Angle of Repose (73 page)

But the air, warm or not, was fresher than inside, and there were tendrils of coolness wandering in off the lawn, where Oliver had set the hose cart to irrigate the grass. Suspiciously, as if expecting to smell some sort of incriminating evidence, she sniffed at the mixed odors of hot day and cooling evening–sage, dust, firecrackers, the wet wood of the waterwagon like the smell of an old rowboat, and among these a freshness of wet grass and a drift of fragrance from the yellow climber at the corner. The northwest had cooled from its hot gold, the hills were black against it. But she looked at their silhouette without pleasure, hardly seeing it, intent on the shapes of trouble in her mind.

It was so quiet that she could hear the creak of buggy wheels receding far down the lane toward the road, and the voices of the girls surprisingly clear and close-seeming, though they must have been almost a half mile away. Her first act after waving them good-bye had been to rush into her stuffy bedroom and get out of dress, corset, shoes, everything confining, and into a dressing gown. In her bare feet, shaking the loose gown to get air to her released body, she stood in the doorway and listened to her receding family until she could hear their sounds no more. There was a secret small gurgle of water from the hose, and then in a moment like a sigh the last of the water ran out and that sound too ceased. She listened for the windmill, whose clanging and creaking were as much a part of their days and nights as the wind itself, but could not hear it. The blades must be hanging like a great open flower in the twilight.

She let her weight down, heavy and tired, into the hammock. Bats wove back and forth, utterly soundless, across the openings between the piazza pillars. At first she could see them against the sky, erratic and flickering and swift; then she couldn’t be sure whether she still saw them or whether she only sensed them as movement across the dusk. The house behind her was as dark and empty as herself. Her eyes were fixed on the framed view of mesa, black hills, saffron sky. The last brightness of already-gone day burned darkly on a cloud that went slate-color as she watched. She saw a star, then another.

Utterly cut off, sunk into the West, cut off behind arid hills, she lay thinking backward to another piazza and the smell of other roses. It was hard to believe that they no longer existed, not for her–the old house of her great-grandfather sold to a surly farmhand grown up, the vines of the porch now screening his evening relaxation, the kitchen “fixed up” by his vulgar and ambitious wife. No home there any longer, parents dead, Bessie wronged and ruined, herself adrift in the hopeless West, Thomas and Augusta farther from her in fame and associations even than they were in miles. To sit with them just one evening, an evening such as this! To sit with them even here, on this barren piazza! She acknowledged that all her preparations in this house had had them in mind. When it was ready, when they could be induced, she would offer herself to their love all over again, in her new setting, and prove to them that her years of exile had changed her not at all.

Noiseless as a flower opening, a rocket burst above the hills. She sat up, watching the white stars curve and fall. Then
BOOM!
All the night air between her and the town, two and a half miles of it, trembled with the delayed report.

Pshaw!
she started to think
They won’t be in time, the children will miss it,
and then remembered that from out on the mesa they would be able to see the whole thing as if from a balcony. They would do better to stay out, rather than try to find a place among the crowds drunk on statehood and spread-eagle oratory and worse. The thought of that vulgar little city, and all its sharpers, trimmers, and hopeful naïfs seething with the importance of their moment in history, crawled on her skin like a spider. She heard herself saying to Oliver’s waiting, sober, questioning face, “You go, take Nellie and the children. It means nothing to me.”

What she had meant–and after what they had said to one another in the past two days he could hardly have misunderstood her–was “None of it means anything to me any more. I’m sick and disspirited and without hope. We have bled our lives away in this desert like that watercart draining into the sand.”

“You ought to come,” he had said. “It’ll take your mind off things.”

“I’m tired. I’d rather stay here.”

She could see in his eyes, in the tasting movement of his lips under the mustache, that he felt the blame she could not help laying on him. But she could not make herself smile, or lay a hand on his arm, or send him away with an injunction to enjoy himself.

There was a long, probing meeting of eyes. “No quarter,” he said.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He let it go. “I’d stay here with you, but the children are counting on it, and there’s nobody else to take them.”

“You mustn’t think of not going.”

“I’m sorry.”

Sorry, of course. And what good did it do? He could not be sorrier than she.

Another rocket seared across the sky at an angle and bloomed with hanging green balls. Another went up through the green shower and burst into an umbrella of red. Then three together, all white. Then one that winked hotly but did not flower.
BOOM!
went the cushioning air.
BOOM! BOOM BOOM BOOM! BOOM!

It was hot and close in the hammock. She left it and sat on the warm adobe of the balustrade. Above the town, streaks of smoke were lighted by the rocket bursts. Under the sodden booming she heard a continuous musketry of firecrackers, big and little. She could imagine the boys and drunken men who would be darting around through the crowds on the Capitol grounds throwing cannon crackers under the feet of tied horses and dressed-up girls, and into the buggies of the dignified. Pandemonium, a foolishness costing thousands of dollars. Before morning there would be runaways, clothes and buildings set on fire, fingers blown off, eyes put out. Her family were infinitely better off watching from the mesa.

And yet from a distance how beautiful! There was a colored mist all above the unseen city, as if the smoke of the explosions were now lighted by fires from below. The torchlight parade. The so-called Governor’s Guard, including that wretched Burns, would be parading in their uniforms. She stood up, trying to see better, bracing herself against the warm pillar, and from up there heard, faint and far off, sweetened by distance, carrying wonderfully on the still air, the sound of the band.

And something else: the sound of footsteps coming around the house, solid and heavy on the board walk.

In one motion she snatched the dressing gown around her, crouched and jumped, soft-barefooted, and put herself back into the deeper dark of the hammock. The footsteps ceased, either because the walker had paused or because he had stepped off onto the lawn.

“Anybody home?” his voice said.

Tension flowed down her wrists and away. She breathed once, deeply. “Oh Frank! Come in, I’m on the piazza.”

He stood above her, a troubling shadow, saying, “I thought everybody must have gone in for the celebration.”

“Everybody else has. Wan and Sidonie and John left right after breakfast. Oliver celebrated the Fourth by doing John’s irrigating and I celebrated by cooking two meals.”

He sniffed. “Smells like firecrackers.”

“Can you still smell them? My nose is numb with gunpowder. We’ve been slapping out smoldering clothes and smearing lard on burned fingers all day. The children looked like the children of a charcoal burner.”

“Wiley and I meant to come down, but his mare got cut up in the barbed wire, and we had to doctor her.”

“You only missed a lot of noise and a headache. But the children were happy, and so they were good.”

“I guess that’s what it takes.”

“I guess.”

“And now they’re all gone in to watch the pyrotechnics.”

“They just left twenty minutes ago, they won’t have made it in time. I suppose they’re watching from the road.”

His tall outline lounged across the opening, with the fountains of light playing on the sky behind it. She could barely see his face–couldn’t see it really, only the outline of his head and shoulders. Then he moved abruptly, pulling back against the pillar. “Excuse me, I’m cutting off your view.”

“It’s all right. I’m not child enough to want to watch fireworks long.”

“I was watching as I rode down the bench. Quite a show.”

“Yes.”

The distance rumbled and crackled with the bombardment, the lights flared and hung and died and flared again. “Did you want to see Oliver?” she said. “I’m afraid he won’t be back till quite late.”

“I can see him tomorrow.”

“How are things in the canyon?”

“Glum.”

“They’re no different here. Did you hear about that Burns?”

“Oliver told me. He ought to be lynched.”

From her darkness she studied his shape jackknifed against the sky frantic with bursting lights, and thought of the day she had entered Leadville, the day the man Oates who had jumped Oliver’s lot there had ended his life at the end of a rope in front of the jail. Frank had seen that–it had been an excitement that bulged his eyes and stammered on his lips when she first saw him. She thought also about the story they had heard from Tombstone–the murdered friend, the hard ride after the killer, the body swinging from a tree somewhere down in the Mexican desert. Frank had not only seen that, he had been one of the avengers. Perhaps his hand had knotted the rope or lashed the horse from under or cut the body down. It chilled her to think of. And yet in her present mood she was half inclined to think manly rage a better response to wrong than the self-blame of a man who trusted too much and then refused to condemn.

“At the very least he should be taken to court,” she said. “Oliver won’t. He says it was his own carelessness.”

“Everybody knows what Burns is. Court’s too good for him. A horsewhip might serve.”

“But he’ll neither be horsewhipped nor sued,” Susan said. “He’ll be allowed to get away with it.”

“Would you like me to horsewhip him? I’d love to.”

“Ah,” she said, “you’re a loyal friend, Frank.” Then, because the feeling in her was like a boil that could have no relief except to burst, she burst. “Oh, when I think of Bessie and John I could simply
die!
To think that it’s our fault, and no cure for it!”

Among the fountains of light that arched and showered down, intense green, red, yellow, and blue balls now burned in the air. Because he said nothing, and because she was ashamed of her outburst and afraid of silence, she said, shrugging out a little laugh, “How do they make all those colors?”

“Colors?” Frank said. “Metallic salts. The yellow’s sodium, the white’s magnesium. Red’s calcium, I think, and the green may be copper salts, maybe barium. I don’t really know. I’m no fireworks expert.”

“You’re an expert in so many things.” She felt almost as if she were going to vomit; she had to keep swallowing her Adam’s apple to keep it down. “I can’t imagine how a woman could have lived all those years in the canyon without her Corps of Engineers. That was the best time of all the West. I loved those years.”

He made a small indeterminate noise,
hm
or
mm
or
ha.
The light of a rocket two and a half miles away brushed his face with ghastly green. She saw it shine and fade in his eyes. “I didn’t come down here to see Oliver, you know.”

Almost to herself she said, “I know.”

“I came down hoping they’d all be gone to town but you.”

“Yes,” she said, though she felt she should not.

“I never see you any more.”

“But Frank, you see me all the time!”

“In a crowd. With the family. Always managing a houseful.”

“There’s been so much to do.”

“Well
that
will be changed, at least.”

His laugh was so short and unpleasant that it wrung her heart. The wretched ditch had changed him as it had changed them all.

Beyond his lean profile the lights were coming less thickly, as if both enthusiasm and ammunition had run out. The booming and crackling were dying down, but the reddish mist still hung above the town. Speaking away from her, indifferently watching the dying-down of the fire fountains, he said, “I miss the rides, do you? I miss sitting while you draw me. I miss talking to you. I could stand it if I could just be alone with you once in a while, the way it used to be.”

“But there were three whole years when you didn’t see me at all, and then more than a year when I was in Victoria.”

“Yes. And I’m a dead pigeon the minute I see you again, no matter how long it’s been. Remember that day in the canyon, just when you were getting ready to leave? I had myself all persuaded. You were a friend, no more. Then I looked up from that corral and saw you waving from the doorway and I blew down like an old shed. The whole place was abandoned, there was nothing but failure in sight, and there you were in your white dress looking as cool and immaculate as if you were just about to call on somebody. Going down with all flags flying, the way you would. I don’t know, you looked so brave and untouched up there on the hill, I . . .”

“Brave?” she said in a weak voice. “Untouched? Oh no!”

“Oh yes. You’re one thing I
am
an expert on.”

“There are no flags flying now.”

“Plenty in Boise. Hip hip hurrah. Statehood.”

She had to laugh. “Isn’t it ridiculous? Isn’t it ironic? Isn’t it
pitiful,
even. Years ago, when we left you in Leadville and went to Mexico, I fell in love with Mexican civilization, and the grace of their housekeeping, and the romantic medieval way they lived . . .”

“I know. I read your articles. Down in Tombstone.”

“Did you? Oh, that makes me feel good. I was talking to you without knowing it. Then you remember those great houses we stopped at coming home, Queréndaro, Tepetongo, Tepetitlán, and the others. That’s what Oliver’s dreamed of making here. He wanted to build me such a place. Even the tile floors–those are Mexican. The stone and adobe house, and the way it nearly encloses a courtyard. It was going to enclose it completely some day–well, you remember from the canyon, when we used to plan it so carefully–so from the outside rooms we could look outward on this reclaimed desert, and from the inner rooms we’d see only the protected center–flowers, and stillness, and the dripping of water, and the sound of Wan singing through his nose.”