Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [69]
There is a whole folder of correspondence about that birth, its stages, difficulties, damages, and emotional exhaustions and satisfactions. Not even an admiring grandson can deal with it. For one thing, Susan wrote those letters with her eyes firmly closed, having been warned that use of the eyes after childbirth might damage them. For another, they are anciently, mystically, impenetrably female: their sentiments are as opaque to me as their handwriting is illegible. Among other things, she referred to my father then and for a good year afterward as “Boykins.” Ugh.
So I will content myself with my grandfather’s note.
April 29, 1877
My dear Thomas and Augusta, April 29, 1877
Oliver Burling Ward sends his greetings to you this morning, or rather he did some time since and is now sleeping quietly by the side of his mother, who says she is ridiculously well and “too happy to be comfortable.”
She had a little trouble from the long labor, Dr. McPherson had to make some repairs, her convalescence was somewhat extended. Though children might be born among the Cousin Jacks and the Mexicans as casually and as stoically as calves are born in pastures, the camp rallied round for this one. China Sam sent a silk Chinese flag to wrap this Baby Bunting in. A Cornish wife brought over a horrible quilt, quilted by her husband in his off hours, which Susan laughed over and nearly wept over and put firmly away where it could never be seen. But she kept it all her life–it’s probably somewhere in a cupboard in this house right now. Mother Fall’s young men opened so much champagne that they sent her a bouquet of corks surrounded by wild flowers, and before that joke had settled for five minutes, followed it with an armful of roses.
Lying in the parlor, which had been selected as the warmest and least drafty room in the house, Susan could look through the arch, under the pendant bowie, spurs, and revolver, and see her household going on: Miss Prouse hopping up, sitting down, hopping up again like a helpful younger sister, Lizzie serving, Oliver presiding, Buster whipping his homemade high chair. Miss Prouse was smooth and efficient and gentle with Boykins (ugh) when she bathed or changed him. She was modest, soft, and sisterly with Susan. Distracted by the test of the new hoist, Oliver was driven and divided, and away more than either of them liked, but she loved to have him stretch out beside her in the evening and talk, and not even his habit of smoking his pipe in her bed made her want to send him away. He looked upon the baby with awe, and handled him as if he might break.
Within three weeks Boykins was swinging in his cradle from the veranda ceiling–long, easy swings that they thought Mrs. Elliott would have to approve of. None of your jerky ordinary cradle motions. Cosmic tides. Susan was resolved that he was to be the world’s healthiest infant. Never so much as a cold, if care could prevent it. She bragged to her mother and Augusta that he had napped outside from the age of two weeks. (A little Western boastfulness? You, Grandmother?) Studying him, she decided that he was not pretty (beauty was reserved for Augusta’s children), but that his face already showed character. His eyes, she reluctantly reported to ox-eyed Augusta, were fatally blue.
While she was recovering among the letters, gifts, and attentions of those who loved and looked after her, Thomas Hudson with his delicate sense of timing requested three illustrations for a ballad by the Norwegian poet Hjalmar Boyesen. He said with tongue in cheek that her experience of drawing Longfellow Vikings ought to let her do these without models, and she might find them a pleasant diversion from the duties of motherhood. She understood him perfectly: he believed in her not only as a woman, but as an artist. So there she sat, drawing burros and senoritas for the New Almaden sketch with one hand, and with the other producing the synthetic stuff that gentility thought virile. Give her credit, she laughed at herself.
She laughed even harder when she was well enough to go out sketching in the open air, hunting the local color of Mexican Camp, Cornish Camp, and the mine. Miners and miners