Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [79]
“Oliver!”
He raised his eyes, noted what she was pointing at, nodded, and looked down at the map again. “Yeah, Kendall had that put up the other day.”
“But why? You’ve always smoked in here.”
“Yes.”
“Is he afraid of fire?”
“No,” Oliver said. “I doubt that he’s very much afraid of fire.”
“Well what is he afraid of? It seems the strangest . . .”
“Seeing how far I’ll be pushed, I guess,” Oliver said.
“You mean . . . ? Oliver, is he against you, is that what you mean?”
Now he finally faced her, shrugging, defensive, getting mulish. “It would look that way.”
“What have you done? I thought everything was going so well.”
“Ahhhh.”
“Tell me.”
“What have I done, you say.”
“Yes. Why should he turn against you?”
“What have I done,” he said, tapping his teeth with the pipestem, elaborately trying to remember. “Well, I made him a more accurate survey than the mine’s ever had, I saved him from making a big mistake with that hoist machinery, and redesigned it so it works, I improved the pump station in Bush tunnel.”
“Please!” she said. “How can he be your enemy just all of a sudden? He’s been perfectly pleasant, as pleasant as he has the capacity for being. He sent his carriage around only the other day.”
“I expect that was Mrs. Kendall.”
“She would hardly do it if he didn’t want her to.”
“Look,” Oliver said, “you’ve got enough to do without worrying about this. I’ll work it out. You run along and draw some pictures and get famous.”
“But I must worry about it! Good heavens, it’s your job, it’s our life!”
“It isn’t that important. If you’re afraid he’ll fire me, forget it. He can’t fire me as long as Smith approves of my work. Maybe he thinks if he makes life unpleasant enough I’ll quit.”
“I just don’t understand,” Susan said. “I thought you were doing just splendidly, and you are, too. But now you say he’d like to fire you if he dared.”
“I was never his choice,” Oliver said. “I was more or less forced on him by Smith and Conrad. We chose to live up on the hill rather than down at the Hacienda. They chose to think we thought ourselves too good for them. I know Ewing, at the store, has always felt that way, and he’s Kendall’s chief spy and toady. Maybe that’s why I got stuck with the cost of renovating the cottage. You begin to see?”
“It’s been from the beginning, then,” Susan said. “Oh, it’s so small!”
“Yes, I guess it is. Then I rejected his Austrian, your cultivated friend. I think Mrs. Kendall had sort of looked forward to having a tame baron around, just the way she gets some kind of satisfaction out of having an artist, even if the artist is stand-offish. And also I questioned Kendall’s judgment on that hoist, and proved he was wrong.”
“But he raised your salary.”
“Smith told him to.”
“Ah,” she said, “I might have known. What a mean, petty little tyrant that man is!”
“I could hardly agree with you more completely.”
“Do you think it was a mistake for me to go down in the mine last week? I knew he didn’t want me to.”
“I don’t think he much liked your remark about the men being prisoners.”
“But they are prisoners!”
“You bet they are,” Oliver said. “I suppose that’s one reason he doesn’t want any sympathetic women around, especially if they write things for magazines.”
“But you feel the same way.”
“Yes, sure, and he knows it. He thinks I’m too chummy with the men. They talk to me and I listen. What he’d like is that whenever I hear anybody grousing or muttering I’d run to him and blab. Then he could fire the troublemakers off the mountain. He knows there’s a lot of grumbling.”
“You never told me. Is there? A lot?”
“All the time.”
“And they talk to you but not to the others.”
“That’s about it. Not to the Hacienda crowd.”
“Then the men didn’t really blame you when you had to stop their work to run your survey.”
“Not especially, no.”
“I’m glad. I don’t want them blaming you.”
“They know who to blame. They know who the spies are, too. The whole place is wormy with fear and hate. Kendall’s way of handling that is to fire anybody who opens