Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [243]
Noiseless as a flower opening, a rocket burst above the hills. She sat up, watching the white stars curve and fall. Then BOOM! All the night air between her and the town, two and a half miles of it, trembled with the delayed report.
Pshaw! she started to think They won’t be in time, the children will miss it, and then remembered that from out on the mesa they would be able to see the whole thing as if from a balcony. They would do better to stay out, rather than try to find a place among the crowds drunk on statehood and spread-eagle oratory and worse. The thought of that vulgar little city, and all its sharpers, trimmers, and hopeful naïfs seething with the importance of their moment in history, crawled on her skin like a spider. She heard herself saying to Oliver’s waiting, sober, questioning face, “You go, take Nellie and the children. It means nothing to me.”
What she had meant–and after what they had said to one another in the past two days he could hardly have misunderstood her–was “None of it means anything to me any more. I’m sick and disspirited and without hope. We have bled our lives away in this desert like that watercart draining into the sand.”
“You ought to come,” he had said. “It’ll take your mind off things.”
“I’m tired. I’d rather stay here.”
She could see in his eyes, in the tasting movement of his lips under the mustache, that he felt the blame she could not help laying on him. But she could not make herself smile, or lay a hand on his arm, or send him away with an injunction to enjoy himself.
There was a long, probing meeting of eyes. “No quarter,” he said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He let it go. “I’d stay here with you, but the children are counting on it, and there’s nobody else to take them.”
“You mustn’t think of not going.”
“I’m sorry.”
Sorry, of course. And what good did it do? He could not be sorrier than she.
Another rocket seared across the sky at an angle and bloomed with hanging green balls. Another went up through the green shower and burst into an umbrella of red. Then three together, all white. Then one that winked hotly but did not flower. BOOM! went the cushioning air. BOOM! BOOM BOOM BOOM! BOOM!
It was hot and close in the hammock. She left it and sat on the warm adobe of the balustrade. Above the town, streaks of smoke were lighted by the rocket bursts. Under the sodden booming she heard a continuous musketry of firecrackers, big and little. She could imagine the boys and drunken men who would be darting around through the crowds on the Capitol grounds throwing cannon crackers under the feet of tied horses and dressed-up girls, and into the buggies of the dignified. Pandemonium, a foolishness costing thousands of dollars. Before morning there would be runaways, clothes and buildings set on fire, fingers blown off, eyes put out. Her family were infinitely better off watching from the mesa.
And yet from a distance how beautiful! There was a colored mist all above the unseen city, as if the smoke of the explosions were now lighted by fires from below. The torchlight parade. The so-called Governor’s Guard, including that wretched Burns, would be parading in their uniforms. She stood up, trying to see better, bracing herself against the warm pillar, and from up there heard, faint and far off, sweetened by distance, carrying wonderfully on the still air, the sound of the band.
And something else: the sound of footsteps coming around the house, solid and heavy on the board walk.
In one motion she snatched the dressing gown around her, crouched and jumped, soft-barefooted, and put herself back into the deeper dark of the hammock. The footsteps ceased, either because the walker had paused or because he had stepped off onto the lawn.
“Anybody home?” his voice said.
Tension flowed down her wrists and away. She breathed once, deeply. “Oh Frank! Come in, I’m on the piazza.”
He stood above her, a troubling shadow, saying, “I thought everybody must have gone in for the celebration.”
“Everybody else has. Wan and Sidonie and John left right after breakfast. Oliver celebrated the Fourth by doing John