Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [232]
Driving, they had no chance to talk. Her critical eye found the streets of Boise as swarming as the streets of Leadville, and not half so picturesque. They had to halt and pick and kink their way through a morning crowd of buggies, wagons, dogcarts, buckboards. The plank sidewalks were full of men, women, children, soldiers, settlers in overalls, politicians in derbies. Two men in frock coats, two of that political crowd that had led Oliver to debase himself in barrooms, raised their hats to her with impertinent smiles. She gave them back a smile as dishonest as their own, and a good deal chillier. Oliver greeted them casually, steering past their stares. For Susan, it was like having to walk through a room where she had just been humiliated.
“The convention’s burst the town’s seams,” Oliver said. “That and the reopening of the public domain.”
“And the canal. I suppose they’re all on your side now.”
His look was surprised and questioning. “I don’t know that they were ever against me.”
Susan did not reply. Nellie was having trouble keeping the children quiet in the back. Ollie kept leaping up to point out landmarks to his sisters: it seemed he had forgotten nothing. Finally his father turned full around, put his nose right against the boy’s nose, and said, scowling, “Sit you down, friend.”
Ollie was not cowed. He looked as if he had a secret pact with his father. And he looked, Susan thought, as excited as if coming home to Boise were the greatest event of his life. “Can I drive?” he said.
“May I,” Susan said.
“Later,” Oliver said.
They turned off the main street, and within a block were heading out of town on a bench road that Susan did not remember. “This is new,” she said. “Yeah,” Oliver said.
The mountains were familiar on the left, the remembered sage plain dropped down its terraces, the southern horizon crawled with overheated peaks. Her traveling dress was too warm. “Are we going to the canyon? I thought Wiley and his crew were out there.”
“They are.”
She waited, but he offered no more. The old impatience at his wordlessness twitched in her mouth. She would not ask him another thing–where he was taking them, where they were to live. Within a half hour of seeing him again after more than a year’s separation, she felt imprisoned in his life, dragged along after his warped buggy wheels.
The following wind blew their dust over them, the air was heavy with dust clear to the canyon’s mouth. After the green gentle earth and the soft sea air of Victoria she found the country of her exile arid, barren, and hateful. The dry wind roughened her lips and parched her nostrils. When Oliver whipped up the team to outrun the dust, she was thrown roughly around.
They slowed. Ollie, standing again, hanging onto his father’s shoulders, said, “Can I drive now?”
His father reached an arm and dragged him over the front seat. His knees and shoes scuffed Susan as he went through. Along a track where the sage had been crushed and the ground pulverized by wagons, they plodded and creaked. After a half mile or so a less worn track forked off southward. Oliver touched the right rein and had Ollie guide them down it. Susan sat silent, watching the sage flow by, her nose full of dust and her eyes full of the desolate country and her mind full of desolate thoughts.
A lane opened to the left, grubbed out of the level sage, and at its end, a half mile or so away, she saw one of the dreary ranches that she supposed would now crop up, sprouting on the promise of water, to make the benches even more forlorn than when they had been empty of everything but wind. A house the color of earth, a windmill that winked–some Olpen family with a slattern wife and a tobacco-chewing husband and a flock of unlicked children wilder