Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [210]
He was exactly like a balky mule. She could see his hind quarters settle and his ears lie back. Aghast at what she had said, more than half afraid she meant it, she stared into his frowning face.
“That’s what I mean by pushing and pulling,” he said. He walked away from her and sat on the table, looking out the window down toward the bridge and Arrow Rock. He talked to the window, or to her reflection in it. “You’re a lot better than I am,” he said. “You think I don’t know that?” In the glass his eyes found and held hers. “You think I don’t know what I’ve put you through? Or that I don’t care? But I tell you, Sue, I’m not going to do any better because anybody, even you, is hauling at me. I’m doing my best right now.”
Wordless, hugging herself, letting the tears run down her cheeks, she watched his angled face ghostly on the glass, with the opposite rim and the sky beyond it.
“If a promise means anything, I have to make it to myself,” Oliver said. “Then if I break it I’ll be harder on myself than you’d ever be. But I can imagine breaking it. If I’m out somewhere by myself, thinking how you’re all God knows where and the canal’s shut down and the company broke and all these years blown away like trash, I’m going to feel low a lot of the time. I haven’t felt any other way since I can remember, practically. I don’t feel any different now, just because of a letter from Major Powell. If somebody comes by when I’m feeling that way, and takes a bottle out of a saddlebag, I might help him kill it. If I did, I’d probably ride straight into the nearest town and get some more. I know myself that well.”
She shook her head, letting the tears run down. In the glass she saw his shoulders move with impatience.
“I suppose I’ll take this job,” he said. “What else can we do? We’re licked. But you can’t make me like it.”
“I can’t understand,” Susan said. “I try, but I can’t. Doesn’t it shame you to be . . . enslaved that way? Doesn’t it humiliate you to think that you can’t resist that temptation when someone like Frank, living out on the railroad with the roughest sort of men, never touches a drop? Why can’t you be like Frank?”
And that was the greatest mistake of all. “Because I’m not Frank,” Oliver said, staring at her reflected face. “Maybe you wish I was.”
In confusion and distress she broke off their reflected look, turned away. “No,” she said, away from him. “I just don’t see why you won’t promise.”
In his voice, to which she listened keenly, trying to hear in it all she had turned away from in his face, she heard no tenderness or compassion or love, nothing but the grate of resistance. “Don’t push me,” he said. “It won’t do any good to fog it all up with words. But I’ll tell you one thing. I’m not taking anything along. I won’t be Clarence King with a mule load of brandy. I won’t be Mrs. Briscoe, and lay in a supply.”
That was the best she got out of him. That was where they left it.
7
“If you’re still in need of an end man,” Shelly said yesterday when I came in from the garden just about five, “I’ve got all sorts of questions for Uncle Remus.”
She wasn’t exactly opportune. I was hot, exhausted, and hurting, and I needed no end man. That was a purely rhetorical need. Shelly’s interest bothers me, moreover, because it isn’t really interest in Grandmother. It is a sort of speculative interest in me, and some of it is mere boredom and desire to talk. Her husband has been after her again by telephone; probably she wonders why I haven’t asked about him. Or maybe she feels sorry for me, locked up in myself as she conceives me to be. She’s like an idle adult who is willing to squat down and help a child make a sand castle on a beach.
It’s a mistake to give her these tapes to type off, but I can’t seem to resist. I’ve worked by eye so long that I can’t believe in what is done by ear. I doubt that I’ve done anything until I can see a typescript.
“Questions such as what?” I said.
“Such as, Was she really thinking of leaving him, or are you guessing?”
“I’m extrapolating.”
“Ah,” she said, “right on the rug. Shame on you.