Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [148]
“Turtles can’t sing,” Ollie said. Languid after his afternoon in the sun, he leaned inside his father’s knees and picked at the broad gold wedding ring on the hand that loosely held him there. The sun in that one afternoon had turned him pink.
“Only snapping turtles,” Frank said. “Wait.”
His dark head bent over the mandolin while he tuned it, he seemed to Susan a dear friend, a brother, a handsome and carefree boy rather than an assistant engineer who stood off claim jumpers with a Winchester. The way his eyes touched her, the way he smiled, made her tender. Everything had in one day grown gentler and more endurable. Oliver, sitting against the log wall with Ollie between his knees, looked domestic enough to be drawn for Hearth and Home. Just beyond him, Pricey hugged his knees. He had that habit of edging as close as he could, and then making himself silent and invisible. Even the roofs of town, the torn-up hills and ugly shaft houses of Leadville, looked picturesque in that light, and the evening noise of the streets below was no more than a tremble on the air. The plink of Frank’s tuning was thinly musical, tunelessly incessant, like the fiddling of a cricket.
When he was ready, Frank plinked out a minstrel tune. He played well enough; Susan declared happily that he was a master. “Good enough for those turtles, maybe,” he said. “What’ll we sing? Name something, Ollie.”
But Ollie lay back against his father with his thumb in his mouth and had no ideas.
“Come on, Ollie,” Susan said. “Take that old thumb out of your mouth, that’s a good boy. What do you want to sing? What do you like?”
He still had no ideas. The thumb that his father had pulled out of his mouth slipped back in. “He’s tired,” Oliver said. “Want to hit the hammock, old boy?”
The answer was small, querulous, muffled by thumb, negative.
“Too much sun, perhaps,” Susan said. “He’d better go soon. But he has to hear the turtle first. Start something, Frank.”
Frank started “Sewanee River.” After a quavery bar or two he got his confidence and sang out. He had a good baritone voice; the mandolin shivered against it like a girl in white backed against a dark tree. Susan came in with the alto part, Oliver with a growling bass. To Susan’s ear they sounded quite good. Then high and sweet, a tree-toad sound, here came Pricey’s tenor and made them whole. They rounded their eyes at one another, pleased; they rounded their tones and leaned together. After two bleak months they sang like mockingbirds on a May Sunday, and loved every sound they made. At the end, which they drew out long, they broke up in laughter, clapping, praising themselves.
“Aren’t we good!” Susan cried. “We sounded absolutely professional. We could hire out in bar rooms or give concerts at the Great Western. Pricey, you’re wonderful! I didn’t know you could sing. You too, Frank. You’ve got a very nice voice. You’re so true.”
Friendly and full of laughter, their eyes touched. She saw that he wanted to take her remark in more ways than she had meant it. Why not? He was true. Neither she nor Oliver could have done without him. But there was even more in his brief, laughing look, and she acknowledged that too. His adoration made her feel excited and flirtatious, the way she was often made to feel by agreeable company and dress-up clothes. She could feel her color come up.
“More!” she said. “What do you know the words to, Pricey? Hymns? ‘Abide with Me? ‘Ein Feste Burg’? Turn Ye to Me’? ‘Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes’? Let’s sing them all, let’s sing all night!”
They filled the dooryard with harmonies while the sun set and the west died out and the bats began to stitch through the darkening air. It was like an hour of thanksgiving for their emergence from trouble. And there sat Pricey, singing away with never a stammer, knowing the words to everything, even songs that she had thought of as strictly American. The day had brought him out like a flower. Surely, now, they were past their bad time. Above the Western range Venus was large, white, and steady.
“Sing, Ollie,” she said. “You know some of these songs. Sing