Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [249]
Nevertheless, as I reconstruct her there, there was in her figure some quality of tension, a certain stiffness suggesting strain or anxiety too pervasive to be forgotten even in the absorption of work. She sat frowning down on her drawing, which reproduced in small space the things that filled her eye–the girls in the curve of hammock, the heavy pillars, the misty desert suggested beyond. Across the bottom of the sheet, as if to keep herself reminded of her subject, she had scrawled in a hurried, untidy hand, A Hot Day on a Western Ranche.
Her head turned slightly, she listened. Sounds of a trotting horse. She laid her pencil on the pad and the pad on the table, and stood up. “All right, children. That’s enough for this morning. Thank you for being good.”
But they looked up, her two very different daughters, with identical looks of protest on their faces and an identical question in their mouths. “Can’t we finish it?”
“So sad a story?”
“Yes, Mother!”
“Ollie’s been at his lessons for an hour. Nellie will be wondering what’s happened to you.”
“Just this chapter!”
“All right. Then off you go.”
Boots came in from the back, loud on the tile floors, then soundless on a rug, then loud again. She turned, her face full of an intense question, to confront Oliver coming across the dining room. His face was weathered, rugged, and hot. He had pushed back his rancher’s hat on his head, above the red line that circled his forehead. His mustache hid his mouth, the squint wrinkles fanning out from the corners of his eyes gave him a look of smiling, but the look he sent ahead of him through the doorway was not a smiling one. The light treble of Betsy’s reading voice went on as the two of them looked at each other. He moved his mouth and lifted his shoulders.
“Ah!” she said–a harsh, angry exclamation. “He won’t.”
Again the delicate lift of the shoulders.
Behind her she heard Betsy’s voice round off to a theatrical conclusion. The book clapped shut. She turned. “Now off to your lessons.”
Betsy rose, but Agnes lolled and hung in the hammock. “Do we have to now? Can’t I go down to the windmill and see Hallie?”
“And miss your lessons?”
“Just for a minute?”
“No, it’s too hot,” Susan said. “Anyway, the last time you went down to the windmill you had to have your mouth washed out.”
“I won’t listen!”
“Come on, you little whortleberry,” her father said. “You go tell Nellie she wants you. Tomorrow you can ask Hallie up for the fireworks. I brought back a whole saddlebag full.”
“Goodie!” Betsy said. “Can I shoot off a rocket?”
“Maybe. Depending on how good you are all day.”
“Oh, I’ll be very good,” Betsy said. “I’ll be the best. Can I shoot off more than one?”
“You wouldn’t want to be a pig.”
“Yes I would.”
She hung onto his hand and swung by it. “Not you,” he said. “There’s less pig in you than in anybody around. Now how about those lessons?”
She swung a last swing all around him and ran out, but she had barely let go before Agnes had wrapped herself around his leg and put her two feet on his boot. He carried her around a few steps that way. Her upturned face was a baby replica of the strained face of her mother. “I’m not a whortleberry,” she said.
“Well it’s news to me. How would anybody know? You look like a whortleberry.”
“I look like a girl!”
“You look like a blue-eyed whortleberry to me. Or a whortle-eyed blueberry?”
He lifted her, kissed her, set her down, turned her three times, and spanked her off toward Nellie’s schoolroom, but she swerved, looking provocatively over her shoulder, and began hopping on one foot from tile to tile down the piazza. At each post she put out her flat hand and touched the side face, the inside face, then the other side face. Along the balustrade she patted the adobe every third hop. She did not put her left foot to the ground, but turned the end in three quick hops, three pats, and came back hopping, still with her left foot withered upward, carefully patting wall, window sill, doorframe, and made it back to him and patted his hip, home free, and fell around his leg again. She tried to