Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [154]
“Aren’t we good!” Susan cried. “We sounded absolutely professional. We could hire out in bar rooms or give concerts at the Great Western. Pricey, you’re wonderful! I didn’t know you could sing. You too, Frank. You’ve got a very nice voice. You’re so true.”
Friendly and full of laughter, their eyes touched. She saw that he wanted to take her remark in more ways than she had meant it. Why not? He was true. Neither she nor Oliver could have done without him. But there was even more in his brief, laughing look, and she acknowledged that too. His adoration made her feel excited and flirtatious, the way she was often made to feel by agreeable company and dress-up clothes. She could feel her color come up.
“More!” she said. “What do you know the words to, Pricey? Hymns? ‘Abide with Me? ‘Ein Feste Burg’? Turn Ye to Me’? ‘Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes’? Let’s sing them all, let’s sing all night!”
They filled the dooryard with harmonies while the sun set and the west died out and the bats began to stitch through the darkening air. It was like an hour of thanksgiving for their emergence from trouble. And there sat Pricey, singing away with never a stammer, knowing the words to everything, even songs that she had thought of as strictly American. The day had brought him out like a flower. Surely, now, they were past their bad time. Above the Western range Venus was large, white, and steady.
“Sing, Ollie,” she said. “You know some of these songs. Sing ’em out. Or are you still sucking that old thumb?”
“He’s a little cold, I guess,” Oliver said. “He’s shivering.”
“Why didn’t you get him a blanket?”
“And interrupt a song?” He laughed and bent over the top of Ollie’s head to look at him. “You cold, boy? Want a blanket, or are you ready for bed?” Ollie made no answer. “Hey,” his father said, “you are shivering. It’s not that cold.”
Tense with premonition, Susan was on her knees. “Maybe he got too much sun, he looked quite pink.”
“I think he’s playing jokes. Come on, Old Timer, you don’t have to shake as if it was thirty below.”
He lifted the boy to his feet and turned him around, peering at him in the dusk. He shuddered and shook in his father’s hands, his teeth clacked. Even before Susan could scramble across to feel his cold face, before she got him inside and lighted the lamp and saw his fingers fish-white, his nails blue, she knew. The ague fit, the return of the old Milton curse. In a few hours he would be burning with fever, in another few soaked with sweat. It would go on that way for weeks, ague fit, fever fit, sweating fit, a few days of delusive well-being, and again the ague fit, the whole cycle, every cycle leaving either the disease or the patient weaker, until one or the other wore out. And nobody to take him to in Leadville except the drunken doctor from whom she had rescued Pricey.
10
I can remember from my childhood how uneasy Grandmother could make a sickroom. “Let the child alone,” Grandfather would growl at her. “Let him sleep it off.” That was his way–turn his face to the wall and turn down his metabolism until something inside told him he was well enough to get up. But Grandmother treated illness the way she treated her insomnia. She could never simply lie still until she fell asleep. There was always some last-minute adjustment, some final arrangement for relaxation–a glass of water, a little bicarbonate to settle her stomach, a fresh pillowcase, a pulling-down of the blinds to shut out a crack of light, the checking of the front door lock or the drafts of the stove. By the time she got fully ready to sleep it was time