Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [208]
“Ah, yeah, I know,” Sally said. “Havin’ a baby.”
“Oh she is not!” He was furious. What did she know, with her raggedy hair and her face all dinted and her dirty feet? He hopped up and down. He said, “Hurry, Mrs. Olpen!”
The woman hauled off the top bar a saddle with one stirrup broken down to the iron, and skirts that were curled and dry. She heaved it onto the Roman nose and settled it by shaking the horn. “You git at that chicken,” she said to Sal. “Don’t leave it lay out in the sun. And don’t you pluck and draw it right by the door, where feathers and guts gits tracked around.”
Sal smiled a secret smile at Ollie, picked up the chicken, and held it up thoughtfully by the legs, watching its neck drip. Mrs. Olpen grunted, heaving at the latigo, and kicked old Roman nose briskly in the belly to make him quit holding his breath. She was so slow! The two boys had started to run up the river path. Ollie stood on the corral bar and remounted, so as to be above them when they arrived. His mother had never encouraged him to make friends with the Olpens. They were another tribe, potential enemies. But then from the mare’s back he saw the dust of a rig coming fast up the river road, and recognized the black and tan mules and the tall man on the seat.
“It’s all right!” he cried. “Never mind, Mrs. Olpen. Here’s my father! It’s all right now!”
In front of them all-leather-faced Mrs. Olpen, that girl with the bloody chicken in her hand, the panting boys dangling their dust-patched fish on a forked stick and bursting with questions-he started to cry. Blindly he yanked the mare around and kicked and lashed her out of the yard to meet the buggy.
His father had met John on the road; there was no need to tell him anything. He didn’t let Mrs. Olpen linger even to unsaddle the plow horse, but had her in the buggy almost before the wheels had stopped rolling. To Ollie, biting his lips and stretching the stiffness of tears off his cheeks, he said, “You want to ride with us, Ollie? We can lead your pony.”
Ollie shook his head. For a second his father studied him, unsmiling. Then he turned, said a word to Mrs. Olpen, and laid the whip to the mules. They burst off and left Ollie standing, so that he rode furiously after them, not only to catch up but to leave behind with the Olpens a vision of his reckless horsemanship.
It was raining in the mountains. Black clouds covered the peaks, and above those, white thunderheads with bright silver edges were piled high into a sky still blue. Lightning licked and flickered across the storm front, thunder rumbled like rockslides down the canyon. Just where the trail entered the canyon gateway Ollie turned his head and saw the broad sagebrush basin behind him still in dust-thickened sunlight. The canyon was a sudden coolness, his sweating skin shrank, his shirt was cold on his back. He wound his hand in the mare’s mane and hung on as she lunged and labored on a steep pitch.
Ahead of him the buggy’s wheels grated and ground on the rocks. His father looked back, but made no sign. Mrs. Olpen rode with her face aimed straight ahead out of the tunnel of a sunbonnet. Between their two heads Ollie could see the corner beyond which the canyon widened into their little flat where their corral and haystack were, and to whose right, across the swinging bridge, the stone house hardly more noticeable than a ledge of rock looked down on the river. He wondered if the mother he adored and thought himself unworthy of was still crying for pain.
The buggy rolled through the pasture gate, and Ollie slid off to fight the wire loop over the post. Running, dragging at the mare’s holding-back weight, he led her to the corral, where his father and Mrs. Olpen had already alighted. On the hill across the canyon Nellie Linton was waving a dishtowel, either in jubilation or in urgency, from the doorway.
“Take care of the horses, Ollie,” his father said. “I’ll be back for you.”
“Yes,