Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [195]
“Strictly business, eh? How’s it sound to you, Frank?”
“I have no opinion,” Frank said. “But I’d like to stay on.”
“Wiley?”
“Me too.”
“All right,” Oliver said. He sat a moment with his lips compressed and his eyes on the fire. “Frank and Wiley to stay on and get their reward in Heaven, or some time in the future. Susan to make her pound of flesh out of the company. All of us to be in the same boat-the canal boat. Maybe we can even keep Wan. Is that what we all want? All right, we’ll build the best damned house in Idaho. I get to be architect and chief engineer.” He stood up and swung the lantern around his head. They cheered.
The Canyon
Jan. 8, 1884
Dear Thomas–
I send you with this the first two blocks in the “Far Western Life” series, together with a thousand-word sketch to accompany each. Please, please throw these last away if they fail to come up to your standards, and have some competent writer do something in substitution. The pictures I am surer of-at the very least they are authentic. “The Last Trip In” I was fortunate to catch just as that great double freight wagon drawn by ten mules passed along the bench above us on its way to a mountain ranche where we spent two days last summer fishing. You may recognize members of our little band: Frank Sargent is the man in gaiters who stands by the stirrup in “Cinching Up.” I have drawn him many times-indeed, if it were not for my family and our little group of last-ditchers I should be starved for models. He is a hard person to change or disguise, being proudly and rather fiercely himself. I hope it will not be construed as a weakness that he has already appeared in Century as a Leadville engineer, a ne’er-do-well, a packer, a stage driver, and a mucker in a mine, and that Osgood and Company have known him as the young man next door in a Louisa Alcott novel.
Mr. Wiley I find harder to draw, though he patiently submits himself to whatever I demand. He is constantly cheerful, endlessly kind. He reads to the children by the hour. And all three of my engineers are so clever with their hands that I have only to express a wish and some invention is created to make it come true.
As I write you, I am sitting in the very prow of our latest accomplishinent. It is a house, but from a little distance could hardly be told from a ledge of rock. Our joint hands, brains, and enthusiasm built it. Oliver designed it and supervised its construction, I made certain suggestions from the point of view of the housewife, all of us helped build it, even Wan and Nellie, even the children. It is made of rock hauled by stoneboat from the rockslide just back of us, held together with cement that Oliver made of the earth beneath our feet-that experiment with cement in Santa Cruz has finally proved useful after all. The word was throw in the rock and spare the hammer. Mud was cheaper than labor, and time was short.
Have you ever built a house with your own hands, out of the materials that Nature left lying around? Everyone should have that experience once. It is the most satisfying experience I know. We have been as fascinated as children who build forts or snowhouses, and it has made us the tightest little society in all the West. We are not the kind of ideal society that gathers around you and Augusta in the studio, yet we are not without our ideal aspects. A Brook Farm without a social theory, and a melting pot Brook Farm at that: a Chinese cook, a Swedish handyman, an English governess, three Eastern-American engineers, two children, and a lady artist. I have watched with admiration how you two first created a place for yourselves in New York and then molded and shaped it within a world of art and ideas. Let me tell you how it is done in primitive Idaho.
Having determined the proportions of your temple, which Oliver said should be 21 by 35 feet–multiples of seven, the proportions of the Parthenon!–and your site, which we agreed should be the knoll behind the cooktent, you dig a trench three feet deep and