Angle of Repose (16 page)
Walking back along the black lane, with Oliver’s lantern throwing blobs of shadow ahead of them and lighting the dusty roots in the bank, she had a few minutes of near-panic. Physically it was like any other country lane at night; it might have been the lane between John Grant’s and her father’s. But already, back of them, she heard the loud voices of men, and she knew that in a half hour or so they would be louder yet.
“Will they come, do you think?”
He put his arm around her. “Not a chance. They just wanted an excuse to bum a treat ”
“Why did we leave, then?”
“So I could have you to myself.”
He had her to himself so close that they lurched and stumbled in the trail.
2
For three more mornings she awoke in her bare room, breathing air strangely scented and listening to the strange sounds that had awakened her: once the bells of the
panadero’s
burro coming up the trail with loaves sticking out of the panniers on both sides, twice the distant beating of kettles and hullaballoo of voices yelling in a strange tongue–the Chinese arising in their camp under the hill. Each morning Oliver came in and kissed her fully awake and laid a wild-flower on her breast. Their breakfasts were interrupted by the seven o’clock whistle from the nearest shaft house, and they smiled because for these few days Oliver could ignore it.
panadero’s
burro coming up the trail with loaves sticking out of the panniers on both sides, twice the distant beating of kettles and hullaballoo of voices yelling in a strange tongue–the Chinese arising in their camp under the hill. Each morning Oliver came in and kissed her fully awake and laid a wild-flower on her breast. Their breakfasts were interrupted by the seven o’clock whistle from the nearest shaft house, and they smiled because for these few days Oliver could ignore it.
Between the little jobs of getting settled, she added bits to her serial letter. Grandmother did not live in the local color period for nothing. Here, for instance, is the vegetable man:
Lizzie does the buying and I stand around with my Jap umbrella, very much in everybody’s way, and tell what we want. The man is an Italian named Costa. It is delightful to hear him say the names of common vegetables. When he asks me if I want cabbage, as he says it I feel that it must be a most tempting thing. And it is so amusing to hear him reckon up the account–‘One bit carrot–two bit tomato–four bit potato–3 bit apple–2 bit blackberries.’ Lizzie is washing this morning, and the baby sits in a drygoods box on the floor as happy as possible . . . Everything will be so easy that I shall grow fat and lazy. Three times a day we hear steam whistles, and here and there are columns of smoke rising. A heavily laden wagon drawn by mules passes a distant curve of the winding road, but nothing passes us. The place is as orderly as a military post, and as quiet from our remote porch as if every day were Sunday . . . How I wish you could see this place! I have taken no walks because I have no stout shoes, and no clothes until our trunks arrive except winter garments sent last spring as freight. The evenings are so cool I can be very comfortable in a serge dress, and in the daytime I wander about in a white dressing sacque which Oliver says looks “as if the feathers had been picked off the back,” because the puffs and ruffles are strictly confined to the front. I never felt so free in my life, and strange to say it does not seem far off. I feel as if you were as near as at Milton.
A Live White Woman in the Mines, she rose on the fifth morning and drank coffee with her husband before he went off to work, and gave him for the post office in Cornish Camp a letter to her parents and the fat letter to Augusta. Later that morning the trunks arrived by dray, and she spent the rest of the day unpacking. To stack the wood-blocks for
The Scarlet Letter
in the corner cupboard with her sketch pads, pencils, and watercolors gave her an intense pleasurable feeling of being ready to live.
The Scarlet Letter
in the corner cupboard with her sketch pads, pencils, and watercolors gave her an intense pleasurable feeling of being ready to live.
The six o’clock whistle blew while she was changing into a summer dress still warm from Lizzie’s iron. Calling to Lizzie to put the kettle on, she hurried out to the hammock and spread herself there to wait.
I can see her. From here she looks terribly unlikely. She was always careful of her clothes–“Thy dress should be a background for thy face,” I once heard her tell my Aunt Betsy, whose taste was not dependable-and she lived in a time when women wrapped themselves in yards of satin, serge, taffeta, bombazine, what not, with bustles and ruffles and leg-of-mutton sleeves, all of it over a foundation of whalebone. A modern woman in a mining camp, even if she is the wife of the Resident Engineer, lives in pants and a sweatshirt. Grandmother made not the slightest concession to the places where she lived. I have a photograph of her riding a horse in something that looks like a court costume, and another taken at the engineer’s camp on the bank of Boise Creek in the 1880s, with a home-made rowboat at her feet and a tent pitched in the background and her third baby on her shoulder, and what is she wearing? A high-necked, pinch-waisted, triple-breasted, puff-sleeved, full-length creation of dotted swiss or something of the kind. And a picnic hat. In that baldest of their bald frontiers, at the very bottom of their fortunes, she dressed as if for a garden party. I don’t suppose she had a hat on as she waited for Oliver to come back from the mine, that first real day of her housekeeping life, but she probably had everything else.
Shortly she saw him coming through the trees. Stranger lumbered up and went to meet him. Susan waved. In his mine clothes stained with red ore, his boots muddy, his face full of the light the sight of her turned on in him, he ran up the high steps and leaned against the post with his hands behind him and his face stuck out. She kissed it, and still with his hands behind him he fainted against the porch post. “Is this where the Resident Engineer lives?” he said. “You look beautiful. What happened?”
“Does something have to happen before I can look beautiful? The trunks came, so now I can be a wife greeting her husband as he returns from work.”
“I like it. I guess I’ll go back and come home again.”
“No, you’re to stay. Lizzie will be bringing tea.”
“Tea, even.”
She loved the way he leaned against the post. He had relaxed, graceful poses, big as he was. The mine hat with a stub of candle socketed in its front was pushed back on his head, his wool shirt was open at the neck. She probably thought him unbearably picturesque. She could have drawn the two of them just as they stood there, pretty bride and manly husband. Title, something like, “The Return from Honest Toil,” or perhaps “An Outpost of Civilization.” It flooded her with happiness to be there, to have him there, to be able to give him this after so many years of stale crackers and mouse cheese in tarpapered shacks.
He removed his hand from behind him, with a letter in it. “Brought you something.”
She saw by the stationery whose it was, and the hand that snatched it was so greedy that she lifted a look of apology before she ripped off the end. But only one disappointing sheet, and it not even filled. Fear and its verification were all but simultaneous.
I have that piece of thin blue paper, brown along the folds and with its few lines of script faded nearly out. No bold and graceful hand here–a scrawl, and unsigned.
My darling Sue,
This is no letter. I can’t write, I can’t think, and yet I must let you know. Baby died of diphtheria last night. Oh, why aren’t you here! I can’t bear it, everything is in pieces. I could die, I could die.
So in one stroke her picnic in the West was turned into exile. The three thousand miles that had seemed no more than the distance from Milton to New York revealed themselves as a continent. Across that implacable distance a train carrying a message would crawl with the slowness of a beetle. Tomorrow or next day one would start across with the letter she had given to Oliver that morning. She would have given all she owned to have it back, to have back everything she had written since leaving home. For the child must have died on the first or second day of her trip, about the time she was scribbling her impressions of Omaha. All the time she had been crossing plains, mountains, and deserts, all the day she had rested in San Francisco, all the days of her getting used to Almaden, Augusta and Thomas had been suffering their sorrow. Another week, or even more, and the postman would bring to their door not comfort, not the sympathy of their dearest friend, but pages of drivel about Chinese fish peddlers and Italian vegetable men.
She took out of Oliver’s hand the blue sheet, which he had gently removed from her fingers and read. By the trouble in his face she could assess her own. For a second she blazed like a burning tree. She cried out, “I must go back! I must pack at once!” But looking into his serious face she knew she couldn’t. He didn’t have the money to send her. Her own savings must be held for their mutual life, not for the attachments she had left behind. It wouldn’t be fair, though she knew he would agree without hesitation if she asked.
Did she feel trapped in her complex feelings, caught in marriage as she was caught on the wrong side of the continent? I shouldn’t be surprised. For a time, at least, while the inexorabilities of space and time ate into her. They entirely forgot tea, and when Lizzie served supper Susan sat with Oliver at the table, eating nothing herself and almost despising him for his apologetic miner’s appetite. After Lizzie had cleared away, she sat on, writing a passionate hopeless letter, while Oliver smoked his pipe in the other room and watched her furtively under the spurs and pistol and bowie that hung like shy masculine mistletoe in the arch. When she stood up suddenly, he stood up too, but she gave him a quivering smile and said, “Don’t come along. You’re tired. I’m only going out to pick a flower.”
I don’t have the flower, but I have the letter.
Oh my darling, what can I say? It seems so cruel that I did not know by instinct when the blow fell on two hearts so close to mine! If I had only known it, there were signs everywhere as I crossed the country. The bloodred sunsets and pallid moonlight nights were full of foreboding, but I was ignorantly wrapped up in the brightness of life, and would not see that my darling was desolate.
These poor little flowers will all be crushed and withered when they reach you, but they are better than words. They grow along the roadside and keep their meek little faces white and pure in the midst of the dust . . . My heart aches with a load of sympathy for you and Thomas. I do not say much to Oliver because it grieves him to feel that it was he who separated us . . .
Poor Grandmother. She might have lived an idyll in her honeymoon cottage in the picnic West if her heart had not bled eastward. Poor Grandfather, too. Whether or not he felt guilty at having separated those two, he must have thought it almost malicious in Augusta to have her personal tragedy just when she did. Fair means having failed to hold Susan in New York and within the old threesome, she resorted to foul.
Still, who knows, perhaps Augusta’s woe helped weld their incongruities into a marriage. In that remote place, where the country made a great impression on her and the people hardly any, it was as if Oliver were the only man in the world, and hers the only house. Though she followed Oliver wherever she could, to his office in Shakerag Street, to the Hacienda to dine with the Kendalls, to the post office, to the store, to the shaft house when he was going underground, she was much alone. Lizzie, though a good creature, was “not company.” The Cornish wives who came to call gave Susan and themselves an awkward time, finding little to talk of except Oliver’s virtues–“’e do ’ave a way with’im”–and if they came more than once, found their way around to the kitchen door for a comfortable cup of tea with Lizzie.
None of the Cornish people, men or women, attracted her. She thought them crude, she remembered the threatened charivari and the extortion of two barrels of beer from Oliver’s poor purse, she thought their accent barbarous. And when she went walking with Stranger, and met on the trails brown-faced men and women who saluted her with grave courtesy and moved aside for her to pass, watching her out of their Indian eyes, she was tempted by the pictures they made, but would no more have thought of making companions of them than of their burros. In time she came to know a good many faces, but none of them were people.
When she was tired of walking the restricted trails that Oliver’s instructions permitted her–what he called her stomping ground–she worked on
The Scarlet Letter
blocks. If she got tired of drawing, she read on the veranda, mainly books that Thomas Hudson, persistently thoughtful, sent her in her exile. If she was waiting for Oliver she kept to the side facing the trail and the southward spurs of mountain, but now and then, to surprise herself, she walked to the corner and looked down on the hills that collapsed toward the valley. She wrote many letters. A new issue of
Scribner’s,
with things in it by people who had once crowded the summer porch at Milton, was almost as precious as a letter from Augusta or from home.
The Scarlet Letter
blocks. If she got tired of drawing, she read on the veranda, mainly books that Thomas Hudson, persistently thoughtful, sent her in her exile. If she was waiting for Oliver she kept to the side facing the trail and the southward spurs of mountain, but now and then, to surprise herself, she walked to the corner and looked down on the hills that collapsed toward the valley. She wrote many letters. A new issue of
Scribner’s,
with things in it by people who had once crowded the summer porch at Milton, was almost as precious as a letter from Augusta or from home.
Quiet black and white birds with rusty breasts worked among the bushes below her. Now and then one rose to an oak and blew a
cheweee! cheweeee!
into the still, dusty woods. That and the duck and cackle of quail was the only birdsong–a starvation diet after the robins, thrushes, and white throats of Milton summers.
cheweee! cheweeee!
into the still, dusty woods. That and the duck and cackle of quail was the only birdsong–a starvation diet after the robins, thrushes, and white throats of Milton summers.
Oliver was gone from before seven until after six, six days a week. She lived for the evenings and for Sundays. Every night after supper they sat together in the hammock and watched the sun leave the floating crest of the San Jose Mountains eastward, and the valley’s pool of dusty air thicken, darken, flare up, and fade. She felt, I imagine, both trapped with him and abjectly dependent on him. They both remarked on how much they seemed to hold hands.
I feel deeply grateful that these mountains do not close all round us. Across the valley we can look out into a vague misty distance, which is the way back to all we left behind.
In the twilight a strange fancy often comes to me that you are all there in the valley below us. Darkness broods over it, but here and there a light twinkles. I feel sure that you are all there, the Milton people and you and Thomas, all the dear ones who haunt my thoughts. It is a fancy I would not lose, for I am very near you all then.
This is a place to be very happy in–we are–we shall be–but there is a thought in common which we do not often express, but which is the undertone of our life here-that
this
is not our real home, that we do not belong here except as circumstances keep us.
this
is not our real home, that we do not belong here except as circumstances keep us.
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