Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [193]
I can visualize them pretty exactly, because a little later Grandmother drew her three men in that posture for a series called Far Western Life-the best things she ever did, I believe, better even than the Mexican drawings. I saw them described in an art history the other day as “beautiful examples from the golden age of woodcut illustration.” This picture she titled Prospectors, and she captioned it with a verse from Bret Harte:
The glowing campfire with rude humor painted
The ruddy tints of health
On haggard face, and form that drooped and fainted
In the fierce race for wealth
In their hour of disspiritedness, the haggard face and form that drooped and fainted were authentic enough. They had worked hard and hoped hard, and their disappointment was as great as their expectations had been. But the money motive demeans them. They were in no race for wealth-that was precisely what disgusted Grandfather with the mining business. They were makers and doers, they wanted to take a piece of wilderness and turn it into a home for a civilization. I suppose they were wrong–their whole civilization was wrong-but they were the antithesis of mean or greedy. Given the choice, any one of them would have chosen poverty, with the success of their project, over wealth and its failure. It was some such perception that made Susan raise her voice above the lonely night sounds of fire and wind. “Ah, well! The Keysers aren’t the only people with money.”
No, they said. Of course not. Sure.
“General Tompkins is working. You might get a telegram tomorrow.”
“If we did it wouldn’t do us any good this year,” Oliver said. “Our construction season’s gone.”
“Isn’t there anything you can do in the winter?”
Frank Sargent slapped his dusty boots, a sound loud and impatient. “Why don’t we just start digging that ditch ourselves, the four of us?”
“Because it wouldn’t do to get people laughing,” Oliver said. “If we’d got started we could have gone on till Christmas. Now it isn’t worth starting. Not with four men, one team, and one Fresno scraper.”
“At least you can use the winter for more planning,” Susan said.
Across the fire he sent her a slow, narrow-eyed smile. “We’re already oversupplied with that. There’s one thing we can do through the winter, though.”
“What?”
“Wait ”
They laughed. They threw sticks and pebbles at the fire. Huddled in the coat whose sleeves came four inches below her fingertips, listening to the secret noises of the river, watching the light flutter on the cliff behind Frank Sargent’s profiled head, Susan tasted the word and did not like its flavor. Wait. They had done little else since he came East to convert her to his scheme. She remembered him standing above the basket of his three-week-old daughter and declaring himself as confident of success as she was that the baby could be brought up to be a woman. Betsy was now a month past her second birthday. Their home was this wild canyon, their hearth this river beach, their hope as far off as ever. Farther, for then they had Pope and Cole behind them, and now they had no one.
“Waiting’s got its problems, though,” Oliver said.
“I thought we were getting pretty good at it,” Wiley said, and laughed again.
Oliver did not laugh. He looked at Susan and then into the fire. “We can’t go back to town-can’t afford it. We can’t keep Wan-no money, no room. We can’t ask Frank and Wiley to go on working for nothing. They’ve been doing it since the first of May.”
Wiley looked up once, quickly, and then began to dig in the coarse sand with a stick. Frank arched his back against the log and relaxed again. It occurred to Susan that though she had drawn him in many poses, she had never tried him as an Indian. He had a high-nosed, proud, touchy look. She imagined a blanket around his shoulders, his hair in braids with bits of feather and bone plugs. Yes.
She heard him say humorously,