Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

  “Turtles can’t sing,” Ollie said. Languid after his afternoon in the sun, he leaned inside his father’s knees and picked at the broad gold wedding ring on the hand that loosely held him there. The sun in that one afternoon had turned him pink.

  “Only snapping turtles,” Frank said. “Wait.”

  His dark head bent over the mandolin while he tuned it, he seemed to Susan a dear friend, a brother, a handsome and carefree boy rather than an assistant engineer who stood off claim jumpers with a Winchester. The way his eyes touched her, the way he smiled, made her tender. Everything had in one day grown gentler and more endurable. Oliver, sitting against the log wall with Ollie between his knees, looked domestic enough to be drawn for Hearth and Home. Just beyond him, Pricey hugged his knees. He had that habit of edging as close as he could, and then making himself silent and invisible. Even the roofs of town, the torn-up hills and ugly shaft houses of Leadville, looked picturesque in that light, and the evening noise of the streets below was no more than a tremble on the air. The plink of Frank’s tuning was thinly musical, tunelessly incessant, like the fiddling of a cricket.

  When he was ready, Frank plinked out a minstrel tune. He played well enough; Susan declared happily that he was a master. “Good enough for those turtles, maybe,” he said. “What’ll we sing? Name something, Ollie.”

  But Ollie lay back against his father with his thumb in his mouth and had no ideas.

  “Come on, Ollie,” Susan said. “Take that old thumb out of your mouth, that’s a good boy. What do you want to sing? What do you like?”

  He still had no ideas. The thumb that his father had pulled out of his mouth slipped back in. “He’s tired,” Oliver said. “Want to hit the hammock, old boy?”

  The answer was small, querulous, muffled by thumb, negative.

  “Too much sun, perhaps,” Susan said. “He’d better go soon. But he has to hear the turtle first. Start something, Frank.”

  Frank started “Sewanee River.” After a quavery bar or two he got his confidence and sang out. He had a good baritone voice; the mandolin shivered against it like a girl in white backed against a dark tree. Susan came in with the alto part, Oliver with a growling bass. To Susan’s ear they sounded quite good. Then high and sweet, a tree-toad sound, here came Pricey’s tenor and made them whole. They rounded their eyes at one another, pleased; they rounded their tones and leaned together. After two bleak months they sang like mockingbirds on a May Sunday, and loved every sound they made. At the end, which they drew out long, they broke up in laughter, clapping, praising themselves.

  “Aren’t we good!” Susan cried. “We sounded absolutely professional. We could hire out in bar rooms or give concerts at the Great Western. Pricey, you’re wonderful! I didn’t know you could sing. You too, Frank. You’ve got a very nice voice. You’re so true.”

  Friendly and full of laughter, their eyes touched. She saw that he wanted to take her remark in more ways than she had meant it. Why not? He was true. Neither she nor Oliver could have done without him. But there was even more in his brief, laughing look, and she acknowledged that too. His adoration made her feel excited and flirtatious, the way she was often made to feel by agreeable company and dress-up clothes. She could feel her color come up.

  “More!” she said. “What do you know the words to, Pricey? Hymns? ‘Abide with Me? ‘Ein Feste Burg’? Turn Ye to Me’? ‘Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes’? Let’s sing them all, let’s sing all night!”

  They filled the dooryard with harmonies while the sun set and the west died out and the bats began to stitch through the darkening air. It was like an hour of thanksgiving for their emergence from trouble. And there sat Pricey, singing away with never a stammer, knowing the words to everything, even songs that she had thought of as strictly American. The day had brought him out like a flower. Surely, now, they were past their bad time. Above the Western range Venus was large, white, and steady.

  “Sing, Ollie,” she said. “You know some of these songs. Sing ’em out. Or are you still sucking that old thumb?”

  “He’s a little cold, I guess,” Oliver said. “He’s shivering.”

  “Why didn’t you get him a blanket?”

  “And interrupt a song?” He laughed and bent over the top of Ollie’s head to look at him. “You cold, boy? Want a blanket, or are you ready for bed?” Ollie made no answer. “Hey,” his father said, “you are shivering. It’s not that cold.”

  Tense with premonition, Susan was on her knees. “Maybe he got too much sun, he looked quite pink.”

  “I think he’s playing jokes. Come on, Old Timer, you don’t have to shake as if it was thirty below.”

  He lifted the boy to his feet and turned him around, peering at him in the dusk. He shuddered and shook in his father’s hands, his teeth clacked. Even before Susan could scramble across to feel his cold face, before she got him inside and lighted the lamp and saw his fingers fish-white, his nails blue, she knew. The ague fit, the return of the old Milton curse. In a few hours he would be burning with fever, in another few soaked with sweat. It would go on that way for weeks, ague fit, fever fit, sweating fit, a few days of delusive well-being, and again the ague fit, the whole cycle, every cycle leaving either the disease or the patient weaker, until one or the other wore out. And nobody to take him to in Leadville except the drunken doctor from whom she had rescued Pricey.

  10

  I can remember from my childhood how uneasy Grandmother could make a sickroom. “Let the child alone,” Grandfather would growl at her. “Let him sleep it off.” That was his way—turn his face to the wall and turn down his metabolism until something inside told him he was well enough to get up. But Grandmother treated illness the way she treated her insomnia. She could never simply lie still until she fell asleep. There was always some last-minute adjustment, some final arrangement for relaxation-a glass of water, a little bicarbonate to settle her stomach, a fresh pillowcase, a pulling-down of the blinds to shut out a crack of light, the checking of the front door lock or the drafts of the stove. By the time she got fully ready to sleep it was time to get up.

  So with illness. Her chilly hand was always being laid on the hot forehead of suffering. She woke you to see if you didn’t need something to make you more comfortable. She listened to your breathing, studied your clouded eyes and coated tongue, sighed and clucked and murmured, went away reluctantly and left you alone and was back before your eyes could close. The Chinese farmer who kept pulling up his rice to see how it was growing was a relaxed man beside Grandmother. It was a wonder Father survived his measles and chickenpox, much less his malaria. It was a wonder she did. After a week of crisis she was as attenuated as wire sculpture, with eyes that she would describe, looking with distaste into the mirror, as two burned holes in a blanket.

  This time Ollie’s sickness was so violent, his chills so wracking, his fever so high, his sweats so profuse, that she slept only in catnaps, dozing in her wakeful chair a half hour now and a half hour then when Ollie seemed well enough to be left to Oliver or Frank. She didn’t trust them to detect danger signs. The very fact that she must leave them to do what she herself, exhausted and muddle-headed as she was, was the only person capable of doing-that woke her from uneasy sleep and set her on her feet toward the bed before she knew where she was.

  She hardly noticed the routines of her house. Someone did most of the cooking, but whether she or Oliver or Frank she could not have said. Someone took furtive Pricey away, and in a lucid moment she noted that he was gone, but forgot again before she could ask what arrangement had been made for him. Someone brought the German woman around to do up washings every two or three days, for with wet sheets for the fever, and towels for the sweats, and changes of night-clothes daily, there was a linen crisis, but she hardly noticed the woman’s presence or the copper boiler steaming on the stove. She only snatched whatever she needed off the line as soon as the wind had dried it.

  Like a burning glass she focused on her big-eyed child with his.
terrifying pallor and his pitiful thin neck and his terrible gentleness. She sat watching by his bed for hours on end, and when he woke to himself, and neither shook nor burned nor sweated, she would coax Oliver, against his judgment, to carry him out to the hammock where he could lie and see things going on and be part of the family again and delude her with the hope that he was past the crisis; and in a few hours, or a day, she would have to have him carried back to the bedroom frozen-jawed and blue-fingered.

  Six weeks of that. Everything in her life stopped but nursing. She saw few friends—even when they called she hardly saw them—and there were no evenings by the fire, not even with Frank and Pricey. In all that time she apparently wrote no letters except a note to Osgood and Company refusing a contract to illustrate a novel by Mr. Howells. She rejected Oliver’s suggestion that they telegraph one of his Guilford cousins to come out and help. Where would they put her? She would only be in the way. She herself was sleeping in the hammock, Oliver in Pricey’s cot.

  Since there was no way to go but forward, that was the way she went. She never thought to inquire how things went at the mine, she forgot the apprehension that had tightened the pit of her stomach every time Oliver went to work armed like a bandit or a sheriff. All her concern now was to know when he would return to spell her or help her in the sickroom.

  It was August before she was sure Ollie would get well. He had gone three days without a symptom, he was sitting up and taking an interest, he ate the custards and gruels she spooned into him, each morning he was stronger. Still she could not trust herself to sleep, for while she lay senseless, what if the chills returned, what if no one noticed and wrapped him in blankets and the wildcat-skin rug warmed before the fire?

  Then one afternoon Oliver came home with a sleeping draught obtained from the polite drunken doctor whose services she had rejected. She would not take it. She considered sleeping draughts immoral. What if she got the habit? She preferred insomnia to its alarming remedy. If Oliver would promise to wake her in four hours, she would lie down now and sleep, really sleep. If all was well when he woke her, she would go back to sleep for another four hours. That was all she needed. She didn’t trust him to watch for more than four hours at a time. He slept too well, that was the trouble.

  “Drink this,” he told her, “and no more palaver. Ollie’s all right, he’s sleeping now. Have at least as much sense as a four-year-old.”

  Finally, hesitating, fluttering, dreading, changing her mind and having to be persuaded all over again, she drank it and stared at him over the cup as if it had been the arsenic of a death pact. She kissed Ollie’s sleeping face with the emotions of one going on a long journey, and tucked him into his hammock and touched his cool forehead and let herself be led away and put to bed. Within minutes she was up again to lay out the makings of the eggnog laced with brandy that he was to have, to strengthen him, as soon as he awoke. She extracted promises, she took a half-irritable scolding and a kiss, she lay back and braided her hair into pigtails and felt her weakness flow into the bed as if the sleeping potion had begun to liquefy her body. She blinked a tear, and talked a little while Oliver sat at the bedside and watched her. Sometime in the midst of her talking, the potion snuffed her like a candle.

  She awoke to find Oliver sitting just where he had been when she had dropped off, and thought she had only drowsed. Her mouth was fuzzy and her mind felt numb. Then she saw that the blind was up and the window opened on broad daylight. It had been dusk when she went to bed. Morning, then. Oh, good! A bumblebee buzzed in, crawled around on the cretonne flowers of the curtains, and buzzed out again. Oliver was watching her with a slow, amused, memorizing look; she knew that he had been watching her sleep. Rigid with readiness, she sat up. “How is he?”

  “Asleep.”

  “Have you felt his head?”

  “I’ve about worn his skull out, feeling his head. He’s cool, he’s fine.*

  “Did you give him his eggnog?”

  “Three times.”

  “Three times! What time is it?”

  “A little after two.”

  “Oh my goodness! How long have I slept?”

  He consulted his watch. “About sixteen hours.”

  She was awed. “What on earth did that doctor give me?”

  “Just what you needed. What you ought to take every time you get wound up like that.”

  “Oh no,” she said, “no, I couldn’t.” Groggily she turned her head to look at the brightness outside, the brown hill sloping up to aspens that wavered as unstable as water. “You should have waked me up. I’ve kept you from going to the mine.”

  “Frank’s there. There’s nothing to do but wait anyway.”

  “Ah,” she said sympathetically, “I haven’t been paying enough attention to my husband. Is everything still all snarled up?”

  “Still snarled up.”

  “I keep hoping you’ll run into a rich ore body.”

  “We won’t do that unless they give us some money to operate with.”

  “And they won’t do that till the suit is settled.”

  “Maybe it’ll be settled by 1883 or so.”

  She put out a hand. “I’m sorry it’s so hard for you. How’s Frank? He’s been such a lamb about helping out, and I’ve hardly said good morning or good evening. We’ve got to have him up for supper. Tonight. Let’s get the Wards and some others and have an evening again.”

  “That’d be good. Frank would like that.”

  “And Pricey. How is Pricey?”

  He had opened his knife and was working at the horny callus on his palm. His eyes lifted, without any movement of his head, he looked up at her over half-moons of white, so apologetic, ashamed, angry, or embarrassed that he scared her. “Pricey’s gone.”

  “Gone? Gone where?”

  “England.”

  “Did they send for him?”

  “No. I sent him.”

  The tears that welled weakly to her eyes made him swim and flow, fluid and out of focus in his faded blue shirt and blue jeans. “Oh, Oliver, why?”

  “Why?” He sat with his jaw bulging. His knife clicked shut, he stretched his leg to slide it into the tight pocket of his jeans. “Why,” he said, thinking. His eyes came up again, the pupils coldly furious. Every gentle and good-natured line in his face was hardened and coarsened. “Why!” he said a third time. “Because we couldn’t look after him. Because he was in the road.”

  As if the expression on her face maddened him, he moved his shoulders and flattened his mouth. She stared at him through her tears. “If you’re going to ask why we didn’t take him to the mine with us,” he said, “we did. He remembered, he shook like a dog, he was scared to death. I tried taking him along when I had to ride anywhere, but he held me back. Frank tried setting him up in their shack with all the books he could borrow. You’d think that would be Pricey’s dish, but Frank would come home and find him gone, and then he’d have to hunt all over Leadville for him. Once he was in jail—where else would Leadville put a fellow that can’t look after himself? He kept wanting to come up here. I told him Ollie was sick and you were swamped and there wasn’t any room, he’d have to stay with Frank. Where do I find him—not once, three or four times? Hiding behind W.S.’s privy, just hanging around and looking down here like a mongrel dog waiting for scraps to be thrown out the door.” He brushed nothing off the tight thighs of his jeans. “Do you think I liked sending him home?”

  “No. Of course not.” She could not help the weak tears that kept welling to her eyes. They broke through her lashes and ran down both cheeks and she did not wipe them away. “It’s just—he was so helpless. It’s like kittens being put in a bag to be taken to the river. How could he travel?”

  “Frank took him as far as Denver and put him on the Santa Fe and paid the porter to look after him to New York. I wired the Syndicate to have somebody meet him and put him on the boat, and cabled his father to meet him at Southampton.”

  “I wish you’d told me so I could at
least have said good-bye.”

  The fiery cold eye touched her, held a moment, looked out the window. “I didn’t think you needed anything else.”

  “Oh, I know. You were being thoughtful. How did ... When Frank left him in Denver, how was it? What did Pricey say?”

  “He cried,” Oliver said.

  He would not look at her, he stared stubbornly out the window. She let her own wet glance go the same way. Out there the dry hillside shimmered with tears and summer, the aspens flashed light off their incessant leaves, the grasshoppers whirred and arched. A mourning dove was who-whoing off in the timber. In the blinking of a tear it would be fall. She had missed the spring and half the summer, the home that they had bragged they would make at the edge of timberline was a disaster.

  The dove’s long mournful throaty cooing was a dirge for the failed and disappointed, for the innocent and incompetent, themselves not excepted, who wandered out to this harsh place and were destroyed.

  As if he had read her mind, Oliver said, “He never did belong. He never could have made it even if he hadn’t been hurt.”

  “Just the same,” she said. “Just the same! If that Syndicate had any heart it would have done something for him. It didn’t, did it? Who paid his fare?”

  “I did.”

  “And will never get it back.”

  “Do you care?”

  “No. But I hate that heartless mine, all those people so many safe miles away who let people get hurt or killed and never care, so long as they get their dividends.”

  “Which they’re not getting.”

  “They’re too callous to deserve anything. Too timid and too callous. Why don’t we quit?”

  A little laugh was jolted out of him. He looked first out the window and then into his hands, as if in search of something that would catch his eye. “Frank would feel terrible, for one thing. He’d stay here ten years without pay, and trade buckshot with those people every afternoon, just to beat them.”