Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [198]
Your own
SBW
4
I have made no chronology of their years in Boise Canyon. Except for a flurry during 1887, when for a while it seemed as if Henry Villard might find a place for them in his empire-building schemes, most of Grandmother’s letters are dated only by month and day, and could have been written any time between 1883 and 1888. Whoever sorted them when they were returned to Grandmother after Augusta’s death has made numerous mistakes that I can detect from internal evidence, but Shelly and I have done only the roughest reordering. It doesn’t much matter what year they were written in; those years were cyclic, not chronological.
Imprisoned in reiterative seasons, vacillating between hope and disappointment, they were kept from being the vigorous doers that their nature and their culture instructed them to be. Their waiting blurred the calendar. The days rolled across from canyon wall to canyon wall, the seasons crept northward until at summer solstice the sun set directly behind what they called Midsummer Mountain, and hung there a little while, and started creeping southward again toward the canyon mouth that gulped December sunsets. Summer or winter or in between, the sky out over the valley was filled with light for a long time after their gulch lay in shadow. Sometimes Susan felt as if evening were a blight that lay on them.
They were ten miles from town, and town was only a little territorial capital twenty-five hundred miles from the springs of civilization and amenity. Their visits and their visitors were few. They all preferred the high pastures, the canyon, and the mountains to the town, whose fluctuations among mining boom, railroad boom, irrigation boom, and statehood boom were too much like their own recurrent fevers of hope.
No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike. It is a law I take advantage of, and bless, but then I am not young, ambitious, and balked.
Grandmother was luckier than Grandfather, because she could work steadily at writing and drawing, and he could occupy his hands and his empty hours only with puttering. There was a period in the spring of 1885 when they were building the suspension bridge and the construction frenzy restored them to an exuberant cheerfulness. Then that was finished, and became a part of their routine. No word came from General Tompkins, no backers appeared to rescue the coming construction season. Susan’s pregnancy prevented her making any of the expeditions to the mountains that had once been their standard entertainment, and because she could not go, the men went less often too.
High spring made them restless. On Oliver’s urging, Frank and Wiley were looking around for jobs. Wiley’s came first–an irrigation project on the South Platte, in Colorado. He left them, swearing it would take only a telegram to pry him loose from any job in the world and return him to the canyon. He kissed the children and shook hands with Nellie and stood before Susan like an embarrassed youngster, obviously thinking that a handshake couldn’t express all he meant, and obviously uncertain that he was permitted more. Susan stooped her heavy body forward and kissed him. It was the end of April, the poppies they had sown all over their knoll were blooming, the rose bushes on each side of the door were in bud, great fair-weather clouds marched eastward along the mountain. A bursting spring day. Wiley’s departure left it feeling hollow and false.
A week later Frank Sargent came back from town and announced that he had an offer from the Oregon Short Line. “Take it,” Oliver said.
Almost sullenly, Frank looked at Susan where she stood, seven months along, bracing her hand on the drafting table from which she had just risen. She thought his look flared with some troubling resentment or blame. “I’ve already taken it,” he said.