Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [101]
Nevertheless, Susan had a spasm of utter panic, a black, blinding bolt of despair, when the train started out of the Cheyenne station leaving Oliver on the platform with his carpetbag and his rolled tent at his feet, his hat in his hand, the spring sun in his eyes. He seemed to be smiling, but he might have been only squinting against the light. She pressed her frantic face to the glass and kept her handkerchief fluttering as he walked, then trotted, beside the train. The platform ended and he stopped abruptly, began to go backward. Susan seized Ollie from his basket and held him so harshly to the window for a parting sight of his father that she made him cry. Immediately she began to cry herself, hugging him to her and straining for a last glimpse backward. He had passed from sight, the track-side ditch was full of muddy water out of which rose the stark poles of the telegraph line. It all swam and drowned in her tears. She felt the nurse taking the baby, and let him go. She heard Mary Prager say something savingly matter-of-fact, she heard Conrad murmur that he guessed he would go back on the platform and smoke a cigar.
Later it began to rain. Protected by the Pragers’ consideration, she sat by herself and brooded out upon empty plains that winter had barely left and spring hardly touched. Miles of brown grass, raw cutbanks, flooded creeks coming down into the flooded bottoms of the Platte where bare cottonwoods seemed to grow out of a slough, and the benches of the flood plain, seen through rain that swept along the train and rattled on the windows, were the banks of a dreary lake. Now and then a stark, muddy little settlement–but no starker than Deadwood would be. Now and then a shack with pole corrals and livestock huddled on high ground, islanded by the floods–but better than the tent that Oliver would have to live in.
The Platte Valley slid by for a whole day before they even got to Omaha. Omaha, which less than two years before had struck her as the absolute dropping-off place, the western edge of nowhere. She remembered her bright scorn at the stockyards building, “plaided, my dear, in red, white, and blue!”, and shrank at the image of the postman delivering that postcard to a crepe-hung door. Now here she came back, already five days on her homeward journey, and she was barely breaking over the rim of the Eastern world (how far she had been away!) bringing her excuses for her husband, her homeless baby, while Oliver fell every minute farther back among the endless plains and badlands.
She planned cunningly how she would tell her story. Deadwood was an opportunity he could not afford to give up, and so she seized the chance for a visit home. She polished phrases that would make his four-day stage ride and his leaky tent and his job for George Hearst seem an adventure. And in the process of framing the West and her husband in words, she began to leave them behind.
She was like a traveler still on the road on one of those evenings when sun and moon, one rising as the other sets, face each other across the world. Once she passed Omaha, Oliver grew steadily more remote in space and time, Milton and Augusta grew nearer. Home was more precious, and her impatience more intense, every hour. She would not let Conrad send a telegram from Chicago to announce her arrival, because she did not want to make her father or John Grant spend a night in Poughkeepsie to meet her late train. She would go to the hotel for what was left of the night, and take the ferry in the morning.
It reconstructed itself in her mind like the lines of a familiar poem: the shabby waiting room, the recognized cabman, the countrified hotel where she would be able to bathe her baby and herself properly for the first time in a week. In