Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [121]
“My goodness,” Susan said. “Is this the road to our place?”
“One way.”
“Could you see what was happening down there?”
“Some kind of ruckus. Nothing you need to see.”
“You protect me too much,” she said, disappointed and rebellious.
“No I don’t.”
“We agreed it was a mistake for me to stay so far out of things at New Almaden.”
“This isn’t New Almaden.”
They bumped up the stumpy hillside. Down to the right she could see packed roofs, and beyond them smelter smokes. All across the West were the peaks she knew were the Sawatch Range. The crowd was out of sight, but she could hear it, a loud continuous uproar, then a stillness, then a harsh, startling outcry. “Something is certainly going on,” she said.
Oliver, with his head dropped, watched the laboring sick horse. She thought his face was stem and unloving, and she hated it that they should arrive at their new home in that spirit. Then he pointed with his whip. “There’s your house.”
She forgot the excitement down below, she forgot the misunderstanding that had kept them silent down the gulch. There it sat, the second house she would try to make into a Western home: a squat cabin of unpeeled logs with a pigtail of smoke from its stovepipe. “Looks as if Frank’s made you a fire,” Oliver said. “You’ll learn to appreciate that boy.”
“Frank, that’s your assistant?”
“General Sargent’s third son, come out West to be an engineer.”
“Just like you.”
“just like me.”
Her quick, upward, smiling look asked or gave forgiveness for what had been between them. “Is he going to be as good as you?”
“That’s a hard standard to hold him to.”
They laughed. It was better already. At the ditch bank she took his hand and teetered prettily before jumping down. The ditch was like no ditch she had ever imagined. This was as clear as water in a glass, and it shot past as if chased. When she stooped impulsively to drag her hand in it it numbed her fingers.
Two planks crossed it for a bridge. Oliver tied the team to a stump and led her across as if it were as dangerous as a high wire. At the door he stood a moment, frowning, listening to the crowd noise from below, and then with an odd, angry shrug he yanked the buckskin latchstring. “Maybe we should begin with the right omens,” he said, and gravely lifted her across the sill and set her down. “In case you think you’ve come down in the world, let me tell you there’s nothing grander in Leadville.”
It was one room, perhaps fifteen by twenty-five feet. Two windows, curtainless. Five chairs, one broken, one a rocker. A Franklin stove with a fallen, ashy fire smoking in it. Two canvas cots made up with gray blankets. A table that had been knocked together out of three wide boards and two sawhorses.
“Don’t look around for the kitchen or bedroom,” Oliver said.
Perhaps she had been remembering the New Almaden cottage, so much better than her expectations, and so had built up expectations of this cabin that it could not support. It took an effort to conceal her disappointment. Yet as she looked around she had to admit that a log house was picturesque, and a house with a welcoming fire on its hearth was touching. She summoned back for her inner eye the image of the peaks rimming the world outside. “It’s charming. I can hang curtains around the cots. We’ll be snug. How will we cook?”
“Breakfast on the Franklin, dinner out of a sardine can, supper at the Clarendon. I’m afraid I won’t be here for dinner much.”
“I’m sure you’ll be welcome when you can come,” she said. “But I’ll be busy-you’ll have to keep out of my way. I brought some blocks for a novel of Louisa Alcott’s.”
He said seriously, “Maybe you’ll want to stay at the hotel.”
She pulled off her hat, she made herself at home. Feeling better all the time, she went around examining the cabin. She rocked the table –the sawhorses wobbled. She bent and tried one of the cots, and looking up to find him gravely watching her, she smiled at him with a great rush of affection and said, “I think it will do very nicely