Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [263]
“I doubt that. But he seems to have convinced you.”
“I don’t know. He’s got me all up in the air.”
I had myself turned askance, as usual, and my eyes fell onto the pile of papers I’d brought down when I came to lunch. One was a letter from Rudyard Kipling, another a letter from Kipling’s father. I couldn’t see the dates, but I knew they were both from July 1890. Right in that time of disintegration and collapse Grandmother had finished the illustrations for something of Kipling’s, and had those warm letters of thanks. How many lines an alert life has its hands on at once, even in exile! Grandmother sat like a spider with her web all around her, spun out of her insides. Probably she read those Kipling letters hastily, with a brief pleasurable surprise, while the rest of her attention went out on trembling threads to the Big Ditch, or Frank Sargent, or Agnes, or Oliver, or Ollie in his far-off school, or Bessie, or Augusta, or the odious Burns. I had left her in a disturbed state of mind, and I wanted to get back, the old werewolf craved cool historical flesh to live in and refrigerated troubles to deal with. I felt a certain irritation at Shelly Rasmussen, very brown from lying in her family’s back yard, sitting in Grandmother’s old wicker chair and littering my porch with her foolish young life. I thought it would serve her right to go to that nut-farm and become a den mother, head of a matrilineal line in a natural-credit Communist economy.
“I gather you’ve patched things up,” I said.
She shrugged, a gesture at once loose and irritable. “Maybe. If I could be sure he’d stay the way he is now. He’s a lot better off when he’s got something to be enthusiastic about. Then he doesn’t sit around and think up ways to take your skin off.”
“Have you been seeing him?”
“Couple times.”
“Been up to San Juan?”
“I was up this last weekend.”
“And you like it.”
Her gray eyes met mine, she closed them deliberately, puckered up her rosebud mouth. “Oh, you know me. I’m soft headed, I ignore history and human nature. But it was sort of nice, you know? I mean–pine woods and a clearing. Off from everything. Part of it’s just a gravel pile, they worked all that country with monitors. But there are some old mine buildings they’re fixing up. Eight people so far, two kids. Later, as more come in, they’ll build geodesic domes. What’s the matter?”
I had only made the sign of the cross. How many times lately has the future perfect been framed in geodesic domes?
“They’ve got chickens that roost in the trees and lay eggs under the porch,” Shelly said. “None of this scientific egg culture that never lets a hen set foot to ground in her whole life. It’s obscene, the way they keep them on chicken wire. They got there too late to plant a garden, but they’re putting in berry bushes, and they’re going to plow a patch for winter wheat. They’ll grind their own wheat and corn. Can you see me with a metate between my knees?”
She laughed her hoarse laugh, rocking back and forth. Ohne Büstenhalter. Her breasts were very live under her thin pullover, her erect nipples made dents and dimples, appeared and disappeared again as flesh met cloth. Every now and then, in her careless unconscious (is it?) way, she makes me aware that I am only fifty-eight years old, not as old as I look, not old enough to have lost everything else when I lost my leg. I felt a hot erection rising from my mutilated lap, and fumbled my sweater over myself, though it was not cool on the porch. Maybe she noticed, maybe she understood. She stretched in her wicker chair and reached her arms over her head, yawning, with her eyes shut. The other eyes looked at me boldly from her expanded chest.
Her arms fell, she flopped back. “I don’t know,” she said almost crossly. “You’re skeptical. But it was sort of good–no poisons, no chemicals, no gadgets. Healthy, sort of. Fun. All the time I was up there I kept thinking it was the way