Angle of Repose (36 page)

“Breakfast on the Franklin, dinner out of a sardine can, supper at the Clarendon. I’m afraid I won’t be here for dinner much.”

“I’m sure you’ll be welcome when you can come,” she said. “But I’ll be busy-you’ll have to keep out of my way. I brought some blocks for a novel of Louisa Alcott’s.”

He said seriously, “Maybe you’ll want to stay at the hotel.”

She pulled off her hat, she made herself at home. Feeling better all the time, she went around examining the cabin. She rocked the table –the sawhorses wobbled. She bent and tried one of the cots, and looking up to find him gravely watching her, she smiled at him with a great rush of affection and said, “I think it will do very nicely here.”

“You could have a lonesome summer.”

“I’ll manage, I’m sure.” He looked so solemn, responsible, and concerned that she skipped up to him and hugged his arm.

“It’s only women we’re short of. Plenty of perfectly presentable men. Plenty of other kinds too. Plenty visitors likewise. I think Conrad and Janin are coming through. Every mining man has to see Leadville once.”

The thought of Oliver’s elegant brother-in-law in that cabin started her giggling. “Can you imagine entertaining Conrad here? Cooking him a steak on the Franklin? Walking around that table with a bottle of wine in a napkin?”

“Do him good. He’s got effete.”

“Anyway, by the time he comes we’ll be fixed up. Can I buy some calico for curtains?”

“I’ll take you to Daniel and Fisher’s tomorrow.”

Just then she looked out the window and saw a man running hard up the ditch bank. Below the standing team he jumped the ditch, and his corduroy coattails flew out behind. “Someone’s coming in a terrible hurry,” she said, and turned in time to see the doorway filled by a very tall young man, panting, ablaze with some news.

“Frank,” Oliver said, “you’re just in time to meet Mrs. Ward, our civilizing influence.”

She thought she had never seen a face more alive. His brown eyes snapped and glowed, he was hot from running, the smile that he produced for her, swallowing both his panting and his news, showed a mouthful of absolutely perfect teeth. “Ah, welcome to Leadville!” he said. “What kind of trip did you have? How’d you like Mosquito Pass?”

“Not as well as I like it here,” Susan said. “It must have been you who had a fire going for us. That made it nice and homey to arrive.”

“I hunted around for flowers,” Frank said. “I wanted to put our best foot forward, but I couldn’t find any feet. Nothing’s out yet. I was going to be here to greet you, too, but they started . . . You almost ran into something, you know that? Did you come through town?”

She saw, or half saw, a look from Oliver that checked him. She said, “We heard a lot of shouting. What was it?”

“A town like this is full of drunks,” Oliver said.

“No!” Susan said, and she may have stamped her foot. “You shan’t protect me from everything! Tell us, Mr. Sargent.”

“Oh, it was . . . nothing much. Little . . . business.”

He looked, breathing hard still, at Oliver. Oliver looked expressionlessly back, and then moved his shoulders as if giving up.

“Tell us,” she said.

He looked at Oliver one last time for confirmation or authority. “They, ah, just hanged a couple of men. Out in front of the jail.”

She heard him with a surprising absence of surprise. It was more or less the sort of thing she had learned to expect in mining camps from reading Bret Harte and
Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.
Examining herself for horror or disgust, she found only a sort of satisfaction that now she had really joined Oliver where he lived his life, some corroboration of her notions of what the wife of a mining engineer might have to expect. “Who?” she said. “What for?”

Sargent spoke directly to Oliver. “One was Jeff Oates.”

Oliver took the word without expression, thought a few seconds, flattened his mouth under the mustache, lifted his blue steady eyes to hers. “Our claim-jumping neighbor. He was a little crazy, like a dog that can’t stand to see another dog with a bone. It didn’t call for hanging.”

“If you ask me,” Sargent said, “he got just what he deserved. You can’t simply go around . . .”

“Who was the other one?” Oliver said.

“A road agent that shot up the stage on the grade yesterday. They had him before he got to English George’s.”

“And he’s dead before another sundown.”

“It had to happen,” Frank said earnestly. “There had to be an object lesson or two. If it isn’t stopped it gets worse and worse.”

But Susan was looking at her husband. “You knew it, didn’t you? You saw what was happening. That’s why we turned up the side hill.”

“It didn’t look good. I couldn’t tell what it was.” Wry-mouthed and squinting, he held her eye. “It’s not the pattern. So far as I know, it’s never happened before in Leadville. If it had, I wouldn’t have let you come. This fireeater here thinks it ought to be repeated, but he’s wrong. If it is, I won’t let you stay. So you cool down, Frank, you hear? The longer we have vigilante law, the longer it will be before we get real law.”

“I suppose,” Susan said, confused. Frank took the rebuke with an exaggerated cringing gesture, protecting his head with his arms as if blows were falling on him.

Oliver said, “At least now you know why that stage driver was coming hell for leather down the pass and would have run over us if we hadn’t got out of his way. You know why I wouldn’t stop for the boys in the bogged-down ore wagon. The way for you to live in this place is to stay out of it.”

 

Frank took the team to the livery stable for them, waving energetically from the buggy while they stood in the door. “What a nice boy,” Susan said “And
handsome.
He looks like Quentin Durward. Do you suppose he’d let me draw him sometime?”

“I expect he’d let you do about anything you wanted. He
is
a nice boy, stays away from women and bottles, knows his business, works hard. You can depend on him. He’s only got one weakness. He’s a warrior, that kid. The worst thing that ever happened to him was that he missed the war. He likes excitement a little too well, he won’t take anything from anybody.”

“No more should he. I’m sure he’s many cuts above the average here.”

“I never doubted it,” Oliver said drily. “Now why don’t I get you a bucket of ice water from the ditch and you can take your bath and then I’ll take you down to supper at the Clarendon. I can’t wait to hear that pandemonium fall silent as I walk you in.”

She was struck by an appalling thought. “Is it near the jail? Would they have . . . ?”

“Cleaned up?” Oliver laughed. “Oates was a Mason. They’ll have him all laid out for a lodge funeral by suppertime.”

She went with him to get the water. “Why do you dip with the current instead of against it?”

“Get less junk in it that way.”

“You know so much.”

He did not reply, only held up his hand. Down below she heard the brassy chords of a band. “Isn’t that something?” he said. “A half hour after they get through the hanging they tootle out the old band and march up and down as if nothing had happened.”

Standing on the ditchbank looking down over the skinned gulch where the town lay fuming, she was face to face with the Western range. The late-afternoon sun rayed out through piled white clouds. Sweetened and mellowed by distance, the music rose up toward them, suggesting order, grace, civilization, Sunday afternoons on green commons. When the music paused, she heard at first only the whisper of the ditch, and then a deeper, farther sound, compounded of boots on hollow planks, stamp mills, voices, rumbling wagons–the sounds of Leadville’s furious and incessant energy. She was thinking of Oliver associated with that productive frenzy, herself as an ally of the music, the two of them together as part of something new and strong.

With the dripping pail in his hand, Oliver watched her, smiling. “Now tell me the truth. Can you manage here, or shall we take you to the Clarendon?”

“Oh, here!”

“You don’t think you’ll get lonesome, away from other people.”

“I’ve got my work. And you said they aren’t people I should live with.”

“We can ride, it’s grand country. Frank or Pricey can take you if I can’t.”

“Who’s Pricey?”

“My clerk. Oxford, don’t you know. Penniless incompetent Englishman.”

“Why it sounds absolutely social. Can we have evenings?”

Squinting against the flattening sun, his eyes were crinkled at the corners like the most flexible leather. The smile hid under his mustache. “How about one tonight?”

Maybe she would have blushed, maybe they would have had a great exchange of speaking looks on the ditchbank, maybe she would have silently rebuked him for unseemly intimations, maybe she would have become giddy, and run, and got him chasing her on that wide-open bench lighted like the stage for a pageant. How would I know? The altitude does peculiar things to people. The one thing I do know is that the misunderstanding that had begun on the pass that morning was all rubbed away, and they began their Leadville life in a state of euphoria.

Even in a Leadville cabin she was coddled.

Those first chilly mornings, she lay in her cot and watched sleepily through her eyelashes as Oliver squatted by the Franklin stove in his undershirt, his suspenders dangling, and blew the coals into flame through a handful of shavings. His movements were quick and sure, he worked intently. Above the darkness of his forearms and below the sunburned line on his neck his skin was very fair. When he opened the outside door the fume of his breath was white and thick, and the vicarious chill made her burrow deeper in the blankets. For a moment he stood there pail in hand, a rude, unidealized figure against a rectangle of bright steel sky–fully adapted, one she could trust to take care of things, a Westerner now of a dozen years’ standing.

The door slammed, she heard him running. In two minutes he was back, the door banged inward, the pail sloshed over as he stepped inside. By that time she had decided to be awake.

How would she have looked, waking up? Because I never saw her anything but immaculate, I can’t imagine her with mussed hair and puffy eyes, particularly when she was young. No curlers, I assume, not in 1879. If she curled her bangs, she curled them with a thing like a soldering iron, heated over stove or lamp. A nightcap? Perhaps. I might go to
Godey’s Lady’s Book
and leam these intimate secrets of the boudoir, I might not. Sears, Roebuck catalogues to tell a historian how a lady was supposed to look when opening her eyes on a new day wouldn’t be along for some years. I doubt that she looked more angel than woman, as the smitten boy at New Almaden had thought. Not to her husband, and at six-thirty in the morning. But maybe even to her husband she shone against the log wall like a saint in a niche. Her rosy complexion would have been rosier from sleep, I suspect; her vivacity not less on the pillow than in the parlor. And she was one who woke chirping. She talked at him as he cooked.

He made the breakfast because, as he said, there was no point in her getting out in the cold, when he was a better camp cook than she was. He was, too, she admitted it. He could broil a steak, fry bacon or eggs or flapjacks or potatoes, make mush and coffee, in half the time and with half the effort she would have expended. He had a trick of chopping up frying hash browns with the edge of an empty baking powder can. He kept insects and dirt out of an opened can of condensed milk by plugging the two holes with matches. He could flip flapjacks so that they alighted in the mathematical center of the pan.

And it was cold. Leadville was said to have one month of summer, but no one would say when it began or ended. It had not yet begun. She propped herself against the logs, bundling into the heartwarmer that Augusta had sent her when she was carrying Ollie, and watched with interest her husband’s efficient movements, thinking that this hour of the morning was their best time together.

“You didn’t tell me when Conrad is coming,” she said.

“Yes I did. Next week.”

“We ought to ask him to stay with us.”

His look went around the cabin, and then he leaned in sideways, squinting against the heat, to turn up the brown crust of the potatoes. “Where’d we put him?”

“I don’t know. I suppose we can’t. It just seems so unhomelike at the Clarendon.”

“He might think it was a little too homelike here.”

“I love it,” she said. “I really love it, all except having to cook and eat and sleep and dress and wash and entertain all in one room. Can we build on an ell before Ollie comes?”

The coffeepot boiled over. He tipped its lid open with the edge of his hand. “You still think you want to bring him out?”

“I’m determined to. I won’t have us separated again for so long.”

The cabin was full of the smells of coffee and bacon, and she shook the covers, flapping away greasy odors, while she watched Oliver fork the bacon onto a tin plate and crack eggs into the grease. He did it with one hand, cracking the shells against the edge of the pan and then opening them upward with his long limber fingers until the insides fell out. She saw them solidify in the pan like golden-hearted, frilly edged flowers.

“Can you ride today?”

“Not today, I’m afraid. I’ve got to go over to Big Evans.”

“Might I go along?”

He considered, squatting. “Not there. I’ll send Frank or Pricey to take you out.”

“Can you make it Frank? Pricey is such a goose. I’m always afraid he’ll fall off, and I have to poke along because he bounces so if we run.”

“It’s easier to get along without Pricey. Anyway you shouldn’t run a horse at this altitude.”

“Yes sir,” she said pertly. “And how did you manage day before yesterday to ride sixty miles? Your horse must be the fastest walker in Colorado.”

“I go fast because I want to get back quick.”