Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [190]
Susan Ward, a devoted correspondent and sometimes a very interesting one, had her dry spells like other mortals. She also had her reticences and her pride: having made up her mind to follow her husband into that sagebrush desert, she would not complain more than humorously; she would have to adopt the attitudes of a tourist confronted by the picturesque. Result: she chatters a good deal during her first year or so in Boise. Her only companions are Army wives who never come back into her life–are transferred away, or dropped, or forgotten about.
Nothing there that I want to know about, neither events nor feelings. I have to keep turning the pages of those chatty, empty letters for a long time before I find any that are worth stopping at. The first of these comes eleven months, one novel, one miscarriage, some anxious cases of measles and whooping cough, and some miles of her hasty illegible scrawl after the one I have just quoted.
P.O. Box 311
Boise City
May 17, 1883
Dearest Augusta–
Please note the change of address, which was effected last week. For the summer, we shall get our mail only when someone rides into town, ten miles. We have given up Father Mespie’s house and moved bag and baggage into the canyon. Pope and Cole, our Eastern backers, have suffered reverses, and tell General Tompkins that they are unable to go on with us.
Oliver takes the blow with a lightness I could never manage. He says he never did expect to sail right through without delays and troubles, but I am sure it must be maddening to him to have to stop, for he drove himself very hard through the winter to complete the topographical work, and had just arranged with a contractor for the digging of the first eight miles of ditch–a unit which will be called (it makes me want to laugh at the intended compliment and shed a tear for the bad luck!) the Susan Canal. Now we must postpone everything while General Tompkins finds new backers. The likeliest prospects seem to be the Keysers of Baltimore, who are connected with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
In the circumstances, the canyon camp is a godsend. Oliver is on standby salary. Frank and Wiley are sticking with us on no salary at all beyond the privilege of putting their legs under our camp table. We shall keep John, the handyman, to do the minimal work required to keep our claims and permits clear, and the Chinese cook, named Charley Wan–doesn’t he sound faded? He isn’t at all. He is a little grinning idol of old ivory, and a great dandy. On Saturday he rode into Boise, spent the night, and came back barbered and shining and smelling of lotions, in time to get Sunday breakfast. Betsy calls him the “pitty Chinaman.”
The failure of our money frightens me–it is what I feared, or half feared, all along–but for the summer I like the canyon much better than Boise. I would rather be picturesquely uncomfortable than comfortably dull. The camp consists of a shack, a cook tent with a “fly” over our table, Wiley’s and Frank’s tent on the beach, and an abandoned miner’s cabin downriver, where John sleeps. The shack used to be the office, but as Oliver says, you don’t need an office to mark time in, and so now it houses the four Wards and Nellie Linton. “A mean low house,” etc–and don’t we wish we could expend all our strength on the ditches and water channels!
It was Nellie more than myself that I worried about when it became plain that we must move out here. You remember I wrote you about her–my old teacher’s daughter who once expressed an interest in sometime coming West. But oh, my, to come West, not to a civilized house, but to a shack in a canyon! There was no way to stop her, she was already on her way from London, where she had been teaching the children of an American diplomat. So Oliver and