Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [46]
She was touched. Like the raked yard, the clean paint, his absurd masculine decorations in the archway, his gifts proved him what she had believed him to be. Yet the one small doubt stuck in her mind like a burr in tweed. In a small voice she said, “You’ll spoil me.”
“I hope so.”
Lizzie came in with luggage in one hand and the baby in her other arm. “Right through the kitchen,” Oliver said. “Your bed’s made up. The best I could do for Georgie was a packing box with a pillow in it.”
“That will be fine, thank you,” Lizzie said, and went serenely on through.
Kind. He really was. And energetic. Within a minute he was making a fire so that Susan could have warm water to wash in. Then he said that he had a little errand at Mother Fall’s, and before she could ask him what he was off the piazza and gone.
Susan took off her traveling dress and washed in the basin by the kitchen door. Below her were the tops of strange bushes, the steep mountainside tufted with sparse brown grass. Looking around the corner of Lizzie’s room to the upward slopes, she saw exotic red-barked trees among the woods, and smelled the herb-cupboard smells of sage and bay. Another world. Thoughtfully she poured out the water and went inside, where Lizzie was slicing a round loaf she had found in the cooler. Even the bread here was strange.
“How does it seem, Lizzie? Is your room all right?”
“It’s fine.”
“Is it the way you imagined it?”
“I don’t know that I imagined it much.”
“Oh, I did,” said Susan. “All wrong.”
She looked at Lizzie’s room, clean and bare; went out through the dining room where her gifts lay on the table and read the inscription on the olla: Help thyself, Tomasita. Out on the piazza she sat in the hammock and looked out over the green and gold mountain and thought how strange, how strange.
Rocks clattered in the trail, and Oliver came in sight with a great black dog padding beside him. He made it sit down in front of the hammock. “This is Stranger. We figure he’s half Labrador and half St. Bernard. He thinks he’s my dog, but he’s mistaken. From now on he goes walking with nobody but you. Shake hands, Stranger.”
With great dignity Stranger offered a paw like a firelog, first to Oliver, who pushed it aside, and then to Susan. He submitted to having his head stroked. “Stranger?” Susan said. “Is that your name, Stranger? That’s wrong. You’re the one who lives here. I’m the stranger.”
Oliver went inside and came out with a piece of buttered bread. “Give him something. You’re to feed him, always, so he’ll get attached to you.”
“But it’s you he likes,” Susan said. “Look at the way he watches every move you make.”
“Just the same, he’s going to learn to like you. That’s what we got him for, to look after you. If he doesn’t, I’ll make a rug of him. You hear that, you?”
The dog rolled his eyes and twisted his head back, keeping his bottom firmly on the boards. “Here, Stranger,” Susan said, and broke off a piece of bread. The dog’s eyes rolled down to fix on it. She tossed it, and he slupped it out of the air with a great sucking sound that made them both laugh. Over his broad black head Susan looked into Oliver’s eyes. “You will spoil me.”
“I hope so,” he said for the second time.
Then she couldn’t keep the question back any longer. “Oliver.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me something.”
“Sure.”
“I don’t want you to be angry.”
“Angry? At you?”
“It seems so petty. I shouldn’t even mention it. I only want us to start without a single shadow between us.”
“My God, what have I done?” Oliver said. Then a slow mulish look came into his face, a look like disgust or guilt or evasion. She stared at him in panic, remembering what his mother had said of him: that when he was put in the wrong he would never defend himself, he would only close up like a clam. She didn’t want him to close up, she wanted to talk this out and be rid of it. Blue as blue stones in his sunburned face, his eyes touched hers and were withdrawn. Miserably she stood waiting. “I know what it is,” he said.