Recapitulation

by Wallace Stegner

  The camera lifts its glance, and sees that all along the left is a cliff of cross-bedded sandstone, frozen dunes in whose base the wind has eroded caves. Men have improved them by building corrals around them, trapping for the use of stock shallow areas of shelter. Two corral-caves are open and empty. In a third, a mare stands hipshot above her sprawled sleeping colt. In a fourth, three calves lie chewing the cud. With the same unlocated nose that detected the mint, we know the smell of those caves: horse and cow dung both dry and fresh, the sun-dried reek of urine, dust, some residual odor of sage and juniper. The sun falls straight down; the band of shade in the caves is only eight or ten feet wide. Half buried in the pinkish sand is an Orange Crush bottle.

  Poking along the cliff beyond the caves, the camera comes to a place where the face is vertical and stained with desert varnish. In this dark glazed surface primitive men have pecked the outlines of deer and bighorn sheep, which modern hands have reinforced with chalk. Below the chalked petroglyphs is a band of handprints in red ocher. A sun-steeped richness of life pervades these noon corrals, this quiet ditch, this billboard cliff. The fingers (though there are no fingers) feel how tepid-cool the water would be if one stooped to dip a hand in it.

  The camera pans along the cliff, up it to its rounding rim, and with a gust as sudden as a wind that blows an umbrella inside out, we are looking high upward, away upward, to the rim of a level, lava-capped, spruce-spiked plateau. From a mile up, it looks down over this fertile desert. The interdependence is obvious without a caption. Up there is snow shed, summer range, a subalpine climate, recreation, coolness, relief. Up there is the source of this ditch that makes the desert live.

  Withdrawing, the camera inspects the sod-roofed stable, two long haystacks, and the pole corrals that lie below the main ditch, with the branch ditch flowing past them. Beyond is an alfalfa field, intensely green. Out in the open valley, whitefaces are gleaning a stubble field, perhaps winter wheat, that ends at a barbed-wire fence. On the other side of the fence, a car tows a horizontal funnel of dust along a road, and beyond the road, another line of cliffs holds the valley in on the south. This is not rounded and domed and monolithic like the cliff on the north. It has been eroded into a line of gargoyles and hoodoos, all leaning southward.

  The camera reasons that these are remnants of the outer shell of an enormous dome which wind and water have dissected to its salmon-pink heart, leaving the shell like a broken wall around the wilderness of stone inside. In there, the distance is hazed with transparent blue. It trembles with familiarity. Its cliffs and cameo buttes have been seen only moments ago. The mind gropes for identification, and finds it: The San Rafael Reef, leaning inward toward the waste of the San Rafael Swell. Robbers’ Roost, Butch Cassidy’s country. The camera surveys it with respect, withdraws to the safe ditch bank marked with the tracks of men and horses, and moves on until it is stopped by a fence made of slabs of ripple-marked sandstone set on end.

  Path and ditch go through the fence; the pole gate is down. In the slabs to which gateposts have been bound by windings of baling wire (Mormon silk, says some amused folklorist at the dream’s core) there are brown ribby shapes of fossil fish, some of them a foot long. Inside the gate is deep shade. We are looking into a half acre of big Fremont poplars that lean over a log ranch house and all but obscure the cliff behind. Through the grove, quicksilver bright, the ditch flows through grass that must be periodically flooded to keep it so green. Scattered and clustered through the grove are fifty or sixty people. They make a picture like a Renoir picnic or a Seurat promenade sur l’herbe, but different, special, simpler and homelier, quintessentially red-ledge Mormon.

  The camera recognizes ranchers, farmers, dealers in alfalfa seed, coal miners from Helper or Sunnyside, beauticians from Price, schoolteachers from Castle Dale or Emery, rangers from the Manti-La Sal National Forest. Whoever they are, the women have been weathered by the same dry wind, and have bought their dresses from the same J. C. Penney store in Price, or from the ZCMI in Salt Lake at Conference time. Whatever trade the men practice, they all dress as cowboys, in boots, washed and ironed and faded Levi’s, and shirts with yokes and snap buttons.

  There are children of all ages, the boys small replicas of their fathers, the younger girls in white dresses with white stockings grass-stained at the knees. The yard has been raked and mown, but it is uneven, worn bare in spots, and already gathering a new drift of cottonwood fluff. Three old women sit in a swing lounge in the deepest shade. From a tree over by the cliff, an automobile tire has been hung on a lariat, and girl children are pushing each other in it. They swoop across the ditch, set feet against the cliff, and push out again, shrieking. Up the ditch, some boys throw a shepherd pup into the water. He crawls out dripping, yapping, and agog, and shakes himself on them. Yelling, they grab him and throw him in again. He loves it. He would happily drown, object of so much attention.

  In this crowd the camera finds the city boy, Nola’s young man, marked by his white corduroys and white buck shoes. The old women discuss him, girls eye him as they help set the long trestle tables near the house. He stands talking to Nola’s father about cattle, and alfalfa, and grazing permits, and water rights. The camera understands that these subjects are not those on which he is prepared to be voluble, but he listens well, and he remembers enough from Saskatchewan and Montana to make an occasional sensible remark. When someone calls Nola’s father away, the city boy falls into talk with her brother Buck. Their subject is bulldogging and roping and bronc riding, and here he does better, since he has an honest admiration for any athletic skill and is, moreover, much less wary than with the old man, who makes him nervous.

  Soon the city boy and Buck go through the stone fence and on down to the stable. The old women watch them out of sight; the camera watches the old women. Then we pick up the two around the stable corner. Three others are there, sneaking cigarettes. The city boy offers Buck a Lucky and takes one himself. Buck winks and leans and pulls out of the manger a partly emptied fifth of unlabeled red-eye. It goes around until it comes to Bruce Mason, who declines, using his ulcer as an excuse. The others clearly do not understand about ulcers and look at him as if afraid he might be pious.

  “I tell you, boy,” Buck says, “you ain’t gonna survive this struggle just on brute strength.”

  “Don’t encourage him,” another man says. “More he don’t drink, more they is for us to. I dearly love a man that don’t drink, myself.”

  The bottle goes around again. The next-to-last man, sensing shortage, takes it from his mouth, looks at it against the light, takes one more small sip—a tablespoonful—and regretfully passes it to Buck, who drains it and throws it over his shoulder without looking. It smashes against the log wall. “Who flang that?” a man asks. They laugh.

  One of them leans around the corner to look. “About ready to start, up there, I guess.”

  “Maybe we better git back,” Buck says, and steps on his cigarette. “Come on, boy, you’re family.”

  He whacks Bruce on the shoulder and leaves his arm there as they walk together back to the sandstone fence and into the shade. The old women watch, noting the fraternal acceptance.

  A sort of order is shaping out of the colored chaos under the poplars. Like particles in a kaleidoscope, people arrange themselves around a large genial man in white shirt and arm garters—the bishop—who pushes and pulls at the air, beckoning them in or moving them back. Women leave their work in the kitchen and at the tables and come over, untying apron strings and looking around for their children. The three men whom Bruce and Buck have left behind at the stable come up the slope and drape themselves warily on the sandstone fence at the very edge of things. Chatterers bore on into the growing quiet until they become aware and fall still. Women stoop and fiercely yank up their daughters’ stockings and yank down their dresses. A loose aisle has formed, leading toward the kitchen door. The white-shirted bishop folds his arms and waits, smiling.

  Heads turn like sunflowers, and t
he bride is at the kitchen door, in soft focus behind the screen. Her dress, greener than the grass, is unkind to her coloring, which is doubtful in any case because her brows are dark like Nola’s and her hair, marcelled as rigid as tin, is newly blonded. Though she is weathered and not young, is really quite a homely woman with bony, too large features (that Southern Paiute inheritance?), the camera notes her resemblance to Nola. A stranger might think her Nola’s mother. Her smile is tense.

  She opens the screen and steps down onto the sandstone slab that serves as a doorstep. Coming after her, the groom lets the screen door slam, and winces at the noise, raising his narrow shoulders and grinning guiltily and drawing sympathetic laughter.

  He is the only person there who wears a coat. He wears, in fact, a suit, black and ironed stiff. His boots, new, are outlined under the narrow legs of his pants. Through the collar of his checked cowboy shirt he has run a necktie from behind, so that in the opening where there would normally be a knot there is only a band of patterned silk. The ends of the tie must hang down his back, under his coat, like pigtails. The sun has reddened without tanning him. His hair is sandy and plastered down. His upper lip is cracked, and he keeps touching it with the tip of his tongue.

  The screen opens again and Nola and Buck, maid of honor and best man, step down behind the bride and groom. Buck’s maroon silk shirt glows against the gray logs like an exotic flower. Nola in a dress of soft yellow looks cool, serene, removed from all the stress of this marrying. The camera suffers a pang of pride and love, just looking at her.

  Without intending to, she makes the bride and groom look like yokels. Her eyes go out over the crowd until they find Bruce. Then she smiles a small private smile, throws it like a rosebud, and as he catches it he is enveloped in blue static. She should be the bride here. Is. Will be. There is only one marriage scheduled, but there will be two honeymoons.

  Buck has observed that smile, and who caught it. He says something to his sister out of the corner of his mouth, and she gives him an admonitory nudge with her shoulder, not looking at him, still smiling her inward smile.

  The bishop nods, and the four on the doorstep, not unanimously, start forward. The bride turns her ankle in the rough grass and makes an exasperated, self-conscious grimace. In the front row of watchers a girl of twelve or so stands up with a gasp and a sob. The bride’s daughter, even more tense than the bride. Promptly the woman above her wraps the girl in against her skirts. Pale, trapped, brimming, the girl watches as if at a hanging.

  Her mother stops before the bishop, adjusts her feet in the grass, squares her shoulders, looks around helplessly for some place to lay her bouquet, and with abrupt decision hands it back to Nola. The bridegroom, tonguing his cracked lip, leans forward slightly and peeks down the front of his trousers.

  “Darrell’s nervous,” the bishop says. Laughter, quickly hushed. Barely moving her lips, the bride says something, and the bishop nods. Aloud, he guesses comfortably that folks all seem to be here, they might as well get started.

  A random puff of wind moves and dies in the high tops of the poplars. A watching woman bats cotton out of her face without taking her eyes off the drama before her. The camera strays past the principals, looks out from the shade across the glaring valley and sees the leaning reef of hoodoos and goblins, and away beyond, the Swell crawling with heat, the color of cliffs and canyons almost discharged in the steep light. The clouds in the visible arc of sky are rounded white above, flat below.

  “Now, before we get down to the proceedings, let me remind you of what we were saying before,” the bishop says. He speaks conversationally to the bride and groom, ignoring the spectators. “When you’re married and settled down over there on the Minnie Maud, or for that matter if you should move anywhere else, whatever place you live in, become a real part of that place. Mmmmmm? Dig in and work and belong in it and do your share.”

  They stand before him like culprits, wearing the look of good Mormons hearkening to counsel. The camera, meantime, interprets Bruce Mason’s feelings. He looks upon his girl’s sister and her husband-to-be as hicks. He feels superior to them and to everyone there unless perhaps Nola’s father and brother. The father strikes him as a tough old bird with a gimlet eye, the brother as a good egg, skilled, worldly, and reckless. The rest are yokels. Yet he may not smile at these country Mormons, because they are her people, and she is loyal to them.

  All her life she has been the darling of this tribe. Her sister mothered her, half a dozen aunties anxiously spoiled her. She was the one who could sit down at the piano, even as a little girl, and play by ear any tune you wanted to name. She was the one who would pick up a guitar, or an accordion, or whatever was lying around, and by suppertime be playing the thing. She was the one who went off to the university in Salt Lake. He has seen the fond and yearning looks they give her. Because of her, they deserve his politeness if not his respect.

  He has also caught the women watching him, and seen their speculative eyes. How serious are those two? Is he good enough for her? Somebody said he isn’t LDS. That’s bad. But perhaps he could be brought to receive the Word? He seems in other ways like a well-spoken, pleasant young man.

  An impostor, he knows that every single aspect of his background, if it were known, would be a black mark against him, and their solidarity makes him half envious. He feels how satisfying it would be to belong to some tribe or family, and though he feels superior to this one, he does not dismiss the notion of a not unfriendly alliance. Can he imagine being married here himself—in this grove, before this shirt-sleeved bishop? Would he bring his own family? His mother, yes, she could make contact with anybody. Chet would be at home with the boys back of the stable. But his father is unthinkable here. He belongs out in the Robbers’ Roost, not in this green and pious oasis.

  “This marriage isn’t just yours, you see,” the Bishop is saying. “I’m sure you both understand that. Other people have an interest in it, too. Mmmm? The community has an interest in it because you’ll be part of it, and it has a right to expect you to live up to your obligations. The state has an interest in it because it’ll have you registered, all your records will be there. And the Church has an interest in it because through it your marriage is sanctified.”

  Around the edge of the bridegroom’s hair, like a scalping scar, runs a line of unsunburned white. This is probably the first time he has had his hat off, except to sleep and get his hair cut, in weeks. The barber has shaved his neck round. Down by the corrals a calf is bawling. The woman with her arms around the bride’s daughter frowns in annoyance, willing the creature still.

  “All right, then,” the bishop says. “You understand all that. Now, Darrell, you take Audrey by the right hand. Audrey, you take Darrell. That’s it. Now. By the authority in me vested as an Elder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I declare you man and wife.”

  It comes too quickly. Everyone is confused, including the principals. They look uncertainly at the bishop, who has to motion Buck to step forward with the ring. The bishop takes it from him and hands it to Darrell, who fumbles and nearly drops it from his tonglike fingers, and then has trouble shoving it over Audrey’s knuckle.

  “Darrell is nervous,” the bishop says with a wide smile.

  A black cat with its tail in the air walks around the corner of the house and across the grass. Scare flares in the eyes of one of the watching women, and with her skirts she tries to shoo it back. But her move is too hesitant, inhibited by the occasion, and the cat comes on down the line, rubbing against legs, watched by all, until a little girl stoops quickly and lifts it. Its hind legs and tail hang down, an inert weight, against the white confirmation dress.

  The bride’s daughter weeps steadily, copiously, not quite silently. The woman holding her makes an exasperated face and hands down a wadded handkerchief. The girl takes it, weeps, wipes.

  “You may now kiss each other,” the bishop says.

  Violently the bride flings herself against the bridegr
oom’s chest. The contrast between her worn vulnerability and Nola’s composure confirms for Bruce Mason how far she has outgrown her origins. All around, those origins are wet-eyed.

  Sheepishly the husband wraps his new wife around. Suspended, with drowning eyes, the daughter stares. It is a very swampy occasion. For relief, Bruce looks toward Nola, holding the bridal bouquet on her arm, but her eyes are for her sister, not for him.

  The crowd stands, embarrassed and fulfilled. Nobody dares to break the tableau. Then Audrey pulls her homely wet face away from Darrell’s Tom Mix shirt and cries accusingly, “Well, why don’t somebody say something, instead of standin’ there watchin’ me cry!”

  Laughter is sympathetic and relieved, inertia is broken. The daughter comes running and desperately clings to her mother’s leg. Nola, then Buck, then their father, kiss the bride. The women kiss embarrassed Darrell, the men pump his hand. Two women quietly retrieve their aprons from behind the swing and, tying strings as they go, head for the kitchen.

  “Look this way, Audrey,” a woman says, and raises a camera. People fall back out of the line of fire. A man says, “It’s too dark in the shade here, Ede. You won’t get nothing,” and the camerawoman says, “No, it ain’t, I’ve got this thing.”

  Near her a half-grown boy, serious as a dynamiter’s assistant, holds aloft a tray of flash powder. People back off further, respectful of advanced technology, while the bride assembles herself, dabs, blinks, laughs, grabs Darrell on one side and her daughter on the other, and freezes as stiff as the girl from whose head the crack shot shoots glass balls in a Wild West show.

  “Wait!” Darrell says. He tears off his coat and rips the necktie out of his collar and tosses them to someone in the crowd. Cheers.

  “Smile, now,” the camerawoman says. “Say ‘prunes.’ ”

  She peers, squints, is on the brink. Prunes. Click, but no flash.