Angle of Repose (44 page)

“Why don’t I run down to the office and see if he’s there?” Frank said. “I’ll just get that other trunk in. You stay here and get warm.”

Oliver stood up. “I’ll give you a hand.”

They were outside longer than she thought it should take them. Ollie started to fight his way out of the comforter and she pulled it back over his head. “Stay in a little longer, you’d better. It’s
icy.”

But he wanted to see. With only his fair curly head exposed, he looked wonderingly around. He watched his father and Frank carry in the second trunk and put it in the bedroom. He watched his father come out with the gun belt and six shooter and buckle it around him. So did Susan. “Oh my dear!” she said. “Where is thee going?”

“No reason to worry. We’re just going to check up on Pricey. Probably something came up and he couldn’t leave.”

“But the gun!”

He laughed, not infectiously. “Part of the act.”

He would not look at her as he piled more wood on the fire. She could feel the heat growing against her legs and at the same time smell the cold outdoor air in his clothes as he moved. When he stood up again she forced him to meet her eyes. She felt a kind of splintering, and told herself bitterly, “It’s Leadville. It’s what I chose.”

“We’ll only be a little while,” Oliver said. “Better pull in the latchstring.”

“Oliver . . .”

“Don’t worry,” he said, and closed the door and shut her in. She pulled in the latchstring.

The firelight on her son’s face made him look like so domestic a cherub, so much like one of her own drawings of Bessie’s children at bedtime, that she felt mocked.

“Where did Daddy and the other one go?”

“The other one is Mr. Sargent. They’ll be back afterwhile.”

“Why did Daddy take his gun?”

“I guess he’s afraid something might have happened to Pricey.”

“Who’s Pricey?”

“A friend of Daddy’s–of mine.”

“Is this Leadville?”

“This is Leadville. How do you like it?”

His round, browless, white-lashed eyes went around. “They have logs on the walls in Leadville.”

She had to laugh and hug him, and she felt better. While he hung in front of the growing heat of the fireplace she started a fire in the kitchen stove and put on the kettle, propped open the bedroom door to let a little heat into that mausoleum, set the table hopefully for five, found canned soup and crackers, cheese, canned peaches. When after a very long time the kettle began to sing, she made tea, doctoring Ollie’s with sugar and canned milk, and they sat on the hearth and sipped it and ate from a tin of English biscuits. Through the log walls she could hear nothing outside; when she went to the window she saw only that it had grown dark. She looked several times at the locket watch pinned to her breast. They had been gone more than an hour, then an hour and a half. She stoked the fire.

Now that it began to grow warm enough in the room so that they could move a little distance from the fire, she let Ollie try the hammock that Oliver had slung in the corner, and she told him how she had swung him in it in New Almaden when he was brand new. He was passionate to sleep in it; she said he could. But the hammock aroused such homesickness in her, and the ticking away of time made her so nervous and worried, that she opened one of the trunks and rummaged until she had found some of the household goods. The olla she set on the mantel. The Fiji grass mat, its hay smell obscured by two years of storage camphor, she spread on the table and reset the dishes on top of it. The rug of wildcat skins she spread before the fire and invited Ollie to roll on it.

“Let’s see if Daddy notices,” she said. “We won’t tell him, we’ll just wait and see if he notices how
homey
it is.”

The thumping on the door made her leap to her feet. A kicking, not a knocking–the sound came from low down. “Sit still!” she said to Ollie, and swiftly crossed the room to stand with pounding heart a foot from the rough-hewn planks. The kicking continued, violent and loud. “Yes?” she said. “Who is it?”

“Open up, Sue. Hurry.”

She shoved up the wooden latch, the door burst inward, brushing her aside. Oliver backed in, followed by Frank walking forward. They were carrying a man’s body between them. She got one look at the face, and screamed.

Grandmother draws the curtain on those months. The letters all but stop, the reminiscences skip over that time with a distracted brevity.

For weeks she was Pricey’s nurse, after that his keeper. His cut mouth and broken nose and crushed cheekbone and cracked skull healed, but his mind and his eyes ducked and hid. The weather was unrelievedly bad, the trouble at the mine went unresolved. She was filled with anxiety for Oliver, Ollie, herself, Frank. Men who had broken into the office to steal or destroy papers, and who had done what they had to harmless Pricey, would do anything. She hated the weather that kept Ollie cooped up inside with the smell of carbolic acid and the sight of Pricey’s face. What dreams the child must have! What a parody of all she had promised him when she took him to join his father in the mountains!

Their carefree sociability was gone like last year’s leaves. Few experts passed through Leadville: they had made their investigations, written their reports, taken their fees, and gone. Even if there had been anything like last summer’s visitors she could not have welcomed them freely to her fire. Over in his corner like the family’s imbecile child Pricey was always rocking and reading. If visitors did come, he grabbed up the stereopticon and hid behind it, and peeked. Did he fear all strangers, or was he sensitive about his disfigurement, or did he periodically need to bewitch himself with three-dimensional photographs of the West to which he had come hunting . . . what? It sickened her to see him maimed, body and mind. She wept over him, unable to forget that he had been beaten because he was one of theirs. Yet she sometimes felt him around their necks like an albatross, and she grew frantic at the effect he might have on Ollie.

They were a family that, simply because they could hire, acquired the direction of other lives. Like the climate and the altitude, they were an arm of destiny. To bring a Lizzie or a Marian Prouse out West was one thing; women were in demand. But a Pricey was not, in the West or anywhere else. His English family, notified of his condition, wrote back with what Susan felt was a mean, self-saving caution. They did not, they said, have either the health or the money to come for him. His brothers were both married and tied down by jobs and families. They thought it might be best, if Ian did not show improvement, to try to find some good woman, widow perhaps, or someone whose children were grown and gone, to look after him for a fee, which they would try to help pay. They did not like to think of him in an institution.

“You know who that good woman is likely to be,” Susan said. “Me! Fond as I am of him, I can’t see us saddled with him indefinitely. It will do horrible things to Ollie. They ought to be
made
to bring him home.”

“How?” Oliver said.

“If there were only someone we know who’s going abroad. He’s so gentle and quiet he wouldn’t be a trouble.”

“But we don’t know anybody who’s going abroad. Anyway, he’d be scared to go anywhere except with one of us.”

“But it can’t go on as it is!”

There was a bitten furrow between Oliver’s eyes, he moved as if the slightest step jarred him to his heels. She could literally see one of his headaches coming on. Before night he would be lying in the darkened bedroom with a wet cloth over his eyes. His voice was already roughened by the pain in his head.

“Do you want me to put a tag on him and ship him across like a trunk?”

“Of course not. He’d die.”

“Then I can’t see any way but going on as we are, at least for a while.”

Pain or frustration made him spread his hands before her with a tenseness that she saw as dangerous. He looked at her frowning, his voice shook. He was as worn out and frazzled as she was herself. “I’m sorry, Sue. That’s just the way it is.”

“I know. It’s Leadville. It’s what I chose.”

For a second they confronted each other like enemies. Then she made a contrite, inarticulate sound and grabbed his hand and held it against her cheek. “Don’t pay any attention to me. I wouldn’t think of abandoning him. It’s just–I watch Ollie getting pale and mopey and losing his funny little sense of humor, and I . . .”

“Yeah,” he said, and looked away, over her head. “If we could get the Argentina thing settled, or really hit it so Ferd and the others would give us the money to get into big production, we could work it out. I’ve got some cousins in Guilford, girls, eighteen or so. Maybe we could bring one of those out ”

“Where would we put her?”

“Yeah.”

“That mine is a
prison
for you!” she said. “Oliver, I admit it was a mistake! I take the blame, I made you decide wrong. Could you still get on the Survey?”

“I doubt it. That’s all changed, you know.”

“Changed how?”

“Powell’s not likely to need me. He’s hiring topographers and geologists where King hired mining men. King’s quit as director, did I tell you?”

So her fingers were hammered off that gunwale too. “He has? Why?”

It bothered her to see such scorn, disgust, and sour amusement in his face; his face was made for other expressions than those.

“To get rich as a mining expert,” he said.

“Oh my goodness!”

“Yeah,” Oliver said. “Doesn’t it kind of shake you?”

Then late in June there was an afternoon after a morning shower. The sky boiled with big clearing clouds. When the sun swam into a pool of blue it blazed down with midsummer warmth, and the earth steamed. Standing in the doorway smelling that freshness, soaking up the sun deep down to her moldy and softened bones, Susan said to the cabin behind her, “Ollie, Pricey, let’s all take a walk along the ditch and pick some wildflowers.”

In the strong light outside, Pricey looked more disfigured than in the dark house. His nose, which had once been lumpy and somehow touching, was flattened like a prize fighter’s. He had a permanent bluish bump on his left cheekbone, a dent in the bone above one eye as if he had been hit with a hammer. Maybe he had. They would never know, for he remembered nothing about it, unless his fear of strangers was a memory. He hung close to her as they walked, and his mouth was a blackness empty of all the front teeth.

“Go ahead, look around,” she said. “See how many kinds we can find.”

Tipped head, questioning look half timid and half trusting. He went a little way out from the path, he stooped seriously and picked something, looked back at her and held it up. His mouth opened in a smile that was infantile and pathetic. “Good,” she said. “Get some more. Get a lot. We’ll have whole glasses full on the table for supper.”

Ollie brought her a sweaty little handful, mainly without stems, and went for more. Pricey worked away earnestly, going farther away from her than he had done since he was hurt. Eventually he came back with a fat bouquet. There was so much trust in his battered face, and so much eagerness to be praised, that she was effusive in her admiration, and hugged him as she would have hugged a good child. Whatever they had done to him, they had not beaten out of him that shy desire to please. She accepted his fistful of wildflowers as an offering in payment for two wretched months.

He stood at her shoulder, peeking, while she examined the varieties. Paintbrush, yes, and the pink ones are primroses. The blue one is a pentstemon, those are nice, and the white one a columbine, lovely. The creamy one with the five petals is some kind of cinquefoil, I knew something very like it back home in New York. But this little yellow one with the gray leaves, that’s something new.”

“Puc-puc-puccoon!” Pricey said. “Lithospermum multiflorum:”

“
What?
” She stared at him, jolted into laughter that was half hysterical. “How did you know that?”

Pricey was confused. He stammered and shrugged, searching her face as if the answer might be there.

“Never mind,” she said, and patted his arm. “Pricey, you’re getting well, do you know that? That’s
wonderful
that you remembered.”

A cold shadow fled along the slope faster than a horse could run, the sky winked like a great eye, winked again and flooded them with renewed warmth. Beside them the crystalline ditch rushed to run the mills and gather the rubbish of Leadville. Beyond the piled whiteness of the clouds the sky was so hurtfully blue that she could not help saying, “Pricey, remember that day last summer when we were riding on the Lake Fork? ‘How tenderly the haughty day fills his blue urn with fire’?”

“Hawwww!” Doubtful, filled with dismayed uncertainty, narrowing his eyes to think, he stared at her out of sandy-lashed pale blue eyes. His tongue was between his lips, the lips moved in and out, puckered and rubbery. In pity she tapped his arm again, releasing him, and put his bouquet to her nose and inhaled its faint wild fragrance. But she felt better about him. For a moment there, when that fragment of a Linnaean botany book had burst out of him, the dimmed mind had brightened. She gathered her two charges, one on each side, and walked again, thinking.

If Pricey got well he could go back to live with Frank–just come over evenings and tuck into his corner and read or listen. Now and then she and Oliver would be free to dine at the Clarendon; it seemed the height of gaiety. Now that Leadville’s summer had finally arrived, there would be more ladies–they might have a picnic at Twin Lakes for the Fourth. She could ride again, assuming that Oliver or Frank would dare leave the mine to go with her–most surely they would not let her go alone. She might sleep again, instead of going around wound up ready to snap, or prowling the dark cabin in her dressing gown from Ollie’s hammock to Pricey’s cot, or staring out the window into barren starlight. Maybe, maybe. Maybe the Adelaide would finally hit that rich carbonate that Oliver was sure was there, and the skinflint owners in New York would give him some support (how wry that one of them was Waldo Drake!) and the court would rule against the thieves and roughnecks at the Argentina and Highland Chief, and Oliver could go off to work without that hateful pistol and that scabbarded carbine. Maybe her house would at last cease to be a hospital and a prison, and begin to be the home she had hoped to make it.