Angle of Repose (61 page)

The buggy rolled through the pasture gate, and Ollie slid off to fight the wire loop over the post. Running, dragging at the mare’s holding-back weight, he led her to the corral, where his father and Mrs. Olpen had already alighted. On the hill across the canyon Nellie Linton was waving a dishtowel, either in jubilation or in urgency, from the doorway.

“Take care of the horses, Ollie,” his father said. “I’ll be back for you.”

“Yes, sir.”

They hurried up the path toward the unseen bridgehead. Ollie pulled the bridle and turned his mare loose, unhooked the tugs from the curled iron ends of the singletrees, unbuckled the harnesses and dragged them through the dust and boosted them, all he could lift, onto their pegs in the shed. When he came out, his father and Nellie were just disappearing inside the house. Mrs. Olpen was resting halfway up the hill, with her head down and her hand on her knee. Ollie took the oat pail and poured three equal heaps onto the ground. The mules and the mare bent their heads to the piles, nudging him out of the way. He watched Mrs. Olpen make it to the door and go in. The lightning cut a jagged gash in the clouds upriver, and after several seconds the thunder went rumbling away. A wind whirling down the opposite slope hit the river and roughened the slick water of the pool.

He felt lonely, small, and scared. He wished he could cross the bridge before the storm came on. What if his father should forget, and not come back for him? What if his mother was so sick he couldn’t leave? Or dying? Abandoned on the wrong side, he could not cross because he had already been disobedient twice and knew he must be punished.

He had been waiting at the end of the bridge for a long time before his father came down the path and out onto the span without touching the rope, and pounded across as if the swaying planks were bedrock. Ollie stood up. “Is she all right?”

His father, in a hurry, took his hand. “I think so. I hope so.”

“Is she crying?”

Now his father looked at him in a searching way, and the hurry went out of him. He let go Ollie’s hand, leaned against the cliff, and filled his pipe. “She’ll have to cry some more before it’s over. But she’ll be all right if that doctor will only get here.”

There was a swarming smell of rain in the air, the sweet smell of tobacco, then the sulphur smell of a lucifer match, then smoke.

“Mrs. Olpen’s dirty,” Ollie said.

“She’s a whole lot better than nothing. She’s kind-hearted, at least.”

They stood silent, Ollie as close to his father as he could stand without bumping into him. The north winked brightly, winked again before the first flash had been wiped from his eyeballs. Thunder crashed loud, then louder, then began to roll. Full of his feelings, which included a sense of sin, Ollie stood in the drift of pipe smoke and instead of looking at his father, looked at the river, where heavy drops, unfelt in the shadow of the cliff, were dimpling the water.

His father’s hand came heavily down on his shoulder. He froze. Now it was coming. He accepted it, he knew it was deserved. The fingers squeezed hard on the bones. His father said, “Ollie, you did something.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You did something very grown up. Nobody could have done better.”

Ollie’s eyes flew up to his father’s face. The face looked down at him seriously. The hand was so heavy on his shoulder that he had to brace himself to stand straight under it. As if testing the resistance it invoked, the hand left the shoulder and fitted itself around the back of Ollie’s neck. The fingers closed clear around his throat under his chin. “You’re all right, my friend,” his father said. “You know that?”

As if impatiently, he let go, though Ollie would willingly have stood there all evening with that hand on him. “We’d better get back before we get wet.”

Uncertainly Ollie offered his hand, to be led across, but his father looked down at him with his eyes narrowed and said, “You came across by yourself when you went for John and Mrs. Olpen, is that right?”

Was it coming now? First praise and then punishment? “Yes, sir.”

“Have any trouble?”

“No, sir.”

“Scare you, after this afternoon?”

“No, sir. A little.”

“Did you think about this afternoon? Did you think you might be punished?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If you’d done it for any reason than getting help for Mother, I’d have to punish you. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right. Your mother doesn’t know, and we won’t tell her. It would only worry her when she shouldn’t be worried. Now do you want to go back by yourself?”

The look they exchanged was like a promise. “Yes, sir.”

His father motioned him onto the bridge, stepped out of the way to let him by, let him get twenty feet out onto the planks before he himself started. He stayed that distance behind, all the way across the bridge.

The doctor came just before sunset. Ollie and his father, closed out of the house, had played three games of horseshoes and then been driven inside by a flurry of rain. But the flurry had come to nothing. Out the door Ollie could see that the yard’s dust was pocked with the dried craters of single drops, though lightning still flared on the sky. Above the sound of Nellie Linton’s voice reading to Betsy up in the drafting room he heard nearly continuous thunder.

His father knocked out his pipe impatiently against the doorjamb. “Quite an evening to be born.” They stood together in the south-facing door and looked out over the canyon and the falling mountains to where the sky over the valley was rosy in the last reflected light. Above the rosy haze of valley dust the sky over there was still blue.

The doorway beside him emptied, his father’s quick steps took him along the front of the shack as if he had suddenly remembered something he should have done long ago. But at the corner he stopped. “Good Lord,” he said. “Look at that.”

Ollie went to the corner. In the northwest the sun had broken around the lower slope of Midsummer Mountain and was sending a last long wink across the Sawtooths, straight into the black mass of rain cloud. Clear across the stone house, bridging from mountains to river bluffs, curved two rainbows, one above the other, even the upper one as bright as colored glass, sharp-edged, perfect from horizon to horizon.

“By George, your mother ought to see that. It’s an omen, no less.”

They ran up past the cooktent with the wetted dust adhering to their shoes. Ollie’s father knocked, listened, opened the door. Ollie, behind him, saw past him to the closed door of the bedroom. He waited while his father crossed the room and tapped with his fingernails.

“Sue? Sue, if you’re able, look outside. There’s an absolute sign, the most perfect double rainbow you ever saw.”

The door opened, the doctor stood in it, wide, shirt-sleeved, his hands held fingers-upward in the air. Every lamp in the house seemed to have been lighted behind him; his shadow fell clear to the front door. Ollie’s horrified eyes made out that the stiffly upheld hands were enameled with blood.

“Your wife isn’t interested in rainbows,” the doctor said. “You’ve got a daughter three minutes old.”

Let two years pass-and they literally pass, like birds flying by someone sitting at a window. Seven hundred and thirty risings of the sun, seven hundred and thirty settings. Twenty-four waxings and wanings of the moon. For the woman, six short stories, one three-part serial, fifty-eight drawings. For the man, an automatic waste weir and a box for measuring the flow of water in miner’s inches-both described in technical journals, neither patented. For both of them, for all of them, three times of rising hope and three times of disappointment, the latest of each attributable to Henry Villard’s abortive move to expand his empire.

And now midsummer again, 1887.

 

In that latitude the midsummer days were long, midsummer nights only a short darkness between the long twilight that postponed the stars and the green dawn clarity that sponged them up. All across the top of the world the sun dragged its feet, but as soon as it was hidden behind Midsummer Mountain it raced like a child in a game to surprise you in the east before you were quite aware it was gone from the west. One summer week out of four, when the moon was nearing or at or just past the full, there was hardly anything that could be called night at all.

Whatever it was called, she was alone in it. Oliver was in town, trying to rescue something out of the Villard debacle, raise a little money by borrowing on the sale of some of his own stock. He thought that if prospective backers could only see a mile of completed ditch, they would believe, and he would build that mile at his own expense if he had the money.

It was now nearly eleven; his long stay might be good omen or bad. The children had been long in bed, John had gone to his cabin immediately after supper, Wan had swatted the last flies and miller moths gathered around the lamps and gone out to his tent, Nellie had closed her book an hour ago and said good night and retreated to her room. There sat Susan Burling Ward, tired-eyed after a day’s drawing, dragged-out after a day’s heat, and tightened her drowning-woman’s grip on culture, literature, civilization, by trying to read
War and Peace.

But her eyes were too scratchy. When she closed them and pressed her fingers to the lids, thick tears squeezed out. Sitting so, looking into the red darkness of her closed lids, she heard the stillness. Not a sound inside her cave-like house, not a sigh from the room behind the chimney where Betsy and Agnes slept. Not a fly or moth left to flutter around the light. She opened her eyes. The ragged flame along the wick trembled without sound.

And outside the silent house, the silent moon-whited mountains, the vacant moon-faded sky. No cry of bird or animal, no rattle of hoofs among stones, no movement except the ghostly flash along the surface of the river, no noise except the mutter of water as muted as rumination. Her mind was still moving with the turmoil of Tolstoy, and the contrast between that crowded human world and her moonlit emptiness was so great that she said aloud, “Oh, it’s like trying to communicate from beyond the
grave!”

1970 knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead.

But Susan Ward in her canyon was pre-refrigerator, pre-dishwasher, pre-airplane, pre-automobile, pre-electric light, pre-radio, pre-television, pre-record player. Eyes too tired to read had no alternative diversions, ears that craved music or the sound of voices could crave in vain, or listen to Sister Lips whistle or talk to herself.

Restlessly she stood up, waited for her roiled sight to clear, and went to the door. It let in the pale wash of moonlight and the sunken mutter of the river. The moon was directly above her in the southern sky, with only a small irregularity to mar its roundness. It was not flat like some moons, but visibly globular; she could see it roll in space. Its light fell like pallid dust on bare knoll and cooktent and lay in drifts along the roof-planes of the shack. It might have been a snow scene except for the shadows, which were not blue and luminous but soft and black.

Below, to her right, the canyon was impenetrable, without even a flash from the water, but the little flat across the river, with its haystack, shed, and corral, was a drawing in charcoal and Chinese white, a precise, focused miniature in the streak of moonlight across the shoulder of Arrow Rock. Out of their flat shadows the poles of the corral and the trunks of the cottonwoods bulged with a magical roundness like the moon’s. As she watched, charmed, the trees below must have been touched by the canyon wind, for flakes of light glittered up at her and then were gone. But there was no sound of wind, and where she stood there was not the slightest stir in the air. The glitter of soundless light from that little picture lighted in the midst of darkness was like a shiver of the earth.

But where was Oliver? He had never stayed this long on any of his prowling, unsatisfactory trips to town. The momentary fear that he might have been thrown off his horse, or in some way hurt, she dismissed. He was not one to whom accidents happened. She had never worried about him in that way even in Leadville after Pricey’s beating, when he rode to work armed, through enemies who would have drygulched him if they dared.

Some delay, somebody he had to wait a long time to see. Perhaps even some success. He had more than earned it. He had turned down four different offers, one in the governor’s office, to stick to his great scheme, and she had been loyal, had she not? She had supported him and encouraged him and believed in him and put up with what her support cost her.

As if cupping her hands to catch falling water, she extended her arms. She turned her face upward again to the moon.

Her image of herself held her breathless. She was aware of how she would look to someone-Oliver? No, he was not likely to notice. Frank? Perhaps. Augusta best of all. As she stood reaching for the soft fall of light she studied the ethereal pallor the moonlight gave her hands, and she thought, with Augusta’s mind,
Unchanged.
Still Susan.

The upper half of the path to the river was deceptive and without depth in the wash of moonlight; once she passed into the shadow cast by Arrow Rock the blackness stretched her eyes and put caution in her feet. Feeling her way, she made the loud gravel of the beach. The hollow hole, whenever her feet were still, plashed and guggled with river sounds; it was cool with river chill. By now her eyes had adjusted. She could make out the dividing line between opaque shingle and faintly shining water, with a flutter of white like a ruflle where it tumbled out of the narrows into the upper pool. From where she was, the shed and corral across the river were characterless, lost in a paleness without dimensions. When she tipped her head back and stared for a good while at the glowing sky and the light-paled stars, the luminousness changed her eyes again, so that when she looked back down she could not at first see her own body.