Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [215]
Her eyes were fixed on the gray planks that hung wireless and unsupported between the two darknesses of cliff. The chill from the water pebbled her skin, the sound of the river was like sobbing. “Do you think you can?” she said. “I think I’d better help you.”
Oliver dropped his hand. She went on across, seeing nothing but the planks under her feet, feeling nothing but the uneasy shifting under her soles and the rope’s roughness in her hand. His weight twice lurched the bridge so that she had to pause and cling before going on. Falling off his mule! she thought. A rider as good as he is, falling off a mule!
All the way up the hill she did not look back. When she rested, his feet stopped behind her. When she went on, they followed. With vindicated vindictiveness she heard the unsteadiness of his steps.
Out of the shadow, into the light. She turned her head then and saw the moon float free from behind Arrow Rock. The whitened knoll rounded off around her. Her house, dug into the hill, would hardly have been visible without its lighted window, but cooktent and shack were braced with charcoal shadows and drifted with pale light.
When they came to the place where the path forked between house and shack, she heard Oliver say, “I guess maybe you’d like me to sleep in the shack.”
“That might be best.”
The promptness with which he turned down toward the shack made her want to scream after him. What are you upset about? Why should you act as if you’re angry with me? She felt as empty as the mountains. After eleven years, she wanted to say after him. After eleven years you finally prove to me that Augusta was right.
She found that she had followed him, unintending. They stood before the door of the shack. Oliver would not look at her, he stood obstinately silent. After a long wordless minute he opened the door. “Good night,” he said.
He went in, the door closed, she stood alone before the shack whose unpainted front in the moonlight was as white as the gable of a New England farmhouse. Above the door she saw the quotation from Confucius Oliver had nailed up there five years before. Its bottom half had split off, but the rest of it, faded by weather, was clearly readable in the midnight radiance.
I find no fault with the character of Yu.
He lives in a mean low house
6
About this time I need some Mister Bones to say to me, “Doesn’t this story have anything in it but hard luck and waiting? Isn’t the man ever going to get that ditch dug?” Then I can reply in summary fashion, and get by this dead time.
For I find that it bothers me to wait it out with them. I don’t want to follow Grandfather on his trips to the post office, where there is nothing but a letter for Grandmother from Augusta Hudson that rubs into his raw conscience the realization of his wife’s exile, or a check from Thomas Hudson that reminds him, with barbs, how he is supported. I don’t want to drift with him up to the territorial offices or the Coarse Gold. I don’t want to watch him accept drinks from men who offer them half out of personal liking and half out of alertness to evade what he may ask of them.
Neither do I want to take any of those long train rides to New York, where General Tompkins periodically got a fire going in some handful of damp financial shavings. I don’t want to watch them blow hopefully into one little smudge after another until it went out. I don’t want those depressed rides home, six days long, carrying each time a bigger accumulation of failure. No wonder he spent most of his time in the club car.
At home, after those episodes, he could go out and work off his disappointment helping John grub sagebrush out of the right of way. He was past believing that the skinned line around the corner of the hills would fool anyone into thinking that the canal was making progress; he was simply one who did his worrying with his muscles. I, having no muscles left, cannot share even that minimal relief. It makes me nervous and restless to imagine his condition, I think too much, I lie awake,