Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [227]
“Big and silent. It hasn’t been good for him to grow up in the canyon. He hasn’t seen enough boys and girls his own age.”
“I always thought he loved it.”
“He does, but it hasn’t been good for him. He ought to be sent East to school.”
“Don’t you plan to?”
“With what? What would we use for money?”
They started again, pulled up through the shallowing gulch until it flattened out onto the sagebrush plateau. The wind, blowing erratically from the west, moved in the sage and chilled their warm skins. She burst out, “And yet he must be exposed to cultivated people somehow, he must see plays and hear operas and go to galleries and listen to good talk! He mustn’t grow up as silent as his father!”
Brief and questioning, his glance touched her, and then went far off over the valley to the southern mountains, very high-looking from up there, their slopes hazy jade, their peaks hazy lavender crowned with hazy white. He said, “His father’s the best man in Idaho, with the biggest ideas.”
“All of which have failed.”
“Oh, now, Susan, where’s the faith?”
“Gone. Withered away. Dried up.”
“I can’t believe it.” Again he took her hands, and bent down on her a look that was puzzled, frowning, and intent. She felt like someone trying to hold down blowing papers in a wind; everything was flying away in confusion. “That just won’t do,” Frank said. “You’ve got to have faith in the Chief and in the canal.”
Her eyes would not lift to his. They fixed themselves on the tops of the blowing sage behind him. She felt her mouth twist with bitterness. “Faith in the canal I might manage, even yet,” she said.
For a long time he stood facing her, holding her hands, not answering; and she, appalled at what she had said, stole a swift glance upward, a moment’s flick of the eyes. His face was thoughtful and closed. Finally he said, “Tell me about it?” and started her walking along the bluff trail. But he retained one of her hands.
Later they were sitting on the lava rim where more than once he had sat for her as a model. She had his Norfolk corduroy jacket folded under her to save her dress. Before them opened the gulf of air, with swallows swimming in it. Below them the river was busy digging itself deeper in the lava. They could see how the lava had capped the foothills, or created them, and how the river, coming from the big mountain valley above, had cut down through the dam. (The big valley above would one day all be under water, her engineers had assured her.) They could look down into the top of the slot where the river had cut through (a potential damsite, but not so good as the Arrow Rock site below) but their first sight of the river was where it boiled out, white as a ruffled shirt front, into their pool. On the knoll above the side gulch, Wan’s wash, hung on two lines, waved like a double line of prayer flags.
She sat so close to Frank that their arms brushed when they moved, and she was acutely conscious of every slightest contact. Looking down that steep perspective to the little drawing at the bottom, she said, still in the tone of bitterness, “There lie the most wasted years of our lives.”
Frank, braced back on the hand farthest from her, did not answer. The little scene on which her eyes were fixed had the clarity of a miniature imprisoned in a lens. The cottonwoods in the hole across the river were bright and twinkling, the gulch was thinly washed with green. The wind gusted from the west, and the swallows tilted in it. Under her dangling feet they were either building or serving nests in crannies and pockets of the cliff. She could hear the river, or the wind, or both, a steady murmuring; and now in a momentary hush the long, sad wheeoooo hoo hoo hoo of a dove.
“Yes,” she said. “Mourn!”
Frank moved, bumping her shoulder. He muttered an apology, but she did not reply, or look at him. Her eyes were fixed on the shrunken image of their communal life, her heart was sick with the dove’s calling.
“Sue,” Frank said.
Her mournful preoccupation was both compulsive and somewhat