Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [209]
Miserable, both of them, everything hopeful in them run down, everything joyous smothered under poverty and failure. My impulse, and I hereby yield to it, is to skip it all, to document not one single miserable hour until a day in November 1888. That day the post office finally produced a letter with the seed of change in it.
It was not the letter Oliver waited for, guaranteeing funds for the completion of his project. It was from Major John Wesley Powell, who had succeeded Clarence King as director of the United States Geological Survey. It said that the Survey, recently charged by Congress with surveying all the rivers of the West, designating irrigable lands and spotting reservoir sites, could use his help. Captain Clarence Dutton, who would be in charge of the hydrographic survey, had recommended him warmly (there was an echo of one of those evenings in Leadville). Major Powell understood that Mr. Ward’s own project was temporarily inactive. Would he be willing to take leave from it for perhaps two years and sign on as regional assistant to Captain Dutton, taking as his province the Snake River Basin on which he had already done much work? If Mr. Ward decided to accept the position, he should plan to come to Washington for a week in January, and be prepared to take the field as early in the spring as the weather would allow.
Oliver and Susan, talking it over, understood perfectly that taking a two-year leave from the Idaho Mining and Irrigation Company meant giving it up forever. They also understood that if Oliver signed with the Survey their life would drastically change. Susan and the children and Nellie could not stay alone in the canyon. She would not move into Boise, which she despised.
“Maybe you could make a visit home,” Oliver said. But she folded her arms across her breast and stood frowning at the floor. Her parents were both dead. The old house was up for sale. There were only Bessie, who hadn’t room for them in her little house, and Augusta, before whom she would be ashamed. When she lifted her eyes and said something, it came out as something cheap that she didn’t really mean-a thing near the surface that she seized on as an excuse. “In the same old dress I left in?” she said. “Eight years out of style, with dams in the elbows?”
She saw him consider, and understand, and forgive what she had said. He didn’t even suggest that it was now not impossible to get a new dress. He only said, “Well, then, what do you do if I take it?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but you must take it.”
“Give up.”
“You wouldn’t be giving up everything. All your work would be useful for this government survey. Maybe when that’s done, irrigation will be better understood and you’ll get your backing and can go on.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know. Don’t you?”
“No.”
“Still . . . !”
“Still I ought to take it.”
“I think so, yes.”
“And what do you and the children do?”
“It doesn’t matter what we do! I’d be happy anywhere if I thought you were working and . . . satisfied with yourself. I can support the children. Haven’t I been doing it?”
It was not the thing to say. She knew it, but could not help saying it. The steady, heavy stare of his eyes told her that he resented her and hardened himself against her, and the moment she saw his reaction, she resented him.
“It will do you good to get away from those people and that town,” she said. “You’ll be out in the mountains doing what you like to do. I want you to take this job and I want you to promise me you’ll stop drinking. If you’re working, there’s no excuse, is there?”
“No,” Oliver said.
At his tone she flared up. “Is there? Is there? I’ve tried to understand, I’ve excused you, because I know how . . . But now if you’re working again there isn’t any excuse. You’ve got to promise me!”
“You’d better let me work that out for myself,” he said. “I do better when nobody is pushing or pulling.”
“You think I’m pushing and pulling?”
He looked at her and said nothing.
“If that’s what it is,” she said, close to crying, “if you think I’m a bossy managing woman, it might be better if I took the children away somewhere and never came back.