Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [126]
Isn’t it queer, at my age and in this altitude, to discover what it means to have power over men! It gives one a twinge of understanding of the sort of woman one has never met, the sort who choose to exercise their power. I have three men around me, almost the only society I see, and all three would walk barefoot over coals for me. Do I not strike you as a sad adventuress? But how innocent and pleasant and harmless too, to have one man to cherish and one to sister and one to mother!
The one I mother is Ian Price, Oliver’s clerk, whom we call Pricey. Oliver says he is a duffer, but keeps him on because he is so helpless and lonesome. I cannot fathom why he ever came to Leadville, unless it was that he was miserably unhappy where he was before. He is as little like a Western fortune hunter as you can imagine. His flesh seems to have been put on his bones by the lumpy handful. He stammers, blushes, falls over his own feet, and when he is being teased, or when something amuses him, he has a way of coming out with a great, pained, long-drawn “hawwww!” But in his way he is good company, for he is an even greater reader than Frank, and when we are alone he sometimes talks about books in a way that quite obliterates his usual embarrassment. He loves to sit in our rocker, before our fire, and read–not taking part in the conversation but somehow taking comfort from it, with an air of great content. Seeing him thus, I can’t help thinking what his alternatives would be were we not here to give him a sort of home: the Clarendon’s loud lobby, or the shack he shares with Frank, where he might lie reading in his bunk by the light of a lantern hung on a nail. . . .
Try a sample Leadville evening.
The light was gentle, a mixture of firelight and the soft radiance of two Moderateur lamps bought at a frightening price at Daniel and Fisher’s. The cots were curtained off, the table was shoved against the wall, which was hung with the geological maps of the King Survey. Susan had put these up, not Oliver; and they were for decoration, not study. Frank was sitting on the floor with his chin on his knees and the firelight in his eyes. Between stove and wall Pricey sat reading, and the noise of his rocking creaked in the lulls of their talk like an overindustrious cricket.
“What are you reading that’s so absorbing, Pricey?” Susan said.
Pricey did not hear her. His tiny feet in their clumsy boots came down tippy-toe, pushed against the floor, and floated upward again. His nose was ten inches from the page. His hand moved, a page turned, his feet came down, pushed, floated upward. The floor squeaked. They watched him, smiling among themselves.
“I think it’s a total lack of vanity,” Oliver said. “Anybody else who hears his name will look up, it’ll jar him a little. Not Pricey, not when he’s reading. Look at him, like a kid on a rockinghorse.”
“I saw him riding that old Minnie mule along the road the other day with his nose in a book,” Frank said. “Mule could have stumbled and tossed him down a shaft, he’d have gone right on reading. Maybe he’d have wondered why it got dark all of a sudden.”
Oliver raised his voice slightly to say, “I may have to ask him not to come over here any more. He’ll rock every nail out of the floor.”
They projected their joking toward Pricey and he heard nothing. Creak creak, creak creak. The little boots tapped the planks, floated upward. Pricey turned another page. Out of her suppressed laughter Susan shook her head at the other two. Don’t laugh at him. Don’t make fun.
Oliver said, “There’s one thing the oblivious Pricey doesn’t know. That rocker creeps. Five minutes more and he’ll be