Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [235]
It is a sort of insanity not to be happy, when one has reasonable health and good children and a true, energetic husband who is doing something extraordinary, drawing in the outlines of civilization on the blank page of a desert. I tell myself it is true happiness to be still the friend of the most blessed of women. And yet I cannot boast that I am very happy, or even encourage you to think that some day I might be. I feel as stiff and frozen and ungainly as the sagebrush out there in the wind. But I suppose that, like the sagebrush, I shall at least endure–unless some Hi Mallett should come with a sulky plow and plow me quite up.
That, without your intending it, was nearly the effect of your letter reporting your visit with Frank. I knew you would like him at once. He is truly noble, with the loftiest ideals and the most sensitive understanding. I know he must have found it a relief to talk with you, for among us, in our entangled and encumbered situation, there are no opportunities to speak out. And yet how it shook me to have you report his words about his “incurable disease”! How wretched, how wretched, for him, for me, for Oliver, for all of us, that a boy so clean and fine should be torn between loyalty to the friend he most values in the world, and this incurable disease! And yet his dilemma and his torment cannot be worse than mine.
I must say no more of this. I beg you to think no more of it.
Oliver, having just returned from New York, has had to turn around and start back, to confer with General Tompkins and two members of the London syndicate who have just arrived. It seems there is dissatisfaction with the progress of the Susan Canal, which these gentlemen believe should have been completed to its full twenty miles last fall, so as to be ready for use this spring; and someone seems to have raised a question as to Oliver’s judgment in pressing ahead with the Big Ditch at the same time. It makes me worse than cross to think of people who have only the dimmest idea about this project, questioning the man who conceived it and has pushed it through against every sort of odds. To him, the Susan is only a sop to the skeptics. It means little by comparison with the Big Ditch–is only a secondary canal to that great one, and even if completed now would not put any large acreage under irrigation.
Still, he has had to go and justify himself. He hates it. More talkee-talkee. At least, he told me as he left, he can now bring back a lot of bare-root roses. The varieties available here are somewhat common. I know he is bent upon that rose garden for my sake. He hopes it may help repay me for all the dust and discomfort of last summer, and persuade me that the waiting is not in vain, and that life in the Boise Valley can be given grace and beauty, and that we will not have to wait until Agnes is a woman before our surroundings are fit for civilized living.
He is so good a man I want to weep, and what makes me want to weep most of all is my failure of faith in him. For I cannot help it. Though there has been, ever since my return, a blessed absence of that trouble you know of, I have seen that weakness among all his strengths, and I cannot forget it. I fear the strain of uncertainty, I am frightened by these long wearing trips and the influence of the kinds of people they throw him among. I watch him, I wonder if he watches me. We are polite to each other.
We do not speak of any of this. It is impossible for Oliver to discuss such personal matters, he is made voiceless by them. We pretend that by not speaking of them we have made them not exist. Yet it is not the marriage I dreamed of, not the marriage it was. It is a bruised and careful truce; we walk in bandages and try not to bump our wounds. After fourteen years, that bride whose judgment you questioned finds herself unable fully to trust either the man she married, or herself. Without you and Thomas shining so steadily there on your rock, this darkness would be darkness indeed.
The Mesa
June 17, 1890
Dearest Augusta–
Yesterday the water was turned into the first fifteen miles of the Susan Canal. This much, at least, is done after eight years. Oliver and the juniors are only half happy about it, for the diversion of effort has stopped the Big Ditch, and since even the Susan is being put to work before it is ready, the money return to the Syndicate will be small. Nevertheless, with Idaho due to become a state on July 4, and all here convinced that the eyes of the nation and the world are upon them, Oliver thought it as well to make an occasion. The Governor and his wife and many dignitaries (who would not be dignitaries anywhere but Idaho) assembled on the mesa to watch the first water come down. Frank and Wiley were disappointed that I was not asked to break a bottle of champagne against something, perhaps a clump of sagebrush, inasmuch as the canal is named for me, but I decided that the Governor should have the limelight, he craves it so, and so he was given the principal role, with a shovel instead of with a bottle.