Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [145]
Now that it began to grow warm enough in the room so that they could move a little distance from the fire, she let Ollie try the hammock that Oliver had slung in the corner, and she told him how she had swung him in it in New Almaden when he was brand new. He was passionate to sleep in it; she said he could. But the hammock aroused such homesickness in her, and the ticking away of time made her so nervous and worried, that she opened one of the trunks and rummaged until she had found some of the household goods. The olla she set on the mantel. The Fiji grass mat, its hay smell obscured by two years of storage camphor, she spread on the table and reset the dishes on top of it. The rug of wildcat skins she spread before the fire and invited Ollie to roll on it.
“Let’s see if Daddy notices,” she said. “We won’t tell him, we’ll just wait and see if he notices how homey it is.”
The thumping on the door made her leap to her feet. A kicking, not a knocking–the sound came from low down. “Sit still!” she said to Ollie, and swiftly crossed the room to stand with pounding heart a foot from the rough-hewn planks. The kicking continued, violent and loud. “Yes?” she said. “Who is it?”
“Open up, Sue. Hurry.”
She shoved up the wooden latch, the door burst inward, brushing her aside. Oliver backed in, followed by Frank walking forward. They were carrying a man’s body between them. She got one look at the face, and screamed.
9
Grandmother draws the curtain on those months. The letters all but stop, the reminiscences skip over that time with a distracted brevity.
For weeks she was Pricey’s nurse, after that his keeper. His cut mouth and broken nose and crushed cheekbone and cracked skull healed, but his mind and his eyes ducked and hid. The weather was unrelievedly bad, the trouble at the mine went unresolved. She was filled with anxiety for Oliver, Ollie, herself, Frank. Men who had broken into the office to steal or destroy papers, and who had done what they had to harmless Pricey, would do anything. She hated the weather that kept Ollie cooped up inside with the smell of carbolic acid and the sight of Pricey’s face. What dreams the child must have! What a parody of all she had promised him when she took him to join his father in the mountains!
Their carefree sociability was gone like last year’s leaves. Few experts passed through Leadville: they had made their investigations, written their reports, taken their fees, and gone. Even if there had been anything like last summer’s visitors she could not have welcomed them freely to her fire. Over in his corner like the family’s imbecile child Pricey was always rocking and reading. If visitors did come, he grabbed up the stereopticon and hid behind it, and peeked. Did he fear all strangers, or was he sensitive about his disfigurement, or did he periodically need to bewitch himself with three-dimensional photographs of the West to which he had come hunting . . . what? It sickened her to see him maimed, body and mind. She wept over him, unable to forget that he had been beaten because he was one of theirs. Yet she sometimes felt him around their necks like an albatross, and she grew frantic at the effect he might have on Ollie.
They were a family that, simply because they could hire, acquired the direction of other lives. Like the climate and the altitude, they were an arm of destiny. To bring a Lizzie or a Marian Prouse out West was one thing; women were in demand. But a Pricey was not, in the West or anywhere else. His English family, notified of his condition, wrote back with what Susan felt was a mean, self-saving caution. They did not, they said, have either the health or the money to come for him. His brothers were both married and tied down by jobs and families. They thought it might be best, if Ian did not show improvement, to try to find some good woman, widow perhaps, or someone whose children were grown and gone, to look after him for a fee, which they would try to help pay. They did not like to think of him in an institution.