Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [252]
Utterly cut off, sunk into the West, cut off behind arid hills, she lay thinking backward to another piazza and the smell of other roses. It was hard to believe that they no longer existed, not for her–the old house of her great-grandfather sold to a surly farmhand grown up, the vines of the porch now screening his evening relaxation, the kitchen “fixed up” by his vulgar and ambitious wife. No home there any longer, parents dead, Bessie wronged and ruined, herself adrift in the hopeless West, Thomas and Augusta farther from her in fame and associations even than they were in miles. To sit with them just one evening, an evening such as this! To sit with them even here, on this barren piazza! She acknowledged that all her preparations in this house had had them in mind. When it was ready, when they could be induced, she would offer herself to their love all over again, in her new setting, and prove to them that her years of exile had changed her not at all.
Noiseless as a flower opening, a rocket burst above the hills. She sat up, watching the white stars curve and fall. Then BOOM! All the night air between her and the town, two and a half miles of it, trembled with the delayed report.
Pshaw! she started to think They won’t be in time, the children will miss it, and then remembered that from out on the mesa they would be able to see the whole thing as if from a balcony. They would do better to stay out, rather than try to find a place among the crowds drunk on statehood and spread-eagle oratory and worse. The thought of that vulgar little city, and all its sharpers, trimmers, and hopeful naïfs seething with the importance of their moment in history, crawled on her skin like a spider. She heard herself saying to Oliver’s waiting, sober, questioning face, “You go, take Nellie and the children. It means nothing to me.”
What she had meant–and after what they had said to one another in the past two days he could hardly have misunderstood her–was “None of it means anything to me any more. I’m sick and disspirited and without hope. We have bled our lives away in this desert like that watercart draining into the sand.”
“You ought to come,” he had said. “It’ll take your mind off things.”
“I’m tired. I’d rather stay here.”
She could see in his eyes, in the tasting movement of his lips under the mustache, that he felt the blame she could not help laying on him. But she could not make herself smile, or lay a hand on his arm, or send him away with an injunction to enjoy himself.
There was a long, probing meeting of eyes. “No quarter,” he said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He let it go. “I’d stay here with you, but the children are counting on it, and there’s nobody else to take them.”
“You mustn’t think of not going.”
“I’m sorry.”
Sorry, of course. And what good did it do? He could not be sorrier than she.
Another rocket seared across the sky at an angle and bloomed with hanging green balls. Another went up through the green shower and burst into an umbrella of red. Then three together, all white. Then one that winked hotly but did not flower. BOOM! went the cushioning air. BOOM! BOOM BOOM BOOM! BOOM!
It was hot and close in the hammock. She left it and sat on the warm adobe of the balustrade. Above the town, streaks of smoke were lighted by the rocket bursts. Under the sodden booming she heard a continuous musketry of firecrackers, big and little. She could imagine the boys and drunken men who would be darting around through the crowds on the Capitol grounds throwing cannon crackers under the feet of tied horses and dressed-up girls, and into the buggies of the dignified. Pandemonium, a foolishness costing thousands of dollars. Before morning there would be runaways, clothes and buildings set on fire, fingers blown off, eyes put out. Her family were infinitely better off watching from the mesa.
And yet from a distance how beautiful!