Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [49]
They stared at each other, near anger. She forgave him everything except that he hadn’t explained. One word, and she would have been spared all her doubts about him. But she would certainly not let him pay her back. The hardship would not be all his. He was looking at her squarely, still mulish. She wanted to shake him. “You great . . . Why couldn’t you have told me?”
She saw his eyebrows go up. His eyes, as they did when he smiled, closed into upside-down crescents. Young as he was, he had deep fans of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes that gave him a look of always being on the brink of smiling. And now he was smiling. He was not going to be sullen. They were past it.
“I was afraid you’d be sensible,” he said. “I couldn’t stand the thought of this place sitting here all ready for you and you not in it.”
Supper was no more than bread and butter, tea from Augusta’s samovar, and a left-over bar of chocolate. (Ah, sweet linkage! Are you thinking of me, dear friend back there in New York, as I am thinking of you? Do you comprehend how happy I am, am determined to be? Didn’t I tell you he knew how to look after me?) The dog lay at their feet on the veranda. Along the ridge with its silvery comb of fog the sky faded from pale blue to steely gray, and then slowly flushed the color of a ripe peach. The trees on the crest–redwoods, Oliver said–burned for a few seconds and went black. Eastward down the plunging mountainside the valley fumed with dust that was first red, then rose, then purple, then mauve, then gray, finally soft black. Discreet and quiet, Lizzie came out and got the tray and said good night and went in again. They sat close together in the hammock, holding hands.
“I don’t believe this is me,” Oliver said.
“Thee mustn’t doubt it.”
“Theeing?” he said. “Now I know I’m one of the family.”
A shiver went through her from her hips up to her shoulders. At once he was solicitous. “Cold?”
“Happy, I think.”
“I’ll get a blanket. Or do you want to go in?”
“No, it’s beautiful out here.”
He got a blanket and tucked her into the hammock as if into a steamer chair. Then he sat down on the floor beside her and smoked his pipe. Far down below, in the inverted sky of the valley, lights came on, first one, then another, then many. “It’s like sitting in the warming oven and watching corn pop down on the stove,” Susan said.
Sometime later she held up her hand and said, “Listen!” Fitful on the creeping wind, heard and lost and heard again, came a vanishing sound of music–someone sitting on porch or balcony up in the Mexican camp and playing the guitar for his girl or his children. Remembering nights when Ella Clymer had sung to them at Milton, Susan all but held her breath, waiting for the rush of homesickness. But it never came, nothing interrupted this sweet and resting content. She put out a hand to touch Oliver’s hair, and he captured it and held the fingers against his cheek. The bone of his jaw, the rasp of his beard, sent another great shiver through her.
They sat up a good while, watching the stars swarm along the edge of the veranda roof. When they finally went to bed I hope they made love. Why wouldn’t they, brought together finally after eight years, and with only a two-week taste of marriage? I am perfectly ready to count the months on Grandmother. Her first child, my father, was born toward the end of April 1877, almost precisely nine months after her arrival in New Almaden. I choose to believe that I was made possible that night, that my father was the first thing they did together in the West. The fact that he was accidental and at first unwanted did not make him any less binding upon their lives, or me any less inevitable.
In the night she may have heard the wind sighing under the eaves and creaking the stiff oaks and madrones on the hillside behind. She may have heard the stealthy feet of raccoons on the veranda, and the rumble and rush as Stranger rose and put the intruders out. She may have waked and listened to the breathing beside her, and been shaken by unfamiliar emotions and tender