Angle of Repose (70 page)

The Big Ditch, after progressing well for a time, has run into infuriating delays, and cannot reach us for perhaps another year. We shall have to depend on the well for one more season, and its forty barrels a day will not stretch to everything we would like to spread them on. The Susan Canal is now nearly twelve miles long. By next summer, water from it will be soaking into many hundreds of acres, and the demonstration of Oliver’s original scheme will have reached the end of its first step.

Two claims on our lower line have been “jumped”–which means that someone has detected some deficiency in the filing, or some failure to complete the “improvements,” and so has “pre-empted” the lands. The original filers in these cases were trying to evade the letter of the law, but they are both poor men, and worked hard, and we feel sorry for them. They have consulted Oliver constantly on their plans, and counted on the Susan Canal, and he feels in a way responsible. Yet there is nothing we can do. One of them lost his claim because his wife would not come and live there six months, but when I think of
my
months here–only three, and with everything done to make me comfortable–and look at the shanty where she was supposed to live, I hardly wonder she objected. Almost every claim around us has now been jumped except John’s and Bessie’s. On timber-culture and desert claims such as theirs, no residence is required, only “improvements,” which they will take care of when they come out.

We have a poor-white family camped at the well. The husband has taken a contract to plow a hundred acres of our desert at so much per acre, and do such other jobs as will make Mesa Ranch into the showplace of the district. Oliver’s next task is to get them a cabin built near the windmill where presently they live in two sheep wagons–father, mother, daughter, son-in-law, and two children.

They are all the color of gypsies. They have two sons “up on Camas, lookin’ after the stock,” and a full-blooded bull pup worth more than any team they own. Each morning, while the weather holds, the teams are driven afield, four horses hitched to a sulky plow. The double shares rip up the ground in great swaths, sage brush and all, and leave it in a chaotic mess, roots and branches sticking up out of the raw earth. It looks as if the land had been plowed for the sowing of dragons’ teeth instead of the first peaceful wheat crop. Before snow flies, I want to get out and try to sketch that scene of crude ugly power out of which (we hope) this new civilization will rise.

After I had taken down some late squash the other day, the ladies from the plow camp came and called on me. “How comfortable you look, out of the wind,” they said as they walked in. It was an interesting visit in a way. They are Southern, and they have that remarkable command of language that we see in Miss Murfree’s stories, and an equanimity equal to that of a duchess. For all that I was out of the wind, I am sure they would not willingly have changed places. They
belong
in this crude place. I live here on sufferance, a permanent exile, awaiting the day when all of Oliver’s efforts will have produced in this valley a civilization in which any woman but one of these plowing Malletts would feel at home.

I cannot bring myself to do as Oliver urges me to–go into Boise oftener, make calls, cultivate women friends, attend the “functions” of the place. For one thing, we have put everything we own and everything we can borrow into this ranch, and I have no desire to be known as the engineer’s wife with the darned elbows. For another–how shall I specify that other? I am not of Boise and do not wish to be.

And so I live an interim or preparatory life. Oliver is bent upon making these thousand acres of ours into something that all men can look at and be inspired by, a sort of pledge of what the country can do when it has water. His goal, he told me the other day, is to make something as near as possible to Querendero, one of those grand Mexican
estancias
at which we stayed when we rode back from Morelia. He will fence our thousand acres and push his improvements clear to the fences–wheat, lucerne, timothy, wild pasture, orchards, berry patches and gardens. He swears he will have a rose garden that will make me forget Milton. He will make father’s roses look like a posy bed! He frightens me, he is so willing to stake everything we have. But when I raise objections, he tells me I can see only what is in front of my nose.

Faith! Faith! he tells me. Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains. When this pioneering enthusiasm takes hold of him, he is not my wordless husband at all. A few days ago, in the last of the Indian summer weather, we rode around the whole place so that he could show me what he wants to do with each part of it. We have kept most of the poplar lane alive, with great effort, by means of the windmill and hose cart, but some of our “grove” has perished. Until we get water from the Big Ditch we must get our results mainly out of native, resistant things, Oliver says. The slope of the mesa will be our wild garden, planted to wild syringa, wild clematis, and buck sage, which has a yellow flower that Nellie admits is almost as handsome as furze. This will cover, some day in the future for which we live, the “upright” of the great step. The “tread” will be covered with grass.

I grew almost hysterical, sitting my horse there on Pisgah’s top and being shown the Promised Land, which consisted of a sweep of sage and our barren house and the dots of three distant settlers’ shacks, with off to our right the desolation that Hi Mallett has created with his sulky plow. “Remember Querendero?” Oliver kept saying to me. “Have you forgotten the grace and romance you found in Tepitongo? Well just look at this with the eye of faith. This can be as good.”

In truth, he half convinced me. Let the water project be completed, and it can be splendid; there is literally no limit to what one might do. I rode home feeling almost exhilarated, and I have been very cheerful since. Maybe, maybe. I cling to that possibility as a child clutches a piece of sea-worn magic glass on the beach.

This, you see, is one of my hopeful days, all because I have been given a glimpse of what lights up Oliver’s mind even when he seems taciturn and silent. All because the windmill has pumped us past the dry season with only modest casualties. All because we have had a rain to settle the summer dust cloud. With his hand on his heart, Oliver swears that next spring we shall have a lawn all along the front of the house to hold down all the Idaho dirt that wants to blow inside.

This must sound incredible, read on Staten Island.

 

The Mesa

January 10, 1890

Dearest Augusta–

It was so good of you to have Ollie for Christmas. It was out of the question that he should come home, for we hadn’t the money for his fare. Without you, he would have had to go to Milton, sadly reduced now that father and mother are gone and the old house sold, or stay over with two or three other waifs at school. Dr. Rhinelander and his wife are kindness itself, but it wouldn’t have been Christmas.

He wrote me after returning–one of his characteristic twenty-word letters–and said that “he had fun with Rodman,” and that “Mrs. Hudson was nice to me and asked a lot of questions.” I hope he had the manners to write to you.

Just today I heard from Oliver, who has taken his Irrigation Survey report east (Major Powell is in difficulties with a certain clique of Senators, and wants all possible ammunition for this session of Congress). Before going to Washington, Oliver found time to run up to Concord. All is not quite as I had hoped. Ollie is struggling, keeping afloat in his studies but only barely. He is somewhat lonesome and isolated, Oliver says. He feels his difference, and resents the allusions of his schoolmates to it. Shortly after he arrived last fall, he appears to have got into an actual fist fight with a boy who sneered at the place he came from. “Idaho is my
home!”
he told Dr. Rhinelander, as if that justified everything. And he wears a sprig of sage in his jacket buttonhole, as a Scotch lassie might wear a sprig of heather!

I am miserable at the thought of his homesickness and his fighting–he is not a rude or brawling boy. It makes me doubt the wisdom of my plans for him. Yet he has come to know you and Thomas and your children, he has traveled by himself like a grown man, he is studying with the finest teachers, among the finest Eastern boys. I know he will thank me in the end for forcing this on him.

In his letter he asks for a photograph of his sisters to put up in his room, and also one of his pony. Evidently the information that he has a pony has helped gain him prestige among his schoolmates, and he has always been very manly and protective about his sisters, especially Agnes. I have asked Wiley, who owns a camera, to bring it next time he rides this way, so that we may send Ollie what he wants.

One thing in Oliver’s letter made me feel like crying with an odd mixture of feelings. It seems that after talking with Dr. Rhinelander and saying good-bye to Ollie, Oliver slipped up into the balcony of the chapel and watched unseen during the chapel service, which he says was impressive, and the boys well behaved. Oh, I would give anything I own to do that same thing, only for ten minutes–to look down from my hiding place in that dim, scholarly light, with solemn noble words on the air, and see my own boy’s brown head down there among the others, absorbing it and gathering in wisdom and the sense of what it means to be civilized!

Instead, I look out my window and see thin, rippled snow, and sagebrush that bends stiffly in a bitter northwest wind. Our hope of restoring our old community of saints here has not quite been gratified. The men have been frantically busy, Frank and Wiley have been up in the canyon most of the time. Now Oliver is away and Frank is about to go East and visit his parents for the first time in five years. I shall give him a letter to you, for I want you to know each other. If he expresses himself freely to you, please listen, and do not judge him or me too harshly. It will be the next best thing to talking to you myself. We are all right–life continues, the old bonds hold–and if there is a certain unhappiness, a real regret, why that is what man, and even more woman, is born to. I repeat, I am
all right.

 

The Mesa

March 1, 1890

Darling Augusta–

You have been much with me for the past two or three days. The other evening I was rereading
The Freshening Day,
that first book of Thomas’s poems, and our wedding-present copy from you, with the date of my wedding day fourteen years ago. You remember you painted a rose spray across the silk-lined fly leaf, and daisies in the back. Two of the sonnets Thomas wrote in Milton, on one of those summer weekends that seem more and more wonderful as time tries to efface them. I felt strangely, miraculously preserved as I read, and yet oh! so melancholy and sad! The book of life turned back in my hands to that time of maidenhood and expectation.

Who could have foreseen for the bride of that day the picture that is and has been–the
shall be
is still to be unfolded. Sometimes it chills my heart to think about the future almost as much as it warms it to think about the past. I believe that I can foresee my life to come much better than I could, and I feel that I have the strength to bear it, whatever it may be. And yet,
bear
it! What of a future of which it can even be thought, it might have to be
borne!

It is a sort of insanity not to be happy, when one has reasonable health and good children and a true, energetic husband who is doing something extraordinary, drawing in the outlines of civilization on the blank page of a desert. I tell myself it is true happiness to be still the friend of the most blessed of women. And yet I cannot boast that I am
very
happy, or even encourage you to think that some day I might be. I feel as stiff and frozen and ungainly as the sagebrush out there in the wind. But I suppose that, like the sagebrush, I shall at least endure–unless some Hi Mallett should come with a sulky plow and plow me quite up.

That, without your intending it, was nearly the effect of your letter reporting your visit with Frank. I knew you would like him at once. He is truly noble, with the loftiest ideals and the most sensitive understanding. I know he must have found it a relief to talk with you, for among us, in our entangled and encumbered situation, there are no opportunities to speak out. And yet how it shook me to have you report his words about his “incurable disease”! How wretched, how wretched, for him, for me, for Oliver, for all of us, that a boy so clean and fine should be torn between loyalty to the friend he most values in the world, and this incurable disease! And yet his dilemma and his torment cannot be worse than mine.

I must say no more of this. I beg you to think no more of it.

Oliver, having just returned from New York, has had to turn around and start back, to confer with General Tompkins and two members of the London syndicate who have just arrived. It seems there is dissatisfaction with the progress of the Susan Canal, which these gentlemen believe should have been completed to its full twenty miles last fall, so as to be ready for use this spring; and someone seems to have raised a question as to Oliver’s judgment in pressing ahead with the Big Ditch at the same time. It makes me worse than cross to think of people who have only the dimmest idea about this project, questioning the man who conceived it and has pushed it through against every sort of odds. To him, the Susan is only a sop to the skeptics. It means little by comparison with the Big Ditch–is only a secondary canal to that great one, and even if completed now would not put any large acreage under irrigation.

Still, he has had to go and justify himself. He hates it. More talkee-talkee. At least, he told me as he left, he can now bring back a lot of bare-root roses. The varieties available here are somewhat common. I know he is bent upon that rose garden for my sake. He hopes it may help repay me for all the dust and discomfort of last summer, and persuade me that the waiting is not in vain, and that life in the Boise Valley can be given grace and beauty, and that we will not have to wait until Agnes is a woman before our surroundings are fit for civilized living.