"Rumors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Godbersen Anna)

Six

THERE WERE ONLY A FEW THINGS IN THE LITTLE cabin on the Keller lease, but what was there Will had made a point of acquiring for Elizabeth. In the middle of the dirt floor was a square table that Will had built, and over to the side was an old brass frame bed that he had bought off a wildcatter gone broke up in Lancaster, the same one who had sold them the horse. There was the brass-framed oval mirror that was hung over the tin water basin — both of the same provenance — and it was there that Elizabeth still arranged her hair before dinner every night, usually in a little bun high in the back, like the center of a pincushion. Hair done, water brought up from the well, she had now turned to a task she knew very little of. Elizabeth Holland was attempting, once again, to make dinner.

A clutch of the orange poppies that she had taken from the field yesterday sat in an old mason jar at the center of the table, which was covered with the same canvas they used for everything. Beside them was a little pile of Will’s books — Geological Techniques for Locating Petroleum Beneath the Earth’s Surface and How a Man Digs a Well in the Wild. She had managed to get a fire going in the little iron stove in the corner, but opening the cans of baked beans was proving too difficult for her. The opener was rusted, and she suspected that Will had found it somewhere — a bit of thrift that she would have considered admirable at any other moment, but was currently so distressing to her that she wanted to scream.

This was in fact what she did next. She let out a cry that might very well have been — it occurred to her even as her throat began to vibrate and her lungs became empty of air — the loudest noise she’d ever personally made. When it was over she was still alone, although she felt better. She put her hand on her abdomen and closed her eyes. Her lips turned upward in a slight smile; it was, after all, amusing to think that she was so far away from all those fine things she’d so worked to be and finding herself unequal to even small tasks. To be incapable was as new to her as vociferous outbursts.

She put down the can and sat at the table. It was that part of the day when she usually became conscious of having been alone for a long stretch, after Will had stayed out in the field for many hours with Denny, the partner he’d found in Oakland. Those were hours beyond her realm, and she didn’t try to understand what they did out there. The world of labor had always been Will’s world, and a mystery to her, and while this had once seemed like a plain fact, it did make her feel a little guilty lately. She knew he had spent time setting up their home — which would have been a natural task for a different kind of girl — that he could have otherwise used to explore the field. Elizabeth wanted nothing more than to be with Will, but she couldn’t help but wish — at moments like these, late in the day, when, in New York, the sun would have already gone down — that she could better keep up with him. It was the perfect society girl in her, and she only longed to prepare a frontier supper with half the aplomb she used to deploy chatting with visitors on Sunday in her family drawing room.

She sat there for a while thinking of those people she’d left behind and of those several thousand miles that separated them. She wouldn’t miss them so if only she could see into their lives a little more, if only that distance were slightly more conquerable. Every now and then she would read a week-old newspaper that mentioned some New York news, but that mainly stoked her worry, for it was inevitably about how her mother wasn’t her old self or how Diana still was.

“Lizzy!” Will called before he was even through the door. Elizabeth looked up from the table, and already she was up in his arms. She was in the air and being swung around. Her arms were tight at his neck, and she clung to him, feeling again how right it was for her to be in this place at this time. She was taking in his scent — that mixture of sweat and plain soap and some other musky quality just beyond her grasp — when he spoke in a quiet voice. “Today we had luck.”

He set her down, and as her feet touched the floor, she looked up into his face. It was full of sun and light, and his pale blue eyes looked lucky indeed. “What kind of luck?”

“Oil luck.” He paused and pressed his thick lips together and watched her. His breath made his chest rise and fall under the threadbare collared shirt rolled to his sleeves. His hair was dark from the sweat where it hadn’t been bleached by the sun. “Denny and I, we found it. We found oil — shiny, black oil. You can smell it out there. I just know there’s lakes of it underground. It’s seeping through the rocks. The air is full of sulfur. We’re going to follow what my book says and dig a well and sell it to the refinery in Lancaster, and then we’ll be able to hire more workers. For a while we’ll have to spend everything we make. But it’s right here — we’re just sitting on it, the thing that’s going to make us rich.”

Will had been speaking so quickly and with such excitement that he had to stop and take several breaths. But the energy was in his face and body; he was heaving with it. He took off the serge trousers, which he wore every day when he left home, because they were smeared with the sticky black stuff. He put on the long underwear he wore to sleep in, all the while telling her how oil was extracted and how much he thought would be there and what barrels of crude were selling for these days. She hung the trousers on the back of the bed, so they wouldn’t soil anything else, and watched Will as he went to open the can of beans and continued talking about the team he would need to hire and what the returns would be.

Elizabeth’s cheeks had risen in one of those radiant smiles that used to be wasted on brocade, or the gift bags at balls, or salmon mousse. She was surprised to find it was not for this mineral wealth, however — all that still seemed like some far-off fantasy. It was for Will as he would be. There would be successes, whether they began with the oil field or not, and after that he would become one of those men they wrote about in the adventure magazines — about his mythic youth and his great business acumen and all the intelligent choices he had made along the way. He would be shrewd and hard with people who needed it, but he would be fair and looked up to. He would be the head of a family, and he would help those people who were deserving and in need.

The softness would go out of his face, but the crooked nose would remain the same. They would grow older and see the world change together. They looked at each other for another long moment, and then she moved in, pressing her body against his body, feeling his heart beating in his chest.