Collected Stories, page 14
“Aw!” the boy said. He looked inside the Ford. There was the lunch all packed, the fat wet canvas waterbag, even Spot with his tongue out and his ears up. Looking at his father, all his sullenness gone now, the boy said, “When did you get all this ready?”
His father grinned. “While you slept like a sluggard we worked like a buggard,” he said. Then the boy knew that everything was perfect, nothing could go wrong. When his father started rhyming things he was in his very best mood, and not even breakdowns and flat tires could make him do more than puff and blow and play-act.
He clambered into the front seat and felt the motor shaking under the floorboards. “Hey, Ma!” he yelled. “Hurry up! We’re all ready to go!”
Their own road was a barely marked trail that wriggled out over the burnouts along the east side of the wheat field. At the line it ran into another coming down from the homesteads to the east, and at Cree, a mile inside the Montana boundary, they hit the straight section-line road to Chinook. On that road they passed a trotting team pulling an empty wagon, and the boy waved and yelled, feeling superior, feeling as if he were charioted on pure speed and all the rest of the world were earth-footed.
“Let’s see how fast this old boat will go,” the father said. He nursed it down through a coulee and onto the flat. His fingers pulled the gas lever down, and the motor roared. Looking back with the wind-stung tears in his eyes, the boy saw his mother hanging on to her hat, and the artificial cherries on the hat bouncing. The Ford leaped and bucked, the picnic box tipped over, the dog leaned out and the wind blew his eyes shut and his ears straight back. Turning around, the boy saw the blue sparks leaping from the magneto box and heard his father wahoo. He hung on to the side and leaned out to let the wind tear at him, tried to count the fence posts going by, but they were ahead of him before he got to ten.
The road roughened, and they slowed down. “Good land!” his mother said from the back seat. “We want to get to the Bearpaws, not wind up in a ditch.”
“How fast were we going, Pa?”
“Forty or so, I guess. If we’d been going any faster you’d have hollered ’nuff. You were looking pretty peaked.”
“I was not.”
“Looked pretty scared to me. I guess Ma was hopping around back there like corn in a popper. How’d you like it, Ma?”
“I liked it all right,” she said, “but don’t do it again.”
They passed a farm, and the boy waved at three openmouthed kids in the yard. It was pretty good to be going somewhere, all right. The mountains were plainer now in the south. He could see dark canyons cutting into the slopes and there was snow on the upper peaks.
“How soon’ll we get there, Pa?”
His father tapped the pipe out and put it away and laughed. Without bothering to answer, he began to sing:
Oh, I dug Snoqualmie River,
And Lake Samamish too,
And paddled down to Kirkland
In a little birch canoe.
I built the Rocky Mountains,
And placed them where they are,
Sold whiskey to the Ind-i-ans
From behind a little bar.
It was then, with the empty flat country wheeling by like a great turntable, the wheat fields and the fences and the far red peaks of barns rotating slowly as if in a dignified dance, wheeling and slipping behind and gone, and his father singing, that the strangeness first came over the boy. Somewhere, sometime … and there were mountains in it, and a stream, and a swing that he had fallen out of and cried, and he had mashed ripe blackberries in his hand and his mother had wiped him off, straightening his stiff fingers and wiping hard. … His mind caught on that memory from a time before there was any memory, he rubbed his finger tips against his palm and slid a little down in the seat.
His father tramped on both pedals hard and leaned out of the car, looking. He swung to stare at the boy as a startled idiot might have looked, and in a voice heavy with German gutturals he said, “Vot it iss in de crass?”
“What?”
“Iss in de crass somedings. Besser you bleiben right here.”
He climbed out, and the boy climbed out after him. The dog jumped over the side and rushed, and in the grass by the side of the road the boy saw the biggest snake he had ever seen, long and fat and sleepy. When it pulled itself in and faced the stiff-legged dog he saw that the hind legs and tail of a gopher stuck out of the stretched mouth.
“Jiminy!” the boy said. “He eats gophers whole.”
His father stopped with hands on knees to stare at the snake, looked at the boy, and wagged his head. “Himmel,” he said. “Dot iss a schlange vot iss a schlange!”
“What is it?” the mother said from the car and the boy yelled back, “A snake, a great big snake, and he’s got a whole gopher in his mouth!”
The father chased the pup away, found a rock, and with one careful throw crushed the big flat head. The body, as big around as the boy’s ankle, tightened into a ridged convulsion of muscles, and the tail whipped back and forth. Stooping, the father pulled on the gopher’s tail. There was a wet, slupping noise, and the gopher slid out, coated with slime and twice as long as he ought to have been.
“Head first,” the father said. “That’s a hell of a way to die.”
He lifted the snake by the tail and held it up. “Look,” he said. “He’s longer than I am.” But the mother made a face and turned her head while he fastened it in the forked top of a fence post. It trailed almost two feet on the ground. The tail still twitched.
“He’ll twitch till the sun goes down,” the father said. “First guy that comes along here drunk is going to think he’s got D.T.’s.” He climbed into the car again, and the boy followed.
“What was it, Pa?”
“Milk snake. They come into barns sometimes and milk the cows dry. You saw what he did to that gopher. Milk a cow dry as powder in ten minutes.”
“Gee,” the boy said. He sat back and thought about how long and slick the gopher had been, and how the snake’s mouth was all stretched, and it was a good feeling to have been along and to have shared something like that with his father. It was a trophy, a thing you would remember all your life, and you could tell about it. And while he was thinking that already, even before they got to the mountains at all, he had something to remember about the trip, he remembered that just before they saw the snake he had been remembering something else, and he puckered his eyes in the sun, thinking. He had been right on the edge of it, it was right on the tip of his tongue, and then his father had tramped on the pedals. But it was something a long time ago, and there was a strangeness about it, something bothersome and a little scary, and it hurt his head the way it hurt his head sometimes to do arithmetical sums without pencil and paper. When you did them in your head something went round and round, and you had to keep looking inside to make sure you didn’t lose sight of the figures that were pasted up there somewhere, and if you did it very long at a time you got a sick headache out of it. It was something like that when he had almost remembered just a while ago, only he hadn’t quite been able to see what he knew was there. …
By ten o’clock they had left the graded road and were chugging up a winding trail with toothed rocks embedded in the ruts. Ahead of them the mountains looked low and disappointing, treeless, brown. The trail ducked into a narrow gulch and the sides rose up around them, reddish gravel covered with bunch grass and sage.
“Gee whiz,” the boy said. “These don’t look like mountains.”
“What’d you expect?” his father said. “Expect to step out onto a glacier or something?”
“But there aren’t any trees,” the boy said. “Gee whiz, there isn’t even any water.”
He stood up to look ahead. His father’s foot went down on the low pedal, and the Ford growled at the grade. “Come on, Lena,” his father said. He hitched himself back and forward in the seat, helping the car over the hill, and then, as they barely pulled over the hump and the sides of the gully fell away, there were the real mountains, high as heaven, the high slopes spiked and tufted with trees, and directly ahead of them a magnificent V-shaped door with the sun touching gray cliffs far back in, and a straight-edged violet shadow streaming down from the eastern peak clear to the canyon floor.
“Well?” the father’s voice said. “I guess if you don’t like it we can drop you off here and pick you up on the way back.”
The boy turned to his mother. She was sitting far forward on the edge of the seat. “I guess we want to come along, all right,” she said, and laughed as if she might cry. “Anything as beautiful as that! Don’t we, sonny?”
“You bet,” he said. He remained standing all the way up over the gentle slope of the alluvial fan that aproned out from the canyon’s mouth, and when they passed under the violet shadow, not violet any more but cool gray, he tipped his head back and looked up miles and miles to the broken rock above.
The road got rougher. “Sit down,” his father said. “First thing you know you’ll fall out on your head and sprain both your ankles.”
He was in his very best mood. He said funny things to the car, coaxing it over steep pitches. He talked to it like a horse, patted it on the dashboard, promised it an apple when they got there. Above them the canyon walls opened out and back, went up steeply high and high and high, beyond the first walls that the boy had thought so terrific, away beyond those, piling peak on peak, and the sun touched and missed and touched again.
The trail steepened. A jet of steam burst from the brass radiator cap, the car throbbed and labored, they all sat forward and urged it on. But it slowed, shook, stopped and stood there steaming and shaking, and the motor died with a last, lunging gasp.
“Is this as far as we can get?” the boy said. The thought that they might be broken down, right here on the threshold of wonder, put him in a panic. He looked around. They were in a bare rocky gorge. Not even any trees yet, though a stream tumbled down a bouldered channel on the left. But to get to trees and the real mountains they had to go further, much further. “Can’t we get any further?” he said.
His father grunted. “Skin down to the creek and get a bucket of water.” The boy ran, came stumbling and staggering back with the pail. His mother had already climbed out and put a rock under the back wheel, and they stood close together while the father with a rag made quick, stabbing turns at the radiator cap. The cap blew off and steam went up for six feet and they all jumped back. There was a sullen subterranean boiling deep under the hood.
“Now!” the father said. He poured a little water in, stepped back. In a minute the water came bubbling out again. He poured again, and the motor spit it out again. “Can’t seem to keep anything on her stomach,” the father said, and winked at the boy. He didn’t seem worried.
The fourth dose stayed down. They filled up the radiator till it ran over, screwed the plug in, and threw the pail in the back end. “You two stay out,” the father said. “I’ll see if she’ll go over unloaded.”
She wouldn’t. She moved two feet, strangled, and died. The boy watched with his jaw hanging, remembering yesterday, remembering when something like this had happened and the whole day had gone wrong. But his father wasn’t the same today. He just got out of the car and didn’t swear at all, but winked at the boy again, and made a closing motion with his hand under his chin. “Better shut that mouth,” he said. “Some bird’ll fly in there and build a nest.”
To the mother he said, “Can you kick that rock out from under the wheel?”
“Sure,” she said. “But do you think … Maybe we could walk from here.”
“Hell with it,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll get her up if I have to lug her on my back.”
She kicked the stone away and he rolled backward down the hill, craning, steering with one hand. At the bottom he cramped the wheels, got out and cranked the motor, got in again, and turned around in the narrow road, taking three or four angled tries before he made it. Then his hand waved, and there was the Ford coming up the hill backward, kicking gravel down from under its straining hind wheels, angling across the road and back and up, and the motor roaring like a threshing engine, until it went by them and on up to the crest and turned around with one quick expert ducking motion, and they got in and were off again.
“Well!” said the mother in relief. “Who’d have thought of going up backward?”
“Got more power in reverse,” the father said. “Can’t make it one way, try another.”
“Yay!” the boy said. He was standing up, watching the deep insides of the earth appear behind the angled rock, and his mind was soaring again, up into the heights where a hawk or eagle circled like a toy bird on a string.
“How do you like it?” his mother shouted at him. He turned around and nodded his head, and she smiled at him, wrinkling her eyes. She looked excited herself. Her face had color in it and the varnished cherries bouncing on her hat gave her a reckless, girlish look.
“Hi, Ma,” he said, and grinned.
“Hi yourself,” she said, and grinned right back. He lifted his face and yelled for the very pressure of happiness inside him.
They lay on a ledge high upon the sunny east slope and looked out to the north through the notch cut as sharply as a wedge out of a pie. Far below them the golden plain spread level, golden-tawny grass and golden-green wheat checkerboarded in a pattern as wide as the world. Back of them the spring they had followed up the slope welled out of the ledge, spread out in a small swampy spot, and trickled off down the hill. There were trees, a thick cluster of spruce against the bulge of the wall above them, a clump of twinkling, sunny aspen down the slope, and in the canyon bottom below them a dense forest of soft maple. The mother had a bouquet of leaves in her hand, a little bunch of pine cones on the ground beside her. The three lay quietly, looking down over the steeply dropping wall to the V-shaped door, and beyond that to the interminable plain.
The boy wriggled his back against the rock, put his hand down to shift himself, brought it up again prickled with broken spruce needles. He picked them off, still staring out over the canyon gateway. They were far above the world he knew. The air was cleaner, thinner. There was cold water running from the rock, and all around there were trees. And over the whole canyon, like a haze in the clear air, was that other thing, that memory or ghost of a memory, a swing he had fallen out of, a feel of his hands sticky with crushed blackberries, his skin drinking cool shade, and his father’s anger—the reflection of ecstasy and the shadow of tears.
“I never knew till this minute,” his mother said, “how much I’ve missed the trees.”
Nobody answered. They were all stuffed with lunch, pleasantly tired after the climb. The father lay staring off down the canyon, and the sour smell of his pipe, in that air, was pleasant and clean. The boy saw his mother put the stem of a maple leaf in her mouth and make a half-pleased face at the bitter taste.
The father rose and dug a tin cup from the picnic box, walked to the spring, and dipped himself a drink. He made a breathy sound of satisfaction. “So cold it hurts your teeth,” he said. He brought the mother a cup, and she drank.
“Brucie?” she said, motioning with the cup.
He started to get up, but his father filled the cup and brought it, making believe he was going to pour it on him. The boy ducked and reached for the cup. With his eyes on his father over the cup’s rim, he drank, testing the icy water to see if it really did hurt the teeth. The water was cold and silvery in his mouth, and when he swallowed he felt it cold clear down to his stomach.
“It doesn’t either hurt your teeth,” he said. He poured a little of it on his arm, and something jumped in his skin. It was his skin that remembered. Something numbingly cold, and then warm. He felt it now, the way you waded in it.
“Mom,” he said.
“What?”
“Was it in Washington we went on a picnic like this and picked blackberries and I fell out of a swing and there were big trees, and we found a river that was half cold and half warm?”
His father was relighting his pipe. “What do you know about Washington?” he said. “You were only knee-high to a grasshopper when we lived there.”
“Well, I remember,” the boy said. “I’ve been remembering it all day long, ever since you sang that song about building the Rocky Mountains. You sang it that day, too. Don’t you remember, Mom?”
“I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “We went on picnics in Washington.”
“What’s this about a river with hot and cold running water?” his father said. “You must remember some time you had a bath in a bathtub.”
“I do not!” the boy said. “I got blackberries mashed all over my hands and Mom scrubbed me off, and then we found that river and we waded in it and half was hot and half was cold.”
“Oh-h-h,” his mother said. “I believe I do. … Harry, you remember once up in the Cascades, when we went out with the Curtises? And little Bill Curtis fell off the dock into the lake.” She turned to the boy. “Was there a summer cottage there, a brown shingled house?”
“I don’t know,” the boy said. “I don’t remember any Curtises. But I remember blackberries and that river and a swing.”
“Your head is full of blackberries,” his father said. “If it was the time we went out with the Curtises there weren’t any blackberries. That was in the spring.”
“No,” the mother said. “It was in the fall. It was just before we moved to Redmond. And I think there was a place where one river from the mountains ran into another one from the valley, and they ran alongside each other in the same channel. The mountain one was a lot colder. Don’t you remember that trip with the Curtises, Harry?”
“Sure I remember it,” the father said. “We hired a buckboard and saw a black bear and I won six bits from Joe Curtis pitching horseshoes.”
“That’s right,” the mother said. “You remember the bear, Brucie.”
The boy shook his head. There wasn’t any bear in what he remembered. Just feelings, and things that made his skin prickle.
His mother was looking at him, a little puzzled wrinkle between her eyes. “It’s funny you should remember such different things than we remember,” she said. “Everything means something different to everybody, I guess.” She laughed, and the boy thought her eyes looked very odd and bright. “It makes me feel as if I didn’t know you at all,” she said. She brushed her face with the handful of leaves and looked at the father, gathering up odds and ends and putting them in the picnic box. “I wonder what each of us will remember about today?”
