Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

  Her eyes popped open. Gray daylight, unfamiliar room—something was wrong. Up on her elbow, shaking the sleep from her eyes, she recognized her new bedroom, cluttered with half-unpacked belongings. She was alone in the bed. Where was Oliver? Something was wrong, there was crying from the other wing where Lizzie and Georgie slept, and outside now began an uproar of barking and the honking wheeze of a donkey. Then she heard Oliver shout, “Sic ’im, Stranger, take him out of here!” A growling rush, the clatter of hoofs in stones, a threshing of bushes. Oliver sent a piercing whistle after dog and donkey, and blending with it, coming in like a thin woodwind in duet with a piccolo, a queer, high voice cried, “Fis! Fis! Fis!”

  Oliver’s bare feet thudded down the porch. “No want fish, John. Go way.”

  “Fis belly flesh,” said the voice.

  “No want fish,” Oliver said. “What for come so early, John? Go way now.”

  “Fis belly flesh,” the voice said, receding, complaining, vanishing. Roosters were crowing both above and below. The sound of Oliver’s feet crossed the living room. He opened the door upon her as she sat up in bed.

  “What on earth!” she said.

  He was rumbling with laughter. His blond mustache, which he had probably grown to make him look older and more authoritative, made him look about twenty. “Welcome,” he said. “Everybody wants to welcome you, even a jackass and a jackass Chinaman.”

  At midmorning they were moving furniture around. Oliver had bought it from Mother Fall, who in her turn had acquired it from the desperate mine captain who had formerly lived in this house. He had brought his young wife here, she had had her baby here, they had laid out all they owned in furnishing the place. Then without warning he had lost his job. An ill omen, but she hardly even acknowledged that she was adapting the wreckage of an unlucky life to her own uses, for everything that she saw of the house with rested eyes pleased her. The veranda that she had drawn around three sides of Oliver’s sketch, and had him spend most of his savings on, was a triumph. It took her breath to look east, it filled her heart to look west or south. The rooms themselves were good, the furniture would do for the brief time they would be here. But she gave Oliver a good deal of exercise moving it, anyway, trying it in all possible positions and combinations, and enjoying herself extremely as she stood around in a dressing sacque being a young housewife. Then he happened to glance out the window as he pushed a chair across the room. “Whsht!” he said. “Get dressed. We’re being called on.”

  She flew into the bedroom and slammed the door, and as she fumbled into her traveling dress, all she had until the trunks came, she heard feet come up the porch and into the house, and voices, a man’s and a woman’s. When she came out—and she would have come out rosy and vivacious and charming as if she had not twenty seconds before been biting her lips and muttering un-Quakerish words at hooks and eyes that had disappeared in the fabric or eluded her fingers —Oliver introduced her to Mr. and Mrs. Kendall, the manager and his wife.

  Mr. Kendall was not a smiler. He had gimlet eyes and a notably still, restrained manner. But he took her hand and looked into her face until she blushed, and said to Oliver, “Well, Ward, I see why you were so impatient to get readied up here.“ Wanting to dislike him for his broken promise, she could find no fault with his manners. His wife was ladylike, gentle, soft-spoken, and welcoming. Both of them regretted that the Wards had not chosen to live down at the Hacienda, where things were rather more civilized and where people would have had a better chance of their company. Mrs. Kendall asked if she might come by in her carriage and take Susan for a drive around on the mountain trails. She asked them to dinner the Sunday following. She was almost effusively glad to have so charming an addition to New Almaden society, she had heard that Susan was an accomplished artist and hoped to become familiar with her work, she hoped that New Almaden would offer many subjects for her pencil. They stood on the veranda and admired the view and praised what Oliver had been able to do with the old cottage. There was a lot of waving and smiling in both directions as they left.

  “Well,” Oliver said when the carriage had passed out of sight among the oaks. “That’s something I never saw before.”

  “What? Their calling? It seems only polite.”

  “They’ve never called on anyone else.”

  “It’s because of Conrad Prager. Mr. Kendall knows you’ve got an important connection.”

  “If he thought my connections were that important, why wouldn’t he let me go East and get you?” Oliver said. “Why would he stick me for the whole price of the renovations? No, you’ve got them wrong. They’re impressed because you’re an artist. You make New Almaden look classy.” He looked at her as he might have looked at a horse he was thinking of buying. “Matter of fact,” he said, “you do.”

  In the afternoon Susan got a few minutes to herself and began a serial letter to Augusta. She got in a good deal of literary landscape painting and an impression of the manager and his wife. Mrs. Kendall, she thought, “has those qualities of surface prettiness and ladylike manners that make her at once attractive and uninteresting.” Of Kendall himself she said, “It is hard to believe that this largest mine in the world—Oliver says there are twenty-seven miles of underground workings-should be under the absolute despotic control of this small, mild-mannered man, and that one’s whole future should be at the mercy of his whim. Fortunately, he appears to regard Oliver highly, and Oliver, I am proud to say, bears himself in the presence of his superior as befits a man. In spite of his agreeableness I could not quite forget that he forced Oliver to spend his last cent in making over the cottage that is properly part of his compensation—the cottage moreover which he now praises for its charm.”

  That night they had supper with the lower echelons of New Almaden society, the crew of junior engineers, college students, and “outside captains” who boarded with Mother Fall. I don’t suppose the atmosphere of a third-class boardinghouse was any more exhilarating to her than the near-gentility of the Kendalls, but at least it was honestly what it was, and Oliver was at ease in it. The talk was about evenly divided between engineering technicalities and comments an Oliver’s undeserved luck. In their exaggerated joking, at once boisterous and shy, they enlisted her sympathy, because she thought them lonely, but she did not therefore think of them as potential friends or companions. When she had occasion to add a few paragraphs to her letter she told Augusta that they were “nice enough to see once in a while, but I don’t think I shall care greatly for any of the people here.”

  A terrible snob you were, Grandmother, in spite of the Quaker background and the farm upbringing, and in spite of the fact that you would have been too warmhearted to let any of these young men see your snobbery. Thanks partly to your success in art, and more to the influence of Augusta and Thomas Hudson, you had gentility in your eye like a cinder, and there would be a lot of rubbing, reddening, and irritation before your tears flooded it out.

  As they sat after supper talking and rocking on the boardinghouse porch in the chilly night air tainted with Cornish Camp smells, two miners approached and signaled Oliver down the steps. There was a good deal of snickering, some glancing up at the porch. “Now, you,” Mother Fall said to them, “wot’re you planning, you two?”

  They shook hands with Oliver and went away, walking fast. Oliver came back and stood smiling, behind Susan’s chair, pushing it so that she rocked forward and touched her toes and could spring back again against his hands. “We must go,” he said.

  The young men were indignant, Mother Fall was hurt. Susan stood up obediently, unsure of what was happening.

  “There was some talk about a charivari,” Oliver said. ”I gave them money for a couple of barrels of beer. So now I’m going to take Sue home and barricade the doors.”

  They protested. Nobody in camp would think of pulling any horseplay on the Resident Engineer’s wife. Even if they didn’t have sense enough to know that anything roughhouse would be out of keeping, they were all too
scared for their jobs. Oliver should have told them to go chase themselves. Stay on here, maybe it would get lively. Get your health drunk in person.

  That was just what he expected, Oliver said. He saw no reason Susan should be exposed to a bunch of beery admirers. Are you ready, Susan?

  She shook their hands one by one. With some sort of inward shudder she let herself be clasped to Mother Fall’s faintly onion-smelling best dress. She expressed her thanks for all they had done to make things easy and pleasant, and she went away not sure whether they would pick her to pieces as being too high toned for mining-camp life, or whether they would be groaning with envy at Oliver’s luck. And what if those men did decide to play some drunken prank? She had heard of the most appalling things—kidnapped bride, imprisoned and humiliated bride-groom, Halloween destructions and practical jokes.

  Walking back along the black lane, with Oliver’s lantern throwing blobs of shadow ahead of them and lighting the dusty roots in the bank, she had a few minutes of near-panic. Physically it was like any other country lane at night; it might have been the lane between John Grant’s and her father’s. But already, back of them, she heard the loud voices of men, and she knew that in a half hour or so they would be louder yet.

  “Will they come, do you think?”

  He put his arm around her. “Not a chance. They just wanted an excuse to bum a treat ”

  “Why did we leave, then?”

  “So I could have you to myself.”

  He had her to himself so close that they lurched and stumbled in the trail.

  2

  For three more mornings she awoke in her bare room, breathing air strangely scented and listening to the strange sounds that had awakened her: once the bells of the panadero’s burro coming up the trail with loaves sticking out of the panniers on both sides, twice the distant beating of kettles and hullaballoo of voices yelling in a strange tongue—the Chinese arising in their camp under the hill. Each morning Oliver came in and kissed her fully awake and laid a wild-flower on her breast. Their breakfasts were interrupted by the seven o’clock whistle from the nearest shaft house, and they smiled because for these few days Oliver could ignore it.

  Between the little jobs of getting settled, she added bits to her serial letter. Grandmother did not live in the local color period for nothing. Here, for instance, is the vegetable man:Lizzie does the buying and I stand around with my Jap umbrella, very much in everybody’s way, and tell what we want. The man is an Italian named Costa. It is delightful to hear him say the names of common vegetables. When he asks me if I want cabbage, as he says it I feel that it must be a most tempting thing. And it is so amusing to hear him reckon up the account—‘One bit carrot—two bit tomato—four bit potato—3 bit apple—2 bit blackberries.’ Lizzie is washing this morning, and the baby sits in a drygoods box on the floor as happy as possible ... Everything will be so easy that I shall grow fat and lazy. Three times a day we hear steam whistles, and here and there are columns of smoke rising. A heavily laden wagon drawn by mules passes a distant curve of the winding road, but nothing passes us. The place is as orderly as a military post, and as quiet from our remote porch as if every day were Sunday ... How I wish you could see this place! I have taken no walks because I have no stout shoes, and no clothes until our trunks arrive except winter garments sent last spring as freight. The evenings are so cool I can be very comfortable in a serge dress, and in the daytime I wander about in a white dressing sacque which Oliver says looks “as if the feathers had been picked off the back,” because the puffs and ruffles are strictly confined to the front. I never felt so free in my life, and strange to say it does not seem far off. I feel as if you were as near as at Milton.

  A Live White Woman in the Mines, she rose on the fifth morning and drank coffee with her husband before he went off to work, and gave him for the post office in Cornish Camp a letter to her parents and the fat letter to Augusta. Later that morning the trunks arrived by dray, and she spent the rest of the day unpacking. To stack the wood-blocks for The Scarlet Letter in the comer cupboard with her sketch pads, pencils, and watercolors gave her an intense pleasurable feeling of being ready to live.

  The six o’clock whistle blew while she was changing into a summer dress still warm from Lizzie’s iron. Calling to Lizzie to put the kettle on, she hurried out to the hammock and spread herself there to wait.

  I can see her. From here she looks terribly unlikely. She was always careful of her clothes—“Thy dress should be a background for thy face,” I once heard her tell my Aunt Betsy, whose taste was not dependable-and she lived in a time when women wrapped themselves in yards of satin, serge, taffeta, bombazine, what not, with bustles and mffies and leg-of-mutton sleeves, all of it over a foundation of whalebone. A modem woman in a mining camp, even if she is the wife of the Resident Engineer, lives in pants and a sweatshirt. Grandmother made not the slightest concession to the places where she lived. I have a photograph of her riding a horse in something that looks like a court costume, and another taken at the engineer’s camp on the bank of Boise Creek in the 1880s, with a home-made rowboat at her feet and a tent pitched in the background and her third baby on her shoulder, and what is she wearing? A high-necked, pinch-waisted, triple-breasted, puff-sleeved, full-length creation of dotted swiss or something of the kind. And a picnic hat. In that baldest of their bald frontiers, at the very bottom of their fortunes, she dressed as if for a garden party. I don’t suppose she had a hat on as she waited for Oliver to come back from the mine, that first real day of her housekeeping life, but she probably had everything else.

  Shortly she saw him coming through the trees. Stranger lumbered up and went to meet him. Susan waved. In his mine clothes stained with red ore, his boots muddy, his face full of the light the sight of her turned on in him, he ran up the high steps and leaned against the post with his hands behind him and his face stuck out. She kissed it, and still with his hands behind him he fainted against the porch post. “Is this where the Resident Engineer lives?” he said. “You look beautiful. What happened?”

  “Does something have to happen before I can look beautiful? The trunks came, so now I can be a wife greeting her husband as he returns from work.”

  “I like it. I guess I’ll go back and come home again.”

  “No, you’re to stay. Lizzie will be bringing tea.”

  “Tea, even.”

  She loved the way he leaned against the post. He had relaxed, graceful poses, big as he was. The mine hat with a stub of candle socketed in its front was pushed back on his head, his wool shirt was open at the neck. She probably thought him unbearably picturesque. She could have drawn the two of them just as they stood there, pretty bride and manly husband. Title, something like, “The Return from Honest Toil,” or perhaps “An Outpost of Civilization.” It flooded her with happiness to be there, to have him there, to be able to give him this after so many years of stale crackers and mouse cheese in tarpapered shacks.

  He removed his hand from behind him, with a letter in it. “Brought you something.”

  She saw by the stationery whose it was, and the hand that snatched it was so greedy that she lifted a look of apology before she ripped off the end. But only one disappointing sheet, and it not even filled. Fear and its verification were all but simultaneous.

  I have that piece of thin blue paper, brown along the folds and with its few lines of script faded nearly out. No bold and graceful hand here—a scrawl, and unsigned.

  My darling Sue,

  This is no letter. I can’t write, I can’t think, and yet I must let you know. Baby died of diphtheria last night. Oh, why aren’t you here! I can’t bear it, everything is in pieces. I could die, I could die.

  So in one stroke her picnic in the West was turned into exile. The three thousand miles that had seemed no more than the distance from Milton to New York revealed themselves as a continent. Across that implacable distance a train carrying a message would crawl with the slowness of a beetle. Tomorrow or next day one
would start across with the letter she had given to Oliver that morning. She would have given all she owned to have it back, to have back everything she had written since leaving home. For the child must have died on the first or second day of her trip, about the time she was scribbling her impressions of Omaha. All the time she had been crossing plains, mountains, and deserts, all the day she had rested in San Francisco, all the days of her getting used to Almaden, Augusta and Thomas had been suffering their sorrow. Another week, or even more, and the postman would bring to their door not comfort, not the sympathy of their dearest friend, but pages of drivel about Chinese fish peddlers and Italian vegetable men.

  She took out of Oliver’s hand the blue sheet, which he had gently removed from her fingers and read. By the trouble in his face she could assess her own. For a second she blazed like a burning tree. She cried out, “I must go back! I must pack at once!” But looking into his serious face she knew she couldn’t. He didn’t have the money to send her. Her own savings must be held for their mutual life, not for the attachments she had left behind. It wouldn’t be fair, though she knew he would agree without hesitation if she asked.

  Did she feel trapped in her complex feelings, caught in marriage as she was caught on the wrong side of the continent? I shouldn’t be surprised. For a time, at least, while the inexorabilities of space and time ate into her. They entirely forgot tea, and when Lizzie served supper Susan sat with Oliver at the table, eating nothing herself and almost despising him for his apologetic miner’s appetite. After Lizzie had cleared away, she sat on, writing a passionate hopeless letter, while Oliver smoked his pipe in the other room and watched her furtively under the spurs and pistol and bowie that hung like shy masculine mistletoe in the arch. When she stood up suddenly, he stood up too, but she gave him a quivering smile and said, “Don’t come along. You’re tired. I’m only going out to pick a flower.”