Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [185]
“I wrote you the minute I was sure we could pull it off,” he said.
He made her shake her head, he jarred out of her some hard laughter. “How can you say such a thing? How can you be sure you can pull it off, as you say? It would take millions of dollars.”
“Not right away. We’ll do it in stages.”
“Each stage taking only half a million.”
“Listen,” he said, and took her by the wrist, scowling down on her. Then he smoothed out the scowl and made it into a smile, he coaxed her with his eyes. “Come here.” He led her to the foot of the basket. The breeze from the window stirred the baby’s fine pale hair, and Susan reached to pull the sash clear down. Outside, though the August sunshine was full and hot, weather was building up. She caught a glimpse of thunderheads off beyond the river, and a far flicker of lightning, too far away for thunder. Oliver held her by the wrist, looking down at the sleeping baby.
“Do you think you can bring her up?” he said. “Can you make a woman of that baby?”
“What kind of mother would I be if I didn’t think so?”
“You’re confident.”
“I hope so. I think so. Yes, why?”
“Will you believe me when I tell you I’m just as confident I can carry water to that desert?”
She saw in his face that he had contracted the incurable Western disease. He had set his cross-hairs on the snowpeak of a vision, and there he would go, triangulating his way across a bone-dry future, dragging her and the children with him, until they all died of thirst. “I believe you’re confident,” she said. “I know I’m not.”
He led her to the bed and made her sit down; he drew from the pocket of his coat, hanging on the bedpost, a brochure in a green cover. I have a copy of it here. “The Idaho Mining and Irrigation Company,” it says. Inside, on the title page, fellaheen in loincloths are carrying water in pots slung on a pole, and underneath the woodcut is a quotation which with great difficulty I have determined comes from Psalms: “I have removed his shoulder from the burden; his hands were delivered from the pots.”
“I showed that to Clarence King,” Oliver said. “Did I tell you I met him on the train, coming East? He says that quotation alone insures us success.”
She was appalled: he was a child. “Mr. King is a great joker.”
“Maybe, but he wasn’t joking about this. Neither am I. Go ahead, read.”
Shakily she laughed. “I thought I was the only writer of fiction in this family.”
“Fiction, is it?” He flipped the page. “See who the president of this company is? General Tompkins, who is also president of American Diamond Drill. He’s not used to backing fictions. Look at the figures. Look at the facts.”
Unwillingly she read about damsites, weather, rainfall, storage capacities, topography, soil analyses, placer production from the Snake River sands. She read two interviews with settlers already irrigating out of Boise Creek, and thought them enthusiasts of the same stripe as her husband. He was a child. It took some tough financial pirate, some Gould or Vanderbilt, to do what he in his innocence thought he could do.
His thumb came down and dented the map spread before her, made a deep crease at a point where the contour lines crowded together and the wiggle of a stream flowed away. “There’s the principal damsite. We won’t do anything about it yet. At first we’ll just throw a diversion dike across the creek lower down, and turn the creek into our canal system. That alone will take water to thousands of acres.”
“I don’t see how you make money,” she said helplessly. “The land isn’t yours to sell.”
“We don’t sell land, we sell water rights and water. The more settlers come in, the greater the need. That’s when we’ll build the dam and lengthen the canal line clear to the Snake. Here goes the canal, along the edge of the mountain here, right across the drainage. The whole valley’s under the ditch.”
“I never could