Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

  Well, you must. There’s no one else to be had

  Something moved just inside the comer of the cliff, beyond where the juniors’ tent used to stand. Moving to the extreme left of the window, she could see half of Mrs. Briscoe, sitting on half a rock inside the edge of shade. As she watched, the left hand lifted a flat bottle, bottle and lips met in a long kiss, the hand lowered the bottle and tucked it under the edge of the long skirt.

  Oh my goodness.

  In a fury she craned and peered. For a time Mrs. Briscoe leaned almost out of sight, as assuredly she thought she was. Then she leaned back, her face turned down and across the river. Her left hand rose in a hoo-hoo sort of wave. Susan’s eyes followed the gesture, and there was Ollie coming out onto the far end of the bridge.

  She made a moaning sound and put her hands flat on the windowsill, watching as he edged out, testing the sway of the span. It seemed to her he filled his lungs with air. Paralyzed, cut off from him by glass and distance, she may or may not have screamed at him to stop, not to come on. But he came on, carefully inching along the planks, carrying a package of some sort under one arm. He stopped to get a better hold on the rail-rope; he shot an estimating glance across the hundred feet he still had to cross; he shoved the package more firmly under his arm. Below him his shadow paused, buglike, on the shadow bridge. Then it moved. And as it moved, shadow and bridge, bug and boy, began to sway.

  Susan’s held breath was choking her. She forced it, clogged with harsh sound, out of her lungs. She saw the shaking sway of the cables communicate itself to Ollie’s knees. He grabbed for the rope with his left hand, the package fell straight down into the river, the lurch of the boy’s falling against the rope kicked the planks sideward, and there he hung across the rail rope with his legs desperately rigid to keep his feet against the planks.

  Susan screamed, and screamed again, and was at the rear window tearing at the catch, screaming down toward the windmill, “The bridge! Ollie! The bridge!”

  Oliver’s face turned, hung in the heat-shriveled air for half a breath. Then his wrench went flying and he was lunging down the slope in great leaps. She was back at the front window without knowing how she got there. Ollie, still hanging by his elbows across the rope, was just lifting his feet to let the walk swing back under him. He caught it with a knee, both knees. His face turned upward toward her. “Don’t move!” she cried to the glass. “Hold on!” and was outside.

  Heat exploded in her face, the small bright terrible image her retina carried dissolved in a red blur. She put her hand against the wall, steadying herself, and felt a bright, distant pain. Someone’s arm-Nellie’s -was supporting her. Something small was whimpering and clamoring down on the ground. Her sight cleared and she saw Betsy. She moved her stinging hand and found that she had thrust it into the rosebush beside the door. “What is it?” Nellie was saying, and then her head snapped around as Oliver appeared, thundering down toward the river, and she saw it all. Oliver was shouting as he ran. On his knees, Ollie clung, patient and small above the curve of swift water.

  Susan started down the path, was held back. “Let me go, Nellie!” Clumsily she braced and slid and stepped. The rocks she touched were as hot as stoves, the sun beating off the hillside blinded her, the little flowers of mallow stared up at her like coals. She had to watch the ground, for fear of slipping, but she stopped every few steps to watch Oliver and her son. Nellie, protesting and trying to hold her back, she shook off. Somehow she found herself holding Betsy by the hand.

  Oliver plowed through the gravel and leaped up the path to the bridge head. He stooped, steadying the vibration out of the cables while he shouted something at Ollie. Then he started out onto the planks. He moved smoothly and swiftly. His weight sagged the walk, his motion shook Ollie where he clung. Down to the deepest part of the sag, then up. His arm went out, he had the boy hooked tight. For a second they were very still, as if resting.

  “Oh, thank God!” Nellie said. She was crying and laughing, and she still clung to Susan’s arm. Susan pried loose her hand, and holding Betsy’s small wet paw she went on down the path. By the time she reached the shingle, they were off the bridge. Evaporating tears were very cold on her cheekbones. She said something gentle to Betsy, transferred her hand to Nellie’s, and held out her arms to Ollie. With one white look upward at his father, he came into them. She could not hold him against her naturally because of her great belly; she had to hold him against her hip. One hand was on his whitey-brown hair. Over the top of his head she looked at Oliver, red with exertion, his shirt wet, his eyes like blue stones. As if restoring the circulation of his hands, he hung them at his sides and shivered the arms from the shoulders.

  “Oh, Ollie,” Susan said, “why did you do such a thing? Why did you cross by yourself? You know you’re forbidden to.”

  He said nothing.

  “He’s safe,” Oliver said. “That’s what matters.”

  But she was all to pieces, and her agitation came out as blame. “Have you learned a lesson?” she said to Ollie’s double crown. “Has it taught you something? Next time I might not be looking out the window ...”

  Then she remembered what else she had seen out the window. Her head turned, and there was Mrs. Briscoe, who must have stood in her tracks during the whole excitement, just starting toward them. Susan took Ollie by his thin shoulders and shook him. “What was it she sent you for? She did send you, didn’t she?”

  He looked away, he said nothing. She shook him hard enough to rattle his teeth, furious at the stubborn wordlessness that was so exactly like his father’s. “Didn’t she!”

  Held away and forced to glance up, he said, “Yes ma’am.”

  “Why? What for?”

  “Sue ...” Oliver said.

  She ignored him. “What for?”

  “She’d left something on the other side. She was afraid to go get it herself.”

  “That package you were carrying.”

  “Yes. I ... It slipped, Mother! When the bridge wobbled it just slipped and fell in the river, I couldn’t hang onto it. I could have come across easy except for the package. It kept slipping.”

  “No you couldn’t. Don’t even begin to think you could. What was in the package?”

  “Sue, can’t this wait?” Oliver said. “Let’s get you out of the sun.”

  “What was it?” Susan said. “Was it a bottle?”

  She cut her eyes aside to watch Mrs. Briscoe plowing through the gravel. She had sweated half-moons under her gingham arms, and her face, at a hundred yards away, was already fixing itself in an expression she obviously hoped was agitated concern.

  “What kind of a bottle?” Ollie said. He was staring at her. So was Oliver. Nellie held Betsy off to one side.

  “A whiskey bottle?”

  “I don’t know,” Ollie said. “It wasn’t big. I could carry it easy, only it kept slipping.”

  “Where was it? Where did she tell you to look for it?”

  “On the poles over the shed door.”

  “Yes,” Susan said, and straightened up. “Not exactly left by accident.” She pressed down on Ollie’s shoulders. “You shouldn’t have gone. You knew better. But it isn’t really your fault. It’s that ...”

  Bunion footed, wearing her look of a supposedly house-broken dog which is called upon to explain a puddle on the floor, Mrs. Briscoe labored toward them. Susan turned her back squarely and met Oliver’s eyes.

  “Is that it?” he said “How’d you get onto it?”

  “I saw her. She’s got another bottle buried down there on the beach. I saw her drinking from it.” She turned Ollie toward the house. “Come along. I don’t want to speak to her. You’ll have to take her back, Oliver.”

  “Then who do we get?”

  “I’d rather have nobody.”

  “You can’t have nobody. It might take five or six hours to get the doctor out here.”

  “Mrs. Olpen will come in an emergency.”

  “She couldn’t stay. She’s
got five of her own to look after.”

  “Please!” she said, and pushed Ollie ahead of her up the path. The sun was like thunder on her head. Her hair, when she put up her hand, felt hot enough to smoke.

  Oliver had her by the arm. “Nellie,” he said, “could I ask you ... No, I’ll tell her myself as soon as we get Mrs. Ward to bed.”

  “Don’t waste ten minutes,” Susan said. “I want you to clear the canyon of her.”

  She shut her lips, she turned herself inward. All the way up the hill she was thinking of the difference between this coming childbirth and the first, in the comfortable cottage at New Almaden, with Lizzie and Marian Prouse and Oliver all building a protective cushion around her and the doctor only an hour away at Guadalupe; and the second, in her old room in Milton, where she could hear Bessie’s step in the hall and see her mother’s face look in the door every time she sighed or coughed. That time Oliver had been missing, already chasing his dream. Each child marked a decline in the security of their life. Now she would have her third child in a canyon cave, unattended, or attended by a rough-handed settler’s wife. Meanwhile, her children ran daily through dangers that turned her cold even on that Naming hillside, and were only kept from becoming as crude as their background by the constant efforts of Nellie and herself.

  Before she would lie down, she made Ollie go in and finish the reading he had skipped. How else, she asked him, would he ever get into a good Eastern school?

  An hour after she heard the buggy grating up the hill on the bluffs road, taking Mrs. Briscoe back to Boise, she had her first pain.

  I have no intention of writing an account of how a pioneer woman, gently reared, had a child in a canyon camp with no help but that of an old maid governess. I am not going to heat up all those pails of water, or listen for the first weak bleat from the bedroom. Neither am I going to let Susan get up the day after her lying-in, to chum the butter or put out a washing or finish her story. This is not a story of frontier hardships, though my grandparents went through a few; nor of pioneer hardihood, though they both had it. It is only Lyman Ward, Coe Professor of History, Emeritus, living a day in his grandparents’ life to avoid paying too much attention to his own.

  She was no novice, had had two children and a miscarriage, and she did not panic. She thought she had a few hours. Depending on whether he took the bluffs road back, or the canyon road, it would take Oliver three to four hours to return. When he got back he could ride down to the Olpen ranch, send Mrs. Olpen up, and go back into Boise for the doctor. Perhaps Wan would come home early, or John might come up from his cabin, and one of them could be sent. She lay in her darkened room with a wet cloth over her eyes and waited for her body to do what it must.

  But Nellie Linton, gentle spinster, Victorian virgin, was more agitated. To quiet Betsy, she turned her recklessly loose with the total contents of her workbox, and she let Ollie off, without comment, from his reading and conferred with him outside. In a way flattering to his eight-year-old judgment, she asked him if he could ride to the Olpen place and fetch Mrs. Olpen.

  But his father had the mules, and there were no horses on this side of the river.

  Could he walk it? Would he be afraid?

  He wasn’t afraid, but it was a long away around on this side.

  Perhaps he could walk down to John’s cabin and have him go for help.

  But John’s cabin was also on the other side, and you couldn’t shout loud enough to be heard across the river there. There were rapids.

  Nellie wrung her hands. If his father had just waited one hour!

  Was his mother sick? Ollie wanted to know. Did she need the doctor?

  Yes, and some good woman. Mrs. Olpen would be of enormous help, if only they could reach her.

  They fell silent. The sun had dropped far enough so that the house laid a precise triangle of shade across the bare ground. Any minute now Mrs. Ward would call out, in there.

  Miss Linton?

  Yes Ollie.

  I could get there quick across the bridge. I could zip across and ride my pony down.

  Oh my goodness, no!

  But if she’s sick. That’s the quickest.

  Right after you had to be rescued from that bridge? No no. Oh no.

  I went across easy. It was the package, coming back.

  No. Your mother would die at the thought.

  Then it came, the harsh, grunting cry that Miss Linton had been dreading. She saw Ollie’s eyes widen, she saw the blood leave his face.

  Wait here. I must go and see ...

  But when she came back, having been able to do nothing but hold Mrs. Ward’s hand until the spasm passed, she made a small sound of her own, a sound of horror. Ollie was already halfway .across the bridge, moving along crabwise with both hands on the rope. The farther he went the more rapidly he moved, until he jumped off onto solid rock. He looked back and saw her, his arm waved, he bolted around the corner of the cliff. In two seconds he appeared at a dead run, headed for the corral.

  Shading her eyes, caught between two fears and a hope, Miss Linton watched him come out of the shed with the oat can and bait his brown pony out of the pasture to the corral bars. He poured the oats on the ground, and when she dropped her head to them he got the halter rope around her neck, stretching with both arms in a sort of embrace. He climbed the corral poles to haul her head up and get the bit into her mouth, the headstall over her ears. Inside, Miss Linton heard Susan say something, not in the tone of pain, but conversationally, which meant that Betsy had wandered in and must be dealt with. But she hung in the sunken entrance watching until Ollie had pulled the mare close and flung himself in a bellyflop across her back. He kicked, straightened, his hands shook out the reins, his heels drummed at her ribs. Riding like a cavalryman, as his mother sometimes said with pride and dismay, he bolted across the little flat toward the canyon gate. Like a cavalryman? More like an Indian. His spidery shape clung to the mare’s withers, his tow head was down. He lashed the mare with the ends of the reins and fled out of sight behind the cliff.

  It is an effort for me to imagine my way backward from the silent father I knew to the boy in Boise Canyon. Like my grandfather, he was not a man of words, and it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers. Grandmother herself may have made that mistake. I have heard her say, in her rueful voice with its overtone of regret, what a brave, manly little boy he was, but I never heard her say how sensitive he was. Yet I think he must have been. But though it is from her letters that I get that impression, I think she herself never understood how deep he ran, any more than she understood his difficulty with reading.

  It was his capacity for feeling that she should have attended to: by failing to comprehend it, she probably contributed to his silence.

  Feeling, more than manliness, drove him across the bridge against the warnings of his conscience-a horrified sympathy for his mother’s pain, a sense of fatal responsibility in his father’s absence. He was not a disobedient child. He simply overflowed obedience on a flood of emotion, and he had some of his father’s readiness in a crisis.

  I see him going down that rough canyon pushing his mare as his father always pushed a horse. He was wound up as tight as a ball of wet rawhide. The last two or three hundred yards before John’s cabin the trail was soft silt, and he lashed the mare into a run, and so excited her that he could hardly pull her in before the door. She danced and cartwheeled, and he shouted, fighting her hard mouth. No one came out. He let the mare stiff-leg him around the comer to where he could see John’s corral. Empty. Before he had had time to frame a thought he was galloping down the canal line that followed the contour around the foot of the sagebrush hills.

  He found John sitting on his stoneboat in the shade of a cottonwood, resting himself and his mules. He had been moving testimonial dirt off the right of way. Before Ollie had panted out three sentences John was on his feet stripping the harness from the jenny, letting it fall into the cottonwood fluff that covered the ground like fea
thers or light snow. He tied the other mule, he looped a halter rope around the jenny’s nose and bellied up across her back. He was a big heavy man, not excitable. He sang when he talked, and he could not say the sound oo, it always came out iu.

  “Yiu go back,” he said. “If Ay don’t run into your pa Ay bring the doc myself.”

  “I’ve got to get Mrs. Olpen.”

  The mare side-stepped, pulling at his arms. From the jenny John gave Ollie a long appraising squinting look, the look of an adult asked permission for something dubious. “Ya,” he said finally. “O.K. That’s gude idea. But yiu be careful.”

  He turned the jenny and kicked her into a trot down the partly graded canal line. He rode loose and heavy, his toes pointed out. His relaxed weight made the jenny’s trot look smooth. He did not look back. Ollie watched him, feeling hollow and relieved, his burden divided. But then he thought how long it would be before John, or his father, or the doctor, or anyone, could get out from town, and he remembered the animal sound of his mother’s pain. In a moment he was galloping back along the canal line toward the river trail.

  He had the Olpen place in sight from a good way off-log cabin and stable, hay-roofed shed, pole corrals, a gnawed and tattered haystack, tall cottonwoods. As he got closer he saw Mrs. Olpen come out into the yard, and chickens running stretch-necked in every direction, scattering the cottonwood fluff. He came in at a trot, with his arm across his face to hold out the dust. When he could see, there was Mrs. Olpen, leathery, slab-sided, standing by the chopping block with a Plymouth Rock hen by the legs in one hand and a kindling ax in the other. Rough men’s boots poked out from under her skirt. With her ax hand she held back a string of hair from her eyes, squinting upward.

  “Havin’ it, is she? Needs me?”