Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [194]
“Have you seen Mrs. Briscoe, Nellie?”
“She said she was going for a walk.”
“She? On a day as hot as this?” Vexed by the unpleasantness of her own laugh as much as by Mrs. Briscoe’s. absence, she looked over her shoulder, afraid that meeching pig-like presence might be behind her.
Nellie laid aside the crocheting and stood. “Can I do something?”
“No. No thank you, Nellie. I thought I might like a cup of tea. But she shall fix it, when I find her. She has to be good for something.” Looking down on the tow head of her daughter, studiously bent over the buttons, she said, “You’ve spilled Nellie’s workbox all over.”
“I told her she could,” Nellie said. “She loves buttons. She’s a little housewife, very neat. She puts everything back, don’t you, duck?”
“I hope she does. Where’s Ollie? I thought he was in here at his lessons.”
“He went out to help his father at the windmill.”
“His father knew he was supposed to put in extra time at his reading. Has he been doing any better?”
“He tries, he truly does.”
“But still isn’t doing well.”
“He loves to be read to. It isn’t that he doesn’t like reading. He just has difficulty recognizing words, even when he’s had them over and over. It’s as if he’d never seen them before.”
Dyslexia, says my 1969 overview. The poor kid was a dyslectic eighty years before the condition will be discovered and named. Word-blind, and the son of my grandmother.
“He must learn,” Susan said. “If he really tries, he can. You must be strict when his mind wanders. He’d so much rather be out playing engineer with his father.”
“It’s not that he’s a dull boy,” Nellie said. “At maths he’s very good. He’s learned things from his father and Mr. Sargent and Mr. Wiley that are quite beyond me. It’s only the reading.”
“Nevertheless,” Susan said. “Right now he was told to stay in and work at what he’s weak in, and he’s out irrigating. At this rate he’ll never get into a good Eastern school. And where on earth is that Mrs. Briscoe?”
She turned from Nellie’s door and went to the back window that looked down the knoll to the spring. Passing sheep bands had trampled and half ruined it, and now there was a dug well with a windmill mounted on it which was supposed, when the wind blew, to pump water onto a home-made waterwheel which poured it down a sluice into a hydraulic ram which boosted it into a higher sluice which ran into a ditch high enough to irrigate the garden. Beside the motionless wheel she saw Oliver, alone, bent over some problem. The sun all but obliterated him. The bare ground, cocoa-brown in ordinary light, glittered like snow. Oliver spun the windmill fan by hand until a little water gushed into the upper cup of the waterwheel. The wheel moved a few inches, the water splashed into the hat he held under it, he put the dripping hat back on his head. Alone, puttering, absorbed, he looked like some frontier farmer.
When she opened the casement, dust sifted from the deep sill. The outside air, hot even on the shaded north side, surged into her face. She called, and Oliver straightened, turning. “Where’s Ollie? Isn’t he with you? Where’s Mrs. Briscoe?”
He laid down the wrench he held and came up the slope as far as the garden fence. “What?”
“Where are Ollie and Mrs. Briscoe?”
“Down by the creek.”
“He was supposed to be working on his reading.”
“I know. I let him off.”
“I wish you wouldn’t do things like that. He needs to study.”
“I suppose.” He squinted up at her, blind in the sun. “I thought it was pretty hot.”
“It isn’t half as hot inside as it is out there. Don’t you stay out working, you’ll get sunstroke.”
For answer he lifted the dripping hat off his head and clapped it back on. “How you feeling?”
“All right. But I don’t want Ollie going down to the river with nobody more sensible than Mrs. Briscoe. What if they should run into a snake?”
“I expect Ollie’d kill it.”
“Did you remind him not to go swimming or wading?”
“Oh come on,” he said. “He’s dependable. Old Briscoe wanted him along, I expect she’s nervous without somebody. They’re just down in the canyon where it’s cooler.” Across fifty yards of sun-blasted gravel he squinted up at her.