Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

Author:Wallace Stegner
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781101075821
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-12-15T10:00:00+00:00

8

Snow blew down the Royal Gorge in a horizontal blur. With Ollie’s sleeping head in her lap and a down comforter around them both, she tried now and then to get a look at that celebrated scenic wonder, but the gorge was only snow-streaked rock indistinguishable from any other rock, all its height and grandeur and pictorial organization obliterated in storm. The dark, foaming, ice-shored river was so unlike the infant Arkansas that she used to ford on her horse that she didn’t believe in it. The circles that she blew and rubbed on the window healed over in secret ferns of frost.

Without knowing in what setting she would see Oliver, or what he would be wearing, she found it hard to visualize him. She knew it for a deficiency in herself that her imagination was so controlled by things. In her drawings, she was often unable to get expressiveness and individuality into figures and faces until she could set them in some domestic or architectural background–under a fanlight doorway, by a carved stair rail, against mantels where they could lean in costumes drawn meticulously from life. Now she kept seeing Oliver in the postures of past meetings and partings–as he had looked stepping off the rainswept ferry in his hooded field coat, or squinting into the sun as the train pulled away eastward from the Cheyenne station, or searching for her over the heads of the crowd in Denver. As if taking an oath, she assured herself that from now on she would have him, and so would Ollie. They would not have to imagine him any more.

The train lurched and awakened Ollie. He reared up. “Are we there?”

“Not for a long time. You’d better go back to sleep.”

But he didn’t want to go back to sleep. He lay and whined until she diverted him with a story about how some of her grandfather’s sheep had been swept down the millrace and drowned, but she and Bessie had rescued a lamb and fed it on a bottle until it grew up to be a pet and followed them everywhere like Mary’s Little Lamb.

(Years later, a frugal lady making every tiny experience count, she wrote another story about a sick lamb left behind by a Basque herder, and illustrated it, using two of her children as models, and sold it to St. Nicholas. I remember having it read to me in my childhood, and it sits on the desk here now, the faces entirely recognizable–Grandmother did have a gift for catching a likeness. The serious boy of ten or so with his little sister beside him, the two of them hunkered down offering a baby’s bottle to the lamb, is incontrovertibly my father. For some reason the picture makes me feel old and sad.

How trivial a thing to entrap the memory of three or four generations ! Three at least. Rodman’s mythology contains no rescued lambs, I imagine. Perhaps I myself remember this story because it so clearly meant something to Grandmother.

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