Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [92]
“You could get someone to back you.”
Now she had got his full attention. He stared at her out of the corners of his eyes, suspicious and ready to laugh. “Are you suggesting I go into the cement business? I’m an engineer, not a capitalist ”
“But if you could get someone to back you, couldn’t you design the machinery, and do all that construction that you like so, and maybe be manager or superintendent or something?”
“You’ve got it all figured out.”
“Why couldn’t you?”
“Recipe for rabbit pie,” he said. “First catch rabbit.”
“Oliver, I’m absolutely sure thee can do it!”
“And while chasing rabbits, find some way to support family.”
“The family can support itself.”
“Not while head of family is healthy,” Oliver said. “I’ll find something, surveying or something else.”
“But I want thee to experiment with cement!”
“Oh,” he said, smiling. “Thee does, does thee?”
“Yes, and you know what else? I want you to discover cement, and get your capital, and build your plant and machinery, and start selling cement to everybody in this country, and then I want us to buy this laguna and this promontory and build a house that looks right straight out at Japan. We can get Lizzie back from her rancher, and bring Stranger down from Mother Fall’s. Can’t you see him on this beach, chasing sandpipers and getting his big feet wet? Can’t you see Ollie growing up into the healthiest sort of outdoor boy and maybe learning to become a scientist or naturalist like Agassiz, studying tide pools? He can go to a good Eastern school, and then to Yale or Boston Tech, so he won’t suffer from growing up in an out-of-the-way place. Oliver, thee absolutely must work on cement!”
Still smiling, squinting his eyes to crescents in the brightness, he said, “I intend to. In my spare time. Without any expectation of getting rich. Don’t get your face fixed for that mansion right away.”
“And yet it might happen. Mightn’t it?”
“I don’t suppose it’s out of the question.”
“Then that’s what thee should work for. What if there aren’t any jobs? Thee can do this, and it won’t keep us apart as Potosí would have.”
The surf boomed against the point, the air was full of turnstones, gulls, tattlers, plovers, screams and cries and the keen smells of salt and iodine. She put her hands to her cheeks, hot with sun and wind and exhortation. Oliver was watching her closely.
“Suppose I don’t make it work.”
“Then I’ll go wherever thee must. I’ll leave Ollie with Mother or Bessie if I have to, until he’s old enough to come along. But thee will make it work, I have the most blissfully confident feeling. And we’ll build our house on this promontory and watch the whales go by.”
Indulgent, sleepy-eyed, he watched her. “I thought you wanted to move back East.”
“Eventually. But Oliver, if thee can make this work, I’d be willing to stay here ten years. Maybe until Ollie is ready to go back to school. I could go home on visits, I wouldn’t ask for more. We could lure our families and friends out for visits in our lighthouse.”
His hand came out and took hold of her ankle, gave it a squeeze and a shake. He was laughing. She could see how she charmed him.
Perhaps he remembered holding her by that ankle while she hung over the waterfall above Big Pond. Perhaps he thought, though I do not believe that he did, that on that picnic afternoon of his courting he might just as well have put his hand on the pan of a bear trap.
3
In the fashion of the nineteenth-century theater, let Marian Prouse push across the stage the perambulator with a placard on its side: TWO MONTHS LATER. That will make it November 1877.
She awoke as if at some signal from her own flesh, a tickling or a pain. For a minute she lay listening, locating herself, identifying Oliver’s warm weight beside her, strange in that stranger’s bed. It made her tender to have him there, breathing softly, with a little whiffle through his mustache. Only the fear of waking