Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [67]
I have no evidence, but I think Grandmother must have been set up to be asked to write that piece. She would have loved to think it was good. It would demonstrate that marriage had not shrunk her career, but broadened it. She wanted to grow, as she imagined Thomas and Augusta growing, and as she was sure that Oliver grew, in his own way, through his work at the mine. Yet to think of herself appearing page to page with Cable or Nadal or any of the Scribner’s writers left her cold with the fear that her sketch would show up as a lame and embarrassing thing.
She had to know. So in two evenings she wrote another little story about the fiesta on Mexican Independence Day in September, with double heroines in Mr. Hernandez’s languid and beautiful sisters. This she sent off smoking hot to Mr. Howells at the Atlantic, submitting herself to a less partial judge than Thomas. That gave her three things to wait for.
5
Late afternoon, a soft spring day, the hills so green and soft she thought she would like to roll down them as she and Bessie used to roll down the pasture hill in Milton when they were children. Instead, she moved from the chair on the valley side of the porch to the bench on the trail side. The hammock she had given up weeks ago; she could not have got out of it if she had got in. Lizzie’s noises in the kitchen, and a banging that was probably Buster among the stovewood, might have been the sounds from her mother’s kitchen. The smells of damp and mold from below the porch were so familiar that it seemed her family must be just over the hill, to be visited in a ten-minute walk. Across on a blue, lupine-covered saddle two white mules were grazing, as peaceful as two white clouds in a summer sky.
Stranger scrambled out from under the porch and went off up the trail. That should mean Oliver was coming. In a minute he appeared, so much like a farmer returning from the fields in his corduroy pants and blue shirt that he might have been her father, or John Grant. He made a pass at Stranger’s ears, the dog bounced around him like a playful plowhorse. She saw a letter in Oliver’s shirt pocket. His forehead and nose were red from working all day Sunday in the yard. She sat still, placid and waiting, until he was clear up the steps. Then she lifted her smiling face to be kissed.
“Oh,” she said, “it’s been so beautiful I hated to think of you down that grim old mine.”
“I came out at noon and had a good mule ride over to Guadalupe.”
“Good, I’m glad. What for?”
“Remember that hoisting machinery Kendall was going to put in at the Santa Isabel, the rig he saw in the Sierra, that I didn’t like the looks of?”
“I guess I don’t remember.”
“Oh, sure you remember. Kendall wasn’t pleased when I questioned it. I told you.”
“If you did it didn’t penetrate. I haven’t much of a head for things like that ”
“I guess your head will do. Well, anyway. I knew it wouldn’t work here because–never mind. He thought it would. So I proved it to him. Captain Smith and I have been redesigning it; and when Smith was down last I showed it to him. So they’re going to try it out over at Guadalupe, and if it works there, which it will, they’ll install it in the Santa Isabel.”
For him, it was a speech. She could tell what it meant to him by the words it forced out of him. He succeeded in everything he did. She could see him broadening down, like freedom, from precedent to precedent, and because she was proud of him, and wanted his value acknowledged by his employers, she said, “Shouldn’t you get something from that? Couldn’t you take out a patent?”
She made him laugh. “What is it about Quakers? My time belongs to the company.”
“Even Sundays? I’ll bet that’s not what Mr. Smith would say.”
“Maybe not, but Kendall does. He also said something else today. He may not like to have me prove him wrong, but he just told me I’ve got a three-hundred-dollar raise.”
“Which you’ve earned and a lot more. You’re such a child anybody could take advantage of you. You’ve probably saved them thousands. Aren’t you going to give me my letter?”
He touched his pocket.