Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [198]
Before she would lie down, she made Ollie go in and finish the reading he had skipped. How else, she asked him, would he ever get into a good Eastern school?
An hour after she heard the buggy grating up the hill on the bluffs road, taking Mrs. Briscoe back to Boise, she had her first pain.
I have no intention of writing an account of how a pioneer woman, gently reared, had a child in a canyon camp with no help but that of an old maid governess. I am not going to heat up all those pails of water, or listen for the first weak bleat from the bedroom. Neither am I going to let Susan get up the day after her lying-in, to chum the butter or put out a washing or finish her story. This is not a story of frontier hardships, though my grandparents went through a few; nor of pioneer hardihood, though they both had it. It is only Lyman Ward, Coe Professor of History, Emeritus, living a day in his grandparents’ life to avoid paying too much attention to his own.
She was no novice, had had two children and a miscarriage, and she did not panic. She thought she had a few hours. Depending on whether he took the bluffs road back, or the canyon road, it would take Oliver three to four hours to return. When he got back he could ride down to the Olpen ranch, send Mrs. Olpen up, and go back into Boise for the doctor. Perhaps Wan would come home early, or John might come up from his cabin, and one of them could be sent. She lay in her darkened room with a wet cloth over her eyes and waited for her body to do what it must.
But Nellie Linton, gentle spinster, Victorian virgin, was more agitated. To quiet Betsy, she turned her recklessly loose with the total contents of her workbox, and she let Ollie off, without comment, from his reading and conferred with him outside. In a way flattering to his eight-year-old judgment, she asked him if he could ride to the Olpen place and fetch Mrs. Olpen.
But his father had the mules, and there were no horses on this side of the river.
Could he walk it? Would he be afraid?
He wasn’t afraid, but it was a long away around on this side.
Perhaps he could walk down to John’s cabin and have him go for help.
But John’s cabin was also on the other side, and you couldn’t shout loud enough to be heard across the river there. There were rapids.
Nellie wrung her hands. If his father had just waited one hour!
Was his mother sick? Ollie wanted to know. Did she need the doctor?
Yes, and some good woman. Mrs. Olpen would be of enormous help, if only they could reach her.
They fell silent. The sun had dropped far enough so that the house laid a precise triangle of shade across the bare ground. Any minute now Mrs. Ward would call out, in there.
Miss Linton?
Yes Ollie.
I could get there quick across the bridge. I could zip across and ride my pony down.
Oh my goodness, no!
But if she’s sick. That’s the quickest.
Right after you had to be rescued from that bridge? No no. Oh no.
I went across easy. It was the package, coming back.
No. Your mother would die at the thought.
Then it came, the harsh, grunting cry that Miss Linton had been dreading. She saw Ollie’s eyes widen, she saw the blood leave his face.
Wait here. I must go and see . . .
But when she came back, having been able to do nothing but hold Mrs. Ward’s hand until the spasm passed, she made a small sound of her own, a sound of horror. Ollie was already halfway .across the bridge, moving along crabwise with both hands on the rope. The farther he went the more rapidly he moved, until he jumped off onto solid rock. He looked back and saw her, his arm waved, he bolted around the corner of the cliff. In two seconds he appeared at a dead run, headed for the corral.
Shading her eyes, caught between two fears and a hope, Miss Linton watched him come out of the shed with the oat can and bait his brown pony out of the pasture to the corral bars. He poured the oats on the ground, and when she dropped her head to them he got the halter rope around her neck, stretching with both arms in a sort of embrace. He climbed the corral poles to haul her head up and get the bit into her mouth, the headstall over her ears. Inside, Miss Linton heard Susan say something, not in the tone of pain, but conversationally, which meant that Betsy had wandered in and must be dealt with. But she hung in the sunken entrance watching until Ollie had pulled the mare close and flung himself in a bellyflop across her back. He kicked, straightened, his hands shook out the reins, his heels drummed at her ribs. Riding like a cavalryman, as his mother sometimes said with pride and dismay, he bolted across the little flat toward the canyon gate. Like a cavalryman? More like an Indian. His spidery shape clung to the mare