The Big Rock Candy Mountain (50 page)

She got paper and pencil and made a list at his dictation, and sold Lars Poulsen a half gallon of rye and watched him tuck it carefully under the seat of the bobsleigh and turn his horses toward Van Dam's. It was almost funny, the way her dislike for the whiskey business boomeranged. She was the operator of a blind pig now, all by herself. She could be arrested if anyone wanted to turn her in. But there was no time now to worry about that.

Poulsen was a long time at Van Dam's. When everything was ready for him she sat on the bed. “I hate to see you go up there,” she said. “I'd rather take care of you here, but I think for the kids' sake ...”

“You'd be up all night,” Bo said. “You stay home and take it easy and I'll be back in a few days. This isn't anything but grippe.”

“It's worse than grippe. You be careful, and do what they tell you to up there. I can imagine you ranting around and refusing to take your medicine.”

He grunted. “Some of that hooch ought to be delivered,” he said. “The sawbones gets the case of Irish, and there's a list of guys who get bourbon. In my pocket, somewhere.”

She found the list. “I'll see that they get it.”

“Chet could take it on his sled,” he said. “But tell him not to leave it without the money. Not for anybody.”

“I won't be sending Chet,” she said. “I won't have the kids mixed up in this.”

For a minute he looked at her, red-faced and puffy-lipped. Then he grunted.

But he was tender with her when Poulsen's knock sounded. “Take it easy,” he whispered. “I got a hunch that as soon as we get past this flu we're out of the woods.”

Her lip was trembling, and she bit it down. “Bo, get well right away. Do what they tell you, and don't get mad at anything.”

“What would I get mad at?”

“You always get mad when you're sick. You get mad at people for trying to help.”

“Oh bull!” he said, grinning. To Poulsen he said, “How you going to get me out there? Got another man?”

“Nope. Can't you walk a few steps? I'll hold you up.”

“My feet are froze,” Bo said, instantly irritable. “Walking out there would be like walking on broken glass. Why the hell can't they send two men on a job like this?”

“Ain't got ‘em to send,” Poulsen said. “How about riding on my back? How much you weigh?”

“Two ten,” Bo said. He snorted, a short, violent sound. “Feel like lugging two ten out there?”

“Now come on,” Elsa said. “I can take your feet if Lars will take your shoulders.”

They got him out finally, and he lay in the hay of the wagonbox with his forehead white and dewed, his jaw tight and his eyes furious. Then Ole, almost as heavy, but easier to carry because they didn't have to be careful of hands and feet. Poulsen climbed to the seat and Elsa leaned against the tailgate, looking at the bundled sick men, all of them big, strapping men, and she thought again of the thing people said, that the flu took the strongest first, the ones with the deep chests and wide backs. The tears in her eyes were like pebbles of ice.

“Goodbye,” she said. “Get well quick, all of you.” She said it to all, but she looked only at Bo. She saw his jaw relax a little. “Take it easy, Mama,” he said. “I got enough meanness in me to poison any germ.”

“John Chapman died this mornin‘,” Poulsen said from the seat.

Bo sat up, and the stab he made to catch his balance with his hand made him grit his teeth. “What did you say?”

“John Chapman's dead. Funny thing, Doc O‘Malley says his heart was all out of place, clear over on the right side. Been that way all his life. Never think it, a big tall guy like that.”

Bo's eyes sought Elsa's. “By Godfrey,” he said, “I almost forgot about something.”

“Shall I do anything about it?” She too had forgotten that they owed Chapman two hundred dollars. Now Chapman was dead. But they could pay it back as soon as she delivered those cases ...

“No,” Bo said. “Let it go. Everything's closed up anyway. Let it go.” He lay back on the hay and stared upward. “John Chapman,” he said, as if he didn't believe it. “I talked to him three days ago and he was as well as I was.”

“Bo ...” Elsa said.

Poulsen flipped the lines and the sled started, the runners creaking in the dry snow, breaking down through the drift as he swung around toward the school. “Goodbye!” Elsa shouted. “I'll be up to see you every chance I get. And please be careful, do what they say ... !”

 

For just an instant, as the sled slid away and she saw the schoolhouse two blocks beyond in the middle of the white field, the symbol now of plague and death because it housed in its four square rooms dozens of sick men and women, Elsa was shaken by utter panic. Then the moment passed and she turned back to the house. Bo would be better there. The doctor was living there now, and there were nurses on duty day and night. She would have plenty to do trying to keep the boys safe, and taking care of Bo's whiskey.

For an hour she went about the house cleaning up all the leavings of the two men, throwing Bo's clothes in a tub of water and starting them to boil, hanging out all the blankets and quilts that had been over him and Ole, scalding the used dishes with triple doses of boiling water. Then she stood and looked at the stack of sacked whiskey in the corner, the keg on the kitchen chair with its bung up. That next, the sooner the better.

Altogether she made three trips, taking two cases at a time on Chet's sled, going boldly through the main street because she believed literally Bo's story of the emergency. She knocked on doors and was greeted suspiciously from inside, until she told her errand, when the doors came wide and eager hands reached for the ears of the sacks. “I'll have to have the money right now,” she told them stolidly. “Bo's sick, but he told me not to leave anything without the money, because he borrowed the money to get it and has to pay it back right away.”

Two of her customers paid at once. A third grumbled about the price. Elsa said, quite honestly, that she knew nothing about that except what Bo had told her. If the price wasn't all right, she would take it back. But Bill Patterson, who was doing the grumbling, didn't want it taken back. He went and found forty-eight dollars in every denomination down to pennies.

At the fourth house Jewel King wanted the whiskey but didn't have the money. The bank was closed, Chapman was dead, he couldn't pay till he could get into the bank again.

“I'm sorry,” Elsa said. “Bo said not to leave it without the money. I can't.”

“But good Lord, Elsa,” King said. “We need that stuff. If Bo was here he wouldn't hold out. I'd give you the money in a minute if I could lay hands on it.”

If it had been her own doing she would have let him have it. But she didn't want to do anything that Bo could find fault with. She hated this job, so she would do it impeccably. “I wish I could, Jewel,” she said, “but Bo said not to.”

“Well, let me have some of it,” Jewel said. “I got enough money for a bottle or two. I got to have something around, with all these germs in the air.”

“You come down,” Elsa said. “Bo tipped over on the way in and and broke quite a few, and that left some loose bottles. I'll sell you all you want of those, or there's some bulk in a keg.”

“Okay,” he said. “I'll come down. Bo tipped over, you say? How'd he get back up?”

“I don't know. He wouldn't tell me.”

King, scratching himself thoughtfully under the arm, laughed. “Old Bo,” he said. “He's quite a boy.”

“He brought a homesteader named Ole Pederson in with him,” Elsa said. “He had the flu, and now Bo's got it.”

King eased his weight onto the other foot. He obviously did not care to continue the conversation. Gregariousness had suddenly ceased to be pleasurable in Whitemud. “Yeah,” he said. “Tough. Well ...”

So Elsa pulled the case of bourbon back to the house, unloaded it, put the Irish on the sled, and went to the schoolhouse to see Bo. They wouldn't let her in. Visitors were not allowed. The best she could do was wait in the vestibule while Regina Orullian went to find O‘Malley. When he came, he didn't have the money either. “If you want to leave it anyway,” he said, “I can have a check for you tonight.”

For just an instant, looking at his young, tired, sleepless-eyed face, she hesitated.

“Don't leave it if you don't want to,” he said. “I can see why you might not. I might die, and you'd never be able to distill it our of me.”

“I guess I'll take a chance,” she said, and smiled at him.

The doctor ducked out of the storm door and carried in the sack. “I suppose you want to know how your husband is.”

“I'd like to, yes.”

“I wouldn't worry,” O‘Malley said. “He's too ornery to be hurt much. I tried putting packs on his hands and feet and he about tore the ward down. He'll be all right.”

Elsa saw that he didn't like Bo. He didn't like him and yet he had a sneaking admiration for him. A lot of people reacted to him that way, they saw only his hard side ...

“Well, thanks,” she said. “Can I come back here every day and find out how he is?”

“Or call up,” he said. “That's better.” He looked at her speculatively. “How many of you at home now?”

“The two boys and I.”

“If any of you get it,” he said, “call up here right away. I can't do a thing unless I have everybody in one place. And if you hear of anyone else, call me, will you?”

“I will,” she said. “And you're sure Bo isn't really very sick?”

“He's sick enough,” O‘Malley said, “but I think he'll be all right.”

On the way back home again through the crusted drifts, she saw the sun break through the mist and shine for a few minutes thin and watery on the snow. She was glad O‘Malley was there instead of old Doctor Barber. She remembered Barber, sag-cheeked, shaking-handed, riddled with dope or whatever it was he took. He must have been pretty far gone to drink denatured alcohol on a bet, the way he did. It occurred to her that everywhere she and Bo had lived there was somebody like Doctor Barber, lost and derelict and painful to see. Were they all over, she wondered, or was it just that Bo took them always to the fringes of civilization where the misfits and the drifters all congregated?

After lunch there was the problem of keeping the boys in the parlor while she served the continuous stream of people who came, some with milk pails, some with fruit jars, some furtive, some loud. The kitchen was headachy with the barroom smell of rye slopped from the keg. By suppertime she had taken in, from case goods and bulk, two hundred and sixty-five dollars. At eight o‘clock that night she bundled up and walked to the schoolhouse, found that Bo was sleeping and doing as well as could be expected, collected the sixty-five dollars from the doctor, and came home again. She put her afternoon's total of three hundred and thirty along with the six she had got from Poulsen in the morning, tucking it down in a box at the bottom of her bureau drawer. Tomorrow, if things went right, she would be shut of the whiskey job.

She knew the moment she woke that she was sick. Her bones ached, her head throbbed, her throat was inflamed and sore, and her tongue, when she stuck it out in front of the mirror, was coated with gray-green moss. For a minute, desperately, she tried to pretend it wasn't true. She was just tired; she hadn't slept well; she was coming on toward her time, and that always made her feel low and draggy. But she hadn't been up ten minutes before the staggering weakness in her legs made her sit down. She called for Chet and Bruce, raising her voice painfully over her sore throat, and in a few minutes Chet came racing downstairs. “Ma!” he said. “Brucie's got it! He threw up all over the bed!”

“Oh my Lord!” she said. Driving herself, she stood up and started for the stairs. “Call Doctor O‘Malley,” she said. “Tell him Brucie and Mommie have both got it. You'll have to hold the fort alone, son.”

“Jeez!” Chet said. For a moment she thought he was going to run and cling to her legs as Bruce sometimes did. But he stood still, running his tongue around his upper lip. “I can do it,” he said. “I can milk old Red and sell the whiskey and do everything.”

“Sell the whiskey!” she said. “You don't know what you're talking about.”

Within an hour she lay in the hay-filled box of Poulsen's sleigh, with Bruce, pinched and delirious, against her side. Poulsen was not driving the sled today, but a young man she did not know. He said his name was Vickers, and he had just got in from the south the night before. Why, he must be a sort of neighbor of ours, out on the farm, she thought. But she was too weak and tired, and Chet was standing beside the sleigh too consciously brave in his mackinaw. The devil could have been driving the team and she wouldn't have paid very much attention.

She made Chet promise to call up twice a day and report to the hospital how he was getting along. She asked Vickers to look in once in a while on his trips around. When they pulled away she couldn't even kiss Chet, or hug him, for fear of the death her lips might carry. She could only wave, sitting up weakly with her muttering younger son under the blankets beside her, and say, “Goodbye, Chet, goodbye. You're the man of the family now, you've got to hold the fort.”

Too weak and hurried to do anything else, she had left the whiskey in plain sight in the kitchen. The bundle of money she carried in a knotted sock in her purse.

Until afternoon Chet stayed indoors. The silence of the house bothered him, and the thought of what if Mom and Pa and Brucie never came back at all lay big as a sob in his throat. On his back was the burden of being the man of the house, responsible for the fires, the stock, for getting his own meals and keeping the house clean. He accepted those duties solemnly. For a while he was attentive to the fires as though they were in danger of flickering out every ten minutes. He made the beds. He got the broom and stirred a dust in parlor and dining room.