In the fresh air I light my first cigar of the day, and break the match before I drop it. My chair is a nest of cloth and paper at least as flammable as the California roadside. Then I wheel in, leaving the door open for Ada, and hitch onto the lift and float up into the airier, brighter upper hall. As I detach myself and turn, I can see the study door and the windows in line with it, the pines stirring beyond the windows, the desk waiting with its piles of books and folders of papers and photographs—home of a kind, life of a kind, purpose of a kind.
Do werewolves feel this sense of safety as they creep back just at dawn into some borrowed body?
My mornings are peacefully my own, except for a little conversation-break with Ada when she comes up to make my bed and do up my dishes and get my lunch. If the Giants are on the road, I eat on the porch, listening to the game on the radio. After lunch I lie down for a half hour, more for the change of position than because I need a nap. At any time between one and one thirty—she is no clock watcher —Shelly appears, and we spend an hour or two running down the answers to problems I have encountered during the morning. At three, leaving her to type whatever needs typing, and get ready whatever papers I will need the next morning, I go down into the garden for my daily Gethsemane with the crutches. And even that, because I impose it on myself, I can take a sort of Calvinist pleasure in.
Every association in this place is safe, enduring, and right. The only intrusion is the one I let in myself when I enlisted Shelly, and with Shelly all her grubby entanglements. He is gone, thank the Lord, having appeared to me only once like Peter Quint passing along the edge of the garden—outside, and looking in, but without any particular threat to me. Why should he be interested in me? If he was hanging around figuring out how to leave some cannibal tracks to scare Shelly, as I suppose he was, I would be nothing to him, just the old crip who owned the place. I looked up from my hobbling and there he was across the fence, with his thin ascetic beard and his beaded headband and his purple pants and knee-high moccasins, not sneaking, just strolling with his hands behind his back, following the fence. I went on pegging and swinging, forcing myself through the fifth or sixth or seventh lap, I don’t remember, and we passed like casual walkers in a street. He looked at me pleasantly, he wagged his head in appreciation of what we shared. “Great day,” he said. “Great country,” and passed on, through the pines. Whose woods those were, I think I know, and they were not his.
Shelly by that time had moved back to her family’s house. I assumed she thought he had gone, and so I warned her that he was still around. “I know,” she said. “I’ve seen him.”
“You’ve seen him?”
“Yes, twice.”
“Talked to him, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“No problems?”
“Not really. I’m not going back, but he’s all right.”
“Have you told your family?”
“What for? They’d just get uptight and try to have him arrested or something.”
“Why’s he hanging around? Still trying to persuade you?”
“He likes it here,” she said, and shook her hair back, laughing her ho ho ho. “Isn’t it a gas? He loves the country. Why didn’t you tell me about Grass Valley?’ he asks me. This is a place, this isn’t just Anywheresville. This is a place where a man could live.’ He might just settle down here. Wouldn’t that be great?”
“Would it?”
“No,” she said. “He’s just talking that way to bug me. You know, if he can’t make the mountain come to Mohammed, he plays like Mohammed will come up on the mountain. It’ll wear out. He’ll go back to where it’s at. This isn’t his scene.”
She read him right, he did go back. But he wasn’t through laying down cannibal tracks, as witness that business yesterday afternoon.
I was on the piazza, just getting back into my chair after my nap, when this Parcel Delivery truck pulled into the drive. The driver hopped out with a clipboard in his hand and started up the steps. He saw me before he punched the doorbell.
“Rasmussen?” he said. “Care of Hawkes?”
“You should have turned off this lane at the next driveway down,” I told him. “What is it? Mrs. Rasmussen works here, she’ll be up in a few minutes.”
“Canaries,” the driver said.
“Canaries?”
“Twenty-four canaries.”
Just at that moment Shelly came up behind him, around the corner. “Hi,” she said. “What is it?”
“Man says he has twenty-four canaries for you.”
“What?”
“Don’t look at me,” the driver said. “I’m just the delivery boy. Twenty-four canaries from the Emporium in the City. Where do you want ’em?”
“I don’t want ’em at all,” Shelly said. “This is some God-damned joke.” She went to the idling truck and looked in. The driver opened the back doors and reached out a lightweight, paper-wrapped parcel five feet high and three feet through. He pulled off the paper and there they were. From where I watched from the top of the ramp there looked to be more than two dozen, in a wicker cage.
“Who sent them?” Shelly said.
“The Emporium.”
“Let me see the bill.”
He handed her the clipboard. The canaries were beginning to trill and chirp, now that light came into their cage.
“Oh, that son of a bitch,” Shelly said. She handed the clipboard back. “Take ’em back, it’s a bum joke.”
“Jeez, I don’t know.”
“Take ’em back,” she said again. “I’ll call the Emporium and straighten it out.”
Shrugging, the driver put the cage back into his truck and drove off. Shelly came up on the piazza to where I sat—I have to admit, laughing. I said, “It seems a shame, they might have brightened up the house. One for every room.”
“Oh, man!” She flopped on the steps beside the ramp and took a strand of hair in her mouth and scowled down into the roses. She spit the hair out. “Didn’t I tell you? His jokes draw blood. A present. A little gift from my loving man. Charged to me. The son of a bitch stole my charge card when I gave him my purse to get himself some cigarettes. He’ll flood me with presents! I’ll be straightening out his God-damned cute tricks from now till Christmas.”
I suppose she may, at that. I wiped the smile off my face and suggested that she make her telephone call so we could go up and get to work. After an incredulous instant in which she looked as if I had suggested she bring her typewriter to somebody’s funeral, so we could get off a few letters while we waited for the praying to begin, she did just that.
I wonder what Grandmother would have done with such a husband? Answer: She would never have got mixed up with him in the first place. I suppose in a way we deserve the people we marry.
IV
LEADVILLE
1
Today was Rodman day. He might as well have put a gun to my head.
He called before nine, saying that Leah was taking Jackie to her camp, and he might drop up if I was going to be home. I wonder where he thought I might be going. I’d be glad to see him, I said, not untruthfully. Ada and I plotted a lunch: avocado salad, a soufflé, garlic bread, a bottle of Green Hungarian. There is simply no sense in letting him think I subsist on canned soup and peanut butter sandwiches.
A little before noon I heard his car in the drive, then the bell. Ada let him in, and they talked a minute or two down in the hollow hall. With all the windows and doors open to let the breeze through, sounds are carried through the house with great clarity.
There is a certain endearing innocence about Rodman—he makes the world’s worst conspirator or gumshoe. It has apparently never occurred to him that he has the loudest voice in the entire world, and that when he wants to be confidential he ought to retreat two miles. He reminds me of Bob Sproul, who was president of the University of Califomia when I taught there, back in simpler times than these. There was a story they always told, that once a visitor came into his office for an
appointment and heard Bob’s voice booming away in the inner office. Sit down, the secretary said, he’ll just be a few minutes, he’s talking to New York. It seems so, says the visitor, but why doesn’t he use the telephone?
That’s Rodman, to the life. He bellows at Ada in a way to rattle the windows. “Hi, Ada. Hot enough for you? How’s everything? How’s Pop?”
“Doin’ just fine.”
“How’s the pain? Any better?”
“Well, how would a person know? He don’t tell you when he hurts, he just takes his aspirin. Some day he’s just goin’ to blow up with those aspirin, two dozen a day.”
“Sleeps all right, does he?”
“He seems to sleep pretty good. I put him to bed about ten, and he’s up at six.”
“You work a long day.”
“Oh, I don’t get him up. He gets himself up. He’s up and down that lift, and out in the yard every afternoon. You’d be surprised what he can do for himself.”
“No I wouldn’t,” Rodman says. “I’m surprised he hasn’t started playing golf.” His voice drops a few decibels, the vase of marguerites on the desk quits trembling. “Any signs of, you know, failing? Still seem to have all his buttons?”
“Oh, buttons! Don’t you worry about his buttons!” (Atta girl, Ada.)
“No problems like Grandpa’s.”
I can’t quite hear Ada’s reply. She knows, if Rodman doesn’t, how sounds carry up the bare stairs, and I suppose it embarrasses her to be passing on my sanity in my hearing. I know what she thought of Father. He was such a gloomy man, she has said more than once. Just sat and stared at nothing for hours at a time, and got up and walked off without a word right while you were talking to him. Lived in some world off by himself. Got stingy, too, as he got worse—saved little scraps of things in the icebox, would have lived on scraps if she hadn’t kept an eye on him. I am not like that, am I, Ada? Make a joke now and again, don’t I? Show my appreciation of what you do for me? Did Father ever have a drink with you at bedtime, or sit on the porch with you and Ed drinking beer and watching the ballgame?
“Well, good,” says Rodman’s voice. “Great. We want him to go on just like he is, as long as he can manage. Where is he, up in his study?”
“Where else?” Ada says. “He’s at that desk all hours. You go ahead on up, it’ll do him good to take his eyes out of a book for a minute. I’ll holler when lunch is ready.”
Hard heels on the thin Beluchi rug, then on wood. He must wear leather heels, maybe with taps. I wonder if he’d begin to doubt his existence if he couldn’t hear himself? He says from the bottom of the stairs, “How’s this lift work? Can I ride up without a ticket?”
“Just stand on the step and push the switch,” Ada says. “I ride it all the time, it’s a real leg saver.”
Murmur of the moving lift, the big laugh rising with it. Then the click of its stopping, the hard heels on bare boards. “Pop? Hey Pop, you there? It’s Rod.”
I push back from the desk, where I have been examining some F. Jay Haynes stereoscopic views of Deadwood in the 1870s, and swing my chair around. “Rodman!” I say. “What’s the idea, sneaking up on me that way?”
Impervious, burly, bearded, beaming, here he comes with his hand out. Now take it easy, you oaf, my hand won’t stand... Oh, Jesus.
Contrite, he releases me. “Whoops, sorry. Hurt your hand?”
“No, no.” I let the hand down carelessly on the chair arm. Afterwhile the bones will work back into place, especially if I can catch him looking the other way and flex the fingers a little. “How’s school?” I say. “Classes all over?”
“Classes all over, grades all in. I’m clean. How are you getting on with your book?”
“It keeps me out of mischief.”
“I’ll bet. Ninety years of Grandmother’s life ought to keep you out of mischief till the twenty-first century. How far have you got her by now?”
“I’ve got her back to Milton, New York. Grandfather’s in Deadwood.”
“Deadwood? Wasn’t that kind of a wild camp? Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane and all that?”
“Rodman,” I say, “you’ve been reading history.”
“You never gave me proper credit. I’m not opposed to history if it’s interesting.” Grinning, he leans to look at the stereopticon slides spread along the desk. “Is this Deadwood? Looks like a movie set.”
“It has been, plenty of times.”
“I didn’t know your grandfather ever got into anything like that.” He picks up the stereoscope and slips a picture into the slot, takes it out and slips in another. “It really is like a movie set. Look at all the guns on these guys. Anything exciting happen to him there?”
“He never shot it out with Wild Bill Hickok, if that’s what you mean.”
Lifted viewer, ironic eye. “All right, Pop, all right. What was he doing there?”
“Building a mill ditch for George Hearst’s Homestake mine. Ever hear of the Homestake?”
“I’ve heard of Hearst. Not the Homestake.”
“Last time I looked it had produced a half billion in gold.”
“And Great-grandpa built the mill ditch,” Rodman says. “Good for him.”
He irritates me, he always does. Nothing is interesting to him unless it’s bellowing as loud as he is. I say, “Ever try living in a tent through a Dakota winter? That’s excitement enough to last anybody a while. Ever see Buffalo Bill Cody and Captain Jack Crawford ride their horses onto the stage of the Bella Union Theater to re-create Buffalo Bill’s single-handed killing and scalping of the Oglala chief Yellow Hand?”
He is looking into the viewer again. “The real Buffalo Bill?”
“I don’t know that there were any imitations. Unfortunately Captain Jack’s horse got cutting up, scared of Captain Jack’s warbonnet, and he shot himself through the leg and brought down the curtain.”
“You mean they were putting on an act with live ammunition?”
I say ironically, “The West was not built with blank cartridges.”
“Great,” Rodman says. “Now you’re talking. What else?”
“So Grandfather lived in his tent in Blacktail Gulch and built George Hearst’s mill ditch and George took a fancy to him and wanted him to become one of his affidavit men. That means somebody who swears to false testimony in court to get Hearst control of another claim. So Grandfather said, ‘George, I guess you don’t need me any more,’ and got on the stage for Cheyenne, and then on the train for Denver, and on the Denver train he met a little farmerish man who said he owned a mine in Leadville that some jumpers were trying to horn in on, and he could use a mining expert who would study the mine, survey it, and testify when the case came up. That little man was Horace Tabor. Ever hear of him?”
He lowers the stereoscope and regards me with a smile behind which things are going on like shadows passing across a drawn blind. “You’re really full of it, aren’t you?”
“What’s the antecedent of ‘it’?”
He throws back his head and roars with laughter. I can see the strong cords in his neck where his beard thins out. “O.K., Pop, I wasn’t trying to put you down. I think it’s great you’ve got something that interests you this much. I’m glad Great-grandpa got to Deadwood, too. It’ll add some zing to your book.”
“I’m not going to put any of that in,” I say.
“You’re not? Why not? You know all about it. You’re writing a book about Western history. Why leave out the colorful stuff?”
“I’m not writing a book of Western history,” I tell him. “I’ve written enough history books to know this isn’t one. I’m writing about something else. A marriage, I guess. Deadwood was just a blank space in the marriage. Why waste time on it?”
Rodman is surprised. So am I, actually—I have never formulated precisely what it is I have been doing, but the minute I say it I know I have said it right. What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engin
eer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That’s where the interest is. That’s where the meaning will be if I find any.
In my peripheral vision I am aware that he is looking at me steadily, but I don’t turn. I look a while at the gun and bowie and spurs above the desk, where Grandmother put them. Then I turn a half circle and look at Grandmother’s downcast, pensive portrait. Up here in the study it is beginning to be hot.
“A marriage,” I say. “A masculine and a feminine. A romantic and a realist. A woman who was more lady than woman, and a man who was more man than gentleman. I don’t give a damn if he once saw Wild Bill plain. He couldn’t have, anyway, because Wild Bill was killed at least a year before Grandfather blew into Deadwood. I’m much more interested in quirky little things that most people wouldn’t even notice. Why, for instance, did he send the Christmas presents he did from Deadwood—a bundle of raw beaver pelts and an elk head the size of a good-sized woodshed? What would he do that for? It’s as nutty as Shelly Rasmussen’s nutty husband sending her twenty-four canaries.”
“He did?” Rodman says, delighted.
“Yes, but that’s not what I’m talking about now. I’m talking about Grandfather, who wasn’t a kook, but who still sent those things, as if he was insisting on something. It’s like that horse pistol up there that he brought to his courting and laid out on her Quaker dresser. He wanted to be something she resisted. She was incurably Eastern-genteel, what she really admired was a man of sensibility like Thomas Hudson.”
“Who he?”
Angle of Repose Page 24
