Angle of Repose (54 page)

“You don’t look after yourself.”

“I’ve got better advice than yours, Mr. Ward. Mother and Bessie would have me in bed if they thought I belonged there.”

Up in her room he stood above the basket, lifting the corner of the pink blanket to get a look. He studied his daughter quietly. Susan had the conviction that if the baby awoke and found his strange face looking down on her, she would not cry.

“You’ve named her Elizabeth.”

“After Father’s mother and Bessie. But it isn’t final, if you’d prefer something else.”

“Elizabeth’s fine. Only we’ll have to call her Lizzie or Betsy or something to keep her sorted out.” Softly he let the blanket down. His eyes, very blue, came up to meet hers.
“Hecho en Mejico,”
he said.

“Yes. She’s one thing we got out of that.”

Wind rattled through the maple outside, and the curtains blew inward from the open window and snagged on the basket. Susan lifted them off and pushed down the window a few inches. When she looked up again, Oliver was still watching her. “Susie, didn’t I deserve to know?”

“What could you have done? It would only have upset you.”

“Don’t you think it upsets a man to get a letter saying his wife has had a baby he never even knew was coming?”

“I’m sorry. I suppose I was wrong. I just . . .”

Her mind was darting into corners, her feelings were confused. She both granted his right to blame her, and resented his doing so. She knew perfectly well why she had more than once stopped herself in the act of writing him. He was a threat to Milton’s placid domesticity, to her restored intimacy with Augusta and Thomas, to her position as an artist and writer known and acknowledged by a public. The demands he might make on her were demands she wanted to postpone. For months he had been hardly more than the photograph of someone loved and absent and not miserably missed; she could take him out when she chose, and cry over him, and put him back. And then when she might have told him, when she had fully intended to tell him in time for him to come home if he could, then had come his letter, with his own news. Her mouth, opened to apologize, stiffened in resentment and anger; from being pliable and loving, she found herself throwing his blame back at him with a stammering tongue.

“I’m at fault, yes. I should have written. Thee has a r-right to be upset. But haven’t I too? D-doesn’t it upset a wife who is staying home and working and h-holding things together to hear that her h-husband isn’t doing at all what she–what she thought he was doing, what they’d agreed he’d do, but is out, is off in some
wild
impossible scheme to bring water to two, three, what is it, three hundred thousand? acres of desert. Didn’t I deserve to know?”

“That wasn’t quite the same thing.”

“But it concerned us all, just as much.”

“Sue, I just had to be sure, first.”

“Sure!” she cried. “What kind of word is that?
Sure!
I didn’t write you about the baby because I thought you were hunting up just the right place, some deep mine where there would be a future and we could all live. I didn’t want you to be diverted. And all the time you . . .”

“I doubt there is any such place,” Oliver said. “You and the children couldn’t have lived in any of the camps I was in, and none of them have a future.”

“Then you should have written and told me. How long have you been–fooling around with this irrigation scheme? Months, apparently. And not a word to me. Were you afraid, or ashamed, or what?”

“I told you. I had to be sure.”

Angrily she stared at him. He stood before her filled with an idiotic confidence, a county-fair Moses with his sleeves rolled up, ready to smite the rock. If he didn’t throw away his foolish staff and quit dreaming, he would humiliate her and himself, and justify every doubt her friends had ever had of him.

“I wrote you the minute I was sure we could pull it off,” he said.

He made her shake her head, he jarred out of her some hard laughter. “How can you say such a thing? How can you be sure you can pull it off, as you say? It would take millions of dollars.”

“Not right away. We’ll do it in stages.”

“Each stage taking only half a million.”

“Listen,” he said, and took her by the wrist, scowling down on her. Then he smoothed out the scowl and made it into a smile, he coaxed her with his eyes. “Come here.” He led her to the foot of the basket. The breeze from the window stirred the baby’s fine pale hair, and Susan reached to pull the sash clear down. Outside, though the August sunshine was full and hot, weather was building up. She caught a glimpse of thunderheads off beyond the river, and a far flicker of lightning, too far away for thunder. Oliver held her by the wrist, looking down at the sleeping baby.

“Do you think you can bring her up?” he said. “Can you make a woman of that baby?”

“What kind of mother would I be if I didn’t think so?”

“You’re confident.”

“I hope so. I think so. Yes, why?”

“Will you believe me when I tell you I’m just as confident I can carry water to that desert?”

She saw in his face that he had contracted the incurable Western disease. He had set his cross-hairs on the snowpeak of a vision, and there he would go, triangulating his way across a bone-dry future, dragging her and the children with him, until they all died of thirst. “I believe you’re confident,” she said. “I know I’m not.”

He led her to the bed and made her sit down; he drew from the pocket of his coat, hanging on the bedpost, a brochure in a green cover. I have a copy of it here. “The Idaho Mining and Irrigation Company,” it says. Inside, on the title page, fellaheen in loincloths are carrying water in pots slung on a pole, and underneath the woodcut is a quotation which with great difficulty I have determined comes from Psalms: “I have removed his shoulder from the burden; his hands were delivered from the pots.”

“I showed that to Clarence King,” Oliver said. “Did I tell you I met him on the train, coming East? He says that quotation alone insures us success.”

She was appalled: he was a child. “Mr. King is a great joker.”

“Maybe, but he wasn’t joking about this. Neither am I. Go ahead, read.”

Shakily she laughed. “I thought I was the only writer of fiction in this family.”

“Fiction, is it?” He flipped the page. “See who the president of this company is? General Tompkins, who is also president of American Diamond Drill. He’s not used to backing fictions. Look at the figures. Look at the facts.”

Unwillingly she read about damsites, weather, rainfall, storage capacities, topography, soil analyses, placer production from the Snake River sands. She read two interviews with settlers already irrigating out of Boise Creek, and thought them enthusiasts of the same stripe as her husband. He
was
a child. It took some tough financial pirate, some Gould or Vanderbilt, to do what he in his innocence thought he could do.

His thumb came down and dented the map spread before her, made a deep crease at a point where the contour lines crowded together and the wiggle of a stream flowed away. “There’s the principal damsite. We won’t do anything about it yet. At first we’ll just throw a diversion dike across the creek lower down, and turn the creek into our canal system. That alone will take water to thousands of acres.”

“I don’t see how you make money,” she said helplessly. “The land isn’t yours to sell.”

“We don’t sell land, we sell water rights and water. The more settlers come in, the greater the need. That’s when we’ll build the dam and lengthen the canal line clear to the Snake. Here goes the canal, along the edge of the mountain here, right across the drainage. The whole valley’s under the ditch.”

“I never could read contour maps,” she said.

“Never mind,” he said, and took the brochure from her lap. “Can you imagine one enormous sage plain that drops in benches–a big nearly level plateau for a mile or two, and then a fifty-foot drop, and then another bench? Can you visualize it? That canal will eventually run seventy-five miles and not cross any man’s land. Do you know what that means?”

“I know what it sounds like.”

He waited.

“It sounds like a country without life, people, schools, anything.”

“It sounds to me like a country with a future.”

“And no present.”

The impatience she created in him troubled her, and yet she had to resist his enthusiasm. For her own sake and the children’s sake and for his sake she had to be sensible. But she smiled, trying to express love even while she blocked his way; she felt that she begged, that he could not insist if she made it clear how much the prospect appalled her.

He flapped the brochure against his knuckles, thinking. “Boise’s not a village, it’s a little city, the territorial capital. The Oregon Short-line will go through it and put it on the main line to Oregon. There’s a cavalry post, there’re balls even. The mountains rise up right behind town, the riding’s wonderful. You can have a horse, so can Ollie.”

With her hands in her lap she sat, not wanting to look up at him. “And he can go to a one-room school. He’ll be starting, you know. This fall.”

“You were going to take a tutor along to Morelia. Why not to Boise?” But she remained silent, and he exclaimed in exasperation, “Don’t you see it? Any of it? Doesn’t it challenge you at all? Do you even see the significance of those seventy-five miles of canal across the public domain?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“No right of way problems. Not one old coot who can make you divert your ditch around his land. No lawsuits. Just one big simple engineering problem.”

“And one big money problem.”

“That’s not a problem.”

“What?” Now she did look up.

“General Tompkins has already lined up backing from Pope and Cole. We’re talking to them in New York tomorrow.”

Slowly she rose. Her shoulder twitched, she felt weak and tired, aggrieved that he kept her talking and resisting him instead of letting her go to bed. “You mean you’ve already committed yourself. Without ever talking to me.”

Beyond his head the maple leaves outside hung without movement, as still as his face. The air was brassy. “Everything moved so fast,” he said. “I hoped I could persuade you.”

“But how can I decide so suddenly! It’s so different from anything I was prepared for. I’m not strong yet, you really can’t expect . . .”

Women’s tactics, unfair. She saw them take effect. Moodily he turned his eyes out the window.

“It’s not only me,” she said. “Baby’s too small. I wouldn’t dare, with winter ahead.”

“Winters there are a whole lot milder and healthier than they are here.”

“But there’s no safe job. There’s only this . . . speculation.”

“Do you think superintending a mine is safe?” he said, and laughed so unpleasantly that she wanted to cry. “Didn’t Almaden or the Adelaide teach you anything?”

“Yes,” she said, looking down. “So did Mexico. How easily something can go wrong–
always
goes wrong!”

“Sue, I
know
this scheme. I made it up, I surveyed it, I laid out the plans. It’ll work.”

Wearily she looked up, let her eyes meet his stubborn blue ones. “Well, go in to your meeting tomorrow and see what they say. We can’t settle it now.”

“There’s no point in talking to Pope and Cole if you aren’t willing.”

The flick of their eyes meeting and breaking apart again. “Suppose I wasn’t,” she said. “What would you do?”

It took him a few seconds. Then he answered steadily, “Stay here, I suppose. Get some sort of job. Pick apples. Hire out to John.”

The ghost of Mrs. Elliott was whispering to her. She took her throat in her hand and swallowed against the pressure of her fingers. “You know I wouldn’t stand in your way or make you . . give up what you want. Could you run it from out there and come back here for –between whiles? Like Conrad and Mary?”

“That’s the sort of arrangement you didn’t want when we were talking about Potosí.”

“It would be different, here at home.”

Another silence, while the baby stirred and sighed and turned half over. “No,” Oliver said at last. “Now
I
won’t have it. I’ve lived away from you all I want to.”

“Oh, Oliver!” she cried. “Don’t think I don’t love thee! Don’t think I want thee living apart from us! It’s only that I feel safe here. Thee is asking me to give up what I love almost as much as thee. That little mite there has taken all the recklessness out of me. Let me think. Go to the meeting, but let me think a while.”

For a while he held her there, saying nothing. Then he walked her to the window, where a wind was thrashing the maple outside and stirring the curtains through the cracks of the closed sash. She stood with his arm around her, leaning on him and looking down to where the ferns along the edge of the lane bent limberly in the gust. She heard him say, “Look at her. She’s nursing in her sleep.” His arm squeezed her, shook her, let her go. “All right. You get used to my news and I’ll get used to yours. Maybe they’ll turn out to be compatible.”

“Maybe.”

But she had already given in. She knew that sooner or later, this fall or next spring, she would be packing up her children and her depleted collection of household goods and going West again–not, as at first, on an adventurous picnic, and not with a solemn intention of making a home in her husband’s chosen country, but into exile.

Boise City, June 16, 1882

Darling Augusta–

I am sitting, or lying, in our old hammock–the same old hammock that hung on the piazza in New Almaden, and later served as a bed for Ollie in Leadville. It hangs now between two cottonwood trees in the ragged yard that surrounds this house, built by a missionary Jesuit since called to other fields. On hot afternoons it is my favorite spot, if I can be said to have a favorite spot in this drab new town where ladies say ma’am and servants don’t, and Irish miners still calloused from pick and shovel are erecting their millionaire houses with porte cocheres and stone turrets. Oliver is out at the engineering camp in the canyon much of the week. With the help–it isn’t really that–of a good-natured clumsy town girl, I have been able to establish a routine of work in the mornings. I am writing another Leadville novel, being poor in experience and having to make do with what is at hand. In the afternoon when baby is fed and put down, and Ollie has gone up for his nap, I come out here to read, and write letters, and listen to the dry lonely rattle of wind through the cottonwood leaves.