Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [100]
It makes me restless, too, to see Oliver Ward going off to Deadwood, a raw Black Hills gulch lately stolen from the Sioux. When he started for there, Custer’s cavalry had been two years dead, and the Sioux were either behind reservation fences or gnawing the bones of exile in the Wood Mountain and Cypress Hills country beyond the Canadian line. So I don’t fear for his scalp. I fear for his soul. His employer was to be George Hearst, then building the sort of empire that Grandfather might have built if he had been another sort of man–George Hearst who, according to Clarence King, was once bitten on the privates by a scorpion, which fell dead.
Clarence King himself, Conrad Prager’s friend and superior on the Survey of the Fortieth Parallel, and later on a friend of my grandparents, would turn out to be not untroubled by the temptations of a George Hearst. There was no reason Oliver Ward should not have been, except character. Pioneer or not, resource-raider or not, afflicted or not with the frontier faith that exploitation is development, and development is good, he was simply an honest man. His gift was not for money making and the main chance. He was a builder, not a raider. He trusted people (Grandmother thought too much), he was loved by animals and children and liked by men, he had an uncomplicated ambition to leave the world a little better for his passage through it, and his notion of how to better it was to develop it for human use. I feel like telling him to forget Deadwood. There never was anything there for a man like him.
But he had no options, having married a lady with a talent and having so far demonstrated his inability to keep her as he believed she should be kept. It was clear to him that, however she tried to reassure him, Susan carried his failure home in her baggage. She returned East poorer than she had come West, still homeless, and with a remoter chance of being soon settled. And she paid her own fare again, a thing that galled him.
Probably Susan consoled herself with the thought that she brought at least one good thing home: her baby. Perhaps she also had in some private corner of her mind the satisfaction of knowing that in spite of marriage, motherhood, and economic uncertainty she had not ceased to exist as an artist.
If she felt regret at having to leave Lizzie and Marian Prouse out on the edge of the half-civilized world, she shouldn’t have; she could have done them no greater favor. Whatever the West of 1878 was for young mining engineers, it was the land of opportunity for unmarried women. Lizzie shortly would marry her rancher, and before she was through would give Buster five brothers and sisters. Marian Prouse, that large, soft, surprisingly adventurous young woman, would go on even farther west, to the Sandwich Islands, and there would marry a sugar planter and live on a beach more romantic than the one Grandmother coveted in Santa Cruz–a beach of silvery sand above Lahaina, on Maui, where coconut palms lean to frame the hump of Lanai across the Auau Channel.
It is odd to think, as I sit here in Grandmother’s study imagining a future that is already long past, that I have walked that Lahaina beach with Marian’s grandchildren, and found them, as they perhaps found me, only pleasant strangers. Irrationally, at the time, I couldn’t help thinking that because their grandmother’s life was briefly entangled with that of Susan and Oliver Ward, we owed each other something more than casual politeness.
No sign of failed hope showed on their trip East, for Conrad Prager had a princely way with money, food, wine, cigars, conversation, and Pullman porters, and their party included not only the Pragers and their two children, but a Scotch nurse who seemed to manage three