Angle of Repose - Wallace Earle Stegner [46]
Down the mountain, moving beyond a curtain of quivering air, she saw the stage coming, perhaps with letters. If she started in five minutes, she would arrive at the Cornish Camp post office at about the same time as the stage. But the post office was in the company store, where there were always loiterers-teamsters, drifters, men hunting work -whom Oliver did not want her to encounter alone. And Ewing, the manager of the store, was a man she thought insolent. She must wait another two hours, till Oliver came home, to know whether there was mail. If the truth were known, these days she always looked at his hands, for the gleam of paper, before she looked at his face.
Bells again, unmistakable. She went around the comer, where the mountain fell away and the veranda stood on posts ten feet high, and looked around the comer of Lizzie's room to the hill behind. She could see the path, used only by the Mexican packers who brought wood down from the mountain, curving and disappearing among the red-barked madrones. The bells were plain and coming nearer.
Then from out of the madrones came a mule bearing an immense cargo of split wood. His ears were down, his nose was down, he planted his small feet with reluctant, aggrieved deliberation, holding back against the weight and the steepness of the path, sliding a little, humped up behind, braced in front. The bell around his neck clunked and tinkled with every wincing step. Behind him came another, then another, then another, until there were eight in line; and behind them came an old Mexican with a sombrero on his head, a stick in his hand, and a red silk handkerchief around his neck; and behind him a younger Mexican, a helper, a Sancho, almost invisible in his nonentity.
The mules stopped. Their heads drooped, their ears waggled forward, they snuffed hopelessly at the dusty ground. The leader heaved out his sides and blew a great breath, stirring up dust. Clunk went his bell. The old Mexican had his hat in his hand, his brown face turned upward into the sun. He was saying something in Spanish. Since Susan's Spanish lessons with Oliver's assistant Mr. Hernandez had gone no further than four brief sessions, she caught only the word leno, and perhaps caught that only because of the burden the mules carried.
Pointing to her breast she said carefully, "żPara me?"
"Si, seńora."
"Yes. Well, you may put it under the porch there, I know that's where Mr. Ward wants it "
"żComo?"
By signs she made him understand. He had great theatrical gestures-swept on his sombrero, blasted Sancho with a volley of orders, fell upon one of the mules and began to loosen the hitch that held its load. The whole event suddenly acquired gaiety, it was an occasion, it so lifted the tempo of the listless afternoon that Susan ran inside and got her sketch pad and drew them as they worked. Sight of the growing pile of firewood, like the stacks her father used to stretch in October between two oaks down by the sheepfold, set her to thinking, as one might let his mind stray to the images of some secret vice, of the Franklin stove inside, polished like an art work, waiting for the time when all this sun would be quenched and Mrs. Oliver Ward could sit with her husband through long evenings by an open fire, preferably while blasts howled without. This was a girl who almost illustrated Snowbound, and should have.
The unloading and stacking took three quarters of an hour. When it was done, Sancho disappeared, vanished, stood on three legs among the hipshot mules. She imagined sores on his withers like the raw patches on theirs, and a stripe down his back and three or four stripes around his legs like some of them, as if there were zebras among their mutual ancestors.
The old Mexican again had his hat off. God knows how she looked to him up there on her high porch in her high-necked dress with a brooch pinned at the throat, her face rosy, her sketch pad in her hand. By that time she was well known as the lady who drew; many had met her on the trails carrying her pad and her little stool.
He said something. "żComo?"