Angle of Repose (78 page)

I am bothered by the thought of her reading aloud to those children. It is a measure of her humbling, for household reading had been one of their chief pleasures when they were all a company of saints out in the canyon, and Frank, Wiley, the children one by one, herself, Nellie, even Grandfather, picked a favorite poem and read it. Everyone knew everyone else’s favorites by heart; they chanted them aloud like a Greek chorus pronouncing wisdom or doom. And I feel that scene, both in its warm family shape and in its colder, reduced shape as a schoolroom exercise for unlicked Boise. I could probably come in off the bench cold and substitute for any one of them, for Grandmother imprinted me with those same household poets a quarter of a century later.

Her letters through the fall and winter keep assuring Augusta that she is well and safe. People drop by–John, Sidonie, Wan, even near-strangers, for not even Boise, which Grandmother had scorned, would leave two women and a child unlooked–after in an isolated house. She speaks of having ice hauled and stored in sawdust against the coming summer. She speaks of her intention to replace the trees that have died, as soon as frost is out of the ground. She discusses what she is drawing or writing. She reports that she has moved her work out to Oliver’s office to avoid competition with Nellie’s pupils.

But one part of her life has been abruptly cut off. It lies on the other side of a stern silence, as a severed head lies beyond the guillotine knife.

Only four letters in more than six months mention my grandfather at all, apart from that reference to her use of his office. The first one, in November, says only, “Oliver continues to send a money order on the first of each month. I am grateful from the bottom of my heart for this sign that he has not forgotten us, though as to the money, we could make do without.” The second, dated December 10, says, “Oliver’s draft which came today was mailed at Merced, California, whereas the others have come from Salt Lake City. I must wait as patiently as I can, to know what this may mean.”

The third, dated February 12, 1891, says, “A money order from Oliver yesterday, this one from Mazatlán, Mexico, and today a letter from Bessie which explains it. He has written to her, and has sent John two hundred dollars on the debt he says he owes him for the collapse of the canal stock. Bessie is uncertain about accepting it–she suggests sending it to me! Of course she must keep it, it is a debt of honor. But oh, it warms my heart that he should take it so! It dispels the gloom of this long cold snowless winter. And I am glad he is now in a position where he can
build–he
is always happiest when he is building something. Our dear old Sam Emmons is responsible. He and some others own an onyx mine down there, and they have brought Oliver down to construct a short-line railroad and a port facility for the shipment of the stone. I feel it as the beginning of better times. There is hope in this news, as in the first crocus.”

The fourth of these letters, though, has sunk back; it is neither stoical nor hopeful, but depressed and sad. It is a long letter and a gloomy one. The snowfall has been very light, it will be another dry year, Boise is dead and hostile, as if, being the only remaining representative of the London and Idaho Canal, she caught all the blame for the collapse that disappointed so many.

I have already turned away from what I started to do, which was to look at those newspaper stories and discover what they can tell me beyond the raw happenings. I must remember who I am. I am a historical pseudo-Fate, I hold the abhorréd shears. I have set myself the task of making choral comment on a woman who was a perfect lady, and a lady who was a feeling, eager, talented, proud, snobbish, and exiled woman. And fallible. And responsible, willing to accept the blame for her actions even when her actions were, as I suppose all actions are, acts of collaboration. For her, conduct was like marriage–private. She held herself to account, and she was terribly punished. And now I really must get down to it. No more of this picking a random card. Let me find the crucial one–the first crucial one. Here it is.

It says that on the evening of July 7 Agnes Ward, daughter of the chief engineer of the London and Idaho Canal, drowned in the Susan ditch after becoming separated from her mother while taking a walk. There is a lot more, but that is the essential part. Who what where, and to the extent that people were able to piece it out, how. The why is more difficult.

That’s the first one. It is accompanied by three or four lesser items–funeral and all that–which tell me nothing I really want to know. But now comes the second crucial one, front page and two-column like the first, which reports that on July 11 (the day after Agnes’s funeral, though the story does not say so) Frank Sargent, thirty-three, son of General Daniel M. Sargent of New York City, was found dead in his bed at the London and Idaho’s engineering camp in Boise Canyon. He had put the muzzle of a .30-.30 saddle gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger with his thumb. Associates said he had been despondent over the financial difficulties of the canal company, of which he was assistant chief engineer.

The reporter made no connection between the drowning of Agnes Ward and the suicide of Frank Sargent, except to remark that for the unlucky London and Idaho people tragedy came in bunches. But Susan Ward and Oliver Ward, and probably Ollie Ward too, made such a connection, and so must I.

I know that Frank Sargent was out of a job and intending to go away. I know that his long, smoldering, “incurable disease” of love for my grandmother had burst out like a spontaneous-combustion fire in the airless loft of their failure. I know that Grandmother would have had to see him–or at least I am morally certain she would, either because her own feelings were dangerously inflamed or because she felt it necessary to break off for good. It would not be easy to see him at her house, where Nellie, the children, John, Wan, the Malletts, Oliver himself, were always coming and going. It would have been awkward to ride up to the canyon camp to see him because Wiley was there, and because after the July 4 visit she felt that Oliver was suspicious. But Frank still rode the Susan Canal nearly every day: two months before, she had written a story about a young engineer patrolling just such a ditch in just such a valley, trying to discover who kept creating little breaks in the bank that rapidly widened to let the whole ditch run dry. He had found a girl doing it, the daughter of a local rancher who felt that the ditch was robbing him of water rightfully his, and their little drama was worked out just at twilight, with the last of a red sunset reflected on the slow, spinning current of the ditch and the mountains going cool and black all around the horizon.

Life copying art? Not improbably; her mind worked that way. Suppose she was truly afraid to meet Frank Sargent alone, and didn’t dare give him her good-bye with others around? Who might she take along, as camouflage or protection? A child, maybe? A child of five, too young to understand speaking looks or the hidden emphasis of words? Young enough to be sent off to pick flowers or catch polliwogs while two adults held their tense, nearly silent interview? On that bench the sagebrush was four feet tall, tall enough for seated people to be hidden from sight, tall enough for a child to disappear in it within fifty feet.

There is nothing in the newspaper story either to corroborate or deny such speculation. The mother, the paper says, was too distracted with grief to give a coherent account of the accident, but according to the father, they had become separated while searching for wildflowers among the sage. When Mrs. Ward became aware that she was alone, and began to call, there was no answer. She ran calling through the tall sage and along the ditch bank. Her cries attracted Mr. Ward and his son, who happened to be riding the ditch trail, and they joined the search on horseback. It was the boy who found his sister’s body a quarter mile downstream, kept afloat by the air inside her dress. Efforts by the rather and by Mr. Frank Sargent to revive the little girl by artificial respiration proved unavailing.

Efforts by the father
and by Mr. Frank Sargent.
Where did he come from? Did he just pop into the action as he pops into the newspaper story, out of nowhere? Had he been riding down the ditch with Oliver and Ollie? The paper does not say so. Did he come along later? We don’t know. Was he there all the time–had he been sitting hidden in that tall sage with his arm around Susan Ward, or with Susan Ward’s two hands in his, pleading his urgent, ardent, reckless, hopeless cause? Were those two so absorbed in themselves that they forgot for a while to wonder where Agnes had got to? Did Susan, pushing away the misery of their parting, or whatever it was, stand up at some point, looking anxiously around in the growing dusk, on that bench like a great empty stage, under that sky beginning to show the first weak stars, and call out, and have no answer? Did the two of them go through the sage and along the trail and down the ditch, calling? And is that when Oliver and Ollie, attracted by the voices, came riding down?

If so, it is not what Grandfather reported to the Boise
Sentinel.
It is only by a seeming inadvertence that Frank Sargent is in the story at all. But there he is, ambiguous, having to be dealt with. And four days later, after hanging around the edges of their grief for four days, after standing helpless and excluded, probably hated, through the service and the burying, blaming himself not unjustly for everything that had happened–he took the same view of individual responsibility that Grandmother did–he went back to the canyon in his funeral suit and lay down on the bed that had once been Susan Ward’s and blew the top of his head off.

And that would have confirmed everything that Oliver Ward thought he knew. As surely as that slug went through Frank Sargent’s head, it went through Susan and Oliver and Ollie Ward.

 

There is also that business of the rose garden.

Once a long time ago, forty years–oh, more, more than forty-five–I was helping my grandfather in the rose garden here at Zodiac Cottage. He paid me a dollar or two a week to help him, more for the company, I think, than for any actual work I did. I brought peat moss or manure in the wheelbarrow when he wanted them, and wheeled potted cuttings into the greenhouse and set them up on tables, carefully labeled, when he was through slipping or grafting them. Mostly I sat around and watched his big, clumsy-looking, clever hands work with those frail shoots and frailer grafts. He rarely said more than ten words an hour. Sometimes he sat down by me and smoked a pipe and played me a game of mumbly-peg on the lawn.

I remember this special afternoon because of my Aunt Betsy, by then married and living in Massachusetts, who was in Grass Valley for a month’s visit. She was a nice woman, gentle, rather sallow, anxious about small things. She came walking alone through the yard from the orchard, strolling in and out of the shade on a bright afternoon–June, probably, since all the roses were loaded with blooms. She strolled along the cross path to the greenhouse, stooping to sniff, snapping off a blossom, walking with it under her nose, her eyes searching and abstract.

“Having fun?” she asked when she reached us.

Grandfather looked at her over the tops of his glasses, wiped a big hand across his face, smiled, and said nothing. His fingers pressed and tamped soil and moss around a little plant, he set it aside and picked up another pot.