The Big Rock Candy Mountain (39 page)

There were days, during that hot July, when they got into the Ford and went down to the little stream by Pete and Emil and had a swim in the lukewarm, barely-running water. Those were good days. But as July passed and the rain held off a tension,came into the house. His father sang less at breakfast-making, and he was likely to stand in the door facing another cloudless morning and swear under his breath. His mother went around often with her lips pressed together and her eyes worried, and he saw how she avoided talk whenever she could.

When thunderheads did build up, the tension pulled harder, and there was a difference in the way they stood and watched. In June they had waited confidently, because if this one blew over the ground was still good and moist, and there would be another one soon anyway. But now there was a half expectation that the clouds would come to nothing, because there had been false alarms a half dozen times. Once or twice they watched storms get near enough to drop a few heavy pellets of rain in the baked dooryard, and whistle their winds through the screens of the porch so that they ran to roll down the canvas blinds. But by the time they got the porch snug the pelting would have stopped, and they would stand in the doorway again and see blue sky coming like a falsely-smiling enemy behind the hopeful dark of the cloud.

That tension invaded the private life of the boy, too. The farm was no longer a world invented simply for his exploration and delight. Seeing his father glum, his mother silent, he felt a compulsion to do something. The only thing he could do was to destroy gophers, and though they were not the real danger now, their decimation at least gave him the sense of helping. He was in the pasture and along the field three or four times a day, and from his lookout in the sleeping porch he kept the coulee bank always under his eye when he was in the house. The minute a gopher showed on the tawny slope he was out with a bucket as if he belonged to a volunteer fire company.

“By God,” his father would say irritably, looking up at the brassy summer sky, “there isn't a drop of rain in a thousand miles.”

The boy's mother told him privately that there wasn't enough for Pa to do. If he had had stock to care for, or odd jobs to do, or anything, he wouldn't be so nervous. On an ordinary farm, if one crop failed, others would come through all right, and you would have your hogs or your cattle or your cowpeas or whatever even if your big crop didn't make. But here it was just sit and watch, and it was pretty hard on Pa, and if the wheat didn't make there was nothing.

He took to going out into the field alone, and they would see him walking along the edge of the wheat, green-bronze now, stooping and straightening and taking little excursions into the grain that reached around his waist like green water. The first year they had come out, his mother said—1915, that was—the wheat had been higher than Pa's head. He had just walked into Gadke's field and disappeared. Ever since then Pa had had a great respect for Gadke as a farmer. But he hadn't had much of a field in that year himself, just twenty acres, because he was building the house and getting the fence in and getting the sod broken and everything. Even so, they had made over a thousand bushel of wheat that year, more than they had made since with two or three times the acreage in.

The boy dreamed about the wheat at night now. Once he dreamed that he went out across the coulee and there was the grain grown enormously, a wilderness, a woods of wheat, taller than tall, with great fat heads nodding far above him, and he ran back to the house with his mouth shouting words, calling his father to come and see, but when they got back the wheat had shrivelled and blackened and died, and the field looked like a dark and smoky place that fire had passed over. His father flew into a rage and cuffed him for lying, and he awoke.

As August moved on day by cloudless day, they began to watch the southwest rather than the southeast. The days were hot, with light hot fingering winds that bent the wheat and died again, and in the evenings there was always a flicker of heat lightning. The southwest was dangerous in August. From that direction came the hot winds, blowing for two or three days at a time, that had withered and scorched the wheat last year. They were like Chi nooks, his father said, except that in summer they were hot as hell. You couldn't predict them and you couldn't depend on their coming, but if they came you were sunk.

What a God damned country, his father said.

The boy heard them talking in bed at night, when they thought he was asleep, but even without that he couldn't have missed how his father grew darker and more sullen and silent. The good humor was less frequent and never lasted. Even when he proposed a swim down by Pete and Emil he did it as if it were a last resort to keep from flying all apart with worry and impotence. “Let's get out of here and do something,” he would say. “Sit around here much longer and the roof'll fall in on us.”

“It's just this not being able to do anything,” the boy's mother said. “It's this sitting, without being able to do anything but sit ...”

That was why, the boy knew, she proposed the visit to the Garfields, who had come two years before to take up a homestead four miles east of them. “We ought to know our neighbors better,” she said. “They've lived there two years and we've never even met them.”

“I've met him,” Bo said.

“Where?”

“Down at Cree. He's a prissy-faced long-nosed Englishman.”

“Well, but he's our nearest neighbor. And she might be nice.”

“Have they got any kids, Ma?” the boy asked.

“I don't think so. I wish they had.” She looked at Bo and wheedled him. “You'll drive us over on Sunday, won't you?” she said. “Just to be neighborly. It'll do you good.”

He shrugged and picked up a magazine, four months old and dog-eared from long use.

 

The boy was excited by the visit to Garfields‘. The hot afternoon was still and breathless, the air harder to breathe than usual. He knew there was a change in weather coming, because the ginger-snaps in their tall cardboard box were soft and bendable when he snitched a couple to stick in his pocket. He could tell too by his father's grumpiness that something was coming. If it was rain everything would be dandy, there would be humming and singing again before breakfast. Maybe his father would let him ride the mare down to Cree for the mail. But if it was hail or hot wind they'd have to walk soft and speak softer, and the crop might be ruined, and that would be calamity.

He found more than he looked for at Garfields‘. Mr. Garfield was tall and bald with a big nose, and talked very softly and politely. The boy's father was determined not to like him right from the start.

When Mr. Garfield said, “Dear, I think we might have a glass of lemonade, don't you?” the boy saw his parents look at each other, saw the beginning of a smile on his father's face, saw his mother purse her lips and shake her head ever so little. And when Mrs. Garfield, prim and spectacled, with a habit of tucking her head back and to one side while she listened to anyone talk, brought in the lemonade, the boy saw his father taste his and make a little face behind the glass. He hated any summer drink without ice in it, and kept his own beer at home deep in the cellar hole where it would keep cool.

But Mr. and Mrs. Garfield were nice people. They sat down in their new parlor and showed the boy's mother the rug and the gramophone. When the boy came up curiously to inspect the little box with a petunia-shaped horn with a picture of a terrier and “His Master's Voice” painted on it, and when the Garfields found that he had never seen or heard a gramophone, they put on a cylinder like a big spool of tightly-wrapped black thread, and pushed a lever and lowered a needle, and out came a man's voice singing in Scotch brogue, and his mother smiled and nodded and said, “My land, Harry Lauder! I heard him once a long time ago. Isn't it wonderful, sonny?”

It was wonderful all right. He inspected it, reached out his fingers to touch things, wiggled the big horn to see if it was loose or screwed in. His father warned him sharply to keep his hands off, but Mr. Garfield smiled and said, “Oh, he can't hurt it. Let's play something else,” and found a record about the saucy little bird on Nellie's hat that had them all laughing. They let him wind the machine and play the record over again, all by himself, and he was very careful. It was a fine machine. He wished he had one.

About the time he had finished playing his sixth or seventh record, and George M. Cohan was singing, “She's a grand old rag, she's a high-flying flag, and forever in peace may she wave,” he glanced at his father and saw that he was grouchy about something. He wasn't taking part in the conversation, but was sitting with his chin in his hand staring out the window. Mr. Garfield was looking at him a little helplessly. His eyes met the boy's and he motioned him over.

“What do you find to do all summer, young man? Only child, are you?”

“No sir. My brother's in Whitemud. He's twelve. He's got a job.”

“So you came out on the farm to help,” Mr. Garfield said. He had his hand on the boy's shoulder and his voice was so kind that the boy lost his shyness and felt no embarrassment at all in being out there in the middle of the parlor with all of them looking at him.

“I don't help much,” he said. “I'm too little to do anything but drive the stoneboat, Pa says. When I'm twelve he's going to get me a gun and then I can go hunting.”

“Hunting?” said Mr. Garfield. “What would you hunt?”

“Oh, gophers and weasels. I got a pet weasel now. His name's Lucifer.”

“Well,” Mr. Garfield said. “You seem a manly little chap. What do you feed your weasel?”

“Gophers.” He thought it best not to say that the gophers were alive when he threw them in. He thought that probably Mr. Garfield would be a little shocked at that.

Mr. Garfield straightened up and looked around at the grown-ups. “Isn't it a shame,” he said, “that there are so many predatory animals and pests in this country that we have to spend our time destroying them? I hate killing things.”

“I hate weasels,” the boy said. “I'm saving this one till he turns white and then I'm going to skin him. Once I speared a weasel with a pitchfork in the chicken house and he dropped right off the tine and ran up my leg and bit me after he was speared clean through.”

He finished breathlessly, and his mother smiled at him, motioning him not to talk so much. But Mr. Garfield was still looking at him kindly. “So you want to make war on the cruel things, the weasels and hawks,” he said.

“Yes sir.” The boy looked at his mother and it was all right. He hadn't spoiled anything by talking about the weasels.

“Now that reminds me,” Mr. Garfield said, rising. “Maybe I've got something you would find useful.”

He went into another room and came back with a .22 in his hand. “Could you use this?”

“I ... yes sir!” the boy said. He had almost, in his excitement, said, “I hope to whisk in your piskers.”

“If your parents will let you have it,” Mr. Garfield said, and raised his eyebrows at the boy's mother. He didn't look at the father, but the boy did.

“Can I, Pa?”

“I guess so,” his father said. “Sure.”

“Thank Mr. Garfield nicely,” his mother said.

“Gee,” the boy said “Thanks, Mr. Garfield, ever so much.”

“There's a promise goes with it,” Mr. Garfield said. “I'd like you to promise never to shoot anything with it but the bloodthirsty animals, the cruel ones like weasels and hawks. Never anything like birds or prairie dogs.”

“How about butcher birds?”

“Butcher birds?”

“Shrikes,” said the boy's mother. “We've got some over by our place. They kill all sorts of other things, snakes and gophers and other birds. They're worse than the hawks, because they kill just for the fun of it.”

“By all means,” said Mr. Garfield. “Shoot the shrikes. A thing that kills for the fun of it ...” He shook his head and his voice got solemn, like the voice of Mr. McGregor, the Sunday school superintendent in town, when he was asking the benediction. “There's something about the way the war drags on, or maybe it's just being in this new, clean country,” Mr. Garfield said, “.that makes me hate killing. I simply can't bear to shoot anything any more, even a weasel.”

The boy's father turned cold eyes away from Mr. Garfield and looked out the window. One big brown hand, a little dirty from the wheel of the car, rubbed against the day-old bristles of his jaws. Then he stood up and stretched. “We got to be going,” he said.

“Oh, stay a while,” Mr. Garfield said. “You just came. I wanted to show you my trees.”

The boy's mother stared. “Trees?”

He smiled. “Sounds a bit odd out here, doesn't it? But I think trees will grow. I've made some plantings down below.”

“I'd love to see them,” she said. “Sometimes I'd give almost anything to get into a deep shady woods. Just to smell it, and feel how cool ...”

“There's a little story connected with these,” Mr. Garfield said. He spoke warmly, to the mother alone. “When we first decided to come out here I said to Martha that if trees wouldn't grow we shouldn't stick it. That's just what I said, ‘If trees won't grow there we shan't stick it.' Trees are like the breath of life to me.”

The boy's father was shaken by a sudden spell of coughing, and his wife shot a look at him and then looked back at Mr. Garfield with a light flush on her cheekbones. “I'd love to see them,” she said again. “I was raised in Minnesota, and I never will get used to a place as barren as this.”