Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [52]
“I like it. I guess I’ll go back and come home again.”
“No, you’re to stay. Lizzie will be bringing tea.”
“Tea, even.”
She loved the way he leaned against the post. He had relaxed, graceful poses, big as he was. The mine hat with a stub of candle socketed in its front was pushed back on his head, his wool shirt was open at the neck. She probably thought him unbearably picturesque. She could have drawn the two of them just as they stood there, pretty bride and manly husband. Title, something like, “The Return from Honest Toil,” or perhaps “An Outpost of Civilization.” It flooded her with happiness to be there, to have him there, to be able to give him this after so many years of stale crackers and mouse cheese in tarpapered shacks.
He removed his hand from behind him, with a letter in it. “Brought you something.”
She saw by the stationery whose it was, and the hand that snatched it was so greedy that she lifted a look of apology before she ripped off the end. But only one disappointing sheet, and it not even filled. Fear and its verification were all but simultaneous.
I have that piece of thin blue paper, brown along the folds and with its few lines of script faded nearly out. No bold and graceful hand here–a scrawl, and unsigned.
My darling Sue,
This is no letter. I can’t write, I can’t think, and yet I must let you know. Baby died of diphtheria last night. Oh, why aren’t you here! I can’t bear it, everything is in pieces. I could die, I could die.
So in one stroke her picnic in the West was turned into exile. The three thousand miles that had seemed no more than the distance from Milton to New York revealed themselves as a continent. Across that implacable distance a train carrying a message would crawl with the slowness of a beetle. Tomorrow or next day one would start across with the letter she had given to Oliver that morning. She would have given all she owned to have it back, to have back everything she had written since leaving home. For the child must have died on the first or second day of her trip, about the time she was scribbling her impressions of Omaha. All the time she had been crossing plains, mountains, and deserts, all the day she had rested in San Francisco, all the days of her getting used to Almaden, Augusta and Thomas had been suffering their sorrow. Another week, or even more, and the postman would bring to their door not comfort, not the sympathy of their dearest friend, but pages of drivel about Chinese fish peddlers and Italian vegetable men.
She took out of Oliver’s hand the blue sheet, which he had gently removed from her fingers and read. By the trouble in his face she could assess her own. For a second she blazed like a burning tree. She cried out, “I must go back! I must pack at once!” But looking into his serious face she knew she couldn’t. He didn’t have the money to send her. Her own savings must be held for their mutual life, not for the attachments she had left behind. It wouldn’t be fair, though she knew he would agree without hesitation if she asked.
Did she feel trapped in her complex feelings, caught in marriage as she was caught on the wrong side of the continent? I shouldn’t be surprised. For a time, at least, while the inexorabilities of space and time ate into her. They entirely forgot tea, and when Lizzie served supper Susan sat with Oliver at the table, eating nothing herself and almost despising him for his apologetic miner’s appetite. After Lizzie had cleared away, she sat on, writing a passionate hopeless letter, while Oliver smoked his pipe in the other room and watched her furtively under the spurs and pistol and bowie that hung like shy masculine mistletoe in the arch. When she stood up suddenly, he stood up too, but she gave him a quivering smile and said, “Don’t come along. You’re tired. I’m only going out to pick a flower.”
I don’t have the flower, but I have the letter.
Oh my darling, what can I say? It seems so cruel that I did not know by instinct when the blow fell on two hearts so close to mine! If I had only known it, there were signs everywhere as I crossed the country. The bloodred sunsets and pallid moonlight nights were full of foreboding, but I was ignorantly wrapped up in the brightness of life, and would not see that my darling was desolate.