Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [60]
Brooding, she watched Lizzie take advantage of the rest to change Georgie’s diaper. The little man-thing squirmed and rolled and gurgled, grabbing for the ribbon pinned on his mother’s breast, but she took hold of his ankles and yanked his bottom into the air and efficiently shoved under it a dry flour-sack diaper with the faded word EXCELSIOR on it. With two swift motions she pinned him. She made one unsmiling tickling poke at his exposed navel and laid him back in his box. No nonsense with that fatherless mite, who already seemed to have learned some of Lizzie’s stoicism. He took what life handed him and did not complain. Susan had heard him cry only five or six times.
There was something tragic about Lizzie. Was it a disastrous marriage or the betrayal of a good girl? For Lizzie was a good girl¦–Grandmother was not so genteel as to deny it, however Georgie was fathered. But once when she had asked Lizzie if it would help her to talk about her life, Lizzie had only said briefly, “Best not get into it ”
Thousands of miles from friends or kin, with no husband to look after her, she bore her life patiently. When she worked she often sang to Georgie, sounding entirely happy; but once, starting to sing him to sleep, she started “Bye Baby Bunting,” and stopped as if someone had knocked on the door.
She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into. Yet she was much liked by the Cornish women who came visiting, and apparently needed no other company, was less obviously lonely than Susan. Susan wondered if her own discontent was a weakness or if it was only a manifestation of greater sensibility. Was there something gnarly and tough about working-class people that kept them from feeling all that more delicately organized natures felt? If Georgie died, would Lizzie be prostrated, apathetic, and despairing, as Augusta still was, or would she rise in the morning, supported by some coarse strength, and build her fire and make breakfast and go on as before?
Susan could not imagine how it would be to know your husband for a brute, and determine to leave him. She would not even attempt to imagine being the victim of a seducer. She could not conceive the feelings of a woman who carried the child of a man she despised. But she had some inkling of how it felt to carry a child, for she had missed her last two periods. Nausea hung along the edge of her awareness like the fogfall that hung along the ridge but never rolled over.
What if she had no husband? All to go through alone, out here in this crude camp away from everything dear and safe? Like a magic-lantern slide the magnified image gleamed in her mind: Oliver’s fair head, touched with the reddish early sun, sinking into the hole at the Kendall shaft to the groaning of the slow wheels. What if he never came back from one of those trips underground? A broken cable, a cave-in, an explosion, black damp, any of a dozen dangers he risked every day, could snuff him out. Then what? Oh, back home, back home! At once. Poor Susan, she went West with her husband and it was hardly three months before he was killed. No, I don’t believe she’ll marry again –she married rather late as it was, and she was much in love. I believe she will return to her career, live quietly at Milton in her father’s house and have her old friends down from New York as before. Her dear friend Augusta, who also suffered a terrible personal loss, will have another baby, only a few months older than Susan’s. Her sister Bessie now has two, less than a half mile down the lane. The children can grow up together, they will be inseparable.
The element of longing in her fantasy appalled her. He was too dear to her, she could never survive his loss. But how lovely it would be, all the same, to be back home, to have