Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [212]
Some delay, somebody he had to wait a long time to see. Perhaps even some success. He had more than earned it. He had turned down four different offers, one in the governor’s office, to stick to his great scheme, and she had been loyal, had she not? She had supported him and encouraged him and believed in him and put up with what her support cost her.
As if cupping her hands to catch falling water, she extended her arms. She turned her face upward again to the moon.
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest
And on her silver cross soft amethyst
And on her hair a glory, like a saint . . .
Her image of herself held her breathless. She was aware of how she would look to someone-Oliver? No, he was not likely to notice. Frank? Perhaps. Augusta best of all. As she stood reaching for the soft fall of light she studied the ethereal pallor the moonlight gave her hands, and she thought, with Augusta’s mind, Unchanged. Still Susan.
The upper half of the path to the river was deceptive and without depth in the wash of moonlight; once she passed into the shadow cast by Arrow Rock the blackness stretched her eyes and put caution in her feet. Feeling her way, she made the loud gravel of the beach. The hollow hole, whenever her feet were still, plashed and guggled with river sounds; it was cool with river chill. By now her eyes had adjusted. She could make out the dividing line between opaque shingle and faintly shining water, with a flutter of white like a ruflle where it tumbled out of the narrows into the upper pool. From where she was, the shed and corral across the river were characterless, lost in a paleness without dimensions. When she tipped her head back and stared for a good while at the glowing sky and the light-paled stars, the luminousness changed her eyes again, so that when she looked back down she could not at first see her own body.
The lighted opposite bank lured her. Dared she cross the bridge in the dark, and be waiting at the corral when Oliver rode up? She walked to the bridgehead and stood in the dark there until things swam obscurely into visibility: pale planks, the blackness of the cliffs against the sky. From below, the river noise came up strongly, and a damp chill flowed around her feet. She could not see the water, only a darker, inverted sky down there, with nearly lost stars in it. For all her eyes could tell her, the bridge might lie on black bedrock glinting with mica, or it might span bottomless space opening under the bottom of the world.
Tentatively she moved out a yard or two, and stood. It seemed remarkably steady. The damp water-breath excited her. With one hand she lifted her skirts above her shoe tops, and with the other she laid hold of the rope’s weather-softened twist. Steadily, holding her breath but not hesitating, she walked the sway downward, then upward. Then she was on rock. Then she emerged from the cliff’s darkness into cool moonlight, and the river smell was replaced by the smells of dust, sage, horses, dry hay. Exhilarated, feeling no bigger than a doll, she crossed to the corral and went around it to the shed side. She spread her forearms on the top bar and put her chin on her stacked hands, a white figure flooded by the moon, rounded and highlighted against the rounding white poles, with her shadow stretched on a rack of fence-shadow behind her.
A trance was on her eyes, she saw up, down, ahead, and to both sides without moving head or eyeballs. Before her, reaching to her feet, was the pocked, silvered dust of the corral, across which the shadow of the opposite fence was drawn like a musical staff. High across the river her window glowed orange; straight ahead, and up, Arrow Rock jutted black beside the moon. All her right hand was a blackness of cliff.