Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [176]
He pulled loose the handkerchief knotted around his throat. He concentrated on the bootjack until the second boot slid off. In her bare feet Susan went quietly around the room. She touched with her fingertips the cool carved wood of the footboard, the embossed leather of the chest, the tipped edges of the shutters, the mantel’s cold stone. “I wonder,” she said.
She turned and saw him sitting on the bed, still feeling criticized. And he would not bend, that was what made her so resentful. He would not defend himself or justify himself. When she questioned him, wanting to be on his side, wanting to help work out a future for them both, he acted as if she were accusing him of deliberately, out of some stupid notion of honesty, throwing away their chance. His honesty was not stupid, that was not what she meant at all. Only . . .
“Is it fate?” she said, more bitterly than she intended. “Is it just bad luck? What is it? Why are you always having to take a stand that hurts us or loses you your job? Doesn’t honesty ever get rewarded?”
Her tone, she recognized, was the intimate tone that would normally have brought the Quaker “thee” to her tongue. Yet she called him “you.” Perhaps he noticed, perhaps he didn’t.
He shrugged, sitting there in his undershirt and stockinged feet (and I in my shift, she thought. Like a pair of quarreling shopkeepers).
“I have to do what I have to do,” he said.
She stood at the mantel, and after a moment she said, “Yes. And all of us have to take the consequences.”
Now she touched him. His head came up, his stare was full of disbelief and resentment. He heard, registered, acknowledged, what had come out of her mouth, but he would not answer. She would have liked to be comforted for hurting him, but he would not bend, and they spent the evening in bruised silence, one-word questions, monosyllabic answers.
It did not occur to her, apparently, though it occurs to me, that he was more frustrated and sore than she was, and mainly for her sake. She thought he was unfeeling.
6
The Casa Walkenhorst had overnight become a different place. The air was full of tension, Don Gustavo’s looks were full of barely controlled dislike, as if, in coming to an unfavorable conclusion about the mine, Oliver had abused his hospitality. From the corredor, Susan witnessed a little episode in the courtyard in which Don Gustavo lashed the gate mozo across the back with his quirt. Emelita, every time Susan tried to talk with her, escaped with timid, hurried smiles that begged understanding. Time they were gone, taking with them their private breakage.
With Don Pedro there was no such chill; he was a grandee to the end. Just before they were to leave, he sent over for the use of Señora Ward one of his personal horses, a rosillo, a strawberry roan with a light mane and tail, which he hoped she would find easier-gaited than any of the broncos they might hire.
Not to be outdone in courtesy, Susan sent back the sketch she had made of the Señora Gutierrez y Salarzano at the head of her splendid stairway. It was one of her best, one she had counted on transferring to a block for the Century, but she did not hesitate. If Don Gustavo had made any friendly gesture, she would have felt obligated by her dislike to respond threefold. She atoned for accepting his hospitality by giving Emelita drawings of herself, of Enriqueta, of the poodle Enrique, and of the parrot Pajarito.
The evening before they were to leave they went early to their room, where Oliver worked at his field notes and his geological map that corrected the map of Kreps; Susan got out their bags for packing, and dumped them onto the bed. At the bottom of one carpetbag were her Colorado riding clothes, never used since she had packed them in Leadville. As she shook them out, there rose out of their wrinkles the smells of horse and woodsmoke, the styptic odors of spruce and bitter cottonwood, the witch hazel smell of willows. She stood holding the divided skirt to her nose, caught by recollection as strong as pain.
Her best rides were in that complex smell