The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Page 2

  But when she sat on the bed and looked at the dark, thin-faced woman who had been her mother, she felt herself go slowly, weakly sick with the old anger. Staring at the picture, rubbing her knuckles back and forth across her lips and teeth, she thought how her mother too had run away from home, younger than Elsa herself, no more than seventeen, and after three days let her parents know that she had married the carpenter on their place at Voss, in Norway. She risked everything for him, and got only him: he was below her, they never took her back. Within six months she was on her way to America, where for a life she had the backbreaking work of a Minnesota farm—she who had never been used to working at all. It was a short life; Elsa was fifteen when her mother died worn out at thirty-four, and it was Elsa who took up the work her mother had let go. She had father, sister, brother, to take care of; the school she had dropped out of at fourteen to nurse her mother saw her no more. And then less than three years after that lingering death they had all had to watch too closely, Nels Norgaard announced he ...

  Elsa shut her eyes down hard on the smart of tears. It isn’t only that Sarah is twenty years younger than he is, she said silently to the empty, strange room. It’s that she was supposed to be my best friend.

  Counting up what she had left behind her forever, she saw them all as if their faces were propped on the dresser beside her mother’s daguerreotype: her father’s stern long-cheeked face slashed across by the guardsman’s mustache, his eyes merely veiled, unreadable; Sarah in the posture she had been reduced to by Elsa’s anger and scorn—stooped over, weeping, with a slack mouth and flooded gray eyes that said pity me, pity me; Erling’s corkscrew red curls and red farm-boy’s face emerging from the blackened towel by the kitchen cistern pump; Kristin’s awed, aghast, pretty face in the bedroom when she found Elsa packing, the affected pompadour and the vain ribbons, and the whispering voice full of love, kinder than spoiled little sister had ever sounded: “Won’t you take that hat I made last week? You could wear it on the train. It’d look lovely with your hair—it’s green,”—and then the tempest of tears.

  She knew already that she would miss them more than she had ever thought possible; she ached for them this minute, she could even have been respectful to her father and pleasant to Sarah. Maybe ... and yet what else could she have done?

  From the dresser the daguerreotype looked back at her calmly, the lips compressed. It was not a good likeness, and like all pictures of the dead it had petrified the memory of the living, so that every recollection Elsa had of her mother was now limited by this stern and pinched expression. Her mother had been ill when the picture was taken. Perhaps for that reason, perhaps because of the narrowing of memory to fit the one picture she had, Elsa had always felt the daguerreotype to be a portrait of martyrdom.

  “Mor,” she said in Norwegian, groping for some contact or reassurance. “Mom ...”

  Out the window she saw a summer whirlwind spinning across the level fields beyond the flanks of the town. The funnel of dust lifted, dropped again, whirled forward across a road, stopped and spun, moved off in jerky rushes like a top spinning on an irregular surface. It hit a mound of dumped refuse, and tin cans rolled, papers sailed flatly, slid back groundward. Beyond the whirlwind was the prairie running smoothly, the planed horizon broken by two far homesteads, ships on the calm green-bronze sea; and far beyond, the glitter from the moving blades of a windmill.

  It was very big; she felt she could see a long way, even into the future, and she felt how the world rolled under her. After she had watched the summer plains for a long time, and the smarting under her lids had passed, a meadowlark sang sharp and pure from a fencepost, and she began to think that the future into which this new world of her choosing moved with her could hardly be unfriendly, could hardly be anything but good.

  2

  “Elsa,” Karl Norgaard said, “how’d you like to go to a ballgame?”

  He was sitting at the kitchen table opening a jar of gamelost with a screwdriver. Elsa turned from the stove.

  “Are you going?”

  “They couldn’t play without me,” Karl said. ,“I’ve closed the store for every ballgame in fifteen years.”

  “Sure,” she said. “I’d love to.”

  He bore down with the screwdriver, prying at the lid. The blade slipped, and he leaped up with a startled howl. “Fand slyta!” he said. He shook his fingers, and the blood welling from his gouged palm spattered on the floor. “Heste lort!” Karl said, almost jumping up and down. For a full minute he swore savagely in Norwegian, looked at Elsa, bent his lips into a baffled, half-humorous smirk, and looked back at his hand.

  She came running with the iodine bottle and soused the wound. Karl swore again. “Shame on you,” she said.

  “Well, hell,” Karl said. He looked at the deep gouge in his palm and shook his head incredulously. “You haven’t got any business knowing what I said,” he said. “That’s the trouble, having a Norske girl around.”

  Elsa giggled. “Anyway you sounded good and mad,” she said. “Norwegian swearing sounds ten times worse than English, somehow. It’s just like ripping canvas.”

  “I guess you’d swear too,” he said. “Dug my whole damn hand out.”

  “If there was any of that smelly old cheese on the screwdriver you’ll be infected sure,” Elsa said. She tore a strip off a clean cloth and started bandaging.

  “You mean you don’t like gamelost?”

  Elsa made a face. “Erling put some on my knife once, just stuck the knife in the jar and then laid it beside my plate, and I was sick for two hours.”

  “You’re a traitor,” Karl said. “You don’t like ludefisk either.”

  “No, nor herrings.”

  He shook his pink head over her. “But you like ballgames?”

  “Ballgames are all right.”

  “Vell, you batter like dem,” Karl said. “You yoost batter like dem.”

  He went out to the store muttering, shouting back that she yoost batter be raddy at two o‘clock, or a little before, and she saw him stomping through the sweet clover crosslots to the store, holding his gouged hand tenderly against his stomach.

  It was a blistering day. The ground, when they walked out at two o‘clock, was dry and baked, with cracks splitting through the yellow grass of the yard. What had once been a mud puddle in the road was caked into a hundred cupped plates laid together like a Chinese puzzle. Elsa picked one up; it took all the strength of her fingers to break it. Around them the sweet clover, just drying into clusters of seeds, was bone-stiff and dusty. West of the town three whirlwinds raced and dipped and lifted over the flats.

  They walked past the two grain elevators, across the cindery, fire-bitten tracks. On the other side a tier of crude seats was already well filled. Buggies lined the edge of the field, crowded with women under big parasols of fringed canvas faded from the fierce sun. There was a persistent flash of paper fans. A booth wound with red, white, and blue bunting was doing a land-office business in lemonade and pop and ice cream. There were bottles and papers littered along the weedy edge of the diamond.

  Standing below the plank seats, Elsa felt people’s eyes on her. Men spoke to Karl, and he grinned, squinting up into the sun, saying, “Hello Gus, hello George, hello. Ought to be a hot game.”

  “We got it on ice,” somebody said, and there was a laugh.

  Feeling conspicuous, Elsa stood silently under her big hat while her uncle picked out a place in the stands. Then someone was calling from a buggy over on the first base line: “Come on over here. You’ll melt down to grease in that stand.”

  “Ah,” Karl said. “There’s Helm. That’ll be better.”

  The woman who had called beckoned. Elsa saw a broad, dark face, a wide hat, a shapeless body in a loud, intolerably hot-looking dress, a cluster of children. Then they were at the wheel of the buggy, and Karl was saying, “This is Helm, Elsa. Never call her Mrs. Helm or she’ll burst a blood vessel.”

  Grinning with bad teeth, Helm stuck down a
broad hand, her dark eyes running over every detail of the girl’s hair, dress, face. At the first clutch of her hand Elsa thought her knuckles would crumble. She flushed, grew angry, and squeezed back with all her strength until she felt her knuckles slip back into line and the broad palm in hers begin to give. For an instant more they gripped each other, until Helm opened eyes and mouth in astonishment.

  “My God!” she said loudly. “You’re strong as a horse. Where’d you get it?”

  “Milking cows,” Elsa said sweetly. Give me another chance and I’ll squeeze your fingernails off, she thought. She wished Karl hadn’t brought her over here.

  , “Come on up,” Helm said. She stuck down her hand again, and in one mighty heave hauled the girl up beside her, where she inspected her again, closely, with brown shining eyes.

  “You ain’t so light, either. How much do you weigh?”

  “I don’t know. A hundred and thirty or thirty-five.”

  “I got you by a hundred pounds, honey,” Helm said. She rum-. bled with laughter, and her thick fingers pinched experimentally at Elsa’s arm. “You don’t dint easy, either. First off, I had you pegged for one of these ladies with fainting spells and weak chests.”

  Jammed uncomfortably close to Helm’s radiating bulk, Elsa looked around into the box of the democrat, at the clot of children there. Helm caught her looking. “Ain’t that a brood for you? They all look like their granpa. He was a Sioux Indian.”

  “Are you?” Elsa said.

  “Half,” Helm said. “The best half, if there’s any choice.” She picked at a tooth with her fingernail, her eyes warm behind the broad hand. “Their old man was a good-for-nothing,” she said. “After he got all these he run off and left me with a shape like a bale-a hay. Good riddance to bad rubbish.” She got whatever she was digging for and took her hand away. “You like baseball?”

  “Very much,” Elsa said stiffly. She didn’t know what to make of this great vulgar woman, but Karl, sprawling on the grass beside the buggy, must have thought she was all right or he wouldn’t have come to sit with her.

  “This ought-a be a good game,” Helm said. “We got a team, last few years. Got a catcher used to play in the Three-Eye League.”

  “Oh?”

  “You watch him. He’s a one. Bo Mason’s his name.”

  “He runs the bowling alley next to my store,” Karl said. “If he didn’t have a trick knee he’d be in the big leagues.”

  “Oh!” Elsa said. “I think I met him the morning I came. Is he dark, sort of slim—looks slimmer than he really is?”

  “That’s him,” Helm said. “Parts his hair in the middle and a hide like shoe leather.”

  A minute later she pointed. “In the blue shirt,” she said. Elsa looked, and saw the young man of that first morning. As he said something to a companion his teeth were very white in his almost negroid face. She wondered how he got so dark running a bowling alley. That would keep him inside, out of the sun, she would think. And she didn’t know whether she liked his looks or not. There was a kind of rolling swagger in his walk, and as the home team pegged the ball around the infield he kept making bright remarks. A little of the smart alec in him.

  But he was as good as they said he was. In the very first inning he caught an Oasis man trying to steal second, caught him by three feet with a perfect ankle-high peg. After that the opposing baserunners took short leads and went down only with the crack of the bat. When he came up to bat the first time, Mason was out on a screaming grass-cutter that the first baseman tried in vain to get out of the way of, but in the fifth he drove in two runs with a thunderous triple that chased the centerfielder far back in the wild mustard. Helm, pounding Elsa on the back, announced three times that it would have been a homer sure except for that trick knee.

  In the seventh inning the score was tied, eight to eight. The first two Oasis hitters were easy outs. The next one was a slugger. The stocky youngster on the mound took his time, mopping his neck with a bandanna between pitches. Squatting on his hams behind the plate, Bo Mason talked it up. Easy out, easy out! Give him the old dark one.

  The pitcher wound up and threw. Strike! The hitter swung so hard he had to put the end of his bat down to keep from falling. “You need a little oil on your hinges, son,” Mason told him, and the stands hooted. Next pitch, ball. Next one, ball again. Mason’s soothing voice went out over the infield. “All right, boy. Can’t hit what he can’t see. Right down the old alley. Let him swing like a shutter in a cyclone. Feed it to him, he’s got a glass eye.”

  The next pitch was grooved, and the Oasis slugger rode it deep into left field. The fielder lost it in the sun, and the runner went down to second, his feet pumping quick explosions in the dust. A strained look showed him the fielder still chasing the rolling ball, and he legged it for third, where the players on the sidelines waved him frantically home.

  Mason, his teeth showing in his dark face, waited spraddle-legged in front of home plate. The relay from the short stop reached him two steps ahead of the runner, who swerved, skidded, and scrambled back for third. He was in the box. The crowd was on its feet, yelling, as Mason chased him carefully back, holding the throw. He faked, then threw, and the runner reversed and tore for home again. But the ball was there before him, and the catcher blocked the baseline. The Oasis man put his head down and butted through under Mason’s ribs, and Mason, as he was plowed out of the path, lifted the ball and tagged him, hard, on the top of his bare head.

  The sound of ball on skull cracked in the heat, and the grand-stand let go a long, shivering “Ahhhhhhhhhh!” This might mean a fight. They stood higher in the stands, eyes joyful and faces expectant. “Atta boy, Bo!” they said. “Atsy old way to slow him down!”

  Karl Norgaard was standing by the buggy wheel, his pinkish hair damp. He was concentrating on the figure of the Oasis man, slowly pushing himself up from the dust with his flat palms. Karl’s voice rose with him in the expectant hush, thin, tremulous, singsong: “Batter we gat a doctor. Ay tank he ban sunstruck.”

  The stands exploded in mirth that rode the thick hot air and echoed off the elevators. The Oasis man scowled, looking at Mason, standing just off the baseline with the ball in his hand. Contemptuously Mason pulled off his mitt and turned his back, walking over to the Hardanger bench. With his head down the Oasis man started after him, pursued by the hoots of the spectators, who began to jump down from the lower tiers to get in on the scrap. But other Oasis players grabbed their fellow’s elbows and held him while he stood in the clover, fists balled, swearing. Then abruptly he jerked himself loose and ran back into centerfield, and the crowd settled back.

  After that there wasn’t much to the game. Hardanger batted around in the eighth; the final score was sixteen to nine. After the game Helm yelled until Bo Mason came over, and as he stood talking at the buggy wheel Elsa forgot her dislike for his smart alec streak. He was the best player there, there was no question. But his grin embarrassed her when they were introduced, and she sat back in the hot sweaty alley between Helm and the rail and let the others talk.

  “What were you trying to do, kill that guy?” Karl said.

  Mason laughed. “He ran me down, didn’t he? He wants to play rough I can play rough too.”

  “I bet he can’t get his hat on for a week,” Helm said. “How about some beer? You look hot, Bo.”

  “You could fry eggs on me,” Mason said. “Sure. Over at your place?”

  Elsa, sitting uncertainly beside Helm, caught her uncle’s grin. “You want to come along, Elsa?”

  The girl flushed and laughed. “I don’t drink beer,” she said, and was furious at how squeaky her voice sounded. They laughed at her, and Helm patted her on the back with a hand like a leg of lamb. “You don’t have to, honey,” she said. “We c’n take care of that.”

  3

  In the hot morning hush Elsa walked down the plank sidewalk toward her uncle’s store. There wasn’t enough housework to keep her busy more than a few hours a day, even on Mondays
, when she washed, and Saturdays, when she baked. It was a problem to know what to do with her time. Unlike her father, Karl did not have many books around, and though he had given her money to subscribe to the Ladies’ Home Journal, the first number hadn’t come yet.

  She could have called on Helm, but the prospect was still a little terrifying. As she thought over that afternoon with the beer drinkers she felt a little weak. They had all got a little tipsy, they had laughed uproariously, they had told jokes that she knew weren’t quite clean, and she had just pretended not to hear. Before long, if she didn’t watch out, she wouldn’t know what was respectable and what wasn’t. Fiddlesticks, she said. What was wrong about it? But she didn’t quite dare call on Helm.

  In the window of the hotel she caught sight of her reflection, and was pleased. The white dress, perfectly ironed, not yet wilted by the heat; the red hair puffed like a crown in front; the round, erect figure, slim in the waist, full breasted. When she walked past three young men lounging on the sidewalk she stepped self-consciously. Feeling their eyes on her, she hurried a little in spite of herself. She was ten steps past when she heard the low whistle and the voice: “Oh you kid!”

  She remembered the time she had bloodied George Moe’s nose for him when he got smart about her hair. Men were just the same. They’d say smart alec things and if you turned on them, even if you bloodied their noses, they’d laugh even more. But she would have liked to say something sharp to that loafer. Oh you kid! The smart alecs.

  But anyway, the next window told her, she looked nice, cool as a cloud.

  In front of her uncle’s store she almost ran into Bo Mason, bare-headed, his pomaded hair sleek as a blackbird’s breast. As he looked at her his eyes were sleepy, the full upper lids making them narrower than they really were. His voice was slow and warm. “Hel loooo!”