Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [210]
The look they exchanged was like a promise. “Yes, sir.”
His father motioned him onto the bridge, stepped out of the way to let him by, let him get twenty feet out onto the planks before he himself started. He stayed that distance behind, all the way across the bridge.
The doctor came just before sunset. Ollie and his father, closed out of the house, had played three games of horseshoes and then been driven inside by a flurry of rain. But the flurry had come to nothing. Out the door Ollie could see that the yard’s dust was pocked with the dried craters of single drops, though lightning still flared on the sky. Above the sound of Nellie Linton’s voice reading to Betsy up in the drafting room he heard nearly continuous thunder.
His father knocked out his pipe impatiently against the doorjamb. “Quite an evening to be born.” They stood together in the south-facing door and looked out over the canyon and the falling mountains to where the sky over the valley was rosy in the last reflected light. Above the rosy haze of valley dust the sky over there was still blue.
The doorway beside him emptied, his father’s quick steps took him along the front of the shack as if he had suddenly remembered something he should have done long ago. But at the corner he stopped. “Good Lord,” he said. “Look at that.”
Ollie went to the corner. In the northwest the sun had broken around the lower slope of Midsummer Mountain and was sending a last long wink across the Sawtooths, straight into the black mass of rain cloud. Clear across the stone house, bridging from mountains to river bluffs, curved two rainbows, one above the other, even the upper one as bright as colored glass, sharp-edged, perfect from horizon to horizon.
“By George, your mother ought to see that. It’s an omen, no less.”
They ran up past the cooktent with the wetted dust adhering to their shoes. Ollie’s father knocked, listened, opened the door. Ollie, behind him, saw past him to the closed door of the bedroom. He waited while his father crossed the room and tapped with his fingernails.
“Sue? Sue, if you’re able, look outside. There’s an absolute sign, the most perfect double rainbow you ever saw.”
The door opened, the doctor stood in it, wide, shirt-sleeved, his hands held fingers-upward in the air. Every lamp in the house seemed to have been lighted behind him; his shadow fell clear to the front door. Ollie’s horrified eyes made out that the stiffly upheld hands were enameled with blood.
“Your wife isn’t interested in rainbows,” the doctor said. “You’ve got a daughter three minutes old.”
5
Let two years pass-and they literally pass, like birds flying by someone sitting at a window. Seven hundred and thirty risings of the sun, seven hundred and thirty settings. Twenty-four waxings and wanings of the moon. For the woman, six short stories, one three-part serial, fifty-eight drawings. For the man, an automatic waste weir and a box for measuring the flow of water in miner’s inches-both described in technical journals, neither patented. For both of them, for all of them, three times of rising hope and three times of disappointment, the latest of each attributable to Henry Villard’s abortive move to expand his empire.
And now midsummer again, 1887.
In that latitude the midsummer days were long, midsummer nights only a short darkness between the long twilight that postponed the stars and the green dawn clarity that sponged them up. All across the top of the world the sun dragged its feet, but as soon as it was hidden behind Midsummer Mountain it raced like a child in a game to surprise you in the east before you were quite aware it was gone from the west. One summer week out of four, when the moon was nearing or at or just past the full, there was hardly anything that could be called night at all.
Whatever it was called, she was alone in it. Oliver was in town, trying to rescue something out of the Villard debacle, raise a little money by borrowing on the sale of some of his own stock. He thought that if prospective backers could only