Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [150]
Like a burning glass she focused on her big-eyed child with his. terrifying pallor and his pitiful thin neck and his terrible gentleness. She sat watching by his bed for hours on end, and when he woke to himself, and neither shook nor burned nor sweated, she would coax Oliver, against his judgment, to carry him out to the hammock where he could lie and see things going on and be part of the family again and delude her with the hope that he was past the crisis; and in a few hours, or a day, she would have to have him carried back to the bedroom frozen-jawed and blue-fingered.
Six weeks of that. Everything in her life stopped but nursing. She saw few friends–even when they called she hardly saw them–and there were no evenings by the fire, not even with Frank and Pricey. In all that time she apparently wrote no letters except a note to Osgood and Company refusing a contract to illustrate a novel by Mr. Howells. She rejected Oliver’s suggestion that they telegraph one of his Guilford cousins to come out and help. Where would they put her? She would only be in the way. She herself was sleeping in the hammock, Oliver in Pricey’s cot.
Since there was no way to go but forward, that was the way she went. She never thought to inquire how things went at the mine, she forgot the apprehension that had tightened the pit of her stomach every time Oliver went to work armed like a bandit or a sheriff. All her concern now was to know when he would return to spell her or help her in the sickroom.
It was August before she was sure Ollie would get well. He had gone three days without a symptom, he was sitting up and taking an interest, he ate the custards and gruels she spooned into him, each morning he was stronger. Still she could not trust herself to sleep, for while she lay senseless, what if the chills returned, what if no one noticed and wrapped him in blankets and the wildcat-skin rug warmed before the fire?
Then one afternoon Oliver came home with a sleeping draught obtained from the polite drunken doctor whose services she had rejected. She would not take it. She considered sleeping draughts immoral. What if she got the habit? She preferred insomnia to its alarming remedy. If Oliver would promise to wake her in four hours, she would lie down now and sleep, really sleep. If all was well when he woke her, she would go back to sleep for another four hours. That was all she needed. She didn’t trust him to watch for more than four hours at a time. He slept too well, that was the trouble.
“Drink this,” he told her, “and no more palaver. Ollie’s all right, he’s sleeping now. Have at least as much sense as a four-year-old.”
Finally, hesitating, fluttering, dreading, changing her mind and having to be persuaded all over again, she drank it and stared at him over the cup as if it had been the arsenic of a death pact. She kissed Ollie’s sleeping face with the emotions of one going on a long journey, and tucked him into his hammock and touched his cool forehead and let herself be led away and put to bed. Within minutes she was up again to lay out the makings of the eggnog laced with brandy that he was to have, to strengthen him, as soon as he awoke. She extracted promises, she took a half-irritable scolding and a kiss, she lay back and braided her hair into pigtails and felt her weakness flow into the bed as if the sleeping potion had begun to liquefy her body. She blinked a tear, and talked a little while Oliver sat at the bedside and watched her. Sometime in the midst of her talking, the potion snuffed her like a candle.
She awoke to find Oliver sitting just where he had been when she had dropped off, and thought she had only drowsed. Her mouth was fuzzy and her mind felt numb. Then she saw that the blind was up and the window opened on broad daylight. It had been dusk when she went to bed. Morning, then. Oh, good! A bumblebee buzzed in, crawled around on the cretonne flowers of the curtains, and buzzed out again. Oliver was watching her with a slow, amused, memorizing look; she knew that he had been watching her sleep. Rigid with readiness, she sat up.