Angle of Repose (55 page)

It is a life without much stimulation or excitement. The bugles from the cavalry post just above us mark off the days as inexorably as the whistles of New Almaden or the church bells of Morelia. I open my eyes to First Call, rise to Reveille, nurse my baby to Mess Call. When I am working at my desk I am often spurred on by the thrilling notes of the Charge from the drill field beyond our pasture fence. When I hear To the Colors, as they lower the flag in the evening, I know it is time to bestir myself about supper. I go to bed to Taps, and drift off to sleep as Lights Out blows eastward across the mesa, a long, fading, musical relinquishment as sweet and sad as the call of a mourning dove.

The house is comfortable, the children are very well, Oliver’s work goes ahead steadily, I have my own work to keep me from thinking too much about all I left behind, and so I have no right to belittle this place where we shall spend our lives until Oliver gives up being a field engineer. There are one or two Army wives, Eastern ladies, who are good company. The town ladies I can say less for. You never saw such attention to dress and manners, and to so little purpose. They have been eager about paying calls, but most of their calls I shall not return. They may think me snobbish if they wish.

Oliver hoped that I would find the Governor and his wife attractive. We dined with them a few nights ago, and alas, I am afraid I thought him pretentious, his house tasteless, and his wife common. For O’s sake I do not admit this, for the Governor is his supporter, and of much use to him in cutting red tape.

It is strange to find ourselves people of consequence. My old boy has sold them all on his dream. I am sure they all hope to get rich out of him, or richer–some shareholders in the company are the Irish millionaires I mentioned. There has been a considerable land boom already, and the land office is doing-I just realized where the phrase comes from–a land-office business. Oh, couldn’t you and Thomas homestead a claim and lay the foundations for a western place of visitation? Quite seriously, it would be a profitable thing to do, and on “desert” or “timber-culture” claims there is no residence requirement as there is for a homestead. You need only have someone make minimal “improvements,” as they are called, and wait. Don’t you want to join us in the making of a new country? Have you no impulse to see the banks of the Snake? Or is that one of those horrid Western names that put you off?

The country, as distinguished from its improvements and its people, is beautiful–a vast sage plain that falls in great steps from the mountains to the canyon of the Snake, and then rises gradually on the other side to other mountains. It is one of the compensations of being a pioneer that one may see it wild and unbroken. Coming out, we had to leave the Union Pacific at Granger, in Wyoming Territory, and board the single passenger car attached to a construction train on the Oregon Shortline, which is not yet completed. Oliver met us with a democrat wagon at Kuna, the end of the line.

I wish I could make you feel a place like Kuna. It is a place where silence closes about you after the bustle of the train, where a soft, dry wind from great distances hums through the telephone wires and a stage road goes out of sight in one direction and a new railroad track in another. There is not a tree, nothing but sage. As moonlight unto sunlight is that desert sage to other greens. The wind has magic in it, and the air is full of birds and birdsong. Meadowlarks pipe all around us, something else–pipits? true skylarks?–rains down brief sweet showers of notes from the sky. Hawks sail far up in the blue, magpies fly along ahead, coming back now and then like ranging dogs to make sure you are not lost. Not a house, windmill, hill, only that jade-gray plain with lilac mountains on every distant horizon. The mountains companionably move along with you as the dirt road flows behind. The plain, like a great Lazy Susan, turns gravely, and as it turns it brings into view primroses blooming in the sand, and cactus pads with great red and yellow blooms as showy as hibiscus.

We had miles of that, while Betsy slept and Ollie got to drive the team, seated between his father’s knees. It was touching to see how he responded to the wild empty country–touching and a little alarming. I would not be fully easy in my mind if I thought he might grow into a Western child, limited by his limited world.

And yet how beautiful it is! For the first time I understood Oliver’s enthusiasm. We went softly on that sandy trail among the sage, and that dry magical wind from the west blew across us, until at last we came out on a long bench above a river valley, with mountains close behind patched with snow and forest. To our right, the stream broke out of a canyon cut through the sagebrush foothills. To the left, across a bridge, was Boise City climbing up its stepped benches. Below town the crooked line of cottonwoods marking Boise Creek groped across the plain until in the distance trees and river sank below the benches and the plains healed over. From a mile or two away, unless one is on a high place, neither the Boise nor the Snake can be seen at all, sunken in their canyons.

Canyon gate and creek and city were no more than a scribble on the great empty page across which Oliver hopes to write a history of human occupation. He stopped the team and we looked at it a considerable while. It was good for me to see it as he first saw it when he came down from the Coeur d’Alene and was struck by his great idea. Oliver knew, in that quiet way he has of knowing, that if I once saw it I would feel about it as he does. It
is
a great idea, difficult of accomplishment but not impossible. I have become half a believer, and though I cannot say I am fully reconciled to the life it will lead us, I am no longer fearful of failure.

Now that we are here and the work is going forward, there are even indications that the West which so lightly and cruelly separates and scatters people can bring them together again–that the binding force of civilization and human association is as strong, perhaps, as the West’s bigness and impersonality. I allude to the fact that Oliver has managed to locate his old assistant, Frank Sargent, and has arranged for him to join us here. I am glad–but not because, as you once or twice playfully suggested, Frank is romantically attached to a woman ten years older than himself. I have been concerned about him, a well-born and educated young man from the East, thrown among rough men in the rough camps where he has worked the past several years. He used to talk to me in Leadville about his mother and sisters, and about the temptations that assail any young man in the West, and his determination to resist them. But if rumor is correct, he has not been able to evade them entirely in Tombstone, as dreadful a camp as the West ever spawned. Oliver tells me that in Arizona Frank participated in the hunt for a man who had murdered a friend, and that the hunt ended, down across the line in Mexico, with the murderer swinging from a tree. It is hard to believe this of the Frank I know, so ardently gentle–and yet there was always a young warrior in him. When Pricey was beaten in Leadville, only Oliver’s restraint kept Frank from going after his assailants with a gun.

To us, he is a dear and loyal friend, and to boot, as they say out here, a beautiful and patient model. He would try all day to balance on a toad-stool while I drew him as Oberon, if only I asked it. He will add much to Boise. He arrives next week.

How gossipy this sounds, like chattering with you and Katy and Emma in the halls of Cooper!

Oliver’s other young assistant is a Boston Tech man named Wiley, as sunny and good natured as some cheerful bird. You must know, having had it from the beginning, what a happiness it is to have one’s husband completely contented in his work. O. has always handled his jobs conscientiously and well, but I think his heart was never in a job until now. He works all day, and at night buries himself in the history of irrigation, and reports on systems in Persia, India, China, everywhere. Reading aloud to him the other night when he had a headache, I came across a quotation from Confucius that made us both laugh, it so perfectly expressed Oliver Ward. Confucius said, “I find no fault with the character of Yu. He lived in a mean low house and expended all his strength on the ditches and water channels.” Oliver at once painted the whole quotation on a board and nailed it above the door of the canyon shack, like an epigraph at the beginning of a chapter.

I must end this. Ollie has just come out and asked if he can go up to the post, where a sergeant–one of the men who hunted down Chief Joseph–has promised to teach him and some of his playmates to ride like cavalrymen. I suppose it is safe, but at least I must go up and take a look at this sergeant. At
five
, to ride like a cavalryman!

Good-bye, dear Augusta. It eases me to talk to you through half an afternoon this way. You will have many miles of my illegible hand to decipher, I fear, before we have brought this valley into the civilized world.

Your own

S.B.W.

I have heard publishers, lamenting their hard life over Scotch and soda, complain that they must read a hundred bad manuscripts to find one good one. Having practiced the trade of history, I feel no stir of sympathy. A historian scans a thousand documents to find one fact that he can use. If he is working with correspondence, as I am, and with the correspondence of a woman to boot, he will wade toward his little islands of information through a dismal swamp of recipes, housekeeping details, children’s diseases, insignificant visitors, inconclusive conversations with people unknown to the historian, and recitations of what the writer did yesterday.

Susan Ward, a devoted correspondent and sometimes a very interesting one, had her dry spells like other mortals. She also had her reticences and her pride: having made up her mind to follow her husband into that sagebrush desert, she would not complain more than humorously; she would have to adopt the attitudes of a tourist confronted by the picturesque. Result: she chatters a good deal during her first year or so in Boise. Her only companions are Army wives who never come back into her life–are transferred away, or dropped, or forgotten about.

Nothing there that I want to know about, neither events nor feelings. I have to keep turning the pages of those chatty, empty letters for a long time before I find any that are worth stopping at. The first of these comes eleven months, one novel, one miscarriage, some anxious cases of measles and whooping cough, and some miles of her hasty illegible scrawl after the one I have just quoted.