Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [242]
I grew almost hysterical, sitting my horse there on Pisgah’s top and being shown the Promised Land, which consisted of a sweep of sage and our barren house and the dots of three distant settlers’ shacks, with off to our right the desolation that Hi Mallett has created with his sulky plow. “Remember Querendero?” Oliver kept saying to me. “Have you forgotten the grace and romance you found in Tepitongo? Well just look at this with the eye of faith. This can be as good.”
In truth, he half convinced me. Let the water project be completed, and it can be splendid; there is literally no limit to what one might do. I rode home feeling almost exhilarated, and I have been very cheerful since. Maybe, maybe. I cling to that possibility as a child clutches a piece of sea-worn magic glass on the beach.
This, you see, is one of my hopeful days, all because I have been given a glimpse of what lights up Oliver’s mind even when he seems taciturn and silent. All because the windmill has pumped us past the dry season with only modest casualties. All because we have had a rain to settle the summer dust cloud. With his hand on his heart, Oliver swears that next spring we shall have a lawn all along the front of the house to hold down all the Idaho dirt that wants to blow inside.
This must sound incredible, read on Staten Island.
The Mesa
January 10, 1890
Dearest Augusta–
It was so good of you to have Ollie for Christmas. It was out of the question that he should come home, for we hadn’t the money for his fare. Without you, he would have had to go to Milton, sadly reduced now that father and mother are gone and the old house sold, or stay over with two or three other waifs at school. Dr. Rhinelander and his wife are kindness itself, but it wouldn’t have been Christmas.
He wrote me after returning–one of his characteristic twenty-word letters–and said that “he had fun with Rodman,” and that “Mrs. Hudson was nice to me and asked a lot of questions.” I hope he had the manners to write to you.
Just today I heard from Oliver, who has taken his Irrigation Survey report east (Major Powell is in difficulties with a certain clique of Senators, and wants all possible ammunition for this session of Congress). Before going to Washington, Oliver found time to run up to Concord. All is not quite as I had hoped. Ollie is struggling, keeping afloat in his studies but only barely. He is somewhat lonesome and isolated, Oliver says. He feels his difference, and resents the allusions of his schoolmates to it. Shortly after he arrived last fall, he appears to have got into an actual fist fight with a boy who sneered at the place he came from. “Idaho is my home!” he told Dr. Rhinelander, as if that justified everything. And he wears a sprig of sage in his jacket buttonhole, as a Scotch lassie might wear a sprig of heather!
I am miserable at the thought of his homesickness and his fighting–he is not a rude or brawling boy. It makes me doubt the wisdom of my plans for him. Yet he has come to know you and Thomas and your children, he has traveled by himself like a grown man, he is studying with the finest teachers, among the finest Eastern boys. I know he will thank me in the end for forcing this on him.
In his letter he asks for a photograph of his sisters to put up in his room, and also one of his pony. Evidently the information that he has a pony has helped gain him prestige among his schoolmates, and he has always been very manly and protective