Angle of Repose (24 page)

“But you said he’d like to fire you, too, and that
could
hurt the company. Look what you saved them on that machinery.”

“He won’t fire me,” Oliver said. “He’ll just try to make me quit. The day after I went and talked to him about Tregoning he had Hernandez hang that sign in here. He doesn’t mean ‘No Smoking.’ He means, You’d better watch your step, young fellow.’ ”

“But you stand right in front of it and smoke!”

“Yep.”

“What if he sees you?”

“I expect he will.”

“But what if he calls you down?”

“He’ll only do it once.”

“Oliver,” she said earnestly, “why do we even
try
to stay?”

“Because I’m still learning something,” he said. “I’m getting a lot of good experience, and an engineer’s capital is his experience. Also I haven’t got any other job lined up. Also you like it here, and you’ve still got some drawings to do.”

“I wouldn’t have liked it if I’d known about all this. I can’t, ever again.”

“Oh, it’s nothing new,” he said. “There’s just this sort of crisis right now.

“I hate to think of you having to submit to that man.”

“Submit?” he said mildly. “Is that what I’m doing?”

The seven o’clock whistle cut loose, screaming across the gulch. Just on its dying wail Mr. Hernandez came in. Susan saw that the street outside had a woman or two in it, but not a single man. Not a straggler was hurrying to tunnel or shaft house or tramway. This morning everybody was on time. She supposed the spies would report that the object lesson taught through Tregoning and the two Mexicans had been taken to heart. When she first arrived, she had thought the place as orderly as a military post. Now she understood how it was done.

“Buenos dias
,” she said in response to Hernandez’s soft greeting. They had a pact to speak only Spanish to each other, with the result that their conversation never got beyond hello and good-bye.

Oliver laid a hand on her back. “You’d better get. No loitering in this office, eh, Chepe?”

Hernandez made a small sound with his tongue against his teeth. “Did you hear that he promised to fire anybody who bought any of Tregoning’s furniture?”

For a moment Oliver said nothing, he only looked steadily at Hernandez. “What’s Tregoning going to do?”

“What could he do?” Hernandez said. “He’s giving it away.”

For a musing time Oliver stood looking out into Shakerag Street through the dirty window. “How long have you been here, Chepe?” he said finally.

“Six years.”

“Never had any run-ins with the Hacienda crowd?”

“No,” said Hernandez, faintly smiling.

“Good,” Oliver said. “Eight more years of faithful service and you can look forward to what Tregoning got.”

“I am careful,” Hernandez said. “I have a mother and two sisters.”

Standing outside of this casual revelation of how deep and violent were the divisions in the camp, Susan felt as a woman running an orderly quiet household might feel if she looked out the window and saw men fighting in the street. She had been wrapped in cottonwool. Every glance between these two was loaded with meanings she had been protected from. She saw them only when they had put the mine and the manager behind them. She knew her husband not as an engineer but as a companion, lover, audience, household fixer. Her drawings of Hernandez’s two sisters for Mr. Howells and the
Atlantic
had shown them languid, slim, domestic, offering figs and native wine to a visitor, herself. She had dwelt not on the harsh life at whose insecure edge they lived, but on their grace, their dark and speaking eyes, the elegance of their dancing, the attractiveness of
rebozo
or
mantilla
over their hair, the feminine gentleness of their gestures and postures. In her indignation she almost wished those blocks back, so that she could send in their place something closer to the truth of mining camp lives. Yet how would she get close to those lives to draw them? She had lived in New Almaden nearly a year and had seen only its picturesque surface.

“You run along, Susan,” Oliver said. “No use to get upset. This is what you might call run of the mine.”

“All right.” But she laid a hand on his arm. Her eyes went to Hernandez, she smiled.
“¿Con permiso
?” she said. He lifted his eyebrows in admiration of her linguistic gifts and turned away, making himself deaf. To Oliver at the door she said, “Don’t consider Boy or me for one second. Don’t compromise your principles.”

“Sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“All right, we’ll see. Maybe by now he’s demonstrated his authority.”

She did not linger in Cornish Camp, and she did not try to sketch, though the fog was already beginning to burn away. She went straight home past the watertank where teamsters and boys had gathered, and where the
aguador
, already down from his first trip upmountain, was refilling his kegs. It always bothered her to walk through the stares, even when she had Stranger along and had no reason to feel unsafe. Now, having had a glimpse of how rotten a string their lives were tied together with, she walked through them smiling a bright smile of fellowship and sympathy, a smile so rigid that her face hurt when she was finally past.

Tell a story like this to any twentieth-century American and he will demand to know how authority got away with that sort of arrogance. Why didn’t the men strike? Try that kind of business nowadays and the UMW would tie the place up as tight as a wet knot. I remember once when they tied up the Zodiac, when my father was superintendent, because of the mine’s policy of carrying the men’s lunch boxes up and down, to prevent the stealing of highgrade. “No spies in the dryhouse,” that sort of slogan. Fleabites, by comparison, irritations rather than injustices. Which demonstrates our need of a sense of history : we need it to know what real injustice looked like. When Kendall was running the New Almaden the United Mine Workers were a half century away, the Western Federation of Miners a generation off, the IWW wouldn’t be founded until 1905.

The West of my grandparents, I have to keep reminding others and myself, is the early West, the last home of the freeborn American. It is all owned in Boston and Philadelphia and New York and London. The freeborn American who works for one of those corporations is lucky if he does not have a family, for then he has an added option: he can afford to quit if he feels like it. If you are a Tregoning, you are lucky to be fired without having your head broken as well. Beyond question, once fired, you will be blacklisted. Tregoning will never operate a hoist again, not in California. He will end up on some valley ranch doing unfamiliar labor for a few dollars a month and a shack to live in.

For buying some stovepipe outside the company store! somebody says.

Exactly. A bad mistake. He knew the rules.

 

When Oliver came in the gate before noon, she knew by his face what he was going to tell her. He walked with a hard, pounding haste, and he started talking, or stammering, before he was to the bottom of the steps. “Well,” he said, “are you . . . I guess we . . . are you ready to move?”

“You resigned.”

“I quit. Resigning would have been too polite. It was all I could do to keep from knocking him down.”

“Oh, Oliver, I’m glad!” she said. She was sure she was. Her spirits surged up as if to an insult or a challenge. She would have walked off the mountain with her baby in her arms and no more possessions than the clothes on her back–but they would have been impeccable–rather than yield one inch or even acknowledge the existence of Lawrence Kendall. “I couldn’t have respected you if you hadn’t,” she said shakily, and took hold of his arm above the elbow. It was as hard as an oak branch. He kept looking around him in an odd, furious way as if he were looking for a place to spit. “What happened?”

“Ha!” he said. “What happened! He came down and ordered me to take a construction crew up by Day tunnel and tear down Tregoning’s house.”

“Can you believe it? That’s exactly what he wanted. There’s a crew doing it right now, poor Chepe’s bossing it.”

“But tear down his house? Why? What earthly good . . . He was already fired.”

“Oh, sure!” he said. “Sure, sure. He was fired, he wasn’t allowed to sell anything. That isn’t enough, the lesson isn’t rubbed in yet. Tregoning owned his own house, the manager before Kendall let him build it on company land for a dollar a year rent. That was to encourage a skilled man to stay. So now Kendall’s tearing it down and scorching the earth. There are already thirty Chinamen scavenging boards and stuff, and a crowd of Cornish women just standing on the hill watching. Not a word out of them, they’re like people watching a hanging. It’s a wonder he
didn’t
hang the whole family, or drive them off the mountain with dogs. They’re off by themselves watching too. None of their neighbors dares even speak to them.”

“I hope thee spoke to them. Did thee?”

“Yes,” he said, and gave her a crooked, apologetic, impatient look that tightened her insides with pity and sympathy for him. She had never seen him upset. He was the laconic one who was always in command of himself. This outrage unmanned him, he shook like a dog. She could have taken his head against her breast and rocked him and told him never mind, never mind, it’s not your fault, you did all you could, it’s the way this brutal place is. “I hope you don’t mind,” Oliver said. “I gave them all the money I had, twenty dollars or so.”

“Oh, Oliver, of
course
thee should have! It was generous.” She hung onto his arm, huddling against his rigid body that moved in twitches and jerks. His eyes were stretched wide like those of a man trying to see in the dark, he whistled through his teeth.

“I wish I knew,” he said. “Hell, I
do
know. He wouldn’t go that far just to enforce a company rule or scare grumblers into line. Unless he was making an absolutely calculated move against me, he wouldn’t have the gall to come to me and tell me to do his dirty work. I hate it that poor Tregoning gets it this bad just because of me.”

“I almost wish thee
had
knocked him down.”

“Ahhh!” He jerked and twitched; she hung on.

“At least,” she said, “now thee’ll explain everything to Mr. Smith and Mr. Prager.”

But he made a face of disgust and distaste. “Let Kendall do the explaining.”

“But you know what he’ll say!”

“Sure. Insubordination, stirring up unrest among the men. I flew into a rage and quit. Too bad a promising young fellow should have dangerous opinions and a bad temper. I don’t care what he says.”

“You’d let him lie about you?”

“I’d rather let him lie about me than have to deal with him or even think about him another five minutes. If they don’t know me well enough to know he’s lying, that’s too bad.” With an eye as cold as Kendall’s own he squinted along the veranda roof. “I wonder if he’ll tear this house down too? Maybe I should beat him to it. I could take this porch off in an afternoon. It’s ours, we paid for it.”

Though she knew it was only a sour joke, it turned her cold, for it brought up the problem of their own moving. How long? Forty-eight hours, like Tregoning? But she did not dare ask until Oliver was calmer. She said; “Let him have his petty triumph. Thee can leave knowing thee has done everything thee was asked to do, and done it well, and more besides.”

Oh, that was Grandmother. What though the world be lost? All is not lost. Honor is not lost.

Miss Prouse came to the door with the baby draped across a napkin on her shoulder, saw them in their intimate conversation, and discreetly withdrew. But the sight of her brought home to Susan such a tangle of responsibilities and complications that she could not keep from saying, “What about Marian? Certainly we can’t afford to keep her now.”

Gloomily he looked at her, saying nothing.

“And Lizzie too. Where will Lizzie go?”

“And
Stranger,” Oliver said. “Stranger’s the luckiest, he can go back to Mother Fall’s.”

“Oh, Oliver, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” She flew against him, in tears. She felt his lips on the top of her head.

“I’m the one who ought to be sorry,” he said. “I did it. It’s not the way we planned it.”

She would not let him blame himself, she shook her head with her face against his chest. “Thee couldn’t have done anything else.”

“I could have done what Chepe’s doing.”

Now she reared back to look into his face. “Not you! You’re too fine!” Immediately she added, in justice to poor trapped Hernandez, “And we’re not that poor.”

His eyes, looking down into hers, wavered almost as if in embarrassment or shame, and he broke the look by hugging her against himself again. “You’re all right, Susan,” he said. “You’re pure gold.”

Again she leaned back to look into his face. “How long will we have? Will he try to evict us?”

“He knows better. No, we’ll take exactly as much time as we need. You still have a picture or two to do, and it will be at least two weeks before I can finish the map.”

“The map! You aren’t going to finish that!”

“Oh yes I am.”

“But
why?
After all he’s . . .”

“For my own satisfaction,” Oliver said. She understood at once that on that point he was immovable. She could argue, he would not argue back. But he would complete the map which he owed no one, which he had done on his own time, for experience, and on the day they left New Almaden he would drop it on Kendall’s desk–no, not that far, he would mail it to Mr. Smith or Mr. Prager, more likely. She could not understand that stubbornness in him which led him to punish himself. But whatever he was, he was not small, and that she took pride in.

“Where will we go?” she asked. “San Francisco?”

“Conrad and Mary, you mean? I don’t think we want to embarrass them with this.”

“I didn’t mean to live with them.”