Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [144]
“That’s too much.”
“Then just say, ‘Good-bye, Daddy’s elk.’ ”
“Good-bye, Daddy’s elk.”
“Will you like seeing your Daddy again?”
“Yes.”
She saw by his wondering stare that he did not understand what she was asking him. Not sure she understood herself, she hugged him hard and picked up the lantern, holding it high to give him a last look at the great creature on the beam.
The varnished muzzle, coated with eighteen months of dust, shone as if wet in the light. A phantasmal fire glinted in the eyeballs. It might have bugled at any moment.
“Wasn’t that odd?” she said late that night when she was sitting with Bessie and John before the fire. “It simply gleamed at us, as if the talk about going to the mountains had wakened it from its sleep. Just hearing the word Leadville brought it to life for a second. Oh, now I feel myself coming to life, too! I can hardly wait to get back there and make a home in that wild beautiful place.”
John Grant had been sitting slumped, studying the toe of his boot. His chin was against his chest, his eyes were narrowed almost shut. Now suddenly he opened his eyes wide and shot her a look that stabbed. His face was full of hatred. With the years he had grown more and more censorious, he rarely spoke except in scorn or dislike, he seemed always quarreling with something inside his head.
The black eyes blazed at her only a moment before they slitted again. For another second he brooded upon the swinging toe of his boot. Then he uncrossed his legs, stood up, and left the room. They heard his steps on the porch, then on the path that led to the lane and back to his own house.
Holding her embroidery frame in her lap, Bessie sat still. Then impatiently she shook her head and started a shining tear-track down each cheek.
“What did I say?” Susan said, bewildered. “Bessie, I’m sorry!”
“Excuse him,” Bessie said. “He envies Oliver so. He’s almost the only person he still speaks well of. He’d so like to be going himself. He says he’s smothering here.”
Susan found no reply. Her gentle sister had always had the patient role, she had never been coddled. It was Bessie who made the humble marriage, Bessie who lived as a farm wife, Bessie who was at hand to help when her parents needed her, Bessie who made the preserves that Susan’s city friends carried triumphantly home as the plunder of a country visit. She had sat for hours submitting her prettiness to Susan’s pencil. While Susan studied in New York and shuttled back and forth across the continent, Bessie looked after the home place. When Susan could not keep her child, Bessie kept him. Sometimes Susan had envied her the placid sweetness of her life.
She said softly, “Would thee go?”
“If it would help him. If it would make him as he used to be.”
“Then!” Susan said, full of generous impulse. “Why don’t I ask Oliver to look around? He can probably find him a place at the Adelaide. Thee could build a house near ours on the ditch!”
Almost with amusement, Bessie raised her eyes and looked through the ceiling. “What about them?”
“They could come too.”
The delusion lasted perhaps five seconds before realism wiped it out. Busy as a Breughel, the vision filled her head: the men jostling up and down plank sidewalks that thrummed under their boots like bridges, overdressed women strolling past open doors of assay and law offices within which men in shirtsleeves argued or smoked or watched the street, wall-eyed teams plunging by, teamsters rising to lay the whip to quivering haunches, the band playing, the smoke of smelters streaming from the stacks, the earth trembling to the vibration of stamp mills, the whole place leaning as if in a strong wind, and all the corners, all the doorways, all the windows packed and staring with faces, and every face disfigured by the passion for wealth, every eye looking out its corners, alert for the main chance. At the edge of this, timid and lost between the frenzy of the crowds and the indifference