Angle of Repose (58 page)

They were ten miles from town, and town was only a little territorial capital twenty-five hundred miles from the springs of civilization and amenity. Their visits and their visitors were few. They all preferred the high pastures, the canyon, and the mountains to the town, whose fluctuations among mining boom, railroad boom, irrigation boom, and statehood boom were too much like their own recurrent fevers of hope.

No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike. It is a law I take advantage of, and bless, but then I am not young, ambitious, and balked.

Grandmother was luckier than Grandfather, because she could work steadily at writing and drawing, and he could occupy his hands and his empty hours only with puttering. There was a period in the spring of 1885 when they were building the suspension bridge and the construction frenzy restored them to an exuberant cheerfulness. Then that was finished, and became a part of their routine. No word came from General Tompkins, no backers appeared to rescue the coming construction season. Susan’s pregnancy prevented her making any of the expeditions to the mountains that had once been their standard entertainment, and because she could not go, the men went less often too.

High spring made them restless. On Oliver’s urging, Frank and Wiley were looking around for jobs. Wiley’s came first–an irrigation project on the South Platte, in Colorado. He left them, swearing it would take only a telegram to pry him loose from any job in the world and return him to the canyon. He kissed the children and shook hands with Nellie and stood before Susan like an embarrassed youngster, obviously thinking that a handshake couldn’t express all he meant, and obviously uncertain that he was permitted more. Susan stooped her heavy body forward and kissed him. It was the end of April, the poppies they had sown all over their knoll were blooming, the rose bushes on each side of the door were in bud, great fair-weather clouds marched eastward along the mountain. A bursting spring day. Wiley’s departure left it feeling hollow and false.

A week later Frank Sargent came back from town and announced that he had an offer from the Oregon Short Line. “Take it,” Oliver said.

Almost sullenly, Frank looked at Susan where she stood, seven months along, bracing her hand on the drafting table from which she had just risen. She thought his look flared with some troubling resentment or blame. “I’ve already taken it,” he said. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”

They stood awkwardly, each one a point of a triangle that they all understood and were determined to ignore. “You’ll be back,” Oliver said. “What about your stuff? Want to leave it here with Wiley’s?”

“I guess. I’d better tear the tent down.”

“I’ll help you.” His eyes touched Susan’s, steady and uninsistent. It was as if he were reassuring her about something. “Where’s Ollie?”

“Down in the drafting room, I think.”

“He’ll want to give us a hand, I expect.”

He ducked his head to the low door and went out. They heard him calling, his voice receding toward the shack. How understanding he was, and how decent, Susan thought; how characteristic of him to make an excuse to give them a minute alone. She was standing by the table where she had been drawing; Frank was by the door. He was looking at her very steadily.

“Well, Frank,” she said.

“Well, Mrs. Ward.”

“We’ll miss you.”

“Will you?”

“Must you ask? It will be poor and shabby without you. The children are going to be lonesome.”

“Only the children?”

“We too-I too.” She laughed, a mere catch of the breath. “I’ll miss the sound of your mandolin down by the river.”

“Well, if that’s all you’ll miss.”

She tried to coax his sullen unhappiness with a smile. “I’ll miss our talks–who else is there around here I can talk books with? I’ll miss our drawing sessions. Oh, we have had fun, haven’t we? We’ve had happy times. We will again.”

He took a step toward her, and in some sort of panic at what his feelings-his only, or hers too?-might lead to, she snatched up from the table the half-finished drawing she had been working on. It was a picture of Frank and Ollie watering horses at the river. Frank’s limber length was bent a little as he listened to the boy, who with face upturned was telling or asking him something. There was an intimation of trust and confidence between the two figures. Their horses stretched their necks to suck water from the stream. It might have been any casual moment from more than two years. Interposing the pad between herself and Frank, ready to-what? Divert him with it? Ask his judgment? Give it to him as a parting gift? Hold him away with it?–she stared at him in confusion that was almost fear.

He stopped at long arm’s length. She had drawn him so often that she could have drawn him blindfold. Dozens of times she had labored to communicate in a drawing the peculiar warm intensity of his eyes. Now they literally burned at her. She expected him to kiss her; she expected to kiss him back in some sort of affectionate, half-gratifying relinquishment.

His hands were at his sides. He said, “It’s time I was getting out. Past time.”

“Don’t say that. You’ll be back.”

“I wonder.”

“Oh, Frank, of course you will! You must! When it finally works out you’ll be back and you’ll all build the canal and we’ll be a happy family again.”

“Happy family,” Frank said. His eyes shifted, and she became aware, with acute embarrassment, that he was looking directly at her swollen belly. “Increased by one,” he said.

The blood spread quick and hot into her face. She had taken him–Wiley too–so much as a part of the family that she had not tried, as a modest woman would do in town, to hide her pregnancy from him. How could she have, anyway, seeing him constantly, eating three meals a day with him, drawing him? She lowered her head and said to his booted feet, “That’s the only ungentlemanly thing you ever said to me.”

It took him a while to answer. “Then I’m sorry,” he said finally. “Only–do you think it’s easy for a man–a man with an incurable disease, to . . .”

Her eyes came up. His glance burned and withered her, but she could not help saying, “To what?”

“To see you,” Frank said. “To see this . . . evidence . . . of how much you belong to someone else.”

“I have other children.”

“I didn’t have to watch them born!”

She put one hand to her flaming face, she turned her back, as it were snatching her bulging belly from the brutality of his eyes. In a few seconds his steps went toward the door. She did not turn or speak, but stood with her head bent, her teeth sunk hard into her lip.

Later she looked out the broad window to the river, and saw him, Oliver, and Ollie, with Nellie and Betsy for audience–the whole family except herself–working over the dismantled tent. His cot, table, camp stool, and trunk sat in the smoothed and bleached rectangle that had been his floor. His life was turned out like an exposed mouse nest at the foot of the lava cliff.

Later still she gave him her hand and a sober word of good-bye. If Oliver noticed that she did not kiss him as she had kissed Wiley, he made no sign.

 

Jump to midsummer 1885. She was bloated, breathless, near her time. If she had been a cow she would have headed off, heavy with premonition, into the brush. If she had been a dog she would have dug under some shed. Being Susan Ward, she tried to work. By now, after three years of the Idaho Mining and Irrigation Company, she was providing more than half of what they lived on. She mined and irrigated every slightest incident, she wrote and drew her life instead of living it.

It was quiet in the stone dugout curtained against the heat. Mrs. Briscoe, that disaster who passed for a practical nurse, had gone somewhere. Oliver was out tinkering with the miniature irrigation system he had developed for the garden, Wan was taking his regular Saturday off in town. She felt abandoned, left behind; she thought with motherly affection of Wiley, who kept in touch with them by letters, and with uneasiness of Frank, who had disappeared without trace where out the Oregon Short Line toward the coast.

From Nellie’s room came a brief light gabble of talk or lessons. In her muddleheaded condition she at first confused it with the buzzing of a fly caught between curtains and window.

Working was impossible. Her eyes kept drifting out of focus, her head throbbed. Every few seconds the life inside her rolled over or kicked. She took it into the bedroom and lay down on her back to give it all the room there was, but even then it was restless. And there was a fly in the bedroom too, a big irritating blow fly with a buzz like a bumblebee.

She lay still, arms flung wide, eyes on the rough-sawn rafters and roof boards above her. There were footprints and wheelbarrow tracks on them, left from the time when with mud on their feet they had swarmed from mixing trough to lumber pile. She might have thought of them as a record of the good time before waiting had become the hopeless pattern of their lives, She might have responded sentimentally to the small eternal footprints of her children. Instead, she felt a spasm of disgust at how raw, untidy, and unfinished everything was, and she wondered if Oliver with a brush and pail couldn’t scrub her ceiling clean.

Her legs twitched with the spastic jerking that her generation called growing pains. I can tell her, having learned it while investigating the sickness of my own skeleton, that they indicate a calcium deficiency-something I would willingly put up with, being cursed with altogether too much calcium in places where I don’t need it. She thought the twitching was nervousness, part of the impatience she shared with the unborn child. She would not be able to contain that irritable life much longer.

It kicked her hard, and with a curious deadness of feeling she smoothed the shift across her bulging stomach and craned her neck, watching until she felt the soft blow and saw the swift slight upward denting of the cloth. She did not want this baby. It made her desolate to think what it would be born into.

It kicked her again, the twitching in her legs was intolerable. She sat up and went heavily to the door. “Mrs. Briscoe?”

The woman was still out somewhere. Susan went through the living room, pausing to look into the children’s room that opened by a very narrow door next to the chimney. Empty. Her mind made the note that Betsy and Ollie must soon be separated. Betsy was getting too old to share a room with her brother. And how would they manage that? Build another room? And where would they put the new one when it outgrew a basket?

“Mrs. Briscoe?”

The mutter of voices had stopped in Nellie’s room. She tapped and looked in. Nellie’s thin, gopher-toothed face looked up inquiringly, her hands stopped crocheting, her rocking chair paused. The lace at her throat and wrists was as crisp as lace in a Dutch painting-she was always crocheting, or washing, or ironing cuffs and collars. How uncomplicated, undemanding a life!

On the floor was her workbox, a thing of marquetry inlaid with ivory and ebony and mother of pearl, fitted inside with exquisite little drawers and lidded boxes crammed with papers of pins, reels of cotton and silk, yards of linen tape and braid, bobbins, buttons, hooks and eyes. Betsy had dumped one drawer between her legs and was sorting buttons. She did not even look up.

“Have you seen Mrs. Briscoe, Nellie?”

“She said she was going for a walk.”

“She? On a day as hot as this?” Vexed by the unpleasantness of her own laugh as much as by Mrs. Briscoe’s. absence, she looked over her shoulder, afraid that meeching pig-like presence might be behind her.

Nellie laid aside the crocheting and stood. “Can I do something?”

“No. No thank you, Nellie. I thought I might like a cup of tea. But she shall fix it, when I find her. She has to be good for
something.”
Looking down on the tow head of her daughter, studiously bent over the buttons, she said, “You’ve spilled Nellie’s workbox all over.”

“I told her she could,” Nellie said. “She loves buttons. She’s a little housewife,
very
neat. She puts everything back, don’t you, duck?”

“I hope she does. Where’s Ollie? I thought he was in here at his lessons.”

“He went out to help his father at the windmill.”

“His father knew he was supposed to put in extra time at his reading. Has he been doing any better?”

“He tries, he truly does.”

“But still isn’t doing well.”

“He loves to be read
to.
It isn’t that he doesn’t like reading. He just has difficulty recognizing words, even when he’s had them over and over. It’s as if he’d never seen them before.”

Dyslexia, says my 1969 overview. The poor kid was a dyslectic eighty years before the condition will be discovered and named. Word-blind, and the son of my grandmother.

“He
must
learn,” Susan said. “If he really tries, he can. You must be strict when his mind wanders. He’d so much rather be out playing engineer with his father.”

“It’s not that he’s a dull boy,” Nellie said. “At maths he’s very good. He’s learned things from his father and Mr. Sargent and Mr. Wiley that are quite beyond me. It’s only the reading.”

“Nevertheless,” Susan said. “Right now he was told to stay in and work at what he’s weak in, and he’s out irrigating. At this rate he’ll
never
get into a good Eastern school. And where on earth is that Mrs. Briscoe?”

She turned from Nellie’s door and went to the back window that looked down the knoll to the spring. Passing sheep bands had trampled and half ruined it, and now there was a dug well with a windmill mounted on it which was supposed, when the wind blew, to pump water onto a home-made waterwheel which poured it down a sluice into a hydraulic ram which boosted it into a higher sluice which ran into a ditch high enough to irrigate the garden. Beside the motionless wheel she saw Oliver, alone, bent over some problem. The sun all but obliterated him. The bare ground, cocoa-brown in ordinary light, glittered like snow. Oliver spun the windmill fan by hand until a little water gushed into the upper cup of the waterwheel. The wheel moved a few inches, the water splashed into the hat he held under it, he put the dripping hat back on his head. Alone, puttering, absorbed, he looked like some frontier farmer.