Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [179]
“I showed that to Clarence King,” Oliver said. “Did I tell you I met him on the train, coming East? He says that quotation alone insures us success.”
She was appalled: he was a child. “Mr. King is a great joker.”
“Maybe, but he wasn’t joking about this. Neither am I. Go ahead, read.”
Shakily she laughed. “I thought I was the only writer of fiction in this family.”
“Fiction, is it?” He flipped the page. “See who the president of this company is? General Tompkins, who is also president of American Diamond Drill. He’s not used to backing fictions. Look at the figures. Look at the facts.”
Unwillingly she read about damsites, weather, rainfall, storage capacities, topography, soil analyses, placer production from the Snake River sands. She read two interviews with settlers already irrigating out of Boise Creek, and thought them enthusiasts of the same stripe as her husband. He was a child. It took some tough financial pirate, some Gould or Vanderbilt, to do what he in his innocence thought he could do.
His thumb came down and dented the map spread before her, made a deep crease at a point where the contour lines crowded together and the wiggle of a stream flowed away. “There’s the principal damsite. We won’t do anything about it yet. At first we’ll just throw a diversion dike across the creek lower down, and turn the creek into our canal system. That alone will take water to thousands of acres.”
“I don’t see how you make money,” she said helplessly. “The land isn’t yours to sell.”
“We don’t sell land, we sell water rights and water. The more settlers come in, the greater the need. That’s when we’ll build the dam and lengthen the canal line clear to the Snake. Here goes the canal, along the edge of the mountain here, right across the drainage. The whole valley’s under the ditch.”
“I never could read contour maps,” she said.
“Never mind,” he said, and took the brochure from her lap. “Can you imagine one enormous sage plain that drops in benches–a big nearly level plateau for a mile or two, and then a fifty-foot drop, and then another bench? Can you visualize it? That canal will eventually run seventy-five miles and not cross any man’s land. Do you know what that means?”
“I know what it sounds like.”
He waited.
“It sounds like a country without life, people, schools, anything.”
“It sounds to me like a country with a future.”
“And no present.”
The impatience she created in him troubled her, and yet she had to resist his enthusiasm. For her own sake and the children’s sake and for his sake she had to be sensible. But she smiled, trying to express love even while she blocked his way; she felt that she begged, that he could not insist if she made it clear how much the prospect appalled her.
He flapped the brochure against his knuckles, thinking. “Boise’s not a village, it’s a little city, the territorial capital. The Oregon Short-line will go through it and put it on the main line to Oregon. There’s a cavalry post, there’re balls even. The mountains rise up right behind town, the riding’s wonderful. You can have a horse, so can Ollie.”
With her hands in her lap she sat, not wanting to look up at him. “And he can go to a one-room school. He’ll be starting, you know. This fall.”
“You were going to take a tutor along to Morelia. Why not to Boise?” But she remained silent, and he exclaimed in exasperation, “Don’t you see it? Any of it? Doesn’t it challenge you at all? Do you even see the significance of those seventy-five miles of canal across the public domain?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“No right of way problems. Not one old coot who can make you divert your ditch around his land. No lawsuits. Just one big simple engineering problem.”
“And one big money problem.”
“That’s not a problem.”
“What?” Now she did look up.
“General Tompkins has already lined up backing from Pope and Cole. We’re talking to them in New York tomorrow.”
Slowly she rose. Her shoulder twitched, she felt weak and tired, aggrieved that he kept her talking and resisting him instead of letting her go to bed.