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By Root 11225 0

I know that his long, smoldering, “incurable disease” of love for my grandmother had burst out like a spontaneous-combustion fire in the airless loft of their failure. I know that Grandmother would have had to see him–or at least I am morally certain she would, either because her own feelings were dangerously inflamed or because she felt it necessary to break off for good. It would not be easy to see him at her house, where Nellie, the children, John, Wan, the Malletts, Oliver himself, were always coming and going. It would have been awkward to ride up to the canyon camp to see him because Wiley was there, and because after the July 4 visit she felt that Oliver was suspicious. But Frank still rode the Susan Canal nearly every day: two months before, she had written a story about a young engineer patrolling just such a ditch in just such a valley, trying to discover who kept creating little breaks in the bank that rapidly widened to let the whole ditch run dry. He had found a girl doing it, the daughter of a local rancher who felt that the ditch was robbing him of water rightfully his, and their little drama was worked out just at twilight, with the last of a red sunset reflected on the slow, spinning current of the ditch and the mountains going cool and black all around the horizon.

Life copying art? Not improbably; her mind worked that way. Suppose she was truly afraid to meet Frank Sargent alone, and didn’t dare give him her good-bye with others around? Who might she take along, as camouflage or protection? A child, maybe? A child of five, too young to understand speaking looks or the hidden emphasis of words? Young enough to be sent off to pick flowers or catch polliwogs while two adults held their tense, nearly silent interview? On that bench the sagebrush was four feet tall, tall enough for seated people to be hidden from sight, tall enough for a child to disappear in it within fifty feet.

There is nothing in the newspaper story either to corroborate or deny such speculation. The mother, the paper says, was too distracted with grief to give a coherent account of the accident, but according to the father, they had become separated while searching for wildflowers among the sage. When Mrs. Ward became aware that she was alone, and began to call, there was no answer. She ran calling through the tall sage and along the ditch bank. Her cries attracted Mr. Ward and his son, who happened to be riding the ditch trail, and they joined the search on horseback. It was the boy who found his sister’s body a quarter mile downstream, kept afloat by the air inside her dress. Efforts by the rather and by Mr. Frank Sargent to revive the little girl by artificial respiration proved unavailing.

Efforts by the father and by Mr. Frank Sargent. Where did he come from? Did he just pop into the action as he pops into the newspaper story, out of nowhere? Had he been riding down the ditch with Oliver and Ollie? The paper does not say so. Did he come along later? We don’t know. Was he there all the time–had he been sitting hidden in that tall sage with his arm around Susan Ward, or with Susan Ward’s two hands in his, pleading his urgent, ardent, reckless, hopeless cause? Were those two so absorbed in themselves that they forgot for a while to wonder where Agnes had got to? Did Susan, pushing away the misery of their parting, or whatever it was, stand up at some point, looking anxiously around in the growing dusk, on that bench like a great empty stage, under that sky beginning to show the first weak stars, and call out, and have no answer? Did the two of them go through the sage and along the trail and down the ditch, calling? And is that when Oliver and Ollie, attracted by the voices, came riding down?

If so, it is not what Grandfather reported to the Boise Sentinel. It is only by a seeming inadvertence that Frank Sargent is in the story at all. But there he is, ambiguous, having to be dealt with. And four days later, after hanging around the edges of their grief for four days, after standing helpless and excluded, probably hated, through