Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [47]
“Well,” Oliver said, “come on inside.”
It was as she had visualized it from his sketches, but much more finished–a house, not a picturesque shack. It smelled cleanly of paint. Its floors and wainscot were dark redwood, its walls a soft gray. The light was dim and cool, as she thought the light in a house should be. A breeze went through the rooms, bringing inside the smell of aromatic sun-soaked plants. The Franklin stove was polished like a farmer’s Sunday boots, water was piped into the sink, the kitchen cooler held sacks and cans and let out a rich smell of bacon. In the arch between dining room and living room Oliver had hung his spurs, bowie, and six-shooter. “The homey touch,” he said. “And wait, there are some little housewarming presents.”
From the piazza he brought one of the packages that had been part of their luggage down from San Francisco. She opened it and pulled out a grass fan. “Fiji,” Oliver said. Next a large mat of the same grass, as finely woven as linen, and with a sweet hay smell. “More Fiji.” Next a paper parasol that opened up to a view of Fujiyama. “Japan,” Oliver said. “Don’t open it inside—bad luck.” At the bottom of the box was something heavy which, unwrapped, turned out to be a water jar with something in Spanish written across it. “Guadalajara,” Oliver said. “Now you’re supposed to feel that the place is yours. You know what that Spanish means? It says, ‘Help thyself, little Tomasa.’ ”
There it sits, over on my window sill, ninety-odd years later, without even a nick out of it. The fan and the parasol went quickly, the mat lasted until Leadville and was mourned when it passed, the olla has come through three generations of us, as have the bowie, the spurs, and the six-shooter. It wasn’t the worst set of omens that attended the beginning of my grandparents’ housekeeping.
She was touched. Like the raked yard, the clean paint, his absurd masculine decorations in the archway, his gifts proved him what she had believed him to be. Yet the one small doubt stuck in her mind like a burr in tweed. In a small voice she said, “You’ll spoil me.”
“I hope so.”
Lizzie came in with luggage in one hand and the baby in her other arm. “Right through the kitchen,” Oliver said. “Your bed’s made up. The best I could do for Georgie was a packing box with a pillow in it.”
“That will be fine, thank you,” Lizzie said, and went serenely on through.
Kind. He really was. And energetic. Within a minute he was making a fire so that Susan could have warm water to wash in. Then he said that he had a little errand at Mother Fall’s, and before she could ask him what he was off the piazza and gone.
Susan took off her traveling dress and washed in the basin by the kitchen door. Below her were the tops of strange bushes, the steep mountainside tufted with sparse brown grass. Looking around the corner of Lizzie’s room to the upward slopes, she saw exotic red-barked trees among the woods, and smelled the herb-cupboard smells of sage and bay. Another world. Thoughtfully she poured out the water and went inside, where Lizzie was slicing a round loaf she had found in the cooler. Even the bread here was strange.
“How does it seem, Lizzie? Is your room all right?”