Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [120]
I can’t help reading that as more than a literary flourish; I want to read it as a perception of Western necessity, something deeper than scenery. Something must have told her, as they dragged over the summit and down to English George’s, that character as well as mountains had to strip for the skies. She must have known that a Thomas Hudson, despite his urbanity, uprightness, and delicacy of feeling, would not have got that dying horse in motion fast enough to save them, or got it on over the summit to the place of help. Almost before she had stopped screaming and pulling at his hard whip arm, she felt shame. It was his physical readiness, his unflusterable way of doing what was needed in a crisis, that she most respected in him: it made him different from the men she had known. In remembering the episode years later, she makes a veiled acknowledgment of the respect that at the time, upset and sulky, she begrudged.
Even her prose strips–she does the rest of that trip to Leadville in a half dozen lines.
I am glad I have forgotten what I said to my husband in that moment when he saved our lives, and I hope he has too. The horse died after we got to English George’s, and there we hired another, or the remains of one, and he died the day after we reached Leadville. Oliver paid for both–and how much more the trip cost him (both trips) I never knew. But that is the price of Romance. To have allowed his wife to come in by stage in company with drunkenness and vice would have been realism.
That was written years after the event, and is conditioned by the Doppler Effect. That day in June 1879, they came down off Mosquito Pass silent and constrained, she scared and sulky, he worried and somewhat bruised in spirit at being thought a brute. Or I suppose that is what he felt. The fact is, I don’t know. He is the silent character in this cast, he did not defend himself when he thought he was wronged, and he left no novels, stories, drawings, or reminiscences to speak for him. I only assume what he felt, from knowing him as an old man. He never did less than the best he knew how. If that was not enough, if he felt criticism in the air, he put on his hat and walked out.
3
Leadville made its appearance as a long gulch (Evans) littered with wreckage, shacks, and mine tailings. It was rutted deep by ore wagons, scalped of its timber. The smoke of smelters and charcoal kilns smudged a sky that all down the pass had been a dark, serene blue. They passed a string of corrals, then a repair yard where the bodily parts of a hundred wagons were strewn. People appeared and thickened–walkers, riders, drivers of buggies and wagons. A log cabin wore a simple sign, SALOON: it looked to be a half mile from anywhere. Farther down, a shack had scrawled in charcoal above its door “No chickens no eggs no keep folks dam.” The shacks grew thicker, the road became the parody of a street. A false-fronted shack said ASSAY OFFICE.
Ahead, something seemed to be happening. People were hurrying, others stood in doorways looking toward the center of town. A young man with a flapping vest and a face pink with high-altitude exertion passed them, running hard. Still aggrieved with each other, Susan and Oliver had been traveling without much talk, but when she heard shouting up ahead Susan could not help saying, “What is it? Is it always like this?”
“Not necessarily.” He stood up to look, he shrugged and sat down. The crowd sound ahead stopped as if hands had choked it off. Now Susan stood up. She could see a dense crowd from sidewalk to sidewalk in a street between false fronts, and men coming in from every direction. “What on earth! It must be something exciting.”
She was jolted back into the seat, and Oliver stood up; they popped up and popped down like counterweighted jumping jacks. She heard him grunt, a hard inarticulate sound, and abruptly he cracked the whip on the haunch of their new horse, as dragging and wheezing almost as the one