The Big Rock Candy Mountain (5 page)

“He's from Illinois,” Helm said. “Rock River. His old man wasn't much good, I guess. Just let his family run loose. I've heard him talk about it once or twice, just odds and ends of things.”

That was all Elsa got, odds and ends, scraps that could be pieced together into a skeleton biography. She did not admit to herself, did not even think about, the unusual eagerness she had to reconstruct that biography. She did not say to herself that he was the most masterful, dominating, contradictory, and unusual man she had ever met, but she picked up everything she heard, nevertheless, and she pumped Bo himself when he came over in the evening to sit on the steps and talk.

 

When Fred Mason came home to Illinois from the war in 1865 he had left an arm somewhere in a field hospital near Vicksburg, and most of his disposition in the Andersonville prison. In the ten years after his arrival he successively married a Pennsylvania Dutch girl of broad dimensions, begot seven children, and became the nucleus and chief yarn-spinner of the livery stable crowd.

For money he depended on his pension and a few scattered odd jobs. Working for anyone else tired him; orders were more than his irascible individualism would stand. “Nobody in my family ever took orders from anybody,” he used to say. “My pap come into this state when she was nothin' but oak and Indians, and he never took no orders from any man. Neither did his pap, or his pap's pap. I'm the on‘y one ever did, and I on'y did in the army. And I don't take no more.”

He spent his days lounging at the stable talking bird dogs and battles. Once in a while he took over a job in a burst of ambition to augment his pension, because, though he was not especially a drinking man, he loved to eat, and his shapeless and rather sullen hausfrau couldn't make the pension stretch to cover much more than sowbelly and eggs. Often, too, he sat in the sun with the fecund stable smell about him and a coach dog dozing among the flies, and generated great schemes. He invented, on paper or in drawings sketched in the dust with a twig, all sorts of gadgets: revolvers with twelve chambers, a telescopic ramrod that could be carried in the vest pocket, a folding bootjack, an artificial arm that could be moved by a complicated system of wires and pulleys, with a miniature ice tongs for a hand. He even went to work and whittled out the arm, laboriously fitted it with pulleys and strung the wires, but when he had a fellow-loafer strap it on him, and tried it out before the eyes of his crowd, he got tangled up and bit himself in the ribs with the ice tongs. In a fury he threw the whole contraption in the Rock River.

His six boys and one girl grew up untended in the shambling old frame house his wife had brought him as dowry. The children learned early to avoid their father, for his one hand was quick at back-handed slaps, and his temper was hair-trigger. A crying or teasing or noisy child set him mad with irritation; he was fond of telling what a damned pest kids were—his especially, the damnedest pack of mongrels ever whelped.

But if they were mongrels, they had the mongrel's knack of making his own way. Any one of them above the age of six could have lived on what he could catch or steal. They grew like savages, black-haired, husky, broad-faced children with their mother's German features and their father's long bones. Most of their time in summer they spent roaming the wilderness of brushy woods along the Rock River, fishing, robbing garden patches, shooting rabbits and grouse with slingshots or whatever weapon they could lay hands on.

By the time the youngest boy, Harry, was eight years old, they all had guns. One by one, mysteriously, the firearms came. Fred Mason swore they had been stolen, and stamped around the house whenever a new gun appeared, but he could never beat a confession out of any of the boys. Elmer had worked for a farmer and made the money for his. George had found his lying right out in the open on a bridge rail, and had waited all day to see if anyone would come and claim it, but nobody did. Harry had been given his by a woodchopper up along the river. And so on.

Probably the boys felt that guns were a necessity, in order to provide food. The chances were two to one that any time they came home for a meal they would be cornered and whipped for something, if not by their father then by their mother, who sometimes flew into insane rages and drove even her hair-trigger husband from the house. So the boys stayed away, at least in summer, and lived on the fish and rabbits and corn and vegetables and watermelons of their expeditions. Sometimes they stayed out in the woods for days at a time.

In winter there was nothing much to do except go to school. It was a way of avoiding the domestic uproar, and it was a fairly painless way of satisfying parental demands. “My kids gonna have an eddication,” Fred Mason was fond of saying. “They're gonna learn to read and write and figger if I have to beat it into them with a wagon tongue.”

But one by one the boys dropped out, found jobs, wandered away. None of them, except Harry, remained in school beyond the fifth grade. Harry stayed till the eighth, partly because he was less indocile than his brothers, partly because he was brighter.

He was an intractable enough pupil, and the cause of much academic grief, but his intelligence and his sense of self-preservation were sharp enough to tell him when to stop, and once in a while he got a chance to outface his teacher with some monumental feat of brains.

His teacher quit picking on him, and gave him his unruly head, when Harry was in the sixth grade. From that day on she looked upon him with something like awe, tinctured with mild horror. They were reading McGuffey's Second Reader. For three or four weeks Harry slaved like a malicious little demon, reading every selection, prose and poetry, over and over until he knew almost the whole book by heart. The class, meanwhile, had spelled its way through sixty or seventy pages. Harry had ceased utterly to pay attention in reading class, loafed ostentatiously at his bench, whittled his initials, honked weirdly when the teacher's back was turned and then played he had been blowing his nose, pulled the girls' braids, pinked his fellows with a peashooter, and raised so much uproar that he was hauled up into the corner and a dunce cap set on his head. From there he grinned and made faces and commented audibly on the reading performances of the others.

The teacher was in a tooth-gnashing fury. She had tried whipping before: he was too tough to hurt. Sending him home would just be giving him a chance to go out in the woods and have some fun. So now, smelling a way of humiliating him (the only way he could be hurt), she slapped her ruler down on the desk and walked over to him with a wicked and wintry smile. “Of course, Harry,” she said, “you're too brilliant to need any training in reading. But suppose—just suppose, now—you take your book and read to us for the rest of the afternoon, pronouncing every
word!
We'll let geography go, just for the pleasure of listening to you. Go on down to your desk and get your reader.”

The class snickered. Harry grinned, shaking his head. “I don't need any book,” he said.

“I suppose you know it all by heart!”

“I've read it over. When you're smart that's all it takes.”

“All
right!”
she squealed, so outraged at his impudence that her voice cracked. “You can start right at the beginning.” With her back stiff and her face tomato red, she marched back to her desk and sat down, her book open before her, ready to pounce on his slightest mistake.

At four o‘clock she reluctantly turned him and the rest of the class loose. He had reached page ninety-two with only a few minor errors.

Harry Mason had good reason to hate his father, and he took advantage of his reasons. By the time the boy was fourteen he was big for his age and hard as flint from an active life of hunting and sports. Yet the beatings that had soured his childhood went on as if he were still a child. All the boys except Elmer had left, George to Chicago, Oscar and Bill to nearby farms, Dave to drive a dray in Davenport. As a result, whenever a neighbor missed a chicken, or complained of kids in his melon patch, or had his buggy wheels taken off and hung on the ridge of his barn on Hallowe‘en, or found some youth toying with his daughter in the haymow, Harry had to look sharp if he wanted to avoid a tanning for it. Sometimes he was guilty, sometimes not. Sometimes he got beaten for Elmer's misdeeds because Elmer was too big at sixteen to be handled.

The procedure was monotonously reiterative. Fred Mason would lay for his one punishable son whenever he heard of a prank or theft. If he caught him (as he seldom did, and the infrequency of his success only whetted his wrath) he would take him out on the porch in full view of the offended public and administer punishment there. Because of his missing arm, he couldn't both hold and whip the boy, and so he held him by the collar and kicked his backside with brutal shoes, or hammered his head against a porch pillar. The more he kicked and hammered, the madder he got, and the more stubborn the boy's grim silence became. He never cried for pain, but sometimes after a thumping he would go off in the woods and throw himself on the ground and weep with rage and hatred. Once or twice he ran away, to be gone for two or three weeks, but he always came back, until one day in the summer of his fourteenth year.

In that July Fred Mason had had one of his occasional spells of ambition, had got together a couple of scythes, and had contracted to cut off the hay in the river meadow west of town. Elmer and Harry were impressed as free labor. They went unwillingly enough, but before they had been working half an hour they got into a race to see who could mow the greatest swath by noon. They shucked their shirts and slaved mightily in the early heat, while their father sat with his back against a tree, smoking his corncob.

Heads down, elbows bent, arms and shoulders swinging, the boys went down the field of damp grass close together, mowing almost in unison. At the fence along the road they turned and started back, still together. Then Elmer, two years older and a little bigger, began to inch ahead, and Harry strained to catch him, reaching for the exact cutting power of the scythe.

Harry never knew quite how it happened. His head was down, his eyes on the next semicircle of long wild grass that the scythe would reach. Either Elmer moved a little closer, or Harry in his hurry reached out too far, but in the warm hay-smelling quiet Elmer suddenly yelped, just as Harry, having felt the sudden solid obstruction to the blade, stood up.

Elmer sat down and rolled up his pants leg. Jets of blood pumped from a long deep gash in his inner calf. “Oh my gosh!” Harry said. He dropped on hands and knees and tried to stop the bleeding with his hands, but it burst out of the red lips of the wound and flooded his wrists. Their father came running, swearing at every step. For once Harry saw him move quickly and efficiently.

“Get me your shirt!” he said. Harry raced for it, came back on the dead run. His father had already laid Elmer on his back, found the artery above the cut, and was pressing deep with his thumb into the brown flesh. The bleeding lessened, came in feeble, choked spurts. Mason jerked his head at the twist of black eating tobacco in his shirt pocket. “Chew that up, a big hunk of it.”

Harry stuffed the end in his mouth, bit off a great mouthful, and chewed desperately. Some of the juice ran down his throat; he choked, gagged, felt his bowels heave in nauseated protest, but he chewed on.

“C‘mere!”

Harry knelt, helped his father fit a stone into a strip of cloth and press it against the spot where his thumb had been. A burst of blood shot from the wound, was choked down again. “Tie that around his leg,” Mason said. “Tight as you can tie it.”

His cheeks bulged with the evil wad, Harry tied, pulling until Elmer snapped at him. His father, kneeling on the ripped shirt, was tearing off another strip with his good hand. “All right, lessee that tobacco.”

Harry spat it into the outstretched palm, watched it smeared on the wound, rubbed in with dirty fingers. Elmer winced, his eyebrows drew down, his lips pulled away from his teeth. “Gosh I'm sorry, Elmer,” Harry said. “I must-a reached out too far.”

“Tie that!” his father said harshly. The boy tied the strip of sweaty shirt over the daubed wound. For a moment he remained squatting beside his brother, contrite and sympathetic, and in that moment his father's anger, restrained till now by the immediacies of first aid, blew out of him like an explosion.

“God damn you!” he howled. The boy saw the blow coming, but couldn't duck. The back of his father's hard hand hit him across the mouth, bowled him over on his back. He arose slowly, watchfully, his sullen face sallow, his eyes burning with hatred. “I didn't go to do it,” he said.

The hand hauled back again, and Harry backed away slowly. “Give me your lip!” the old man shouted. “God damn it, ain't I got enough worries without you cuttin' Elmer all to hell and bringin' on doctor bills? Who's gonna cut this hay now?”

Harry had backed away to a safe distance. “Well, I'm not, by God!” he blazed. “That's the last time you ever hit me!”

He turned and ran across the mown edge of the meadow, climbed the fence, went into town and hunted up the doctor and directed him to the place where Elmer lay, and started west out of town. He never came back.

In Davenport, three days later, he found his brother Dave. “You did just right,” Dave said. “The hell with the old bastard.”

“Only thing I feel mean about is running out on El,” Harry said. “That was a bad cut.”

Dave, while driving his dray, had learned to talk tough and smoke stogies, and he wore leather wrist protectors studded with brass nails. “Hell,” he said, “what's a cut on the leg? He'll be all right. Anyway, you can write him a letter.”

So Harry wrote a letter, and in a week got a scrawl back from Elmer saying that the leg was healing and itched like hell, and as soon as it was well he was going to pull out too. He was getting sick of hearing the old man moan about his hay. Maybe he'd come to Davenport himself. He'd see how things looked.