Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [81]
For a moment Oliver said nothing, he only looked steadily at Hernandez. “What’s Tregoning going to do?”
“What could he do?” Hernandez said. “He’s giving it away.”
For a musing time Oliver stood looking out into Shakerag Street through the dirty window. “How long have you been here, Chepe?” he said finally.
“Six years.”
“Never had any run-ins with the Hacienda crowd?”
“No,” said Hernandez, faintly smiling.
“Good,” Oliver said. “Eight more years of faithful service and you can look forward to what Tregoning got.”
“I am careful,” Hernandez said. “I have a mother and two sisters.”
Standing outside of this casual revelation of how deep and violent were the divisions in the camp, Susan felt as a woman running an orderly quiet household might feel if she looked out the window and saw men fighting in the street. She had been wrapped in cottonwool. Every glance between these two was loaded with meanings she had been protected from. She saw them only when they had put the mine and the manager behind them. She knew her husband not as an engineer but as a companion, lover, audience, household fixer. Her drawings of Hernandez’s two sisters for Mr. Howells and the Atlantic had shown them languid, slim, domestic, offering figs and native wine to a visitor, herself. She had dwelt not on the harsh life at whose insecure edge they lived, but on their grace, their dark and speaking eyes, the elegance of their dancing, the attractiveness of rebozo or mantilla over their hair, the feminine gentleness of their gestures and postures. In her indignation she almost wished those blocks back, so that she could send in their place something closer to the truth of mining camp lives. Yet how would she get close to those lives to draw them? She had lived in New Almaden nearly a year and had seen only its picturesque surface.
“You run along, Susan,” Oliver said. “No use to get upset. This is what you might call run of the mine.”
“All right.” But she laid a hand on his arm. Her eyes went to Hernandez, she smiled. “¿Con permiso?” she said. He lifted his eyebrows in admiration of her linguistic gifts and turned away, making himself deaf. To Oliver at the door she said, “Don’t consider Boy or me for one second. Don’t compromise your principles.”
“Sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“All right, we’ll see. Maybe by now he’s demonstrated his authority.”
She did not linger in Cornish Camp, and she did not try to sketch, though the fog was already beginning to burn away. She went straight home past the watertank where teamsters and boys had gathered, and where the aguador, already down from his first trip upmountain, was refilling his kegs. It always bothered her to walk through the stares, even when she had Stranger along and had no reason to feel unsafe. Now, having had a glimpse of how rotten a string their lives were tied together with, she walked through them smiling a bright smile of fellowship and sympathy, a smile so rigid that her face hurt when she was finally past.
Tell a story like this to any twentieth-century American and he will demand to know how authority got away with that sort of arrogance. Why didn’t the men strike? Try that kind of business nowadays and the UMW would tie the place up as tight as a wet knot. I remember once when they tied up the Zodiac, when my father was superintendent, because of the mine’s policy of carrying the men’s lunch boxes up and down, to prevent the stealing of highgrade. “No spies in the dryhouse,” that sort of slogan. Fleabites, by comparison, irritations rather than injustices. Which demonstrates our need of a sense of history : we need it to know what real injustice looked like. When Kendall was running the New Almaden the United Mine Workers were a half century away, the Western Federation of Miners a generation off, the IWW wouldn’t be founded until 1905.
The West of my grandparents, I have to keep reminding others and myself, is the early West, the last home of the freeborn American. It is all owned in Boston and Philadelphia and New York and London.