Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [218]
She shook her head, letting the tears run down. In the glass she saw his shoulders move with impatience.
“I suppose I’ll take this job,” he said. “What else can we do? We’re licked. But you can’t make me like it.”
“I can’t understand,” Susan said. “I try, but I can’t. Doesn’t it shame you to be . . . enslaved that way? Doesn’t it humiliate you to think that you can’t resist that temptation when someone like Frank, living out on the railroad with the roughest sort of men, never touches a drop? Why can’t you be like Frank?”
And that was the greatest mistake of all. “Because I’m not Frank,” Oliver said, staring at her reflected face. “Maybe you wish I was.”
In confusion and distress she broke off their reflected look, turned away. “No,” she said, away from him. “I just don’t see why you won’t promise.”
In his voice, to which she listened keenly, trying to hear in it all she had turned away from in his face, she heard no tenderness or compassion or love, nothing but the grate of resistance. “Don’t push me,” he said. “It won’t do any good to fog it all up with words. But I’ll tell you one thing. I’m not taking anything along. I won’t be Clarence King with a mule load of brandy. I won’t be Mrs. Briscoe, and lay in a supply.”
That was the best she got out of him. That was where they left it.
7
“If you’re still in need of an end man,” Shelly said yesterday when I came in from the garden just about five, “I’ve got all sorts of questions for Uncle Remus.”
She wasn’t exactly opportune. I was hot, exhausted, and hurting, and I needed no end man. That was a purely rhetorical need. Shelly’s interest bothers me, moreover, because it isn’t really interest in Grandmother. It is a sort of speculative interest in me, and some of it is mere boredom and desire to talk. Her husband has been after her again by telephone; probably she wonders why I haven’t asked about him. Or maybe she feels sorry for me, locked up in myself as she conceives me to be. She’s like an idle adult who is willing to squat down and help a child make a sand castle on a beach.
It’s a mistake to give her these tapes to type off, but I can’t seem to resist. I’ve worked by eye so long that I can’t believe in what is done by ear. I doubt that I’ve done anything until I can see a typescript.
“Questions such as what?” I said.
“Such as, Was she really thinking of leaving him, or are you guessing?”
“I’m extrapolating.”
“Ah,” she said, “right on the rug. Shame on you.”
I was really in no mood for one of her discussion periods. My wrists were stiff and sore, my stump jerked, I ached from footboard to neckrest. But as I turned my chair to go back down to the porch where Ada would bring me a drink and let me be quiet, Shelly said, “I know he was a juicehead when they lived here, so I guess she never did get him to take the pledge.”
“How did you know that?”
“Dad. He said your grandfather owned this underground placer up on the Yuba, and Dad’s father used to drive him up there every once in a while to inspect. They were cheating him blind, Dad says. They’d give him the sand and keep the gold.”
“He was easy to cheat. That was one of Grandmother’s exasperations.”
“But nice?” Shelly said. “Everybody respected him? Dad says the miners all thought he was the fairest man they ever worked for. He’d give anybody a second chance.”
“And a third,” I said. “Not a fourth. When he was abused beyond his toleration he could be implacable.”
“He didn’t sound