Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [248]
Oliver, who never mistrusts anyone unless the evidence is overwhelming, is inclined to take the blame. He says that Burns could have made an honest mistake. I say he did not. He had access to the company’s maps and plans, he knew exactly where the Susan would go, he knew that water would reach those claims before it could reach any of the lands higher up. And he will make no gesture toward redeeming his “mistake.” He says he has made his first payment on that land, has little money, can’t be asked to give up what he has staked his future on. In some desperation Oliver offered to buy the claims, but Burns says he is making plans to build. He already has another wife in mind, the daughter of one of the pick and shovel millionaires. Wouldn’t you think he might be sure enough of his future to sacrifice those acres of desert? Tomorrow I shall send Oliver back to town to see if Burns won’t sell one of the claims, at least. I know the answer in advance. And if he should say yes, where would we get the money? We are in debt up to our necks.
So I shall not see my sister this fall, and my children will not have cousins to ride with or do lessons with (Nellie was prepared to enlarge her school to take in Bessie’s three). Poor John will not realize his dream of coming West. We may or may not have money to send Ollie back to St. Paul’s. We may not even have a job, we may have not a leftover crumb of hope. But we do have a great deal of dry land, unless when we weren’t looking someone has jumped ours too.
Forgive me, I should not be bitter. Yet I cannot see one ray of light. Perhaps we can sell this house to someone who can afford it, Burns perhaps, and move down into the Mallett cabin and herd people’s sheep or plow their sagebrush. It seems the logical conclusion of our effort to reclaim and civilize the West.
4
From the wide doorway where she perched on her stool with the drawing pad in her lap, she looked out into and through the piazza, past the hammock where Betsy was reading to Agnes, past the heavy pillars and the balustrade on which sat the old Guadalajara olla with its inscription half visible–asita–and on across the lawn and the spreading sagebrush to the far line of the mountains. The indoor light was tea-colored, sepia; the lawn was whitened under the sun like an overexposed photographic negative, the sagebrush went palely, growing dimmer and paler with distance, until it ended at the foot of the mountains that were pale, dusty blue against a sky even paler and dustier. She thought it was like being inside a cool cave and seeing out into an allegorical desert plain, the sort of place where wayfarers are bewildered and creatures die of thirst.
She looked from the hammock to her drawing and back to the hammock, estimating the grace of the young bodies curved in the netting, heavy as carried cats. The sweet treble of Betsy’s voice was the only sound. She was reading The Birds’ Christmas Carol. The two lay facing different ways, their feet entangled. Agnes, with her wide eyes open and glazed with imagining, kept pulling out strands of silvery hair to arm’s length as if measuring them.
Susan worked with her lips pressed together, her brows tightened a little under the mouse-colored bangs. There was a fist of hair at the back of her head, a little too tightly knotted to be becoming; but the head itself was small and shapely, the neck delicate, the profiled face cut like a cameo. In her high-necked dress with its leg-of-mutton sleeves, its pinched-in waist, its overskirt and bustle, she was antiquely attractive, the portrait of a lady, a tidy, fastidious lady who looked younger than she was.