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

offered, driving spikes in the new spur of the Illinois Central working westward through Illinois and Iowa. The heavy labor developed him into a man, sheathed his chest and shoulders with muscle, left him hard as a hound. But it brought him again into conflict with authority, with the voice of the boss. The Irish foremen on the line were drivers, loud mouthed and quick with their fists, and Bo was anything but docile. He talked back, sneered at the section boss, made no effort to keep his voice down when he beefed. That came to a climax on the graded roadbed just at the end of the steel.
    The crew was bending rails for a gentle curve, locking them in the heavy vises and heaving against them with a surge of muscle. It was hot, back-breaking work in a sun over a hundred degrees. Stripped to the waist, the men launched themselves against the springy steel, relaxed, strained again. McCarthy, the foreman, stood at the end cocking his eye, estimating the curve. He had a hangover, and apparently his cigar was nasty in his mouth, because he threw it away.
    â€œCome on!” he roared suddenly. “Get some beef into it. You ain’t bending a willow switch.”
    Bo wiped the sweat out of his eyes with his forearm. “I can think of a place I’d like to bend a willow switch,” he said. He heaved with the rest, rocking against the rail. McCarthy stepped three paces closer, dropping his head between his shoulders.
    â€œWhere would that be, Squarehead?”
    Bo heaved, grunting. “Right across your ass, Shanty-Irish,” he said pleasantly.
    As if at an order the men were back from the rail and dropping into a half circle. Bo and the foreman faced each other on the banked gravel, their feet shuffling lightly, their eyes sparring, their hands up.
    The foreman lashed out, caught Bo beside the head, took a stiff right cross to the face in return. Like stiff-legged dogs they circled. The foreman dropped his head and rushed, swinging. For a full minute they stood and slugged it out, neither giving an inch. Then McCarthy stumbled and fell on hands and knees, his mouth hanging and his eyes amazed. The watching men howled as Bo, fighting as he had learned to fight on the road, gave him the boots. .McCarthy covered up with his arms and started to roll away, and Bo, tiptoeing like a dancer, followed to crash a kick into the foreman’s ribs that shocked him shudderingly still.
    There was not a sound as he walked away. The men parted and let him by, and wiping his bloody nose as he went, he walked over to the bunkhouse, his head still singing with the power of McCarthy’s fists, his ear swelling, but his blood pounding with a triumph so high and savage that he wanted to yell. The picture of McCarthy lying back there with his ribs caved in was raw alcohol to his soul. He was drunk on it; the toughest Irishman on the crew was back there cold as a clam.
    The next day he was on his way to Wisconsin, bound for a logging camp where another section hand had worked the winter before. The food, he said, was good, the work hard but agreeable, the wages fair. They would just about be getting crews ready for the winter’s cutting.
    Two winters in Wisconsin gave him many skills. Either with rifle or shotgun he was the best shot in camp, so that frequently he got laid off the saw to go hunting for the cook. Those days of prowling the timber with a gun only deepened the wild streak in him as the work on the crosscut deepened his chest. He took to skis and snow-shoes as if he had known them all his life, and he went out of his way to make friends.
    He was genial, a good story-teller, a hearty drinker and a ribald companion in the towns where the rafts and the wanigan tied up and the men swarmed ashore for a bender. On winter evenings, when there was nothing doing in the bunkhouse steaming with the thick smell of drying socks and scorched leather and mutton tallow, he often lay on his bunk reading the one book he had found, a