Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [211]
I was really in no mood for one of her discussion periods. My wrists were stiff and sore, my stump jerked, I ached from footboard to neckrest. But as I turned my chair to go back down to the porch where Ada would bring me a drink and let me be quiet, Shelly said, “I know he was a juicehead when they lived here, so I guess she never did get him to take the pledge.”
“How did you know that?”
“Dad. He said your grandfather owned this underground placer up on the Yuba, and Dad’s father used to drive him up there every once in a while to inspect. They were cheating him blind, Dad says. They’d give him the sand and keep the gold.”
“He was easy to cheat. That was one of Grandmother’s exasperations.”
“But nice?” Shelly said. “Everybody respected him? Dad says the miners all thought he was the fairest man they ever worked for. He’d give anybody a second chance.”
“And a third,” I said. “Not a fourth. When he was abused beyond his toleration he could be implacable.”
“He didn’t sound implacable the way Dad talks about him. He doesn’t seem implacable in your book, either. That’s why it seems so funny he’d have to take these three-day trips up Yuba Canyon and put on these big drunks with his driver. Just drink till he went to sleep, and then sleep it off and come home again.”
“He had a chronic drouth of the soul,” I said. “Every now and then I guess he had to irrigate.”
“Did you ever see him drunk?”
“How would I know? I was a boy. He was never noisy, or sloppy, or anything like that. He never drank on the job, and I’m sure he never drank around Grandmother. He was a restful sort of man, as I knew him. I sort of felt he held the world up and kept it running. I can remember times when he took me down the mine.”
“Yes?”
“Nothing. Just . . . He had a big warm hand. You know how the pump shaft of the Zodiac runs right alongside the main shaft, just some timbering between?”
“I never was down the Zodiac. It closed up before I was born.”
“Really?” I was surprised. The Zodiac is very real to me. To her it is not even a memory, it is only some decaying buildings and a boarded-up entrance and a lot of rusting cable and iron overgrown with weeds.
“It’s a sloping shaft,” I said. “The pump rod goes down nearly a mile. Grandfather designed the pumps–it was his first job when Conrad Prager brought him here to open the Zodiac up again after the lower levels flooded. Twelve pumps worked off the same rod. Going down, you walked down the track, but every once in a while you’d have to step back into the timbering to let a car pass, and then you’d feel that great rod working in the dark right behind the back of your neck. It would crawl up to its top pitch, and strain there for a second and then ram down. The shaft was always full of gulps and sobs way down in the dark where the pumps sucked water. They went twenty four hours a day, seven strokes to the minute, like a slow, heavy pulse. The old Cousin Jack who tended them always spoke of them as “she,” but I never stood there between the timbers hanging onto Grandfather’s hand without thinking of them as somehow part of him. They had his sort of dependability. It was as if I could feel them beating in his hand.”
Shelly was looking at me with her head on one side. Her eyes, which are normally a cool skeptical gray, warmed nearly to brown. “You liked him a lot.”
“I suppose I liked him-trusted him-more than I’ve ever trusted anyone.”
“I think he must have been a lot like you,” she said, still with her head on one side and that smiling look of speculation on her face. “He understood human weakness, wasn’t that it? He didn’t blame people. He had this kind of magnanimity you’ve got.”
“Oh my dear Shelly,” I said. “My dear Shelly.”
I think that her impulses are mainly confessional. She would love it if every afternoon we could start up one of these truth parties. It must puzzle her that since my one look at her private life I have not explored it further. It may annoy her that I don’t solicit her opinions on the problems of human conduct (she would call it behavior). She has her little drama, poor thing, and she would like to play it to a packed house. She would also not mind being the audience for my confessional moments. Her discussions of Oliver and Susan Ward have this torque in them, they twist toward Lyman Ward too often.