Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [170]
“Is it fate?” she said, more bitterly than she intended. “Is it just bad luck? What is it? Why are you always having to take a stand that hurts us or loses you your job? Doesn’t honesty ever get rewarded?”
Her tone, she recognized, was the intimate tone that would normally have brought the Quaker “thee” to her tongue. Yet she called him “you.” Perhaps he noticed, perhaps he didn’t.
He shrugged, sitting there in his undershirt and stockinged feet (and I in my shift, she thought. Like a pair of quarreling shopkeepers).
“I have to do what I have to do,” he said.
She stood at the mantel, and after a moment she said, “Yes. And all of us have to take the consequences.”
Now she touched him. His head came up, his stare was full of disbelief and resentment. He heard, registered, acknowledged, what had come out of her mouth, but he would not answer. She would have liked to be comforted for hurting him, but he would not bend, and they spent the evening in bruised silence, one-word questions, monosyllabic answers.
It did not occur to her, apparently, though it occurs to me, that he was more frustrated and sore than she was, and mainly for her sake. She thought he was unfeeling.
6
The Casa Walkenhorst had overnight become a different place. The air was full of tension, Don Gustavo’s looks were full of barely controlled dislike, as if, in coming to an unfavorable conclusion about the mine, Oliver had abused his hospitality. From the corredor, Susan witnessed a little episode in the courtyard in which Don Gustavo lashed the gate mozo across the back with his quirt. Emelita, every time Susan tried to talk with her, escaped with timid, hurried smiles that begged understanding. Time they were gone, taking with them their private breakage.
With Don Pedro there was no such chill; he was a grandee to the end. Just before they were to leave, he sent over for the use of Señora Ward one of his personal horses, a rosillo, a strawberry roan with a light mane and tail, which he hoped she would find easier-gaited than any of the broncos they might hire.
Not to be outdone in courtesy, Susan sent back the sketch she had made of the Señora Gutierrez y Salarzano at the head of her splendid stairway. It was one of her best, one she had counted on transferring to a block for the Century, but she did not hesitate. If Don Gustavo had made any friendly gesture, she would have felt obligated by her dislike to respond threefold. She atoned for accepting his hospitality by giving Emelita drawings of herself, of Enriqueta, of the poodle Enrique, and of the parrot Pajarito.
The evening before they were to leave they went early to their room, where Oliver worked at his field notes and his geological map that corrected the map of Kreps; Susan got out their bags for packing, and dumped them onto the bed. At the bottom of one carpetbag were her Colorado riding clothes, never used since she had packed them in Leadville. As she shook them out, there rose out of their wrinkles the smells of horse and woodsmoke, the styptic odors of spruce and bitter cottonwood, the witch hazel smell of willows. She stood holding the divided skirt to her nose, caught by recollection as strong as pain.
Her best rides were in that complex smell–mountain water, the sky whose light hurt the eyes. Pricey was in it–not the beaten disfigured Pricey but the diminutive rocker with his nose in a book, the smiler from the saddle he sat so uncomfortably. Ah, Pricey, how tenderly the haughty day! The circle around her Franklin stove was in it–Helen Jackson, King and Janin and Prager and Emmons, the laughter and the talk and the sense of empires being hewn out of raw creation, all the hope and excitement of that new country. Frank Sargent was in it, his tall limberness rising to anticipate some wish of hers, his eyes across the room as brown and glowing as the eyes of an adoring dog.
She saw him on the morning of their departure, when the two of them stood among the boxes and bags in the cabin whose door stood open on the fume of Leadville and the front-lighted Sawatch. Oliver had taken Ollie into town on a last minute errand. In the litter of departure Susan and Frank looked at one another, and Susan made a wincing, regretful face. She was close to tears.