Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [200]
Later she looked out the broad window to the river, and saw him, Oliver, and Ollie, with Nellie and Betsy for audience–the whole family except herself–working over the dismantled tent. His cot, table, camp stool, and trunk sat in the smoothed and bleached rectangle that had been his floor. His life was turned out like an exposed mouse nest at the foot of the lava cliff.
Later still she gave him her hand and a sober word of good-bye. If Oliver noticed that she did not kiss him as she had kissed Wiley, he made no sign.
Jump to midsummer 1885. She was bloated, breathless, near her time. If she had been a cow she would have headed off, heavy with premonition, into the brush. If she had been a dog she would have dug under some shed. Being Susan Ward, she tried to work. By now, after three years of the Idaho Mining and Irrigation Company, she was providing more than half of what they lived on. She mined and irrigated every slightest incident, she wrote and drew her life instead of living it.
It was quiet in the stone dugout curtained against the heat. Mrs. Briscoe, that disaster who passed for a practical nurse, had gone somewhere. Oliver was out tinkering with the miniature irrigation system he had developed for the garden, Wan was taking his regular Saturday off in town. She felt abandoned, left behind; she thought with motherly affection of Wiley, who kept in touch with them by letters, and with uneasiness of Frank, who had disappeared without trace where out the Oregon Short Line toward the coast.
From Nellie’s room came a brief light gabble of talk or lessons. In her muddleheaded condition she at first confused it with the buzzing of a fly caught between curtains and window.
Working was impossible. Her eyes kept drifting out of focus, her head throbbed. Every few seconds the life inside her rolled over or kicked. She took it into the bedroom and lay down on her back to give it all the room there was, but even then it was restless. And there was a fly in the bedroom too, a big irritating blow fly with a buzz like a bumblebee.
She lay still, arms flung wide, eyes on the rough-sawn rafters and roof boards above her. There were footprints and wheelbarrow tracks on them, left from the time when with mud on their feet they had swarmed from mixing trough to lumber pile. She might have thought of them as a record of the good time before waiting had become the hopeless pattern of their lives, She might have responded sentimentally to the small eternal footprints of her children. Instead, she felt a spasm of disgust at how raw, untidy, and unfinished everything was, and she wondered if Oliver with a brush and pail couldn’t scrub her ceiling clean.
Her legs twitched with the spastic jerking that her generation called growing pains. I can tell her, having learned it while investigating the sickness of my own skeleton, that they indicate a calcium deficiency-something I would willingly put up with, being cursed with altogether too much calcium in places where I don’t need it. She thought the twitching was nervousness, part of the impatience she shared with the unborn child. She would not be able to contain that irritable life much longer.
It kicked her hard, and with a curious deadness of feeling she smoothed the shift across her bulging stomach and craned her neck, watching until she felt the soft blow and saw the swift slight upward denting of the cloth. She did not want this baby. It made her desolate to think what it would be born into.
It kicked her again, the twitching in her legs was intolerable. She sat up and went heavily to the door. “Mrs. Briscoe?”
The woman was still out somewhere. Susan went through the living room, pausing to look into the children’s room that opened by a very narrow door next to the chimney. Empty. Her mind made the note that Betsy and Ollie must soon be separated. Betsy was getting too old to share a room with her brother. And how would they manage that? Build another room? And where would they put the new one when it outgrew a basket?
“Mrs. Briscoe?”