Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

  “Why? Aren’t the manager and the others nice?”

  “They’re all right. I guess I prefer the Cousin Jacks and Mexicans up at the camps.”

  They were going right through the Hacienda at a trot. Some children scattered, turning to stare. A woman looked out a door. “Aren’t we stopping here?” she asked.

  “I slipped Eugene a little extra to deliver you right to your gate.”

  “Ah,” she said, “that’ll be nicer,” and leaned to the window to see as the stage tilted through dry oaks along a trail dug out of the hillside. But her mind worried a question. He thought of making her arrival as pleasant as possible, and as easy for her, and he didn’t hesitate to spend money to do it, but he hadn’t thought to send her the fare to cross the continent—not only Lizzie’s fare, which he might have forgotten, but her own, which he shouldn’t have. Not the least unknown part of her unknown new life was the man beside her. From the time she had bought the tickets out of her savings she had not been entirely free of fear.

  Grandmother, I feel like telling her, have a little confidence in the man you married. You’re safer than you think.

  The road climbed, kinked back on itself and started a sweeping curve around a nearly bare hill. Ahead she saw five parallel spurs of mountain, as alike as the ridges of a plowed field but huge and impetuous, plunging down into the canyon. The first was very dark, the next less dark, the third hazed, the fourth dim, the fifth almost gone. All day there had been no sky, but now she saw that there was one, a pale diluted blue.

  At the turn a battered liveoak leaned on limbs that touched the ground on three sides. To its trunk were nailed many boxes, each with a name painted or chalked on it: Trengove, Fall, Tregoning, Tyrrell. Across a gulch on the left she saw roofs and heard the yelling of children.

  “Cornish Camp?”

  “Draw your own conclusions.”

  “What are the boxes? Is there a newspaper?”

  “Oh Eastern effeteness,” Oliver said. “Those are meat boxes. Every morning the meat wagon comes by and leaves Tregoning his leg of mutton and Trengove his soup bone and Mother Fall her pot roast. Tomorrow, if you want, I’ll put up a box for Mother Ward.”

  “I don’t think I should like everyone to know what I feed you,” Susan said. “Doesn’t anybody ever steal things?”

  “Steals? This isn’t the Hacienda.”

  “You don’t like the Hacienda, do you?” she said. “Why not?”

  He grunted.

  “Well, I must say it’s prettier than this.”

  “There I can’t argue with you,” he said. “It smells better, too.”

  The whole place had the air of having been dumped down the hillside-steep streets, houses at every angle white and incongruous or unpainted and shabby. Wash hung everywhere, the vacant lots were littered with cans and trash, dogs prowled and children screamed. At the water tank they slowed to pass through a reluctantly parting, densely staring tangle of men, boys, teamsters, cows, donkeys, mules. When Oliver leaned out and saluted some of them they waved, grinning, and stared with their hands forgotten in the air. Engineer and his new missus. She thought them coarse and cow-faced and strangely pale.

  But they made sharp pictures, too: a boy hoisting a water yoke with a pail at each end, the pails sloshing silver over their rims; a teamster unyoking his mules; a donkey standing with his ears askew and his nose close to the ground, on his face a look of mournful patience that reminded her comically of Lizzie.

  “Over there’s Mother Fall’s, where I lived,” Oliver said, and pointed.

  A white two-story house, square, blank, and ugly. Each window was a room, she supposed, one of them formerly his. The downstairs would smell of cabbage and grease. She could not even imagine living there. Her heart rose up and assured her that she would make him glad she had come.

  “You said she was nice to you.”

  “Yes. A stout Cornish dame. She’s been helping me get ready for you.”

  “I must call on her, I should think.”

  He looked at her a little queerly. “You sure must. If we don’t have supper there tomorrow we’ll never be forgiven.”

  Above and to the left, scattered down a long hogback ridge, the Mexican camp appeared. Its houses were propped with poles, timbers, ladders; its crooked balconies overflowed with flowers; in a doorway she saw a dark woman smoking a cigarette, on a porch a grandmother braided a child’s hair. There were no white-painted cottages, but she thought this camp more attractive than the Cornish—it had a look of belonging, some gift of harmoniousness. The stage turned off to the right, below the camp, and left her craning, unsatisfied.

  “Is there a Chinese Camp too?” she said.

  “Around the hill and below us. We’ll hear it a little, but we won’t see it.”

  “Where’s the mine?”

  With his forefinger he jabbed straight down. “You don’t see that either. Just a shaft house or a dump in a gulch here and there.”

  “You know what?” she said, holding the curtains back and watching ahead through the dusty little oaks, “I don’t think you described this place very well.”

  “Draw your own conclusions,” Oliver said. He offered a finger to Lizzie’s baby, just waking up and yawning and focusing his eyes. The stage stopped.

  The cottage she had imagined exposed on a bare hill among ugly mine buildings was tucked back among liveoaks at the head of a draw. In her first quick devouring look she saw the verandas she had asked for and helped Oliver sketch, a rail fence swamped under geraniums. When she hopped out slapping dust from her clothes she saw that the yard showed the even tooth-marks of raking. He had prepared for her so carefully. Both mostly what she felt in the moment of arrival was space, extension, bigness. Behind the house the mountain went up steeply to the ridge, along which now lay, as soft as a sleeping cat, a roll of fog or cloud. Below the house it fell just as steeply down spurs and canyons to tumbled hills as bright as a lion’s hide. Below those was the valley’s dust, a level obscurity, and rising out of it, miles away, was another long mountain as high as their own. Turning back the way she had come in, she saw those five parallel spurs, bare gold on top, darkly wooded in the gulches, receding in layers of blue haze. I know that mountain, old Loma Prieta. In nearly a hundred years it has changed less than most of California. Once you get beyond the vineyards and subdivisions along its lower slopes there is nothing but a reservoir and an Air Force radar station.

  “Well,” Oliver said, “come on inside.”

  It was as she had visualized it from his sketches, but much more nnished—a house, not a picturesque shack. It smelled cleanly of paint. Its floors and wainscot were dark redwood, its walls a soft gray. The light was dim and cool, as she thought the light in a house should be. A breeze went through the rooms, bringing inside the smell of aromatic sun-soaked plants. The Franklin stove was polished like a farmer’s Sunday boots, water was piped into the sink, the kitchen cooler held sacks and cans and let out a rich smell of bacon. In the arch between dining room and living room Oliver had hung his spurs, bowie, and six-shooter. “The homey touch,” he said. “And wait, there are some little housewarming presents.”

  From the piazza he brought one of the packages that had been part of their luggage down from San Francisco. She opened it and pulled out a grass fan. “Fiji,” Oliver said. Next a large mat of the same grass, as finely woven as linen, and with a sweet hay smell. “More Fiji.” Next a paper parasol that opened up to a view of Fujiyama. “Japan,” Oliver said. “Don’t open it inside—bad luck.” At the bottom of the box was something heavy which, unwrapped, turned out to be a water jar with something in Spanish written across it. “Guadalajara,” Oliver said. “Now you’re supposed to feel that the place is yours. You know what that Spanish means? It says, ‘Help thyself, little Tomasa.’ ”

  There it sits, over on my window sill, ninety-odd years later, without even a nick out of it. The fan and the parasol went quickly, the mat lasted until Leadville and was mourned when
it passed, the olla has come through three generations of us, as have the bowie, the spurs, and the six-shooter. It wasn’t the worst set of omens that attended the beginning of my grandparents’ housekeeping.

  She was touched. Like the raked yard, the clean paint, his absurd masculine decorations in the archway, his gifts proved him what she had believed him to be. Yet the one small doubt stuck in her mind like a burr in tweed. In a small voice she said, “You’ll spoil me.”

  “I hope so.”

  Lizzie came in with luggage in one hand and the baby in her other arm. “Right through the kitchen,” Oliver said. “Your bed’s made up. The best I could do for Georgie was a packing box with a pillow in it.”

  “That will be fine, thank you,” Lizzie said, and went serenely on through.

  Kind. He really was. And energetic. Within a minute he was making a fire so that Susan could have warm water to wash in. Then he said that he had a little errand at Mother Fall’s, and before she could ask him what he was off the piazza and gone.

  Susan took off her traveling dress and washed in the basin by the kitchen door. Below her were the tops of strange bushes, the steep mountainside tufted with sparse brown grass. Looking around the comer of Lizzie’s room to the upward slopes, she saw exotic red-barked trees among the woods, and smelled the herb-cupboard smells of sage and bay. Another world. Thoughtfully she poured out the water and went inside, where Lizzie was slicing a round loaf she had found in the cooler. Even the bread here was strange.

  “How does it seem, Lizzie? Is your room all right?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Is it the way you imagined it?”

  “I don’t know that I imagined it much.”

  “Oh, I did,” said Susan. “All wrong.”

  She looked at Lizzie’s room, clean and bare; went out through the dining room where her gifts lay on the table and read the inscription on the olla: Help thyself, Tomasita. Out on the piazza she sat in the hammock and looked out over the green and gold mountain and thought how strange, how strange.

  Rocks clattered in the trail, and Oliver came in sight with a great black dog padding beside him. He made it sit down in front of the hammock. “This is Stranger. We figure he’s half Labrador and half St. Bernard. He thinks he’s my dog, but he’s mistaken. From now on he goes walking with nobody but you. Shake hands, Stranger.”

  With great dignity Stranger offered a paw like a firelog, first to Oliver, who pushed it aside, and then to Susan. He submitted to having his head stroked. “Stranger?” Susan said. “Is that your name, Stranger? That’s wrong. You’re the one who lives here. I’m the stranger.”

  Oliver went inside and came out with a piece of buttered bread. “Give him something. You’re to feed him, always, so he’ll get attached to you.”

  “But it’s you he likes,” Susan said. “Look at the way he watches every move you make.”

  “Just the same, he’s going to learn to like you. That’s what we got him for, to look after you. If he doesn’t, I’ll make a rug of him. You hear that, you?”

  The dog rolled his eyes and twisted his head back, keeping his bottom firmly on the boards. “Here, Stranger,” Susan said, and broke off a piece of bread. The dog’s eyes rolled down to fix on it. She tossed it, and he slupped it out of the air with a great sucking sound that made them both laugh. Over his broad black head Susan looked into Oliver’s eyes. “You will spoil me.”

  “I hope so,” he said for the second time.

  Then she couldn’t keep the question back any longer. “Oliver.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me something.”

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t want you to be angry.”

  “Angry? At you?”

  “It seems so petty. I shouldn’t even mention it. I only want us to start without a single shadow between us.”

  “My God, what have I done?” Oliver said. Then a slow mulish look came into his face, a look like disgust or guilt or evasion. She stared at him in panic, remembering what his mother had said of him: that when he was put in the wrong he would never defend himself, he would only close up like a clam. She didn’t want him to close up, she wanted to talk this out and be rid of it. Blue as blue stones in his sunburned face, his eyes touched hers and were withdrawn. Miserably she stood waiting. “I know what it is,” he said. “You needn’t tell me.”

  “You didn’t just forget, then.”

  “No, I didn’t forget.”

  “But why, then?”

  He looked over her head, he was interested in the valley. She could see shrugging impatience in his shoulders. “It isn’t the money,” she said. “I had the money, and there was nothing I would rather have spent it for than coming to you. But your letter never even mentioned it. I thought perhaps ... I don’t know. It shamed me before Father. I hated it that he had to send me off to someone he would think didn’t know ...”

  “What my duty was?” Oliver said, almost sneering. “I knew.”

  “Then why?”

  Impatiently he turned, he looked down at her directly. “Because I didn’t have it.”

  “But you said you had something saved.”

  He swung an arm. “There it is.”

  “The house? I thought the mine agreed to pay for that.”

  “Kendall did. The manager. He changed his mind.”

  “But he promised!”

  “Sure,” Oliver said. “But then somebody overspent on one of the Hacienda cottages and Kendall said no more renovations.”

  “But that’s unfair!” she said. “You should have told Mr. Prager.”

  His laugh was incredulous. “Yes? Run crying to Conrad?”

  “Well then you should just have stopped. We could have lived in it as it was.”

  “I could have,” Oliver said. “You couldn’t. I wouldn’t have let you.”

  “Oh I’m sorry!” she said. “I didn’t understand. I’ve been such an expense to you.”

  “It seems to me I’ve been an expense to you. How much did you spend for those tickets?”

  “I won’t tell you.”

  They stared at each other, near anger. She forgave him everything except that he hadn’t explained. One word, and she would have been spared all her doubts about him. But she would certainly not let him pay her back. The hardship would not be all his. He was looking at her squarely, still mulish. She wanted to shake him. “You great ... Why couldn’t you have told me?”

  She saw his eyebrows go up. His eyes, as they did when he smiled, closed into upside-down crescents. Young as he was, he had deep fans of wrinkles at the comers of his eyes that gave him a look of always being on the brink of smiling. And now he was smiling. He was not going to be sullen. They were past it.

  “I was afraid you’d be sensible,” he said. “I couldn’t stand the thought of this place sitting here all ready for you and you not in it.”

  Supper was no more than bread and butter, tea from Augusta’s samovar, and a left-over bar of chocolate. (Ah, sweet linkage! Are you thinking of me, dear friend back there in New York, as I am thinking of you? Do you comprehend how happy I am, am determined to be? Didn’t I tell you he knew how to look after me?) The dog lay at their feet on the veranda. Along the ridge with its silvery comb of fog the sky faded from pale blue to steely gray, and then slowly flushed the color of a ripe peach. The trees on the crest—redwoods, Oliver said-burned for a few seconds and went black. Eastward down the plunging mountainside the valley fumed with dust that was first red, then rose, then purple, then mauve, then gray, finally soft black. Discreet and quiet, Lizzie came out and got the tray and said good night and went in again. They sat close together in the hammock, holding hands.

  “I don’t believe this is me,” Oliver said.

  “Thee mustn’t doubt it.”

  “Theeing?” he said. “Now I know I’m one of the family.”

  A shiver went through her from her hips up to her shoulders. At once he was solicitous. “Cold?”

  “H
appy, I think.”

  “I’ll get a blanket. Or do you want to go in?”

  “No, it’s beautiful out here.”

  He got a blanket and tucked her into the hammock as if into a steamer chair. Then he sat down on the floor beside her and smoked his pipe. Far down below, in the inverted sky of the valley, lights came on, first one, then another, then many. “It’s like sitting in the warming oven and watching corn pop down on the stove,” Susan said.

  Sometime later she held up her hand and said, “Listen!” Fitful on the creeping wind, heard and lost and heard again, came a vanishing sound of music—someone sitting on porch or balcony up in the Mexican camp and playing the guitar for his girl or his children. Remembering nights when Ella Clymer had sung to them at Milton, Susan all but held her breath, waiting for the rush of homesickness. But it never came, nothing interrupted this sweet and resting content. She put out a hand to touch Oliver’s hair, and he captured it and held the fingers against his cheek. The bone of his jaw, the rasp of his beard, sent another great shiver through her.

  They sat up a good while, watching the stars swarm along the edge of the veranda roof. When they finally went to bed I hope they made love. Why wouldn’t they, brought together finally after eight years, and with only a two-week taste of marriage? I am perfectly ready to count the months on Grandmother. Her first child, my father, was born toward the end of April 1877, almost precisely nine months after her arrival in New Almaden. I choose to believe that I was made possible that night, that my father was the first thing they did together in the West. The fact that he was accidental and at first unwanted did not make him any less binding upon their lives, or me any less inevitable.

  In the night she may have heard the wind sighing under the eaves and creaking the stiff oaks and madrones on the hillside behind. She may have heard the stealthy feet of raccoons on the veranda, and the rumble and rush as Stranger rose and put the intruders out. She may have waked and listened to the breathing beside her, and been shaken by unfamiliar emotions and tender resolves. Being who she was, she would have reasserted to herself beliefs about marriage, female surrender, communion of the flesh and union of the spirit that would have been at home in a Longfellow poem. She could have both written and illustrated it. And if she thought of Augusta, as she probably did, she would have poulticed the bruise of abandoned and altered friendship with healing herbs gathered from all the literary gardens where she habitually walked: parted as they were, each was fulfilled in another and nobler way. When I catch Grandmother thinking in this fashion I shy away and draw the curtains, lest I smile. It does not become a historian to smile.