Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [63]
“Just a symptom. We were in the labor–you know, the stope, where they’re getting out ore, a sort of hollowed-out room along the vein. There’s a lot of loose rock, it isn’t timbered. You have to keep your eyes open. He leaned over to examine the face, and I saw dirt and pebbles fall out of the ceiling onto his shoulder. He should have felt it, too. I yelled at him, ‘Back!’, something like that, and what did he do? He turned around with those big deer’s eyes soft and wondering, and said, ‘Pardon?’ When a man hollers at you down a mine and says jump, you’d better jump, not ask questions.”
He sat blinking at the fire. “Then what?” Susan said. “How did you hurt yourself? I’m sorry, I never noticed.”
“I pushed him. A slab fell right where he’d been leaning. Just nicked me.” He put the bruise to his mouth as if kissing it.
“You saved his life. At the risk of your own!”
“Nothing quite that heroic. The point is I shouldn’t have had to push him. You just can’t work with a man who turns around and wonders why you’re yelling at him.”
She sat quietly. She did not doubt Oliver’s judgment of Starling, not now. She was only rebellious against the conditions of their life, which excluded, except perhaps in positions of control such as Conrad Prager had, men sensitive enough to appreciate the finer things. She knew without any question, no matter what he said, that Oliver’s act had been heroic; but she still wished he were more competent in cultivated conversation.
Then he hoisted his eyebrows at the fire, looking across the hands he had folded under his chin, and said through his mustache, with the edge of sullenness in his voice, “Maybe you think I’m going to recommend against him because he fell in love with you. That isn’t so.”
“Oh, fell in love!”
“Of course he did. At first sight. Bang.” He turned his sleepy face. “Why wouldn’t he? So did I.”
It was precisely the right thing to say. It absolved him of jealousy and spread balm on her irritations and reassured her that she had not the slightest regret. If Thomas Hudson himself were available, she would still choose Oliver Ward. They sat up together–close together–by the open fire until the coals had fallen into ash, and all was reaffirmed and renewed. Grandmother had her identity back, having had the baron to reflect it for an evening. He was the first young man with a genteel education to encounter her in the camps and backwoods that framed much of her life. He would not be the last, nor the last to fall in love with her rosy animated face and her interest in anything that moved, especially anything that talked.
I doubt that she reopened the matter of her violated bedroom. Instead, I would guess that she took advantage of the renewed tenderness between them to tell him, with all the hesitancy demanded by her times and training, that he was going to have an heir, a fact that Augusta had known for a month.
What did he say? I am utterly unable to guess. He was not one to say much under any circumstances. He was too concerned about her safety and comfort to be very pleased that it was to happen in that mining camp, and too pinched economically to be pleased it was to happen so soon. But he was too much in love not to be awed and grateful at what she had done for him, or what they had done together.
What was there for a young husband of 1876 to say? Something ineffable, something like what William Clark wrote in his notebook when he and Meriwether Lewis saw the Pacific at the mouth of the Columbia (O! the joy!)? Certainly not what I heard my son Rodman say when Leah telephoned him from her gynecologist’s office. (Shit!)
New Almaden, Dec. 2, 1876
My dear girl–
Your last letter came to us on our way from the mine to San Francisco for our Thanksgiving excursion. It is an all-day journey and only 75 miles. I enjoyed the ride on top of the stage through the fog to San Jose, and our lunch at the La Moille House was made doubly pleasant