Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [45]
Oliver, sitting with his hands braced on his knees, looked altogether too vigorous and untired. He had evidently been keeping silent for her sake, not because he himself felt this jolting, dust-choked, endless ride a hardship. “Are you disappointed?” he said.
“If there are trees maybe there’s a stream. Is there?”
“Not up at our place.”
“Where do we get our water?”
“Why, the housewife carries it from the spring,” he said. “It’s only a half mile up the hill. Things are not as uncivilized out here as you think.”
Lizzie’s face, bent over the finally sleeping baby, showed the faintest shadow of a smile. It was not well advised of Oliver to make jokes before her. She was a jewel, tidy, competent, and thoughtful, but she should not be spoiled with familiarity. Susan watched the trees pass, dusty but authentic.
The stage leveled off into what seemed a plain or valley. She leaned to see. Ahead of them, abrupt as the precipices up which little figures toil in Chinese paintings, she saw a wild wooded mountainside that crested at a long ridge spiky with conifers. She pulled the curtains wide. “But my goodness!” she cried. “You called them hills!”
He laughed at her, as pleased as if he had made them by hand. “You permiscus old consort,” she said, “you deceived me. Don’t tell me anything. I’m going to watch and draw my own conclusions.”
The road became a street, and no dust rose around their wheels: she saw that it had been sprinkled. On one side of them was a stream nearly lost among trees and bushes, on the other a row of ugly identical cottages, each with a patch of lawn like a shirtfront and a row of red geraniums like a necktie. At the end of the street, below the wide veranda of a white house, a Mexican was watering flowers with a garden hose. She saw water gleam from the roadside ditch, smelled wet grass. The oaks had been pruned so that they went up high, like maples in a New England village. Their shade lay across road and lawn.
“This must be the Hacienda,” she said.
“Draw your own conclusions.”
“I conclude it is. It’s nice.”
“Would you rather we were going to live down here?”
She thought that cool grass the most delicious thing she had ever seen or smelled, but she appraised his tone and said cautiously, “I haven’t seen our place yet.”
“No. But this looks good to you, does it?”
She considered, or pretended to. “It’s lovely and cool, but it looks as if it were trying to be something it isn’t. It’s a little too proper to be picturesque, isn’t it?”
Oliver took her hand and shook it. “Good girl. And too close to too many people.”
“Why? Aren’t the manager and the others nice?”
“They’re all right. I guess I prefer the Cousin Jacks and Mexicans up at the camps.”
They were going right through the Hacienda at a trot. Some children scattered, turning to stare. A woman looked out a door. “Aren’t we stopping here?” she asked.
“I slipped Eugene a little extra to deliver you right to your gate.”
“Ah,” she said, “that’ll be nicer,” and leaned to the window to see as the stage tilted through dry oaks along a trail dug out of the hillside. But her mind worried a question. He thought of making her arrival as pleasant as possible, and as easy for her, and he didn’t hesitate to spend money to do it, but he hadn’t thought to send her the fare to cross the continent—not only Lizzie’s fare, which he might have forgotten, but her own, which he shouldn’t have. Not the least unknown part of her unknown new life was the man beside her. From the time she had bought the tickets out of her savings she had not been entirely free of fear.
Grandmother, I feel like telling her, have a little confidence in the man you married. You’re safer than you think.
The road climbed, kinked back on itself and started a sweeping curve around a nearly bare hill. Ahead she saw five parallel spurs of mountain, as alike as the ridges of a plowed field but huge and impetuous, plunging down into the canyon. The first was very dark, the next less dark, the third hazed, the fourth dim, the fifth almost gone. All day there