Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [240]
Oh, oh, it was all I could do to keep from huddling him against me and drowning him in my tears. Only twelve Think what it must be to travel all the way from Idaho to New Hampshire by yourself at that age, going toward something new and strange, where you don’t know a soul, and where you are afraid you will be an ugly duckling from the West, ignorant and unable to learn! I know he feels that way–he told Nellie, though he would not tell me.
It is just as well Oliver is not here. He has never been as sure as I am that the boy must go East. “Why send him away?” he said to me only last week. “I’m just getting to know him again. Why not let him go to the high school in Boise?”
Of course it would not have done. He knows hardly more people in Boise than he will at St. Paul’s, actually; and from the local school he would emerge a barbarian, prepared for nothing and untouched by culture, believing in the beauties of Idaho civilization! I had to harden my heart to a stone, and in the end he got over his panic. But when the train pulled away, and I saw his young scared face pressed against the window, and his hand making brave half-hearted desolate waves at Nellie, his sisters, Frank, and me, I quite broke down, and I have been crying off and on all afternoon.
I can’t bear to think of him, by now off in Wyoming somewhere, huddled in the seat and watching the country pass and thinking–what? That his mother sent him away. What choices we are offered in this life, if we live in Idaho. Yet in the long run he will have to realize that it is worth any amount of unhappiness to be given the opportunity to learn and grow and become something good and true, perhaps even noble. I confess it is one of the things I hug to my heart, a thing I envy my poor little boy for–his opportunity to see you and Thomas. He has heard about you all his life, but of course doesn’t remember you. Now he can at last know what I have been talking about. But if having him down for Thanksgiving will be the slightest bother, if he will interfere with the great things that fill your life now, do not hesitate to tell him not to come. I would rather he were a little lonely and unhappy than that he should ever become a burden or duty to you.
His sisters and Nellie will miss him as much as I do. The girls depend on their big brother for all sorts of things from mending a toy to saddling their ponies. As for Nellie, poor thing, she cried as if it were her own boy she was sending off.
The Mesa
November 10, 1889
Dearest Augusta–
. After such a summer of heat, dust, and wind you can imagine how gladly I accept winter, which is at least fairly clean, and with what passion I long for spring. It has been build, build, build, all through the fall, and since we are more than two miles from town, the workmen have had to be boarded. Wan has cooked for the family, many visitors, and an average of seven additional men, though that will now be reduced.
With paint, carpets, and curtains we have done something toward making the house habitable, and in addition have built an icehouse, shop, blacksmith shed, and office, all under one roof, making quite a picturesque little building, with outside stairs leading to a storage loft.
The Big Ditch, after progressing well for a time, has run into infuriating delays, and cannot reach us for perhaps another year. We shall have to depend on the well for one more season, and its forty barrels a day will not stretch to everything we would like to spread them on. The Susan Canal is now nearly twelve miles long. By next summer, water from it will be soaking into many hundreds of acres, and the demonstration of Oliver’s original scheme will have reached the end of its first step.
Two claims on our lower line have been “jumped”–which means that someone has detected some deficiency in the filing, or some failure to complete the “improvements,” and so has “pre-empted