Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [157]
As if the expression on her face maddened him, he moved his shoulders and flattened his mouth. She stared at him through her tears. “If you’re going to ask why we didn’t take him to the mine with us,” he said, “we did. He remembered, he shook like a dog, he was scared to death. I tried taking him along when I had to ride anywhere, but he held me back. Frank tried setting him up in their shack with all the books he could borrow. You’d think that would be Pricey’s dish, but Frank would come home and find him gone, and then he’d have to hunt all over Leadville for him. Once he was in jail–where else would Leadville put a fellow that can’t look after himself? He kept wanting to come up here. I told him Ollie was sick and you were swamped and there wasn’t any room, he’d have to stay with Frank. Where do I find him–not once, three or four times? Hiding behind W.S.’s privy, just hanging around and looking down here like a mongrel dog waiting for scraps to be thrown out the door.” He brushed nothing off the tight thighs of his jeans. “Do you think I liked sending him home?”
“No. Of course not.” She could not help the weak tears that kept welling to her eyes. They broke through her lashes and ran down both cheeks and she did not wipe them away. “It’s just–he was so helpless. It’s like kittens being put in a bag to be taken to the river. How could he travel?”
“Frank took him as far as Denver and put him on the Santa Fe and paid the porter to look after him to New York. I wired the Syndicate to have somebody meet him and put him on the boat, and cabled his father to meet him at Southampton.”
“I wish you’d told me so I could at least have said good-bye.”
The fiery cold eye touched her, held a moment, looked out the window. “I didn’t think you needed anything else.”
“Oh, I know. You were being thoughtful. How did . . . When Frank left him in Denver, how was it? What did Pricey say?”
“He cried,” Oliver said.
He would not look at her, he stared stubbornly out the window. She let her own wet glance go the same way. Out there the dry hillside shimmered with tears and summer, the aspens flashed light off their incessant leaves, the grasshoppers whirred and arched. A mourning dove was who-whoing off in the timber. In the blinking of a tear it would be fall. She had missed the spring and half the summer, the home that they had bragged they would make at the edge of timberline was a disaster.
The dove’s long mournful throaty cooing was a dirge for the failed and disappointed, for the innocent and incompetent, themselves not excepted, who wandered out to this harsh place and were destroyed.
As if he had read her mind, Oliver said, “He never did belong. He never could have made it even if he hadn’t been hurt.”
“Just the same,” she said. “Just the same! If that Syndicate had any heart it would have done something for him. It didn’t, did it? Who paid his fare?”
“I did.”
“And will never get it back.”
“Do you care?”
“No. But I hate that heartless mine, all those people so many safe miles away who let people get hurt or killed and never care, so long as they get their dividends.”
“Which they’re not getting.”
“They’re too callous to deserve anything. Too timid and too callous. Why don’t we quit?”
A little laugh was jolted out of him. He looked first out the window and then into his hands, as if in search of something that would catch his eye. “Frank would feel terrible, for one thing. He’d stay here ten years without pay, and trade buckshot with those people every afternoon, just to beat them.”
“Are you talking about Frank or yourself?”
“All right,” he said. “I’m not exactly friendly with them. And I don’t like to lose.”
“You need a vacation, that’s what you need.”
“So do you.”
“So does Ollie. We all do. It hasn’t been good here, Oliver. Helen was right. Grass won’t grow, cats can’t live, chickens