Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [199]
It is an effort for me to imagine my way backward from the silent father I knew to the boy in Boise Canyon. Like my grandfather, he was not a man of words, and it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers. Grandmother herself may have made that mistake. I have heard her say, in her rueful voice with its overtone of regret, what a brave, manly little boy he was, but I never heard her say how sensitive he was. Yet I think he must have been. But though it is from her letters that I get that impression, I think she herself never understood how deep he ran, any more than she understood his difficulty with reading.
It was his capacity for feeling that she should have attended to: by failing to comprehend it, she probably contributed to his silence.
Feeling, more than manliness, drove him across the bridge against the warnings of his conscience-a horrified sympathy for his mother’s pain, a sense of fatal responsibility in his father’s absence. He was not a disobedient child. He simply overflowed obedience on a flood of emotion, and he had some of his father’s readiness in a crisis.
I see him going down that rough canyon pushing his mare as his father always pushed a horse. He was wound up as tight as a ball of wet rawhide. The last two or three hundred yards before John’s cabin the trail was soft silt, and he lashed the mare into a run, and so excited her that he could hardly pull her in before the door. She danced and cartwheeled, and he shouted, fighting her hard mouth. No one came out. He let the mare stiff-leg him around the corner to where he could see John’s corral. Empty. Before he had had time to frame a thought he was galloping down the canal line that followed the contour around the foot of the sagebrush hills.
He found John sitting on his stoneboat in the shade of a cottonwood, resting himself and his mules. He had been moving testimonial dirt off the right of way. Before Ollie had panted out three sentences John was on his feet stripping the harness from the jenny, letting it fall into the cottonwood fluff that covered the ground like feathers or light snow. He tied the other mule, he looped a halter rope around the jenny’s nose and bellied up across her back. He was a big heavy man, not excitable. He sang when he talked, and he could not say the sound oo, it always came out iu.
“Yiu go back,” he said. “If Ay don’t run into your pa Ay bring the doc myself.”
“I’ve got to get Mrs. Olpen.”
The mare side-stepped, pulling at his arms. From the jenny John gave Ollie a long appraising squinting look, the look of an adult asked permission for something dubious. “Ya,” he said finally. “O.K. That’s gude idea. But yiu be careful.”
He turned the jenny and kicked her into a trot down the partly graded canal line. He rode loose and heavy, his toes pointed out. His relaxed weight made the jenny’s trot look smooth. He did not look back. Ollie watched him, feeling hollow and relieved, his burden divided. But then he thought how long it would be before John, or his father, or the doctor, or anyone, could get out from town, and he remembered the animal sound of his mother’s pain. In a moment he was galloping back along the canal line toward the river trail.
He had the Olpen place in sight from a good way off-log cabin and stable, hay-roofed shed, pole corrals, a gnawed and tattered haystack, tall cottonwoods. As he got closer he saw Mrs. Olpen come out into the yard, and chickens running stretch-necked in every direction, scattering the cottonwood fluff. He came in at a trot, with his arm across his face to hold out the dust. When he could see, there was Mrs. Olpen, leathery, slab-sided, standing by the chopping block with a Plymouth Rock hen by the legs in one hand and a kindling ax in the other. Rough men’s boots poked out from under her skirt. With her ax hand she held back a string of hair from her eyes, squinting upward.
“Havin’ it, is she? Needs me?”
“Yes, she’s sick, she was crying. Miss Linton said . . .