freeze, or something?”

He roared with laughter that clicked off against his teeth when the pain hit him. “Old Mama!” he said. “It'll freeze about as quick as the thermometer will.”

“How about the car radiator?”

“Have to get a new one,” he said. “That'll be froze solid before now. I wasn't in very good shape to drain her when I pulled in.”

“No,” she said, and stooped carefully to kiss his raw, hot face. “You couldn't have gone on much longer, could you?”

“It was pretty touchy for a while.”

“Mmmm,” she said, quiet now, at rest, warm and peaceful and in possession of her husband and her home, and not afraid of anything because somehow they'd pull through it. They always did. She lay down beside him, and he turned to nuzzle in her throat. His lips nipped softly at the skin under her jaw.

“Take off your clothes,” he whispered.

“How about Ole?”

“He's dead to the world.”

“Don't talk that way. He might really be.”

“He's all right. Take them off.”

“But your hands,” she said. “Your feet ...”

“I don't need any hands or feet.”

“Well,” she said, softly laughing. “If you want to hurt yourself ...”

“I want to hurt you too,” he said, and bit her suddenly in the side of the neck. “I want us both to lie here and love and hurt together and then I want to sleep for twenty-four hours.”

 

But in the morning the peace was gone, along with the violence of the wind. When she slid out of bed, Bo still slept, one swollen hand up to his cheek. His breath was quick and noisy. She started to feel his forehead, but didn't for fear of waking him. In the other room Ole Pederson was blazing with fever, his voice so weak that she could hardly make out what he said. Blood had oozed in tiny droplets through the pores of his cheeks and nose, and the inert helplessness of his body alarmed her. In slippers and robe she padded into the kitchen to make up the fire and get some breakfast going.

The rattling of the stove when she shook down the ashes woke Bo. He felt hot, he said, and his eternally God damned hands and feet were killing him. His back felt as if a log had dropped across it, and his bones ached. For a while she went on trying to believe that his fever was from the frost-bite and the terrible trip, but after breakfast he gurgled frantically, waved his arm, grew purple. She ran with a pan and he leaned out of bed to vomit, every joint tortured with retching, his eyes shut and the sweat standing out on his forehead in great drops. She remembered Jim Van Dam yesterday, the big man helpless as a stunned calf, and she couldn't pretend any more.

The sleigh from the livery stable came just after she and Chet had finished getting the liquor in from the Ford. The house stank with the smell from the seven broken bottles when Lars Poulsen knocked on the door and said to get the patients ready, he'd go get Van Dam and be back. He stood on the porch and chewed tobacco rhythmically, watching her from under his felt cap.

“See your car got left out.”

“Yes.”

“Bo out driving when the wind come on?”

She hesitated a moment. “Yes.”

“Where's he now?” Poulsen said. “Like to see him a minute.”

“Come in,” she said. “He's sick. I was just going to ask you to take him in to the schoolhouse.”

Poulsen came in, stood at Bo's bedside. “Fella told me you had some hooch for sale,” he said.

“Who told you that?”

“I dunno. One of the guys.” He lifted his head and sniffed. “Smells like he had it about right.”

“What do you want?” Bo said. “I'm sort of laid out. Sis'll get it for you.”

“How much is it?” Elsa said. “I don't know anything about it.”

“I can tell you, can't I?” he said. “Get a pencil and I'll make you a price list. You'll have to run this thing if I'm getting lugged off to the hospital.”