Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [127]
“I doubt if it’d get his attention,” Frank said.
With preposterous daintiness the boots came down, tapped the planks, rose, hung, descended. CREAK creak, CREAK creak. Wetting his thumb, Pricey turned another page.
“I swear,” Oliver said, and stood up. “This is serious.”
He stepped along the wall to the bookcase that stood behind Pricey’s chair. Pricey hunched his shoulders aside slightly to make passage room, and a small interrogative humming issued from his nose, but he did not look up. The rockers rose and fell. Standing close behind him, Oliver took in each hand a volume of the King Survey reports-great quartos that ran six pounds to the book, the concentrated learning of King, Prager, Emmons, the Hague brothers, a dozen others who had been Oliver’s guides and models.
For a moment Susan was afraid he was going to drop the books on Pricey’s unconscious head, and she made a restraining motion. But Oliver only stood a moment, adjusting to Pricey’s rhythm, and then stooped quickly and shoved a book under each rocker.
Pricey stopped with a jolt, his head snapped back, his jaw snapped shut. He looked up startled into their laughter. His face went pink, his pale eyes circled wildly looking for a focus. “S-s-s-sorry!” he said. “What?”–and then the long acceptant “hawwwww!” like a groan.
Yet only a day or two after that, this same Pricey showed Susan some of the incongruous possibilities of Leadville. He had been the one delegated to take her riding, and they were down on the Lake Fork of the Arkansas at a place where they must ford. It was a time of high water, the infant Arkansas was swift and curly. “Come on, Pricey!” Susan called, and quirted her horse into the water.
The creek broke against his knees, and then as he surged carefully ahead, feeling for footing, against his shoulder. His hoofs were delicate among the slippery bottom stones. Susan pulled her foot out of the stirrup of the sidesaddle and sat precariously, thrilled and dazzled by the cold rush going underneath. When the water shallowed, the horse lunged out, shedding great drops, and as she felt for the stirrup she turned to see how Pricey was making it. There he came, strangling the horn with both hands. From midstream he sent her a sweet, desperate smile.
She guided her horse through willows and alders and runted birches, leaned and weaved until the brush ended and she broke into the open. She was at the edge of a meadow miles long, not a tree in it except for the wiggling line that marked the course of the Lake Fork. Stirrup-high grass flowed and flawed in the wind, and its motion revealed and hid and revealed again streaks and splashes of flowers–rust of paintbrush, blue of pentsternon, yellow of buttercups, scarlet of gilia, blue-tinged white of columbines. All around, rimming the valley, bare peaks patched with snow looked down from above the scalloped curve of timberline.
All but holding her breath, she pushed into the field of grass. The pony’s legs disappeared, his shoulders forced a passage, grass heads and flowers snagged in her stirrup and saddle skirts. The movement around and beneath her was as dizzying as the fast current of the creek had been a moment before. The air was that high blue mountain kind that fizzes in the lungs. Rising in her stirrup to get her face and chest full of it, she gave, as it were, a standing ovation to the rim cut out against the blue. From a thousand places in the grass little gerns of unevaporated water winked back the sun.
She heard Pricey come up and stop just behind her. His horse blew. But she was filling her eyes, and did not turn. Then she heard Pricey say, in his fine cultivated Oxonian voice, strongly, without the trace of a stammer,
Oh, tenderly the haughty day
Fills his blue urn with fire.
Who but Pricey? Where but Leadville?
Mice have gnawed Grandmother’s Leadville letters and created some historical lacunae. The packet is thin, moreover. That much time in New Almaden and Santa Cruz produced a bale of correspondence. Leadville’s letters number only thirty.
The reminiscences