Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [273]
“Why did he pull up all the roses?” I said to my Aunt Betsy. But she only shook her head at me, hurriedly, as if embarrassed or annoyed, and bent her nose to her talisman bud and went on into the house. I thought she was a little crazy. Why should Grandfather, who would putter all afternoon on one rose bush, pull up a whole garden?
But now I think he did. “A reminder,” Grandmother said in that miserable letter while she waited for spring in the first year of her widowhood on the Mesa.
I see it as very early morning. The windows, screened with cheesecloth, are wide open. The cheesecloth stirs in no wind. There is a sense of suspended time, suspended heat, as if the whole night has been used up radiating away the heat of yesterday, and now it is all to start over again, the heat of today is ready to burst over the horizon and dry up this interval of cool twilight.
Susan Ward lies in the double brass bed, flat on her back, wide awake, staring straight upward with eyes that are dark and cried-out. In a week she seems to have aged years; she is a worn, tense woman. The pillow beside hers has not been slept on.
Her head lifts slightly, she listens. In a moment she slips out of her bed in her nightgown and goes quickly to the window. Things outside, seen through the cheesecloth, look like an illustration, cool black and white and gray, patterned with the cheesecloth web like a fine-screen half tone.
Central in the picture is a horse, Oliver’s blood bay gelding, standing with trailing reins in the middle of the lawn–that tender lawn on which even the children have been told to walk barefoot or not at all. Oliver himself is standing farther on, at the edge of the rose garden. He looms above the blooming bushes, he looks taller than the Lombardies along the western edge of the yard. The sky behind him is clear pale green; the sage that begins just outside the line of Lombardies sweeps away clear to the mountains, up the slopes and over them, spilling over the edge of the world.
Oliver stands with bent head, as if thinking. Then he leans, and with his bare hand takes hold of the white rose called the Blanc Double de Coubert. He pulls, and with a slow tough resistance the bush comes up by the roots. He drops it, takes two steps, and leans to take hold of the Mareschal Niel.
“Mother!”
Susan whirls around, and there is Betsy in the doorway. She has seen, she is already crying. It is all they have done for a week, cry.
“What’s he doing?”
“Shh.” Susan puts out her arm and takes the thin little nightgowned figure against her. Together they stand behind the cheesecloth screen and watch him go heavily, impassively, expressionlessly, up the row. One by one he tears the bushes from the ground and leaves them lying–Jacqueminot, American Beauty, Paul Fontaine–rose-pink, black-crimson, rich red. One by one, not yanking in a fury but tugging thoughtfully, almost absent-mindedly, he destroys one row and comes back along the other, down the long narrow bed. At the end, when it is all done, he stands inspecting his bloody hand, and then steps across the lawn and picks up the reins of the standing horse.
“Mother . . .”
“Shhhl” says Susan harshly, and sets her teeth in her lip.
The left hand gathers the reins over the neck, the bloody right hand turns the stirrup, the worn boot slips in, the weight swings up. The horse leaves deep hoofprints in the tender lawn. Not hurrying, he rides across through the sage and into the lane. He diminishes, not hurrying. His right hand is cradled against his stomach. He has not once looked at the house.
That was when she bundled her family together, or what was left of it, and fled eastward. That was about July 21, 1890. She thought then that her marriage, her hope, and her exile had all ended together, but in less than a month she was back in the ruins, trying to hold things together while she waited for something she didn’t dare name.
She never blamed her husband for abandoning her in her grief and guilt, she never questioned the harshness of his judgment, she did