Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [50]
Her eyes popped open. Gray daylight, unfamiliar room–something was wrong. Up on her elbow, shaking the sleep from her eyes, she recognized her new bedroom, cluttered with half-unpacked belongings. She was alone in the bed. Where was Oliver? Something was wrong, there was crying from the other wing where Lizzie and Georgie slept, and outside now began an uproar of barking and the honking wheeze of a donkey. Then she heard Oliver shout, “Sic ’im, Stranger, take him out of here!” A growling rush, the clatter of hoofs in stones, a threshing of bushes. Oliver sent a piercing whistle after dog and donkey, and blending with it, coming in like a thin woodwind in duet with a piccolo, a queer, high voice cried, “Fis! Fis! Fis!”
Oliver’s bare feet thudded down the porch. “No want fish, John. Go way.”
“Fis belly flesh,” said the voice.
“No want fish,” Oliver said. “What for come so early, John? Go way now.”
“Fis belly flesh,” the voice said, receding, complaining, vanishing. Roosters were crowing both above and below. The sound of Oliver’s feet crossed the living room. He opened the door upon her as she sat up in bed.
“What on earth!” she said.
He was rumbling with laughter. His blond mustache, which he had probably grown to make him look older and more authoritative, made him look about twenty. “Welcome,” he said. “Everybody wants to welcome you, even a jackass and a jackass Chinaman.”
At midmorning they were moving furniture around. Oliver had bought it from Mother Fall, who in her turn had acquired it from the desperate mine captain who had formerly lived in this house. He had brought his young wife here, she had had her baby here, they had laid out all they owned in furnishing the place. Then without warning he had lost his job. An ill omen, but she hardly even acknowledged that she was adapting the wreckage of an unlucky life to her own uses, for everything that she saw of the house with rested eyes pleased her. The veranda that she had drawn around three sides of Oliver’s sketch, and had him spend most of his savings on, was a triumph. It took her breath to look east, it filled her heart to look west or south. The rooms themselves were good, the furniture would do for the brief time they would be here. But she gave Oliver a good deal of exercise moving it, anyway, trying it in all possible positions and combinations, and enjoying herself extremely as she stood around in a dressing sacque being a young housewife. Then he happened to glance out the window as he pushed a chair across the room. “Whsht!” he said. “Get dressed. We’re being called on.”
She flew into the bedroom and slammed the door, and as she fumbled into her traveling dress, all she had until the trunks came, she heard feet come up the porch and into the house, and voices, a man’s and a woman’s. When she came out–and she would have come out rosy and vivacious and charming as if she had not twenty seconds before been biting her lips and muttering un-Quakerish words at hooks and eyes that had disappeared in the fabric or eluded her fingers –Oliver introduced her to Mr. and Mrs. Kendall, the manager and his wife.
Mr. Kendall was not a smiler. He had gimlet eyes and a notably still, restrained manner. But he took her hand and looked into her face until she blushed, and said to Oliver, “Well, Ward, I see why you were so impatient to get readied up here.” Wanting to dislike him for his broken promise,