Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [57]
Still with her hand in Stranger’s collar, she went inside, up against the plank barrier, and looked down. A gray stir of movement was receding down there. She could see shapes defined by the candles that grew brighter as the skip sank, and then went dimmer, shrank to swimming points, and went out. A damp, warm wind blew up the shaft into her face.
She turned away, she kept her composure, she smiled back at the toothless hoist man and said something cheerful, she let go of Stranger’s collar and sent him wallowing up the trail ahead of her. But her heart was withered in her breast like a prune. She could not bear to think of him down there in the blackness, dropping his thousand-foot plumb lines, gluing his eye to the theodolite eyepiece while an assistant held a candle close, and while the bob, suspended in water to make its motion minimal, moved in its deep orbit hundreds of feet below and the wire which was all he had to measure by shifted its hairsbreadth left or right.
He disliked this surveying, not only because it kept him underground so much but because all work had to stop while the survey went forward. A blast, the passing of an ore car, could throw off his measurements and cause errors of many feet. When work was stopped, the men grumbled, and Oliver, who totted up their weekly production and hence their wages, might be doubly blamed. What was worse for her, if not for him, was that once he started on any leg of his survey he had to stay down till it was completed. The last time, he had been down for nearly twenty-four hours without a break.
He had sunk out of the world, or into it, and she was beached in the interminable sunshine. Ten long sunstruck hours until suppertime, and after that unpredictable further hours of dusk, dark, late reading, before he came home.
The sight of a Chinaman in a blue blouse and slippers, with a bundle of brush on his back and an ax in his hand, trotting down the trail with his pigtail jerking, made her step to one side. He passed her with one sidelong glitter of jet eyes, and left her shivering. The people here were not people. Except for Oliver, she was alone and in exile, and her heart was back where the sun rose.
Unending summer. It was hotter at the end of September than it had been in July. But the heat was more seen than felt, more hallucination than discomfort. It turned illusory even the things on which she had fixed in the attempt to make the strange world real. From her temperate veranda she now saw only void where the valley used to be–a gray, smoky void into which she peered, hunting distance and relief from the mirage of mountains that quivered around her with visible heat. The wind that breathed past her and moved the banal bright geraniums in their pots brought a phantasmal sound of bells, and ex pired again, tired as a sigh.
She contemplated a walk and gave up the idea at once. Out on the trails it would be too hot. Stranger was dug in like a barnyard fowl in the shady dust beside the porch. Despite all their efforts, he was still Oliver’s dog, not hers. He was obedient and friendly, but his interest woke only when Oliver came home, and he lay watching the trail for hours at a time.
Down the mountain, moving beyond a curtain of quivering air, she saw the stage coming, perhaps with letters. If she started in five minutes, she would arrive at the Cornish Camp post office at about the same time as the stage. But the post office was in the company store, where there were always loiterers-teamsters, drifters, men hunting work –whom Oliver did not want her to encounter alone. And Ewing, the manager of the store, was