Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [115]
He cocked his head, with his hand raised, for only a second, long enough for her to hear something, she couldn’t tell what-perhaps only the empty roaring of the sky. He dropped his hand, he threw a look right, then left. The buggy sagged and rolled a half wheel backward as he leaped onto the step. At that instant appeared around the upper bend a pair of trotting horses, then another pair, then another, then the rocking cradle of the stage. She saw sparks clash from rock under the tires. To her horrified eyes it seemed a runaway, out of control.
Oliver’s whip cracked on the rump of the black horse, then the bay, the black again. Susan grabbed for the dash. They jerked wildly in toward the cliff, among the blocks of stone. And there was not room, she knew it with a certainty that froze her mind.
The sick horse, on the inside, floundered among the rocks and deep snow. Oliver lashed, lashed, lashed it–oh, how could he? She screamed and grabbed for his whip arm; he shook her off without even looking at her. The left wheels reared up, climbed, crashed down, climbed again; the buggy tilted so steeply that she hung on in frantic fear of sliding straight off under the hoofs and wheels. Oliver’s hand shot out and grabbed her. She screamed again, the air was full of a sound like a high wind. There was a smoke of horse breath, a roar and rumble, a close, tense, voiceless rush, and the stage passed her so close that if she had had her arm extended it might have been torn off. Glaring up into the dangerous shadow as it thundered by, she saw a lean, hook-nosed face, a figure with feet braced against the dash, lines that hummed stiff as metal. And she saw the stage driver’s queer, small, gritted smile.
Still hanging onto her arm, but leaning far inward toward the cliff like a sailor high-siding in a blow, Oliver guided the buggy up over a last rock to a bumpy landing in the road. The air still reeked with the hot smell of horse and the spark odor of iron tires on stone. The noise of the stage diminished behind and below them. They turned to watch it go.
“God Almighty,” Oliver said, and slid back into the seat beside her. “You all right?”
“I think so.”
“Too close.”
She was staring in pain at the sick horse. It tottered on its legs–she could see the deep trembling that ran from pastern to knee. Its nose went clear to the ground, it shuddered and began to sink. Instantly Oliver lashed it harshly with the whip, lashed its mate, leaped to the ground and kept on lashing. The horse tottered, strained, was dragged forward, the buggy crawled painfully upward. Susan sat white and trembling, hating his cruelty, hating the pain and exhaustion of the sick beast, hating the heartless mountains, the brutal West.
Just at this point in Grandmother’s reminiscences there is a somewhat high-flown paragraph:
The mountains of the Great Divide are not, as everyone knows, born treeless, though we always think of them as above timberline with the eternal snows on their heads. They wade up through ancient forests and plunge into canyons tangled up with water-courses and pause in little gem-like valleys and march attended by loud winds across high plateaus, but all such incidents of the lower world they leave behind them when they begin to strip for the skies: like the Holy Ones of old, they go up alone and barren of all circumstance to meet their transfiguration.
I can’t help reading that as more than a literary flourish; I want to read it as a perception of Western necessity, something deeper than scenery. Something must have told her, as they dragged over the summit and down to English George’s, that character as well as mountains had to strip for the skies. She must have known that a Thomas Hudson, despite his urbanity, uprightness, and delicacy of feeling, would not have got that dying horse in motion fast enough to save them, or got it on over the summit to the place of help. Almost before she had stopped screaming and pulling at his hard whip arm, she felt shame. It was his physical readiness, his unflusterable way of doing what was needed in a crisis, that she most respected in him: it made him different from the men she had known. In remembering the episode years later, she makes a veiled acknowledgment of the respect that at the time, upset and sulky, she begrudged.