Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

  “Never mind. Augusta’s husband, you know. Fragile and a little effeminate and very cultivated. Grandfather was something totally different. What held him and Grandmother together for more than sixty years? Passion? Integrity? Culture? Convention? Inviolability of contract? Notions of possession? By some standards they weren’t even married, they just had a paper signed by some witnesses. The first dozen years they knew each other, they were more apart than together. These days, that marriage wouldn’t have lasted any longer than one of these hippie weddings with homemade rituals. What made that union of opposites hold them?”

  Too late, I realize that I have been vehement. Rodman has quietly laid the stereoscope down on the desk. My stump is twitching and my seat is numb from four or five hours in the chair. I take out the aspirin bottle and shake two into my hand.

  “Want some water?” Rodman says.

  “No, I can take them without.”

  “Works better if it’s diluted and dissolved.”

  “O.K.”

  He brings a glass of water from the bathroom. There is a constraint as thick as gelatin in the air between us. A linnet looks us over from the window ledge, but when I turn my chair to face Rodman I hear the thrrrt! of its wings and in the comer of my eye see its dark blip disappear.

  “Pop, I suppose I better tell you,” Rodman says. “Mother was over yesterday.”

  There are certain advantages to being made of stone. I sit there, and I don’t think I quiver. “She was?”

  “She asked about you—where you were, what you were doing, how your health is, who’s taking care of you.”

  “Did you give her the dope?”

  His look splinters on mine. Even Rodman has difficulty with my immobility, and now he obviously suffers from embarrassment—for himself or for me I can’t tell. But after that moment’s cringing he holds my eye. “Yes.”

  “All right.”

  “She doesn’t look good,” he says. “She’s shaky. She’s had a bad time.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “She’s taken an apartment in Walnut Creek.”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “Pop...”

  I take the hand that he mashed in greeting me, and work the knuckles with the fingers of my other hand. I can feel the bone hard and resistant and enlarged. Rodman is standing by the desk, so that I have to look upward at him under my eyebrows. God damn, it would be a pleasure to live among people four feet high, or as considerate as Al Sutton.

  “I think she’d like to see you,” Rodman says. “I think she feels very bad.”

  I do not answer. The ache which has never gone away since he shook my hand spreads up the wrist and arm, I feel it stiffening my shoulder and solidifying down my spine. Everything in me is congealing —guts, glands, blood vessels, organs, bones. My stump, as it always does when I get upset, jerks like a fish on a line. I lay the aching hand on top of it and sit, too rigid for my own comfort.

  “Don’t you think, maybe—” Rodman says.

  “She made her bed.”

  He stands looking down at me; I look past him.

  “Why not get us a drink?” I say. “In the cabinet, there. There’s ice in the little refrigerator under the far end of the desk.”

  He goes away from me and I sit in the midst of my own petrefaction, hating him, hating her, hating it, hating myself. He brings the drinks silently and hands me a glass. Lifting my eyes upward through my eyebrows, excruciatingly conscious of the rigidity of my neck, I raise the glass an inch. “To you.”

  “Prosit.”

  But he is not going to leave it at that. He stands there bending me with his eyes, and with an expression on his bearded face that I have to read as pained, diffident, everything that Rodman normally is not.

  “If I brought her up,” he says, “would you see her?”

  For an instant it is touch and go, the stone threatens to become weak flesh again. For the half breath that I feel that weakness, I want it, yearn for it, would willingly turn to mush if only some of the old warmth would come back. My mind darts like a boy who has stolen something and wants to get to a safe place to examine his prize. Then I am aware that throughout this instant of weakness I have been sitting there as rigid as ever. There is too much of Grandfather in me.

  “You may as well understand,” I say. “I don’t hate her. I don’t blame her. I think I understand her temptation. I’m sorry about her bad luck and her suffering. But I have nothing to say to her. Tell her so.”

  2

  At first light she pulled her curtains aside and saw sunrise pink on distant snow peaks. Breakfasting, she sat on the left side of the dining car to watch the mountains come nearer, and she was getting her things together when the train was still racketing across empty plains. When it finally crawled between lines of side-tracked boxcars and died with a hiss at the Denver platform, she was on tiptoe behind the porter in the vestibule. But at the last moment, when he opened the door on a pandemonium of hatted heads, bearded faces, shouting mouths, blowing papers, Mexicans, Indians, frock coats, buckskins, and a ten-foot sign that said “Lunch Pails Filled 25 c. Passengers for the Mines Take Notice,” she pulled back with a hollowness in her stomach and let others go first. Her eyes flew up and down, hunting him.

  At once she saw him, not pushing forward but back against the station wall, using his height to see over heads. The first thing she thought was that he must not be called Sonny any more. The lines of his thinned-down face were severe, his skin looked weather-beaten except where the pink edge of a new haircut showed on his neck when he turned his head. Expressionlessly his eyes picked up and discarded one by one the passengers who descended and stood for the porter’s whisking, or bolted up the windy platform. He might have been expecting a freight shipment, not a wife he had not seen for more than a year.

  Had he done without her for so long he was indifferent to her coming? Did he blame her, as she blamed herself, for that empty year? Did he think she was insane to force herself on him now, just when he was getting on his feet but before he felt Leadville was prepared for her? She thought he looked closed-in, watchful, perhaps resigned.

  Then the expressionless eyes found her, and she saw them change. All at once unbearably excited, she waved a black mitt. Foolishly they beamed at each other across forty feet of bedlam, and then here he came, and down she went to meet him. Folded up against him and lifted off the ground, she heard him say, “Ah, Susie, you made it! I was afraid it was another false alarm.”

  “I couldn’t do that to you twice. You’re so thin! Are you well?”

  “Tiptop shape. But the altitude’s not fattening. Neither is the Clarendon’s food.” He was holding her out to look her over. “You’re a little thin yourself. How was the trip? How’s Ollie?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, out of breath. “The trip was fine. The conductor even invited me to ride in the locomotive, but I didn’t. Ollie’s much better. He’ll get well fast, now I’m gone. I was bad for him.”

  “Come on.”

  “Oh, I was!” She was all to pieces. In the middle of bumping shoulders and clumping boots, in all the dust that swirled around them, she wanted to confess her mistakes and get started right again. No more foolish protectiveness about Ollie, no more timorous holding-back from sharing her husband’s life, no more—ever—of these meetings and partings at the steps of transcontinental trains. “I was always at him,” she said. “It scared me so to see him delirious that I couldn’t let the poor child rest, and the ague fits and the sweating fits were almost as bad as the fever. Mother and Bessie finally shut me out of his room. That’s when I decided that even if he wasn’t fully well, I was coming out to you. I won’t be in your road, I promise.”

  “I guess you won’t,” he said, and laughed.

  “Oh, isn’t it ironic?” Susan cried. “I wouldn’t take him to Deadwood because I was afraid in a rough camp like that he’d get sick and I’d be lonely. So I take him home to Milton and he gets the old Milton malaria and I’m
lonelier than I’ve ever been anywhere. But I’m sorry about last month. I was all ready to come when he fell ill, and I was so upset I left it to Mr. Vail to telegraph you. I thought he could be trusted, since he was coming West on the same train I’d have taken.”

  “He could be trusted, all right,” Oliver said. “He just wanted to save me a dollar, so he didn’t send his telegram until Chicago. By that time I’d already left Leadville to meet you. So he saves me a dollar and costs me two hundred, and leaves me standing on this platform gnashing my teeth. I met the train for three days before Frank finally got word to me. On the way back over the range I said a few things to myself about Mr. Vail.”

  “Ah, but now,” she said, and let herself be wagged back and forth between his big hands. “Now we can have a good trip in, together. It’ll be like going in to New Almaden for the first time.”

  He was indulgent and paternal; she could see that every move she made and every word she spoke fascinated him. “Well, not exactly,” he said. ”Getting over there is no picnic, and you won’t have my special satisfactions to compensate for the discomforts.”

  “What are your special satisfactions?”

  “Upon arrival, I will instantly be one of the two most envied men in Leadville. Horace Tabor’s got all the money and I’ve got the only wife.”

  “Really? Aren’t there any women?”

  “Some women. No wives. There are some widows, as they call themselves, and some boardinghouse keepers, and a couple of hard cases who wear pants and dig all day in prospect holes. Well, maybe one wife. Her German husband herded her over Mosquito Pass with sixty pounds on her back.”

  “Mercy,” she said, between real and comic dismay. “It sounds like a social summer.”

  “You’ll have to do all your talking to me.”

  “Poor you.”

  “I can put up with it.” He had not let go of her arms, he waggled her shoulders with a slow, insistent motion. She had forgotten how warm a smile he had. The thinness of his face accentuated the fans of wrinkles at the comers of his eyes. The crowd thinning around them, the wind that blew dust and papers past could not interrupt their looking at each other.

  Then the porter picked up her bags and carried them a few feet closer and set them down. Oliver let go of her to lay a silver dollar in the pink palm, and picked up both bags in one hand and steered her with his left arm. “Tell me about Mosquito Pass,” she said. “Is it as horrible as it looked in Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper? Dead horses and wrecked wagons and frightful precipices?”

  “Horrible,” he agreed. “You’ll be paralyzed with fright. But it won’t be quite as bad for you as for German Hausfraus and Leslie’s correspondents.”

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, I shouldn’t have to put more than forty-fifty pounds on you. For another, you know all about those people who draw terrific Western pictures to scare Eastern dudes.”

  She had taken it for granted that they would spend the night in Denver. Even a genteel Quaker lady, after a year’s separation, may dream of a second honeymoon, especially if she arrives all braced with resolves about being a model wife. But they had no time even for a proper dinner. The Denver, South Park & Pacific narrow gauge that would take them to Fairplay would leave in less than an hour. Waiting for a lunch to be put up for them, they almost missed it, and came panting aboard to find only one seat unoccupied—a broken one. Oliver spread his field coat over it and braced it from underneath with her carpetbag, and she sat eating a great sandwich of tough beef and too much mustard while the train dug into the mountain beside a torrent that Oliver said was the South Platte. The roadbed was rough, the train’s grip on the rails precarious. She was thrown around, bouncing between Oliver and the window and having trouble getting the sandwich to her mouth.

  “This is an adventure,” she said.

  “Good.”

  “The train’s so little, after the Santa Fe. If I should draw us now, I’d take a position away behind and above, and show us as a teeny little toy disappearing into these enormous mountains.”

  “Hang around a while,” Oliver said. “When we get to Slack’s and pick up the team we’ll be an even teenier speck disappearing into even bigger mountains.”

  “Deeper and deeper into the West. They call Leadville the Cloud City, don’t they?”

  “Do they?”

  “That’s what Leslie’s called it.”

  “Good for Leslie’s.”

  “You’re no fun,” she said. “You won’t let me gush. Tell me about our cabin on the ditch. Is it really logs?”

  “Really logs. A dollar a log.”

  “Long logs? How big is it?”

  “Short logs. What do you expect for a dollar?”

  “Has it got a view?”

  “The only way you could avoid a view up there is to go underground.”

  “Are there neighbors?”

  He laughed, smoothing breadcrumbs out of his mustache and brushing them off his coat and lap. He kept watching her with a delighted, sidelong smile as if she constantly astonished him. Other men in the car were watching them too, and the near ones were listening. She could not look up without encountering some gaze that immediately withdrew. The admiration of two dozen magnetized eyeballs exhilarated her. She supposed it would be pleasant for men deprived of the company of ladies to see one on this improbable little train, headed toward places where no lady had ever ventured. When the car hit a smooth spot and her chattering spread further than she intended, she understood that ears away out of earshot were strained to catch what she was saying.

  “No neighbors unless the bird who jumped my first lot has built himself a house since last week,” Oliver said.

  “Jumped your lot!”

  “Stood me off with a shotgun.”

  “But what did you do?”

  “Went down to the office and picked out another.”

  “You just let him?”

  “It wasn’t worth much blood. I got a better lot the second time.”

  “I should think it would have made you mad.”

  “Sure.”

  “I should think you’d have had him arrested.”

  “In Leadville? Anyway, what for?”

  “For theft. And now he’ll be our neighbor.”

  “I doubt it. By now he’s off jumping somebody else’s lot or claim. He’s got a kind of gift that way.”

  She studied him curiously. “You’re queer, do you know? You let yourself be imposed on and cheated, and you don’t seem to care.”

  “I don’t like trouble, not about anything that small. I’ve got too ugly a temper when I do get mad, so I try not to get mad.”

  “Have you really got an ugly temper? I don’t believe it.”

  “Ask my mother.”

  “She said you were stubborn. She said you refused to defend yourself when anybody put you in the wrong.”

  “I hold grudges.”

  “I should think you’d hold a grudge against Horace Tabor, then.”

  Amused, he came up from adjusting the carpetbag under their tipping seat. “That was the biggest joke in camp.”

  “Joke? You call it a joke? You make this gentleman’s agreement, as he called it, though it doesn’t sound as if he’d know what the word meant. You’re to inspect his mine for the customary fee and testify about it in court, and you study that mine for three whole months, and make a glass model of the vein that everybody in Denver admired, and you win him his case—didn’t his lawyer admit it was your testimony that did it?—and then he hands you a hundred dollars! You could have made more washing dishes.”

  “That was the joke. Everybody knows Horace. He may own mines worth five or six million dollars, but his hand doesn’t get into his pocket very often. The moths aren’t disturbed more than once a month.”

  “Five times that would have been too little. Ten times. That’s what Conrad or Mr. Ashburner would have asked.”

  “All right. Next time I can ask it. Horace’s payoff mad
e me pretty famous.”

  “I hate to have you famous as the man who only smiles if you cheat him or jump his claim.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said comfortably, and covered her folded hands with one of his. “It won’t break us. There’s no problem about making money in Leadville. Matter of fact, I’m making it hand over fist.”

  Slack’s, at the end of the steel, was as ugly as proud flesh, a gulch of shacks and tents and derailed cars, its one street a continuous mudhole, every square foot of flat ground cluttered with piles of ties, rails, logs, rusty Fresno scrapers, wagonbeds, spare wheels, barrels, lumber, coal. Dejected mules and horses stood hipshot in corrals knee-deep in muck. The canyon walls, skinned of trees, were furrowed and gullied between the stumps. Three great ore wagons full of concentrate from the Leadville smelters were being loaded into flatcars by a gang of men.

  Watched with interest by this gang, and by trainmen, teamsters, Chinamen, loafers, in fact by every eye in Slack’s, Oliver carried Susan through the mud and left her treed on a pile of ties while he waded through the deeper mud up the street to get the buggy and team he had left there the day before. He kept turning to keep an eye on her; twice she saw him look out the stable door to see that she was alone, and where he had left her. The audience gave her its full attention while she waited, and during the whole operation after he came driving back in a democrat wagon, stowed her bags and parcels, lifted her to the seat, laid a buffalo robe under her feet and a gray blanket in her lap, and started her up Kenosha Pass.

  ‘Isn’t there a stage?” she asked. ”Wouldn’t that have been cheaper and easier?”

  “There’s a stage, but not a stage I’d let you ride on.”

  Though it was nearly five o’clock, the glare of the day blazed in their faces. The road was mud, rock, mud again, dirty snow. Then they tipped down to the creek, the horses braced back in the breeching, Oliver’s hand rode the brake, and where the shadow of the wall fell across them they passed instantly into chill. The smell of water burned in Susan’s nostrils, she heard the wheels clash among rocks and the water rushing through the spokes, but in the abrupt transition from glare she was as blind as if they had entered a tunnel. Hardly had she begun to see again when they tipped upward, the horses dug in, the wet wheel beside her rolled up with a felt of red mud on its tire, and the sun was in her face again like a searchlight.