Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [187]
“It would be different, here at home.”
Another silence, while the baby stirred and sighed and turned half over. “No,” Oliver said at last. “Now I won’t have it. I’ve lived away from you all I want to.”
“Oh, Oliver!” she cried. “Don’t think I don’t love thee! Don’t think I want thee living apart from us! It’s only that I feel safe here. Thee is asking me to give up what I love almost as much as thee. That little mite there has taken all the recklessness out of me. Let me think. Go to the meeting, but let me think a while.”
For a while he held her there, saying nothing. Then he walked her to the window, where a wind was thrashing the maple outside and stirring the curtains through the cracks of the closed sash. She stood with his arm around her, leaning on him and looking down to where the ferns along the edge of the lane bent limberly in the gust. She heard him say, “Look at her. She’s nursing in her sleep.” His arm squeezed her, shook her, let her go. “All right. You get used to my news and I’ll get used to yours. Maybe they’ll turn out to be compatible.”
“Maybe.”
But she had already given in. She knew that sooner or later, this fall or next spring, she would be packing up her children and her depleted collection of household goods and going West again–not, as at first, on an adventurous picnic, and not with a solemn intention of making a home in her husband’s chosen country, but into exile.
VII
THE CANYON
1
Boise City, June 16, 1882
Darling Augusta–
I am sitting, or lying, in our old hammock–the same old hammock that hung on the piazza in New Almaden, and later served as a bed for Ollie in Leadville. It hangs now between two cottonwood trees in the ragged yard that surrounds this house, built by a missionary Jesuit since called to other fields. On hot afternoons it is my favorite spot, if I can be said to have a favorite spot in this drab new town where ladies say ma’am and servants don’t, and Irish miners still calloused from pick and shovel are erecting their millionaire houses with porte cocheres and stone turrets. Oliver is out at the engineering camp in the canyon much of the week. With the help–it isn’t really that–of a good-natured clumsy town girl, I have been able to establish a routine of work in the mornings. I am writing another Leadville novel, being poor in experience and having to make do with what is at hand. In the afternoon when baby is fed and put down, and Ollie has gone up for his nap, I come out here to read, and write letters, and listen to the dry lonely rattle of wind through the cottonwood leaves.
It is a life without much stimulation or excitement. The bugles from the cavalry post just above us mark off the days as inexorably as the whistles of New Almaden or the church bells of Morelia. I open my eyes to First Call, rise to Reveille, nurse my baby to Mess Call. When I am working at my desk I am often spurred on by the thrilling notes of the Charge from the drill field beyond our pasture fence. When I hear To the Colors, as they lower the flag in the evening, I know it is time to bestir myself about supper. I go to bed to Taps, and drift off to sleep as Lights Out blows eastward across the mesa, a long, fading, musical relinquishment as sweet and sad as the call of a mourning dove.
The house is comfortable, the children are very well, Oliver’s work goes ahead steadily, I have my own work to keep me from thinking too much about all I left behind, and so I have no right to belittle this place where we shall spend our lives until Oliver gives up being a field engineer. There are one or two Army wives, Eastern ladies, who are good company. The town ladies I can say less for. You never saw such attention to dress and manners, and to so little purpose. They have been eager about paying calls, but most of their calls I shall not return. They may think me snobbish if they wish.
Oliver hoped that I would find the Governor and his wife attractive. We dined with them a few nights ago, and alas, I am afraid I thought him pretentious,