Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [272]
And that would have confirmed everything that Oliver Ward thought he knew. As surely as that slug went through Frank Sargent’s head, it went through Susan and Oliver and Ollie Ward.
There is also that business of the rose garden.
Once a long time ago, forty years–oh, more, more than forty-five–I was helping my grandfather in the rose garden here at Zodiac Cottage. He paid me a dollar or two a week to help him, more for the company, I think, than for any actual work I did. I brought peat moss or manure in the wheelbarrow when he wanted them, and wheeled potted cuttings into the greenhouse and set them up on tables, carefully labeled, when he was through slipping or grafting them. Mostly I sat around and watched his big, clumsy-looking, clever hands work with those frail shoots and frailer grafts. He rarely said more than ten words an hour. Sometimes he sat down by me and smoked a pipe and played me a game of mumbly-peg on the lawn.
I remember this special afternoon because of my Aunt Betsy, by then married and living in Massachusetts, who was in Grass Valley for a month’s visit. She was a nice woman, gentle, rather sallow, anxious about small things. She came walking alone through the yard from the orchard, strolling in and out of the shade on a bright afternoon–June, probably, since all the roses were loaded with blooms. She strolled along the cross path to the greenhouse, stooping to sniff, snapping off a blossom, walking with it under her nose, her eyes searching and abstract.
“Having fun?” she asked when she reached us.
Grandfather looked at her over the tops of his glasses, wiped a big hand across his face, smiled, and said nothing. His fingers pressed and tamped soil and moss around a little plant, he set it aside and picked up another pot.
“The roses are simply gorgeous,” Aunt Betsy said. “So many kinds, and all out at once.”
“Mmm,” Grandfather said around his pipe.
“You’ve been working on them. They weren’t like this when I lived here.”
“No. I suppose not.”
“You’ve got a real knack.”
He straightened, smiled, laid his pipe aside, took out his pocket knife, and honed it on a little stone he kept lying on the bench. Aunt Betsy sprawled in a broken-backed lawn chair made of wooden slats, and sniffed her rosebud, a talisman, one of the sweetest smelling kind. “Daddy,” she said.
Grandfather answered only with his eyebrows, holding them up in a welcoming sort of way, testing the knife’s edge against his thumb.
“You remember the rose garden on the Mesa.”
Now his old eyes were on her, the whites faded and a little coffee-colored, the blue bright and watery. He said nothing, he only waited.
“You pulled it up,” Betsy said. “One after the other. I saw you.”
Pleasantly inquiring, his eyes rested on her. She seemed upset by his silence. Her eyes came up and fell again, her face reddened. “Why?” she said. “It was years ago, but I’ve never forgotten it. I couldn’t imagine why you’d do it. I loved those roses, they were so opulent in that desert-y place. I never got over wondering why you did it.”
Grandfather squinted across the bench at her. His heavy face was without any particular expression, the wrinkles fanned out from the corners of his eyes. In the V of his open shirt I could see the softened flaps of his neck.
Absently he clicked his knife shut and put it in his pocket. His heavy body squeezed past the end of the bench and came around into the path past where she sat with her legs stretched out and her face flushed and her eyes searching his face for some sort of answer. He had his pipe in one hand. Now he put it in his mouth, reached a hand to touch her shoulder briefly, and went heavily on past her, out through the orchard toward the back lot, shambling along aimlessly as if he had forgotten where he was