Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [45]
Above and to the left, scattered down a long hogback ridge, the Mexican camp appeared. Its houses were propped with poles, timbers, ladders; its crooked balconies overflowed with flowers; in a doorway she saw a dark woman smoking a cigarette, on a porch a grandmother braided a child’s hair. There were no white-painted cottages, but she thought this camp more attractive than the Cornish–it had a look of belonging, some gift of harmoniousness. The stage turned off to the right, below the camp, and left her craning, unsatisfied.
“Is there a Chinese Camp too?” she said.
“Around the hill and below us. We’ll hear it a little, but we won’t see it.”
“Where’s the mine?”
With his forefinger he jabbed straight down. “You don’t see that either. Just a shaft house or a dump in a gulch here and there.”
“You know what?” she said, holding the curtains back and watching ahead through the dusty little oaks, “I don’t think you described this place very well.”
“Draw your own conclusions,” Oliver said. He offered a finger to Lizzie’s baby, just waking up and yawning and focusing his eyes. The stage stopped.
The cottage she had imagined exposed on a bare hill among ugly mine buildings was tucked back among liveoaks at the head of a draw. In her first quick devouring look she saw the verandas she had asked for and helped Oliver sketch, a rail fence swamped under geraniums. When she hopped out slapping dust from her clothes she saw that the yard showed the even tooth-marks of raking. He had prepared for her so carefully. Both mostly what she felt in the moment of arrival was space, extension, bigness. Behind the house the mountain went up steeply to the ridge, along which now lay, as soft as a sleeping cat, a roll of fog or cloud. Below the house it fell just as steeply down spurs and canyons to tumbled hills as bright as a lion’s hide. Below those was the valley’s dust, a level obscurity, and rising out of it, miles away, was another long mountain as high as their own. Turning back the way she had come in, she saw those five parallel spurs, bare gold on top, darkly wooded in the gulches, receding in layers of blue haze. I know that mountain, old Loma Prieta. In nearly a hundred years it has changed less than most of California. Once you get beyond the vineyards and subdivisions along its lower slopes there is nothing but a reservoir and an Air Force radar station.
“Well,” Oliver said, “come on inside.”
It was as she had visualized it from his sketches, but much more finished–a house, not a picturesque shack. It smelled cleanly of paint. Its floors and wainscot were dark redwood, its walls a soft gray. The light was dim and cool, as she thought the light in a house should be. A breeze went through the rooms, bringing inside the smell of aromatic sun-soaked plants. The Franklin stove was polished like a farmer’s Sunday boots, water was piped into the sink, the kitchen cooler held sacks and cans and let out a rich smell of bacon. In the arch between dining room and living room Oliver had hung his spurs, bowie, and six-shooter. “The homey touch,” he said. “And wait, there are some little housewarming presents.”
From the piazza he brought one of the packages that had been part of their luggage down from San Francisco. She opened it and pulled out a grass fan. “Fiji,” Oliver said. Next a large mat of the same grass, as finely woven as linen, and with a sweet hay smell. “More Fiji.” Next a paper parasol that opened up to a view of Fujiyama. “Japan,” Oliver said. “Don’t open it inside—bad luck.” At the bottom of the box was something heavy which, unwrapped, turned out to be a water jar with something in Spanish written across it. “Guadalajara,” Oliver said. “Now you’re supposed to feel that the place is yours. You know what that Spanish means? It says, ‘Help thyself, little Tomasa.’ ”
There it sits, over on my window sill, ninety-odd years later, without even a nick out of it. The fan and the parasol went quickly, the mat lasted until Leadville and was mourned when it passed, the olla has come through three generations of us, as have the bowie, the spurs, and the six-shooter. It wasn