Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

  Oliver hopped down. Over the wheel, a little grimly, he said, “You might as well see the worst. She’ll be dirty in the dry and muddy in the wet, and there’s nothing to break the wind. But I call your attention to the view.”

  She did not look at the view; she looked into his eyes. “Yes,” she said, almost under her breath. She was aware of the children, still sitting uncertainly as if unwilling to get down in this totally strange place.

  Then a ranch dog came wagging out from a shed, and after her four fat puppies. The children piled out and went to her and squatted down where she cowered and wagged in the dust. The puppies attacked their fingers and rolled on their backs, exposing naked bellies to be tickled.

  Tentatively, Agnes put out a hand to one of the pups. It seized her fingers in its mouth, and she yanked her hand back, frowning. The pup got hold of her shoe buckle and tugged, backing, with fierce growls. Agnes let him tug, her face breaking up into smiles, and then suddenly, squeezing her eyes gleefully shut, her arms stuck out from her shoulders, her skirts lifting to expose her nimble black-stockinged legs, she twirled away. The pup pursued her, fat and ferocious, as gleeful as she. Her sailor hat came off and flew behind her, held by the elastic under her chin. Across the yard, around the lumber pile, around the shed, she went like a baby dust devil, spinning with some happiness as privately her own as her silvery hair. The pup, nearsighted, got lost and stopped, looking and sniffing around him until here she came spinning back, and wound herself into a tangle as she neared him, and fell in the dust. The pup dove for her exposed ears and she shrieked, covering them. Dust rose.

  “Oh my goodness,” Susan said. “She’ll be filthy!”

  Ollie and Betsy were rescuing Agnes and diverting the pup. Oliver stood by the wheel laughing. Many summers of sun and wind had roughened and seamed his skin. His jaw seemed to have grown heavier, his mustache hid his mouth. To Susan he looked as impenetrable as a rock, and older than his thirty-nine years.

  “She seems to be in great shape,” he said.

  “Yes. All of them.”

  Nellie got down and went to dust Agnes off. For the moment the two were alone, with nothing to divert them from looking at each other straight. She looked for signs of dissipation in his face—How had he been living with her not there to save him from his weaker self?—and could see only a rude outdoor strength. He had the kind of face, she realized, that John had. Put him on a frontier ranch and he could not be distinguished from the cowboys. But she thought she was entitled to some sort of assurance that she had not come home to a repetition of their old quarrel. “Oliver ...”

  His look, bright blue, direct, fully comprehending, warned her off. He refused to be put in the position of defending himself or justifying himself or taking any oath. He did the best he knew how, his look said. He was himself, for better or worse. He did not grant her the supervision of his habits. “You married me,” his look said. “Maybe that was a mistake. But you didn’t marry what you could make out of me. I wouldn’t be much good remodeled.”

  Something in her that had been trembling to open, closed again.

  “Aren’t you coming down?” he said, with his hand up.

  “Yes.”

  His big calloused hand closed on hers, she stepped from the step to the ground. Nodding, he said, “I put that veranda all along the west side to keep the sun out of our eyes till the trees grow up.”

  “That was thoughtful,” she said. “I hate a room full of glaring sun.”

  The back door had opened, and Wan stood in it, wildly flapping a dishtowel. She stood on tiptoe to wave, calling, “Ch, Wan, hello, hello! I didn’t know you were here! This is wonderful! Just a minute ...”

  Betsy and Ollie left the puppies and bolted to greet him. Agnes, dusted off, hung back, not quite sure who he was.

  “She doesn’t remember him,” Susan said. “But how wonderful you could get him back. It broke my heart to see him go. It’ll be almost like old times, with Wiley and Wan and all of us. And John? Is John with us?”

  “He’s filling the water wagon down at the windmill. I saw him as we drove in.”

  “Oh, really like old times!”

  There was another name that hung between them unspoken. She saw it in Oliver’s eyes as plainly as if it had been spelled there. Unsmiling, dry, calculatedly expressionless, he stood by her in the dusty yard. Then he moved his head, indicating something to the north, up toward the canyon. “The whole tribe,” he said. “Here comes Frank, I expect, to say hello.”

  She turned, as much to hide her face as to look, and saw a small moving dust midway between her and the hazed mountain front. The appropriate words, the appropriate feelings, tangled in her throat and breast. Anything less than gladness would be noticed, too much gladness would be marked. She was not sure, anyway, whether what she felt, what had made her heart jump at that name, was gladness or panic.

  In a voice that to her own ears was brittle and false she said, “Frank? He too? Oh, good. I didn’t know he’d come back.” She continued to look at the moving dust, since that kept her from having to look at Oliver.

  “After he invested three years in this ditch?” Oliver said. “I brought him back first thing. He’s bossing the diversion dam and the Big Ditch, while Wiley bosses the Susan.” He took her arm. “Come on, don’t you want to see your house?”

  She came along, feeling obscurely rebuked. Old friends to greet, the whole canyon family restored as a surprise for her, everything as it was. She heard the children shrieking inside as they explored the house, and she shook Wan’s hand with both her own in fierce, overdone enthusiasm. She hurt her face with smiling, she examined the rooms with the eagerness of a housekeeper.

  But her mind went steadily on something else, bubbling along like dark water under sunlit ice. Just now she had searched Oliver’s face for signs of drink, prying at him to discover if she had made a mistake to return, all but asking him outright what he had done and what he intended to do. Had he, when he mentioned Frank, been searching her face for an answer to a question of his own? Had he seen an answer? For her heart had leaped at the name, the gladness had come before the fear, and before the furtive, alert sense of how dangerous it was to show what she really felt. Had he seen that?

  She almost wished he would ask, so that they could have it out, so that she could promise and therefore demand a promise from him: she thought of it as a sort of trade, in which each must give up something. She was shaken and in danger; she was also determined to lie in the bed she had made when she married him.

  As she walked from room to unfinished room making pleased or judgmental noises, she was resenting her husband’s wordlessness, she smoldered with grievance that he would not submit to talking their problems out. It was harder to get words from him than it was to get gold from rock. He tortured her with his silence. What did he mean, bringing Frank back on the project? Was he testing her? Tempting her? Was he so dense that he did not feel the undercurrent in his house?

  Why don’t you come out with it? she felt like saying to him in anger. I’m sure you think there’s something. Why don’t you say it, so I can tell you there isn’t?

  2

  I am going to have to ask myself a question not too different from the one Grandmother wanted to ask Grandfather. What does it mean for my future, such as it is, that I sit at my desk at ten-thirty in the morning with a half-emptied bourbon and water at my elbow? For quite a while it has been getting easier to put down the old aching bones by a little roll over to the liquor cupboard. What am I to infer from the fact that every day for the past two weeks I have been half stoned before lunch?

  I know perfectly well what I am to infer. I’m close, I’m maybe over the line. Pain, is that the reason? Am I a pathetic broken creature becoming a juicehead, as Shelly puts it, to dull my agonies? Nothing so dramatic. My kind of pain isn’t the screaming kind, it’s only the tooth-gritting kind.

  Am I beginning to draw the dividends on my investment in isolation? Stir crazy? Rodm
an might think so. Sit out on that mountain doing nothing but read his grandmother’s letters, it’d drive anybody to drink.

  Or am I feeling my isolation threatened? Do I hear Rodman and Ellen and that cat’s-paw of a doctor conspiring to move in and capture me? Am I some Kafka creature sweating in its hole?

  Maybe all of those reasons, maybe none of them. I have never been a very social type: age and infirmity only confirm what youth and health used to crave. For years I have spent every morning in the study, just as I do now. It is true I used to be pulled out by classes, meetings, examinations, visitors, trips to the library, and a lot else. My afternoons used to have more in them than eight laps on the crutches and a little conversation with Shelly or her mother. My evenings used to go, as they do now, to reading, but very often they went to dinners, friends, concerts, shows. I used to think I lived a good old-fashioned scholarly life. What I don’t have now that I had then is friends. Some of those dropped away, out of embarrassment, when Ellen left and I became a gargoyle; the others I simply moved away from when I came up here. I don’t think their absence is enough to explain that glass there.

  I was always one whose arm twisted easily. I have always felt better and talked better when I was a little high. My grandfather in me? Why not? What begins as safety-valve binges and gestures toward social ease ends as habit. I have no reason to be surprised if I have by now picked up a physiological craving that has nothing to do with pain, boredom, reticence, tension, lack of friends, or anything else.

  But it’s too risky. If I let myself go that way I give them a handle, I lose it all. Suppose I do have pain? I can put up with it, or go back to cortisone; and if cortisone blows me up with water retention and gives me insomnia, why then I have taken what I want and paid for it. I’d rather be sleepless, and even more a Gorgon than I am, than turn into a helpless old stewbum that Rodman can handle as he pleases.

  So for the sake of my independence, here goes my felicity. As of this minute I’m on the wagon.

  What about the half-emptied glass? Dump it in the sink? Why? My backbone is rigid enough, I don’t have to stiffen it with symbolic gestures. Now then. One smooth brown swallow sluiced around in the mouth, cool among the teeth, and put it down. That’s the end of it.

  Now do I feel better? Think. Try to be exact.

  No, I don’t feel better. I feel aggrieved, picked-on, and pursued. I want to know why a bunged-up old scholar can’t have his drink in peace. I want to know why I must be wary of the uncertain future. What future? Not Lyman Ward’s. He has converted back to kerosene and is living his grandparents’ life. His own future ought not bother him or anyone else. His grandfather’s horse pistol three feet from his forehead tells him that there is always a solution if things get unbearable. The fact that he isn’t tempted seems to prove that they aren’t unbearable yet. But they are going to be a lot less pleasant without Old Grand-Dad.

  So right on, as the activists say. Right on, Lyman. Fifty whole years of Grandmother’s life to go. Make them last.

  Of course it’s impossible. I’ll never finish. Autumn is already nearly here, Shelly has had about all the country quiet her physiology can stand, and will be leaving soon. Ada has been having trouble with her breathing. She smokes too much, there is always a cigarette dribbling ashes down her front and into her dishwater and onto her ironing, and I hear her wheeze like an old dog when she makes my bed. Emphysema, I shouldn’t be surprised, her breathing apparatus gone as slack as an old garter. Hyperventilation, pains in her chest and left arm, maybe heart involved too. Good Christ, what would I do if she collapsed?

  The very thought of it brings an element of desperation into my delusions of independence. I will not kid myself that this summer of quiet routine and country air have left me much better off than when I came. I have had six aspirins and a bourbon since I got up, and still I ache.

  What the hell, my right is in retreat, my center is giving way, my left is crumbling, I have just sent my bottled support to the rear. I shall attack. I shall go on writing the personal history of my grandmother, following Bancroft’s advice to historians: present your subject in his own terms, judge him in yours.

  Actually, I’d just as soon leave out the judgment entirely. I don’t feel at ease judging people. And I’d just as soon let her present herself: her letters from the Mesa are among the longest and fullest she wrote during that long half century of correspondence.

  3

  The Mesa

  August 16, 1889

  Darling Augusta—

  We have slept five nights in our house in the sagebrush. Like everything here, it is large and raw. It is for the future, it sacrifices the present for what is to come. In time it may be charming, but now it seems hopeless. We need everything-awnings, more chairs, boardwalks around the premises, lawn, shrubs, flowers, trees, shade. The sun beats on us from sunup to sundown. We are like a seashore place, with dust instead of sand. Dust lies drifted two inches deep in the piazza, dust blows in our faces if we attempt to sit there and read or work, dust whirls about the yard, dust is tracked in by every pair of feet, dust hangs above the canyon mouth and hazes the whole valley, especially at sunset.

  I used to write you from Almaden how strangely transformed the dust clouds were after the sun went down. It is the same here. In some ways this mesa is a return. We look off, just as we did at Almaden, into a vast stretch of valley, with the moon at our back. Not a single tree in sight as far as we can see south, east, and west. To the north lie the irrigated lowlands along the river. The noble shape of the country lies bare under the sky as if just made, and ready for the birth of trees and crops.

  It is a vision that absorbs Oliver. He follows it like a man panting after a mirage, and he works, works, works. He manages his survey, he supervises the ditch construction, he confers with politicians and contractors and shareholders, he takes visiting representatives of the Syndicate over the works-we have been visited twice since I arrived—and in the hours between dusk and dark, and even after dark, he is out with John doing something to the land or the buildings or the well. He is full of excitement and energy. But my heart whispers to me that all he dreams of is still years away, and that meantime we grow old, we diminish, we lose touch with all that used to make life rich and wonderful. I have just counted on my fingers how long it has been since I saw you. More than seven years.

  But I began to speak of our house, before dust and the years obscured it. We have again the mud-plastered walls of the canyon house. The adobe is not as tough as that of the canyon, but a better color—a greenish-yellow gray, like beach sand. We are going to paint the wainscot and woodwork in one of the rooms old ivory-I think it will bring out the color of the walls. Even one finished room would cheer me. I must think in those terms —one room, then another, and another, till all are done, and then grass outside instead of dust, and hammocks on the veranda for the watching of sunsets.

  Then if you could only come we could give you a peaceful, roomy sleeping chamber, and a house in which your serene beauty would feel at home. How solitary and strange this great sweep of country would look to you! Yet I can fancy you would like to lie on the hill slope by a clump of sage, and gaze down over the valley and into the bosom of the mountain range opposite, almost as we used to lie on Orchard Hill and look across at the farms of Dutchess County.

  Wiley has driven the Susan Canal more than eight miles. It will go twenty before water is turned into it, to water claims that lie below ours. That is for next summer. Meantime the “Big Ditch” is alive with teams and scrapers, and the canyon resounds with blasting. It awes me to see how big this scheme is. In all the years I thought I was helping dream it, I hadn’t the imagination to understand what I was dreaming. The Big Ditch will be immense, a man-made river, and eventually will water nearly three hundred thousand acres—nearly five hundred square miles. There are countries in the world no bigger than that. There will have to be several storage dams, but those will come later. Even without the dams, this will
be one of the grandest things in the West.

  The finished section, so far hardly more than a half mile, sweeps in a great curve around the shoulder of the mountain, eighty feet wide at the top, fifty at the bottom. The twelve-foot banks slope back at the “angle of repose,” which means the angle at which dirt and pebbles stop rolling. Down the bottom of the ditch fifteen horsemen could ride abreast, without crowding. It was good for me to see it all the other day, in company with the gentlemen from the London syndicate, and to be reminded how all of it is owing to my old boy’s imagination and his refusal to be beaten.

  He works far too hard; he always has. It is a thing I have sometimes held against him, that his family must come second to his job. Now he has to make one last trip to the mountains to complete some field work for the Irrigation Survey, and that means Ollie must start East without seeing his father again. It is a great pity, for they are very close. But what can I do? Ollie can’t afford to pass up the chance that St. Paul’s has given him. He will be lonely, and will miss his pony and the excitement of the construction, to which he attends all day, riding the line with Wiley or his father. He lives on his pony.

  All through our stay in Victoria he talked about the canyon as if it were the Paradise from which we had been evicted, and from the moment of our return he wanted to go out there. Yesterday I threw up my hands over everything that needs doing here, and rode out with him. Wiley was there, and showed us the changes. He and Frank share our old bedroom, two draftsmen use the others, the shack overflows with men. It seemed a very different place from the quiet canyon where we lived on hope. But it pleased me to see that the trees we planted are doing well, and that the poppies have seeded themselves around the knoll and bloom without human encouragement.