Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [46]
At the turn a battered liveoak leaned on limbs that touched the ground on three sides. To its trunk were nailed many boxes, each with a name painted or chalked on it: Trengove, Fall, Tregoning, Tyrrell. Across a gulch on the left she saw roofs and heard the yelling of children.
“Cornish Camp?”
“Draw your own conclusions.”
“What are the boxes? Is there a newspaper?”
“Oh Eastern effeteness,” Oliver said. “Those are meat boxes. Every morning the meat wagon comes by and leaves Tregoning his leg of mutton and Trengove his soup bone and Mother Fall her pot roast. Tomorrow, if you want, I’ll put up a box for Mother Ward.”
“I don’t think I should like everyone to know what I feed you,” Susan said. “Doesn’t anybody ever steal things?”
“Steals? This isn’t the Hacienda.”
“You don’t like the Hacienda, do you?” she said. “Why not?”
He grunted.
“Well, I must say it’s prettier than this.”
“There I can’t argue with you,” he said. “It smells better, too.”
The whole place had the air of having been dumped down the hillside-steep streets, houses at every angle white and incongruous or unpainted and shabby. Wash hung everywhere, the vacant lots were littered with cans and trash, dogs prowled and children screamed. At the water tank they slowed to pass through a reluctantly parting, densely staring tangle of men, boys, teamsters, cows, donkeys, mules. When Oliver leaned out and saluted some of them they waved, grinning, and stared with their hands forgotten in the air. Engineer and his new missus. She thought them coarse and cow-faced and strangely pale.
But they made sharp pictures, too: a boy hoisting a water yoke with a pail at each end, the pails sloshing silver over their rims; a teamster unyoking his mules; a donkey standing with his ears askew and his nose close to the ground, on his face a look of mournful patience that reminded her comically of Lizzie.
“Over there’s Mother Fall’s, where I lived,” Oliver said, and pointed.
A white two-story house, square, blank, and ugly. Each window was a room, she supposed, one of them formerly his. The downstairs would smell of cabbage and grease. She could not even imagine living there. Her heart rose up and assured her that she would make him glad she had come.
“You said she was nice to you.”
“Yes. A stout Cornish dame. She’s been helping me get ready for you.”
“I must call on her, I should think.”
He looked at her a little queerly. “You sure must. If we don’t have supper there tomorrow we’ll never be forgiven.”
Above and to the left, scattered down a long hogback ridge, the Mexican camp appeared. Its houses were propped with poles, timbers, ladders; its crooked balconies overflowed with flowers; in a doorway she saw a dark woman smoking a cigarette, on a porch a grandmother braided a child’s hair. There were no white-painted cottages, but she thought this camp more attractive than the Cornish–it had a look of belonging, some gift of harmoniousness. The stage turned off to the right, below the camp, and left her craning, unsatisfied.
“Is there a Chinese Camp too?” she said.
“Around the hill and below us. We’ll hear it a little, but we won’t see it.”
“Where’s the mine?”
With his forefinger he jabbed straight down. “You don’t see that either. Just a shaft house or a dump in a gulch here and there.”
“You know what?” she said, holding the curtains back and watching ahead through the dusty little oaks, “I don’t think you described this place very well.”
“Draw your own conclusions,” Oliver said. He offered a finger to Lizzie’s baby, just waking up and yawning and focusing his eyes. The stage stopped.
The cottage she had imagined exposed on a bare hill among ugly mine buildings was tucked back among liveoaks at the head of a draw. In her first quick devouring look she saw the verandas she had asked for and helped Oliver sketch, a rail fence swamped under geraniums. When she hopped out slapping dust from her clothes she saw that the yard showed the even tooth-marks of raking. He had prepared for her