Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [207]
He stood before her and said nothing.
“To come home like a common drunkard!”
He stood there. He did not reply.
“Are you even sorry? Are you ashamed?”
He stood there.
“Are you even going to explain?”
Her maneuvering had brought her around so that in facing her he had to look into the light. His face was stubborn and hangdog. “Sorry?” he said. “Sure I’m sorry. But what is there to explain? We talked a long time, got nowhere. I had a few too many.”
“Where were you? Where did you do this talking?”
“The back room of the Coarse Gold.”
“That saloon!”
“I guess you’d call it that.”
She put her fingers to her eyes and pinched out the sight of his stubborn face. When she took her hands away, his shape weaved and staggered in her sight. His tongue was thick, he couldn’t even speak clearly, after a ten-mile ride home. What must he have been when he left Boise?
“I’m ashamed, if you’re not,” she said. “We’ll get nowhere trying to talk when you’re in this condition. I’m going up to bed.”
Going up the path she felt that she was crying silently inside, drowning in desolate unshed tears. Behind her his feet stumbled, and she hated his clumsiness.
At the bridge he caught up with her and took her arm; she stopped without turning. “Wait,” he said. “You can’t go across there without a hand.”
Her eyes were fixed on the gray planks that hung wireless and unsupported between the two darknesses of cliff. The chill from the water pebbled her skin, the sound of the river was like sobbing. “Do you think you can?” she said. “I think I’d better help you.”
Oliver dropped his hand. She went on across, seeing nothing but the planks under her feet, feeling nothing but the uneasy shifting under her soles and the rope’s roughness in her hand. His weight twice lurched the bridge so that she had to pause and cling before going on. Falling off his mule! she thought. A rider as good as he is, falling off a mule!
All the way up the hill she did not look back. When she rested, his feet stopped behind her. When she went on, they followed. With vindicated vindictiveness she heard the unsteadiness of his steps.
Out of the shadow, into the light. She turned her head then and saw the moon float free from behind Arrow Rock. The whitened knoll rounded off around her. Her house, dug into the hill, would hardly have been visible without its lighted window, but cooktent and shack were braced with charcoal shadows and drifted with pale light.
When they came to the place where the path forked between house and shack, she heard Oliver say, “I guess maybe you’d like me to sleep in the shack.”
“That might be best.”
The promptness with which he turned down toward the shack made her want to scream after him. What are you upset about? Why should you act as if you’re angry with me? She felt as empty as the mountains. After eleven years, she wanted to say after him. After eleven years you finally prove to me that Augusta was right.
She found that she had followed him, unintending. They stood before the door of the shack. Oliver would not look at her, he stood obstinately silent. After a long wordless minute he opened the door. “Good night,” he said.
He went in, the door closed, she stood alone before the shack whose unpainted front in the moonlight was as white as the gable of a New England farmhouse. Above the door she saw the quotation from Confucius Oliver had nailed up there five years before. Its bottom half had split off, but the rest of it, faded by weather, was clearly readable in the midnight radiance.
I find no fault with the character of Yu.
He lives in a mean low house
6
About this time I need some Mister Bones to say to me, “Doesn’t this story have anything in it but hard luck and waiting? Isn’t the man ever going to get that ditch dug?” Then I can reply in summary fashion, and get by this dead time.
For I find that it bothers me to wait it out with them. I don’t want to follow Grandfather on his trips to the post office, where there is nothing but a letter for Grandmother from Augusta Hudson that rubs into his raw conscience the realization of his wife