Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [53]
A Live White Woman in the Mines, she rose on the fifth morning and drank coffee with her husband before he went off to work, and gave him for the post office in Cornish Camp a letter to her parents and the fat letter to Augusta. Later that morning the trunks arrived by dray, and she spent the rest of the day unpacking. To stack the wood-blocks for The Scarlet Letter in the corner cupboard with her sketch pads, pencils, and watercolors gave her an intense pleasurable feeling of being ready to live.
The six o’clock whistle blew while she was changing into a summer dress still warm from Lizzie’s iron. Calling to Lizzie to put the kettle on, she hurried out to the hammock and spread herself there to wait.
I can see her. From here she looks terribly unlikely. She was always careful of her clothes–“Thy dress should be a background for thy face,” I once heard her tell my Aunt Betsy, whose taste was not dependable-and she lived in a time when women wrapped themselves in yards of satin, serge, taffeta, bombazine, what not, with bustles and ruffles and leg-of-mutton sleeves, all of it over a foundation of whalebone. A modern woman in a mining camp, even if she is the wife of the Resident Engineer, lives in pants and a sweatshirt. Grandmother made not the slightest concession to the places where she lived. I have a photograph of her riding a horse in something that looks like a court costume, and another taken at the engineer’s camp on the bank of Boise Creek in the 1880s, with a home-made rowboat at her feet and a tent pitched in the background and her third baby on her shoulder, and what is she wearing? A high-necked, pinch-waisted, triple-breasted, puff-sleeved, full-length creation of dotted swiss or something of the kind. And a picnic hat. In that baldest of their bald frontiers, at the very bottom of their fortunes, she dressed as if for a garden party. I don’t suppose she had a hat on as she waited for Oliver to come back from the mine, that first real day of her housekeeping life, but she probably had everything else.
Shortly she saw him coming through the trees. Stranger lumbered up and went to meet him. Susan waved. In his mine clothes stained with red ore, his boots muddy, his face full of the light the sight of her turned on in him, he ran up the high steps and leaned against the post with his hands behind him and his face stuck out. She kissed it, and still with his hands behind him he fainted against the porch post. “Is this where the Resident Engineer lives?” he said. “You look beautiful. What happened?”
“Does something have to happen before I can look beautiful? The trunks came, so now I can be a wife greeting her husband as he returns from work.”
“I like it. I guess I’ll go back and come home again.”
“No, you’re to stay. Lizzie will be bringing tea.”
“Tea, even.”
She loved the way he leaned against the post. He had relaxed, graceful poses, big as he was. The mine hat with a stub of candle socketed in its front was pushed back on his head, his wool shirt was open at the neck. She probably thought him unbearably picturesque. She could have drawn the two of them just as they stood there, pretty bride and manly husband. Title, something like, “The Return from Honest Toil,” or perhaps “An Outpost of Civilization.” It flooded her with happiness to be there, to have him there, to be able to give him this after so many