Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [152]
“Go ahead, look around,” she said. “See how many kinds we can find.”
Tipped head, questioning look half timid and half trusting. He went a little way out from the path, he stooped seriously and picked something, looked back at her and held it up. His mouth opened in a smile that was infantile and pathetic. “Good,” she said. “Get some more. Get a lot. We’ll have whole glasses full on the table for supper.”
Ollie brought her a sweaty little handful, mainly without stems, and went for more. Pricey worked away earnestly, going farther away from her than he had done since he was hurt. Eventually he came back with a fat bouquet. There was so much trust in his battered face, and so much eagerness to be praised, that she was effusive in her admiration, and hugged him as she would have hugged a good child. Whatever they had done to him, they had not beaten out of him that shy desire to please. She accepted his fistful of wildflowers as an offering in payment for two wretched months.
He stood at her shoulder, peeking, while she examined the varieties. Paintbrush, yes, and the pink ones are primroses. The blue one is a pentstemon, those are nice, and the white one a columbine, lovely. The creamy one with the five petals is some kind of cinquefoil, I knew something very like it back home in New York. But this little yellow one with the gray leaves, that’s something new.”
“Puc-puc-puccoon!” Pricey said. “Lithospermum multiflorum:”
“What?” She stared at him, jolted into laughter that was half hysterical. “How did you know that?”
Pricey was confused. He stammered and shrugged, searching her face as if the answer might be there.
“Never mind,” she said, and patted his arm. “Pricey, you’re getting well, do you know that? That’s wonderful that you remembered.”
A cold shadow fled along the slope faster than a horse could run, the sky winked like a great eye, winked again and flooded them with renewed warmth. Beside them the crystalline ditch rushed to run the mills and gather the rubbish of Leadville. Beyond the piled whiteness of the clouds the sky was so hurtfully blue that she could not help saying, “Pricey, remember that day last summer when we were riding on the Lake Fork? ‘How tenderly the haughty day fills his blue urn with fire’?”
“Hawwww!” Doubtful, filled with dismayed uncertainty, narrowing his eyes to think, he stared at her out of sandy-lashed pale blue eyes. His tongue was between his lips, the lips moved in and out, puckered and rubbery. In pity she tapped his arm again, releasing him, and put his bouquet to her nose and inhaled its faint wild fragrance. But she felt better about him. For a moment there, when that fragment of a Linnaean botany book had burst out of him, the dimmed mind had brightened. She gathered her two charges, one on each side, and walked again, thinking.
If Pricey got well he could go back to live with Frank–just come over evenings and tuck into his corner and read or listen. Now and then she and Oliver would be free to dine at the Clarendon; it seemed the height of gaiety. Now that Leadville’s summer had finally arrived, there would be more ladies–they might have a picnic at Twin Lakes for the Fourth. She could ride again, assuming that Oliver or Frank would dare leave the mine to go with her–most surely they would not let her go alone. She might sleep again, instead of going around wound up ready to snap, or prowling the dark cabin in her dressing gown from Ollie’s hammock to Pricey’s cot, or staring out the window into barren starlight. Maybe, maybe. Maybe the Adelaide would finally hit that rich carbonate that Oliver was sure was there, and the skinflint owners in New York would give him some support (how wry that