Angle of Repose (62 page)

The lighted opposite bank lured her. Dared she cross the bridge in the dark, and be waiting at the corral when Oliver rode up? She walked to the bridgehead and stood in the dark there until things swam obscurely into visibility: pale planks, the blackness of the cliffs against the sky. From below, the river noise came up strongly, and a damp chill flowed around her feet. She could not see the water, only a darker, inverted sky down there, with nearly lost stars in it. For all her eyes could tell her, the bridge might lie on black bedrock glinting with mica, or it might span bottomless space opening under the bottom of the world.

Tentatively she moved out a yard or two, and stood. It seemed remarkably steady. The damp water-breath excited her. With one hand she lifted her skirts above her shoe tops, and with the other she laid hold of the rope’s weather-softened twist. Steadily, holding her breath but not hesitating, she walked the sway downward, then upward. Then she was on rock. Then she emerged from the cliff’s darkness into cool moonlight, and the river smell was replaced by the smells of dust, sage, horses, dry hay. Exhilarated, feeling no bigger than a doll, she crossed to the corral and went around it to the shed side. She spread her forearms on the top bar and put her chin on her stacked hands, a white figure flooded by the moon, rounded and highlighted against the rounding white poles, with her shadow stretched on a rack of fence-shadow behind her.

A trance was on her eyes, she saw up, down, ahead, and to both sides without moving head or eyeballs. Before her, reaching to her feet, was the pocked, silvered dust of the corral, across which the shadow of the opposite fence was drawn like a musical staff. High across the river her window glowed orange; straight ahead, and up, Arrow Rock jutted black beside the moon. All her right hand was a blackness of cliff. Upward the sky opened, a broad strip of silver gilt with the moon burning through it and stars like fading sparks flung down toward the world’s rim.

She stared with eyes stretched to their widest, and as she stared, the firmament rolled one dizzying half turn, so that she was looking not up, but down, into a canyon filled with brightness, on whose bottom the moon lay among silver pebbles, a penny flung for luck into a cosmic Serpentine.

“I wish . . .” she said, not knowing what she wished.

Her neck stiffened, her chin came up off her hands. She listened, caught by some sound. Then she heard it again, a musical, drawn-out howling downriver. It paused, broke into a kind of barking, lifted again into the howl.

The hair prickled on the back of her neck. She was familiar with the usual animals of their mountains and deserts, and she knew this was no mountain lion–a mountain lion mewled and complained like a distressed child. It was deeper and more thrilling than the yap and quaver of a coyote. A wolf, then. Even the sheepherders, who liked to dramatize the dangers of their life, admitted that wolves were getting scarce. Yet what else could this be? And if there was ever a night on which a wolf would want to tilt his muzzle to the moon and let out the sound of his wild heart, this was the night.

The sound was gone, diffused in sky, lost among canyon walls. Her straining ears picked up only a sort of ringing in the air, and that, she was sure, was not in the air at all, but in her own head. She put her chin back on her laced hands and brooded into the patterned shadows of the corral.

In a minute she heard the sound again, this time definitely closer. It had come around some obscuring corner; it was moving her way. In quick fear she took a step backward, estimating with her eye the distance to the hidden end of the bridge. But then she stopped and turned her head sideward to listen once more.

There was something un-wolfish about this wolf, something too human. He howled something too close to a tune, he barked something too reminiscent of words. In double relief she laughed aloud. It was Oliver, riding home in the midnight quiet, picking his way from shadow into moonlight and into shadow again, his hat off, maybe, his shirt open to the softness of night, and singing like a boy on a hayride.

Perception and inference were all but simultaneous. If he rode home singing, his long day must have had results. Someone must have put up the few thousand dollars he needed to dig his mile of the Susan Canal. Any potential investors sent out by General Tompkins in the spring might see water flowing around the contour at the canyon’s mouth, and a wheatfield on the sagebrush bench above the Olpens’.

Another corner; the sound came suddenly louder, enlarged by echoes.

Alone, contented with himself and the world, he bellowed in a way to make her smile. As soon as he had sung the melody through, he instantly sang the same verse in the bass, as if trying to sing harmony with himself, and she was reminded of the guides Augusta had told her about, who sang two notes up into the ceiling of the baptistry at Pisa, and let the roof fuse them into a fat round chord.

He was as moon-mad as she was. She heard hoof-irons ring on stone-he was getting close. In a few seconds he would ride into the flat and into visibility. Impulsively she skipped into the shadow of the shed, and there, pressing her back against the rounding logs, she waited to surprise him.

The hoofs passed from rock to dust, came close, closer, stopped. “Hoo, boy,” Oliver said. The saddle creaked. She peeked around the corner of the shed and saw his long leg swing over the cantle and around, his body with its back to her jackknifed in the act of dismounting. Then there was a hard, angry grunt, and he was flat on his back in the dust.

She cried out, and sprang from her hiding place to help him. The mule shied sideways, dragging Oliver by the foot still in the stirrup. “Whoa, whoa!” he was saying, and his body convulsed itself upward and his hand caught the stirrup, or his foot. For another few feet he went bumping, and then he and the mule separated. The mule skittered to the far fence and stood wall-eyed in the moonlight. Oliver sat still.

“Oh my dear!” Susan said.

“Great God, what were you trying to do, get me killed?”

“Oh, when you fell I couldn’t help . . . Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

He stood up and beat the dust out of his pants until the moonlight was a palpable haze around him. “No,” he said in a voice thick with disgust. He went to the mule and picked up the trailing reins, wrapped them once around the corral bar, hooked the near stirrup up onto the horn, and fumbled for the latigo on the mule’s dark side. “What are you doing, still up? What’re you doing over here?”

“Just looking at the moon.” When she came and stood close behind him he went on loosening the cinch and did not turn his head. “I heard you singing. I knew something good must have happened. I was going to surprise you. I’m sorry, I should have known better than to jump out like that when you fell.”

“Ugh,” Oliver said. The cinch swung loose under the mule’s belly, the saddle went up on the rail.

“What did happen? They agreed, didn’t they–somebody did. You got some help.”

Now he turned, but not the whole way. His face was shadowed by his hat, he looked off down the canyon. “No,” he said. “They didn’t agree. Nothing happened. I got no help.”

“Oh,
Oliver
!”

“So far as they’re concerned, the canal’s dead. I’m a good fellow, they like me fine, but they’ve all been burned. They wanted to sell me some stock.”

He sounded like a boy from whom something has been expected, and who has disappointed himself and everybody else. She moved to put her hand on him in comfort, but he turned away and pulled the headstall over the mule’s bending ears. His hand spatted haunch, he walked around Susan as if she had a diameter of ten feet and took the bridle into the shed and brought out the oat can. She heard the disgusted breath whistle through his teeth as he bent to pour the oats on the ground.

“But you were singing so happily!” she said, and now she did come close and lay a hand on his arm. She stopped short, she leaned fiercely to see his face. “You’ve been
drinking!”

For the first time, he faced her; she realized that until now he had been trying to breathe around or past her. Their look was long. She saw that he was uncertain, unable to think of anything to say. “Yeah,” he said finally, and turned and reached to set the oat pail upside down on a post. He missed, the pail fell clattering, he stooped and got it and crammed it hard on the post’s top with both hands.

“You’re drunk,” she said. “You can barely stand up. Oh, how could you!”

He stood before her and said nothing.

“To come home like a common drunkard!”

He stood there. He did not reply.

“Are you even sorry? Are you ashamed?”

He stood there.

“Are you even going to explain?”

Her maneuvering had brought her around so that in facing her he had to look into the light. His face was stubborn and hangdog. “Sorry?” he said. “Sure I’m sorry. But what is there to explain? We talked a long time, got nowhere. I had a few too many.”

“Where were you? Where did you do this talking?”

“The back room of the Coarse Gold.”

“That saloon!”

“I guess you’d call it that.”

She put her fingers to her eyes and pinched out the sight of his stubborn face. When she took her hands away, his shape weaved and staggered in her sight. His tongue was thick, he couldn’t even speak clearly, after a ten-mile ride home. What must he have been when he left Boise?

“I’m ashamed, if you’re not,” she said. “We’ll get nowhere trying to talk when you’re in this condition. I’m going up to bed.”

Going up the path she felt that she was crying silently inside, drowning in desolate unshed tears. Behind her his feet stumbled, and she hated his clumsiness.

At the bridge he caught up with her and took her arm; she stopped without turning. “Wait,” he said. “You can’t go across there without a hand.”

Her eyes were fixed on the gray planks that hung wireless and unsupported between the two darknesses of cliff. The chill from the water pebbled her skin, the sound of the river was like sobbing. “Do you think
you
can?” she said. “I think I’d better help
you.”

Oliver dropped his hand. She went on across, seeing nothing but the planks under her feet, feeling nothing but the uneasy shifting under her soles and the rope’s roughness in her hand. His weight twice lurched the bridge so that she had to pause and cling before going on. Falling off his mule! she thought. A rider as good as he is, falling off a mule!

All the way up the hill she did not look back. When she rested, his feet stopped behind her. When she went on, they followed. With vindicated vindictiveness she heard the unsteadiness of his steps.

Out of the shadow, into the light. She turned her head then and saw the moon float free from behind Arrow Rock. The whitened knoll rounded off around her. Her house, dug into the hill, would hardly have been visible without its lighted window, but cooktent and shack were braced with charcoal shadows and drifted with pale light.

When they came to the place where the path forked between house and shack, she heard Oliver say, “I guess maybe you’d like me to sleep in the shack.”

“That might be best.”

The promptness with which he turned down toward the shack made her want to scream after him. What are you upset about? Why should
you
act as if you’re angry with
me?
She felt as empty as the mountains. After eleven years, she wanted to say after him. After eleven years you finally prove to me that Augusta was right.

She found that she had followed him, unintending. They stood before the door of the shack. Oliver would not look at her, he stood obstinately silent. After a long wordless minute he opened the door. “Good night,” he said.

He went in, the door closed, she stood alone before the shack whose unpainted front in the moonlight was as white as the gable of a New England farmhouse. Above the door she saw the quotation from Confucius Oliver had nailed up there five years before. Its bottom half had split off, but the rest of it, faded by weather, was clearly readable in the midnight radiance.

About this time I need some Mister Bones to say to me, “Doesn’t this story have anything in it but hard luck and waiting? Isn’t the man ever going to get that ditch dug?” Then I can reply in summary fashion, and get by this dead time.

For I find that it bothers me to wait it out with them. I don’t want to follow Grandfather on his trips to the post office, where there is nothing but a letter for Grandmother from Augusta Hudson that rubs into his raw conscience the realization of his wife’s exile, or a check from Thomas Hudson that reminds him, with barbs, how he is supported. I don’t want to drift with him up to the territorial offices or the Coarse Gold. I don’t want to watch him accept drinks from men who offer them half out of personal liking and half out of alertness to evade what he may ask of them.

Neither do I want to take any of those long train rides to New York, where General Tompkins periodically got a fire going in some handful of damp financial shavings. I don’t want to watch them blow hopefully into one little smudge after another until it went out. I don’t want those depressed rides home, six days long, carrying each time a bigger accumulation of failure. No wonder he spent most of his time in the club car.

At home, after those episodes, he could go out and work off his disappointment helping John grub sagebrush out of the right of way. He was past believing that the skinned line around the corner of the hills would fool anyone into thinking that the canal was making progress; he was simply one who did his worrying with his muscles. I, having no muscles left, cannot share even that minimal relief. It makes me nervous and restless to imagine his condition, I think too much, I lie awake, I lose confidence in what I myself am doing, I even find myself bending toward the notion of an inane tranquilized existence in Rodman’s Menlo Park pasture. Maybe I would have been smart to devote my hermit years to some silly untroubling subject such as Lola Montez.