Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [151]
They were a family that, simply because they could hire, acquired the direction of other lives. Like the climate and the altitude, they were an arm of destiny. To bring a Lizzie or a Marian Prouse out West was one thing; women were in demand. But a Pricey was not, in the West or anywhere else. His English family, notified of his condition, wrote back with what Susan felt was a mean, self-saving caution. They did not, they said, have either the health or the money to come for him. His brothers were both married and tied down by jobs and families. They thought it might be best, if Ian did not show improvement, to try to find some good woman, widow perhaps, or someone whose children were grown and gone, to look after him for a fee, which they would try to help pay. They did not like to think of him in an institution.
“You know who that good woman is likely to be,” Susan said. “Me! Fond as I am of him, I can’t see us saddled with him indefinitely. It will do horrible things to Ollie. They ought to be made to bring him home.”
“How?” Oliver said.
“If there were only someone we know who’s going abroad. He’s so gentle and quiet he wouldn’t be a trouble.”
“But we don’t know anybody who’s going abroad. Anyway, he’d be scared to go anywhere except with one of us.”
“But it can’t go on as it is!”
There was a bitten furrow between Oliver’s eyes, he moved as if the slightest step jarred him to his heels. She could literally see one of his headaches coming on. Before night he would be lying in the darkened bedroom with a wet cloth over his eyes. His voice was already roughened by the pain in his head.
“Do you want me to put a tag on him and ship him across like a trunk?”
“Of course not. He’d die.”
“Then I can’t see any way but going on as we are, at least for a while.”
Pain or frustration made him spread his hands before her with a tenseness that she saw as dangerous. He looked at her frowning, his voice shook. He was as worn out and frazzled as she was herself. “I’m sorry, Sue. That’s just the way it is.”
“I know. It’s Leadville. It’s what I chose.”
For a second they confronted each other like enemies. Then she made a contrite, inarticulate sound and grabbed his hand and held it against her cheek. “Don’t pay any attention to me. I wouldn’t think of abandoning him. It’s just–I watch Ollie getting pale and mopey and losing his funny little sense of humor, and I . . .”
“Yeah,” he said, and looked away, over her head. “If we could get the Argentina thing settled, or really hit it so Ferd and the others would give us the money to get into big production, we could work it out. I’ve got some cousins in Guilford, girls, eighteen or so. Maybe we could bring one of those out ”
“Where would we put her?”
“Yeah.”
“That mine is a prison for you!” she said. “Oliver, I admit it was a mistake! I take the blame, I made you decide wrong. Could you still get on the Survey?”
“I doubt it. That’s all changed, you know.”
“Changed how?”
“Powell’s not likely to need me. He’s hiring topographers and geologists where King hired mining men. King’s quit as director, did I tell you?”
So her fingers were hammered off that gunwale too. “He has? Why?”
It bothered her to see such scorn, disgust, and sour amusement in his face; his face was made for other expressions than those.
“To get rich as a mining expert,” he said.
“Oh my goodness!”
“Yeah,” Oliver said. “Doesn’t it kind of shake you?”
Then late in June there was an afternoon after a morning shower. The sky boiled with big clearing clouds. When the sun swam into a pool of blue it blazed down with midsummer warmth, and the earth steamed. Standing in the doorway smelling that freshness, soaking up the sun deep down to her moldy and softened bones, Susan said to the cabin behind her, “Ollie, Pricey, let’s all take a walk along the ditch and pick some wildflowers.”
In the strong light outside, Pricey looked more disfigured than in the dark house. His nose, which had once been lumpy and somehow