Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [43]
Nothing on the trip to New Almaden next day modified her understanding that her lot at first would be hardship. It was intensely hot, the valley roads seen through the train windows boiled with white dust, Lizzie’s usually silent baby cried and would not be comforted. In San Jose a stage with black leather curtains waited; they were the only passengers. But her anticipation of a romantic Bret Harte stage ride lasted only minutes. Dust engulfed them. She had Oliver draw the curtains, but then the heat was so great that they suffered at a slow boil. After three minutes she had Oliver open the curtains again halfway. They were thus insured both heat and dust, and were almost entirely cut off from the view.
By that time Susan cared nothing about the view, she only wanted to get there. Whenever Oliver caught her eye she made a point of smiling bravely; when he said abusive things about the weather she looked at her perspiring hands, and made mute faces of comic endurance. Now and then, as the stage rocked and threw them around among their luggage, she looked up into Lizzie’s stony face and envied her patience.
It seemed a fantastically long twelve miles. Whatever conversation they attempted faded. They sat on, suffering. Susan was aware of brutal sun outside, an intolerable glare above and through their dust. Then after a long time–two hours?–she happened to glance out through the half-open curtains and saw the white trunk and pointed leaves of a sycamore going by. Their wheels were rolling quietly in sand. She thought the air felt cooler. “Trees?” she said. “I thought it would be all barren.”
Oliver, sitting with his hands braced on his knees, looked altogether too vigorous and untired. He had evidently been keeping silent for her sake, not because he himself felt this jolting, dust-choked, endless ride a hardship. “Are you disappointed?” he said.
“If there are trees maybe there’s a stream. Is there?”
“Not up at our place.”
“Where do we get our water?”
“Why, the housewife carries it from the spring,” he said. “It’s only a half mile up the hill. Things are not as uncivilized out here as you think.”
Lizzie’s face, bent over the finally sleeping baby, showed the faintest shadow of a smile. It was not well advised of Oliver to make jokes before her. She was a jewel, tidy, competent, and thoughtful, but she should not be spoiled with familiarity. Susan watched the trees pass, dusty but authentic.
The stage leveled off into what seemed a plain or valley. She leaned to see. Ahead of them, abrupt as the precipices up which little figures toil in Chinese paintings, she saw a wild wooded mountainside that crested at a long ridge spiky with conifers. She pulled the curtains wide. “But my goodness!” she cried. “You called them hills!”
He laughed at her, as pleased as if he had made them by hand. “You permiscus old consort,” she said, “you deceived me. Don’t tell me anything. I’m going to watch and draw my own conclusions.”
The road became a street, and no dust rose around their wheels: she saw that it had been sprinkled. On one side of them was a stream nearly lost among trees and bushes, on the other a row of ugly identical cottages, each with a patch of lawn like a shirtfront and a row of red geraniums like a necktie. At the end of the street, below the wide veranda of a white house, a Mexican was watering flowers with a garden hose. She saw water gleam from the roadside ditch, smelled wet grass. The oaks had been pruned so that they went up high, like maples in a New England village. Their shade lay across road and lawn.
“This must be the Hacienda,” she said.
“Draw your own conclusions.”
“I conclude it is. It’s nice.”
“Would you rather we were going to live down here?”
She thought that cool grass the most delicious thing she had ever seen or smelled, but she appraised his tone and said cautiously, “I haven’t seen our place yet.”
“No. But this looks good to you, does it?”
She considered, or pretended to. “It’s lovely and cool, but it looks as if it were trying to be something it isn’t. It’s a little too proper to be picturesque, isn