The Big Rock Candy Mountain (53 page)

“All right,” his father said. “Now will you tell me why in the name of Christ you invited that damned windbag and all the rest of the sponges over here to drink up my whiskey?”

Chet stood sullenly in the door. He had already given up any hope of explaining. Under his father's hot eyes he boiled sulkily. Here he had held the fort all alone, milked the cows and kept the house. Everybody else praised him and said he was doing a keen job. But you could depend on Pa to fly off the handle and spoil everything.

“The war was over,” he said. “I asked them over to have a drink and celebrate.”

His father's face and neck began to swell. “You asked them over! You asked them over. You said come right on over and drink all the whiskey in the house! Why God damn you ... !”

“Bo,” Elsa said quietly. Chet slid his eyes toward her long enough to see the pain and sympathy in her face, but he didn't move. He set his mouth and faced his father, who was flapping his hands and looking upward in impotent rage. “Leave the house for ten days,” he said. “Go away for as much as a week and by Jesus everything goes wrong. How long were they over here?”

“Since about two,” Chet said. He met his father's hard look with one just as bitter, and his father started from his chair as if to thrash him, but his sore hands and feet put him back, wincing. Two hot angry tears started from Chet's eyes. He wished the old man wasn't all crippled. It would be just fine if he tried to whip him and couldn't make him say a word. He'd bite his tongue out before he'd make a sound, or say he was sorry, or anything.

“How much did they drink?”

“I don't know,” Chet said. “Three crocks, I think.”

His father's head shook back and forth. “Three crocks. At least a gallon. Twelve dollars' worth. Oh Christ, if you had the sense of a pissant ...”

Laboriously, swearing with pain, he got up and hobbled to the keg. When he put down his bandaged hand and shook it his whole body stiffened. “I thought you only sold six gallons out of this,” he said to Elsa.

Her glance fluttered toward Chet. “I don't know,” she said. “I thought that was all ... Now Bo, don't fly off the handle. We're lucky to be alive ...

“I sold some out of there,” Chet said. “I've got the money in here.” His body stiff, his mind full of self-righteous, gloating hatred, he went in and got the money from the jar. With it was the list itemizing each sale. He laid it all on the table.

“So you've been selling liquor,” his father said. “I thought your mother told you to let that alone.”

“People came wanting it. It was medicine, so I thought I ought to sell it to them.”

His father laughed unpleasantly. “Probably sold it for a dollar a bottle,” he said, and picked up the list.

Now! Chet said. He waited, his blood beginning to pound with triumph. His father's eye went down the list, stopped. “What's this twenty-two fifty?”

“That's five bottles of bourbon to Mr. Vickers.”

“That should only be twenty.”

“I know it,” Chet said. “But I got twenty-two fifty.” He met his father's eye and almost beat it down.

“I ought to whale you within an inch of your life,” his father said. “You had no business selling anything. Now you spread my affairs all over town, you charge people too much and ruin good customers, you ask the whole damned town over here to drink up twelve dollars' worth of stuff....”

“All right!” Chet shouted. “All right, I'll tell you something!” He batted at his eyes with his forearm, seeing his father's sick-thin face and seeing nothing else. “The day Ma and Brucie left, Louis Treat and another guy came in here and were going to steal the whole keg and I run ‘em out with the shotgun.” He stood with his fists balled, the tears blurry in his eyes, shouting at his father's stiff, gray, expressionless face. “I wish I'd let 'em take it!” he said, his face twisting. “I wish I'd never done a thing to stop ‘em!”

His father's face was dissolving, running, melting, and the bandaged hands were coming up in the air, and then his father was laughing, flung back against the kitchen table and shouting with uncontrollable mirth. Chet looked startled, and then sneered. His father's hands pointed at him, his father's breath came wheezy with laughter from spent lungs. “Okay, kid,” he said. “Okay, you're a man. Nobody's going to take it away from you. If you looked at Treat the way you just looked at me he's running yet, I'd bet on it.”

Everything had dissolved so suddenly, the defiant stand he had made had produced such unlooked-for results, that Chet went grouchily into the parlor and sat by himself. After a minute his mother came in, her lips twitching with the beginning of a smile, and put her arms around him.

“Don't be mad at Pa,” she said. “He didn't understand at first. He's proud of you, proud as he can be. So am I. You did just fine, Chet. It was more than a boy should have had to shoulder ...”

“If he's so proud,” Chet said, “why does he have to
laugh?”

“Because you looked so fierce you struck him funny, I guess.”

Chet scowled at the .30-30 and the shotgun hanging one on top of the other above the mantel. He shook his shoulders irritably inside his mother's quick tight squeeze. “Well, there's no call to laugh!” he said.

A week after their return from the hospital, Bo sat counting his money in the dining room. Elsa was already in bed; he could feel her watching him. Deliberately he counted out fifty dollars and pocketed the rest, almost six hundred dollars, a fine fat roll with a rubber band around it. He sat down on the edge of the bed and shook off his slippers.

“Coming to bed already?” Elsa said.

“Lot to do tomorrow.”

“What?”

He slid his pants off one leg, pulling at the cuff. “Change the wheels to bobs, for one thing.”

He knew she was lying there stiffly, accusing him with her eyes, but he pulled his shirt over his head and pretended not to know. Finally she said, “To go to Montana?”

“Yep.”

She lay stiff and straight on her side of the bed as he got into his nightgown and stretched out. Her voice went flatly up toward the ceiling. “So it wasn't the epidemic. You're in the whiskey business.”

“Look,” Bo said. He put his arm around her but she didn't yield or turn her face. “I've still got six hundred, and it'll be over a week before they get the bank open again and I have to pay that note. I can take the wagon and bring back twice as much as I did before. Double my money again.”

They lay in silence, with bitterness between them. Then Elsa said, “Fourteen years ago you were in the liquor business and you got out. Now you're back in it worse.”

“What's wrong with the liquor business?” he said. “Almost anywhere it's perfectly legal. Just because this crackpot province passes a war measure ...”

“Even where it's legal it isn't respectable,” she said.

In exasperation he turned his back on her, turned over again just as abruptly to say, “You sold some a while ago. Did it burn your fingers? Did the money you got for it poison you? I suppose you think you and Chet are a cinch for hellfire because you both sold whiskey.”

“It isn't hellfire that bothers me,” she said. “I just want us to have a good solid place in the world where nobody can shame us with anything.”

“That's sure ambitious,” he said. “That shows a lot of imagination, that does. Any dirt farmer in the province can claim that, practically.”

“But we can‘t,” she said.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, I'll go down tomorrow and get the job of driving the honey-wagon. That's a nice solid place in the world. That's a steady job. And Heathcliff's dead, they'll need somebody.”

“Bo,” she said, “I'd rather see you doing that than what you're going to do.”

“By God,” he said, almost in wonder, “I believe you would.” He turned away from her and settled himself to sleep. As long as he remained awake he did not feel her stir. When he woke in the morning he felt the antagonism still between them, but he went ahead anyway. And when he had returned with the load, and had peddled it in town and in all the little towns along the line, and had turned the whiskey into cash and paid back the note to the bank, he took off again with team and bobsled in January, and brought back enough to last through the rest of the winter.

 

Now the long closed winter, blizzard and cold snap and Chinook, delusive thaws in February and iron cold in March and heavy snow in April. Two line-riding cowpunchers from the Half-Diamond Bar froze to death on St. Patrick's day in a forty-below blizzard. Mrs. John Chapman, widowed by the flu, created a sensation by taking strychnine for the lost affections of Hank Freeze, the most prosperous farmer on the north bench. As soon as it was clear that Mrs. Chapman had taken an overdose and would recover, people had a good deal of fun with that. What could you expect of a guy named Freeze?

In formal meeting, the town council voted to collect money for a bronze plaque to be erected in the firehouse in honor of the four local boys who had died in the war and the eleven others who had served. The Reverend Charles Evans, successor to the Reverend John Morrison who had died of the flu, bought a half column of space in the Whitemud
Ledger
to deplore, more publicly than he could from his pulpit, the falling away of Sunday school and church attendance.

Early in April Howard Palmer, who had hung up a shingle reading “Barrister” two years before, stood up in church to denounce the wickedness of the town. He thundered, his head shook, his eyes went bloodshot with passion, foam gathered at the corners of his mouth. He called down hellfire on three sinful women, and named their names. He blasted the person who had brought liquor in in defiance of provincial law, and named his name. He took a passing swipe at Ed Anderson's billiard hell and the Pastime Movie Theater. When he had cracked his damnation blacksnake over most of the town's backs, he fell down between the pews in a fit, and that night, while Bo Mason was.winning a pearl-handled jack-knife for figure skating at the annual ice carnival, they carted the barrister off to Saskatoon to the bughouse, and that was a nine-days' wonder.

Until finally there came a time when the sun was up before most of the townspeople, and by the time breakfasts were over the eaves began to drip. They dripped all day, and after a day or so women emerged on front porches and swept out the accumulated rubbish of the winter. The nights froze hard, but before eight in the morning water was running again, and anyone walking below the bench hills was likely to break through the sodden crust and fill his shoes with icewater, and if he stood quietly and listened he could hear the streams under the snow. Thermometers stood at forty-five, ninety degrees above where they had stood a time or two during the winter. Dogs ran dirty-footed through the town, boys felt the misty, warming air on their faces and hated school. Because this was it: this was the real spring thaw. It might freeze every night, it might even snow again, but the weather had broken. The awakening was like a sunny morning after long rain, or light after long darkness, and the blood leaped to the sound of the spring freshets coming down the gullies from the hills.

After a week of thaw Bo went downtown and brought back the Ford from Bert Withers' garage, where he had left it to get a new radiator put on. Three days later, as soon as the sun had dried the roads a little, he was ready to go.

“Keep an eye on Daisy,” he said to Elsa. “She'll throw her colt any time now. I asked Jim Enich to come around every other day or so.”

“Are you going to be gone long?”

“I might be gone ten days.”

“But why? With the car ...”

“I'm going to peddle this in the other towns,” he said. “The quicker I get rid of this the fatter the stake gets. I want to build up a good one before two or three other guys get the idea the roads are passable.”

“Is there anything you want me to do?” she said.

He looked at her quickly. “Like what?”

“Like selling any stuff you've got left over.”

“I thought you didn't want anything to do with it?”

“I didn‘t,” she said. “But I'd rather be in it with you than have you going off on these trips without telling me anything. We always did things together, till now.”

“Old Mama,” he said, and put his arm around her. “Now you're playing ball.”

An hour later he climbed into the Ford and drove out toward the bench, his tracks like parallel wriggling ditches in the thick gumbo mud.

 

For eleven months of the year the Whitemud River was a sleepy, slow, clear stream, looping in wide meanders between the bench hills, shallowing to brief rapids, deepening along the cutbanks in the bends. But for a week or two around the end of April it was a flood thirty feet deep, jammed with ice cakes and driftwood and the splintered timbers of bridges. It completely covered the willows across the channel from the Mason house, and what had been a wilderness of brush and scrub was a chocolate expanse of water, moving in places with terrible quiet speed, stalling at others into eddies and backwashes.

It began with the first sudden thaw, when every little drainage gully from the hills began pouring water down onto the river ice, and it kept on until the channel was gorged and overflowed by this new river on top of the old. In the sun, in the wet, exciting wind, groups of people lined the banks waiting for the breakup. Somebody reported that she was going below the dam; in ten minutes there was word that ice was backed twenty feet high behind the upper railroad bridge. By the time the townspeople arrived, a section gang Working cautiously from a handcar was dropping dynamite into the moving, sliding, ponderous pressure of the pack. They might as well have dropped firecrackers.