Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [202]
“I wish you wouldn’t do things like that. He needs to study.”
“I suppose.” He squinted up at her, blind in the sun. “I thought it was pretty hot.”
“It isn’t half as hot inside as it is out there. Don’t you stay out working, you’ll get sunstroke.”
For answer he lifted the dripping hat off his head and clapped it back on. “How you feeling?”
“All right. But I don’t want Ollie going down to the river with nobody more sensible than Mrs. Briscoe. What if they should run into a snake?”
“I expect Ollie’d kill it.”
“Did you remind him not to go swimming or wading?”
“Oh come on,” he said. “He’s dependable. Old Briscoe wanted him along, I expect she’s nervous without somebody. They’re just down in the canyon where it’s cooler.” Across fifty yards of sun-blasted gravel he squinted up at her. “You want me to go get ’em?”
“Oh, no. Just don’t let him stay too long.”
“You want La Briscoe?”
“Oh, what for!” she said, and shut the window. Through the dusty pane she saw Oliver stand for a minute, looking up at the house. Then he went back to the windmill, spun up another splash of water, and soused his hat again.
Her skin tingled as if that coolness had touched her own warm face and neck. She thought enviously of how chill the river would be to wading feet, and how tendrils of cool air would wander along the river as erratic and constant as the sounds of flowing. The canyon narrows would be dark and cool. Could she, with Oliver’s help, get down the hill and back? No. Unwise. After months of the most finicky caution she would be insane to risk her baby within a week of its birth.
But she crossed the room, wanting a sight of the river, and drew the curtains and looked down the sun-whitened slope. Under her eyes lay their life, with its constriction, its improvisations, its beauty and its transience. From the narrows the river poured white and broken into the mineral green of the pool, which smoothed it within fifty feet. At the bottom of the pool the water visibly bulged, walling against the rockslide, and twisted right to find a way through. Narrowing, slick as glass, it went under the bridge and into the slot below Arrow Rock and out of sight. Like something alive, wild, and shy, it burst from shadow into sun and slid snakelike into shadow again, ignoring the intrusions they had made on it: the Parson pulled up on the shingle, and on the far bank, in the little round flat over there, shed and haystack surrounded by pole corral. Their path led from the corral across the bottom, disappeared behind a jut of cliff, and reappeared just at the far end of the bridge.
Of all Oliver’s engineering ingenuities she liked the bridge least. It had frightened her pale to watch them build it, suspended above a furious spring runoff. When the wind blew, as it always did morning and evening on days as hot as this, the spider-webby thing kinked and swayed underfoot. Even on calm days it gave way alarmingly to a foot placed on it, and the water shot underneath at a dizzying speed. The single rope handrail struck her as too frail a support when she had to cross alone, and she had forbidden the children to go near it without an adult. The fact that Oliver, and before they left, Frank and Wiley too, slammed across it without touching the rope, and wheeled supplies across it on the wheelbarrow, did not persuade her it was safe. It always stopped her heart to see Betsy carried across on Oliver’s shoulders. Two days before, it had taken all of Oliver’s strength and patience to push and pull and drag fat gasping Mrs. Briscoe across, every thirty seconds prying loose her death-grip on the rope.
As still as a curve in a drawing, the bridge hung from cliff to cliff. Its image, complete even to hand-rope, floated on the smooth water above the tongue of the rapid. To her tranced eyes it seemed to sweep downstream, and yet it remained where it was. Her eyes went up and down the beach. Ollie and Mrs. Briscoe must be up in the narrows. In exasperation she thought, I could be having it right now, how would she know? What good would she be? Stuffs herself