Angle of Repose (46 page)

He consulted his watch. “About sixteen hours.”

She was awed. “What on earth did that doctor give me?”

“Just what you needed. What you ought to take every time you get wound up like that.”

“Oh no,” she said, “no, I couldn’t.” Groggily she turned her head to look at the brightness outside, the brown hill sloping up to aspens that wavered as unstable as water. “You should have waked me up. I’ve kept you from going to the mine.”

“Frank’s there. There’s nothing to do but wait anyway.”

“Ah,” she said sympathetically, “I haven’t been paying enough attention to my husband. Is everything still all snarled up?”

“Still snarled up.”

“I keep hoping you’ll run into a rich ore body.”

“We won’t do that unless they give us some money to operate with.”

“And they won’t do that till the suit is settled.”

“Maybe it’ll be settled by 1883 or so.”

She put out a hand. “I’m sorry it’s so hard for you. How’s Frank? He’s been such a lamb about helping out, and I’ve hardly said good morning or good evening. We’ve got to have him up for supper. Tonight. Let’s get the Wards and some others and have an evening again.”

“That’d be good. Frank would like that.”

“And Pricey. How is Pricey?”

He had opened his knife and was working at the horny callus on his palm. His eyes lifted, without any movement of his head, he looked up at her over half-moons of white, so apologetic, ashamed, angry, or embarrassed that he scared her. “Pricey’s gone.”

“Gone? Gone where?”

“England.”

“Did they send for him?”

“No. I sent him.”

The tears that welled weakly to her eyes made him swim and flow, fluid and out of focus in his faded blue shirt and blue jeans. “Oh, Oliver,
why?
”

“Why?” He sat with his jaw bulging. His knife clicked shut, he stretched his leg to slide it into the tight pocket of his jeans. “Why,” he said, thinking. His eyes came up again, the pupils coldly furious. Every gentle and good-natured line in his face was hardened and coarsened. “Why!” he said a third time. “Because we couldn’t look after him. Because he was in the road.”

As if the expression on her face maddened him, he moved his shoulders and flattened his mouth. She stared at him through her tears. “If you’re going to ask why we didn’t take him to the mine with us,” he said, “we did. He remembered, he shook like a dog, he was scared to death. I tried taking him along when I had to ride anywhere, but he held me back. Frank tried setting him up in their shack with all the books he could borrow. You’d think that would be Pricey’s dish, but Frank would come home and find him gone, and then he’d have to hunt all over Leadville for him. Once he was in jail–where else would Leadville put a fellow that can’t look after himself? He kept wanting to come up here. I told him Ollie was sick and you were swamped and there wasn’t any room, he’d have to stay with Frank. Where do I find him–not once, three or four times? Hiding behind W.S.’s privy, just hanging around and looking down here like a mongrel dog waiting for scraps to be thrown out the door.” He brushed nothing off the tight thighs of his jeans. “Do you think I
liked
sending him home?”

“No. Of course not.” She could not help the weak tears that kept welling to her eyes. They broke through her lashes and ran down both cheeks and she did not wipe them away. “It’s just–he was so helpless. It’s like kittens being put in a bag to be taken to the river. How could he travel?”

“Frank took him as far as Denver and put him on the Santa Fe and paid the porter to look after him to New York. I wired the Syndicate to have somebody meet him and put him on the boat, and cabled his father to meet him at Southampton.”

“I wish you’d told me so I could at least have said good-bye.”

The fiery cold eye touched her, held a moment, looked out the window. “I didn’t think you needed anything else.”

“Oh, I know. You were being thoughtful. How did . . . When Frank left him in Denver, how was it? What did Pricey say?”

“He cried,” Oliver said.

He would not look at her, he stared stubbornly out the window. She let her own wet glance go the same way. Out there the dry hillside shimmered with tears and summer, the aspens flashed light off their incessant leaves, the grasshoppers whirred and arched. A mourning dove was who-whoing off in the timber. In the blinking of a tear it would be fall. She had missed the spring and half the summer, the home that they had bragged they would make at the edge of timberline was a disaster.

The dove’s long mournful throaty cooing was a dirge for the failed and disappointed, for the innocent and incompetent, themselves not excepted, who wandered out to this harsh place and were destroyed.

As if he had read her mind, Oliver said, “He never did belong. He never could have made it even if he hadn’t been hurt.”

“Just the same,” she said. “Just the same! If that Syndicate had any heart it would have done something for him. It didn’t, did it? Who paid his fare?”

“I did.”

“And will never get it back.”

“Do you care?”

“No. But I hate that heartless mine, all those people so many safe miles away who let people get hurt or killed and never care, so long as they get their dividends.”

“Which they’re not getting.”

“They’re too callous to deserve anything. Too timid and too callous. Why don’t we quit?”

A little laugh was jolted out of him. He looked first out the window and then into his hands, as if in search of something that would catch his eye. “Frank would feel terrible, for one thing. He’d stay here ten years without pay, and trade buckshot with those people every afternoon, just to beat them.”

“Are you talking about Frank or yourself?”

“All right,” he said. “I’m not exactly friendly with them. And I don’t like to lose.”

“You need a vacation, that’s what you need.”

“So do you.”

“So does Ollie. We all do. It
hasn’t
been good here, Oliver. Helen was right. Grass won’t grow, cats can’t live, chickens won’t lay. We were mistaken to think we could make a home on this mountain. We ought to get out ”

He had out his knife again, digging at his horny palm. She saw the V between thumb and forefinger thick and yellow with callus. In the absence of money to hire a crew, he and Frank and Jack Hill had been mucking in the mine like common laborers, hoping to turn up something that would persuade the New York office to commit itself and its money. Carefully, without looking up, he said, “Would you consider Mexico?”

“Consider it?” she said suspiciously. “Why? Have you had an offer?”

“Not exactly. But I could, I think.”

“Where is it? Off on some mountaintop, like Leadville or Potosí?”

She saw his forehead pucker. His eyes returned from outdoors and met hers steadily. His head was up so that the pupils sat in the middle, riot up against the upper lids, and there was not that sinister half-moon of white below them. “Sue,” he said, “it’s my
profession.”

She was contrite. She hadn’t meant to sneer. “I know. Tell me.”

“Letter came a week or so ago–ten days, two weeks, I don’t know. The Syndicate’s given up on the Adelaide until the suit’s settled. We’re just sitting here. They’ve got an option on a mine in Michoacán. There was this sort of question, if it worked out that way would I be interested in inspecting it.”

“And then what?”

“Then we’d come back here, assuming the Adelaide wins its suit.”

“What about Ollie?”

“He couldn’t go, not on this inspection trip.”

“Back to Milton?”

“Milton or Guilford. Milton’s more his home than anywhere else.”

“How long?”

“How long?”

“You say you’d have to inspect it. How long would that take?”

“I don’t know. Two months, maybe more.”

“Could I go along?”

“I wouldn’t go otherwise.”

Absently her hand came out and settled on top of his. He was being scrupulous not to influence her, he simply laid out possibilities. “I hate to think of Ollie,” she said. “Just barely well, if he is.”

He said nothing. He watched her.

“I wonder if I could get Thomas to commission an article,” she said. “Mexico might be exciting to draw.”

He sat inert.

“If we didn’t go there, we’d just mildew here,” she said. “When will that suit come up, do you think?”

“Not before winter. Maybe spring.”

“And Frank could hold the fort here, if we went.”

“Why not?”

“If Thomas would commission an article, we might make more by going there than by staying here. We could leave Ollie with Mother and Bessie, I
know
they’re better for him than I am.”

“You mean
you
could make more,” Oliver said, steadily watching her.

“Oh, Oliver, please!”

“Two questions. Will you leave him? And would you like to go? If the answer is yes to both, I’ll write Ferd. He has to pay me whether I stay here or go there. I imagine he’d just as soon get some work out of me.”

The dove cooed again, distant and sorrowful, and was answered from a great distance by another. She laughed shakily and stretched the salt-stiffened skin of her cheeks. “Oliver, let’s! I keep thinking it’s morning. I keep thinking it’s a fine sunny morning after a spell of bad weather. I feel like popping out of bed and being energetic and cheerful.”

“All right,” Oliver said. “You pop out of bed and be energetic and cheerful. I’ll go down to the office and see how Frank’s doing, and maybe write a letter.”

“What if I wrote Waldo Drake too? Would that help?”

“I don’t know. Would it?”

“It might. I’ve known him a long time.”

He looked at her. He shrugged. “O.K., if you want.”

“Would it seem like . . . taking advantage of a connection?”

“I suppose it might.”

“Even if it does!” she said. “I don’t care.”

My mother died when I was two, my father was a silent and difficult man: I grew up my grandparents’ child. As those things went in Grass Valley, I also grew up privileged, son of the superintendent of the Zodiac and grandson of the general manager. Every child I played with came from a family that worked for mine.

Grandmother deferred to my father, seemed almost to fear him. Certainly she assumed the blame for the taciturnity that made him formidable to deal with, and certainly she saw in me a second chance to raise up an ideal gentleman. Rough and dangerous play, adventures into old mine shafts, long hikes and rides, those her life in the West had led her to accept and even encourage: Let me be tried in manliness. But honesty, uprightness, courtesy, consideration for others, cleanliness of body and mouth, sensibility to poetry and nature–those she took as her personal obligation. Never severe, she was often intense. She instructed me as if out of bitter personal experience, she brooded along the edges of my childhood like someone living out a long Tennysonian regret. My lapses from uprightness troubled her, I thought, out of all proportion to the offense.

Once in a while, when she had a visitor she liked, some old tottering friend such as Conrad Prager, I might hear her chattering on the porch or in the pergola, long since torn down, that used to be a part of Grandfather’s prize rose garden. On those occasions I sometimes heard her laugh aloud, a clear, giggly laugh like a flirting girl’s; and I was surprised, for around my father, my grandfather, and me she seldom laughed. Instructing me, especially in moral matters, she used to shake me by the shoulders, slowly and earnestly, looking into my eyes. It was as if she were trying to yearn me into virtue, like Davy Crockett grinning a coon out of a tree. I was never never
never
to behave
beneath
myself. She had known people who did, and the results were calamitous. The way to develop and deserve self-respect, which was the thing most worth seeking in life, was to guide myself always by the noblest ideals that the race had evolved through the ages.

Somewhere back in her mind lurked the figure of Thomas Hudson, in shining mail. His example dictated my training as it had dictated my father’s. In some ways, Grandmother hadn’t learned a thing since the time when she sent my poor scared twelve-year-old father out of Boise to attend St. Paul’s School and become an Eastern gentleman. When my time came around she sent me too to St. Paul’s, my father silently consenting. Gentility is inherited through the female line like hemophilia, and is all but incurable.

The children of Grass Valley, who were far from genteel, might have made things difficult for a little gentleman except for two things. One was the affection the town felt for my grandfather and the respect it had to pay my father. Any boy who picked on me would have been whaled, out of policy or principle or both. The other reason was that I opened up special opportunities.

For example, my grandfather might take a bunch of us down the mine, or he might let us pile into the Hupmobile, driven by Ed Hawkes’s father, and ride through town like blackbirds in an open pie. He might let us help him in the orchard where he fooled with Burbank hybrids and developed hybrids of his own, and when fruits were ripe he was not stingy with them. Many a taste bud in Grass Valley and Nevada City, blunted by sixty years of greasy french fries, ketchup, and bourbon, must remember as mine do the taste of sun-warmed nectarines and Satsuma plums up there in the end of the orchard where I now take my eight hard laps on crutches.

Likewise many a fat or tired or sick or otherwise diminished man and woman in this town must remember afternoons when Lyman Ward, the rich kid, had them over to the big house, where they played run-sheep-run among the pines on Grandfather’s three acres of lawn, or hide-and-seek through the servants’ wing, by that time unused, with its dozen dark closets and cupboards, its twisty back stairs, and its narrow hall whose floorboards betrayed hider and seeker alike. Afterward, the Chinese cook would prepare and the Irish maid serve sandwiches and lemonade and ice cream and cake; and the little barbarians, sweating from their games and abruptly quelled, would sit like little ladies and gentlemen, and cast slant eyes at my grandmother, in long gown and choker collar (she was sensitive about what age did to a lady’s throat), her thinning hair in its bangs and Grecian knot, moving up the polished hall or across the library’s bearskins, or standing in the doorway coercing from them the handshake and muttered thanks–good-bye that were their first instruction in manners.