Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [69]
“Good heavens,” she said to Oliver, “I can’t think Scribby is in such a bad way that it has to fall back on me for its Western correspondent. He ought to get Mr. Harte or Mark Twain or someone.”
“Harte and Mark Twain don’t live in New Almaden,” Oliver said. “If he didn’t want you to do it he wouldn’t have asked you. Wait till you’re rested after the baby and do it then.”
“But I’m not a writer!”
“He seems to think you are.”
She brooded. That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. “It’s all right,” he said. “But I’d take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That’s about used up, I should think.”
Meekly, astonished at herself, she took it out, rewrote the sketch as much in the spirit of discovery as possible, and sent it in. She put in Mother Fall, and her cook China Sam, who had murdered a rival and been reprieved from the rope because he was too good a cook to hang. He had a fourteen-year-old mail-order bride–sent, rumor said, by his real wife in China, who did not want to risk herself when Sam sent for her. She put in the Christmas custom of the Cornish miners, who visited the house and sang carols, those “rude uncultivated people” singing parts as if they had been born the children of choir masters. She put in every rag of local color she could think of about New Almaden, but she still mistrusted what she had done, and she still was afraid that Thomas would take it out of friendship and not for its own merits.
I have no evidence, but I think Grandmother must have been set up to be asked to write that piece. She would have loved to think it was good. It would demonstrate that marriage had not shrunk her career, but broadened it. She wanted to grow, as she imagined Thomas and Augusta growing, and as she was sure that Oliver grew, in his own way, through his work at the mine. Yet to think of herself appearing page to page with Cable or Nadal or any of the Scribner’s writers left her cold with the fear that her sketch would show up as a lame and embarrassing thing.
She had to know. So in two evenings she wrote another little story about the fiesta on Mexican Independence Day in September, with double heroines in Mr. Hernandez’s languid and beautiful sisters. This she sent off smoking hot to Mr. Howells at the Atlantic, submitting herself to a less partial judge than Thomas. That gave her three things to wait for.
5
Late afternoon, a soft spring day, the hills so green and soft she thought she would like to roll down them as she and Bessie used to roll down the pasture hill in Milton when they were children. Instead, she moved from the chair on the valley side of the porch to the bench on the trail side. The hammock she had given up weeks ago; she could not have got out of it if she had got in. Lizzie’s noises in the kitchen, and a banging that was probably Buster among the stovewood, might have been the sounds from her mother’s kitchen. The smells of damp and mold from below the porch were so familiar that it seemed her family must be just over the hill, to be visited in a ten-minute walk. Across on a blue, lupine-covered saddle two white mules were grazing, as peaceful as two white clouds in a summer sky.
Stranger scrambled out from under the porch and went off up the trail. That should mean Oliver was coming. In a minute he appeared, so much like a farmer returning from the fields in his corduroy pants and blue shirt that he might have been her father, or John Grant. He made a pass at Stranger’s ears, the dog bounced around him like a playful plowhorse.