The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner Read Free Book Online

the scythe.
    Harry never knew quite how it happened. His head was down, his eyes on the next semicircle of long wild grass that the scythe would reach. Either Elmer moved a little closer, or Harry in his hurry reached out too far, but in the warm hay-smelling quiet Elmer suddenly yelped, just as Harry, having felt the sudden solid obstruction to the blade, stood up.
    Elmer sat down and rolled up his pants leg. Jets of blood pumped from a long deep gash in his inner calf. “Oh my gosh!” Harry said. He dropped on hands and knees and tried to stop the bleeding with his hands, but it burst out of the red lips of the wound and flooded his wrists. Their father came running, swearing at every step. For once Harry saw him move quickly and efficiently.
    â€œGet me your shirt!” he said. Harry raced for it, came back on the dead run. His father had already laid Elmer on his back, found the artery above the cut, and was pressing deep with his thumb into the brown flesh. The bleeding lessened, came in feeble, choked spurts. Mason jerked his head at the twist of black eating tobacco in his shirt pocket. “Chew that up, a big hunk of it.”
    Harry stuffed the end in his mouth, bit off a great mouthful, and chewed desperately. Some of the juice ran down his throat; he choked, gagged, felt his bowels heave in nauseated protest, but he chewed on.
    â€œC‘mere!”
    Harry knelt, helped his father fit a stone into a strip of cloth and press it against the spot where his thumb had been. A burst of blood shot from the wound, was choked down again. “Tie that around his leg,” Mason said. “Tight as you can tie it.”
    His cheeks bulged with the evil wad, Harry tied, pulling until Elmer snapped at him. His father, kneeling on the ripped shirt, was tearing off another strip with his good hand. “All right, lessee that tobacco.”
    Harry spat it into the outstretched palm, watched it smeared on the wound, rubbed in with dirty fingers. Elmer winced, his eyebrows drew down, his lips pulled away from his teeth. “Gosh I’m sorry, Elmer,” Harry said. “I must-a reached out too far.”
    â€œTie that!” his father said harshly. The boy tied the strip of sweaty shirt over the daubed wound. For a moment he remained squatting beside his brother, contrite and sympathetic, and in that moment his father’s anger, restrained till now by the immediacies of first aid, blew out of him like an explosion.
    â€œGod damn you!” he howled. The boy saw the blow coming, but couldn’t duck. The back of his father’s hard hand hit him across the mouth, bowled him over on his back. He arose slowly, watchfully, his sullen face sallow, his eyes burning with hatred. “I didn’t go to do it,” he said.
    The hand hauled back again, and Harry backed away slowly. “Give me your lip!” the old man shouted. “God damn it, ain’t I got enough worries without you cuttin’ Elmer all to hell and bringin’ on doctor bills? Who’s gonna cut this hay now?”
    Harry had backed away to a safe distance. “Well, I’m not, by God!” he blazed. “That’s the last time you ever hit me!”
    He turned and ran across the mown edge of the meadow, climbed the fence, went into town and hunted up the doctor and directed him to the place where Elmer lay, and started west out of town. He never came back.
    In Davenport, three days later, he found his brother Dave. “You did just right,” Dave said. “The hell with the old bastard.”
    â€œOnly thing I feel mean about is running out on El,” Harry said. “That was a bad cut.”
    Dave, while driving his dray, had learned to talk tough and smoke stogies, and he wore leather wrist protectors studded with brass nails. “Hell,” he said, “what’s a cut on the leg? He’ll be all right. Anyway, you can write him a letter.”
    So Harry wrote a letter, and