Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [202]
His father’s hand came heavily down on his shoulder. He froze. Now it was coming. He accepted it, he knew it was deserved. The fingers squeezed hard on the bones. His father said, “Ollie, you did something.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You did something very grown up. Nobody could have done better.”
Ollie’s eyes flew up to his father’s face. The face looked down at him seriously. The hand was so heavy on his shoulder that he had to brace himself to stand straight under it. As if testing the resistance it invoked, the hand left the shoulder and fitted itself around the back of Ollie’s neck. The fingers closed clear around his throat under his chin. “You’re all right, my friend,” his father said. “You know that?”
As if impatiently, he let go, though Ollie would willingly have stood there all evening with that hand on him. “We’d better get back before we get wet.”
Uncertainly Ollie offered his hand, to be led across, but his father looked down at him with his eyes narrowed and said, “You came across by yourself when you went for John and Mrs. Olpen, is that right?”
Was it coming now? First praise and then punishment? “Yes, sir.”
“Have any trouble?”
“No, sir.”
“Scare you, after this afternoon?”
“No, sir. A little.”
“Did you think about this afternoon? Did you think you might be punished?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If you’d done it for any reason than getting help for Mother, I’d have to punish you. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right. Your mother doesn’t know, and we won’t tell her. It would only worry her when she shouldn’t be worried. Now do you want to go back by yourself?”
The look they exchanged was like a promise. “Yes, sir.”
His father motioned him onto the bridge, stepped out of the way to let him by, let him get twenty feet out onto the planks before he himself started. He stayed that distance behind, all the way across the bridge.
The doctor came just before sunset. Ollie and his father, closed out of the house, had played three games of horseshoes and then been driven inside by a flurry of rain. But the flurry had come to nothing. Out the door Ollie could see that the yard’s dust was pocked with the dried craters of single drops, though lightning still flared on the sky. Above the sound of Nellie Linton’s voice reading to Betsy up in the drafting room he heard nearly continuous thunder.
His father knocked out his pipe impatiently against the doorjamb. “Quite an evening to be born.” They stood together in the south-facing door and looked out over the canyon and the falling mountains to where the sky over the valley was rosy in the last reflected light. Above the rosy haze of valley dust the sky over there was still blue.
The doorway beside him emptied, his father’s quick steps took him along the front of the shack as if he had suddenly remembered something he should have done long ago. But at the corner he stopped. “Good Lord,” he said. “Look at that.”
Ollie went to the corner. In the northwest the sun had broken around the lower slope of Midsummer Mountain and was sending a last long wink across the Sawtooths, straight into the black mass of rain cloud. Clear across the stone house, bridging from mountains to river bluffs, curved two rainbows, one above the other, even the upper one as bright as colored glass, sharp-edged, perfect from horizon to horizon.
“By George, your mother ought to see that. It’s an omen, no less.”
They ran up past the cooktent with the wetted dust adhering to their shoes. Ollie’s father knocked, listened, opened the door. Ollie, behind him, saw past him to the closed door of the bedroom. He waited while his father crossed the room and tapped with his fingernails.
“Sue? Sue, if you’re able, look outside. There’s an absolute sign, the most perfect double rainbow you ever saw.”
The door opened, the doctor stood in it, wide, shirt-sleeved, his hands held fingers-upward in the air. Every lamp in the house seemed to have been lighted behind him; his shadow fell clear to the front door. Ollie’s horrified eyes made out that the stiffly upheld hands were enameled with blood.
“Your wife isn