Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [153]
The moment the wish expressed itself, she felt that it was fulfilled. Between the morning’s rain and the bursting out of the sun, something had changed. Leaving Ollie and Pricey to play in the yard–that was how she thought of Pricey now, as a second and more difficult child–she put their flowers in glasses of water, and then she got out her drawing materials and stool, and idly, but with an extraordinary sense of well-being and release, sketched her little boy digging happily in the ground.
As if to add his testimony to the evidence of change, Pricey lugged a couple of pails of water from the ditch. He had hardly staggered the second one into the kitchen when she saw Oliver coming up the bank with his coat over his shoulder. She stood up, afraid. “Is something wrong?”
“Naw,” he said. “I just got fed up. I dumped the office on Frank and came home to loaf.”
For more than an hour he sat on the ground making Ollie a little threshing machine out of a spool, some shingle nails, and a cheese box. With this the two of them threshed out four or five tablespoonfuls of early weed seeds. They ate supper with the door wide open and the sun shining in, and afterward, when they were sitting on blankets against the warm west wall and watching the sun sink into a fat cloud with fiery edges, Frank came up from town carrying a mandolin. He said he had bought it from a broke miner for three dollars. The time of the singing of birds was come, he said, and as soon as he limbered up his fingers and rediscovered how to play the thing, the voice of the turtle was going to be heard in the land.
“Turtles can’t sing,” Ollie said. Languid after his afternoon in the sun, he leaned inside his father’s knees and picked at the broad gold wedding ring on the hand that loosely held him there. The sun in that one afternoon had turned him pink.
“Only snapping turtles,” Frank said. “Wait.”
His dark head bent over the mandolin while he tuned it, he seemed to Susan a dear friend, a brother, a handsome and carefree boy rather than an assistant engineer who stood off claim jumpers with a Winchester. The way his eyes touched her, the way he smiled, made her tender. Everything had in one day grown gentler and more endurable. Oliver, sitting against the log wall with Ollie between his knees, looked domestic enough to be drawn for Hearth and Home. Just beyond him, Pricey hugged his knees. He had that habit of edging as close as he could, and then making himself silent and invisible. Even the roofs of town, the torn-up hills and ugly shaft houses of Leadville, looked picturesque in that light, and the evening noise of the streets below was no more than a tremble on the air. The plink of Frank’s tuning was thinly musical, tunelessly incessant, like the fiddling of a cricket.
When he was ready, Frank plinked out a minstrel tune. He played well enough; Susan declared happily that he was a master. “Good enough for those turtles, maybe,” he said. “What’ll we sing? Name something, Ollie.”
But Ollie lay back against his father with his thumb in his mouth and had no ideas.
“Come on, Ollie,” Susan said. “Take that old thumb out of your mouth, that’s a good boy. What do you want to sing? What do you like?”
He still had no ideas. The thumb that his father had pulled out of his mouth slipped back in. “He’s tired,” Oliver said. “Want to hit the hammock, old boy?”
The answer was small, querulous, muffled by thumb, negative.
“Too much sun, perhaps,” Susan said. “He’d better go soon. But he has to hear the turtle first. Start something, Frank.”
Frank started “Sewanee River.” After a quavery bar or two he got his confidence and sang out. He had a good baritone voice; the mandolin shivered against it like a girl in white backed against a dark