Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [124]
4
Even in a Leadville cabin she was coddled.
Those first chilly mornings, she lay in her cot and watched sleepily through her eyelashes as Oliver squatted by the Franklin stove in his undershirt, his suspenders dangling, and blew the coals into flame through a handful of shavings. His movements were quick and sure, he worked intently. Above the darkness of his forearms and below the sunburned line on his neck his skin was very fair. When he opened the outside door the fume of his breath was white and thick, and the vicarious chill made her burrow deeper in the blankets. For a moment he stood there pail in hand, a rude, unidealized figure against a rectangle of bright steel sky–fully adapted, one she could trust to take care of things, a Westerner now of a dozen years’ standing.
The door slammed, she heard him running. In two minutes he was back, the door banged inward, the pail sloshed over as he stepped inside. By that time she had decided to be awake.
How would she have looked, waking up? Because I never saw her anything but immaculate, I can’t imagine her with mussed hair and puffy eyes, particularly when she was young. No curlers, I assume, not in 1879. If she curled her bangs, she curled them with a thing like a soldering iron, heated over stove or lamp. A nightcap? Perhaps. I might go to Godey’s Lady’s Book and leam these intimate secrets of the boudoir, I might not. Sears, Roebuck catalogues to tell a historian how a lady was supposed to look when opening her eyes on a new day wouldn’t be along for some years. I doubt that she looked more angel than woman, as the smitten boy at New Almaden had thought. Not to her husband, and at six-thirty in the morning. But maybe even to her husband she shone against the log wall like a saint in a niche. Her rosy complexion would have been rosier from sleep, I suspect; her vivacity not less on the pillow than in the parlor. And she was one who woke chirping. She talked at him as he cooked.
He made the breakfast because, as he said, there was no point in her getting out in the cold, when he was a better camp cook than she was. He was, too, she admitted it. He could broil a steak, fry bacon or eggs or flapjacks or potatoes, make mush and coffee, in half the time and with half the effort she would have expended. He had a trick of chopping up frying hash browns with the edge of an empty baking powder can. He kept insects and dirt out of an opened can of condensed milk by plugging the two holes with matches. He could flip flapjacks so that they alighted in the mathematical center of the pan.
And it was cold. Leadville was said to have one month of summer, but no one would say when it began or ended. It had not yet begun. She propped herself against the logs, bundling into the heartwarmer that Augusta had sent her when she was carrying Ollie, and watched with interest her husband’s efficient movements, thinking that this hour of the morning was their best time together.
“You didn’t tell me when Conrad is coming,” she said.
“Yes I did. Next week.”
“We ought to ask him to stay with us.”
His look went around the cabin, and then he leaned in sideways, squinting against the heat, to turn up the brown crust of the potatoes. “Where’d we put him?”
“I don’t know. I suppose we can’t. It just seems so unhomelike at the Clarendon.”
“He might think it was a little too homelike here.”
“I love it,” she said. “I really love it, all except having to cook and eat and sleep and dress and wash and entertain all in one room. Can we build on an ell before Ollie comes?”
The coffeepot boiled over. He tipped its lid open with the edge of his hand. “You still think you want to bring him out?”
“I’m determined to. I won’t have us separated again for so long.”
The cabin was full of the smells of coffee and bacon, and she shook the covers, flapping away greasy odors, while she watched Oliver fork the bacon onto a tin plate and crack eggs into the grease. He did it with one