The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner Page B

back by the pool tables said loudly, “that I’d cut it for fodder before I’d pay any such cut to a thrashing crew ...”
    â€œLook,” Bo said. “How many times do I have to tell you? I want to marry her. I’m not pretending to be something I’m not, but I’m not saying I’m going on here sitting on my tail in this little joint, either. If she wants to marry me on those terms, whose business is it but hers and mine? Write her old man and tell him anything you please. I’ll write him myself if you want. I’m not trying to pull any fast ones. Sure she’s a nice girl. She’s so nice I can’t believe it, considering the way she was brought up. She’s a peach. She deserves a lot, I know it. I want to try to give it to her.”
    â€œYeah,” Karl said. “Well, nobody could ask for more than that. I wasn’t trying to break it up, you understand. It was just that I got this letter ...”
    He stopped. Bo was looking past him toward the man by the slot machine against the far wall. Moving swiftly, he raised the board and stepped out from behind the bar. He was almost at the man’s shoulder before the other heard him, and turned. He was a tall, loosely-built man, a bum or an itinerant laborer with a ragged elbow in his coat. He turned and squawked almost in the same instant, and then Bo collared him.
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    Elsa looked up from the letter with puckered brows, looked unhappily out the window. It was a gray, unpleasant day, and the wind blew, rattling the window frame. The tight-lipped, strained face of her mother looked at her from the German silver frame of the daguerreotype. She felt miserable and discontented, and she hadn’t seen Bo for days. Hardanger, her uncle’s house, the people she knew here, were a foreign land and a foreign people. She had cut herself off from home, and now there was no real home here.
    Her eyes went back to the letter. Sarah, Kristin wrote, was pretty hard to get along with sometimes. She was funny. One minute she’d be apologetic, and let Erling run all over her, and act as if she were a stray that had been let in, and the next she’d be snappish, trying to run the whole place. And she agreed with Pa that something should be done about Elsa, before she flew off the handle and married some good for nothing. Who was Bo Mason, anyway? Pa seemed to be worried about him. Was he nice? Where had she met him?
    Elsa stood up. Let him think what he pleased. He would think the worst, because that was the way he was, but that didn’t bother her. She knew Bo a lot better than he did, and if she chose to marry him—and were asked—she would. And what right had Sarah to talk! Marrying a man twice as old as she was, and then presuming to dictate the marriages of other people!
    Angrily the girl threw on her coat and went outside. Until five in the afternoon she walked as fast as her legs would carry her, out through flattened weedy fields, across strips of summer fallow, over the corner of the dump-ground among wheels of old buggies, pieces of scrap iron, papers, tin cans rusted and plugged with bullet holes from the target-shooting of boys, the bones of a cow gnawed by dogs or coyotes. The slough confronted her, a saucer of stagnant water rimmed with tules, with mudhens floating close to shore and a wary flock of canvasbacks swimming out in the open water. She walked clear around it, feeling through her coat the coming of deep fall; the going away of warmth from the earth was like some loss of warmth and energy in herself.
    And Kristin, wanting to get away from home too, asking if there wasn’t someone in Hardanger who needed a girl—Kristin who couldn’t bake, couldn’t clean house without leaving the corners full of dust puppies and the wallpaper smeared where her broom had brushed down cobwebs. Indian Falls, the place she had called home and still unconsciously thought of as home, must be as