Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [143]
This time, conceiving herself to be leaving neither on a picnic nor on a visit, but for good, she made the hard effort to disconnect herself from the past, throwing away some things, giving away others, packing a few to take along. Not without tears, she cleared her father’s attic of her stored leavings, believing that those who would go on living there deserved that space, and that she would be healthier for the finality of the move.
It was not much she took–some dresses, some linens, some silver, some hope chest items that would let her compete with the new wives on Ditch Walk. A box of books for the education of her son and the pleasure of Frank and Pricey. A few prized objects that childhood, family, friendship, and marriage had washed like chunks of amber on her beach–Thomas’s Japanese teapot and the little Madonna, all of Augusta’s letters, the Fiji mat and the olla with which Oliver had welcomed her to New Almaden. The rug of wildcat skins on which Ollie had learned to crawl. Two trunks full, no more.
The beaver skins that Oliver had sent her from Deadwood were a trouble. They had always been a trouble, baffling and recalcitrant. She knew no one who could work raw furs. To try to make a coat of them, as Oliver in his innocence had suggested, would have been like making a dress out of Emmons’s white buckskins; she would have felt like Pocahontas in it. To take them back west would be to confuse some issue that she did not want confused. In the end, she and Bessie managed to make three of them into a muff and a little hat. The rest of them she gave to Bessie.
There was also the elk head. Like the beaver skins, it had never had a function in this domesticated place. She had never got over wondering why he had sent such a thing. Maybe he wanted to keep before her some aspect of himself that he did not want her to forget, though that is my guess, not hers. But what to do with it? Anywhere in the house it would have been grotesquely incongruous and out of scale. It would have denied the validity of her family’s life. Their decision to hang it on a beam in the barn was an acknowledgment of how little it belonged. At least, there, it was out of the way. She supposed that men friends of her father’s took a certain interest in it, and once she had seen John Grant standing and looking at it with an expression on his dark dissatisfied face as if he doubted its authenticity.
One purpose it had served: she had used it to impress on Ollie the idea of his father, whom he had completely forgotten. Perhaps in some way known to savages and children he thought it was his father. That was why she took him out to see it the afternoon before they were to start West.
In the cobwebbed dusk the great rack branched upward into shadow. The dusty muzzle was lifted, the dusty eyeballs stared into the mow’s darkness. It did not acknowledge the tame-animal smells of the barn; it had an air of scorning the hay on which such animals fed. Susan, with her son held against her legs, felt how it ignored her, and she had a twinge of the shame she had felt when her father and John uncrated the box, big enough to have held a piano, and exposed this joke, or whatever it was, this inappropriate souvenir of her husband’s life in the Black Hills. A boy’s insensitive whim, she eventually concluded, as jarring in its way as that great horse pistol he had brought to his courting.
Under her hands she felt her little boy breathe respect in its presence.
Lightly she said, “Well, so now we’ll say good-bye to Daddy’s elk. Tell it, ‘Good-bye, Daddy’s elk, tomorrow we’re going on a train to live with Daddy. Daddy will meet us where the train stops, and we’ll go through the mountains to our house made out of logs, and when I’m a little bigger I’ll have a pony and go riding with Daddy or Frank or Pricey, and away off in the mountains where the flowers grow higher than the stirrups we may stop to rest sometime and see an elk like