The Mountain and the Valley (10 page)

Then the sounds downstairs started to flow along a stream, and he floated alongside them. Then they drifted ahead of him and he began to sink. But the stream was of wool, so foldingly deep and closingly warm that he didn’t try any more to reach out for the surface.

Ellen slept dreamlessly when the house was still.

Joseph dreamed that as he lifted the log onto the sled bench Martha and the children came running to help him, but suddenly he was powerless because the snow had disappeared. And Martha dreamed that it was morning and the children were all laughing as they opened their things, but she couldn’t find Joseph anywhere in the house and suddenly all the needles of the tree began to fall. And Chris sighed in his
sleep because he and Charlotte were on the bank of a moving stream, but as they knelt together to drink they couldn’t seem to draw any water up into their mouths. And Anna dreamed that it was morning and some voice kept calling her to come see the tree. She said she had to wait for David, but she couldn’t resist this voice; and when David came to the head of the stairs, there was water across the step, and she couldn’t quite reach his hand across it.

David slept and he dreamed that they were all walking back the road that led to the top of the mountain. All the trees along the road were Christmas trees. They were shining with presents, but as he reached for something (for himself or for Anna) the thing would disappear, and Herb Hennessey would be there, cutting down the tree.

A train whistle carried through the soft air all the way from town. As the tree fell the sound of the train whistle crept into the dream, into the sound of the falling tree.

D
avid awoke at five o’clock. The morning was Christmas-still. He thought it must be night yet until he heard the crackle of kindling in the stove, and the voices of his father and mother in the kitchen. They were day voices. Suddenly sleep past put a sharp edge of clarity on everything. This was the morning that had had Tuesday and Wednesday before it, and then only Wednesday, and now this was the morning itself.

He shook Chris. “Chris, Chris, it’s morning!” He leaped out of bed. “Anna, Anna,” he called, “it’s morning, the fire’s made.”

He and Anna waited, shivering in the hall, for Chris (“Chris, Chris, hurry up”). They went down the stairs, shivering more than cold had ever made them shiver. They went past the dining room where the wonder waited, into the kitchen. Chris glanced into the dining room as he passed, but David whispered to Anna, “Don’t look.” Neither of them turned a head.

They stood by the kitchen stove. They said, “Merry Christmas”; but their voices were like the voices they recited with when they’d forgotten the next line. They tried to stop shivering; but they couldn’t, even by the stove. These were like moments out of time altogether, because they were up and going to do something splendid, but the lamp was still lit, the day hadn’t really begun.

Martha had warmed their clothes on the oven door. David pulled his on in the porch. Anna took hers into the pantry. Joseph came in from the barn with the milk, and Martha strained the milk while he washed his hands. Not till then did she pick up the lamp and say, “Come, Joseph.” She led them all through the dining room door.

The tree was there. So still. So Christmas-still. So proudly, evenly full of its own mysterious bearing that even when Martha turned up the wick of the lamp, no one rushed to touch it. For a minute no one moved. This was the tree of hope: the yellow globes of oranges hanging on the boughs, the perfectly scalloped garlands of popcorn, the white tents of handkerchiefs on the green limbs, and secretly between the branches, nearer the trunk, the mesmeric presents themselves. They knew so surely that everything they wanted would be there, they could wait.

“Joseph,” Ellen said, “do you remember the first little fir we …?” Then the children swarmed about the tree.

Joseph and Martha guided their explorations. They passed down what was beyond the reach of young arms; pointing at something that still remained for one or the other if that one had decided his allotment must be exhausted; holding one thing back for each of them, so that no one would run out of gifts first.

Chris’s sled and larrigans were on the floor. But David’s skates and Anna’s doll were at the top of the tree. When Joseph reached for them they held their breath, as if somewhere on the way down the miracle might disappear before they had touched it once. David put one bright blade against his face. The cool touch of the bright, swift steel and the smell of the new leather mingled with the smell of the oranges and the tree. Anna touched gently the soft, fragile doll’s face. There were scribblers and pencils and the jackets and the dress.

Then almost at the last, David found what Anna had got for him. It was a book.
Robinson Crusoe
. He opened it and saw the wonderful waiting words running over the starch-clean pages. He said, “Oh, Anna.”

Then he told her, no, higher, a little higher, this side,
there
, until at last she saw the ring he’d got for her with soap-wrapper coupons. And when she laid down the doll itself and held the ring in her hand (forgetting to finish the smile she’d started, because the ring was so beautiful), that was better even than any of the things he had found for himself.

They thought it was all finished. But it wasn’t.

“You didn’t look
behind
the tree,” Martha said.

There they found the miniature house, perfect right down to the tiny covers on the stove, for Anna; and the kaleidoscope for David.

“Chris got them out of his rabbit money,” Joseph said.

They could hardly believe it. They’d never thought of
Chris getting
anything
for them, and here he (Chris!) had thought of getting them things like that.

They had the funniest feeling. It was hurtful, but sweet for feeling it together: the shame that neither of them had thought of getting anything for Chris at all. He’d seemed like the older ones, who watched
their
having as if that were a gift itself. He’d seemed to have no special separate place in him that a special gift could match.

They exclaimed more about his presents then, than about their own. They said, “Chris, ain’t that sled a beauty! It’s the best thing of all, ain’t it!”—because, though Chris’s things did add up to more than theirs in a way, there was nothing amongst them just like the kaleidoscope or the little stove with the perfect covers.

The tree was delivered now of its mysteries and the plain having began. The lamp grew pale in the beginning sunlight. Martha remembered breakfast, and Joseph remembered the rest of his chores. David got a hammer and broke the first nut. He broke the skin of the first orange and felt the first incarnate taste of its sharp juice. And suddenly it was Christmas Day.

After breakfast Chris went to his snares. “Do you wanta go with me, Dave?” he said.

“Yeh, sure.” To
day?
he thought—but Chris had thought of a present for him, and he hadn’t thought of Chris at all.

“Are you going to try out your new jacket?” his mother said.

“I guess not now,” he said. He couldn’t bear to think of putting it on just yet and maybe getting it wet and wrinkled in the snow.

There were no rabbits in the snares. When they came to the last one, David said, “I guess I gotta squirt my pickle, if it won’t take all the snow off yer rabbit roads.”

Chris laughed, but he turned his back to fiddle with the snare pole. David tossed his mittens quickly under a tree.

Halfway home he said, “Chris, I musta laid my mittens down back there. You go ahead. I’ll run get em.”

He drew up all the snares as he went. He didn’t blame Chris for catching rabbits. Chris wasn’t cruel. If Chris stopped to
think
about hunting, like he did, he couldn’t do it at all. But David couldn’t bear—not tonight, especially not when he turned the glittering kaleidoscope—to think of the rabbits strangling somewhere in the moonlight.

After dinner (the Christmas dinner food was like food to satisfy hunger developed specially for it; the Christmas Eve food had been more like something for thirst than for hunger), the tree stood still with ripeness, its wonder safely fruited. It could be left. The children went to see Effie and Charlotte.

Effie had a tree. It was a small one, but there was the same feel in her house as in theirs: of this day brought snug into the room from other days. The same touch through the window of the sun that shadowed noon-lazy on the Christmas snow and on the Christmas-lazy walking of anyone on the road. Yet there
was
a difference, David thought. Their Christmas was like a natural garden, with the foliage as well as the blossoms. Effie’s and Bess’s had only the flowers, and those were planted. They had to feed them with their own closeness.

“Our tree ain’t so very pretty,” Bess said. “We couldn’t lug a very big one.”

She always spoke like that about anything of her own. The others seemed to think that nothing pretty should rightfully
belong
to her. Somehow, if she disparaged it first, she could prevent them from taking her custody of it away.

“Why didn’t you ask Father?” David said. “He’d have got you a tree.” Chris frowned at him. David didn’t understand.

“We
wanted
a small tree,” Effie said. “We could carry it all right, couldn’t we, Mother?”

She seemed to put a fence around it. She too knew how her mother was deflected by the other women whenever their paths came close to touching. She resented beforehand any surprise that they could have special things like anyone else.

There wasn’t much for Effie but the silk dress for the concert. Her silk dress and Anna’s woollen one were like the plant and the flower again. They all touched the silk, Chris twice. It made David think of the play.

He whispered to Effie, “Do you know your part?”

She whispered, “Yes, do you?”

Something they shared then lifted their feet off the day.

They seemed to forget for a minute where Chris and Anna were to be found. She withdrew her protectiveness from the tree. She stood looking at it
with
him; as if, if it
shouldn’t
be beautiful there would be no hurt in accepting that judgement from him now. As if, if you both knew what beautiful
was
, it wouldn’t matter what anything of yours looked like to the other.

“We better go,” Chris said, “if we’re goin to Charlotte’s.” Bess slipped some candy into their pockets as they left. It wasn’t a bit like the skimpy-tasting candy the women made for church socials. David wondered why his mother never said anything when he told her how wonderful Bess’s candy tasted. When they came home from Bess’s, she never said like she did when they carne from another house: What did they have for supper? Was she cleaned up? Did she ask you what
I
was doing?

“Dave,”
Chris said, outside, “what made you say that about Father gettin em a tree?”

“Why?”

“Why, Chris?” Anna said.

“Ohhhh, never mind.”

They went to Charlotte’s. Charlotte had no tree. When they went into Rachel’s kitchen, it was as if they’d gone in
out
of Christmas.

Rachel rocked by the window in the cushionless chair. On no day in their house did the moments move faster or slower. Time was something captive in that room always; something she wore away, bit by slow bit, with each movement of her rocker. There was no echo of the laugh of someone who’d just gone. No lingering of a sentence spoken in the day’s work, when a thing was tried one way and then another (“What do
you
think?”); or of a hum in the day’s planning. There was only a kind of smell of walls, of the doily under the Bible on the centre table, the bare kerosene smell of the lamp that stood on the mirrorless bureau beside the bed when time had finally been worn away till nine o’clock.

David could hardly sit still. It was like the long dry sermon when there was only a handful at church.

“What did you get, Lottie?” Anna said.

“I got these shoes,” Charlotte said. She held out one foot.

“She needed em, so I give em to her last week.” Rachel said. “There wasn’t any sense keepin em.”

Wouldn’t that be awful, David and Anna both thought; but Charlotte didn’t seem to mind.

“And I got some scribblers.”

“We didn’t make much fuss,” Rachel said. “We didn’t feel much like Christmas this year.” She sighed. “I’ll be glad when it’s over.”

“Was you down to Effie’s?” Charlotte said.

“Yes.”

“I shouldn’t think Bess’d feel much like Christmas, either,” Rachel said. She sighed again. “I should think remorse …”

David whispered to Anna, “Let’s go.”

He took a long breath outside. He looked toward their own house. There’d be the smell of oranges in it and the cosy, personal smell of the tree. There’d be a kind of resonance lingering still of all the teakettle-singing words his mother and father had spoken to each other while they were away.

Chris stayed. He said he’d bring in the night’s wood for Charlotte.

It’s funny about Chris and Charlotte, David thought. (For a minute Charlotte seemed to like Bess, except for Bess’s great free laugh and something outward-moving about Bess like the spring in their pasture that found its own force amongst the driest rocks.) When Chris went near Charlotte, something in them both seemed to reach out for touch, then recoil. They’d both stand there for a second like two strangers who’d met in a path too narrow for passing.

He kept glancing down at his new jacket as he walked along the road. Little wrinkles were already showing at the crook of his elbows. He walked on, with his arms held straight at his sides. When they went into the house, he took the jacket off and folded it again the way it had been on the tree. It didn’t seem to him that he could ever take it for everyday and have the sharp creases of the sleeves become round and sloppy.

He took it off now, because he and Anna were going down to the meadow with the new skates (screwed right onto the boots, like the older boys’), and he might fall. He was going to try crossing one leg over the other, to make a proper smooth turn. He could never manage that with the old spring skates. If anyone was looking when he came to a corner, he
just coasted around it or stopped to make out he was tying his bootlace.