Angle of Repose (72 page)

Oliver, who never mistrusts anyone unless the evidence is overwhelming, is inclined to take the blame. He says that Burns could have made an honest mistake. I say he did not. He had access to the company’s maps and plans, he knew exactly where the Susan would go, he knew that water would reach those claims before it could reach any of the lands higher up. And he will make no gesture toward redeeming his “mistake.” He says he has made his first payment on that land, has little money, can’t be asked to give up what he has staked his future on. In some desperation Oliver offered to buy the claims, but Burns says he is making plans to build. He already has another wife in mind, the daughter of one of the pick and shovel millionaires. Wouldn’t you think he might be sure enough of his future to sacrifice those acres of desert? Tomorrow I shall send Oliver back to town to see if Burns won’t sell one of the claims, at least. I know the answer in advance. And if he should say yes, where would we get the money? We are in debt up to our necks.

So I shall not see my sister this fall, and my children will not have cousins to ride with or do lessons with (Nellie was prepared to enlarge her school to take in Bessie’s three). Poor John will not realize his dream of coming West. We may or may not have money to send Ollie back to St. Paul’s. We may not even have a job, we may have not a leftover crumb of hope. But we do have a great deal of dry land, unless when we weren’t looking someone has jumped ours too.

Forgive me, I should not be bitter. Yet I cannot see one ray of light. Perhaps we can sell this house to someone who can afford it, Burns perhaps, and move down into the Mallett cabin and herd people’s sheep or plow their sagebrush. It seems the logical conclusion of our effort to reclaim and civilize the West.

From the wide doorway where she perched on her stool with the drawing pad in her lap, she looked out into and through the piazza, past the hammock where Betsy was reading to Agnes, past the heavy pillars and the balustrade on which sat the old Guadalajara olla with its inscription half visible–
asita
–and on across the lawn and the spreading sagebrush to the far line of the mountains. The indoor light was tea-colored, sepia; the lawn was whitened under the sun like an overexposed photographic negative, the sagebrush went palely, growing dimmer and paler with distance, until it ended at the foot of the mountains that were pale, dusty blue against a sky even paler and dustier. She thought it was like being inside a cool cave and seeing out into an allegorical desert plain, the sort of place where wayfarers are bewildered and creatures die of thirst.

She looked from the hammock to her drawing and back to the hammock, estimating the grace of the young bodies curved in the netting, heavy as carried cats. The sweet treble of Betsy’s voice was the only sound. She was reading
The Birds’ Christmas Carol.
The two lay facing different ways, their feet entangled. Agnes, with her wide eyes open and glazed with imagining, kept pulling out strands of silvery hair to arm’s length as if measuring them.

Susan worked with her lips pressed together, her brows tightened a little under the mouse-colored bangs. There was a fist of hair at the back of her head, a little too tightly knotted to be becoming; but the head itself was small and shapely, the neck delicate, the profiled face cut like a cameo. In her high-necked dress with its leg-of-mutton sleeves, its pinched-in waist, its overskirt and bustle, she was antiquely attractive, the portrait of a lady, a tidy, fastidious lady who looked younger than she was.

Nevertheless, as I reconstruct her there, there was in her figure some quality of tension, a certain stiffness suggesting strain or anxiety too pervasive to be forgotten even in the absorption of work. She sat frowning down on her drawing, which reproduced in small space the things that filled her eye–the girls in the curve of hammock, the heavy pillars, the misty desert suggested beyond. Across the bottom of the sheet, as if to keep herself reminded of her subject, she had scrawled in a hurried, untidy hand,
A Hot Day on a
Western Ranche.

Her head turned slightly, she listened. Sounds of a trotting horse. She laid her pencil on the pad and the pad on the table, and stood up. “All right, children. That’s enough for this morning. Thank you for being good.”

But they looked up, her two very different daughters, with identical looks of protest on their faces and an identical question in their mouths. “Can’t we finish it?”

“So sad a story?”

“Yes, Mother!”

“Ollie’s been at his lessons for an hour. Nellie will be wondering what’s happened to you.”

“Just this chapter!”

“All right. Then off you go.”

Boots came in from the back, loud on the tile floors, then soundless on a rug, then loud again. She turned, her face full of an intense question, to confront Oliver coming across the dining room. His face was weathered, rugged, and hot. He had pushed back his rancher’s hat on his head, above the red line that circled his forehead. His mustache hid his mouth, the squint wrinkles fanning out from the corners of his eyes gave him a look of smiling, but the look he sent ahead of him through the doorway was not a smiling one. The light treble of Betsy’s reading voice went on as the two of them looked at each other. He moved his mouth and lifted his shoulders.

“Ah!” she said–a harsh, angry exclamation. “He won’t.”

Again the delicate lift of the shoulders.

Behind her she heard Betsy’s voice round off to a theatrical conclusion. The book clapped shut. She turned. “Now off to your lessons.”

Betsy rose, but Agnes lolled and hung in the hammock. “Do we have to now? Can’t I go down to the windmill and see Hallie?”

“And miss your lessons?”

“Just for a
minute?”

“No, it’s too hot,” Susan said. “Anyway, the last time you went down to the windmill you had to have your mouth washed out.”

“I won’t
listen!”

“Come on, you little whortleberry,” her father said. “You go tell Nellie she wants you. Tomorrow you can ask Hallie up for the fireworks. I brought back a whole saddlebag full.”

“Goodie!” Betsy said. “Can I shoot off a rocket?”

“Maybe. Depending on how good you are all day.”

“Oh, I’ll be very good,” Betsy said. “I’ll be the best. Can I shoot off
more
than one?”

“You wouldn’t want to be a pig.”

“Yes I would.”

She hung onto his hand and swung by it. “Not you,” he said. “There’s less pig in you than in anybody around. Now how about those lessons?”

She swung a last swing all around him and ran out, but she had barely let go before Agnes had wrapped herself around his leg and put her two feet on his boot. He carried her around a few steps that way. Her upturned face was a baby replica of the strained face of her mother. “I’m not a whortleberry,” she said.

“Well it’s news to me. How would anybody know? You
look
like a whortleberry.”

“I look like a girl!”

“You look like a blue-eyed whortleberry to me. Or a whortle-eyed blueberry?”

He lifted her, kissed her, set her down, turned her three times, and spanked her off toward Nellie’s schoolroom, but she swerved, looking provocatively over her shoulder, and began hopping on one foot from tile to tile down the piazza. At each post she put out her flat hand and touched the side face, the inside face, then the other side face. Along the balustrade she patted the adobe every third hop. She did not put her left foot to the ground, but turned the end in three quick hops, three pats, and came back hopping, still with her left foot withered upward, carefully patting wall, window sill, doorframe, and made it back to him and patted his hip, home free, and fell around his leg again. She tried to climb aboard his instep but he lifted her off.

“You’re a witch,” he said, “but I’m the head wizard. Shall I put you under a spell? Shall I fix you so you can’t come to the fireworks until you spell
imbrication?
Or should I make it
trapezoidal?”

“Not
either!”

“Then you’d better get on to Nellie.”

She fled, screaming with laughter, and he looked up to find the older, tenser version of her face waiting for him. He made a smile, he gestured with his head at the drawing pad. “Working. I guess if the world was going to end tomorrow you’d be hurrying to finish something before Gabriel blew.”

“I must!” she said. “How else will we live? Tell me what happened.”

“He won’t sell.”

“Not even the one.”

“No.”

“And there’s nothing we can do.”

“We could sue. I doubt it’d do any good. I’ve got no proofs.”

“Your word ought to be proof enough against the word of that . . .”

“You don’t get far suing a lawyer in a town like this.”

“Then we must buy someone else’s claim!”

“Any claim with water is going to cost plenty. We haven’t got it.”

“Isn’t there any land not filed on?”

“Not under the Susan.”

“There must be
something
we can do!”

Oliver laughed through his nose. “I can keep my eyes open and when somebody fails to complete his improvements I can pre-empt him.”

“It’s hardly a thing to joke about.”

“I wasn’t joking. It’s about the only thing I could do.”

“What if we gave them a farm out of our land? What do we need a thousand acres for?”

His eyes were steady and–she thought–pitying. “I’d do it in a minute. But what good is land under the Big Ditch if the Big Ditch is dry? What can John do with three hundred and twenty acres of sagebrush?”

“What can
we?”
she said, and turned away bitterly, not wanting him to see her face. “Oh, I had set my heart on having Bessie here! I wanted the children to have some companions whose mouths weren’t filthy with barnyard talk.”

“I was thinking some of letting the Malletts go. We’ll probably have to anyway. Bessie and John could have their cabin, and maybe my office for an extra room, till the company gets straightened out and we can finish the Big Ditch. Then they could take their pick of our land.”

“Finish the Big Ditch,” she said, and bent her head to stare at the red tile floor. Her hands were tucked up in her armpits as if they were cold. Her feet took her down the piazza, along the balustrade where Agnes had hopped a few minutes before, and across the end and up along the wall. Her hands were tight in her armpits, her head down, her face set and flushed. She was not one who easily went pale, even during great stress; it was her rosy complexion, as much as anything, that made her look ten years younger than she was. Stopping at the table where her drawing lay, she raised her head and gave him a glance of scorn and misery. “Of course,” she said, “when the Big Ditch is finished, then the stock will be valuable, too.”

“Sue . . .”

“Oh, I can’t
bear
it!”

“Sue, that stock’s still got a chance to be worth thirty times what they paid for it. General Tompkins hasn’t given up. Neither have I. We’ve got assets to burn. The Susan’s producing a little revenue, the Big Ditch is well started. They’re crazy if they pull out now. They’ll reorganize, buy out the ones that want to quit. If they stick a little longer they’re in clover. The project’s just as good as it ever was.”

“Yes,” she said on an indrawn breath. “Just about.”

In anger he took her by the shoulders. “Susie, you too?”

Unyielding, stiff in his hands, she cried into his face, “Oh, how could I help it! Eight years of exile, eight years of living on hope. For what? Till now it’s been all right, I could put up with it, I had faith in it. . . .”

Her voice gave out, she was hung up on his eyes. He let go of her arms. “Did you?” he said.

“What? What do you . . .”

Very still, he stood before her. His face was weathered like a cow-hand’s, his fingers hung half closed at his sides, constricted by their calluses. Almost whispering, he said, “Did you? Did you have faith in it? Did you have faith in
me?”

As if he had slapped her, she stepped back. “That’s not fair!”

“Isn’t it? Sometimes I’ve wondered.” He stared into her eyes, he smiled a bleak smile, he shrugged. “Not that I’ve deserved much faith.”

“Ohhh!” she said, wagging her head back and forth, her eyes on the floor. “You speak of faith and trust. How much better off we’d all be if you hadn’t trusted that Burns. Then at least Bessie and John would have their land. We wouldn’t have dragged them completely under with us.”

Abstractedly his eyes went to the drawing on the table. He studied it, read its caption:
A Hot Day on a Western Ranche.
His eyes lifted, went outward through the door between the piazza pillars, across the sunstruck lawn, past the withering poplars, across the sage, to the mountains. The sage pressed in upon them from every side, they looked out upon it as people on a raft would look out on the sea.

His eyes came inside again, he regarded her soberly. The fans at the corners of his eyes tightened, he seemed to smile. But he was not smiling. “The fault’s mine,” he said. “I should have taken those papers down myself, I knew how important they were to all of us. I just let myself get too busy, I was going too many ways at once. I’ve got no excuse. But this general business of trusting people, I don’t know. I doubt if I can change. I
believe
in trusting people, do you see? At least till they prove they can’t be trusted. What kind of life is it when you can’t?”

There was a heavy, questioning, underlined meaning in his words. She stared up at him wordlessly, her face as set and hard as so pretty a face could be. Her mouth, which was usually firm in a precise, pleasant expression tilting always toward a smile, was twisted. Their eyes met, held, wavered, held again. The rosy color drained very slowly from her face.

It was July 4, evening, the end of a long hot day. The piazza was still thick with heat, the pillars and balustrade were as warm as banked stoves. Wait, she told herself bitterly. In ten years the trees will have grown up enough to shade the house in the late afternoon.