Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [200]
“Just a second.”
She laid the chicken sideways on the block-round eye, leathery lid, open beak–and with one short blow chopped off its head. The ax remained stuck in the block beside the small, perfect, very dead head; the headless chicken flopped and bounced around them, scattering blood and stirring up cottonwood fluff. Ollie held the hard-mouthed mare in tight. Mrs. Olpen wiped her hands on her apron and then reached back to yank the strings. “Sally!” she bawled. “You, Sal!”
Wading through dust, feathers, and cotton, she hung the apron on a post, hoisted her skirts, and climbed through the corral fence. Ollie, looking at the horse inside, felt desperate. It was a Roman-nosed plow horse of the kind his mother always called Old Funeral Procession.
Impulsively he slid off, pulling the reins over the mare’s ears. “You can take mine. I can walk.”
But Mrs. Olpen glanced once at the mare’s slick wet back and shook her head, just one complete wag, over and back. The plow horse resisted the bit and got a crack across the nose. Ollie, reins in hand, felt the insides of his legs go cold in the evaporating wind. Down on the river bank the two youngest Olpen boys came out of the willows carrying fishpoles, and the sun glinted off the silvery side of the fish they carried between them. “Sal!” yelled Mrs. Olpen, cramming the plow horse’s ears into the headstall.
Someone yawned loudly from the house. Ollie turned, and Sally Olpen was in the door, gaping and stretching. She started deliberately down the yard, stopped and scraped her bare foot disgustedly against the ground, and came on again. On the side of her face was printed the pattern of a doily or cushion cover. Her black eyes glittered sideways at Ollie; she leaned on the corral poles and yawned, shuddering and shaking her head.
“Git that chicken plucked and drawed,” her mother said. “If I ain’t back tonight, you and Herm are to help Pa milk, hear? You git supper, too. You’re It.”
“What’s the matter? Where you goin’?”
Mrs. Olpen, not answering, laid on the plow horse a blanket crusted with sweat and hair. She moved slower than anybody Ollie had ever seen. He resented the wise look that Sally Olpen was bending on him, but to hurry things up he said, “My mother’s sick.”
“Ah, yeah, I know,” Sally said. “Havin’ a baby.”
“Oh she is not!” He was furious. What did she know, with her raggedy hair and her face all dinted and her dirty feet? He hopped up and down. He said, “Hurry, Mrs. Olpen!”
The woman hauled off the top bar a saddle with one stirrup broken down to the iron, and skirts that were curled and dry. She heaved it onto the Roman nose and settled it by shaking the horn. “You git at that chicken,” she said to Sal. “Don’t leave it lay out in the sun. And don’t you pluck and draw it right by the door, where feathers and guts gits tracked around.”
Sal smiled a secret smile at Ollie, picked up the chicken, and held it up thoughtfully by the legs, watching its neck drip. Mrs. Olpen grunted, heaving at the latigo, and kicked old Roman nose briskly in the belly to make him quit holding his breath. She was so slow! The two boys had started to run up the river path. Ollie stood on the corral bar and remounted, so as to be above them when they arrived. His mother had never encouraged him to make friends with the Olpens. They were another tribe, potential enemies. But then from the mare’s back he saw the dust of a rig coming fast up the river road, and recognized the black and tan mules and the tall man on the seat.
“It’s all right!” he cried. “Never mind, Mrs. Olpen. Here’s my father! It’s all right now!”
In front of them all-leather-faced Mrs. Olpen, that girl with the bloody chicken in her hand, the panting boys dangling their dust-patched fish on a forked stick and bursting with questions-he started to cry. Blindly he yanked the mare around and kicked and lashed her out of the yard to meet the buggy.
His father had met John on the road; there was no need to tell him anything. He didn’t let Mrs. Olpen linger even to unsaddle the plow horse, but had her in the buggy almost before the wheels had stopped rolling. To Ollie, biting his lips and stretching the stiffness of tears off his cheeks, he said,