Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [211]
It was now nearly eleven; his long stay might be good omen or bad. The children had been long in bed, John had gone to his cabin immediately after supper, Wan had swatted the last flies and miller moths gathered around the lamps and gone out to his tent, Nellie had closed her book an hour ago and said good night and retreated to her room. There sat Susan Burling Ward, tired-eyed after a day’s drawing, dragged-out after a day’s heat, and tightened her drowning-woman’s grip on culture, literature, civilization, by trying to read War and Peace.
But her eyes were too scratchy. When she closed them and pressed her fingers to the lids, thick tears squeezed out. Sitting so, looking into the red darkness of her closed lids, she heard the stillness. Not a sound inside her cave-like house, not a sigh from the room behind the chimney where Betsy and Agnes slept. Not a fly or moth left to flutter around the light. She opened her eyes. The ragged flame along the wick trembled without sound.
And outside the silent house, the silent moon-whited mountains, the vacant moon-faded sky. No cry of bird or animal, no rattle of hoofs among stones, no movement except the ghostly flash along the surface of the river, no noise except the mutter of water as muted as rumination. Her mind was still moving with the turmoil of Tolstoy, and the contrast between that crowded human world and her moonlit emptiness was so great that she said aloud, “Oh, it’s like trying to communicate from beyond the grave!”
1970 knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead.
But Susan Ward in her canyon was pre-refrigerator, pre-dishwasher, pre-airplane, pre-automobile, pre-electric light, pre-radio, pre-television, pre-record player. Eyes too tired to read had no alternative diversions, ears that craved music or the sound of voices could crave in vain, or listen to Sister Lips whistle or talk to herself.
Restlessly she stood up, waited for her roiled sight to clear, and went to the door. It let in the pale wash of moonlight and the sunken mutter of the river. The moon was directly above her in the southern sky, with only a small irregularity to mar its roundness. It was not flat like some moons, but visibly globular; she could see it roll in space. Its light fell like pallid dust on bare knoll and cooktent and lay in drifts along the roof-planes of the shack. It might have been a snow scene except for the shadows, which were not blue and luminous but soft and black.
Below, to her right, the canyon was impenetrable, without even a flash from the water, but the little flat across the river, with its haystack, shed, and corral, was a drawing in charcoal and Chinese white, a precise, focused miniature in the streak of moonlight across the shoulder of Arrow Rock. Out of their flat shadows the poles of the corral and the trunks of the cottonwoods bulged with a magical roundness like the moon’s. As she watched, charmed, the trees below must have been touched by the canyon wind, for flakes of light glittered up at her and then were gone. But there was no sound of wind, and where she stood there was not the slightest stir in the air. The glitter of soundless light from that little picture lighted in the midst of darkness was like a shiver of the earth.
But where was Oliver? He had never stayed this long on any of his prowling, unsatisfactory trips to