Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [205]
Oliver had her by the arm. “Nellie,” he said, “could I ask you . . . No, I’ll tell her myself as soon as we get Mrs. Ward to bed.”
“Don’t waste ten minutes,” Susan said. “I want you to clear the canyon of her.”
She shut her lips, she turned herself inward. All the way up the hill she was thinking of the difference between this coming childbirth and the first, in the comfortable cottage at New Almaden, with Lizzie and Marian Prouse and Oliver all building a protective cushion around her and the doctor only an hour away at Guadalupe; and the second, in her old room in Milton, where she could hear Bessie’s step in the hall and see her mother’s face look in the door every time she sighed or coughed. That time Oliver had been missing, already chasing his dream. Each child marked a decline in the security of their life. Now she would have her third child in a canyon cave, unattended, or attended by a rough-handed settler’s wife. Meanwhile, her children ran daily through dangers that turned her cold even on that flaming hillside, and were only kept from becoming as crude as their background by the constant efforts of Nellie and herself.
Before she would lie down, she made Ollie go in and finish the reading he had skipped. How else, she asked him, would he ever get into a good Eastern school?
An hour after she heard the buggy grating up the hill on the bluffs road, taking Mrs. Briscoe back to Boise, she had her first pain.
I have no intention of writing an account of how a pioneer woman, gently reared, had a child in a canyon camp with no help but that of an old maid governess. I am not going to heat up all those pails of water, or listen for the first weak bleat from the bedroom. Neither am I going to let Susan get up the day after her lying-in, to chum the butter or put out a washing or finish her story. This is not a story of frontier hardships, though my grandparents went through a few; nor of pioneer hardihood, though they both had it. It is only Lyman Ward, Coe Professor of History, Emeritus, living a day in his grandparents’ life to avoid paying too much attention to his own.
She was no novice, had had two children and a miscarriage, and she did not panic. She thought she had a few hours. Depending on whether he took the bluffs road back, or the canyon road, it would take Oliver three to four hours to return. When he got back he could ride down to the Olpen ranch, send Mrs. Olpen up, and go back into Boise for the doctor. Perhaps Wan would come home early, or John might come up from his cabin, and one of them could be sent. She lay in her darkened room with a wet cloth over her eyes and waited for her body to do what it must.
But Nellie Linton, gentle spinster, Victorian virgin, was more agitated. To quiet Betsy, she turned her recklessly loose with the total contents of her workbox, and she let Ollie off, without comment, from his reading and conferred with him outside. In a way flattering to his eight-year-old judgment, she asked him if he could ride to the Olpen place and fetch Mrs. Olpen.
But his father had the mules, and there were no horses on this side of the river.
Could he walk it? Would he be afraid?
He wasn’t afraid, but it was a long away around on this side.
Perhaps he could walk down to John’s cabin and have him go for help.
But John’s cabin was also on the other side, and you couldn’t shout loud enough to be heard across the river there. There were rapids.
Nellie wrung her hands. If his father had just waited one hour!
Was his mother sick? Ollie wanted to know. Did she need the doctor?
Yes, and some good woman. Mrs. Olpen would be of enormous help, if only they could reach her.
They fell silent. The sun had dropped far enough so that the house laid a precise triangle of shade across the bare ground. Any minute now Mrs. Ward would call out, in there.
Miss Linton?
Yes Ollie.
I could get there quick across the bridge. I could zip across