Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [117]
And that made her think, with failing nerve, that whatever it was, it was to be her life. It was what she had deliberately chosen. As soon as he was well enough, she would be bringing Ollie out to grow up in it. Wanly she adjusted herself to Oliver’s unresponsive warmth.
It seemed to her that she heard every noise from midnight until near morning–dogs, drunken men in the street, footsteps that came down the hall and, it seemed, stopped before her door, so that she lay listening fearfully for a long time.
Then someone in the next cubicle sat up, yawning and squeaking the bed. He lighted a lamp whose glow shone blue through the cloth wall and threw huge windmill shadows among the rafters. She heard him stamp into his boots. The light rose and moved and receded down the hall. Outside, a rooster crowed some way off, and right underneath her someone split kindling with a quick thunk thunk thunk. Exhausted, frazzled, wide awake, she turned in the bed, fighting for covers, and found that Oliver’s eyes were open. He always woke that way, as quietly as if he had been lying there waiting.
“Can’t we get up?” she whispered.
They were on the road to Mosquito Pass by seven. For the first hour she hunched within her blanket with her breath congealing on the wool held across her face. A cold wind searched out the openings in her wrapping, her feet were cold under the buffalo robe. The dropped dung of the horses smoked in the road. As they climbed through the snags of a burned spruce forest, tatters of cloud blew out of the overcast. In all the shadowed places there was snow.
Eventually they climbed through the clouds and into the sun. Looking back, Susan saw South Park filled nearly to the brim with cloud, only the saw-toothed peaks rising above it. Their crowbait horses, one black and one bay, dragged them reluctantly up a steep canyon, stopping every quarter of a mile to blow. They came out onto a plateau and passed through aspens still leafless, with drifts deep among the trunks, then through a scattering of alpine firs that grew runty and gnarled and gave way to brown grass that showed the faintest tint of green on the southward slopes and disappeared under deep snowbanks on the northward ones. The whole high upland glittered with light.
As they had need, they drew aside to let ore wagons pass with their loads of concentrate and matte. The skyline, from any part of this magical plateau, was toothed like the jaw of a shark. The road bent and dipped down through a hanging valley where mosquitoes rose in swarms from the wet grass; when it lifted them again around a corner of bare stone the mosquitoes blew away instantly, and the wind was so cold it made her teeth ache. Her eyes watered with cold and light.
“Still remind you of staging in to New Almaden?” Oliver said.
“I take it back. This is so wild and beautiful. I like it ever so much better.”
“So do I. I could do without the town of Fairplay, though.”
“We survived it.”
“You’re all right, Susie,” he said. “You know that? Most women would go to bed for a week after a night like that.”
“Where?” she said, and giggled. Her voice startled her, brittle as ice in that thin air. “Maybe I will go to bed for a week, once we get to a bed.”
“I doubt it. It hasn’t fazed you.”
“I lay awake all last night writing it up for Century,” she said. “I intend to be their Western correspondent. At the very least, think of the letters I can write Augusta.” The thought made her laugh again; she put her black mitts to her cheeks, stinging with cold and sun. She supposed she looked as healthy as a child at a skating party. Oddly enough, she felt healthy too. “No,” she said, “I couldn’t. Can you imagine her opening a letter describing last night, and reading it aloud to Thomas at breakfast in some grand hotel dining room on Lake Leman or somewhere, with all of civilized Europe looking in the window?”
“Better spare her,” Oliver said.