Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [178]
“I’m at fault, yes. I should have written. Thee has a r-right to be upset. But haven’t I too? D-doesn’t it upset a wife who is staying home and working and h-holding things together to hear that her h-husband isn’t doing at all what she–what she thought he was doing, what they’d agreed he’d do, but is out, is off in some wild impossible scheme to bring water to two, three, what is it, three hundred thousand? acres of desert. Didn’t I deserve to know?”
“That wasn’t quite the same thing.”
“But it concerned us all, just as much.”
“Sue, I just had to be sure, first.”
“Sure!” she cried. “What kind of word is that? Sure! I didn’t write you about the baby because I thought you were hunting up just the right place, some deep mine where there would be a future and we could all live. I didn’t want you to be diverted. And all the time you . . .”
“I doubt there is any such place,” Oliver said. “You and the children couldn’t have lived in any of the camps I was in, and none of them have a future.”
“Then you should have written and told me. How long have you been–fooling around with this irrigation scheme? Months, apparently. And not a word to me. Were you afraid, or ashamed, or what?”
“I told you. I had to be sure.”
Angrily she stared at him. He stood before her filled with an idiotic confidence, a county-fair Moses with his sleeves rolled up, ready to smite the rock. If he didn’t throw away his foolish staff and quit dreaming, he would humiliate her and himself, and justify every doubt her friends had ever had of him.
“I wrote you the minute I was sure we could pull it off,” he said.
He made her shake her head, he jarred out of her some hard laughter. “How can you say such a thing? How can you be sure you can pull it off, as you say? It would take millions of dollars.”
“Not right away. We’ll do it in stages.”
“Each stage taking only half a million.”
“Listen,” he said, and took her by the wrist, scowling down on her. Then he smoothed out the scowl and made it into a smile, he coaxed her with his eyes. “Come here.” He led her to the foot of the basket. The breeze from the window stirred the baby’s fine pale hair, and Susan reached to pull the sash clear down. Outside, though the August sunshine was full and hot, weather was building up. She caught a glimpse of thunderheads off beyond the river, and a far flicker of lightning, too far away for thunder. Oliver held her by the wrist, looking down at the sleeping baby.
“Do you think you can bring her up?” he said. “Can you make a woman of that baby?”
“What kind of mother would I be if I didn’t think so?”
“You’re confident.”
“I hope so. I think so. Yes, why?”
“Will you believe me when I tell you I’m just as confident I can carry water to that desert?”
She saw in his face that he had contracted the incurable Western disease. He had set his cross-hairs on the snowpeak of a vision, and there he would go, triangulating his way across a bone-dry future, dragging her and the children with him, until they all died of thirst. “I believe you’re confident,” she said. “I know I’m not.”
He led her to the bed and made her sit down; he drew from the pocket of his coat, hanging on the bedpost, a brochure in a green cover. I have a copy of it here. “The Idaho Mining and Irrigation Company,” it says. Inside, on the title page, fellaheen in loincloths are carrying water in pots slung on a pole, and underneath the woodcut is a quotation which with great difficulty I have determined comes from Psalms: