Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

  Eventually they climbed through the clouds and into the sun. Looking back, Susan saw South Park filled nearly to the brim with cloud, only the saw-toothed peaks rising above it. Their crowbait horses, one black and one bay, dragged them reluctantly up a steep canyon, stopping every quarter of a mile to blow. They came out onto a plateau and passed through aspens still leafless, with drifts deep among the trunks, then through a scattering of alpine firs that grew runty and gnarled and gave way to brown grass that showed the faintest tint of green on the southward slopes and disappeared under deep snowbanks on the northward ones. The whole high upland glittered with light.

  As they had need, they drew aside to let ore wagons pass with their loads of concentrate and matte. The skyline, from any part of this magical plateau, was toothed like the jaw of a shark. The road bent and dipped down through a hanging valley where mosquitoes rose in swarms from the wet grass; when it lifted them again around a corner of bare stone the mosquitoes blew away instantly, and the wind was so cold it made her teeth ache. Her eyes watered with cold and light.

  “Still remind you of staging in to New Almaden?” Oliver said.

  “I take it back. This is so wild and beautiful. I like it ever so much better.”

  “So do I. I could do without the town of Fairplay, though.”

  “We survived it.”

  “You’re all right, Susie,” he said. “You know that? Most women would go to bed for a week after a night like that.”

  “Where?” she said, and giggled. Her voice startled her, brittle as ice in that thin air. “Maybe I will go to bed for a week, once we get to a bed.”

  “I doubt it. It hasn’t fazed you.”

  “I lay awake all last night writing it up for Century,” she said. “I intend to be their Western correspondent. At the very least, think of the letters I can write Augusta.” The thought made her laugh again; she put her black mitts to her cheeks, stinging with cold and sun. She supposed she looked as healthy as a child at a skating party. Oddly enough, she felt healthy too. “No,” she said, “I couldn’t. Can you imagine her opening a letter describing last night, and reading it aloud to Thomas at breakfast in some grand hotel dining room on Lake Leman or somewhere, with all of civilized Europe looking in the window?”

  “Better spare her,” Oliver said. “She thinks you’re enough of a pioneer as it is.” He reached the whip from its socket and touched the horses into activity. “Come on, boys, don’t fall asleep.”

  The thin air smelled of stone and snow, the sun came through it and lay warm on her hands and face without warming the air itself. Up, up, up. There was no top to this pass. Oliver said it crested at more than thirteen thousand feet. They were long past all trees, even runted ones. The peaks were close around them, the distance heaved with stony ridges, needles, pyramids in whose shadowed cirques the snow curved smoothly. The horses stopped, pumping for air, and as they rested she saw below a slumping snowbank the shine of beginning melt, and in the very edge between thaw and freeze a clump of cream-colored flowers.

  “I’d like to walk a little. Could I?”

  “You won’t want to walk far. We’re around twelve thousand right now.”

  “Just a little way. I can keep up with you.”

  It felt good to use her legs, but she had no wind at all. With a handful of the little alpine flowers in her hand and the whole broken world under her eyes, she puffed on after the democrat, and was glad when it stopped and waited. But when she caught up, Oliver was standing out in front looking closely at the bay horse. The moment she saw the closed expression of his face she knew something was wrong. She looked at the horse, spraddle-legged, dull-eyed, with pumping ribs and flaring nostrils, and heard the breath rattle in its throat.

  “Is he sick?”

  “I thought for a while he was just dogging it. They’re not pulling any load to speak of, but look at him heave.”

  Tableau: tiny figures at the foot of a long rising saddle, snowpeaks north and south, another high range across the west. The road crawled upward toward the place where the saddle emptied into sky. The wind came across into her face with the taste of snow in it, and not all the glittering brightness on the snow could disguise the cold that lurked in the air. In the whole bright half-created landscape they were the only creatures except for a toy ore wagon that was just starting down the dugway road from the summit.

  It took an effort to keep her fear from shaking in her voice. “What will we do? Can we walk?”

  Watching the horse with a frown, he shook his head without looking at her. “Don’t you feel the altitude?”

  “Yes, but...”

  “Anyway, what would we do with your luggage and the buggy? They wouldn’t be here when we got back to pick them up, that’s a cinch. Maybe we could leave the sick one and you could ride the other ...No, no saddle or anything. We’ll just have to drive him. He might hold out to English George’s.”

  Once more Susan looked up at the shelf of road where the ore wagon clung. “At least I can go on walking now. I don’t want that poor sick thing pulling me.”

  “I’ll do the walking. You climb up. He’ll be dead by suppertime no matter what you do.”

  Unwillingly she rode, while Oliver walked on the off side with the whip and kept touching up the black horse, making it pull the sick one along. The bay stumbled, hung its nose down until the collar half-choked it, wheezed and rattled for air. They had to stop every hundred yards.

  “Maybe that wagon can help us,” she said once.

  “We’d better make it on our own.”

  A long, painful, halting time later, halfway up the dugway, they met the ore wagon, and Oliver scrambled into the seat to negotiate the passage. Sight of what his two hundred pounds did to the gasping bay horse was so painful to her that she barely saw the wagon driver.

  “Really, I want to walk a while,” she said when they were past. But she was able to struggle upward only a few hundred yards, with many rests. The thin air burned her lungs, her legs were like wood. And it did seem to make no difference to the horse whether she walked or rode. It went staggering upward a few rods and stopped, was whipped and dragged forward, stopped again. The sound of its breathing was like the sound of a saw.

  “All right,” Oliver said after a few minutes. “No more, now. You’ll be sick yourself.” He helped her up into the seat. He was panting; even in the reminding wind his face had the shine of sweat. They hung, fighting for oxygen, on a steep narrow ledge below the place where the road finally curved around out of sight. The shelf had been literally blasted out of the mountain with black powder. Beyond the curve of the road there was nothing in sight. They must be near the summit, or at it. Snow sagged against the inward cliff and around the big blocks of broken stone. The outside dropped away so steep and far she didn’t dare look.

  “How much farther?” she said. “Can he make it, do you think?”

  “It’s going to be all right. Just up this last pitch and then it’s down. We could take him out and let the black pull it.”

  He blew out his breath, with a down-mouthed, acknowledging look of relief. Then she saw his eyes change. “Wait. Listen.”

  He cocked his head, with his hand raised, for only a second, long enough for her to hear something, she couldn’t tell what-perhaps only the empty roaring of the sky. He dropped his hand, he threw a look right, then left. The buggy sagged and rolled a half wheel backward as he leaped onto the step. At that instant appeared around the upper bend a pair of trotting horses, then another pair, then another, then the rocking cradle of the stage. She saw sparks clash from rock under the tires. To her horrified eyes it seemed a runaway, out of control.

  Oliver’s whip cracked on the rump of the black horse, then the bay, the black again. Susan grabbed for the dash. They jerked wildly in toward the cliff, among the blocks of stone. And there was not room, she knew it with a certainty that froze her mind.

  The sick horse, on the inside, floundered among the rocks and deep snow. Oliver lash
ed, lashed, lashed it-oh, how could he? She screamed and grabbed for his whip arm; he shook her off without even looking at her. The left wheels reared up, climbed, crashed down, climbed again; the buggy tilted so steeply that she hung on in frantic fear of sliding straight off under the hoofs and wheels. Oliver’s hand shot out and grabbed her. She screamed again, the air was full of a sound like a high wind. There was a smoke of horse breath, a roar and rumble, a close, tense, voiceless rush, and the stage passed her so close that if she had had her arm extended it might have been torn off. Glaring up into the dangerous shadow as it thundered by, she saw a lean, hook-nosed face, a figure with feet braced against the dash, lines that hummed stiff as metal. And she saw the stage driver’s queer, small, gritted smile.

  Still hanging onto her arm, but leaning far inward toward the cliff like a sailor high-siding in a blow, Oliver guided the buggy up over a last rock to a bumpy landing in the road. The air still reeked with the hot smell of horse and the spark odor of iron tires on stone. The noise of the stage diminished behind and below them. They turned to watch it go.

  “God Almighty,” Oliver said, and slid back into the seat beside her. “You all right?”

  “I think so.”

  “Too close.”

  She was staring in pain at the sick horse. It tottered on its legs-she could see the deep trembling that ran from pastern to knee. Its nose went clear to the ground, it shuddered and began to sink. Instantly Oliver lashed it harshly with the whip, lashed its mate, leaped to the ground and kept on lashing. The horse tottered, strained, was dragged forward, the buggy crawled painfully upward. Susan sat white and trembling, hating his cruelty, hating the pain and exhaustion of the sick beast, hating the heartless mountains, the brutal West.

  Just at this point in Grandmother’s reminiscences there is a somewhat high-flown paragraph:The mountains of the Great Divide are not, as everyone knows, born treeless, though we always think of them as above timberline with the eternal snows on their heads. They wade up through ancient forests and plunge into canyons tangled up with water-courses and pause in little gem-like valleys and march attended by loud winds across high plateaus, but all such incidents of the lower world they leave behind them when they begin to strip for the skies: like the Holy Ones of old, they go up alone and barren of all circumstance to meet their transfiguration.

  I can’t help reading that as more than a literary flourish; I want to read it as a perception of Western necessity, something deeper than scenery. Something must have told her, as they dragged over the summit and down to English George’s, that character as well as mountains had to strip for the skies. She must have known that a Thomas Hudson, despite his urbanity, uprightness, and delicacy of feeling, would not have got that dying horse in motion fast enough to save them, or got it on over the summit to the place of help. Almost before she had stopped screaming and pulling at his hard whip arm, she felt shame. It was his physical readiness, his unflusterable way of doing what was needed in a crisis, that she most respected in him: it made him different from the men she had known. In remembering the episode years later, she makes a veiled acknowledgment of the respect that at the time, upset and sulky, she begrudged.

  Even her prose strips-she does the rest of that trip to Leadville in a half dozen lines.

  I am glad I have forgotten what I said to my husband in that moment when he saved our lives, and I hope he has too. The horse died after we got to English George’s, and there we hired another, or the remains of one, and he died the day after we reached Leadville. Oliver paid for both-and how much more the trip cost him (both trips) I never knew. But that is the price of Romance. To have allowed his wife to come in by stage in company with drunkenness and vice would have been realism.

  That was written years after the event, and is conditioned by the Doppler Effect. That day in June 1879, they came down off Mosquito Pass silent and constrained, she scared and sulky, he worried and somewhat bruised in spirit at being thought a brute. Or I suppose that is what he felt. The fact is, I don’t know. He is the silent character in this cast, he did not defend himself when he thought he was wronged, and he left no novels, stories, drawings, or reminiscences to speak for him. I only assume what he felt, from knowing him as an old man. He never did less than the best he knew how. If that was not enough, if he felt criticism in the air, he put on his hat and walked out.

  3

  Leadville made its appearance as a long gulch (Evans) littered with wreckage, shacks, and mine tailings. It was rutted deep by ore wagons, scalped of its timber. The smoke of smelters and charcoal kilns smudged a sky that all down the pass had been a dark, serene blue. They passed a string of corrals, then a repair yard where the bodily parts of a hundred wagons were strewn. People appeared and thickened-walkers, riders, drivers of buggies and wagons. A log cabin wore a simple sign, SALOON: it looked to be a half mile from anywhere. Farther down, a shack had scrawled in charcoal above its door “No chickens no eggs no keep folks dam.” The shacks grew thicker, the road became the parody of a street. A false-fronted shack said ASSAY OFFICE.

  Ahead, something seemed to be happening. People were hurrying, others stood in doorways looking toward the center of town. A young man with a flapping vest and a face pink with high-altitude exertion passed them, running hard. Still aggrieved with each other, Susan and Oliver had been traveling without much talk, but when she heard shouting up ahead Susan could not help saying, “What is it? Is it always like this?”

  “Not necessarily.” He stood up to look, he shrugged and sat down. The crowd sound ahead stopped as if hands had choked it off. Now Susan stood up. She could see a dense crowd from sidewalk to sidewalk in a street between false fronts, and men coming in from every direction. “What on earth! It must be something exciting.”

  She was jolted back into the seat, and Oliver stood up; they popped up and popped down like counterweighted jumping jacks. She heard him grunt, a hard inarticulate sound, and abruptly he cracked the whip on the haunch of their new horse, as dragging and wheezing almost as the one they had left behind, and swung the team left up a wallowed side hill between shacks.

  “My goodness,” Susan said. “Is this the road to our place?”

  “One way.”

  “Could you see what was happening down there?”

  “Some kind of ruckus. Nothing you need to see.”

  “You protect me too much,” she said, disappointed and rebellious.

  “No I don’t.”

  “We agreed it was a mistake for me to stay so far out of things at New Almaden.”

  “This isn’t New Almaden.”

  They bumped up the stumpy hillside. Down to the right she could see packed roofs, and beyond them smelter smokes. All across the West were the peaks she knew were the Sawatch Range. The crowd was out of sight, but she could hear it, a loud continuous uproar, then a stillness, then a harsh, startling outcry. “Something is certainly going on,” she said.

  Oliver, with his head dropped, watched the laboring sick horse. She thought his face was stem and unloving, and she hated it that they should arrive at their new home in that spirit. Then he pointed with his whip. “There’s your house.”

  She forgot the excitement down below, she forgot the misunderstanding that had kept them silent down the gulch. There it sat, the second house she would try to make into a Western home: a squat cabin of unpeeled logs with a pigtail of smoke from its stovepipe. “Looks as if Frank’s made you a fire,” Oliver said. “You’ll learn to appreciate that boy.”

  “Frank, that’s your assistant?”

  “General Sargent’s third son, come out West to be an engineer.”

  “Just like you.”

  “just like me.”

  Her quick, upward, smiling look asked or gave forgiveness for what had been between them. “Is he going to be as good as you?”

  “That’s a hard standard to hold him to.”

  They laughed. It was better already. At the ditch bank she took his hand and teetered prettily be
fore jumping down. The ditch was like no ditch she had ever imagined. This was as clear as water in a glass, and it shot past as if chased. When she stooped impulsively to drag her hand in it it numbed her fingers.

  Two planks crossed it for a bridge. Oliver tied the team to a stump and led her across as if it were as dangerous as a high wire. At the door he stood a moment, frowning, listening to the crowd noise from below, and then with an odd, angry shrug he yanked the buckskin latchstring. “Maybe we should begin with the right omens,” he said, and gravely lifted her across the sill and set her down. “In case you think you’ve come down in the world, let me tell you there’s nothing grander in Leadville.”

  It was one room, perhaps fifteen by twenty-five feet. Two windows, curtainless. Five chairs, one broken, one a rocker. A Franklin stove with a fallen, ashy fire smoking in it. Two canvas cots made up with gray blankets. A table that had been knocked together out of three wide boards and two sawhorses.

  “Don’t look around for the kitchen or bedroom,” Oliver said.

  Perhaps she had been remembering the New Almaden cottage, so much better than her expectations, and so had built up expectations of this cabin that it could not support. It took an effort to conceal her disappointment. Yet as she looked around she had to admit that a log house was picturesque, and a house with a welcoming fire on its hearth was touching. She summoned back for her inner eye the image of the peaks rimming the world outside. “It’s charming. I can hang curtains around the cots. We’ll be snug. How will we cook?”

  “Breakfast on the Franklin, dinner out of a sardine can, supper at the Clarendon. I’m afraid I won’t be here for dinner much.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be welcome when you can come,” she said. “But I’ll be busy-you’ll have to keep out of my way. I brought some blocks for a novel of Louisa Alcott’s.”

  He said seriously, “Maybe you’ll want to stay at the hotel.”