The Big Rock Candy Mountain (52 page)

 

On the afternoon of the tenth day he was over at Chance's. He had spent a good deal of time there the last day or two. His own house had got heavier and heavier to bear, lonesomer and lonesomer in its dead stillness. Besides, there wasn't much there to eat any more. So he took milk to the Chances, chopped their wood, sat for hours in their warm kitchen listening to talk about the schoolhouse and the Death Ward where they put people who were going to die. The Death Ward was the seventh grade room, his own room, and he and Ed Chance speculated on how it would feel to go back to school there where so many people had died—Mrs. Rieger, John Chapman, old Gypsy Davy from Poverty Flat, lots of others. Mrs. Chance, still so weak she could barely totter around, sat by the range and wiped the tears from her eyes, and when anyone spoke to her she smiled and shook her head and the tears ran down. She didn't seem unhappy about anything; she just couldn't help crying.

Mr. Chance said, solemnly, that there would be many familiar faces missing when this was over. The old town would never be the same. He wouldn't be surprised if an orphan or two had to be adopted by every family in town. He pulled his sagging cheeks and said to Chet, “I'll tell you what, son, you're fortunate yourself. Many times in that hospital I said to myself that those poor Mason boys were going to lose a loving father, certain as grass is green. I'd lie there, and the first thing I'd hear, some old and valued friend had passed in the Death Ward. I gave your father up when they moved him in ...”

Chet's throat was suddenly dry as dust. “Pa isn't in there!” he said.

“Ira,” Mrs. Chance said, and shook her head and smiled and wiped the tears away. “Now you've got the child all worked up.”

“He isn't there now,” Mr. Chance said. “I never hope to see again a spectacle as heartening as Bo Mason coming out of that Death Ward alive. Hands and feet frozen, double pneumonia—what a picture of fortitude that was! You should be proud, son.”

“Is he all right now?” Chet said.

“Right as the rain,” said Mr. Chance. “You needn't worry about your family, my boy. Take your father, I'd bet on him to live through anything. But then on the other hand you take a man like that George Valet. I dislike speaking of such things, but he couldn't even hang onto himself in bed. Those girls cleaned up his bed four times a day while he lay there red as a beet for shame, but did he improve? No.” Mr. Chance closed his fist and made a decisive motion into the air. “A man like that, there's no push in him,” he said. “Everything about him is as loose as his bowels.”

“Ira!” Mrs. Chance said.

“I'll make you a bet,” Mr. Chance said. “I'll bet you he doesn't live through this epidemic.”

“I wouldn't bet on a person's life that way,” she said. “And I wish you'd keep your language clean in front of the children.”

“Ma,” Harvey called from the next room, where he was lying down. “What's all the noise about?”

They stopped talking and listened. The church bell, far uptown, was ringing madly. Then the bell in the firehouse joined it. The heavy bellow of a shotgun, both barrels, rolled over the snowflats. A six-shooter went off, bang bang bang bang bang bang, and there was a sound of distant yelling.

“Well, what in Heaven's name,” Mrs. Chance said. They were all at the window by then, trying to see.

“Here comes somebody!” Ed said. The figure of a boy was streaking across the flat. He. hesitated as if undecided whether to go up by Van Dam's or down at this end of the street. Mr. Chance opened the door and shouted at him. The boy ran closer, shouting something unintelligible.

“What?” Mr. Chance yelled.

Chet recognized the boy now. Spot Orullian. He cupped his hands and yelled from the road as if unwilling to waste a moment's time.

“War's over!” he shouted, and wheeled and was gone up the street.

Mr. Chance closed the door slowly. Mrs. Chance looked at him, her lip jutted and trembled, her weak eyes ran over with tears, and she fell into his arms. The three boys, not quite sure how one acted when a war ended but knowing that it called for celebration, stood around uneasily shooting furtive grins at each other, staring at Mrs. Chance's shaking back.

“Now Uncle Joe can come home,” Ed said. “That's what she's bawling about.”

“I'll be back in a sec,” Chet said. He bolted out the kitchen door, raced over to his own house, pulled the loaded shotgun from above the mantel, and burst into the yard. He blew the lid off the silence in their end of town and split his throat with a wild long yell. Ed and Harvey answered from the open windows of their house, and another shotgun
boom-boomed
from downtown.

Still carrying the gun, Chet went back to Chance's. He felt grown up, a householder, able to hold up his end of any community obligations. Mrs. Chance was still incoherent. Broken ejaculations of joy came out of her, and she put a big red circle with a crayon around the date on the calendar. “I don't ever want to forget what day it happened on,” she said.

“Neither you nor anyone else is likely to,” said Mr. Chance. “This day history has come to one of its great turning points.” Chet looked at him, his mind clicking with an idea that brought his tongue out between his teeth.

“Mr. Chance,” he said, “would you like a drink to celebrate?”

Mr. Chance looked startled, interrupted in a high thought. “I beg pardon?”

“Pa's got some whiskey left. He'd throw a party if he was home. Come on over.”

“I don't think we should,” Mrs. Chance said. She looked at her husband dubiously. “Your father might ...”

“Oh, Mother,” Mr. Chance said, and laid his arm across her back. “One bumper to honor the day. One toast to that thin red line of heroes. Chester here is carrying on his father's tradition like a man of honor.” He bowed and shook Chet's hand. “We'd be delighted, Sir,” he said, and they all laughed.

Nobody knew exactly how the party achieved the proportions it did. Mr. Chance suggested, after one drink, that it would be pleasant to have a neighbor or two, rescued from the terrors of the plague, come around and join in the thanksgiving, and Chet said sure, that was a keen idea. So Mr. Chance called Jewel King on the telephone, and when Jewel came he brought Chubby Klein with him, and a few minutes later three more men came to the door, looked in to see people gathered with glasses in their hands, and came in with alacrity. Within an hour there were eight men, three women, and the two Chance boys, besides Chet. Mr. Chance wouldn't let any of the boys have any whiskey, but Chet, acting as bartender, sneaked a cup of it into the dining room and all three took a sip and smacked their lips. Later, Harvey called Chet into the parlor and whispered. “Hey, I'm drunk. Look.” He staggered, hiccoughed, caught himself, bowed low and apologized, staggered again. “Hic,” he said. “Had a drop too much.” Ed and Chet watched him, laughing secretly while loud voices rose in the kitchen.

Mr. Chance was proposing toasts every three minutes. “Gentlemen,” he would say, “I give you those heroic laddies in khaki who looked undaunted into the eyes of death and saved this ga-lorious empiah from the clutches of the Hun.”

“Yay!” the others said, banging cups on the table. “Give her the other barrel, Dictionary.”

“I crave your indulgence for one moment,” Mr. Chance said. “For one leetle moment, while I imbibe a few swallows of this delectable amber fluid.”

The noise went up and up. Chet went among them stiff with pride at having done all this, at having men pat him on the back or shake his hand and tell him, “You're all right, kid, you're a chip off the old block. What's the word from the folks?” He guggled liquor out of the sloshing cask into a milk crock, and men dipped largely and frequently. About four o‘clock two more families arrived and were greeted with roars. People bulged the big kitchen; their laughter rattled the window frames. Dictionary Chance suggested periodically that it might be an idea worth consideration that some liquid refreshments be decanted from the aperture in the receptacle.

The more liquid refreshments were decanted from the aperture in the receptacle, the louder and more eloquent Mr. Chance became. He dominated the kitchen like an evangelist. He swung and swayed and chanted, led a rendition of “God Save the King,” thundered denunciations of the Beast of Berlin, thrust a large fist into the lapels of new arrivals and demanded news of the war, which they did not have. Within five minutes Mr. Chance and Jewel King were off in a corner holding a two-man chorus of “Johnny McGree McGraw,” keeping their voices down, in the interest of decency, to a level that couldn't have been heard past Van Dam's.

He did not forget to be grateful, either. Twice during the afternoon he caught Chet up in a long arm and publicly blessed him, and about five o‘clock, while Mrs. Chance pulled his sleeve and tried to catch his eye, he rose and cleared his throat and waited for silence. Chubby Klein and Jewel King booed and hissed, but he bore their insults with a reproving eye. “Siddown!” they said. “Speech!” said others. Mr. Chance spread his hands abroad and begged for silence, and finally they gave it to him, snickering.

“Ladees and gen‘lemen,” Mr. Chance said. “We have come together on this auspicious occasion....”

“What's suspicious about it?” Chubby Klein said.

“On this auspicious occasion, to do honor to the gallant boys in Flanders' fields, to celebrate the passing of the twin blights of pestilence and war ...”

“Siddown,” said Jewel King.

“... and last, but not least,” said Mr. Chance, “we are gathered here to cement our friendship with the owners of this good and hospitable house, our old friend Bo Mason and his wife, a universally loved woman.” He cleared his throat and looked around. “And finally, my friends, our immediate host, the boy who in the absence of father, mother, and brother, kept the home fires burning and finally, out of the greatness of his heart and the knowledge of what his father would do under similar circumstances, opened his house and his keg to our pleasure. Ladees and gen‘lemen, the Right Honorable Chester Mason, may he live to bung many a barrel! ”

Embarrassed and grinning and not knowing quite what to do with so many faces laughing at him, so many hands hiking cups up in salute, Chet stood in the dining room door and tried to be casual, tried to hide the fact that he was proud and excited and had never had such a grown-up feeling in his life.

And while he stood there with their loud and raucous approbation beating against him, the back door opened and the utterly flabbergasted face of his father looked in.

 

There was a moment of complete silence. Voices dropped away to nothing, cups hung at lips. Then in a concerted rush they were helping Bo in, limping heavily on slippered feet, his hands bandaged, his face drawn and hollow-eyed and bony with sickness. After him came Elsa, half-carrying Bruce and staggering under his weight. Hands took Bruce away from her, set him on the oven door, led her to a chair. All three of them, hospital-pale, sat and looked around. Chet saw that his father did not look pleased. His jaw was set harshly.

“What the devil is this?” he said.

From the dining room door Chet squeaked, “The war's over!”

“I know the war's over,” his father said. “But what's this?” He jerked a bandaged hand at the silent ring of people. Chet swallowed and looked at Dictionary Chance.

Dictionary was not unequal to the occasion, after his temporary shock. He came up to clap Bo on the back; he swung and shook Elsa's hand; he twinkled at the white-faced, big-eyed Bruce on the oven door.

“This, Sir,” he boomed, “is a welcoming committee of your friends and neighbors, met here to rejoice over your escape from the terrible sickness which has swept away to untimely graves so many of our good friends, God rest their souls! On the invitation of your manly young son we are here not only to celebrate that escape from the plague, but the emancipation of the whole world from the greater plague of war.” With the cup in his hand he bent from the waist and twinkled at Bo. “How's it feel to get back, old hoss?”

Bo grunted. He looked across at Elsa and laughed a short, choppy laugh. The way his eyes came around and rested on Chet made Chet stop breathing, but his father's voice was hearty enough. “You got a snootful,” he said. “Looks like you've all got a snoot, ful.”

“Sir,” said Dictionary Chance, “I have not had such a delightful snootful since the misguided government of this province suspended the God-given right of its free people to purchase and ingest intoxicating beverages.” He drained his cup and set it on the table. “Now neighbors,” he said, “it is clear that the Masons are not yet completely recovered in their strength. I suggest that we do whatever small jobs our ingenuity and gratitude can suggest, and silently steal away.”

“Yeah,” they said. “Sure.” They went in a body out to the sleigh and brought in the one bed that had been sent back, lugged it through the kitchen and set it up in the dining room, piled the mattress on it, swooped together bedding and sheets and left them for the women. Before the bed was made people began to shake hands and leave. Dictionary Chance, voluble to the last, stopped long enough to pour into Bo's ear the virtues of his first-born. “We have enjoyed your hospitality, extended through young Chester,” he said. “If we may be of any service during your convalescence, please do not hesitate to call upon us. I am happy to say that, thanks in good part to the excellent medicinal waters I have imbibed at your house, our family is almost completely recovered and at your service.”

Mrs. Chance said goodbye with a quick, pleading smile and led Dictionary away, and there was nothing for Chet to do but face the eyes that had been waiting for him all the time.