Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

  Her children ran barefoot through Rattlesnakeville. She nagged them for growing up like savages and taking too lightly their lesson-times with Nellie. Even if there had been places she wanted to go, she would not have left the canyon: she had no clothes she considered decent, and she would not appear in Boise visibly shabby-genteel. And every time Oliver returned from town she managed, bent on busy errands, to pass close to him and sniff. I discovered in my childhood that she had a nose like a hound. If I had eaten some forbidden poison such as licorice within two hours, she knew. So I know how a guilty party might have felt in 1888, how resentful of her infallible powers of detection.

  Miserable, both of them, everything hopeful in them run down, everything joyous smothered under poverty and failure. My impulse, and I hereby yield to it, is to skip it all, to document not one single miserable hour until a day in November 1888. That day the post office finally produced a letter with the seed of change in it.

  It was not the letter Oliver waited for, guaranteeing funds for the completion of his project. It was from Major John Wesley Powell, who had succeeded Clarence King as director of the United States Geological Survey. It said that the Survey, recently charged by Congress with surveying all the rivers of the West, designating irrigable lands and spotting reservoir sites, could use his help. Captain Clarence Dutton, who would be in charge of the hydrographic survey, had recommended him warmly (there was an echo of one of those evenings in Leadville). Major Powell understood that Mr. Ward’s own project was temporarily inactive. Would he be willing to take leave from it for perhaps two years and sign on as regional assistant to Captain Dutton, taking as his province the Snake River Basin on which he had already done much work? If Mr. Ward decided to accept the position, he should plan to come to Washington for a week in January, and be prepared to take the field as early in the spring as the weather would allow.

  Oliver and Susan, talking it over, understood perfectly that taking a two-year leave from the Idaho Mining and Irrigation Company meant giving it up forever. They also understood that if Oliver signed with the Survey their life would drastically change. Susan and the children and Nellie could not stay alone in the canyon. She would not move into Boise, which she despised.

  “Maybe you could make a visit home,” Oliver said. But she folded her arms across her breast and stood frowning at the floor. Her parents were both dead. The old house was up for sale. There were only Bessie, who hadn’t room for them in her little house, and Augusta, before whom she would be ashamed. When she lifted her eyes and said something, it came out as something cheap that she didn’t really mean-a thing near the surface that she seized on as an excuse. “In the same old dress I left in?” she said. “Eight years out of style, with dams in the elbows?”

  She saw him consider, and understand, and forgive what she had said. He didn’t even suggest that it was now not impossible to get a new dress. He only said, “Well, then, what do you do if I take it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but you must take it.”

  “Give up.”

  “You wouldn’t be giving up everything. All your work would be useful for this government survey. Maybe when that’s done, irrigation will be better understood and you’ll get your backing and can go on.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Still... !”

  “Still I ought to take it.”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “And what do you and the children do?”

  “It doesn’t matter what we do! I’d be happy anywhere if I thought you were working and ... satisfied with yourself. I can support the children. Haven’t I been doing it?”

  It was not the thing to say. She knew it, but could not help saying it. The steady, heavy stare of his eyes told her that he resented her and hardened himself against her, and the moment she saw his reaction, she resented him.

  “It will do you good to get away from those people and that town,” she said. “You’ll be out in the mountains doing what you like to do. I want you to take this job and I want you to promise me you’ll stop drinking. If you’re working, there’s no excuse, is there?”

  “No,” Oliver said.

  At his tone she flared up. “Is there? Is there? I’ve tried to understand, I’ve excused you, because I know how ... But now if you’re working again there isn’t any excuse. You’ve got to promise me!”

  “You’d better let me work that out for myself,” he said. “I do better when nobody is pushing or pulling.”

  “You think I’m pushing and pulling?”

  He looked at her and said nothing.

  “If that’s what it is,” she said, close to crying, “if you think I’m a bossy managing woman, it might be better if I took the children away somewhere and never came back.”

  He was exactly like a balky mule. She could see his hind quarters settle and his ears lie back. Aghast at what she had said, more than half afraid she meant it, she stared into his frowning face.

  “That’s what I mean by pushing and pulling,” he said. He walked away from her and sat on the table, looking out the window down toward the bridge and Arrow Rock. He talked to the window, or to her reflection in it. “You’re a lot better than I am,” he said. “You think I don’t know that?” In the glass his eyes found and held hers. “You think I don’t know what I’ve put you through? Or that I don’t care? But I tell you, Sue, I’m not going to do any better because anybody, even you, is hauling at me. I’m doing my best right now.”

  Wordless, hugging herself, letting the tears run down her cheeks, she watched his angled face ghostly on the glass, with the opposite rim and the sky beyond it.

  “If a promise means anything, I have to make it to myself,” Oliver said. “Then if I break it I’ll be harder on myself than you’d ever be. But I can imagine breaking it. If I’m out somewhere by myself, thinking how you’re all God knows where and the canal’s shut down and the company broke and all these years blown away like trash, I’m going to feel low a lot of the time. I haven’t felt any other way since I can remember, practically. I don’t feel any different now, just because of a letter from Major Powell. If somebody comes by when I’m feeling that way, and takes a bottle out of a saddlebag, I might help him kill it. If I did, I’d probably ride straight into the nearest town and get some more. I know myself that well.”

  She shook her head, letting the tears run down. In the glass she saw his shoulders move with impatience.

  “I suppose I’ll take this job,” he said. “What else can we do? We’re licked. But you can’t make me like it.”

  “I can’t understand,” Susan said. “I try, but I can’t. Doesn’t it shame you to be ... enslaved that way? Doesn’t it humiliate you to think that you can’t resist that temptation when someone like Frank, living out on the railroad with the roughest sort of men, never touches a drop? Why can’t you be like Frank?”

  And that was the greatest mistake of all. “Because I’m not Frank,” Oliver said, staring at her reflected face. “Maybe you wish I was.”

  In confusion and distress she broke off their reflected look, turned away. “No,” she said, away from him. “I just don’t see why you won’t promise.”

  In his voice, to which she listened keenly, trying to hear in it all she had turned away from in his face, she heard no tenderness or compassion or love, nothing but the grate of resistance. “Don’t push me,” he said. “It won’t do any good to fog it all up with words. But I’ll tell you one thing. I’m not taking anything along. I won’t be Clarence King with a mule load of brandy. I won’t be Mrs. Briscoe, and lay in a supply.”

  That was the best she got out of him. That was where they left it.

  7

  “If you’re still in need of an end man,” Shelly said yesterday when I came in from the garden just about five, “I’ve got all sorts of questions for Uncle Remus.”

  She wasn’t exactly opportune. I was hot, e
xhausted, and hurting, and I needed no end man. That was a purely rhetorical need. Shelly’s interest bothers me, moreover, because it isn’t really interest in Grandmother. It is a sort of speculative interest in me, and some of it is mere boredom and desire to talk. Her husband has been after her again by telephone; probably she wonders why I haven’t asked about him. Or maybe she feels sorry for me, locked up in myself as she conceives me to be. She’s like an idle adult who is willing to squat down and help a child make a sand castle on a beach.

  It’s a mistake to give her these tapes to type off, but I can’t seem to resist. I’ve worked by eye so long that I can’t believe in what is done by ear. I doubt that I’ve done anything until I can see a typescript.

  “Questions such as what?” I said. “Such as, Was she really thinking of leaving him, or are you guessing?”

  “I’m extrapolating.”

  “Ah,” she said, “right on the rug. Shame on you.”

  I was really in no mood for one of her discussion periods. My wrists were stiff and sore, my stump jerked, I ached from footboard to neckrest. But as I turned my chair to go back down to the porch where Ada would bring me a drink and let me be quiet, Shelly said, “I know he was a juicehead when they lived here, so I guess she never did get him to take the pledge.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Dad. He said your grandfather owned this underground placer up on the Yuba, and Dad’s father used to drive him up there every once in a while to inspect. They were cheating him blind, Dad says. They’d give him the sand and keep the gold.”

  “He was easy to cheat. That was one of Grandmother’s exasperations.”

  “But nice?” Shelly said. “Everybody respected him? Dad says the miners all thought he was the fairest man they ever worked for. He’d give anybody a second chance.”

  “And a third,” I said. “Not a fourth. When he was abused beyond his toleration he could be implacable.”

  “He didn’t sound implacable the way Dad talks about him. He doesn’t seem implacable in your book, either. That’s why it seems so funny he’d have to take these three-day trips up Yuba Canyon and put on these big drunks with his driver. Just drink till he went to sleep, and then sleep it off and come home again.”

  “He had a chronic drouth of the soul,” I said. “Every now and then I guess he had to irrigate.”

  “Did you ever see him drunk?”

  “How would I know? I was a boy. He was never noisy, or sloppy, or anything like that. He never drank on the job, and I’m sure he never drank around Grandmother. He was a restful sort of man, as I knew him. I sort of felt he held the world up and kept it running. I can remember times when he took me down the mine.”

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing. Just ... He had a big warm hand. You know how the pump shaft of the Zodiac runs right alongside the main shaft, just some timbering between?”

  “I never was down the Zodiac. It closed up before I was born.”

  “Really?” I was surprised. The Zodiac is very real to me. To her it is not even a memory, it is only some decaying buildings and a boarded-up entrance and a lot of rusting cable and iron overgrown with weeds.

  “It’s a sloping shaft,” I said. “The pump rod goes down nearly a mile. Grandfather designed the pumps—it was his first job when Conrad Prager brought him here to open the Zodiac up again after the lower levels flooded. Twelve pumps worked off the same rod. Going down, you walked down the track, but every once in a while you’d have to step back into the timbering to let a car pass, and then you’d feel that great rod working in the dark right behind the back of your neck. It would crawl up to its top pitch, and strain there for a second and then ram down. The shaft was always full of gulps and sobs way down in the dark where the pumps sucked water. They went twenty four hours a day, seven strokes to the minute, like a slow, heavy pulse. The old Cousin Jack who tended them always spoke of them as ”she,” but I never stood there between the timbers hanging onto Grandfather’s hand without thinking of them as somehow part of him. They had his sort of dependability. It was as if I could feel them beating in his hand.”

  Shelly was looking at me with her head on one side. Her eyes, which are normally a cool skeptical gray, warmed nearly to brown. “You liked him a lot.”

  “I suppose I liked him-trusted him-more than I’ve ever trusted anyone.”

  “I think he must have been a lot like you,” she said, still with her head on one side and that smiling look of speculation on her face. “He understood human weakness, wasn’t that it? He didn’t blame people. He had this kind of magnanimity you’ve got.”

  “Oh my dear Shelly,” I said. “My dear Shelly.”

  I think that her impulses are mainly confessional. She would love it if every afternoon we could start up one of these truth parties. It must puzzle her that since my one look at her private life I have not explored it further. It may annoy her that I don’t solicit her opinions on the problems of human conduct (she would call it behavior). She has her little drama, poor thing, and she would like to play it to a packed house. She would also not mind being the audience for my confessional moments. Her discussions of Oliver and Susan Ward have this torque in them, they twist toward Lyman Ward too often.

  I could tell her, and may have to, that if there is one thing above all others that I despise, it is fingers, especially female fingers, messing around in my guts. My guts, like Victorian marriage, are private.

  So I fumbled a couple of aspirin out of the bottle in my saddlebag, and eased my good leg out to a full stretch, and rubbed a little on my twitching stump, and said, “Would you bring me a glass of water, Shelly, please?”

  She brought it, but she didn’t get the message. When I had downed the pills she took the glass and said, “How do you know he was a drunk away back in 1887?”

  “Not a drunk. A drinker. Don’t make the mistake Grandmother did.”

  “A drinker, then.”

  “From some of Grandmother’s letters.”

  “Where she says she’s upset about his drinking.”

  “That and some other things.”

  “That’s funny. I don’t remember any letters like that, and I’ve been through nearly everything up to the time they came down here.”

  “Those letters aren’t in the files.”

  “Really? Why not? Where are they?”

  “Because they’re the most private things I know about her,” I said. “All of a sudden that poor Victorian lady is stripped bare, and it’s kind of awful. She found herself having to deal with emotions that a genteel education hadn’t prepared her for.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. That’s why we wrote a while back to the Idaho Historical Society, to see if someone could search the Boise papers for us.”

  Shelly studied me with a frown. She was sitting on one foot, and her corduroy pants were stretched tight on her thighs. The loose loafer flapped up and down as she wiggled her toes inside it. “It seems to me she made an awful lot of fuss because her husband took a few drinks.”

  “I didn’t say that was all.”

  Finally she began to feel the chill. “Well, you’re very mysterious. What was it? Did she really get mixed up with Frank Sargent? Do I get to see those letters?”

  I didn’t answer. I swung the chair and looked over her head to where Grandmother sat in her gilt frame, looking down in a sidelong wash of light. Somehow I don’t want anybody messing around in her guts any more than I want anybody messing in mine.

  Why then am I spending all this effort trying to understand my grandparents’ lives? What am I talking and organizing all this for? Why do I hire this girl to make my talking real by typing it off the tapes? Why do I drive my drifts and tunnels toward the hidden lode of Susan Ward’s woe? Is it love and sympathy that makes me think myself capable of reconstructing these lives, or am I, Nemesis in a wheelchair, bent on proving something—perhaps that not even gentility and integrity are proof against the cor
rosions of human weakness, human treachery, human disappointment, human inability to forget?

  My stump was twitching, I felt upset, cornered, and angry. “Maybe sometime,” I said. “I’ll have to hunt them up.”

  Time is not on my side. I am distressed by the slow progress I have made. Here it is nearly September. I have used up the spring and summer getting Susan Ward to the age of forty, and she doesn’t die until she is ninety-one. If Shelly goes back to Berkeley next month, as she makes noises about doing, I shall have more privacy and probably make even slower progress.

  Furthermore, my little general practitioner in Nevada City now wonders if I should risk staying through the winter without a proper nurse. What he means is two shifts of nurses, and he knows as well as I do that I can’t afford them and don’t want them. Like Grandfather, I do a little better without any pushing and pulling. Ada is all the nurse I want. She will come when I holler, but not try to run me. Dr. Hines, when I suggested this, said she had troubles of her own, bad arthritis in the winter, a lot of respiratory trouble, and might not be dependable. I will face that problem when it arises. Meantime all his concern is unconvincing. I smell an Afro in the woodpile, and his name is Rodman Ward. Behind him is another Afro whose name is Ellen Hammond Ward. My son, I believe, has given me all the playtime he thinks is reasonable, and in his growing conviction that something must be done, he has become an ally of his mother, the woman I was married to for twenty-six years.

  How would I explain, if I were susceptible to Shelly’s truth parties, or even if I were writing a book about myself instead of about my grandmother, my relations with Ellen Ward? All that long history of intense couple-ship during graduate school in Cambridge, was that all falsehood and waste? I can’t think so. Did she harbor all those years a resentment at giving up her own degree and her own career? It was not I who persuaded her. She said herself that if she wasn’t going to have a professional career there was no point in preparing for one; and she had no interest in being a faculty-wife amateur trusted with the details of teas in the art museum.