Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [206]
Oh my goodness, no!
But if she’s sick. That’s the quickest.
Right after you had to be rescued from that bridge? No no. Oh no.
I went across easy. It was the package, coming back.
No. Your mother would die at the thought.
Then it came, the harsh, grunting cry that Miss Linton had been dreading. She saw Ollie’s eyes widen, she saw the blood leave his face.
Wait here. I must go and see . . .
But when she came back, having been able to do nothing but hold Mrs. Ward’s hand until the spasm passed, she made a small sound of her own, a sound of horror. Ollie was already halfway .across the bridge, moving along crabwise with both hands on the rope. The farther he went the more rapidly he moved, until he jumped off onto solid rock. He looked back and saw her, his arm waved, he bolted around the corner of the cliff. In two seconds he appeared at a dead run, headed for the corral.
Shading her eyes, caught between two fears and a hope, Miss Linton watched him come out of the shed with the oat can and bait his brown pony out of the pasture to the corral bars. He poured the oats on the ground, and when she dropped her head to them he got the halter rope around her neck, stretching with both arms in a sort of embrace. He climbed the corral poles to haul her head up and get the bit into her mouth, the headstall over her ears. Inside, Miss Linton heard Susan say something, not in the tone of pain, but conversationally, which meant that Betsy had wandered in and must be dealt with. But she hung in the sunken entrance watching until Ollie had pulled the mare close and flung himself in a bellyflop across her back. He kicked, straightened, his hands shook out the reins, his heels drummed at her ribs. Riding like a cavalryman, as his mother sometimes said with pride and dismay, he bolted across the little flat toward the canyon gate. Like a cavalryman? More like an Indian. His spidery shape clung to the mare’s withers, his tow head was down. He lashed the mare with the ends of the reins and fled out of sight behind the cliff.
It is an effort for me to imagine my way backward from the silent father I knew to the boy in Boise Canyon. Like my grandfather, he was not a man of words, and it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers. Grandmother herself may have made that mistake. I have heard her say, in her rueful voice with its overtone of regret, what a brave, manly little boy he was, but I never heard her say how sensitive he was. Yet I think he must have been. But though it is from her letters that I get that impression, I think she herself never understood how deep he ran, any more than she understood his difficulty with reading.
It was his capacity for feeling that she should have attended to: by failing to comprehend it, she probably contributed to his silence.
Feeling, more than manliness, drove him across the bridge against the warnings of his conscience-a horrified sympathy for his mother’s pain, a sense of fatal responsibility in his father’s absence. He was not a disobedient child. He simply overflowed obedience on a flood of emotion, and he had some of his father’s readiness in a crisis.
I see him going down that rough canyon pushing his mare as his father always pushed a horse. He was wound up as tight as a ball of wet rawhide. The last two or three hundred yards before John’s cabin the trail was soft silt, and he lashed the mare into a run, and so excited her that he could hardly pull her in before the door. She danced and cartwheeled, and he shouted, fighting her hard mouth. No one came out. He let the mare stiff-leg him around the corner to where he could see John’s corral. Empty. Before he had had time to frame a thought he was galloping down the canal line that followed the contour around the foot of the sagebrush hills.
He found John sitting on his stoneboat in the shade of a cottonwood, resting himself and his mules. He had been moving testimonial dirt off the right of way. Before Ollie had panted out three sentences John was on his feet stripping the harness from the