Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [196]
It was a scene of the most fascinating activity-Oliver and Frank and John wheeling and hauling, Wiley mixing cement, Wan puddling, all of us throwing in such rocks as we could lift, even little toddler Betsy contributing her pebbles. Ollie had a heavenly time and worked like a stevedore, “proving” himself to the men. He is like his father in that. I tried to draw all this, but could not find a focus. It was like trying to draw a colony of ants.
While the walls “cured,” the men hauled lumber, windows, etc., from town, and also scooped out the whole interior down to the base of the walls, using John’s scraper when they could, and picks and shovels when they had to. Then they built a great central chimney with four flues, and fireplaces on all four sides, and laid on a low-browed roof, and installed windows, and built a door out of planks like the door on our Leadville cabin, with a buckskin thong for a latchstring which we have sworn will never be pulled in. Oh, for the day when you and Augusta pull that thong! It is a low door, at which both Oliver and Frank must stoop. They say it teaches them humility.
By frantic effort, we were able to move in for Christmas Eve, and oh, the snugness, despite the unfinished nature of everything, and what a chimney for the children to hang their stockings by! Our great window looks out at ground level into trampled snow, but inside it is snug as a bear’s den. The windowsills are deep, as I love them-even near the top our walls are two feet thick. The woodwork is unpainted, the walls are the natural warm tan of the cement. The chimney spreads its warmth in every direction, and even the three small bedrooms all along one side benefit from it. Nellie’s is at one end, ours at the other; the children’s, with a fireplace of its own, in between. The chimney partly divides the long narrow main room so that we can separate if we wish, I to work, the men to study or read, Nellie to teach the children. Or we can gather together in commons. We have no kitchen-that has been left in the tent.
In summer, the men assure me, we shall be as cool as in winter we are warm. You never saw such a trio. They work hard and long and enjoy it all. They cackle like geese over every completed job and solved problem. Their ingenuity is now exercising itself in creating a multitude of little cupboards and storage nooks and seats, and in the rehabilitation of the shack as winter quarters for Frank, Mr. Wiley, and Wan. The shack’s loft is already designated the drafting room.
The shut-in time of winter does not dismay us. The engineers have laid in books, reports, journals, and much else. Oliver has in mind a couple of little inventions and has already started on an automatic waste-weir that he calls the “flop-gate.” And thanks to you and Augusta there is that whole Christmas box of books-in our canyon, such riches! They are already going from hand to hand through our little community of saints. Moreover, Nellie, who is constantly astonishing me with the way she adapts herself to our crude border life, turns out to have studied bookbinding under her father, and to have brought her presses, stamps, and other tools along. She has offered to teach us all, and Frank and Mr. Wiley have already set up her machinery in the drafting room. Oliver understands tanning–the children still use between their beds a rug of wildcat skins that he tanned and sewed in New Almaden–and with plenty of cattle and sheep hides available for a song, he promises that our entire library will be in leather