Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [208]
Neither do I want to take any of those long train rides to New York, where General Tompkins periodically got a fire going in some handful of damp financial shavings. I don’t want to watch them blow hopefully into one little smudge after another until it went out. I don’t want those depressed rides home, six days long, carrying each time a bigger accumulation of failure. No wonder he spent most of his time in the club car.
At home, after those episodes, he could go out and work off his disappointment helping John grub sagebrush out of the right of way. He was past believing that the skinned line around the corner of the hills would fool anyone into thinking that the canal was making progress; he was simply one who did his worrying with his muscles. I, having no muscles left, cannot share even that minimal relief. It makes me nervous and restless to imagine his condition, I think too much, I lie awake, I lose confidence in what I myself am doing, I even find myself bending toward the notion of an inane tranquilized existence in Rodman’s Menlo Park pasture. Maybe I would have been smart to devote my hermit years to some silly untroubling subject such as Lola Montez.
What bothers me most is to watch the slow corrosion of the affection and loyalty that have held Oliver and Susan Ward together. I am ashamed that he hits the bottle when he gets low, I hate the picture of Grandmother sitting in the canyon house, a sulky, sullen dame, worrying half spitefully that he may fall off the bridge coming home, or show himself sodden and sottish before the children. And feeling, too, the profoundest, most hopeless pity, wanting to help and having no notion how. She knew that drink must be an almost irresistible temptation, even while she expected him, if he was a man, to resist it.
Less and less a companion, more and more a grind, she was bolted to her desk by her desperate sense that the family depended entirely on her; and the more she drove herself to work, the more she resented the separation that her work enforced between her and her children and husband. I can visualize her coming out in the still early morning and looking down across the lonely desolation where she lived, and shuddering for what had happened to her; and if she caught sight of her own face in the water bucket’s dark pane, she was appalled.
If he said–and I’m sure he did, more than once–“Let’s get out of here before the place caves in under us, let’s go up the mountain for a few days and do some fishing,” she refused because of her work, suggesting that he and Ollie go. Then when they did go, she felt deserted, one who had to work while others played, and all the time they were gone she fretted over Ollie’s missed lessons. How was he ever going to learn to read properly if he was always out fishing?
Yet when jobs were offered Oliver–a mine in Kellogg, a bureau in the Governor’s office–she closed her mouth on the impulse to influence him, and accepted his decision when he made it against, as she had to think, all the best interests of his family. There was always a clearing of the air when they had considered and he had rejected some alternative to their bondage. Yet within days of such a decision she had added it to her cumulative grudge.
Her children ran barefoot through Rattlesnakeville. She nagged them for growing up like savages and taking too lightly their lesson-times with Nellie. Even if there had been places she wanted to go, she would not have left the canyon: she had no clothes she considered decent, and she would not appear in Boise visibly shabby-genteel. And every time Oliver returned from town she managed, bent on busy errands, to pass close to him and sniff. I discovered in my childhood that she had a nose like a hound. If I had eaten some forbidden poison such as licorice within two hours, she knew. So I know how a guilty party might have felt in 1888, how resentful of her infallible powers of detection.