Angle of Repose (42 page)

Oliver’s letters told her little–she wondered often how she had happened to marry a man for whom words were so difficult. A few crumbs of news leaked through. Ferd Ward’s son, sent out to work at the Adelaide, had been spending more time at the monte tables than at the office. He had borrowed two hundred dollars from Oliver and smaller sums from Frank. Now last payday Pricey had found the cash box short by more than a hundred, and young Ward, challenged, had admitted “borrowing” it. Oliver had written his father. Nothing else to report except that the DR&G was making progress up the valley of the Arkansas. She wouldn’t have to come over Mosquito Pass when she came. Frank and Pricey sent regards.

She was provoked with him for letting himself be imposed upon, though she could not have said how he should have avoided lending money to Ferd Ward’s scapegrace son. She wrote him telling him to make an immediate claim on the father, to let no time elapse. There had been rumors in the papers that the Wizard of Wall Street was shaky. She told him how well Ollie had been, how she was coming on with her novel. She reported scraps of Augusta’s travels in Sicily. She walked to the post office to mail her letter, and returned to work through the afternoon. It gave her a miser’s pleasure to watch the pile of manuscript grow. Her grandfather’s life absorbed hers.

For a long time. She had finished the novel and sold it to Century as a five-part serial, and the orchards were beginning to pop their buds, by the time his letter came saying she could now get in by rail. At once, like a milldam opened, her ponded life began to flow again.

 

This time, conceiving herself to be leaving neither on a picnic nor on a visit, but for good, she made the hard effort to disconnect herself from the past, throwing away some things, giving away others, packing a few to take along. Not without tears, she cleared her father’s attic of her stored leavings, believing that those who would go on living there deserved that space, and that she would be healthier for the finality of the move.

It was not much she took–some dresses, some linens, some silver, some hope chest items that would let her compete with the new wives on Ditch Walk. A box of books for the education of her son and the pleasure of Frank and Pricey. A few prized objects that childhood, family, friendship, and marriage had washed like chunks of amber on her beach–Thomas’s Japanese teapot and the little Madonna, all of Augusta’s letters, the Fiji mat and the olla with which Oliver had welcomed her to New Almaden. The rug of wildcat skins on which Ollie had learned to crawl. Two trunks full, no more.

The beaver skins that Oliver had sent her from Deadwood were a trouble. They had always been a trouble, baffling and recalcitrant. She knew no one who could work raw furs. To try to make a coat of them, as Oliver in his innocence had suggested, would have been like making a dress out of Emmons’s white buckskins; she would have felt like Pocahontas in it. To take them back west would be to confuse some issue that she did not want confused. In the end, she and Bessie managed to make three of them into a muff and a little hat. The rest of them she gave to Bessie.

There was also the elk head. Like the beaver skins, it had never had a function in this domesticated place. She had never got over wondering why he had sent such a thing. Maybe he wanted to keep before her some aspect of himself that he did not want her to forget, though that is my guess, not hers. But what to do with it? Anywhere in the house it would have been grotesquely incongruous and out of scale. It would have denied the validity of her family’s life. Their decision to hang it on a beam in the barn was an acknowledgment of how little it belonged. At least, there, it was out of the way. She supposed that men friends of her father’s took a certain interest in it, and once she had seen John Grant standing and looking at it with an expression on his dark dissatisfied face as if he doubted its authenticity.

One purpose it had served: she had used it to impress on Ollie the idea of his father, whom he had completely forgotten. Perhaps in some way known to savages and children he thought it
was
his father. That was why she took him out to see it the afternoon before they were to start West.

In the cobwebbed dusk the great rack branched upward into shadow. The dusty muzzle was lifted, the dusty eyeballs stared into the mow’s darkness. It did not acknowledge the tame-animal smells of the barn; it had an air of scorning the hay on which such animals fed. Susan, with her son held against her legs, felt how it ignored her, and she had a twinge of the shame she had felt when her father and John uncrated the box, big enough to have held a piano, and exposed this joke, or whatever it was, this inappropriate souvenir of her husband’s life in the Black Hills. A boy’s insensitive whim, she eventually concluded, as jarring in its way as that great horse pistol he had brought to his courting.

Under her hands she felt her little boy breathe respect in its presence.

Lightly she said, “Well, so now we’ll say good-bye to Daddy’s elk. Tell it, ‘Good-bye, Daddy’s elk, tomorrow we’re going on a train to live with Daddy. Daddy will meet us where the train stops, and we’ll go through the mountains to our house made out of logs, and when I’m a little bigger I’ll have a pony and go riding with Daddy or Frank or Pricey, and away off in the mountains where the flowers grow higher than the stirrups we may stop to rest sometime and see an elk like you carrying his antlers into the timber, or hear an elk like you bugling from away-way up the mountain.’ Can you tell him that?”

“That’s too much.”

“Then just say, ‘Good-bye, Daddy’s elk.’ ”

“Good-bye, Daddy’s elk.”

“Will you like seeing your Daddy again?”

“Yes.”

She saw by his wondering stare that he did not understand what she was asking him. Not sure she understood herself, she hugged him hard and picked up the lantern, holding it high to give him a last look at the great creature on the beam.

The varnished muzzle, coated with eighteen months of dust, shone as if wet in the light. A phantasmal fire glinted in the eyeballs. It might have bugled at any moment.

“Wasn’t that odd?” she said late that night when she was sitting with Bessie and John before the fire. “It simply
gleamed
at us, as if the talk about going to the mountains had wakened it from its sleep. Just hearing the word Leadville brought it to life for a second. Oh, now I feel myself coming to life, too! I can hardly wait to get back there and make a home in that wild beautiful place.”

John Grant had been sitting slumped, studying the toe of his boot. His chin was against his chest, his eyes were narrowed almost shut. Now suddenly he opened his eyes wide and shot her a look that stabbed. His face was full of hatred. With the years he had grown more and more censorious, he rarely spoke except in scorn or dislike, he seemed always quarreling with something inside his head.

The black eyes blazed at her only a moment before they slitted again. For another second he brooded upon the swinging toe of his boot. Then he uncrossed his legs, stood up, and left the room. They heard his steps on the porch, then on the path that led to the lane and back to his own house.

Holding her embroidery frame in her lap, Bessie sat still. Then impatiently she shook her head and started a shining tear-track down each cheek.

“What did I say?” Susan said, bewildered. “Bessie, I’m sorry!”

“Excuse him,” Bessie said. “He envies Oliver so. He’s almost the only person he still speaks well of. He’d so like to be going himself. He says he’s smothering here.”

Susan found no reply. Her gentle sister had always had the patient role, she had never been coddled. It was Bessie who made the humble marriage, Bessie who lived as a farm wife, Bessie who was at hand to help when her parents needed her, Bessie who made the preserves that Susan’s city friends carried triumphantly home as the plunder of a country visit. She had sat for hours submitting her prettiness to Susan’s pencil. While Susan studied in New York and shuttled back and forth across the continent, Bessie looked after the home place. When Susan could not keep her child, Bessie kept him. Sometimes Susan had envied her the placid sweetness of her life.

She said softly, “Would thee go?”

“If it would help him. If it would make him as he used to be.”

“Then!” Susan said, full of generous impulse. “Why don’t I ask Oliver to look around? He can probably find him a place at the Adelaide. Thee could build a house near ours on the ditch!”

Almost with amusement, Bessie raised her eyes and looked through the ceiling. “What about them?”

“They could come too.”

The delusion lasted perhaps five seconds before realism wiped it out. Busy as a Breughel, the vision filled her head: the men jostling up and down plank sidewalks that thrummed under their boots like bridges, overdressed women strolling past open doors of assay and law offices within which men in shirtsleeves argued or smoked or watched the street, wall-eyed teams plunging by, teamsters rising to lay the whip to quivering haunches, the band playing, the smoke of smelters streaming from the stacks, the earth trembling to the vibration of stamp mills, the whole place leaning as if in a strong wind, and all the corners, all the doorways, all the windows packed and staring with faces, and every face disfigured by the passion for wealth, every eye looking out its corners, alert for the main chance. At the edge of this, timid and lost between the frenzy of the crowds and the indifference of the peaks, their gentleness elbowed aside, their sweetness assaulted by every crudity, their habits outraged, their lives made nothing, that white-haired pair upstairs.

Not to be thought of. Trees transplanted do not thrive. Hence not to be thought of for Bessie and John either. What she accepted for herself and her son was impossible for her parents and unlikely for her sister. It seemed to her that she had already traveled a great distance from the still waters that had produced her. What stretched unbroken from her great-great-grandfather, who had built this house, to her father, who would die in it, was cut short in her. The book about her grandfather that she had begun in affectionate memory was really a sort of epitaph.

Snow blew down the Royal Gorge in a horizontal blur. With Ollie’s sleeping head in her lap and a down comforter around them both, she tried now and then to get a look at that celebrated scenic wonder, but the gorge was only snow-streaked rock indistinguishable from any other rock, all its height and grandeur and pictorial organization obliterated in storm. The dark, foaming, ice-shored river was so unlike the infant Arkansas that she used to ford on her horse that she didn’t believe in it. The circles that she blew and rubbed on the window healed over in secret ferns of frost.

Without knowing in what setting she would see Oliver, or what he would be wearing, she found it hard to visualize him. She knew it for a deficiency in herself that her imagination was so controlled by
things
. In her drawings, she was often unable to get expressiveness and individuality into figures and faces until she could set them in some domestic or architectural background–under a fanlight doorway, by a carved stair rail, against mantels where they could lean in costumes drawn meticulously from life. Now she kept seeing Oliver in the postures of past meetings and partings–as he had looked stepping off the rainswept ferry in his hooded field coat, or squinting into the sun as the train pulled away eastward from the Cheyenne station, or searching for her over the heads of the crowd in Denver. As if taking an oath, she assured herself that from now on she would
have
him, and so would Ollie. They would not have to imagine him any more.

The train lurched and awakened Ollie. He reared up. “Are we there?”

“Not for a long time. You’d better go back to sleep.”

But he didn’t want to go back to sleep. He lay and whined until she diverted him with a story about how some of her grandfather’s sheep had been swept down the millrace and drowned, but she and Bessie had rescued a lamb and fed it on a bottle until it grew up to be a pet and followed them everywhere like Mary’s Little Lamb.

(Years later, a frugal lady making every tiny experience count, she wrote another story about a sick lamb left behind by a Basque herder, and illustrated it, using two of her children as models, and sold it to
St. Nicholas.
I remember having it read to me in my childhood, and it sits on the desk here now, the faces entirely recognizable–Grandmother did have a gift for catching a likeness. The serious boy of ten or so with his little sister beside him, the two of them hunkered down offering a baby’s bottle to the lamb, is incontrovertibly my father. For some reason the picture makes me feel old and sad.

How trivial a thing to entrap the memory of three or four generations ! Three at least. Rodman’s mythology contains no rescued lambs, I imagine. Perhaps I myself remember this story because it so clearly meant something to Grandmother. I can see her, when she had finished reading to me, sitting in the porch swing with her neat head bent, her lips pursed, thinking. Then, in the one eye that I could see, an abrupt round lens of water leaped out, was forced out as if under pressure. It did not run down her cheek, it literally sprang from her eye and hit the page wetly. “Oh, pshaw!” she said, and rubbed it away angrily with the heel of her hand. Her crying, so sudden and without motivation, puzzled me and made me solemn. Only later, thinking about it, I have come to realize that it was not my father’s young face that made her cry, and certainly not the lamb, which died within twenty-four hours. It was the picture of Agnes, the little girl. There was a lamb that was not rescued. Grandmother wore that child like a crown of thorns.)

When stories ran out, she amused Ollie by helping him find pictures in the frosted window. A forest of ferny shapes grew upward from the bottom sash, and with her fingernail she drew into it half-revealed faces of deer and foxes, and peering from behind the thickest frost a mustached face wearing a look of astonishment. “That’s Daddy,” she said. “Looking for us. He thinks we’re lost.” They giggled together.