Angle of Repose (67 page)
No hint in these Victoria letters of her marital difficulties. The implication is always that as soon as Oliver finishes the field work of his survey they will be reunited. Yet she stayed on through the summer and fall of 1888, when Oliver was locating damsites on the Snake and its tributaries, and through the winter, when he was working out of a Boise hotel room, classifying irrigable lands in the Snake River Valley, and through the spring of 1889, when he was off to the mountains again. Ollie did not go East to school. She was unsuccessful in getting him any scholarship aid, and she hadn’t the money to send him herself.
Like a widow, she was, grim and diligent to support her brood. She does not sound unhappy, but in two separate letters she refers to herself as one “who wants above all to be alone.” She did for Vancouver Island the sort of illustrated travel sketch she had previously done for New Almaden, Santa Cruz, Mexico, and the canyon, but except for that impersonal geography her work did not reflect her life closely. The confessional mode was no more common in genteel fiction than in genteel lives.
What she wrote was a version of her old story of the upright engineer torn between love for a young lady and opposition to her wicked father; and a story about a dissolute but charming cavalryman who came to a bad end; and a story about romance that blossomed during two days when a transcontinental train was snowbound in Wyoming. Only one thing she wrote in Victoria seems to me revealing, in the way the Lochinvar-Frank story was revealing. It is the story of a young and promising singer, married to an engineer in the West, who finds that in the harsh Western climate her voice is cracked and destroyed, so that she must reconcile herself, nobly, to live within her deprivations.
She was a factory-a lonely factory, depressed, bravely industrious, afflicted with worry and insomnia, perhaps a little poisoned with self pity. Yet she stayed away. She neither went back to visit Bessie and the Hudsons (money? pride?) nor did she return at once when Oliver’s telegram arrived. I don’t have the telegram, only the letter in which Susan reported it to Augusta.
Victoria, May 14, 1889
Dearest Augusta–
Wonder of wonders, the irrigation scheme is not dead after all! I have had a telegram from Oliver, who had barely begun his summer’s work in the Salmon River Mountains when word followed him that General Tompkins has at last succeeded in finding new backers. The canal has been named the London and Idaho Canal, in deference to the source of the funds, which is English. The Syndicate’s representative, a Mr. Harvey, was out more than a year and a half ago, but he moved so quietly and seemed so little excited by what he saw that we gave him up almost as soon as he arrived. Now it appears that he was greatly impressed, thought Oliver’s surveys and plans superb, liked the country, liked the prospects, liked everything about us, in short.
And of course, having waited so long to make up its mind, the Syndicate now wants water flowing within weeks, and wheat ripening by fall. Oliver feels he cannot leave the Survey until he has completed the field work and written his report, which will take the rest of the year, perhaps longer. Isn’t it provoking that having held himself ready for so long, he should now be prevented from plunging into the canal as he wants to! But he has arranged a short leave while he goes back to Denver to arrange construction contracts, and he has brought Wiley from Colorado and put him in charge of digging the “Susan” Canal, the first element of what will eventually be a network of ditches. He himself, though on leave to the Survey, will continue to be Chief.
Oh, Augusta, how I wept when I read that telegram with all its enthusiasm instantly renewed and all its hope as intact as if we had not spent these six years–seven, nearly–pursuing disappointment. I wept for joy that Oliver’s hope is revived, and for bitterness that it was so long frustrated, and for grief that years of failure have left scars we may never be able to forget. Do you understand me? I hope you do–completely. I should not like to be understood only partially, and yet that is the way I understand myself. And I wept for fear, too –fear that hope may be dashed again as it has been dashed so many times.
These contradictory feelings have led me to postpone my return for now, though my impulse was to catch the first train. Oliver will be incontinently busy, as he likes to be, and away much of the time. We will have no firm place to stay, since the canyon buildings are already converted into engineering headquarters, with their windows gloriously unwashed and their floors pocked with boot nails. Boise itself does not appeal to me, especially with Oliver much away. So it is Victoria for another while longer.
Let me urge you–how ridiculous this is, and yet nothing would make me happier than to have my suggestion taken–that if you want to file on land in the Boise Valley you should empower Oliver to do the preliminary filing for you at once. I shall write him to do so; you can let me know if you want him thereafter to go ahead. Presently, all government lands are withdrawn from entry pending their classification as irrigable or nonirrigable, and the land offices are packed with angry speculators denouncing Major Powell, Captain Dutton, and my poor husband. But all the lands under our ditches have been certified, and await only the President’s proclamation to be re-opened to entry. (And how I wish your dear friend Mr. Cleveland were still in office to make that proclamation, and complete the great land reform that was begun in his term!) With the constitutional convention due to convene in Boise this summer, and the Susan going forward as fast as Wiley can drive it, there will be such a land boom as Idaho and perhaps the West has never seen.
Do you see the effect on me of the first good news in years? Already I am infected with optimism, and am almost willing to expose myself and the children yet again to the uncertainties of life in the Boise Valley, and to those other uncertainties that I dread.
Uncertainties about Grandfather or about her treacherous feeling for Frank Sargent? Since Frank had gone up to Kellogg to the gold mines, I have to assume it was Grandfather whom she doubted. I suppose her letters must have suggested that now, with the canal going forward and his anxieties removed, he might promise her never to give in to his weakness again. I suppose he would have ignored any such suggestion. Love her and admire her and respect her he did; let her manage him he would not. He was as stubborn as a post, and in his way as word-blind as my dyslectic father.
So I assume that he neither stooped to beg her to come home, nor made any promises. Nor, understanding the Frank Sargent situation, would he have asked any of her. He probably reported on the progress of the ditch and ignored the state of his feelings, while he waited for her true feelings to reassert themselves. At last, in August 1889, after fifteen months away, she came back.
Once more they met at the steps of a transcontinental train. They were both watchful and restrained; the presence of Nellie and the children kept their reunion from being too personal; any diffidence in his greeting of her could be covered up in the exuberance of greeting his children. Then they gathered up their suspended life and carried it off once more in a democrat wagon.
Driving, they had no chance to talk. Her critical eye found the streets of Boise as swarming as the streets of Leadville, and not half so picturesque. They had to halt and pick and kink their way through a morning crowd of buggies, wagons, dogcarts, buckboards. The plank sidewalks were full of men, women, children, soldiers, settlers in overalls, politicians in derbies. Two men in frock coats, two of that political crowd that had led Oliver to debase himself in barrooms, raised their hats to her with impertinent smiles. She gave them back a smile as dishonest as their own, and a good deal chillier. Oliver greeted them casually, steering past their stares. For Susan, it was like having to walk through a room where she had just been humiliated.
“The convention’s burst the town’s seams,” Oliver said. “That and the reopening of the public domain.”
“And the canal. I suppose they’re all on your side now.”
His look was surprised and questioning. “I don’t know that they were ever against me.”
Susan did not reply. Nellie was having trouble keeping the children quiet in the back. Ollie kept leaping up to point out landmarks to his sisters: it seemed he had forgotten nothing. Finally his father turned full around, put his nose right against the boy’s nose, and said, scowling, “Sit you down, friend.”
Ollie was not cowed. He looked as if he had a secret pact with his father. And he looked, Susan thought, as excited as if coming home to Boise were the greatest event of his life. “Can I drive?” he said.
“May I,” Susan said.
“Later,” Oliver said.
They turned off the main street, and within a block were heading out of town on a bench road that Susan did not remember. “This is new,” she said. “Yeah,” Oliver said.
The mountains were familiar on the left, the remembered sage plain dropped down its terraces, the southern horizon crawled with overheated peaks. Her traveling dress was too warm. “Are we going to the canyon? I thought Wiley and his crew were out there.”
“They are.”
She waited, but he offered no more. The old impatience at his wordlessness twitched in her mouth. She would not ask him another thing–where he was taking them, where they were to live. Within a half hour of seeing him again after more than a year’s separation, she felt imprisoned in his life, dragged along after his warped buggy wheels.
The following wind blew their dust over them, the air was heavy with dust clear to the canyon’s mouth. After the green gentle earth and the soft sea air of Victoria she found the country of her exile arid, barren, and hateful. The dry wind roughened her lips and parched her nostrils. When Oliver whipped up the team to outrun the dust, she was thrown roughly around.
They slowed. Ollie, standing again, hanging onto his father’s shoulders, said, “Can I drive now?”
His father reached an arm and dragged him over the front seat. His knees and shoes scuffed Susan as he went through. Along a track where the sage had been crushed and the ground pulverized by wagons, they plodded and creaked. After a half mile or so a less worn track forked off southward. Oliver touched the right rein and had Ollie guide them down it. Susan sat silent, watching the sage flow by, her nose full of dust and her eyes full of the desolate country and her mind full of desolate thoughts.
A lane opened to the left, grubbed out of the level sage, and at its end, a half mile or so away, she saw one of the dreary ranches that she supposed would now crop up, sprouting on the promise of water, to make the benches even more forlorn than when they had been empty of everything but wind. A house the color of earth, a windmill that winked–some Olpen family with a slattern wife and a tobacco-chewing husband and a flock of unlicked children wilder than coyotes, a clutter of slovenly corrals, a yard made filthy by scrub hens. She could see it, it burned into her mind like a raw, unrealized drawing.
Oliver’s hand again touched Ollie’s, this time on the left rein, and they turned down the lane.
Susan’s head snapped around, she stared at him with a terrible question, but he rode slumped, looking ahead over Ollie’s cap. Trying to get her bearings, she half stood. The odor of crushed sage filled her nostrils like sal volatile. The grubbed-out bushes had been stacked in windrows along both sides of the lane, and inside the windrows of gray brush she saw the lines of little trees on each side, each tree staked in its bowl of dug earth, each basin damp, watered that day. Hanging to the back of the seat, she stared ahead at the house and windmill. They had a certain air of confidence, closing off the lane as if someone with imagination had set them there. The house, now that she saw it clearly, was large, much more than a settler’s shack. A veranda like a promenade stretched all along its front.
“Oliver Ward,” she said, “where are you taking us? Is this our land? Is that
our
place?”
our
place?”
“Mesa Ranch,” Oliver said. “Model farm. Thought you might like to see it.”
She thought his eyes asked something of her, warned her, said “Wait.” But she couldn’t wait, too much was dawning on her all at once. “When did you build it? You’ve even planted your half mile of Lombardies!”
His eyes warmed, narrowed, held hers with an expression she could not read, a kind of urgent, knowing look not far from mockery. “Best foot forward,” he said. “With only the well to irrigate from, I couldn’t swing the lawn and the orchard and the wheatfield and the alfalfa patch. They’ll have to wait till water comes down the Big Ditch.”
“Oliver . . .”
“I
had
to start the trees,” he said, watching her. “Four hundred and fifty for the lane alone. A hundred locusts and box elders around the house. I didn’t want you to wait any longer than you had to for your grove.”
had
to start the trees,” he said, watching her. “Four hundred and fifty for the lane alone. A hundred locusts and box elders around the house. I didn’t want you to wait any longer than you had to for your grove.”
“The way you planned it.”
“The way we planned it.”
She made note of his pronoun.
“I was too late to start the rose garden. That’ll have to wait till next spring. But I did move the yellow climber down from the canyon. Never even set it back. It’s blooming right now, not quite over.”
She looked ahead, while Ollie with his eyes looking out the corners at them and his ears obviously wide open, steered the team toward the barren house squatting on the bench. She saw that the veranda was deep, with square pillars every ten feet or so supporting a broad low roof. Wherever he had planted the rose, it didn’t show. Neither did the hundred trees of his grove–well, yes, a few, staked-up, spindling saplings, hardly higher than the sagebrush. In something like despair, she cried, “When did you do all this?”
For the first time since they had met at the station she saw her old Oliver in him, loose-shouldered, humorously apologetic. “I didn’t do much of it. The crews have been working since a week after we got the go-ahead on the ditch. This’ll be the demonstration farm. The Governor loaned me the Territory’s well-drilling rig, and the boys from the canal crew scraped out the road.”
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