Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [229]
Now do I feel better? Think. Try to be exact.
No, I don’t feel better. I feel aggrieved, picked-on, and pursued. I want to know why a bunged-up old scholar can’t have his drink in peace. I want to know why I must be wary of the uncertain future. What future? Not Lyman Ward’s. He has converted back to kerosene and is living his grandparents’ life. His own future ought not bother him or anyone else. His grandfather’s horse pistol three feet from his forehead tells him that there is always a solution if things get unbearable. The fact that he isn’t tempted seems to prove that they aren’t unbearable yet. But they are going to be a lot less pleasant without Old Grand-Dad.
So right on, as the activists say. Right on, Lyman. Fifty whole years of Grandmother’s life to go. Make them last.
Of course it’s impossible. I’ll never finish. Autumn is already nearly here, Shelly has had about all the country quiet her physiology can stand, and will be leaving soon. Ada has been having trouble with her breathing. She smokes too much, there is always a cigarette dribbling ashes down her front and into her dishwater and onto her ironing, and I hear her wheeze like an old dog when she makes my bed. Emphysema, I shouldn’t be surprised, her breathing apparatus gone as slack as an old garter. Hyperventilation, pains in her chest and left arm, maybe heart involved too. Good Christ, what would I do if she collapsed?
The very thought of it brings an element of desperation into my delusions of independence. I will not kid myself that this summer of quiet routine and country air have left me much better off than when I came. I have had six aspirins and a bourbon since I got up, and still I ache.
What the hell, my right is in retreat, my center is giving way, my left is crumbling, I have just sent my bottled support to the rear. I shall attack. I shall go on writing the personal history of my grandmother, following Bancroft’s advice to historians: present your subject in his own terms, judge him in yours.
Actually, I’d just as soon leave out the judgment entirely. I don’t feel at ease judging people. And I’d just as soon let her present herself: her letters from the Mesa are among the longest and fullest she wrote during that long half century of correspondence.
3
The Mesa
August 16, 1889
Darling Augusta–
We have slept five nights in our house in the sagebrush. Like everything here, it is large and raw. It is for the future, it sacrifices the present for what is to come. In time it may be charming, but now it seems hopeless. We need everything–awnings, more chairs, boardwalks around the premises, lawn, shrubs, flowers, trees, shade. The sun beats on us from sunup to sundown. We are like a seashore place, with dust instead of sand. Dust lies drifted two inches deep in the piazza, dust blows in our faces if we attempt to sit there and read or work, dust whirls about the yard, dust is tracked in by every pair of feet, dust hangs above the canyon mouth and hazes the whole valley, especially at sunset.
I used to write you from Almaden how strangely transformed the dust clouds were after the sun went down. It is the same here. In some ways this mesa is a return. We look off, just as we did at Almaden, into a vast stretch of valley, with the moon at our back. Not a single tree in sight as far as we can see south, east, and west. To the north lie the irrigated lowlands along the river. The noble shape of the country lies bare under the sky as if just made, and ready for the birth of trees and crops.
It is a vision that absorbs Oliver. He follows it like a man panting after a mirage, and he works, works, works. He manages his survey, he supervises the ditch construction, he confers with politicians and contractors and shareholders, he takes visiting representatives of the Syndicate over the works–we have been visited twice since I arrived–and in the hours between dusk and dark, and even after dark, he is out with John doing something to the land or the buildings or the well. He is full of excitement and energy. But my heart whispers to me that all he dreams of is still years away, and that meantime we grow old, we diminish, we lose touch with all that used to make life rich and wonderful. I have just counted on my fingers how long it has been since I saw you. More than seven years.