Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [204]
Restlessly she stood up, waited for her roiled sight to clear, and went to the door. It let in the pale wash of moonlight and the sunken mutter of the river. The moon was directly above her in the southern sky, with only a small irregularity to mar its roundness. It was not flat like some moons, but visibly globular; she could see it roll in space. Its light fell like pallid dust on bare knoll and cooktent and lay in drifts along the roof-planes of the shack. It might have been a snow scene except for the shadows, which were not blue and luminous but soft and black.
Below, to her right, the canyon was impenetrable, without even a flash from the water, but the little flat across the river, with its haystack, shed, and corral, was a drawing in charcoal and Chinese white, a precise, focused miniature in the streak of moonlight across the shoulder of Arrow Rock. Out of their flat shadows the poles of the corral and the trunks of the cottonwoods bulged with a magical roundness like the moon’s. As she watched, charmed, the trees below must have been touched by the canyon wind, for flakes of light glittered up at her and then were gone. But there was no sound of wind, and where she stood there was not the slightest stir in the air. The glitter of soundless light from that little picture lighted in the midst of darkness was like a shiver of the earth.
But where was Oliver? He had never stayed this long on any of his prowling, unsatisfactory trips to town. The momentary fear that he might have been thrown off his horse, or in some way hurt, she dismissed. He was not one to whom accidents happened. She had never worried about him in that way even in Leadville after Pricey’s beating, when he rode to work armed, through enemies who would have drygulched him if they dared.
Some delay, somebody he had to wait a long time to see. Perhaps even some success. He had more than earned it. He had turned down four different offers, one in the governor’s office, to stick to his great scheme, and she had been loyal, had she not? She had supported him and encouraged him and believed in him and put up with what her support cost her.
As if cupping her hands to catch falling water, she extended her arms. She turned her face upward again to the moon.
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest
And on her silver cross soft amethyst
And on her hair a glory, like a saint . . .
Her image of herself held her breathless. She was aware of how she would look to someone-Oliver? No, he was not likely to notice. Frank? Perhaps. Augusta best of all. As she stood reaching for the soft fall of light she studied the ethereal pallor the moonlight gave her hands, and she thought, with Augusta’s mind, Unchanged. Still Susan.
The upper half of the path to the river was deceptive and without depth in the wash of moonlight; once she passed into the shadow cast by Arrow Rock the blackness stretched her eyes and put caution in her feet. Feeling her way, she made the loud gravel of the beach. The hollow hole, whenever her feet were still, plashed and guggled with river sounds; it was cool with river chill. By now her eyes had adjusted. She could make out the dividing line between opaque shingle and faintly shining water, with a flutter of white like a ruflle where it tumbled out of the narrows into the upper pool. From where she was, the shed and corral across the river were characterless, lost in a paleness without dimensions. When she tipped her head back and stared for a good while at the glowing sky and the light-paled stars, the luminousness changed her eyes again, so that when she looked back down she could not at first see her own body.
The lighted opposite bank lured her. Dared she cross the bridge in the dark, and be waiting at the corral when Oliver rode up? She walked to the bridgehead and stood in the dark there until things swam obscurely into visibility: pale planks, the blackness of the cliffs against the sky. From below, the river noise came up strongly, and a damp chill flowed around her feet. She could not see the water, only a darker, inverted sky down there, with nearly lost stars in it. For all her eyes could tell her, the bridge might lie on black bedrock glinting with mica, or it might span bottomless space opening under the bottom of the world.