Free Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner Page B

of canvas. And now, from the corner of the house, voices. There are Sid and Charity, dressed for outdoors, full of urgency. Can we come on a picnic? Since we have no telephone yet, they took a chance and just made a lunch and
came.
Last night was their wedding anniversary. They were going to pour champagne for a finale, but then the Ehrlich business sort of damped the party and they didn’t. But they want a celebration, and they want us along. They know a hill out in the country where you can see a long way, where last spring they found pasqueflowers, and where now there might be hickory nuts. No need to bring anything—it’s all packed.
    Vigorous, vital, temperate, and hence not hung over, they flush us out of our culvert of duty. We bundle our books and papers inside the basement door, we manage to contribute some apples to the picnic supplies, and we pour around the house to their car.
    Out in front, the mailman is just arriving. He hands me a letter and I see the return on the envelope. My eyes jump to meet Sally’s. A hope as startling as a stray bullet ricochets off up Morrison Street. When I stick my finger under the flap, Sally frowns slightly: Not now, don’t open your mail in public. Sid is holding open the station wagon door.
    But I can’t wait. I never could. I have been opening my mail in public all my life. I can no more refrain than Noah could have refrained from taking the sprig of green from the dove’s beak. Already moving to get in the car, I rip open the envelope and snatch a look. I let out a yell.
    Sally knows instantly, but Sid and Charity stare. “What is it? Is it good news of some kind?”
    I pass Sid the letter.
Atlantic
wants my story, the one I wrote in the week before the beginning of classes. They will pay me two hundred dollars.
    The Langs join us in a war dance around the station wagon, and all the way out into the country their excited faces turn from the front seat to shine on us. They ask a hundred questions, they burst with pleasure, they warm us with their total, generous happiness in our good luck. Everybody’s tap is wide open.
    Once we have parked and started down a country road between stripped cornfields, with crows cawing over, Sally and Charity go on ahead. Sid carries a big Adirondack pack basket that he will not let me spell him with. The girls, after their first briskness, dawdle, stopping often to examine roadside weeds, and we consciously slow our pace so as not to catch up.
    I can hear Charity’s high animated voice doing most of the talking. She is endlessly volatile and enthusiastic and provocative. I gather that she is back on baby-making, telling Sally not to be afraid, to
give
herself to it and get the most out of it. Herself, she intends this time to be conscious the whole time. She will not take any ether unless it gets unbearable, which she does not expect it to do, being the third time. She has worked out a system: She will take a little flag into the delivery room, and when she can’t bear any more, if it comes to that, she will raise the flag as a signal to the anesthetist. She wishes she could rig a mirror so that she could
see
the birth.
    I am guessing, but not wildly. Their talk often goes like that. As for me, I walk in the mellow sun with that letter in my shirt pocket as warm as if it had life. Two hundred dollars are a tenth of a year’s pay. I wrote that story in a week. If I could go on doing even a quarter that well and that fast, I might double Wisconsin’s salary. I tell myself I will do just that. I decide that for Christmas I will get Sally a portable phonograph and some records, to cheer up her basement during the winter months and give us something to listen to together, the way the Langs do.
    Beside me, Sid walks under his pack basket as if it weighed no more than his shirt. He is earnest, I have discovered. His grappling, wrestler’s mind is not quick, but it will not let go of an idea until he has pinned it or it has patted the mat.