The Big Rock Candy Mountain (99 page)

Into the grave. Into lot 6, block 37, beside Elsa Mason and Chester Mason, and let the bodies of the united family unite more intimately in the deep earth than they ever did in life. There is the makings of a man in that family, and more of it than I ever thought will have to come out of the tissues of my father.

The preacher stopped. Bruce had not heard him for several minutes. Now he saw him fold his hands and bend his head. From the pews behind, where a sprinkling of acquaintances, nondescript pall-bearers recruited from his father's old intimates, banker and broker and bootlegger and pimp, sat and listened to the preacher's words, there came a light sniffle. The attendants came to the edge of the curtains and stood ready. The minister finished his short prayer, the chapel organ began to cough and mourn. Dry-eyed, Bruce stood up and stepped three steps forward to where the coffin lay open. He had not yet brought himself to look at his father's body.

The heavy square hands were crossed on the neatly-pressed coat-front. The thinning hair was brushed back, and the right temple, where the bullet had entered, was so smoothly patched with wax that only a knowing eye could have detected it. The mouth was gentle, almost humorously curved; the jaw was blunt and strong. Whatever violence had been in the face had been erased.

But what he noticed most strongly, before the attendants stepped forward and lowered the lid of the casket, was the enormous, powerful arch of his father's chest, and the width of the shoulders in the satin-lined box.

As he followed the handful of people out through the entrance into the sun of the court, he could feel no grief for his father, nor for his mother and brother whose graves were grassy beside the new raw hole at the cemetery. He could think only of the brightness of the sun, an excessive sparkling brightness, as if there were some meaning in it, or a blessing, and he saw the sweep of the spring-green slopes up to the worn peaks above Dry Canyon. His past was upon him, the feeling he had had two or three times that he bore his whole family's history in his own mind, and he remembered the time when he had gone with his mother and father on a picnic to the Bearpaw Mountains, the wonder and delight of his childhood, and the shadow behind it of the things that his mind had caught from infancy, from other times, from some dim remoteness that gave up its meaning slowly and incompletely. He remembered the great snake his father had killed by the roadside, and the gopher that had come slimy and stretched from the snake's mouth, and the feeling he had had then was like the feeling he had now: it was a good thing to have been along and seen, a thing to be remembered and told about, a thing that he and his father shared.

Perhaps that was what it meant, all of it. It was good to have been along and to have shared it. There were things he had learned that could not be taken away from him. Perhaps it took several generations to make a man, perhaps it took several combinations and re-creations of his mother's gentleness and resilience, his father's enormous energy and appetite for the new, a subtle blending of masculine and feminine, selfish and selfless, stubborn and yielding, before a proper man could be fashioned.

He was the only one left to fulfill that contract and try to justify the labor and the harshness and the mistakes of his parents' lives, and that responsibility was so clearly his, was so great an obligation, that it made unimportant and unreal the sight of the motley collection of pall-bearers staggering under the weight of his father's body, and the back door of the hearse closing quietly upon the casket and the flowers.

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