Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [223]
Oh, Augusta, how I wept when I read that telegram with all its enthusiasm instantly renewed and all its hope as intact as if we had not spent these six years–seven, nearly–pursuing disappointment. I wept for joy that Oliver’s hope is revived, and for bitterness that it was so long frustrated, and for grief that years of failure have left scars we may never be able to forget. Do you understand me? I hope you do–completely. I should not like to be understood only partially, and yet that is the way I understand myself. And I wept for fear, too –fear that hope may be dashed again as it has been dashed so many times.
These contradictory feelings have led me to postpone my return for now, though my impulse was to catch the first train. Oliver will be incontinently busy, as he likes to be, and away much of the time. We will have no firm place to stay, since the canyon buildings are already converted into engineering headquarters, with their windows gloriously unwashed and their floors pocked with boot nails. Boise itself does not appeal to me, especially with Oliver much away. So it is Victoria for another while longer.
Let me urge you–how ridiculous this is, and yet nothing would make me happier than to have my suggestion taken–that if you want to file on land in the Boise Valley you should empower Oliver to do the preliminary filing for you at once. I shall write him to do so; you can let me know if you want him thereafter to go ahead. Presently, all government lands are withdrawn from entry pending their classification as irrigable or nonirrigable, and the land offices are packed with angry speculators denouncing Major Powell, Captain Dutton, and my poor husband. But all the lands under our ditches have been certified, and await only the President’s proclamation to be re-opened to entry. (And how I wish your dear friend Mr. Cleveland were still in office to make that proclamation, and complete the great land reform that was begun in his term!) With the constitutional convention due to convene in Boise this summer, and the Susan going forward as fast as Wiley can drive it, there will be such a land boom as Idaho and perhaps the West has never seen.
Do you see the effect on me of the first good news in years? Already I am infected with optimism, and am almost willing to expose myself and the children yet again to the uncertainties of life in the Boise Valley, and to those other uncertainties that I dread.
Uncertainties about Grandfather or about her treacherous feeling for Frank Sargent? Since Frank had gone up to Kellogg to the gold mines, I have to assume it was Grandfather whom she doubted. I suppose her letters must have suggested that now, with the canal going forward and his anxieties removed, he might promise her never to give in to his weakness again. I suppose he would have ignored any such suggestion. Love her and admire her and respect her he did; let her manage him he would not. He was as stubborn as a post, and in his way as word-blind as my dyslectic father.
So I assume that he neither stooped to beg her to come home, nor made any promises. Nor, understanding the Frank Sargent situation, would he have asked any of her. He probably reported on the progress of the ditch and ignored the state of his feelings, while he waited for her true feelings to reassert themselves. At last, in August 1889, after fifteen months away, she came back.
Once more they met at the steps of a transcontinental train. They were both watchful and restrained; the presence of Nellie and the children kept their reunion from being too personal; any diffidence in his greeting of her could be covered up in the exuberance of greeting his children. Then they gathered up their suspended life and carried it off once more in a democrat wagon.
Driving, they had no chance to talk. Her critical eye found the streets of Boise as swarming as the streets of Leadville, and not half so picturesque. They had to halt and pick and kink their way through a morning crowd of buggies, wagons, dogcarts, buckboards. The plank sidewalks were full of men, women, children, soldiers, settlers in overalls, politicians in derbies. Two men in frock coats, two of that political crowd that had led Oliver to debase himself in barrooms, raised their hats to her with impertinent smiles. She gave them back a smile as dishonest as their own, and a good deal chillier. Oliver greeted them casually, steering past their stares. For Susan, it was like having to walk through a room where she had just been humiliated.