Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [233]
I cannot bring myself to do as Oliver urges me to–go into Boise oftener, make calls, cultivate women friends, attend the “functions” of the place. For one thing, we have put everything we own and everything we can borrow into this ranch, and I have no desire to be known as the engineer’s wife with the darned elbows. For another–how shall I specify that other? I am not of Boise and do not wish to be.
And so I live an interim or preparatory life. Oliver is bent upon making these thousand acres of ours into something that all men can look at and be inspired by, a sort of pledge of what the country can do when it has water. His goal, he told me the other day, is to make something as near as possible to Querendero, one of those grand Mexican estancias at which we stayed when we rode back from Morelia. He will fence our thousand acres and push his improvements clear to the fences–wheat, lucerne, timothy, wild pasture, orchards, berry patches and gardens. He swears he will have a rose garden that will make me forget Milton. He will make father’s roses look like a posy bed! He frightens me, he is so willing to stake everything we have. But when I raise objections, he tells me I can see only what is in front of my nose.
Faith! Faith! he tells me. Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains. When this pioneering enthusiasm takes hold of him, he is not my wordless husband at all. A few days ago, in the last of the Indian summer weather, we rode around the whole place so that he could show me what he wants to do with each part of it. We have kept most of the poplar lane alive, with great effort, by means of the windmill and hose cart, but some of our “grove” has perished. Until we get water from the Big Ditch we must get our results mainly out of native, resistant things, Oliver says. The slope of the mesa will be our wild garden, planted to wild syringa, wild clematis, and buck sage, which has a yellow flower that Nellie admits is almost as handsome as furze. This will cover, some day in the future for which we live, the “upright” of the great step. The “tread” will be covered with grass.
I grew almost hysterical, sitting my horse there on Pisgah’s top and being shown the Promised Land, which consisted of a sweep of sage and our barren house and the dots of three distant settlers’ shacks, with off to our right the desolation that Hi Mallett has created with his sulky plow. “Remember Querendero?” Oliver kept saying to me. “Have you forgotten the grace and romance you found in Tepitongo? Well just look at this with the eye of faith. This can be as good.”
In truth, he half convinced me. Let the water project be completed, and it can be splendid; there is literally no limit to what one might do. I rode home feeling almost exhilarated, and I have been very cheerful since. Maybe, maybe. I cling to that possibility as a child clutches a piece of sea-worn magic glass on the beach.
This, you see, is one of my hopeful days, all because I have been given a glimpse of what lights up Oliver’s mind even when he seems taciturn and silent. All because the windmill has pumped us past the dry season with only modest casualties. All because we have had a rain to settle the summer dust cloud. With his hand on his heart, Oliver swears that next spring we shall have a lawn all along the front of the house to hold down all the Idaho dirt that wants to blow inside.
This must sound incredible, read on Staten Island.
The Mesa
January 10, 1890
Dearest Augusta–
It was so good of you to have Ollie for Christmas. It was out of the question that he should come home, for we hadn’t the money for his fare. Without you, he would have had to go to Milton, sadly reduced now that father and mother are gone and the old house sold, or stay over with two or three other waifs at school. Dr. Rhinelander and his wife are kindness itself, but it wouldn’t have been Christmas.
He wrote me after returning–one of his characteristic twenty-word letters