The Big Rock Candy Mountain (2 page)

 

The country about her was flat as a floor and absolutely treeless. On both sides of the tracks the town sprawled, new, temporary-looking, cut by rutted streets whose borders were a jungle of sweet clover and weeds. Across the roofs of two cottages Elsa could see the square high fronts of stores on what seemed to be the main street. Toward them she started, pulled off balance by the weight of her telescope. As she passed the first cottage a man in his undershirt threw open the door and stood in the sun yawning and stretching and staring at her.

The main street was a river of fine powder between the raised plank sidewalks. On both sides a row of hitching posts stood in vanishing perspective down to the end of the street, which trailed off weakly into open country. As she walked, looking for her uncle's store, Elsa saw with sick certitude that Hardanger was ugly. Frame buildings, false fronts, gaping vacant lots piled with old barrels, boxes, blowing newspapers, ashes. Dust-choked streets and sidewalks that were treacherous to walk on because sometimes the ends of the boards were loose. A general store whose windows were crammed with overalls, pitchforks, gloves, monkey wrenches, spools of barbed wire, guns, boxes of ammunition, ladies' hats. A butcher shop and bakery under the same roof, the windows of both opaque with fly specks. On the first corner a two-story frame hotel, its windows giving her a momentary glimpse of leather chairs and a disconsolate potted palm. A drug store across the street, its sides plastered with advertisements for medicines. Next to that a vacant lot, then a pensioned railroad car set end-to to the street and wearing on its front the legend “Furs bought for cash.” Another vacant lot, a store labeled “Gents and Ladies Haberdashery,” a billiard hall and bowling alley, and then her uncle's store: “Karl Norgaard, Plain and Fancy Groceries.”

But the store was closed. It was only, Elsa discovered by a look at her watch, twenty minutes past six. There was not a soul in the street. She was standing on the sidewalk, clasping and unclasping her fingers to restore the circulation after the weight of the telescope, when a young man came out of the pool hall. He was tall, slim, but heavy in the shoulders. His black hair was parted in the middle and pomaded flat over a forehead dark as an Indian's from the sun. His sleeves were rolled up to expose powerful arms, thick in the wrists and roundly muscled.

“Hello!” he said, staring at her. Elsa flushed. The man had a merry and speculative glint in his eye; his stare bothered her as the smirk of the man at the station in Fargo had.

“You looking for somebody?”

Elsa stooped and picked up the telescope, some notion in her mind that that showed she was leaving in a minute. “I was looking for my uncle, Mr. Norgaard. You don't know where he lives, do you?”

“Sure. Just down around the next corner. You can see it from here.” He came toward her with a slightly lurching stride, his shoulders swinging, and pointed to a gray frame house on the first cross street.

“Thank you,” Elsa said, and started away.

He followed her. “You his niece? I could tell, though, by that hair.”

Her hot, suspicious look made him laugh. “No need to get mad. We all been expecting you.”

“I was supposed to wire him,” she said. “He didn't know when. ... Well, thank you for ...”

“Can I lug that satchel for you?” He kept pace with her, watching her, talking with a hidden burble of laughter in his voice.

“No thanks. I can carry it.”

She hurried faster, and he stopped, but all the way to her uncle's house she could feel him watching her, and her mind's eye could see him standing in his shirt sleeves on the sidewalk with the sun on his dark face. It irritated her. There was something fresh about him.

Karl Norgaard was not yet dressed when she knocked. After a moment his red head appeared in an upstairs window.

“Hello, Elsa! I thought you were going to wire me.”

She tilted back her head to smile at him, feeling suddenly very tired and hungry and soiled. “I forgot, Uncle Karl. Can I come in anyway?”

“You bet you,” he said. “Be down in a minute.”

In a minute the door opened and he was grinning at her, his pink round face so full of welcome that she found herself laughing weakly aloud.
“Velkommen!”
he said.
“Velkommen,
Elsa.”

Elsa unwound her scarf from her hat and said, “Thanks, Uncle Karl. It's nice to be here at last.”

“You came in a hurry,” Karl said. He stood in his felt pantofles and regarded her with shrewd eyes. “How's everybody at home?”

“Fine. Everybody's fine. But I had to come in a hurry, Uncle Karl. I couldn't stay there a minute longer.”

Karl rubbed one apple cheek. “Well, you're young.
Herregud,
the fool things you do when you're young.” He grabbed her by the arm. “Well, come in, come in. Come on upstairs. Want to wash your face? Take a bath? There's a tub in the cellarway. I'll heat some water.”

“Let me get my breath first,” she said. “Can I put this bag somewhere?”

He showed her her room, led her into the other two upstairs rooms, one his own bedroom, one his office. “You might as well learn right away to leave the office alone,” he said. “I can't find anything as it is.”

“How about your bedroom? Can you sleep if I take off those dirty old sheets and put some clean ones on?”

“It was changed two weeks ago,” Karl said. “That's pretty good for an old batch.” He frowned. “Maybe I made a mistake letting you come. You get so neat a man can't stand you and I'll send you home.”

“I'll be good,” she said. “I'll be as sloppy as you want, but don't send me home.” She took off her hat and lifted her hair with her fingers to ease its weight. “You go get a fire going and I'll get your breakfast.”

After breakfast he went off to the store. In spite of his instructions to go to bed, she tidied up, swept, changed the beds and laid out a washing for the next day, cleaned up the sardine cans and cracker boxes and cheese rinds from the kitchen. The curtains, she decided, had not been washed since the flood, and took them down to add them to the washing. Then she went up to her room and unpacked. By the time she had things put away, the telescope stuck into the attic, and the daguerreotype of her mother set up on the dresser, she began to feel settled and permanent. The mere fact of working in this house made it her own, her clothes hanging in the wardrobe gave her proprietorship.

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.

“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.