The Mountain and the Valley (12 page)

Anna and Charlotte stood on two chairs. Effie stood, between and above them, on a step ladder. Everything was swathed first in sheets, then in billows of cheesecloth. The three figures were supposed to come out of a cloud. Their hair was combed out loose about their shoulders: Anna’s a soft brown; Charlotte’s coal black; and Effie’s a light thin gold. Each had a silver crown—of stiff cardboard covered with pressed-out tea lead. Each had across her breast a wide band of flour bag dyed scarlet; with cut-out lettering so that a legend showed in white from the cheesecloth beneath.

Anna’s was
FAITH
; Charlotte’s
HOPE;
and Effie’s
LOVE
.

“Now don’t move,” the teacher whispered.

The audience was as immobile as the girls. It was like a
spell. It was as if some beautiful flower that grew only in warm climates had suddenly sprung up in their own fields. They didn’t see where the cheesecloth gaped behind the ladder, or the little cracks in Effie’s crown where the tea lead was joined or the tiny trembling of Anna’s hand or Charlotte’s black shoes that she had seen before Christmas.

(Bess was so startled she almost cried out. It was like a vision. So much like the picture of Effie she’d had sometimes in thought. She prayed, “Don’t move, oh, please don’t move.” No woman her own age was sitting near her—they had located where she was sitting their first glance through the door, then sat somewhere else. But she didn’t care. Effie was the loveliest thing anyone had ever seen and she was hers. Even if no one said so to her, they needn’t, it was true … if Effie could just hold it that way.

The curtain closed. Martha leaned ahead and whispered to Bess, “Wasn’t they beautiful? What in the world held Effie
up
there?”

The defiance wilted. She could scarcely answer for tears: Martha had spoken to her about their two children being beautiful in the same way; she had added a little joke.

“I don’t know,” Bess said, “but she never moved, did she?”

The teacher disentangled the cheesecloth both hastily and with caution not to tear it. It would be cut up and distributed for table throws. The older boys, Chris amongst them, came back to set up the castle for the play.

The castle was a cardboard front; crenelated at the top like a geography castle, and nailed to uprights of two-by-four.

David wished desperately that he was Chris. Whatever Chris had to do was always so simple. It was like lifting. The weight was there and the muscles were there. You just put them together.

Effie was a princess, so she kept on her crown. She had a ruby necklace of wild rosebush seed-sacs. She had a brooch of Ellen’s at the neck of her silk dress (though it had a real diamond, it didn’t shine near so brightly as the rhinestone brooch her mother had bought her in town), and she wore a beaded and tasseled sash that Martha had come across in the attic. Her slippers came from an old trunk of Ellen’s. They were too large, but they had high heels and were made not of leather but of some brocaded material almost like dress stuff.

David wore only his plain corduroy suit at first. At the very end he’d step behind the castle and come out in the crimson cape, with a piece of snow-white rabbit fur sewn on the collar. They had copied it from a picture of the little Plantagenets in his history book

“And now, ladies and gentlemen …”

“Come on, Dave,” Anna said.

She took his hand, as if for a minute she were the older one because it was he who must go. She could go no farther with him than the edge of the curtain. David stepped out on the stage.

It was like the time they’d taken Anna to the doctor’s office. When they were almost there everything had become hostile and unfamiliar with the thought of Anna going in; but they had walked up the street just the same, because there was no way to jump out of the relentless minute now.

A searching light seemed to come from every face in the audience and focus on him.

“I came to play with you.” The words might have been pebbles lying in his mouth.

They dropped through the surface of the silence and disappeared. But when the silence closed over them again it had a different quality. When the chipyard was so awry you didn’t
know where to begin cleaning it up but picked up a random object anyway, as soon as you did, the total plan sprang up instantly. The next words came like the notes of a tune on the organ your fingers went to without watching, as if they were the only notes there. He couldn’t remember
learning
them at all. Faster and faster he came to the princess and the castle, actually. In the routeless movement of light or thought.

“Do you
always
play alone?”

He commanded the silence now, surely, masterfully. Now they all listened as if to someone who had come home from glory in a far place—not in envy, but endowed with some of the glory themselves, because that one’s knowledge of his own wonder before them had no pride in it.

He thought, not proudly, but with gratitude toward them: oh, I’m glad I’m not like the others now. He knew how they were looking at him. They’d looked at him that way the day he calculated a rafter’s length down to the fraction of an inch, by right-angled triangles. They hadn’t believed he could find that out with just a pencil, but they’d taken a chance on cutting it as he said and it fitted exactly.

“I play alone too.”

Oh, it was perfect now. He was creating something out of nothing. He was creating exactly the person the words in the play were meant for. He had the whole world of make-believe to go to. They had only the actual, the one that
came
to them.

How much better this was than saying the words to himself had been! The kind of better you could never imagine, until you were into it. (You thought you’d rather sit in the corner and listen to the fiddle music, but they made you fill up the set even if you were small; and then when you polkaed out they all clapped, they all laughed so warmly because where
did you ever learn to dance like that? And then, oh then, when you all joined hands in the Big Ring!)

This was better than the cosiness of doing anything alone. He’d never do anything alone again. He’d take them with him always, in their watching. Closer somehow
because
they followed. It would be like the burning loyalty to his father (somehow suddenly to his father’s mended socks drying on the oven door), when he spelled the long hard words in the evening lesson exactly right. Oh, this was perfect. There was a bated wonder coming from their faces: to know that this was David, but a David with the shine on him (they’d never suspected!) of understanding and showing them how everything was.

The first scene was over, and the curtains were drawn together for a minute.

One time the whole family had tried a thousand dollar contest. The object was to total correctly the myriad numbers that made up the shape of a huge elephant. They had traced the numbers one by one with dye, and he had added as they went. They had checked and rechecked until they were tired out. But when the total was sealed in the envelope, ready to go, a shine went out over everything. They had a lunch, and whenever two would reach for the sugar at the same time they’d both laugh and say, “No, no, you go on.” All the next day he’d think suddenly of someone: “She’s pretty, ain’t she!” or “He’s awfully strong.” If anyone made a joke he laughed right out loud it seemed so funny. If he read a story that was sad he’d almost cry, because he’d never noticed the sadness in it like that before. If he looked over any work he’d done in his scribblers it seemed as if he’d done it far better than he’d known at the time. If any man spoke to him on the road, after he’d gone by, he’d think:
“Gee, he’s about as good a man as there is
around
here.”

A shine like that went out over everything now.

None of all this was consecutive and time-taking like thought. It was glimpsed instantaneously, like the figures of space. And orchestrated in the subliminal key of memory: cold water reaching to the roots of his tongue when thirst in the haymow was like meal in his mouth … the touch of the crisp dollar bill he had changed his dented pennies for at the bank in town … the light on the water curling white over the dam when his line first came alive with the dark, secret sweep of the trout … the cut clover breathing through his open window just before summer sleep … the sound of his father’s sleighbells the night of the day he’d sent for the fountain pen … the date of the Battle of Flodden looked up tremblingly in the book and found to be exactly the same as the one he’d put down, uncertainly, in the examination … the doctor coming out of the room and saying that Anna would be all right … his own name in printed letters on the envelope from the city … the moment in the dream when he climbed to the top of the mountain and looked down …

The curtains parted again for the last scene.

“But I am a prince …”

(He
is
some kind of prince, Martha thought. And Joseph watched as if he were touching a garment he was proud to own, but which he could never wear, because its texture was so much finer than his skin’s.)

“I am a prince …”

When all the stray scraps in the door yard had been gathered into one pile, the flame roared through them, melting and levelling them, gathering up all their separate piecefulness into one great uniform consummation.

He thought, I will be the greatest actor in the whole world.

He stepped through the door of the castle for his cloak. He thought: When I go out, I’ll kiss her. That wasn’t in the play, but that’s how it would really be.

He kissed Effie so precipitately that she was startled. Her head went back. Her crown came off and rolled across the floor.

Jud Spinney was lounging in a group of young men at the back of the room. He shouted gleefully, “That’s it, Dave. Slap em
to
her!”

Once a sudden blow of sickness had struck the pit of his stomach when he smoked a moss cigarette. It sheared away everything but the shape and movements of the other boys watching him turn grey. This moment now was shorn of all its dimensions as suddenly as that one. He saw the raw edges of the flimsy cardboard and the verdigris on the clasp weldings of Effie’s rhinestone brooch. He saw the parched underskin of the rabbit’s fur on this foolish damn cloak. They were like the flame of a lamp that has burned on into the daylight.

Once he’d been trying to imitate the smile of a Zane Grey hero in the mirror and he’d turned and Chris was standing in the door. He felt the shame of having spoken the foolish words in this goddam foolish play as he’d felt shame then.

Shame struck first; then anger. His breath trembled. His lips puckered over his teeth. The anger gave him a rough physical shove. He threw the cape on the floor, as one smashes a mirror that reminds of some hateful scar. Tripping over it, he stumbled from the stage.

T
he teacher cried, “Dave …” She tried to close the curtain quickly. “Dave …” Anna cried. He paid no attention. He grabbed his coat and rubbers. His cap was buried in the pile of other caps. He ran out the side door in his bare head.

He ran toward home, not because home or any other place was a place of escape, but in the blind way he’d pulled on his rubbers outside the door because they’d happened to be in his hand. He didn’t feel the cold on his head or, missing the path, the weight of the drifts he plunged into. The anger hummed inside him louder than any information of feeling.

The shameful anger at that goddam foolish … that goddam treacherous play. The furious hatred of himself, of everyone, of everything. One rubber came off in the drifts. His new suit became sodden. He didn’t notice. He despised, as if it were another person, the foolish treacherous part of himself that listened to books. That was the only part of him anyone saw … they thought that’s what he was
like
. It was like some damn fool that kept telling people he was your brother.

He
knew
who yelled at him, the ignorant know-nothin. Oh, he’d fix him, when he got older. He’d never forget. The damn thing would say something smart and wait for the rest to laugh and then he’d just stare at him until he felt that even his face was funny-looking, and then he wouldn’t hit him—oh, no—he’d just take him by the collar and turn him around and kick his ass and walk away.

He hated the others almost equally, as if their hearing the guffaw had made them accomplices. When he grew up they’d
see
what he was like. A great surge went through him to leap ahead into time, into the strength that was coming.

Oh, they’d be surprised when they found out what he’d been like all the time. They thought he wasn’t like his father. They’d see. A surge of identification with his father flooded him stronger than the grinding twist of the anger: his father’s toughness which was to the toughness of the others as blood to dye. If the jeezless bastards had sense enough to know that.
Them
laughing at
him
. Oh, when he grew up he wouldn’t make any account of the logs being jammed or his feet being wet or his axe being dull. When they knocked the snow off the bushes ahead of them in the log road, he’d come along behind them and walk right through the bushes and say, “For God’s sake, what’r’ye doin?” Caution, caution—they’d see what he thought of that, they’d feel pretty goddarn small.

He said over all the oaths he knew in a harsh grinding pride. They thought it was kind of smart when they swore themselves. But they were kind of scared too. They laughed when he swore. They didn’t know how he could swear. They didn’t know how to swear at all. He’d swear so it scared them.

He said over all the words of sex he knew. They teased him about girls. They fooled around girls, but when it got right down to hard, meaning stuff they were kind of scared about that too. They’d feel pretty small when he showed them. He’d ride girls the minute he come up to them, whether anyone was looking or not. They wouldn’t tease him then. They’d look kind of sober and foolish because not one of them would dare to go
that
far.

He’d go ’way from this goddam place so fast and make so much money … and when he come back he’d drive down the road in a big car and pick up Bess (yes, Bess was the only one …) and when he passed any of them he’d nod at them as if he couldn’t
quite
place them. He’d have to speak to them
as long as he was here, but he’d never laugh with them again. He’d never have anything to say to them when he or they were in any kind of doubt or trouble, not as long as he lived.