The Big Rock Candy Mountain Read Free

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.
    â€œMor,” 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
    â€œElsa,” Karl