Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [231]
On the way back we rode past John’s old cabin, and found its little flat obliterated by a great construction camp of eighty men and two hundred horses. There Frank is supervising the tearing down of a whole hill to make the diversion dam that will throw the river into the Susan and later into the Big Ditch. Frank has lost, I am afraid, some of his freshness and exuberance, and has grown almost somber. Like Oliver, he drives himself into the work with a relentlessness that I fear will break him down.
Oh, Augusta, you know my hopes! You know my anxiety, though being the ideal creature you are, married to that ideal man who completes and supports you, you cannot comprehend the unworthy contradictions of someone less sure of herself. You were of course right, years ago, about Frank’s feelings. But he is a thorough gentleman, he understands. So it does not alarm me that Oliver is to be gone for two weeks. I am quite safe, on this mesa and in myself, and I find the same satisfaction in work that Oliver and Frank seem to. This morning, amid all the disorder, I blew the dust from my table and wrote for two hours. Tomorrow I want to go up to the Big Ditch and sketch the teams pulling their scraper-loads of dirt up the banks. My “Life in the Far West” series must include the preparations for the future, for that is what life in the Far West is about.
The Mesa
August 30, 1889
Darling Augusta–
This morning I sent my little boy away, and I know his heart broke as mine did. Nellie and I have been trying to keep up his courage and determination with our tales of what wonders he will see, and what fine things he will learn, and what fine men he will study with and what fine boys he will come to know as friends. But this morning after breakfast I sent him to his room to get dressed and ready–he was to catch the ten-thirty train–and when he didn’t appear for a long time I went in and found him ready dressed in his new school clothes, just sitting on the bed with his eyes big and dark and his face as pale as if no Idaho sun had burned it for the last three weeks. “Why, Ollie,” I said, “what is it?” and he looked at me, nearly crying, and said, “Mother, do I have to go?”
Oh, oh, it was all I could do to keep from huddling him against me and drowning him in my tears. Only twelve Think what it must be to travel all the way from Idaho to New Hampshire by yourself at that age, going toward something new and strange, where you don’t know a soul, and where you are afraid you will be an ugly duckling from the West, ignorant and unable to learn! I know he feels that way–he told Nellie, though he would not tell me.
It is just as well Oliver is not here. He has never been as sure as I am that the boy must go East. “Why send him away?” he said to me only last week. “I’m just getting to know him again. Why not let him go to the high school in Boise?”
Of course it would not have done. He knows hardly more people in Boise than he will at St. Paul’s, actually; and from the local school he would emerge a barbarian, prepared for nothing and untouched by culture, believing in the beauties of Idaho civilization! I had to harden my heart to a stone, and in the end he got over his panic. But when the train pulled away, and I saw his young scared face pressed against the window, and his hand making brave half-hearted desolate waves at Nellie, his sisters, Frank, and me, I quite broke down, and I have been crying off and on all afternoon.
I can’t bear to think of him, by now off in Wyoming somewhere, huddled in the seat and watching the country pass and thinking–what? That his mother sent him away. What choices we are offered in this life, if we live in Idaho. Yet in the long run he will have to realize that it is worth any amount of unhappiness to be given the opportunity to learn and grow and become something good and true, perhaps even noble. I confess it is one of the things I hug to my heart, a thing I envy my poor little boy for–his opportunity to see you and Thomas. He has heard about you all his life, but of course doesn’t remember you. Now he can at last know what I have been talking about. But if having him down for Thanksgiving will be the slightest bother, if he will interfere with the great things that fill your life now, do not hesitate to tell him not to come. I would rather he were a little lonely and unhappy than that he should ever become a burden or duty to you.