Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [55]
Still, who knows, perhaps Augusta’s woe helped weld their incongruities into a marriage. In that remote place, where the country made a great impression on her and the people hardly any, it was as if Oliver were the only man in the world, and hers the only house. Though she followed Oliver wherever she could, to his office in Shakerag Street, to the Hacienda to dine with the Kendalls, to the post office, to the store, to the shaft house when he was going underground, she was much alone. Lizzie, though a good creature, was “not company.” The Cornish wives who came to call gave Susan and themselves an awkward time, finding little to talk of except Oliver’s virtues–“’e do ’ave a way with’im”–and if they came more than once, found their way around to the kitchen door for a comfortable cup of tea with Lizzie.
None of the Cornish people, men or women, attracted her. She thought them crude, she remembered the threatened charivari and the extortion of two barrels of beer from Oliver’s poor purse, she thought their accent barbarous. And when she went walking with Stranger, and met on the trails brown-faced men and women who saluted her with grave courtesy and moved aside for her to pass, watching her out of their Indian eyes, she was tempted by the pictures they made, but would no more have thought of making companions of them than of their burros. In time she came to know a good many faces, but none of them were people.
When she was tired of walking the restricted trails that Oliver’s instructions permitted her–what he called her stomping ground–she worked on The Scarlet Letter blocks. If she got tired of drawing, she read on the veranda, mainly books that Thomas Hudson, persistently thoughtful, sent her in her exile. If she was waiting for Oliver she kept to the side facing the trail and the southward spurs of mountain, but now and then, to surprise herself, she walked to the corner and looked down on the hills that collapsed toward the valley. She wrote many letters. A new issue of Scribner’s, with things in it by people who had once crowded the summer porch at Milton, was almost as precious as a letter from Augusta or from home.
Quiet black and white birds with rusty breasts worked among the bushes below her. Now and then one rose to an oak and blew a cheweee! cheweeee! into the still, dusty woods. That and the duck and cackle of quail was the only birdsong–a starvation diet after the robins, thrushes, and white throats of Milton summers.
Oliver was gone from before seven until after six, six days a week. She lived for the evenings and for Sundays. Every night after supper they sat together in the hammock and watched the sun leave the floating crest of the San Jose Mountains eastward, and the valley’s pool of dusty air thicken, darken, flare up, and fade. She felt, I imagine, both trapped with him and abjectly dependent on him. They both remarked on how much they seemed to hold hands.
I feel deeply grateful that these mountains do not close all round us. Across the valley we can look out into a vague misty distance, which is the way back to all we left behind.
In the twilight a strange fancy often comes to me that you are all there in the valley below us. Darkness broods over it, but here and there a light twinkles. I feel sure that you are all there, the Milton people and you and Thomas, all the dear ones who haunt my thoughts. It is a fancy I would not lose, for I am very near you all then.
This is a place to be very happy in–we are–we shall be–but there is a thought in common which we do not often express, but which is the undertone of our life here-that this is not our real home, that we do not belong here except as circumstances keep us.
Speak for yourself, Grandmother. I think you are putting into Grandfather