Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [233]
Oliver’s hand again touched Ollie’s, this time on the left rein, and they turned down the lane.
Susan’s head snapped around, she stared at him with a terrible question, but he rode slumped, looking ahead over Ollie’s cap. Trying to get her bearings, she half stood. The odor of crushed sage filled her nostrils like sal volatile. The grubbed-out bushes had been stacked in windrows along both sides of the lane, and inside the windrows of gray brush she saw the lines of little trees on each side, each tree staked in its bowl of dug earth, each basin damp, watered that day. Hanging to the back of the seat, she stared ahead at the house and windmill. They had a certain air of confidence, closing off the lane as if someone with imagination had set them there. The house, now that she saw it clearly, was large, much more than a settler’s shack. A veranda like a promenade stretched all along its front.
“Oliver Ward,” she said, “where are you taking us? Is this our land? Is that our place?”
“Mesa Ranch,” Oliver said. “Model farm. Thought you might like to see it.”
She thought his eyes asked something of her, warned her, said “Wait.” But she couldn’t wait, too much was dawning on her all at once. “When did you build it? You’ve even planted your half mile of Lombardies!”
His eyes warmed, narrowed, held hers with an expression she could not read, a kind of urgent, knowing look not far from mockery. “Best foot forward,” he said. “With only the well to irrigate from, I couldn’t swing the lawn and the orchard and the wheatfield and the alfalfa patch. They’ll have to wait till water comes down the Big Ditch.”
“Oliver . . .”
“I had to start the trees,” he said, watching her. “Four hundred and fifty for the lane alone. A hundred locusts and box elders around the house. I didn’t want you to wait any longer than you had to for your grove.”
“The way you planned it.”
“The way we planned it.”
She made note of his pronoun.
“I was too late to start the rose garden. That’ll have to wait till next spring. But I did move the yellow climber down from the canyon. Never even set it back. It’s blooming right now, not quite over.”
She looked ahead, while Ollie with his eyes looking out the corners at them and his ears obviously wide open, steered the team toward the barren house squatting on the bench. She saw that the veranda was deep, with square pillars every ten feet or so supporting a broad low roof. Wherever he had planted the rose, it didn’t show. Neither did the hundred trees of his grove–well, yes, a few, staked-up, spindling saplings, hardly higher than the sagebrush. In something like despair, she cried, “When did you do all this?”
For the first time since they had met at the station she saw her old Oliver in him, loose-shouldered, humorously apologetic. “I didn’t do much of it. The crews have been working since a week after we got the go-ahead on the ditch. This’ll be the demonstration farm. The Governor loaned me the Territory’s well-drilling rig, and the boys from the canal crew scraped out the road.”
She closed her stinging eyes, held them painfully shut, opened them, said, “The Lord hates busybodies and people who do too much.” Then she burst out, “But the money! How will we pay for it?”
The children in the back were clamoring, “Is this ours? Is this our place?” and Ollie, twisting to look into his father’s face, was saying, “Aren’t we going to live in the canyon?” Both she and Oliver ignored them. He said over Ollie’s head, holding her eyes, “For a start I used the money the company paid you for the canyon place. It was the first check I signed.”
“You sold it!”
“For twice what it cost. That was the bargain. I took a chance you’d agree it ought to go into this.”
“Dad, don’t we own the canyon any more?”
“Not exactly. But you can go there. All you want.”
“Even twice what the canyon house cost wouldn’t pay for this,” Susan said.
“I sold some of our canal stock to John and