The Mountain and the Valley (11 page)

He was glad now that Chris had stayed at Charlotte’s. Somehow he wouldn’t want Chris to see him, if he failed. Anna was the only one he could bear to have watch him try anything in which he might fail.

But he didn’t fail.

They went down the long hill behind the church, in the soft Christmas-kindled air, to the meadow. Its ice shone blue and wide and smooth; so infinitely full of possible paths for the swift skates to take. The brook ran, open, through its middle. Lips of shell ice hung over the brook’s edges. He stood on his skates. And Anna watched.

The skates felt stiff and strange at first. He could go fast enough on them, straight. But when he tried to turn, it was just as jerky as it had been on the old spring skates. He tried again and again. Once he almost got it, but the next time was no nearer than before.

Then just at dusk—just when there is that nice lonely feeling about the whole world as you stand below a cold hill at the edge of the trees and it is dusk in the wintertime—just when the dark spruces began to come in closer around the blue meadow ice and the blue ice seemed to stretch farther away toward the other side of the woods, hardening and booming with a far-off sound so it would bruise you if you fell on it and you were alone, but not now, because Anna was there with you, watching—just then, he did it.

He didn’t know, in his head, how. But he knew the minute he felt the cool flight-smooth dip of it, that it was right. Now his legs knew it, to repeat it, whenever they liked. He was so sure of it now he knew he could do it slower, or faster, or horse it up, or do it any way he liked.
He was so sure of it now he knew he wouldn’t even have to test it again. He knew he would be the best skater in the whole world.

“I did it!” he said to Anna.

“I know!” she said. “I saw you!” That was the best part of all.

And then his skates were off, and he was walking back up the hill in his larrigans. The funny feel of them as they touched the ground was almost as treacherous after the swift skates as the skates had been when he’d first put them on.

He was tired. The little lonely feel of dusk in the wintertime (like dying, when the dying is over and only the stillness is left) was in the wheels of the wagon that stood at the top of the hill with a little fine snow drifting through the spokes, and in the windows of the church, and, looking back, in the meadow they had left. But Anna was with him. That made it all the nicer for being that way. You would know it was Christmas night no matter where you were and if you had no idea of the date at all.

They were too tired to play that night. They left their things beneath the tree. They only looked at them or touched them. Outside, Christmas moonlight latticed the snow with shadows that grew out longer and longer from the dark roots of the trees. And when David went to bed, sleep covered him at once like an extra blanket drawn up.

II

A shuddering of the bed awakened David as sleep wore thin with the thinning of the dark. Then he heard the mourning wind. It lashed the house, hard and lost. The house seemed caught inside one great mouth. The wind tried to swallow it, then rushed moaning across the fields like something out of
its mind, gathering up the helpless snow, and returning again and again to knock itself out against the windows.

David pulled the clothes up tight. He lay with his eyes shut, exquisitely listening. He knew the house would hold. He knew the sad, driven, crazy teeth of the wind would break when they bit into the friendly wool of the scarves and extra sweaters.

When he went downstairs, Joseph was coming in from the barn. The wind plucked up waves of milk from the pail, like fans of cow urine. It slammed the storm door back and reached inside, sifting a fine layer of snow onto the porch floor. Joseph’s frost-creaking boots skidded and he almost lost his feet. The snow was embedded in his clothes and encrusted his eyebrows.

“Boy, this is a snifter!” he said.

The windowpanes were furred over with frost, except for little parabolas of drift in the sash corners. David thawed out a peephole with his breath. The trees weaved in the wind. They looked almost too tired and distracted to stand. When the wind sucked back from the house and broke in a sudden explosion before the barn, the barn disappeared. The wind spun a bluster of light snow on top of the drifts, lifting it, dropping it, baffling it. The drifts themselves, scooped out on the underside in the shape of a scythe, looked hard as bone; and here and there a patch of ice, swept smooth as a hand, shone blue and mournful.

Joseph warned out the men to break the roads; but before the frost-whiskered oxen had gone the length of a sled runner, the vicious snow had filled in their tracks. When Chris and David went to water the cows, the wind sucked their breath from them as if it were a loose hat on their heads. The bite of the cold went right down to their lungs. They had to shout to make themselves heard. The cows shied their heads
into the biting wind and tested the water again and again with their teeth before gathering up a great frosty ball of it and rolling it down their long throats. The nails in the clapboards of the barn were drawn out and furred with the frost. The barn’s timbers creaked as if with the next gust they must surely split. When Chris and David came back to the house, the only way they could hold their breath at all was to walk back-to.

Now there was no
night
between him and the lines of the play, David’s heart caught when he thought of them, like in falling. But around noon the teacher came to say that the concert was postponed on account of the storm (how warmingly funny the man’s pants she wore looked when he heard her say that!), and the afternoon was perfect.

The afternoon was totally safe, because the storm kept them all in the house together. Nothing could get at them from outside. Nothing could leave. Even his father, shed of his own outdoors part, was together with them in the close house-safeness.

Joseph drowsed on the couch in the kitchen, Ellen tore rags, and Martha knitted. Their talk made a sound like the flutter of wood in the stove or the stewing of the kettle—almost a no-sound. It was as if the cable of time had been broken and they were all magically marooned until its strands were spliced together again.

Chris plaited strips of moosehide into a snowshoe bow on the dining room floor, and Martha let Anna drape blankets over the clothes rack to make a house for herself and her doll. (There were no rules this afternoon about the appropriate place to do anything.) David curled up on the dining room sofa, near enough the tree to smell it and the oranges constantly. He read his new book with an ecstatic caution, as if even reading might soil its pages.

Each one seemed to have a sheltered moment for his own thing. Yet the silence amongst them was itself like a kind of visiting, one with the other.

Sometimes David found the spell of the story so strong he must somehow break it and prolong it. He’d go out to the kitchen and ask his father what was the very highest drift he’d ever seen, or ask his mother if she didn’t want him to hold the skein of yarn over his arms, or help his grandmother tear a few rags. He’d come back and watch Chris’s weaving, silently, as if it were a spellbinding thing that no one else could do; and look inside Anna’s tent of blankets, smiling only, as if to bestow his blessing on her good time without breaking into it.

Then he’d go back to the sofa and rejoin Friday on the hot, mysterious island. And then he’d go to the window and look through the breath holes in the pane at the fans of snow howling against the sash. You’d freeze, outside, if you were naked like Friday; but inside, the wood was sighing under the covers of both stoves. He prayed that the storm would last all night.

It did. When the wood boxes were full and the water in and you knew no one would have to go outdoors any more, the storm mourned, more lost than ever, at the pane. At suppertime they pulled the kitchen table closer to the stove. Joseph covered up the potatoes in the cellar with the bearskin laprobe from the sleigh, and Martha brought her ferns out into the kitchen so they wouldn’t chill. She said they’d have to stay up late and keep the fires. She got them a lunch at twelve o’clock. He’d never seen midnight before.

The wind was still cold and lost outside, but the lamplight and the wood warmth and the slow-cosy talk melted them all together. And with this the latest he’d ever stayed up in his whole life (the tree was still awake and shining), there
had never been anything like it.

Martha wrapped up a hot stick of wood for his bed. When his feet touched it, it was like touching sleep itself.

There was still a long safe night between him and the words of the play.

T
he next night was the night of the concert. David’s head felt light. The words of the play kept up an uncontrollable chatter in his mind. Supper made a taste in his mouth like the taste after running.

“Why won’t you let us
hear
your piece, Dave?” his mother said.

He couldn’t tell her why not. She wouldn’t understand about the curtain and the spell. He felt as if his refusing was betrayal—but he could only speak the lines aloud
there
, or when he was by himself. Or with Effie and Anna.

He was saying them to himself as he poked hay in to the cows. He didn’t hear his father’s footsteps behind him.

“That sounds all right,” Joseph said.

But they sounded silly to David then. He stopped short. He tried to imitate his father’s voice in the barn. “Git yer head
back
there, you damn …” he shouted at the black cow.

As the time came closer still, the words touched his mind with the chill of bedclothes touching his flesh times he’d had a fever. His arms were trembling so when his mother made last-minute alterations in the sleeve lengths of his new suit that he could hardly hold them straight at his sides. He almost wished he’d refused to take a piece at all, like Chris had. Chris never had to do anything but
listen
.

A wire was stretched across the platform of the schoolhouse. Bedsheets were looped over it for a curtain. Behind this curtain a small corner of the stage had been screened off for a dressing room. Here the teacher and the children were clotted.

The children whispered frenziedly. They fussed continuously with their costumes. They ran to the teacher with bright, terrible confidences: “Miss Speakman, Tim can’t find his star!” “Miss Speakman, the oil’s almost below the wick.” “Miss Speakman, it looks like the curtain’s caught—right there, see?”

Miss Speakman fixed the lamp and the curtain. She made Tim another tinsel star. She told Cora, through the pins in her mouth, for heaven’s sake to keep her head still. She said, “Danny, don’t you dare to laugh tonight and spoil
everything.”

Some of the children got out the scribbler pages their pieces were written on. The pages were worn furry at the creases. They read them over desperately, as if to catch the words before they rushed off the lines. Some whispered them out loud in a solemn voice. Some moved their lips and said them over only in their heads. Some of them peeked through the curtain.

The audience had straggled up the road with their lanterns, in groups of two and four, talking around the edge of things as they always did when they went together to something after dark. Now they were cramped awkwardly into the desk seats.

Once they had sat there as children themselves. They had had the thought ahead of no more school shiver in them like a different breath. But now they waited, patiently, for their own children to come out and say their pieces. These children seemed younger than they had ever been. They seemed older than these children would ever be.

The children peeked and giggled.

“I saw Mother, but she didn’t see
me.”

“Old Herb Hennessey’s there!”

“Miss Speakman? I gotta go out!”

(“Oh Lord! Well, slip out the side door. Now don’t get snow on that crepe paper.”)

“Miss Speakman, what time is it?”

“What time is it, Miss Speakman?”

“How much longer?”

(“Oh, please be quiet. Why can’t you act like David there? He isn’t making a sound.”)

He couldn’t. He was absolutely still inside. The moment when he must say the first lines of the play had started to move toward him.

There was no comfort in anyone near. It was worse than being sick. Then the other faces were outside your pain, but when they smiled at you the pain softened. Now he was absolutely alone. Even Anna’s smile was the smile of a photograph, a smile of some other time. The people outside the curtain seemed to have a cruel strangeness about them. He felt as if nakedness had spread his face and body wide and unmanageable. The words of the play were frozen. They had no feeling at all.

He tried to think of tomorrow. Somehow, tomorrow must come.

“Shhhhhh …” The moment stopped moving. The curtain was pulled back.

“Ladies and gentlemen …”

David listened to Anna’s opening recitation. She said her piece better than the others—almost as if it were something she’d thought up herself; only hesitant for trying to say it exactly the way he’d told her to.

(For some reason Martha felt a little catch in her throat when Anna bowed—the rosette on her shoulder wasn’t quite straight. She wished she could adjust it. And Joseph felt a kind of incredulity that his own Anna had been carrying around all those heavy words, all that time, behind her small soft face.)

The others said their pieces doggedly, as if they were reading the words off their mind. The spring of their nervousness kept jerking the words out one by one until the spring finally ran down. They said the funny parts in the dialogue as they read the words in a lesson they weren’t quite sure how to pronounce. David wondered why the audience laughed. You could see they weren’t speaking to each
other;
it was just the lines of the book talking back and forth. When they came back to the dressing room their excitement was only because it was over; not because for a minute they had made themselves into someone else.

The tableau came next. The teacher had planned this as a stunning surprise. The children had been pledged not to breathe a word of it beforehand.