I don’t have the flower, but I have the letter.
Oh my darling, what can I say? It seems so cruel that I did not know by instinct when the blow fell on two hearts so close to mine! If I had only known it, there were signs everywhere as I crossed the country. The bloodred sunsets and pallid moonlight nights were full of foreboding, but I was ignorantly wrapped up in the brightness of life, and would not see that my darling was desolate.
These poor little flowers will all be crushed and withered when they reach you, but they are better than words. They grow along the roadside and keep their meek little faces white and pure in the midst of the dust ... My heart aches with a load of sympathy for you and Thomas. I do not say much to Oliver because it grieves him to feel that it was he who separated us ...
Poor Grandmother. She might have lived an idyll in her honeymoon cottage in the picnic West if her heart had not bled eastward. Poor Grandfather, too. Whether or not he felt guilty at having separated those two, he must have thought it almost malicious in Augusta to have her personal tragedy just when she did. Fair means having failed to hold Susan in New York and within the old threesome, she resorted to foul.
Still, who knows, perhaps Augusta’s woe helped weld their incongruities into a marriage. In that remote place, where the country made a great impression on her and the people hardly any, it was as if Oliver were the only man in the world, and hers the only house. Though she followed Oliver wherever she could, to his office in Shakerag Street, to the Hacienda to dine with the Kendalls, to the post office, to the store, to the shaft house when he was going underground, she was much alone. Lizzie, though a good creature, was “not company.” The Cornish wives who came to call gave Susan and themselves an awkward time, finding little to talk of except Oliver’s virtues—“‘e do ’ave a way with ’im”—and if they came more than once, found their way around to the kitchen door for a comfortable cup of tea with Lizzie.
None of the Cornish people, men or women, attracted her. She thought them crude, she remembered the threatened charivari and the extortion of two barrels of beer from Oliver’s poor purse, she thought their accent barbarous. And when she went walking with Stranger, and met on the trails brown-faced men and women who saluted her with grave courtesy and moved aside for her to pass, watching her out of their Indian eyes, she was tempted by the pictures they made, but would no more have thought of making companions of them than of their burros. In time she came to know a good many faces, but none of them were people.
When she was tired of walking the restricted trails that Oliver’s instructions permitted her—what he called her stomping ground—she worked on The Scarlet Letter blocks. If she got tired of drawing, she read on the veranda, mainly books that Thomas Hudson, persistently thoughtful, sent her in her exile. If she was waiting for Oliver she kept to the side facing the trail and the southward spurs of mountain, but now and then, to surprise herself, she walked to the corner and looked down on the hills that collapsed toward the valley. She wrote many letters. A new issue of Scribner’s, with things in it by people who had once crowded the summer porch at Milton, was almost as precious as a letter from Augusta or from home.
Quiet black and white birds with rusty breasts worked among the bushes below her. Now and then one rose to an oak and blew a cheweeel cheweeeel into the still, dusty woods. That and the duck and cackle of quail was the only birdsong—a starvation diet after the robins, thrushes, and white throats of Milton summers.
Oliver was gone from before seven until after six, six days a week. She lived for the evenings and for Sundays. Every night after supper they sat together in the hammock and watched the sun leave the floating crest of the San Jose Mountains eastward, and the valley’s pool of dusty air thicken, darken, flare up, and fade. She felt, I imagine, both trapped with him and abjectly dependent on him. They both remarked on how much they seemed to hold hands.
I feel deeply grateful that these mountains do not close all round us. Across the valley we can look out into a vague misty distance, which is the way back to all we left behind.
In the twilight a strange fancy often comes to me that you are all there in the valley below us. Darkness broods over it, but here and there a light twinkles. I feel sure that you are all there, the Milton people and you and Thomas, all the dear ones who haunt my thoughts. It is a fancy I would not lose, for I am very near you all then.
This is a place to be very happy in—we are—we shall be—but there is a thought in common which we do not often express, but which is the undertone of our life here-that this is not our real home, that we do not belong here except as circumstances keep us.
Speak for yourself, Grandmother. I think you are putting into Grandfather’s head attitudes that were never there. He understood well enough that a mining engineer was a Westerner by profession. He was not slopping around in that steaming mine ten hours a day, and mapping its labyrinths in his spare time, and studying engineering texts and government reports after you went to bed, just so he could give it all up and go back to an East coast barren of every mineral except maybe asbestos. You commented often enough how ambitious he was, how hard he worked to make up for the handicap of an aborted education. I think he didn’t stress what your future was likely to be, because he was tender of your homesickness, but he understood it well enough. What he didn’t fully understand, because he was always absorbed in his job, was how dreary long the days were for you, how lonely and how isolated and how strange.
Don’t you know how we lose the sense of our own individuality when there is nothing to reflect it back upon us? These people here have so little conception of our world that sometimes I feel myself as if I must have dreamed it.
The few hours, comparatively, that Oliver and I spend together are like the bread of life by which I live through the rest. I have never said much to you about him, because I have already begun to take him for granted as we do all the good things. I have already forgotten to count the dreadful ways in which all this happiness might have been turned into hopeless misery. Even so little a thing as Oliver’s loving this country and wishing to spend his life here, would have counted up as a serious trouble after a while. As it is, our wistful memories of home make another bond between us.
By such devices she perverted his sympathy into agreement with her fantasy that the West for them was only an excursion. Meantime, every day was the same. Morning opened like a great eye, daylight spied interminably upon her habitual activities, evening closed down. The uninterrupted sunshine made her desperate; it was like something she was doomed to.
Everything was static, in suspension, withheld. She lived a sleep-walker’s life, except for the Sundays when Oliver could leave his map and his reports for a few hours and take her on picnics back into the mountain, or the afternoons when he brought home letters that bloomed for her like firelight on loved faces. Time hung unchanging, or with no more visible change than a slow reddening of poison oak leaves, an imperceptible darkening of the golden hills. It dripped like a slow percolation through limestone, so slow that she forgot it between drops. Nevertheless every drop, indistinguishable from every other, left a little deposit of sensation, experience, feeling. In thirty or forty years the accumulated deposits would turn my cultivated, ladylike, lively, talkative, talented, innocently snobbish grandmother into a Western woman in spite of herself.
Willingly or unwillingly, she collected experience and wrote it back East in letters. Perhaps she wrote so fully because she wanted to divert Augusta’s depression. Perhaps she was only indulging her own starved desire for talk.
3
In the early morning the light leaned on these eastward-facing mountains. She could see it gilding the ridges southward and making a moiré of the varying leaf-faces of oak, madrone, and bay in the gulches. The fogfall that lay along the crest in a cottony roll was as white as the clouds of a fairytale.
Only the heads of the men in the skip were visible from where she stood just outside the door of the shaft house: Oliver, t
wo of his young assistants, two timbermen, and a visiting engineer. The flat sun shone in the door and turned Oliver’s sunburned face to copper, the timbermen’s underground skins to pale brass. The candles on their hats burned with an almost invisible flame. Oliver was taller than the others, she could see him almost to the shoulders. Like someone leaving on a boat or train he smiled and waved. Stranger started forward, and she hung onto his collar.
There was a smell of woodsmoke and steam, the air still cringed from the whistle blast. A bell clinked; she saw Tregoning, the hoist man, reach for a lever. She stepped back a pace in the floury dust. The bell clinked again, Tregoning’s shoulder shoved forward, steam hissed. With a groan as heavy and reluctant as their motion, the two great wheels that rose as high as the shaft-house roof began to revolve. Smoothly the heads sank, Oliver’s last. A hand tossed upward, and she was looking through the empty shack with a black hole in its floor.
Still with her hand in Stranger’s collar, she went inside, up against the plank barrier, and looked down. A gray stir of movement was receding down there. She could see shapes defined by the candles that grew brighter as the skip sank, and then went dimmer, shrank to swimming points, and went out. A damp, warm wind blew up the shaft into her face.
She turned away, she kept her composure, she smiled back at the toothless hoist man and said something cheerful, she let go of Stranger’s collar and sent him wallowing up the trail ahead of her. But her heart was withered in her breast like a prune. She could not bear to think of him down there in the blackness, dropping his thousand-foot plumb lines, gluing his eye to the theodolite eyepiece while an assistant held a candle close, and while the bob, suspended in water to make its motion minimal, moved in its deep orbit hundreds of feet below and the wire which was all he had to measure by shifted its hairsbreadth left or right.
He disliked this surveying, not only because it kept him underground so much but because all work had to stop while the survey went forward. A blast, the passing of an ore car, could throw off his measurements and cause errors of many feet. When work was stopped, the men grumbled, and Oliver, who totted up their weekly production and hence their wages, might be doubly blamed. What was worse for her, if not for him, was that once he started on any leg of his survey he had to stay down till it was completed. The last time, he had been down for nearly twenty-four hours without a break.
He had sunk out of the world, or into it, and she was beached in the interminable sunshine. Ten long sunstruck hours until suppertime, and after that unpredictable further hours of dusk, dark, late reading, before he came home.
The sight of a Chinaman in a blue blouse and slippers, with a bundle of brush on his back and an ax in his hand, trotting down the trail with his pigtail jerking, made her step to one side. He passed her with one sidelong glitter of jet eyes, and left her shivering. The people here were not people. Except for Oliver, she was alone and in exile, and her heart was back where the sun rose.
Unending summer. It was hotter at the end of September than it had been in July. But the heat was more seen than felt, more hallucination than discomfort. It turned illusory even the things on which she had fixed in the attempt to make the strange world real. From her temperate veranda she now saw only void where the valley used to be-a gray, smoky void into which she peered, hunting distance and relief from the mirage of mountains that quivered around her with visible heat. The wind that breathed past her and moved the banal bright geraniums in their pots brought a phantasmal sound of bells, and ex pired again, tired as a sigh.
She contemplated a walk and gave up the idea at once. Out on the trails it would be too hot. Stranger was dug in like a barnyard fowl in the shady dust beside the porch. Despite all their efforts, he was still Oliver’s dog, not hers. He was obedient and friendly, but his interest woke only when Oliver came home, and he lay watching the trail for hours at a time.
Down the mountain, moving beyond a curtain of quivering air, she saw the stage coming, perhaps with letters. If she started in five minutes, she would arrive at the Cornish Camp post office at about the same time as the stage. But the post office was in the company store, where there were always loiterers-teamsters, drifters, men hunting work —whom Oliver did not want her to encounter alone. And Ewing, the manager of the store, was a man she thought insolent. She must wait another two hours, till Oliver came home, to know whether there was mail. If the truth were known, these days she always looked at his hands, for the gleam of paper, before she looked at his face.
Bells again, unmistakable. She went around the comer, where the mountain fell away and the veranda stood on posts ten feet high, and looked around the comer of Lizzie’s room to the hill behind. She could see the path, used only by the Mexican packers who brought wood down from the mountain, curving and disappearing among the red-barked madrones. The bells were plain and coming nearer.
Then from out of the madrones came a mule bearing an immense carga of split wood. His ears were down, his nose was down, he planted his small feet with reluctant, aggrieved deliberation, holding back against the weight and the steepness of the path, sliding a little, humped up behind, braced in front. The bell around his neck clunked and tunkled with every wincing step. Behind him came another, then another, then another, until there were eight in line; and behind them came an old Mexican with a sombrero on his head, a stick in his hand, and a red silk handkerchief around his neck; and behind him a younger Mexican, a helper, a Sancho, almost invisible in his nonentity.
The mules stopped. Their heads drooped, their ears waggled forward, they snuffed hopelessly at the dusty ground. The leader heaved out his sides and blew a great breath, stirring up dust. Clunk went his bell. The old Mexican had his hat in his hand, his brown face turned upward into the sun. He was saying something in Spanish. Since Susan’s Spanish lessons with Oliver’s assistant Mr. Hernandez had gone no further than four brief sessions, she caught only the word leño, and perhaps caught that only because of the burden the mules carried.
Pointing to her breast she said carefully, “¿Para me?”
“Si, señora.”
“Yes. Well, you may put it under the porch there, I know that’s where Mr. Ward wants it ”
“¿Como?”
By signs she made him understand. He had great theatrical gestures-swept on his sombrero, blasted Sancho with a volley of orders, fell upon one of the mules and began to loosen the hitch that held its load. The whole event suddenly acquired gaiety, it was an occasion, it so lifted the tempo of the listless afternoon that Susan ran inside and got her sketch pad and drew them as they worked. Sight of the growing pile of firewood, like the stacks her father used to stretch in October between two oaks down by the sheepfold, set her to thinking, as one might let his mind stray to the images of some secret vice, of the Franklin stove inside, polished like an art work, waiting for the time when all this sun would be quenched and Mrs. Oliver Ward could sit with her husband through long evenings by an open fire, preferably while blasts howled without. This was a girl who almost illustrated Snowbound, and should have.
The unloading and stacking took three quarters of an hour. When it was done, Sancho disappeared, vanished, stood on three legs among the hipshot mules. She imagined sores on his withers like the raw patches on theirs, and a stripe down his back and three or four stripes around his legs like some of them, as if there were zebras among their mutual ancestors.
The old Mexican again had his hat off. God knows how she looked to him up there on her high porch in her high-necked dress with a brooch pinned at the throat, her face rosy, her sketch pad in her hand. By that time she was well known as the lady who drew; many had met her on the trails carrying her pad and her little stool.
He said something. “¿Como?” she said, imitating him, and was shot to pieces by his reply, of which she understood not one word. Finally she comprehended that he wanted his pay. How much? ¿Cuanto? They counted it out for each other on tongues and fingers: cinco pesos. But when she had gone in for her purse and
come outside again she could not devise a way of handing the banknote to him. He was ten feet below her, the mountain fell away steeply, the wind had begun to blow. If it blew the bill into the brush he might never find it. The old man at once understood. With a gesture out of opera he untied the handkerchief from around his neck, rolled it into a ball, and tossed it up to her.
Susan made an instinctive move to catch it, and then pulled back her hands. The handkerchief fell on the veranda floor. She stared down at the craning old man, whose brown neck, with the handkerchief removed, showed deep creases in which the sweat of his labor had deposited channels of dirt.
“Lizzie!” Susan said.
Lizzie came out through the kitchen door, and the old Mexican’s admiration was doubled. Another beautiful one. This house of the engineer was full of them. With her purse open, Susan said, “Lizzie, will you pick up his handkerchief, please?”
Lizzie picked it up, Susan laid a five-dollar bill in its center, and Lizzie folded it and tied its comers and dropped it into the old man’s upstretched hand. “Gracias, much’ grac’,” he said, and then something else. Expectant, he stood looking upward.
“What is it?” Susan said. “What do you want? ¿Que ... ?”
Angle of Repose Page 13
