Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [57]
Susan made an instinctive move to catch it, and then pulled back her hands. The handkerchief fell on the veranda floor. She stared down at the craning old man, whose brown neck, with the handkerchief removed, showed deep creases in which the sweat of his labor had deposited channels of dirt.
“Lizzie!” Susan said.
Lizzie came out through the kitchen door, and the old Mexican’s admiration was doubled. Another beautiful one. This house of the engineer was full of them. With her purse open, Susan said, “Lizzie, will you pick up his handkerchief, please?”
Lizzie picked it up, Susan laid a five-dollar bill in its center, and Lizzie folded it and tied its corners and dropped it into the old man’s upstretched hand. “Gracias, much’ grac’,” he said, and then something else. Expectant, he stood looking upward.
“What is it?” Susan said. “What do you want? ¿Que . . . ?”
He held out his hand, and gazing at it with admiration he appeared to write on his extended palm. “I think he’d like to see your drawing,” Lizzie said.
Reluctantly, hoping he would not take hold of it with his hands, she turned the pad down toward him so that he could see. His arm would not stretch so far, he craned and squinted with the sun in his eyes. Impulsively Susan tore the sheet off the pad, and with gestures that he was to keep it, dropped it down toward him. It planed on the wind, and he pursued it with agility, captured it in a clump of coyote brush. He admired it extravagantly, all but kissing his fingers. A masterpiece.
“Por nada,” she knew enough to say in response to his multiple thanks, and she gave him her best adios when he roused Sancho and the other mules and they circled back up the hill and around the house to the trail. The last she saw of the old man he was holding the picture against his chest as tenderly as if it had been a holy relic.
She had a warm glow at having done something gracious for one of the poor; she liked his admiration even while she smiled at it; she had the feeling of having made a friend. The fact was, she had been somewhat nettled by the comment of one of the Cornish wives, repeated to her by amused Lizzie: “Mister Ward’s missus can picture anything, but what else is she able for?” She told herself that Mexicans, themselves more picturesque than the whey-faced Cornish, better understood the value of picturing.
But what would she have done if she had not had Lizzie? The thought of picking up that handkerchief gave her gooseflesh.
“Let’s rest a minute, Lizzie,” she said, and leaned back against the tree. Lizzie, sitting on the bulging root of a bay tree with her dark hair down and a makeshift A of red ribbon on her breast, gave up the effort to stare with an expression of guilty passion at an invisible Arthur Dimmesdale. She had a womanly body and a handsome face, with high cheekbones and a straight nose and straight, heavy, severe brows. But her expression was naturally impassive. She had trouble simulating Hester Prynne’s pride and recklessness, and Susan could not instruct her too explicitly without risking reflections on Lizzie’s closed past. The figure she had drawn satisfied her, and she had transformed the bay root into something appropriate to Hawthorne’s dark wood, but the face wouldn’t come right. In the last two hours it had been through every expression from Lizzie’s native stoniness to a horrible leer, and it was now rubbed out for the fourth or fifth time.
She did not feel like drawing, but felt she must. She had signed a contract, they needed the money, she ought to keep her hands and mind occupied–there were a dozen reasons. Yet she would rather have sat torpidly and let dim thoughts coil through her head. The air was oppressive, as if it might rain, though she knew it could not rain for weeks or months yet. She drew it down to the bottom of her lungs, with its freight of dust and mold and the herb-cupboard smells of these woods, and she would have given anything for the breath of a hay meadow or the dank mossy air around the spring above Long Pond. Even the sounds here were dry and brittle; she longed for sounds that were sponged up by green moss. She felt half sick again.