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

in a week got a scrawl back from Elmer saying that the leg was healing and itched like hell, and as soon as it was well he was going to pull out too. He was getting sick of hearing the old man moan about his hay. Maybe he’d come to Davenport himself. He’d see how things looked.
    â€œThis town ain’t what it used to be when the arsenal was booming,” Dave said to Harry later, “but there’s a lot of building going on. Why‘n’t you learn a trade? That’s where the wages is. Learn a trade and you’re set. I haul for two-three lumber yards. Maybe I can get you on with some carpenter. Want to be a carpenter?”
    â€œI don’t care,” Harry said. “That’s all right.”
    A week later he was apprenticed to a carpenter, working for board and room and clothes. He stayed at it two years, and when he quit he was good. Even his crabbed old boss admitted it; he had never seen a kid pick up a trade any faster. He had a knack with tools; they cut straight for him, and he didn’t cripple himself or them by their misuse. There was also something stubborn and persistent in him under the veneer of toughness he borrowed from Dave. He double-checked measurements, calculated angles two or three times, drew out a job till he knew what was what. Experienced carpenters seemed to go out of their way to teach him the tricks, and he was earning two dollars a day when he was sixteen.
    In the evenings he hung around the fringes of Dave’s crowd, learning to drink beer, sitting in now and then on a cheap poker game. From those men, teamsters and roustabouts and left-overs from the almost-vanished river traffic, he heard stories that put an itch in his feet. They knew Iowa and Illinois and Wisconsin, “Chi” and Milwaukee. One or two of them had rafted timber all the way down the Wisconsin from Wausau and down the Mississippi from Prairie du Chien to St. Louis. The life they had lived and the places they had seen and spoke of had space in them. So when the master carpenter on a big mansion job snarled at Harry for taking time off to smoke a stogie, he picked up his coat, went home to the room, shook hands with Dave, stuffed into his pocket the few dollars he had saved, and caught a ride on a shanty boat down the river.
    For six months he was on the bum, sleeping in jungles and knowledge boxes, picking up scraps of useful knowledge from hoboes and transient laborers moving with the crops. He visited Chicago, and the sight of that city roaring into incredible size and impressiveness on the shore of Lake Michigan left his mind dazed with grandiose visions. Here was really the big town, here were the gangs of men creating a city out of a windswept slough, here were freight engines, passenger engines, lake boats, nosing in smoking and triumphant from every direction, here was money by the millions, a future as big as the sky. But two weeks in the big town convinced him that the days when you started with nothing and got to the top were gone as far as Chicago was concerned. All the big money was already well grabbed. And when, nosing around the freight yards, he almost got picked up by a cinder dick, he did the most direct and logical thing. He ducked between two moving trains and swung aboard the outside one.
    His wanderings took him out through the canal to the Mississippi, and down the river to Natchez on a coal barge. Then he worked north again, picking up a few weeks’ work here and there on building jobs, getting offers of steady work but turning them down to hit the road again. By the end of six months he had a belly full for the time being, an ingrained and educated contempt for the law and law-abiding people, a handiness at making himself liked by hardboiled and suspicious men, and an ambition to get somewhere where the cream hadn’t been skimmed off, get in on the ground floor somewhere and make his pile. And he had the nickname of Bo.
    He took the first job that