Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [244]
He sniffed. “Smells like firecrackers.”
“Can you still smell them? My nose is numb with gunpowder. We’ve been slapping out smoldering clothes and smearing lard on burned fingers all day. The children looked like the children of a charcoal burner.”
“Wiley and I meant to come down, but his mare got cut up in the barbed wire, and we had to doctor her.”
“You only missed a lot of noise and a headache. But the children were happy, and so they were good.”
“I guess that’s what it takes.”
“I guess.”
“And now they’re all gone in to watch the pyrotechnics.”
“They just left twenty minutes ago, they won’t have made it in time. I suppose they’re watching from the road.”
His tall outline lounged across the opening, with the fountains of light playing on the sky behind it. She could barely see his face–couldn’t see it really, only the outline of his head and shoulders. Then he moved abruptly, pulling back against the pillar. “Excuse me, I’m cutting off your view.”
“It’s all right. I’m not child enough to want to watch fireworks long.”
“I was watching as I rode down the bench. Quite a show.”
“Yes.”
The distance rumbled and crackled with the bombardment, the lights flared and hung and died and flared again. “Did you want to see Oliver?” she said. “I’m afraid he won’t be back till quite late.”
“I can see him tomorrow.”
“How are things in the canyon?”
“Glum.”
“They’re no different here. Did you hear about that Burns?”
“Oliver told me. He ought to be lynched.”
From her darkness she studied his shape jackknifed against the sky frantic with bursting lights, and thought of the day she had entered Leadville, the day the man Oates who had jumped Oliver’s lot there had ended his life at the end of a rope in front of the jail. Frank had seen that–it had been an excitement that bulged his eyes and stammered on his lips when she first saw him. She thought also about the story they had heard from Tombstone–the murdered friend, the hard ride after the killer, the body swinging from a tree somewhere down in the Mexican desert. Frank had not only seen that, he had been one of the avengers. Perhaps his hand had knotted the rope or lashed the horse from under or cut the body down. It chilled her to think of. And yet in her present mood she was half inclined to think manly rage a better response to wrong than the self-blame of a man who trusted too much and then refused to condemn.
“At the very least he should be taken to court,” she said. “Oliver won’t. He says it was his own carelessness.”
“Everybody knows what Burns is. Court’s too good for him. A horsewhip might serve.”
“But he’ll neither be horsewhipped nor sued,” Susan said. “He’ll be allowed to get away with it.”
“Would you like me to horsewhip him? I’d love to.”
“Ah,” she said, “you’re a loyal friend, Frank.” Then, because the feeling in her was like a boil that could have no relief except to burst, she burst. “Oh, when I think of Bessie and John I could simply die! To think that it’s our fault, and no cure for it!”
Among the fountains of light that arched and showered down, intense green, red, yellow, and blue balls now burned in the air. Because he said nothing, and because she was ashamed of her outburst and afraid of silence, she said, shrugging out a little laugh, “How do they make all those colors?”
“Colors?” Frank said. “Metallic salts. The yellow’s sodium, the white’s magnesium. Red’s calcium, I think, and the green may be copper salts, maybe barium. I don’t really know. I’m no fireworks expert.”
“You’re an expert in so many things.” She felt almost as if she were going to vomit; she had to keep swallowing her Adam’s apple to keep it down. “I can’t imagine how a woman could have lived all those years in the canyon without her Corps of Engineers. That was the best time of all the West. I loved those years.”
He made a small indeterminate noise, hm or mm or ha. The light of a rocket two and a half miles away brushed his face with ghastly green. She saw it shine and fade in his eyes. “I didn’t come down here to see Oliver, you know.