Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [149]
“Ooooh!” she said, moving her stiff shoulders and icy hands. Then she looked again, and said, “I thought Pricey was going to have the house full of hate. There’s no smoke.”
“Boy, he’d better have a fire,” Oliver said. “I’ll lift his scalp. Maybe he got to rocking.”
“Don’t you joke about Pricey.” She gave him her hand to be helped down. “If he said he’d be here, he’s here.”
Her buckling legs would hardly hold her. It seemed to her that Oliver was especially solicitous, with his arm around her. To Frank he said, “Don’t try to muscle those trunks. I’ll help you in a minute.”
Frank handed him down mummied Ollie, still sleeping. “Some April weather,” he said. Oliver steered Susan toward the door. The latchstring was out, and she pulled it for him so that he could kick the door open. “Pricey?”
Empty room. The change that she felt in the air was not from cold to warmth, not the lovely prickling and burning of a chilled skin in a hot room, but only a change from wind to stillness. The cabin was stone cold. Carrying Ollie, Oliver went to bedroom door, kitchen door. “Pricey?” No answer.
He gave Susan one look. Then he set Ollie into the rocker and said, “Stay under the covers for a couple of minutes, Old Timer. It’s cold. I’ve got to start a fire.”
While Susan stood close, stamping her feet, he crumpled newspaper and pyramided kindling. The outside door opened and Frank walked a trunk through it on his thighs. Surprised, he said, “Isn’t he here?”
“Hasn’t been here,” Oliver said. “The fire’s dead out.”
He scratched a match, flame jumped upward, a wind blew down the chimney and puffed out into the room a smell of shaving smoke. He leaned split lengths of pine above the flame. The kindling began to crackle with such a sound of comfort that Susan edged closer, though there was yet no heat, only light. “It just isn’t like Pricey.”
“No.”
“Why don’t I run down to the office and see if he’s there?” Frank said. “I’ll just get that other trunk in. You stay here and get warm.”
Oliver stood up. “I’ll give you a hand.”
They were outside longer than she thought it should take them. Ollie started to fight his way out of the comforter and she pulled it back over his head. “Stay in a little longer, you’d better. It’s icy.”
But he wanted to see. With only his fair curly head exposed, he looked wonderingly around. He watched his father and Frank carry in the second trunk and put it in the bedroom. He watched his father come out with the gun belt and six shooter and buckle it around him. So did Susan. “Oh my dear!” she said. “Where is thee going?”
“No reason to worry. We’re just going to check up on Pricey. Probably something came up and he couldn’t leave.”
“But the gun!”
He laughed, not infectiously. “Part of the act.”
He would not look at her as he piled more wood on the fire. She could feel the heat growing against her legs and at the same time smell the cold outdoor air in his clothes as he moved. When he stood up again she forced him to meet her eyes. She felt a kind of splintering, and told herself bitterly, “It’s Leadville. It’s what I chose.”
“We’ll only be a little while,” Oliver said. “Better pull in the latchstring.”
“Oliver . . .”
“Don’t worry,” he said, and closed the door and shut her in. She pulled in the latchstring.
The firelight on her son’s face made him look like so domestic a cherub, so much like one of her own drawings of Bessie’s children at bedtime, that she felt mocked.
“Where did Daddy and the other one go?”
“The other one is Mr. Sargent. They’ll be back afterwhile.”
“Why did Daddy take his gun?”
“I guess he’s afraid something might have happened to Pricey.”
“Who’s Pricey?”
“A friend of Daddy