“So did she. In a pinch she couldn’t help herself.”
“He let her lead him by the nose. Was he sort of soft?”
“He was no good at the talkee-talkee,” I said. “He loved his wife and child. He had just been, for a Victorian, exceptionally well loved. It wasn’t an easy decision. It could have gone either way.”
“I suppose,” Shelly said. “I guess I don’t understand this home business of hers, either. She’s not only a culture hound, she’s got a terrible property consciousness. What would be the matter with traveling around? When Larry and I were hitching, I loved it. That gypsy hobo life, that’s it. I know a pair who hitch hiked all the way from Singapore to London. I’d like to do that. I don’t dig these home bodies.”
“Times change,” I said, not without irony. “Why didn’t you and your husband stay on the road, if it was so great?”
She was at her knuckle again. Slurp. Sidelong flash of eyes. “He’s not my husband, of course. That’s for the family only.”
“All right,” I said. “The man you travel with, then. Why aren’t you still traveling?”
She threw her hands up in the air and leaned back, stretching, arching her chest upward. Ohne Büstenhalter again. “Yakh!” she said. “It did get a little hairy, sleeping in the washrooms of Canadian tourist parks in the rain. But I’d do it again. I mean, you’re never that free again.” She stood up and slapped the seat of her pants as if the floor had been a dusty roadside. “Anyway I take it back about the sex scene. Even if you’d spelled it out, I guess it wouldn’t have been a climax to much of anything.”
“Is it ever?” I said. “No, it was just sort of like everything else.”
7
Grandmother wanted her son to grow up, as she had, knowing some loved place down to the last woodchuck hole. The rural picturesque was not only an artistic manner with her, it was a passionate conviction. She had been weaned on the Romantic poets and the Hudson River school, and what the West had so far taught her was an extension of those: beyond Bryant lay Joaquin Miller, beyond Thomas Cole spread a vast wild grandeur supervised by Bierstadtian peaks. It was never the West as landscape that she resisted, only the West as transience and social crudity. And those she might transform.
There was a real nester in that woman. When she got flirting around with a twig or piece of string in her bill she was not to be balked. In September they began the addition to the cabin-a kitchen, bedroom, and vast rock fireplace designed more for social evenings than for domestic comfort. “Ye’ll have no hate in the house,” said the reluctant Irish mason who laid up the stones, and delighted her with his omen in brogue.
The curtained bedroom angle that Conrad Prager had called the upstairs was decurtained and christened Pricey’s Corners. It held the bookcase, the rocker, and a small table equipped with a stereopticon and two hundred frontier views, the bread and butter gift of Thomas Donaldson. I have the views here, or most of them-brown, mounted on stiff cardboard with beveled and gilded edges, the twin photographs curving in a little like weakly crossing eyes: the early West as caught in the lenses of O’Sullivan, Hillers, Savage, Haynes, Jackson-a little musty, spotted with time, but still, when I hold one of them to that binocular viewer, touched with the wonder and excitement of a new country. Along with them in their box is Donaldson’s ponderous report on the Public Domain, a work as neglected by the Congress that commissioned it as King predicted it would be, but a benchmark in the nation’s understanding of itself, the sort of contribution to disinterested knowledge that my grandfather would have liked to make. These things are about all that is left of the Leadville years.
Early in November, their eyes watchful of a leaden sky that dusted them with snow, a characteristic Leadville buggy-full went over the pass, accompanied by a half dozen riders. The riders were of the class of young, well-born, and well-trained men who had recently contributed twenty-seven graduates of top technical schools to the procession carrying General Vinton, son of Dr. Vinton of Trinity Church, to his Leadville grave. The buggy contained, besides Susan and Oliver, his remote cousin W. S. Ward, W.S.’s older brother Ferd, called the Wizard of Wall Street, and Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., a man who has no historical personality for me except for the somehow awful fact that as a boy of twelve or so he was posted on a hill by his father so that he could watch the slaughter at Shiloh.
If Grant had been equipped to hear the Doppler Effect of time, it might have made him as uneasy to take that ride with Ferd Ward as it had to sit through a battle. It might have made them all uneasy. Before too long, Ferd Ward as General Grant’s financial adviser, would utterly ruin the ex-hero, and shred away the last rag of his dignity and reputation. He would also, as one of the syndicate that owned the Adelaide mine, put a kink in my grandparents’ lives. He was not a man it was quite safe to know. But Grandmother in her innocence thought it rather splendid that Mr. Ward was going over the range with them and that he would be on the same train as herself as far as Chicago. He was a testimony to their rise, he announced the circles that by his professional competence Oliver had earned the right to move in. This time, when she left him on a station platform, she would leave him solidly established, and she would go East without the taste of failure in her mouth.
In every way this returning was different from the last. Despite the prospect of another winter apart, no tears, no dreary thoughts. In Chicago, Ferd Ward and Mr. Grant took her to a banquet honoring General Grant, and she capped her social season by shaking that conquering hand and looking into those sad, streaked eyes. She met General Sherman and a half dozen other generals of the Army of Tennessee, and she had an animated ten-minute conversation with the principal speaker, Mr. Samuel Clemens. These items are not important. They have for me, as a historian, a sort of corroborating charm: they prove that my grandmother did indeed live in time, among people.
Through the fading-autumn she came back to Milton, and after a day’s dismay that her child did not know her, and after a few days of unpacking, washing, talking, and preparing, found herself ready for a winter’s work. There was nothing to hinder-Augusta and Thomas were still abroad. She had finished the Louisa Alcott blocks and had no other contracts for the moment. Without planning it, she found herself beginning a novel about her grandfather, the Quaker preacher who by his abolitionism had got the whole Milton meeting set down.
Writing books about grandparents seems to run in the family.
From the parental burrow Leadville was so far away it was only half real. Unwrapping her apple-cheeked son after a sleigh ride down the lane, she had difficulty in believing that she had ever lived anywhere but here.
She felt how the placid industry of her days matched the placid industry of all the days that had passed over that farm through six generations. Present and past were less continuous than synonymous. She did not have to come at her grandparents, as I do, through a time machine. Her own life and that of the grandfather she was writing about showed her similar figures in an identical landscape. At the milldam where she had learned to skate she pulled her little boy on his sled, and they watched a weasel snow-white for winter flirt his black-tipped tail in and out of the mill’s timbers. She might have been watching with her grandfather’s eyes.
Watching a wintry sky die out beyond black elms, she could not make her mind restore the sight of the Sawatch at sunset from her cabin door, or the cabin itself, or the smokes of Leadville, or Oliver, or their friends. Who were those glittering people intent on raiding the continent for money or for scientific knowledge? What illusion was it that she bridged between this world and that? She tried to think whether she would possibly believe in Sam Emmons if he appeared at her Milton door in his white buckskins. She paused sometimes, cleaning the room she had always called Grandma’s Room, and thought with astonishment of Oliver’s great revolver lying on the dresser.
Milton was dim and gentle, molded by gentle lives, the current of change as slow through it as the seep of water through a bog. More than once she thought ho
w wrong those women in San Francisco had been, convinced that their old homes did not welcome them on their return. Last year she would have agreed. Now, with the future assured, the comfortable past asserted itself unchanged. Even the signs of mutability that sometimes jolted her—the whiteness of her mother’s hair, the worn patience of Bessie’s face, the morose silences of her brother-in-law, now so long and black that the women worried about him in low voices-could not more than briefly interrupt the deep security and peace.
Need for her husband, like worry over him, was tuned low, and Augusta’s continued absence aroused only an infrequent, pleasant wistfulness. They had not seen each other in nearly four years. Absorbed in her child and her book, sunk in her affection for home, she could go whole days without mentioning or thinking Augusta’s name.
I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places. I doubt that anyone of Rodman’s generation could comprehend the home feelings of someone like Susan Ward. Despite her unwillingness to live separately from her husband, she could probably have stayed on indefinitely in Milton, visited only occasionally by an asteroid husband. Or she could have picked up the old home and remade it in a new place. What she resisted was being the wife of a failure and a woman with no home.
When frontier historians theorize about the uprooted, the lawless, the purseless, and the socially cut-off who settled the West, they are not talking about people like my grandmother. So much that was cherished and loved, women like her had to give up; and the more they gave it up, the more they carried it helplessly with them. It was a process like ionization : what was subtracted from one pole was added to the other. For that sort of pioneer, the West was not a new country being created, but an old one being reproduced; in that sense our pioneer women were always more realistic than our pioneer men. The modems, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called “merely cultural,” not even living in traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!
Oliver’s letters told her little-she wondered often how she had happened to marry a man for whom words were so difficult. A few crumbs of news leaked through. Ferd Ward’s son, sent out to work at the Adelaide, had been spending more time at the monte tables than at the office. He had borrowed two hundred dollars from Oliver and smaller sums from Frank. Now last payday Pricey had found the cash box short by more than a hundred, and young Ward, challenged, had admitted “borrowing” it. Oliver had written his father. Nothing else to report except that the DR&G was making progress up the valley of the Arkansas. She wouldn’t have to come over Mosquito Pass when she came. Frank and Pricey sent regards.
She was provoked with him for letting himself be imposed upon, though she could not have said how he should have avoided lending money to Ferd Ward’s scapegrace son. She wrote him telling him to make an immediate claim on the father, to let no time elapse. There had been rumors in the papers that the Wizard of Wall Street was shaky. She told him how well Ollie had been, how she was coming on with her novel. She reported scraps of Augusta’s travels in Sicily. She walked to the post office to mail her letter, and returned to work through the afternoon. It gave her a miser’s pleasure to watch the pile of manuscript grow. Her grandfather’s life absorbed hers.
For a long time. She had finished the novel and sold it to Century as a five-part serial, and the orchards were beginning to pop their buds, by the time his letter came saying she could now get in by rail. At once, like a milldam opened, her ponded life began to flow again.
This time, conceiving herself to be leaving neither on a picnic nor on a visit, but for good, she made the hard effort to disconnect herself from the past, throwing away some things, giving away others, packing a few to take along. Not without tears, she cleared her father’s attic of her stored leavings, believing that those who would go on living there deserved that space, and that she would be healthier for the finality of the move.
It was not much she took-some dresses, some linens, some silver, some hope chest items that would let her compete with the new wives on Ditch Walk. A box of books for the education of her son and the pleasure of Frank and Pricey. A few prized objects that childhood, family, friendship, and marriage had washed like chunks of amber on her beach—Thomas’s Japanese teapot and the little Madonna, all of Augusta’s letters, the Fiji mat and the olla with which Oliver had welcomed her to New Almaden. The rug of wildcat skins on which Ollie had learned to crawl. Two trunks full, no more.
The beaver skins that Oliver had sent her from Deadwood were a trouble. They had always been a trouble, baffling and recalcitrant. She knew no one who could work raw furs. To try to make a coat of them, as Oliver in his innocence had suggested, would have been like making a dress out of Emmons’s white buckskins; she would have felt like Pocahontas in it. To take them back west would be to confuse some issue that she did not want confused. In the end, she and Bessie managed to make three of them into a muff and a little hat. The rest of them she gave to Bessie.
There was also the elk head. Like the beaver skins, it had never had a function in this domesticated place. She had never got over wondering why he had sent such a thing. Maybe he wanted to keep before her some aspect of himself that he did not want her to forget, though that is my guess, not hers. But what to do with it? Anywhere in the house it would have been grotesquely incongruous and out of scale. It would have denied the validity of her family’s life. Their decision to hang it on a beam in the barn was an acknowledgment of how little it belonged. At least, there, it was out of the way. She supposed that men friends of her father’s took a certain interest in it, and once she had seen John Grant standing and looking at it with an expression on his dark dissatisfied face as if he doubted its authenticity.
One purpose it had served: she had used it to impress on Ollie the idea of his father, whom he had completely forgotten. Perhaps in some way known to savages and children he thought it was his father. That was why she took him out to see it the afternoon before they were to start West.
In the cobwebbed dusk the great rack branched upward into shadow. The dusty muzzle was lifted, the dusty eyeballs stared into the mow’s darkness. It did not acknowledge the tame-animal smells of the barn; it had an air of scorning the hay on which such animals fed. Susan, with her son held against her legs, felt how it ignored her, and she had a twinge of the shame she had felt when her father and John un-crated the box, big enough to have held a piano, and exposed this joke, or whatever it was, this inappropriate souvenir of her husband’s life in the Black Hills. A boy’s insensitive whim, she eventually concluded, as jarring in its way as that great horse pistol he had brought to his courting.
Under her hands she felt her little boy breathe respect in its presence.
Lightly she said, “Well, so now we’ll say good-bye to Daddy’s elk. Tell it, ‘Good-bye, Daddy’s elk, tomorrow we’re going on a train to live with Daddy. Daddy will meet us where the train stops, and we’ll go through the mountains to our house made out of logs, and when I’m a little bigger I’ll have a pony and go riding with Daddy or Frank or Pricey, and away off in the mountains where the flowers grow higher than the stirrups we may stop to rest sometime and see an elk like you carrying his antlers into the timber, or hear an elk like you bugling from away-way up the mountain.’ Can you tell him that?”
“That’s too much.”
“Then just say, ‘Good-bye, Daddy’s elk.’”
“Good-bye, Daddy’s elk.”
>
“Will you like seeing your Daddy again?”
“Yes.”
She saw by his wondering stare that he did not understand what she was asking him. Not sure she understood herself, she hugged him hard and picked up the lantern, holding it high to give him a last look at the great creature on the beam.
The varnished muzzle, coated with eighteen months of dust, shone as if wet in the light. A phantasmal fire glinted in the eyeballs. It might have bugled at any moment.
“Wasn’t that odd?” she said late that night when she was sitting with Bessie and John before the fire. “It simply gleamed at us, as if the talk about going to the mountains had wakened it from its sleep. Just hearing the word Leadville brought it to life for a second. Oh, now I feel myself coming to life, too! I can hardly wait to get back there and make a home in that wild beautiful place.”
John Grant had been sitting slumped, studying the toe of his boot. His chin was against his chest, his eyes were narrowed almost shut. Now suddenly he opened his eyes wide and shot her a look that stabbed. His face was full of hatred. With the years he had grown more and more censorious, he rarely spoke except in scorn or dislike, he seemed always quarreling with something inside his head.
The black eyes blazed at her only a moment before they slitted again. For another second he brooded upon the swinging toe of his boot. Then he uncrossed his legs, stood up, and left the room. They heard his steps on the porch, then on the path that led to the lane and back to his own house.
Holding her embroidery frame in her lap, Bessie sat still. Then impatiently she shook her head and started a shining tear-track down each cheek.
“What did I say?” Susan said, bewildered. “Bessie, I’m sorry!”
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