Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

  She looked from the hammock to her drawing and back to the hammock, estimating the grace of the young bodies curved in the netting, heavy as carried cats. The sweet treble of Betsy’s voice was the only sound. She was reading The Birds’ Christmas Carol. The two lay facing different ways, their feet entangled. Agnes, with her wide eyes open and glazed with imagining, kept pulling out strands of silvery hair to arm’s length as if measuring them.

  Susan worked with her lips pressed together, her brows tightened a little under the mouse-colored bangs. There was a fist of hair at the back of her head, a little too tightly knotted to be becoming; but the head itself was small and shapely, the neck delicate, the profiled face cut like a cameo. In her high-necked dress with its leg-of-mutton sleeves, its pinched-in waist, its overskirt and bustle, she was antiquely attractive, the portrait of a lady, a tidy, fastidious lady who looked younger than she was.

  Nevertheless, as I reconstruct her there, there was in her figure some quality of tension, a certain stiffness suggesting strain or anxiety too pervasive to be forgotten even in the absorption of work. She sat frowning down on her drawing, which reproduced in small space the things that filled her eye—the girls in the curve of hammock, the heavy pillars, the misty desert suggested beyond. Across the bottom of the sheet, as if to keep herself reminded of her subject, she had scrawled in a hurried, untidy hand, A Hot Day on a Western Ranche.

  Her head turned slightly, she listened. Sounds of a trotting horse. She laid her pencil on the pad and the pad on the table, and stood up. “All right, children. That’s enough for this morning. Thank you for being good.”

  But they looked up, her two very different daughters, with identical looks of protest on their faces and an identical question in their mouths. “Can’t we finish it?”

  “So sad a story?”

  “Yes, Mother!”

  “Ollie’s been at his lessons for an hour. Nellie will be wondering what’s happened to you.”

  “Just this chapter!”

  “All right. Then off you go.”

  Boots came in from the back, loud on the tile floors, then soundless on a rug, then loud again. She turned, her face full of an intense question, to confront Oliver coming across the dining room. His face was weathered, rugged, and hot. He had pushed back his rancher’s hat on his head, above the red line that circled his forehead. His mustache hid his mouth, the squint wrinkles fanning out from the corners of his eyes gave him a look of smiling, but the look he sent ahead of him through the doorway was not a smiling one. The light treble of Betsy’s reading voice went on as the two of them looked at each other. He moved his mouth and lifted his shoulders.

  “Ah!” she said-a harsh, angry exclamation. “He won’t.”

  Again the delicate lift of the shoulders.

  Behind her she heard Betsy’s voice round off to a theatrical conclusion. The book clapped shut. She turned. “Now off to your lessons.”

  Betsy rose, but Agnes lolled and hung in the hammock. “Do we have to now? Can’t I go down to the windmill and see Hallie?”

  “And miss your lessons?”

  “Just for a minute?”

  “No, it’s too hot,” Susan said. “Anyway, the last time you went down to the windmill you had to have your mouth washed out.”

  “I won’t listen!”

  “Come on, you little whortleberry,” her father said. “You go tell Nellie she wants you. Tomorrow you can ask Hallie up for the fireworks. I brought back a whole saddlebag full.”

  “Goodie!” Betsy said. “Can I shoot off a rocket?”

  “Maybe. Depending on how good you are all day.”

  “Oh, I’ll be very good,” Betsy said. “I’ll be the best. Can I shoot off more than one?”

  “You wouldn’t want to be a pig.”

  “Yes I would.”

  She hung onto his hand and swung by it. “Not you,” he said. “There’s less pig in you than in anybody around. Now how about those lessons?”

  She swung a last swing all around him and ran out, but she had barely let go before Agnes had wrapped herself around his leg and put her two feet on his boot. He carried her around a few steps that way. Her upturned face was a baby replica of the strained face of her mother. “I’m not a whortleberry,” she said.

  “Well it’s news to me. How would anybody know? You look like a whortleberry.”

  “I look like a girl!”

  “You look like a blue-eyed whortleberry to me. Or a whortle-eyed blueberry?”

  He lifted her, kissed her, set her down, turned her three times, and spanked her off toward Nellie’s schoolroom, but she swerved, looking provocatively over her shoulder, and began hopping on one foot from tile to tile down the piazza. At each post she put out her flat hand and touched the side face, the inside face, then the other side face. Along the balustrade she patted the adobe every third hop. She did not put her left foot to the ground, but turned the end in three quick hops, three pats, and came back hopping, still with her left foot withered upward, carefully patting wall, window sill, doorframe, and made it back to him and patted his hip, home free, and fell around his leg again. She tried to climb aboard his instep but he lifted her off.

  “You’re a witch,” he said, “but I’m the head wizard. Shall I put you under a spell? Shall I fix you so you can’t come to the fireworks until you spell imbrication? Or should I make it trapezoidal?”

  “Not eicher!”

  “Then you’d better get on to Nellie.”

  She fled, screaming with laughter, and he looked up to find the older, tenser version of her face waiting for him. He made a smile, he gestured with his head at the drawing pad. “Working. I guess if the world was going to end tomorrow you’d be hurrying to finish something before Gabriel blew.”

  “I must!” she said. “How else will we live? Tell me what happened.”

  “He won’t sell.”

  “Not even the one.”

  “No.”

  “And there’s nothing we can do.”

  “We could sue. I doubt it’d do any good. I’ve got no proofs.”

  “Your word ought to be proof enough against the word of that ...”

  “You don’t get far suing a lawyer in a town like this.”

  “Then we must buy someone else’s claim!”

  “Any claim with water is going to cost plenty. We haven’t got it.”

  “Isn’t there any land not filed on?”

  “Not under the Susan.”

  “There must be something we can do!”

  Oliver laughed through his nose. “I can keep my eyes open and when somebody fails to complete his improvements I can pre-empt him.”

  “It’s hardly a thing to joke about.”

  “I wasn’t joking. It’s about the only thing I could do.”

  “What if we gave them a farm out of our land? What do we need a thousand acres for?”

  His eyes were steady and-she thought-pitying. “I’d do it in a minute. But what good is land under the Big Ditch if the Big Ditch is dry? What can John do with three hundred and twenty acres of sagebrush?”

  “What can we?” she said, and turned away bitterly, not wanting him to see her face. “Oh, I had set my heart on having Bessie here! I wanted the children to have some companions whose mouths weren’t filthy with barnyard talk.”

  “I was thinking some of letting the Malletts go. We’ll probably have to anyway. Bessie and John could have their cabin, and maybe my office for an extra room, till the company gets straightened out and we can finish the Big Ditch. Then they could take their pick of our land.”

  “Finish the Big Ditch,” she said, and bent her head to stare at the red tile floor. Her hands were tucked up in her armpits as if they were cold. Her feet took her down the piazza, along the balustrade where Agnes had hopped a few minutes before, and across the end and up along the wall. Her hands were tight in her armpits, her head down, her face set and flushed. She was not one who easily went pale, even during great stress; it was her ro
sy complexion, as much as anything, that made her look ten years younger than she was. Stopping at the table where her drawing lay, she raised her head and gave him a glance of scorn and misery. “Of course,” she said, “when the Big Ditch is finished, then the stock will be valuable, too.”

  “Sue ...”

  “Oh, I can’t bear itl”

  “Sue, that stock’s still got a chance to be worth thirty times what they paid for it. General Tompkins hasn’t given up. Neither have I. We’ve got assets to burn. The Susan’s producing a little revenue, the Big Ditch is well started. They’re crazy if they pull out now. They’ll reorganize, buy out the ones that want to quit. If they stick a little longer they’re in clover. The project’s just as good as it ever was.”

  “Yes,” she said on an indrawn breath. “Just about.”

  In anger he took her by the shoulders. “Susie, you too?”

  Unyielding, stiff in his hands, she cried into his face, “Oh, how could I help it! Eight years of exile, eight years of living on hope. For what? Till now it’s been all right, I could put up with it, I had faith in it....”

  Her voice gave out, she was hung up on his eyes. He let go of her arms. “Did you?” he said.

  “What? What do you ...”

  Very still, he stood before her. His face was weathered like a cow-hand’s, his fingers hung half closed at his sides, constricted by their calluses. Almost whispering, he said, “Did you? Did you have faith in it? Did you have faith in me?”

  As if he had slapped her, she stepped back. “That’s not fair!”

  “Isn’t it? Sometimes I’ve wondered.” He stared into her eyes, he smiled a bleak smile, he shrugged. “Not that I’ve deserved much faith.”

  “Ohhh!” she said, wagging her head back and forth, her eyes on the floor. “You speak of faith and trust. How much better off we’d all be if you hadn’t trusted that Burns. Then at least Bessie and John would have their land. We wouldn’t have dragged them completely under with us.”

  Abstractedly his eyes went to the drawing on the table. He studied it, read its caption: A Hot Day on a Western Ranche. His eyes lifted, went outward through the door between the piazza pillars, across the sunstruck lawn, past the withering poplars, across the sage, to the mountains. The sage pressed in upon them from every side, they looked out upon it as people on a raft would look out on the sea.

  His eyes came inside again, he regarded her soberly. The fans at the comers of his eyes tightened, he seemed to smile. But he was not smiling. “The fault’s mine,” he said. “I should have taken those papers down myself, I knew how important they were to all of us. I just let myself get too busy, I was going too many ways at once. I’ve got no excuse. But this general business of trusting people, I don’t know. I doubt if I can change. I believe in trusting people, do you see? At least till they prove they can’t be trusted. What kind of life is it when you can’t?”

  There was a heavy, questioning, underlined meaning in his words. She stared up at him wordlessly, her face as set and hard as so pretty a face could be. Her mouth, which was usually firm in a precise, pleasant expression tilting always toward a smile, was twisted. Their eyes met, held, wavered, held again. The rosy color drained very slowly from her face.

  5

  It was July 4, evening, the end of a long hot day. The piazza was still thick with heat, the pillars and balustrade were as warm as banked stoves. Wait, she told herself bitterly. In ten years the trees will have grown up enough to shade the house in the late afternoon.

  But the air, warm or not, was fresher than inside, and there were tendrils of coolness wandering in off the lawn, where Oliver had set the hose cart to irrigate the grass. Suspiciously, as if expecting to smell some sort of incriminating evidence, she sniffed at the mixed odors of hot day and cooling evening—sage, dust, firecrackers, the wet wood of the waterwagon like the smell of an old rowboat, and among these a freshness of wet grass and a drift of fragrance from the yellow climber at the corner. The northwest had cooled from its hot gold, the hills were black against it. But she looked at their silhouette without pleasure, hardly seeing it, intent on the shapes of trouble in her mind.

  It was so quiet that she could hear the creak of buggy wheels receding far down the lane toward the road, and the voices of the girls surprisingly clear and close-seeming, though they must have been almost a half mile away. Her first act after waving them good-bye had been to rush into her stuffy bedroom and get out of dress, corset, shoes, everything confining, and into a dressing gown. In her bare feet, shaking the loose gown to get air to her released body, she stood in the doorway and listened to her receding family until she could hear their sounds no more. There was a secret small gurgle of water from the hose, and then in a moment like a sigh the last of the water ran out and that sound too ceased. She listened for the windmill, whose clanging and creaking were as much a part of their days and nights as the wind itself, but could not hear it. The blades must be hanging like a great open flower in the twilight.

  She let her weight down, heavy and tired, into the hammock. Bats wove back and forth, utterly soundless, across the openings between the piazza pillars. At first she could see them against the sky, erratic and flickering and swift; then she couldn’t be sure whether she still saw them or whether she only sensed them as movement across the dusk. The house behind her was as dark and empty as herself. Her eyes were fixed on the framed view of mesa, black hills, saffron sky. The last brightness of already-gone day burned darkly on a cloud that went slate-color as she watched. She saw a star, then another.

  Utterly cut off, sunk into the West, cut off behind arid hills, she lay thinking backward to another piazza and the smell of other roses. It was hard to believe that they no longer existed, not for her-the old house of her great-grandfather sold to a surly farmhand grown up, the vines of the porch now screening his evening relaxation, the kitchen “fixed up” by his vulgar and ambitious wife. No home there any longer, parents dead, Bessie wronged and ruined, herself adrift in the hopeless West, Thomas and Augusta farther from her in fame and associations even than they were in miles. To sit with them just one evening, an evening such as this! To sit with them even here, on this barren piazza! She acknowledged that all her preparations in this house had had them in mind. When it was ready, when they could be induced, she would offer herself to their love all over again, in her new setting, and prove to them that her years of exile had changed her not at all.

  Noiseless as a flower opening, a rocket burst above the hills. She sat up, watching the white stars curve and fall. Then BOOMI All the night air between her and the town, two and a half miles of it, trembled with the delayed report.

  Pshawl she started to think They won’t be in time, the children will miss it, and then remembered that from out on the mesa they would be able to see the whole thing as if from a balcony. They would do better to stay out, rather than try to find a place among the crowds drunk on statehood and spread-eagle oratory and worse. The thought of that vulgar little city, and all its sharpers, trimmers, and hopeful naïfs seething with the importance of their moment in history, crawled on her skin like a spider. She heard herself saying to Oliver’s waiting, sober, questioning face, “You go, take Nellie and the children. It means nothing to me.”

  What she had meant-and after what they had said to one another in the past two days he could hardly have misunderstood her-was “None of it means anything to me any more. I’m sick and disspirited and without hope. We have bled our lives away in this desert like that watercart draining into the sand.”

  “You ought to come,” he had said. “It’ll take your mind off things.”

  “I’m tired. I’d rather stay here.”

  She could see in his eyes, in the tasting movement of his lips under the mustache, that he felt the blame she could not help laying on him. But she could not make herself smile, or lay a hand on his arm, or send him away with an injunction to enjoy himself.

  There was a long, probing meeting of eyes. “N
o quarter,” he said.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  He let it go. “I’d stay here with you, but the children are counting on it, and there’s nobody else to take them.”

  “You mustn’t think of not going.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Sorry, of course. And what good did it do? He could not be sorrier than she.

  Another rocket seared across the sky at an angle and bloomed with hanging green balls. Another went up through the green shower and burst into an umbrella of red. Then three together, all white. Then one that winked hotly but did not flower. BOOMI went the cushioning air. BOOM! BOOM BOOM BOOM! BOOM!

  It was hot and close in the hammock. She left it and sat on the warm adobe of the balustrade. Above the town, streaks of smoke were lighted by the rocket bursts. Under the sodden booming she heard a continuous musketry of firecrackers, big and little. She could imagine the boys and drunken men who would be darting around through the crowds on the Capitol grounds throwing cannon crackers under the feet of tied horses and dressed-up girls, and into the buggies of the dignified. Pandemonium, a foolishness costing thousands of dollars. Before morning there would be runaways, clothes and buildings set on fire, fingers blown off, eyes put out. Her family were infinitely better off watching from the mesa.

  And yet from a distance how beautiful! There was a colored mist all above the unseen city, as if the smoke of the explosions were now lighted by fires from below. The torchlight parade. The so-called Governor’s Guard, including that wretched Bums, would be parading in their uniforms. She stood up, trying to see better, bracing herself against the warm pillar, and from up there heard, faint and far off, sweetened by distance, carrying wonderfully on the still air, the sound of the band.