Angle of Repose (60 page)

Before she would lie down, she made Ollie go in and finish the reading he had skipped. How else, she asked him, would he ever get into a good Eastern school?

An hour after she heard the buggy grating up the hill on the bluffs road, taking Mrs. Briscoe back to Boise, she had her first pain.

 

I have no intention of writing an account of how a pioneer woman, gently reared, had a child in a canyon camp with no help but that of an old maid governess. I am not going to heat up all those pails of water, or listen for the first weak bleat from the bedroom. Neither am I going to let Susan get up the day after her lying-in, to chum the butter or put out a washing or finish her story. This is not a story of frontier hardships, though my grandparents went through a few; nor of pioneer hardihood, though they both had it. It is only Lyman Ward, Coe Professor of History, Emeritus, living a day in his grandparents’ life to avoid paying too much attention to his own.

She was no novice, had had two children and a miscarriage, and she did not panic. She thought she had a few hours. Depending on whether he took the bluffs road back, or the canyon road, it would take Oliver three to four hours to return. When he got back he could ride down to the Olpen ranch, send Mrs. Olpen up, and go back into Boise for the doctor. Perhaps Wan would come home early, or John might come up from his cabin, and one of them could be sent. She lay in her darkened room with a wet cloth over her eyes and waited for her body to do what it must.

But Nellie Linton, gentle spinster, Victorian virgin, was more agitated. To quiet Betsy, she turned her recklessly loose with the total contents of her workbox, and she let Ollie off, without comment, from his reading and conferred with him outside. In a way flattering to his eight-year-old judgment, she asked him if he could ride to the Olpen place and fetch Mrs. Olpen.

But his father had the mules, and there were no horses on this side of the river.

Could he walk it? Would he be afraid?

He wasn’t afraid, but it was a long away around on this side.

Perhaps he could walk down to John’s cabin and have him go for help.

But John’s cabin was also on the other side, and you couldn’t shout loud enough to be heard across the river there. There were rapids.

Nellie wrung her hands. If his father had just waited one hour!

Was his mother sick? Ollie wanted to know. Did she need the doctor?

Yes, and some good woman. Mrs. Olpen would be of
enormous
help, if only they could reach her.

They fell silent. The sun had dropped far enough so that the house laid a precise triangle of shade across the bare ground. Any minute now Mrs. Ward would call out, in there.

Miss Linton?

Yes Ollie.

I could get there quick across the bridge. I could zip across and ride my pony down.

Oh my goodness, no!

But if she’s sick. That’s the quickest.

Right after you had to be rescued from that bridge? No no. Oh no.

I went across easy. It was the package, coming back.

No. Your mother would die at the thought.

Then it came, the harsh, grunting cry that Miss Linton had been dreading. She saw Ollie’s eyes widen, she saw the blood leave his face.

Wait here. I must go and see . . .

But when she came back, having been able to do nothing but hold Mrs. Ward’s hand until the spasm passed, she made a small sound of her own, a sound of horror. Ollie was already halfway .across the bridge, moving along crabwise with both hands on the rope. The farther he went the more rapidly he moved, until he jumped off onto solid rock. He looked back and saw her, his arm waved, he bolted around the corner of the cliff. In two seconds he appeared at a dead run, headed for the corral.

Shading her eyes, caught between two fears and a hope, Miss Linton watched him come out of the shed with the oat can and bait his brown pony out of the pasture to the corral bars. He poured the oats on the ground, and when she dropped her head to them he got the halter rope around her neck, stretching with both arms in a sort of embrace. He climbed the corral poles to haul her head up and get the bit into her mouth, the headstall over her ears. Inside, Miss Linton heard Susan say something, not in the tone of pain, but conversationally, which meant that Betsy had wandered in and must be dealt with. But she hung in the sunken entrance watching until Ollie had pulled the mare close and flung himself in a bellyflop across her back. He kicked, straightened, his hands shook out the reins, his heels drummed at her ribs. Riding like a cavalryman, as his mother sometimes said with pride and dismay, he bolted across the little flat toward the canyon gate. Like a cavalryman? More like an Indian. His spidery shape clung to the mare’s withers, his tow head was down. He lashed the mare with the ends of the reins and fled out of sight behind the cliff.

 

It is an effort for me to imagine my way backward from the silent father I knew to the boy in Boise Canyon. Like my grandfather, he was not a man of words, and it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers. Grandmother herself may have made that mistake. I have heard her say, in her rueful voice with its overtone of regret, what a brave, manly little boy he was, but I never heard her say how sensitive he was. Yet I think he must have been. But though it is from her letters that I get that impression, I think she herself never understood how deep he ran, any more than she understood his difficulty with reading.

It was his capacity for feeling that she should have attended to: by failing to comprehend it, she probably contributed to his silence.

Feeling, more than manliness, drove him across the bridge against the warnings of his conscience-a horrified sympathy for his mother’s pain, a sense of fatal responsibility in his father’s absence. He was not a disobedient child. He simply overflowed obedience on a flood of emotion, and he had some of his father’s readiness in a crisis.

I see him going down that rough canyon pushing his mare as his father always pushed a horse. He was wound up as tight as a ball of wet rawhide. The last two or three hundred yards before John’s cabin the trail was soft silt, and he lashed the mare into a run, and so excited her that he could hardly pull her in before the door. She danced and cartwheeled, and he shouted, fighting her hard mouth. No one came out. He let the mare stiff-leg him around the corner to where he could see John’s corral. Empty. Before he had had time to frame a thought he was galloping down the canal line that followed the contour around the foot of the sagebrush hills.

He found John sitting on his stoneboat in the shade of a cottonwood, resting himself and his mules. He had been moving testimonial dirt off the right of way. Before Ollie had panted out three sentences John was on his feet stripping the harness from the jenny, letting it fall into the cottonwood fluff that covered the ground like feathers or light snow. He tied the other mule, he looped a halter rope around the jenny’s nose and bellied up across her back. He was a big heavy man, not excitable. He sang when he talked, and he could not say the sound
oo,
it always came out iu.

“Yiu go back,” he said. “If Ay don’t run into your pa Ay bring the doc myself.”

“I’ve got to get Mrs. Olpen.”

The mare side-stepped, pulling at his arms. From the jenny John gave Ollie a long appraising squinting look, the look of an adult asked permission for something dubious. “Ya,” he said finally. “O.K. That’s gude idea. But yiu be careful.”

He turned the jenny and kicked her into a trot down the partly graded canal line. He rode loose and heavy, his toes pointed out. His relaxed weight made the jenny’s trot look smooth. He did not look back. Ollie watched him, feeling hollow and relieved, his burden divided. But then he thought how long it would be before John, or his father, or the doctor, or anyone, could get out from town, and he remembered the animal sound of his mother’s pain. In a moment he was galloping back along the canal line toward the river trail.

He had the Olpen place in sight from a good way off-log cabin and stable, hay-roofed shed, pole corrals, a gnawed and tattered haystack, tall cottonwoods. As he got closer he saw Mrs. Olpen come out into the yard, and chickens running stretch-necked in every direction, scattering the cottonwood fluff. He came in at a trot, with his arm across his face to hold out the dust. When he could see, there was Mrs. Olpen, leathery, slab-sided, standing by the chopping block with a Plymouth Rock hen by the legs in one hand and a kindling ax in the other. Rough men’s boots poked out from under her skirt. With her ax hand she held back a string of hair from her eyes, squinting upward.

“Havin’ it, is she? Needs me?”

“Yes, she’s sick, she was crying. Miss Linton said . . .”

“Just a second.”

She laid the chicken sideways on the block-round eye, leathery lid, open beak–and with one short blow chopped off its head. The ax remained stuck in the block beside the small, perfect, very dead head; the headless chicken flopped and bounced around them, scattering blood and stirring up cottonwood fluff. Ollie held the hard-mouthed mare in tight. Mrs. Olpen wiped her hands on her apron and then reached back to yank the strings. “Sally!” she bawled.
“You,
Sal!”

Wading through dust, feathers, and cotton, she hung the apron on a post, hoisted her skirts, and climbed through the corral fence. Ollie, looking at the horse inside, felt desperate. It was a Roman-nosed plow horse of the kind his mother always called Old Funeral Procession.

Impulsively he slid off, pulling the reins over the mare’s ears. “You can take mine. I can walk.”

But Mrs. Olpen glanced once at the mare’s slick wet back and shook her head, just one complete wag, over and back. The plow horse resisted the bit and got a crack across the nose. Ollie, reins in hand, felt the insides of his legs go cold in the evaporating wind. Down on the river bank the two youngest Olpen boys came out of the willows carrying fishpoles, and the sun glinted off the silvery side of the fish they carried between them. “Sal!” yelled Mrs. Olpen, cramming the plow horse’s ears into the headstall.

Someone yawned loudly from the house. Ollie turned, and Sally Olpen was in the door, gaping and stretching. She started deliberately down the yard, stopped and scraped her bare foot disgustedly against the ground, and came on again. On the side of her face was printed the pattern of a doily or cushion cover. Her black eyes glittered sideways at Ollie; she leaned on the corral poles and yawned, shuddering and shaking her head.

“Git that chicken plucked and drawed,” her mother said. “If I ain’t back tonight, you and Herm are to help Pa milk, hear? You git supper, too. You’re It.”

“What’s the matter? Where you goin’?”

Mrs. Olpen, not answering, laid on the plow horse a blanket crusted with sweat and hair. She moved slower than anybody Ollie had ever seen. He resented the wise look that Sally Olpen was bending on him, but to hurry things up he said, “My mother’s sick.”

“Ah, yeah, I know,” Sally said. “Havin’ a baby.”

“Oh she is not!” He was furious. What did she know, with her raggedy hair and her face all dinted and her dirty feet? He hopped up and down. He said, “Hurry, Mrs. Olpen!”

The woman hauled off the top bar a saddle with one stirrup broken down to the iron, and skirts that were curled and dry. She heaved it onto the Roman nose and settled it by shaking the horn. “You git at that chicken,” she said to Sal. “Don’t leave it lay out in the sun. And don’t you pluck and draw it right by the door, where feathers and guts gits tracked around.”

Sal smiled a secret smile at Ollie, picked up the chicken, and held it up thoughtfully by the legs, watching its neck drip. Mrs. Olpen grunted, heaving at the latigo, and kicked old Roman nose briskly in the belly to make him quit holding his breath. She was so
slow!
The two boys had started to run up the river path. Ollie stood on the corral bar and remounted, so as to be above them when they arrived. His mother had never encouraged him to make friends with the Olpens. They were another tribe, potential enemies. But then from the mare’s back he saw the dust of a rig coming fast up the river road, and recognized the black and tan mules and the tall man on the seat.

“It’s all right!” he cried. “Never mind, Mrs. Olpen. Here’s my father! It’s all right now!”

In front of them all-leather-faced Mrs. Olpen, that girl with the bloody chicken in her hand, the panting boys dangling their dust-patched fish on a forked stick and bursting with questions-he started to cry. Blindly he yanked the mare around and kicked and lashed her out of the yard to meet the buggy.

His father had met John on the road; there was no need to tell him anything. He didn’t let Mrs. Olpen linger even to unsaddle the plow horse, but had her in the buggy almost before the wheels had stopped rolling. To Ollie, biting his lips and stretching the stiffness of tears off his cheeks, he said, “You want to ride with us, Ollie? We can lead your pony.”

Ollie shook his head. For a second his father studied him, unsmiling. Then he turned, said a word to Mrs. Olpen, and laid the whip to the mules. They burst off and left Ollie standing, so that he rode furiously after them, not only to catch up but to leave behind with the Olpens a vision of his reckless horsemanship.

It was raining in the mountains. Black clouds covered the peaks, and above those, white thunderheads with bright silver edges were piled high into a sky still blue. Lightning licked and flickered across the storm front, thunder rumbled like rockslides down the canyon. Just where the trail entered the canyon gateway Ollie turned his head and saw the broad sagebrush basin behind him still in dust-thickened sunlight. The canyon was a sudden coolness, his sweating skin shrank, his shirt was cold on his back. He wound his hand in the mare’s mane and hung on as she lunged and labored on a steep pitch.

Ahead of him the buggy’s wheels grated and ground on the rocks. His father looked back, but made no sign. Mrs. Olpen rode with her face aimed straight ahead out of the tunnel of a sunbonnet. Between their two heads Ollie could see the corner beyond which the canyon widened into their little flat where their corral and haystack were, and to whose right, across the swinging bridge, the stone house hardly more noticeable than a ledge of rock looked down on the river. He wondered if the mother he adored and thought himself unworthy of was still crying for pain.