Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [214]
“Oh my dear!” Susan said.
“Great God, what were you trying to do, get me killed?”
“Oh, when you fell I couldn’t help . . . Are you all right? Are you hurt?”
He stood up and beat the dust out of his pants until the moonlight was a palpable haze around him. “No,” he said in a voice thick with disgust. He went to the mule and picked up the trailing reins, wrapped them once around the corral bar, hooked the near stirrup up onto the horn, and fumbled for the latigo on the mule’s dark side. “What are you doing, still up? What’re you doing over here?”
“Just looking at the moon.” When she came and stood close behind him he went on loosening the cinch and did not turn his head. “I heard you singing. I knew something good must have happened. I was going to surprise you. I’m sorry, I should have known better than to jump out like that when you fell.”
“Ugh,” Oliver said. The cinch swung loose under the mule’s belly, the saddle went up on the rail.
“What did happen? They agreed, didn’t they–somebody did. You got some help.”
Now he turned, but not the whole way. His face was shadowed by his hat, he looked off down the canyon. “No,” he said. “They didn’t agree. Nothing happened. I got no help.”
“Oh, Oliver!”
“So far as they’re concerned, the canal’s dead. I’m a good fellow, they like me fine, but they’ve all been burned. They wanted to sell me some stock.”
He sounded like a boy from whom something has been expected, and who has disappointed himself and everybody else. She moved to put her hand on him in comfort, but he turned away and pulled the headstall over the mule’s bending ears. His hand spatted haunch, he walked around Susan as if she had a diameter of ten feet and took the bridle into the shed and brought out the oat can. She heard the disgusted breath whistle through his teeth as he bent to pour the oats on the ground.
“But you were singing so happily!” she said, and now she did come close and lay a hand on his arm. She stopped short, she leaned fiercely to see his face. “You’ve been drinking!”
For the first time, he faced her; she realized that until now he had been trying to breathe around or past her. Their look was long. She saw that he was uncertain, unable to think of anything to say. “Yeah,” he said finally, and turned and reached to set the oat pail upside down on a post. He missed, the pail fell clattering, he stooped and got it and crammed it hard on the post’s top with both hands.
“You’re drunk,” she said. “You can barely stand up. Oh, how could you!”
He stood before her and said nothing.
“To come home like a common drunkard!”
He stood there. He did not reply.
“Are you even sorry? Are you ashamed?”
He stood there.
“Are you even going to explain?”
Her maneuvering had brought her around so that in facing her he had to look into the light. His face was stubborn and hangdog. “Sorry?” he said. “Sure I’m sorry. But what is there to explain? We talked a long time, got nowhere. I had a few too many.”
“Where were you? Where did you do this talking?”
“The back room of the Coarse Gold.”
“That saloon!”
“I guess you’d call it that.”
She put her fingers to her eyes and pinched out the sight of his stubborn face. When she took her hands away, his shape weaved and staggered in her sight. His tongue was thick, he couldn’t even speak clearly, after a ten-mile ride home. What must he have been when he left Boise?
“I’m ashamed, if you’re not,” she said. “We’ll get nowhere trying to talk when you’re in this condition. I’m going up to bed.”
Going up the path she felt that she was crying silently inside, drowning in desolate unshed tears. Behind her his feet stumbled, and she hated his clumsiness.
At the bridge he caught up with her and took her arm; she stopped without turning. “Wait,” he