Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [44]
Oliver took her hand and shook it. “Good girl. And too close to too many people.”
“Why? Aren’t the manager and the others nice?”
“They’re all right. I guess I prefer the Cousin Jacks and Mexicans up at the camps.”
They were going right through the Hacienda at a trot. Some children scattered, turning to stare. A woman looked out a door. “Aren’t we stopping here?” she asked.
“I slipped Eugene a little extra to deliver you right to your gate.”
“Ah,” she said, “that’ll be nicer,” and leaned to the window to see as the stage tilted through dry oaks along a trail dug out of the hillside. But her mind worried a question. He thought of making her arrival as pleasant as possible, and as easy for her, and he didn’t hesitate to spend money to do it, but he hadn’t thought to send her the fare to cross the continent—not only Lizzie’s fare, which he might have forgotten, but her own, which he shouldn’t have. Not the least unknown part of her unknown new life was the man beside her. From the time she had bought the tickets out of her savings she had not been entirely free of fear.
Grandmother, I feel like telling her, have a little confidence in the man you married. You’re safer than you think.
The road climbed, kinked back on itself and started a sweeping curve around a nearly bare hill. Ahead she saw five parallel spurs of mountain, as alike as the ridges of a plowed field but huge and impetuous, plunging down into the canyon. The first was very dark, the next less dark, the third hazed, the fourth dim, the fifth almost gone. All day there had been no sky, but now she saw that there was one, a pale diluted blue.
At the turn a battered liveoak leaned on limbs that touched the ground on three sides. To its trunk were nailed many boxes, each with a name painted or chalked on it: Trengove, Fall, Tregoning, Tyrrell. Across a gulch on the left she saw roofs and heard the yelling of children.
“Cornish Camp?”
“Draw your own conclusions.”
“What are the boxes? Is there a newspaper?”
“Oh Eastern effeteness,” Oliver said. “Those are meat boxes. Every morning the meat wagon comes by and leaves Tregoning his leg of mutton and Trengove his soup bone and Mother Fall her pot roast. Tomorrow, if you want, I’ll put up a box for Mother Ward.”
“I don’t think I should like everyone to know what I feed you,” Susan said. “Doesn’t anybody ever steal things?”
“Steals? This isn’t the Hacienda.”
“You don’t like the Hacienda, do you?” she said. “Why not?”
He grunted.
“Well, I must say it’s prettier than this.”
“There I can’t argue with you,” he said. “It smells better, too.”
The whole place had the air of having been dumped down the hillside-steep streets, houses at every angle white and incongruous or unpainted and shabby. Wash hung everywhere, the vacant lots were littered with cans and trash, dogs prowled and children screamed. At the water tank they slowed to pass through a reluctantly parting, densely staring tangle of men, boys, teamsters, cows, donkeys, mules. When Oliver leaned out and saluted some of them they waved, grinning, and stared with their hands forgotten in the air. Engineer and his new missus. She thought them coarse and cow-faced and strangely pale.
But they made sharp pictures, too: a boy hoisting a water yoke with a pail at each end, the pails sloshing silver over their rims; a teamster unyoking his mules; a donkey standing with his ears askew and his nose close to the ground, on his face a look of mournful patience that reminded her comically of Lizzie.
“Over there’s Mother Fall’s, where I lived,” Oliver said, and pointed.
A white two-story house, square, blank, and ugly. Each window was a room, she supposed, one of them formerly his. The downstairs would smell of cabbage and grease. She could not even imagine living there. Her heart rose up and assured her that she would make him glad she had come.
“You said she was nice to you.”
“Yes. A stout Cornish dame. She’s been helping me get ready for you.”
“I must call on her, I should think.”
He looked at her a little queerly. “You sure must. If we don’t have supper there tomorrow we