Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

  “Yes, she’s sick, she was crying. Miss Linton said...”

  “Just a second.”

  She laid the chicken sideways on the block-round eye, leathery lid, open beak—and with one short blow chopped off its head. The ax remained stuck in the block beside the small, perfect, very dead head; the headless chicken flopped and bounced around them, scattering blood and stirring up cottonwood fluff. Ollie held the hard-mouthed mare in tight. Mrs. Olpen wiped her hands on her apron and then reached back to yank the strings. “Sally!” she bawled. “You, Sal!”

  Wading through dust, feathers, and cotton, she hung the apron on a post, hoisted her skirts, and climbed through the corral fence. Ollie, looking at the horse inside, felt desperate. It was a Roman-nosed plow horse of the kind his mother always called Old Funeral Procession.

  Impulsively he slid off, pulling the reins over the mare’s ears. “You can take mine. I can walk.”

  But Mrs. Olpen glanced once at the mare’s slick wet back and shook her head, just one complete wag, over and back. The plow horse resisted the bit and got a crack across the nose. Ollie, reins in hand, felt the insides of his legs go cold in the evaporating wind. Down on the river bank the two youngest Olpen boys came out of the willows carrying fishpoles, and the sun glinted off the silvery side of the fish they carried between them. “Sal!” yelled Mrs. Olpen, cramming the plow horse’s ears into the headstall.

  Someone yawned loudly from the house. Ollie turned, and Sally Olpen was in the door, gaping and stretching. She started deliberately down the yard, stopped and scraped her bare foot disgustedly against the ground, and came on again. On the side of her face was printed the pattern of a doily or cushion cover. Her black eyes glittered sideways at Ollie; she leaned on the corral poles and yawned, shuddering and shaking her head.

  “Git that chicken plucked and drawed,” her mother said. “If I ain’t back tonight, you and Herm are to help Pa milk, hear? You git supper, too. You’re It.”

  “What’s the matter? Where you goin’?”

  Mrs. Olpen, not answering, laid on the plow horse a blanket crusted with sweat and hair. She moved slower than anybody Ollie had ever seen. He resented the wise look that Sally Olpen was bending on him, but to hurry things up he said, “My mother’s sick.”

  “Ah, yeah, I know,” Sally said. “Havin’ a baby.”

  “Oh she is not!” He was furious. What did she know, with her raggedy hair and her face all dinted and her dirty feet? He hopped up and down. He said, “Hurry, Mrs. Olpen!”

  The woman hauled off the top bar a saddle with one stirrup broken down to the iron, and skirts that were curled and dry. She heaved it onto the Roman nose and settled it by shaking the horn. “You git at that chicken,” she said to Sal. “Don’t leave it lay out in the sun. And don’t you pluck and draw it right by the door, where feathers and guts gits tracked around.”

  Sal smiled a secret smile at Ollie, picked up the chicken, and held it up thoughtfully by the legs, watching its neck drip. Mrs. Olpen grunted, heaving at the latigo, and kicked old Roman nose briskly in the belly to make him quit holding his breath. She was so slow! The two boys had started to run up the river path. Ollie stood on the corral bar and remounted, so as to be above them when they arrived. His mother had never encouraged him to make friends with the Olpens. They were another tribe, potential enemies. But then from the mare’s back he saw the dust of a rig coming fast up the river road, and recognized the black and tan mules and the tall man on the seat.

  “It’s all right!” he cried. “Never mind, Mrs. Olpen. Here’s my father! It’s all right now!”

  In front of them all-leather-faced Mrs. Olpen, that girl with the bloody chicken in her hand, the panting boys dangling their dust-patched fish on a forked stick and bursting with questions-he started to cry. Blindly he yanked the mare around and kicked and lashed her out of the yard to meet the buggy.

  His father had met John on the road; there was no need to tell him anything. He didn’t let Mrs. Olpen linger even to unsaddle the plow horse, but had her in the buggy almost before the wheels had stopped rolling. To Ollie, biting his lips and stretching the stiffness of tears off his cheeks, he said, “You want to ride with us, Ollie? We can lead your pony.”

  Ollie shook his head. For a second his father studied him, unsmiling. Then he turned, said a word to Mrs. Olpen, and laid the whip to the mules. They burst off and left Ollie standing, so that he rode furiously after them, not only to catch up but to leave behind with the Olpens a vision of his reckless horsemanship.

  It was raining in the mountains. Black clouds covered the peaks, and above those, white thunderheads with bright silver edges were piled high into a sky still blue. Lightning licked and flickered across the storm front, thunder rumbled like rockslides down the canyon. Just where the trail entered the canyon gateway Ollie turned his head and saw the broad sagebrush basin behind him still in dust-thickened sunlight. The canyon was a sudden coolness, his sweating skin shrank, his shirt was cold on his back. He wound his hand in the mare’s mane and hung on as she lunged and labored on a steep pitch.

  Ahead of him the buggy’s wheels grated and ground on the rocks. His father looked back, but made no sign. Mrs. Olpen rode with her face aimed straight ahead out of the tunnel of a sunbonnet. Between their two heads Ollie could see the corner beyond which the canyon widened into their little flat where their corral and haystack were, and to whose right, across the swinging bridge, the stone house hardly more noticeable than a ledge of rock looked down on the river. He wondered if the mother he adored and thought himself unworthy of was still crying for pain.

  The buggy rolled through the pasture gate, and Ollie slid off to fight the wire loop over the post. Running, dragging at the mare’s holding-back weight, he led her to the corral, where his father and Mrs. Olpen had already alighted. On the hill across the canyon Nellie Linton was waving a dishtowel, either in jubilation or in urgency, from the doorway.

  “Take care of the horses, Ollie,” his father said. “I’ll be back for you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They hurried up the path toward the unseen bridgehead. Ollie pulled the bridle and turned his mare loose, unhooked the tugs from the curled iron ends of the singletrees, unbuckled the harnesses and dragged them through the dust and boosted them, all he could lift, onto their pegs in the shed. When he came out, his father and Nellie were just disappearing inside the house. Mrs. Olpen was resting halfway up the hill, with her head down and her hand on her knee. Ollie took the oat pail and poured three equal heaps onto the ground. The mules and the mare bent their heads to the piles, nudging him out of the way. He watched Mrs. Olpen make it to the door and go in. The lightning cut a jagged gash in the clouds upriver, and after several seconds the thunder went rumbling away. A wind whirling down the opposite slope hit the river and roughened the slick water of the pool.

  He felt lonely, small, and scared. He wished he could cross the bridge before the storm came on. What if his father should forget, and not come back for him? What if his mother was so sick he couldn’t leave? Or dying? Abandoned on the wrong side, he could not cross because he had already been disobedient twice and knew he must be punished.

  He had been waiting at the end of the bridge for a long time before his father came down the path and out onto the span without touching the rope, and pounded across as if the swaying planks were bedrock. Ollie stood up. “Is she all right?”

  His father, in a hurry, took his hand. “I think so. I hope so.”

  “Is she crying?”

  Now his father looked at him in a searching way, and the hurry went out of him. He let go Ollie’s hand, leaned against the cliff, and filled his pipe. “She’ll have to cry some more before it’s over. But she’ll be all right if that doctor will only get here.”

  There was a swarming smell of rain in the air, the sweet smell of tobacco, then the sulphur smell of a lucifer match, then smoke.

  “Mrs. Olpen’s dirty,” Ollie said.

  “She’
s a whole lot better than nothing. She’s kind-hearted, at least.”

  They stood silent, Ollie as close to his father as he could stand without bumping into him. The north winked brightly, winked again before the first flash had been wiped from his eyeballs. Thunder crashed loud, then louder, then began to roll. Full of his feelings, which included a sense of sin, Ollie stood in the drift of pipe smoke and instead of looking at his father, looked at the river, where heavy drops, un-felt in the shadow of the cliff, were dimpling the water.

  His father’s hand came heavily down on his shoulder. He froze. Now it was coming. He accepted it, he knew it was deserved. The fingers squeezed hard on the bones. His father said, “Ollie, you did something.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You did something very grown up. Nobody could have done better.”

  Ollie’s eyes flew up to his father’s face. The face looked down at him seriously. The hand was so heavy on his shoulder that he had to brace himself to stand straight under it. As if testing the resistance it invoked, the hand left the shoulder and fitted itself around the back of Ollie’s neck. The fingers closed clear around his throat under his chin. “You’re all right, my friend,” his father said. “You know that?”

  As if impatiently, he let go, though Ollie would willingly have stood there all evening with that hand on him. “We’d better get back before we get wet.”

  Uncertainly Ollie offered his hand, to be led across, but his father looked down at him with his eyes narrowed and said, “You came across by yourself when you went for John and Mrs. Olpen, is that right?”

  Was it coming now? First praise and then punishment? “Yes, sir.”

  “Have any trouble?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Scare you, after this afternoon?”

  “No, sir. A little.”

  “Did you think about this afternoon? Did you think you might be punished?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If you’d done it for any reason than getting help for Mother, I’d have to punish you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All right. Your mother doesn’t know, and we won’t tell her. It would only worry her when she shouldn’t be worried. Now do you want to go back by yourself?”

  The look they exchanged was like a promise. “Yes, sir.”

  His father motioned him onto the bridge, stepped out of the way to let him by, let him get twenty feet out onto the planks before he himself started. He stayed that distance behind, all the way across the bridge.

  The doctor came just before sunset. Ollie and his father, closed out of the house, had played three games of horseshoes and then been driven inside by a flurry of rain. But the flurry had come to nothing. Out the door Ollie could see that the yard’s dust was pocked with the dried craters of single drops, though lightning still flared on the sky. Above the sound of Nellie Linton’s voice reading to Betsy up in the drafting room he heard nearly continuous thunder.

  His father knocked out his pipe impatiently against the doorjamb. “Quite an evening to be born.” They stood together in the south-facing door and looked out over the canyon and the falling mountains to where the sky over the valley was rosy in the last reflected light. Above the rosy haze of valley dust the sky over there was still blue.

  The doorway beside him emptied, his father’s quick steps took him along the front of the shack as if he had suddenly remembered something he should have done long ago. But at the comer he stopped. “Good Lord,” he said. “Look at that.”

  Ollie went to the corner. In the northwest the sun had broken around the lower slope of Midsummer Mountain and was sending a last long wink across the Sawtooths, straight into the black mass of rain cloud. Clear across the stone house, bridging from mountains to river bluffs, curved two rainbows, one above the other, even the upper one as bright as colored glass, sharp-edged, perfect from horizon to horizon.

  “By George, your mother ought to see that. It’s an omen, no less.”

  They ran up past the cooktent with the wetted dust adhering to their shoes. Ollie’s father knocked, listened, opened the door. Ollie, behind him, saw past him to the closed door of the bedroom. He waited while his father crossed the room and tapped with his fingernails.

  “Sue? Sue, if you’re able, look outside. There’s an absolute sign, the most perfect double rainbow you ever saw.”

  The door opened, the doctor stood in it, wide, shirt-sleeved, his hands held fingers-upward in the air. Every lamp in the house seemed to have been lighted behind him; his shadow fell clear to the front door. Ollie’s horrified eyes made out that the stiffly upheld hands were enameled with blood.

  “Your wife isn’t interested in rainbows,” the doctor said. “You’ve got a daughter three minutes old.”

  5

  Let two years pass-and they literally pass, like birds flying by someone sitting at a window. Seven hundred and thirty risings of the sun, seven hundred and thirty settings. Twenty-four waxings and wanings of the moon. For the woman, six short stories, one three-part serial, fifty-eight drawings. For the man, an automatic waste weir and a box for measuring the flow of water in miner’s inches-both described in technical journals, neither patented. For both of them, for all of them, three times of rising hope and three times of disappointment, the latest of each attributable to Henry Villard’s abortive move to expand his empire.

  And now midsummer again, 1887.

  In that latitude the midsummer days were long, midsummer nights only a short darkness between the long twilight that postponed the stars and the green dawn clarity that sponged them up. All across the top of the world the sun dragged its feet, but as soon as it was hidden behind Midsummer Mountain it raced like a child in a game to surprise you in the east before you were quite aware it was gone from the west. One summer week out of four, when the moon was nearing or at or just past the full, there was hardly anything that could be called night at all.

  Whatever it was called, she was alone in it. Oliver was in town, trying to rescue something out of the Villard debacle, raise a little money by borrowing on the sale of some of his own stock. He thought that if prospective backers could only see a mile of completed ditch, they would believe, and he would build that mile at his own expense if he had the money.

  It was now nearly eleven; his long stay might be good omen or bad. The children had been long in bed, John had gone to his cabin immediately after supper, Wan had swatted the last flies and miller moths gathered around the lamps and gone out to his tent, Nellie had closed her book an hour ago and said good night and retreated to her room. There sat Susan Burling Ward, tired-eyed after a day’s drawing, dragged-out after a day’s heat, and tightened her drowning-woman’s grip on culture, literature, civilization, by trying to read War and Peace.

  But her eyes were too scratchy. When she closed them and pressed her fingers to the lids, thick tears squeezed out. Sitting so, looking into the red darkness of her closed lids, she heard the stillness. Not a sound inside her cave-like house, not a sigh from the room behind the chimney where Betsy and Agnes slept. Not a fly or moth left to flutter around the light. She opened her eyes. The ragged flame along the wick trembled without sound.

  And outside the silent house, the silent moon-whited mountains, the vacant moon-faded sky. No cry of bird or animal, no rattle of hoofs among stones, no movement except the ghostly flash along the surface of the river, no noise except the mutter of water as muted as rumination. Her mind was still moving with the turmoil of Tolstoy, and the contrast between that crowded human world and her moonlit emptiness was so great that she said aloud, “Oh, it’s like trying to communicate from beyond the grave!”

  1970 knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights
will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead.

  But Susan Ward in her canyon was pre-refrigerator, pre-dishwasher, pre-airplane, pre-automobile, pre-electric light, pre-radio, pre-television, pre-record player. Eyes too tired to read had no alternative diversions, ears that craved music or the sound of voices could crave in vain, or listen to Sister Lips whistle or talk to herself.

  Restlessly she stood up, waited for her roiled sight to clear, and went to the door. It let in the pale wash of moonlight and the sunken mutter of the river. The moon was directly above her in the southern sky, with only a small irregularity to mar its roundness. It was not flat like some moons, but visibly globular; she could see it roll in space. Its light fell like pallid dust on bare knoll and cooktent and lay in drifts along the roof-planes of the shack. It might have been a snow scene except for the shadows, which were not blue and luminous but soft and black.

  Below, to her right, the canyon was impenetrable, without even a flash from the water, but the little flat across the river, with its haystack, shed, and corral, was a drawing in charcoal and Chinese white, a precise, focused miniature in the streak of moonlight across the shoulder of Arrow Rock. Out of their flat shadows the poles of the corral and the trunks of the cottonwoods bulged with a magical roundness like the moon’s. As she watched, charmed, the trees below must have been touched by the canyon wind, for flakes of light glittered up at her and then were gone. But there was no sound of wind, and where she stood there was not the slightest stir in the air. The glitter of soundless light from that little picture lighted in the midst of darkness was like a shiver of the earth.

  But where was Oliver? He had never stayed this long on any of his prowling, unsatisfactory trips to town. The momentary fear that he might have been thrown off his horse, or in some way hurt, she dismissed. He was not one to whom accidents happened. She had never worried about him in that way even in Leadville after Pricey’s beating, when he rode to work armed, through enemies who would have drygulched him if they dared.