Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [180]
Beyond his head the maple leaves outside hung without movement, as still as his face. The air was brassy. “Everything moved so fast,” he said. “I hoped I could persuade you.”
“But how can I decide so suddenly! It’s so different from anything I was prepared for. I’m not strong yet, you really can’t expect . . .”
Women’s tactics, unfair. She saw them take effect. Moodily he turned his eyes out the window.
“It’s not only me,” she said. “Baby’s too small. I wouldn’t dare, with winter ahead.”
“Winters there are a whole lot milder and healthier than they are here.”
“But there’s no safe job. There’s only this . . . speculation.”
“Do you think superintending a mine is safe?” he said, and laughed so unpleasantly that she wanted to cry. “Didn’t Almaden or the Adelaide teach you anything?”
“Yes,” she said, looking down. “So did Mexico. How easily something can go wrong–always goes wrong!”
“Sue, I know this scheme. I made it up, I surveyed it, I laid out the plans. It’ll work.”
Wearily she looked up, let her eyes meet his stubborn blue ones. “Well, go in to your meeting tomorrow and see what they say. We can’t settle it now.”
“There’s no point in talking to Pope and Cole if you aren’t willing.”
The flick of their eyes meeting and breaking apart again. “Suppose I wasn’t,” she said. “What would you do?”
It took him a few seconds. Then he answered steadily, “Stay here, I suppose. Get some sort of job. Pick apples. Hire out to John.”
The ghost of Mrs. Elliott was whispering to her. She took her throat in her hand and swallowed against the pressure of her fingers. “You know I wouldn’t stand in your way or make you . . give up what you want. Could you run it from out there and come back here for –between whiles? Like Conrad and Mary?”
“That’s the sort of arrangement you didn’t want when we were talking about Potosí.”
“It would be different, here at home.”
Another silence, while the baby stirred and sighed and turned half over. “No,” Oliver said at last. “Now I won’t have it. I’ve lived away from you all I want to.”
“Oh, Oliver!” she cried. “Don’t think I don’t love thee! Don’t think I want thee living apart from us! It’s only that I feel safe here. Thee is asking me to give up what I love almost as much as thee. That little mite there has taken all the recklessness out of me. Let me think. Go to the meeting, but let me think a while.”
For a while he held her there, saying nothing. Then he walked her to the window, where a wind was thrashing the maple outside and stirring the curtains through the cracks of the closed sash. She stood with his arm around her, leaning on him and looking down to where the ferns along the edge of the lane bent limberly in the gust. She heard him say, “Look at her. She’s nursing in her sleep.” His arm squeezed her, shook her, let her go. “All right. You get used to my news and I’ll get used to yours. Maybe they’ll turn out to be compatible.”
“Maybe.”
But she had already given in. She knew that sooner or later, this fall or next spring, she would be packing up her children and her depleted collection of household goods and going West again–not, as at first, on an adventurous picnic, and not with a solemn intention of making a home in her husband’s chosen country, but into exile.
VII
THE CANYON
1
Boise City, June 16, 1882
Darling Augusta–
I am sitting, or lying, in our old hammock–the same old hammock that hung on the piazza in New Almaden, and later served as a bed for Ollie in Leadville. It hangs now between two cottonwood trees in the ragged yard that surrounds this house, built by a missionary Jesuit since called to other fields. On hot afternoons it is my favorite spot, if I can be said to have a favorite spot in this drab new town where ladies say ma’am and servants don’t, and Irish miners still calloused from pick and shovel are erecting their millionaire houses with porte cocheres and stone turrets. Oliver is out at the engineering camp in the canyon much of the week. With the help–it isn’t really that