Angle of Repose (17 page)

Speak for yourself, Grandmother. I think you are putting into Grandfather’s head attitudes that were never there. He understood well enough that a mining engineer was a Westerner by profession. He was not slopping around in that steaming mine ten hours a day, and mapping its labyrinths in his spare time, and studying engineering texts and government reports after you went to bed, just so he could give it all up and go back to an East coast barren of every mineral except maybe asbestos. You commented often enough how ambitious he was, how hard he worked to make up for the handicap of an aborted education. I think he didn’t stress what your future was likely to be, because he was tender of your homesickness, but he understood it well enough. What he didn’t fully understand, because he was always absorbed in his job, was how dreary long the days were for you, how lonely and how isolated and how strange.

By such devices she perverted his sympathy into agreement with her fantasy that the West for them was only an excursion. Meantime, every day was the same. Morning opened like a great eye, daylight spied interminably upon her habitual activities, evening closed down. The uninterrupted sunshine made her desperate; it was like something she was doomed to.

Everything was static, in suspension, withheld. She lived a sleep-walker’s life, except for the Sundays when Oliver could leave his map and his reports for a few hours and take her on picnics back into the mountain, or the afternoons when he brought home letters that bloomed for her like firelight on loved faces. Time hung unchanging, or with no more visible change than a slow reddening of poison oak leaves, an imperceptible darkening of the golden hills. It dripped like a slow percolation through limestone, so slow that she forgot it between drops. Nevertheless every drop, indistinguishable from every other, left a little deposit of sensation, experience, feeling. In thirty or forty years the accumulated deposits would turn my cultivated, ladylike, lively, talkative, talented, innocently snobbish grandmother into a Western woman in spite of herself.

Willingly or unwillingly, she collected experience and wrote it back East in letters. Perhaps she wrote so fully because she wanted to divert Augusta’s depression. Perhaps she was only indulging her own starved desire for talk.

In the early morning the light leaned on these eastward-facing mountains. She could see it gilding the ridges southward and making a moiré of the varying leaf-faces of oak, madrone, and bay in the gulches. The fogfall that lay along the crest in a cottony roll was as white as the clouds of a fairytale.

Only the heads of the men in the skip were visible from where she stood just outside the door of the shaft house: Oliver, two of his young assistants, two timbermen, and a visiting engineer. The flat sun shone in the door and turned Oliver’s sunburned face to copper, the timbermen’s underground skins to pale brass. The candles on their hats burned with an almost invisible flame. Oliver was taller than the others, she could see him almost to the shoulders. Like someone leaving on a boat or train he smiled and waved. Stranger started forward, and she hung onto his collar.

There was a smell of woodsmoke and steam, the air still cringed from the whistle blast. A bell clinked; she saw Tregoning, the hoist man, reach for a lever. She stepped back a pace in the floury dust. The bell clinked again, Tregoning’s shoulder shoved forward, steam hissed. With a groan as heavy and reluctant as their motion, the two great wheels that rose as high as the shaft-house roof began to revolve. Smoothly the heads sank, Oliver’s last. A hand tossed upward, and she was looking through the empty shack with a black hole in its floor.

Still with her hand in Stranger’s collar, she went inside, up against the plank barrier, and looked down. A gray stir of movement was receding down there. She could see shapes defined by the candles that grew brighter as the skip sank, and then went dimmer, shrank to swimming points, and went out. A damp, warm wind blew up the shaft into her face.

She turned away, she kept her composure, she smiled back at the toothless hoist man and said something cheerful, she let go of Stranger’s collar and sent him wallowing up the trail ahead of her. But her heart was withered in her breast like a prune. She could not bear to think of him down there in the blackness, dropping his thousand-foot plumb lines, gluing his eye to the theodolite eyepiece while an assistant held a candle close, and while the bob, suspended in water to make its motion minimal, moved in its deep orbit hundreds of feet below and the wire which was all he had to measure by shifted its hairsbreadth left or right.

He disliked this surveying, not only because it kept him underground so much but because all work had to stop while the survey went forward. A blast, the passing of an ore car, could throw off his measurements and cause errors of many feet. When work was stopped, the men grumbled, and Oliver, who totted up their weekly production and hence their wages, might be doubly blamed. What was worse for her, if not for him, was that once he started on any leg of his survey he had to stay down till it was completed. The last time, he had been down for nearly twenty-four hours without a break.

He had sunk out of the world, or into it, and she was beached in the interminable sunshine. Ten long sunstruck hours until suppertime, and after that unpredictable further hours of dusk, dark, late reading, before he came home.

The sight of a Chinaman in a blue blouse and slippers, with a bundle of brush on his back and an ax in his hand, trotting down the trail with his pigtail jerking, made her step to one side. He passed her with one sidelong glitter of jet eyes, and left her shivering. The people here were not people. Except for Oliver, she was alone and in exile, and her heart was back where the sun rose.

 

Unending summer. It was hotter at the end of September than it had been in July. But the heat was more seen than felt, more hallucination than discomfort. It turned illusory even the things on which she had fixed in the attempt to make the strange world real. From her temperate veranda she now saw only void where the valley used to be–a gray, smoky void into which she peered, hunting distance and relief from the mirage of mountains that quivered around her with visible heat. The wind that breathed past her and moved the banal bright geraniums in their pots brought a phantasmal sound of bells, and ex pired again, tired as a sigh.

She contemplated a walk and gave up the idea at once. Out on the trails it would be too hot. Stranger was dug in like a barnyard fowl in the shady dust beside the porch. Despite all their efforts, he was still Oliver’s dog, not hers. He was obedient and friendly, but his interest woke only when Oliver came home, and he lay watching the trail for hours at a time.

Down the mountain, moving beyond a curtain of quivering air, she saw the stage coming, perhaps with letters. If she started in five minutes, she would arrive at the Cornish Camp post office at about the same time as the stage. But the post office was in the company store, where there were always loiterers-teamsters, drifters, men hunting work –whom Oliver did not want her to encounter alone. And Ewing, the manager of the store, was a man she thought insolent. She must wait another two hours, till Oliver came home, to know whether there was mail. If the truth were known, these days she always looked at his hands, for the gleam of paper, before she looked at his face.

Bells again, unmistakable. She went around the corner, where the mountain fell away and the veranda stood on posts ten feet high, and looked around the corner of Lizzie’s room to the hill behind. She could see the path, used only by the Mexican packers who brought wood down from the mountain, curving and disappearing among the red-barked madrones. The bells were plain and coming nearer.

Then from out of the madrones came a mule bearing an immense
carga
of split wood. His ears were down, his nose was down, he planted his small feet with reluctant, aggrieved deliberation, holding back against the weight and the steepness of the path, sliding a little, humped up behind, braced in front. The bell around his neck clunked and tunkled with every wincing step. Behind him came another, then another, then another, until there were eight in line; and behind them came an old Mexican with a sombrero on his head, a stick in his hand, and a red silk handkerchief around his neck; and behind him a younger Mexican, a helper, a Sancho, almost invisible in his nonentity.

The mules stopped. Their heads drooped, their ears waggled forward, they snuffed hopelessly at the dusty ground. The leader heaved out his sides and blew a great breath, stirring up dust.
Clunk
went his bell. The old Mexican had his hat in his hand, his brown face turned upward into the sun. He was saying something in Spanish. Since Susan’s Spanish lessons with Oliver’s assistant Mr. Hernandez had gone no further than four brief sessions, she caught only the word
leño,
and perhaps caught that only because of the burden the mules carried.

Pointing to her breast she said carefully,
“¿Para me?”

“Yes. Well, you may put it under the porch there, I know that’s where Mr. Ward wants it ”

By signs she made him understand. He had great theatrical gestures–swept on his sombrero, blasted Sancho with a volley of orders, fell upon one of the mules and began to loosen the hitch that held its load. The whole event suddenly acquired gaiety, it was an occasion, it so lifted the tempo of the listless afternoon that Susan ran inside and got her sketch pad and drew them as they worked. Sight of the growing pile of firewood, like the stacks her father used to stretch in October between two oaks down by the sheepfold, set her to thinking, as one might let his mind stray to the images of some secret vice, of the Franklin stove inside, polished like an art work, waiting for the time when all this sun would be quenched and Mrs. Oliver Ward could sit with her husband through long evenings by an open fire, preferably while blasts howled without. This was a girl who almost illustrated
Snowbound,
and should have.

The unloading and stacking took three quarters of an hour. When it was done, Sancho disappeared, vanished, stood on three legs among the hipshot mules. She imagined sores on his withers like the raw patches on theirs, and a stripe down his back and three or four stripes around his legs like some of them, as if there were zebras among their mutual ancestors.

The old Mexican again had his hat off. God knows how she looked to him up there on her high porch in her high-necked dress with a brooch pinned at the throat, her face rosy, her sketch pad in her hand. By that time she was well known as the lady who drew; many had met her on the trails carrying her pad and her little stool.

He said something.
“¿Como?”
she said, imitating him, and was shot to pieces by his reply, of which she understood not one word. Finally she comprehended that he wanted his pay. How much?
¿Cuanto?
They counted it out for each other on tongues and fingers:
cinco pesos.
But when she had gone in for her purse and come outside again she could not devise a way of handing the banknote to him. He was ten feet below her, the mountain fell away steeply, the wind had begun to blow. If it blew the bill into the brush he might never find it. The old man at once understood. With a gesture out of opera he untied the handkerchief from around his neck, rolled it into a ball, and tossed it up to her.

Susan made an instinctive move to catch it, and then pulled back her hands. The handkerchief fell on the veranda floor. She stared down at the craning old man, whose brown neck, with the handkerchief removed, showed deep creases in which the sweat of his labor had deposited channels of dirt.

“Lizzie!” Susan said.

Lizzie came out through the kitchen door, and the old Mexican’s admiration was doubled. Another beautiful one. This house of the engineer was full of them. With her purse open, Susan said, “Lizzie, will you pick up his handkerchief, please?”

Lizzie picked it up, Susan laid a five-dollar bill in its center, and Lizzie folded it and tied its corners and dropped it into the old man’s upstretched hand.
“Gracias,
much’ grac
’,” he said, and then something else. Expectant, he stood looking upward.

“What is it?” Susan said. “What do you want?
¿Que
. . . ?”

He held out his hand, and gazing at it with admiration he appeared to write on his extended palm. “I think he’d like to see your drawing,” Lizzie said.

Reluctantly, hoping he would not take hold of it with his hands, she turned the pad down toward him so that he could see. His arm would not stretch so far, he craned and squinted with the sun in his eyes. Impulsively Susan tore the sheet off the pad, and with gestures that he was to keep it, dropped it down toward him. It planed on the wind, and he pursued it with agility, captured it in a clump of coyote brush. He admired it extravagantly, all but kissing his fingers. A masterpiece.

“Por nada,”
she knew enough to say in response to his multiple thanks, and she gave him her best adios when he roused Sancho and the other mules and they circled back up the hill and around the house to the trail. The last she saw of the old man he was holding the picture against his chest as tenderly as if it had been a holy relic.