Angle of Repose (69 page)

So for the sake of my independence, here goes my felicity. As of this minute I’m on the wagon.

What about the half-emptied glass? Dump it in the sink? Why? My backbone is rigid enough, I don’t have to stiffen it with symbolic gestures. Now then. One smooth brown swallow sluiced around in the mouth, cool among the teeth, and put it down. That’s the end of it.

Now do I feel better? Think. Try to be exact.

No, I don’t feel better. I feel aggrieved, picked-on, and pursued. I want to know why a bunged-up old scholar can’t have his drink in peace. I want to know why I must be wary of the uncertain future. What future? Not Lyman Ward’s. He has converted back to kerosene and is living his grandparents’ life. His own future ought not bother him or anyone else. His grandfather’s horse pistol three feet from his forehead tells him that there is always a solution if things get unbearable. The fact that he isn’t tempted seems to prove that they aren’t unbearable yet. But they are going to be a lot less pleasant without Old Grand-Dad.

So right on, as the activists say. Right on, Lyman. Fifty whole years of Grandmother’s life to go. Make them last.

Of course it’s impossible. I’ll never finish. Autumn is already nearly here, Shelly has had about all the country quiet her physiology can stand, and will be leaving soon. Ada has been having trouble with her breathing. She smokes too much, there is always a cigarette dribbling ashes down her front and into her dishwater and onto her ironing, and I hear her wheeze like an old dog when she makes my bed. Emphysema, I shouldn’t be surprised, her breathing apparatus gone as slack as an old garter. Hyperventilation, pains in her chest and left arm, maybe heart involved too. Good Christ, what would I do if she collapsed?

The very thought of it brings an element of desperation into my delusions of independence. I will not kid myself that this summer of quiet routine and country air have left me much better off than when I came. I have had six aspirins and a bourbon since I got up, and still I ache.

What the hell, my right is in retreat, my center is giving way, my left is crumbling, I have just sent my bottled support to the rear. I shall attack. I shall go on writing the personal history of my grandmother, following Bancroft’s advice to historians: present your subject in his own terms, judge him in yours.

Actually, I’d just as soon leave out the judgment entirely. I don’t feel at ease judging people. And I’d just as soon let her present herself: her letters from the Mesa are among the longest and fullest she wrote during that long half century of correspondence.

The Mesa

August 16, 1889

Darling Augusta–

We have slept five nights in our house in the sagebrush. Like everything here, it is large and raw. It is for the future, it sacrifices the present for what is to come. In time it may be charming, but now it seems hopeless. We need
everything
–awnings, more chairs, boardwalks around the premises, lawn, shrubs, flowers, trees,
shade
. The sun beats on us from sunup to sundown. We are like a seashore place, with dust instead of sand. Dust lies drifted two inches deep in the piazza, dust blows in our faces if we attempt to sit there and read or work, dust whirls about the yard, dust is tracked in by every pair of feet, dust hangs above the canyon mouth and hazes the whole valley, especially at sunset.

I used to write you from Almaden how strangely transformed the dust clouds were after the sun went down. It is the same here. In some ways this mesa is a return. We look off, just as we did at Almaden, into a vast stretch of valley, with the moon at our back. Not a single tree in sight as far as we can see south, east, and west. To the north lie the irrigated lowlands along the river. The noble shape of the country lies bare under the sky as if just made, and ready for the birth of trees and crops.

It is a vision that absorbs Oliver. He follows it like a man panting after a mirage, and he works, works, works. He manages his survey, he supervises the ditch construction, he confers with politicians and contractors and shareholders, he takes visiting representatives of the Syndicate over the works–we have been visited twice since I arrived–and in the hours between dusk and dark, and even after dark, he is out with John doing something to the land or the buildings or the well. He is full of excitement and energy. But my heart whispers to me that all he dreams of is still years away, and that meantime we grow old, we diminish, we lose touch with all that used to make life rich and wonderful. I have just counted on my fingers how long it has been since I saw you. More than seven years.

But I began to speak of our house, before dust and the years obscured it. We have again the mud-plastered walls of the canyon house. The adobe is not as tough as that of the canyon, but a better color–a greenish-yellow gray, like beach sand. We are going to paint the wainscot and woodwork in one of the rooms old ivory–I think it will bring out the color of the walls. Even one finished room would cheer me. I must think in those terms –one room, then another, and another, till all are done, and then grass outside instead of dust, and hammocks on the veranda for the watching of sunsets.

Then if you could only come we could give you a peaceful, roomy sleeping chamber, and a house in which your serene beauty would feel at home. How solitary and strange this great sweep of country would look to you! Yet I can fancy you would like to lie on the hill slope by a clump of sage, and gaze down over the valley and into the bosom of the mountain range opposite, almost as we used to lie on Orchard Hill and look across at the farms of Dutchess County.

Wiley has driven the Susan Canal more than eight miles. It will go twenty before water is turned into it, to water claims that lie below ours. That is for next summer. Meantime the “Big Ditch” is alive with teams and scrapers, and the canyon resounds with blasting. It awes me to see how big this scheme is. In all the years I thought I was helping dream it, I hadn’t the imagination to understand what I was dreaming. The Big Ditch will be immense, a man-made river, and eventually will water nearly three hundred thousand acres–nearly five hundred square miles. There are countries in the world no bigger than that. There will have to be several storage dams, but those will come later. Even without the dams, this will be one of the grandest things in the West.

The finished section, so far hardly more than a half mile, sweeps in a great curve around the shoulder of the mountain, eighty feet wide at the top, fifty at the bottom. The twelve-foot banks slope back at the “angle of repose,” which means the angle at which dirt and pebbles stop rolling. Down the bottom of the ditch fifteen horsemen could ride abreast, without crowding. It was good for me to see it all the other day, in company with the gentlemen from the London syndicate, and to be reminded how all of it is owing to my old boy’s imagination and his refusal to be beaten.

He works far too hard; he always has. It is a thing I have sometimes held against him, that his family must come second to his job. Now he has to make one last trip to the mountains to complete some field work for the Irrigation Survey, and that means Ollie must start East without seeing his father again. It is a great pity, for they are very close. But what can I do? Ollie can’t afford to pass up the chance that St. Paul’s has given him. He will be lonely, and will miss his pony and the excitement of the construction, to which he attends all day, riding the line with Wiley or his father. He lives on his pony.

All through our stay in Victoria he talked about the canyon as if it were the Paradise from which we had been evicted, and from the moment of our return he wanted to go out there. Yesterday I threw up my hands over everything that needs doing here, and rode out with him. Wiley was there, and showed us the changes. He and Frank share our old bedroom, two draftsmen use the others, the shack overflows with men. It seemed a very different place from the quiet canyon where we lived on hope. But it pleased me to see that the trees we planted are doing well, and that the poppies have seeded themselves around the knoll and bloom without human encouragement.

It was strange, that return to Eden. There went the river below, there went the clouds overhead, just as before. The sun beat down as I remembered–sometimes I have thought I could smell the scorched gravel of that gulch! There was everything as we had left it, but changed, too. The sleepiness of our seclusion was replaced by a great busy-ness, and strange faces kept looking out of doors where I was used to seeing only the faces of our local community of saints. It made me melancholy, rather, and I am sure it bothered Ollie too: his memories were thrown out of line. But of course I could not get him to talk about it. He folds things in, and thinks about them, and does not give them outlet, and that worries me for his future. He can be easily hurt.

On the way back we rode past John’s old cabin, and found its little flat obliterated by a great construction camp of eighty men and two hundred horses. There Frank is supervising the tearing down of a whole hill to make the diversion dam that will throw the river into the Susan and later into the Big Ditch. Frank has lost, I am afraid, some of his freshness and exuberance, and has grown almost somber. Like Oliver, he drives himself into the work with a relentlessness that I fear will break him down.

Oh, Augusta, you know my hopes! You know my anxiety, though being the ideal creature you are, married to that ideal man who completes and supports you, you cannot comprehend the unworthy contradictions of someone less sure of herself. You were of course right, years ago, about Frank’s feelings. But he is a thorough gentleman, he understands. So it does not alarm me that Oliver is to be gone for two weeks. I am quite safe, on this mesa and in myself, and I find the same satisfaction in work that Oliver and Frank seem to. This morning, amid all the disorder, I blew the dust from my table and wrote for two hours. Tomorrow I want to go up to the Big Ditch and sketch the teams pulling their scraper-loads of dirt up the banks. My “Life in the Far West” series must include the preparations for the future, for that is what life in the Far West is about.

 

The Mesa

August 30, 1889

Darling Augusta–

This morning I sent my little boy away, and I know his heart broke as mine did. Nellie and I have been trying to keep up his courage and determination with our tales of what wonders he will see, and what fine things he will learn, and what fine men he will study with and what fine boys he will come to know as friends. But this morning after breakfast I sent him to his room to get dressed and ready–he was to catch the ten-thirty train–and when he didn’t appear for a long time I went in and found him ready dressed in his new school clothes, just sitting on the bed with his eyes big and dark and his face as pale as if no Idaho sun had burned it for the last three weeks. “Why, Ollie,” I said, “what is it?” and he looked at me, nearly crying, and said, “Mother, do I have to go?”

Oh, oh, it was all I could do to keep from huddling him against me and drowning him in my tears. Only twelve Think what it must be to travel all the way from Idaho to New Hampshire by yourself at that age, going toward something new and strange, where you don’t know a soul, and where you are afraid you will be an ugly duckling from the West, ignorant and unable to learn! I know he feels that way–he told Nellie, though he would not tell me.

It is just as well Oliver is not here. He has never been as sure as I am that the boy must go East. “Why send him away?” he said to me only last week. “I’m just getting to know him again. Why not let him go to the high school in Boise?”

Of course it would not have done. He knows hardly more people in Boise than he will at St. Paul’s, actually; and from the local school he would emerge a barbarian, prepared for nothing and untouched by culture, believing in the beauties of Idaho civilization! I had to harden my heart to a stone, and in the end he got over his panic. But when the train pulled away, and I saw his young scared face pressed against the window, and his hand making brave half-hearted desolate waves at Nellie, his sisters, Frank, and me, I quite broke down, and I have been crying off and on all afternoon.

I can’t bear to think of him, by now off in Wyoming somewhere, huddled in the seat and watching the country pass and thinking–what? That his mother sent him away. What choices we are offered in this life, if we live in Idaho. Yet in the long run he will have to realize that it is worth any amount of unhappiness to be given the opportunity to learn and grow and become something good and true, perhaps even noble. I confess it is one of the things I hug to my heart, a thing I envy my poor little boy for–his opportunity to see you and Thomas. He has heard about you all his life, but of course doesn’t remember you. Now he can at last know what I have been talking about. But if having him down for Thanksgiving will be the slightest bother, if he will interfere with the great things that fill your life now, do not hesitate to tell him not to come. I would rather he were a little lonely and unhappy than that he should ever become a burden or duty to you.

His sisters and Nellie will miss him as much as I do. The girls depend on their big brother for all sorts of things from mending a toy to saddling their ponies. As for Nellie, poor thing, she cried as if it were her own boy she was sending off.

 

The Mesa

November 10, 1889

Dearest Augusta
–

. After such a summer of heat, dust, and wind you can imagine how gladly I accept winter, which is at least fairly clean, and with what passion I long for spring. It has been build, build, build, all through the fall, and since we are more than two miles from town, the workmen have had to be boarded. Wan has cooked for the family, many visitors, and an average of seven additional men, though that will now be reduced.

With paint, carpets, and curtains we have done something toward making the house habitable, and in addition have built an icehouse, shop, blacksmith shed, and office, all under one roof, making quite a picturesque little building, with outside stairs leading to a storage loft.