Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [147]
He stood at her shoulder, peeking, while she examined the varieties. Paintbrush, yes, and the pink ones are primroses. The blue one is a pentstemon, those are nice, and the white one a columbine, lovely. The creamy one with the five petals is some kind of cinquefoil, I knew something very like it back home in New York. But this little yellow one with the gray leaves, that’s something new.”
“Puc-puc-puccoon!” Pricey said. “Lithospermum multiflorum:”
“What?” She stared at him, jolted into laughter that was half hysterical. “How did you know that?”
Pricey was confused. He stammered and shrugged, searching her face as if the answer might be there.
“Never mind,” she said, and patted his arm. “Pricey, you’re getting well, do you know that? That’s wonderful that you remembered.”
A cold shadow fled along the slope faster than a horse could run, the sky winked like a great eye, winked again and flooded them with renewed warmth. Beside them the crystalline ditch rushed to run the mills and gather the rubbish of Leadville. Beyond the piled whiteness of the clouds the sky was so hurtfully blue that she could not help saying, “Pricey, remember that day last summer when we were riding on the Lake Fork? ‘How tenderly the haughty day fills his blue urn with fire’?”
“Hawwww!” Doubtful, filled with dismayed uncertainty, narrowing his eyes to think, he stared at her out of sandy-lashed pale blue eyes. His tongue was between his lips, the lips moved in and out, puckered and rubbery. In pity she tapped his arm again, releasing him, and put his bouquet to her nose and inhaled its faint wild fragrance. But she felt better about him. For a moment there, when that fragment of a Linnaean botany book had burst out of him, the dimmed mind had brightened. She gathered her two charges, one on each side, and walked again, thinking.
If Pricey got well he could go back to live with Frank–just come over evenings and tuck into his corner and read or listen. Now and then she and Oliver would be free to dine at the Clarendon; it seemed the height of gaiety. Now that Leadville’s summer had finally arrived, there would be more ladies–they might have a picnic at Twin Lakes for the Fourth. She could ride again, assuming that Oliver or Frank would dare leave the mine to go with her–most surely they would not let her go alone. She might sleep again, instead of going around wound up ready to snap, or prowling the dark cabin in her dressing gown from Ollie’s hammock to Pricey’s cot, or staring out the window into barren starlight. Maybe, maybe. Maybe the Adelaide would finally hit that rich carbonate that Oliver was sure was there, and the skinflint owners in New York would give him some support (how wry that one of them was Waldo Drake!) and the court would rule against the thieves and roughnecks at the Argentina and Highland Chief, and Oliver could go off to work without that hateful pistol and that scabbarded carbine. Maybe her house would at last cease to be a hospital and a prison, and begin to be the home she had hoped to make it.
The moment the wish expressed itself, she felt that it was fulfilled. Between the morning’s rain and the bursting out of the sun, something had changed. Leaving Ollie and Pricey to play in the yard–that was how she thought of Pricey now, as a second and more difficult child–she put their flowers in glasses of water, and then she got out her drawing materials and stool, and idly, but with an extraordinary sense of well-being and release, sketched her little boy digging happily in the ground.
As if to add his testimony to the evidence of change, Pricey lugged a couple of pails of water from the ditch. He had hardly staggered the second one into the kitchen when she saw Oliver coming up the bank with his coat over his shoulder. She stood up, afraid. “Is something wrong?”
“Naw,” he said. “I just got fed up. I dumped the office on Frank and came home to loaf.”
For more than an hour he sat on the ground making Ollie a little threshing machine out of a spool, some shingle nails, and a cheese box. With this the two of them threshed out four or five tablespoonfuls of early weed seeds. They ate supper with the door wide open and the sun shining in, and afterward, when they were sitting on blankets against the warm west wall and watching the sun sink into a fat cloud with fiery edges, Frank came up from town carrying a mandolin. He said he had bought it from a broke miner for three dollars. The time of the singing of birds was come, he said, and as soon as he limbered up his fingers and rediscovered how to play the thing, the voice of the turtle was going to be heard in the land.