Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [216]
What bothers me most is to watch the slow corrosion of the affection and loyalty that have held Oliver and Susan Ward together. I am ashamed that he hits the bottle when he gets low, I hate the picture of Grandmother sitting in the canyon house, a sulky, sullen dame, worrying half spitefully that he may fall off the bridge coming home, or show himself sodden and sottish before the children. And feeling, too, the profoundest, most hopeless pity, wanting to help and having no notion how. She knew that drink must be an almost irresistible temptation, even while she expected him, if he was a man, to resist it.
Less and less a companion, more and more a grind, she was bolted to her desk by her desperate sense that the family depended entirely on her; and the more she drove herself to work, the more she resented the separation that her work enforced between her and her children and husband. I can visualize her coming out in the still early morning and looking down across the lonely desolation where she lived, and shuddering for what had happened to her; and if she caught sight of her own face in the water bucket’s dark pane, she was appalled.
If he said–and I’m sure he did, more than once–“Let’s get out of here before the place caves in under us, let’s go up the mountain for a few days and do some fishing,” she refused because of her work, suggesting that he and Ollie go. Then when they did go, she felt deserted, one who had to work while others played, and all the time they were gone she fretted over Ollie’s missed lessons. How was he ever going to learn to read properly if he was always out fishing?
Yet when jobs were offered Oliver–a mine in Kellogg, a bureau in the Governor’s office–she closed her mouth on the impulse to influence him, and accepted his decision when he made it against, as she had to think, all the best interests of his family. There was always a clearing of the air when they had considered and he had rejected some alternative to their bondage. Yet within days of such a decision she had added it to her cumulative grudge.
Her children ran barefoot through Rattlesnakeville. She nagged them for growing up like savages and taking too lightly their lesson-times with Nellie. Even if there had been places she wanted to go, she would not have left the canyon: she had no clothes she considered decent, and she would not appear in Boise visibly shabby-genteel. And every time Oliver returned from town she managed, bent on busy errands, to pass close to him and sniff. I discovered in my childhood that she had a nose like a hound. If I had eaten some forbidden poison such as licorice within two hours, she knew. So I know how a guilty party might have felt in 1888, how resentful of her infallible powers of detection.
Miserable, both of them, everything hopeful in them run down, everything joyous smothered under poverty and failure. My impulse, and I hereby yield to it, is to skip it all, to document not one single miserable hour until a day in November 1888. That day the post office finally produced a letter with the seed of change in it.
It was not the letter Oliver waited for, guaranteeing funds for the completion of his project. It was from Major John Wesley Powell, who had succeeded Clarence King as director of the United States Geological Survey. It said that the Survey, recently charged by Congress with surveying all the rivers of the West, designating irrigable lands and spotting reservoir sites, could use his help. Captain Clarence Dutton, who would be in charge of the hydrographic survey, had recommended him warmly (there was an echo of one of those evenings in Leadville). Major Powell understood that Mr. Ward’s own project was temporarily inactive. Would he be willing to take leave from it for perhaps two years and sign on as regional assistant