The Mountain and the Valley (13 page)

“Dave … Dave …” He heard his father’s voice. It was loud and deep, but shaken with calling as he ran.

He heard his mother’s voice too, fainter, yet with more asking, “Dave … David …”

But the anger (which always bit itself more bitterly inside him when someone else tried to save something for him which because it was imperfect in any part he had to destroy totally) glowed fresh again. If they say anything to me when I get home, if they just open their mouth to me …

The running was hot in his throat now. His hands curled inward, flopping at his sides. He forced himself to run faster still. You couldn’t escape this minute, everywhere you ran it was there. But you had to get home as soon as possible.

Ellen was still up. She stared at him.

“David!” she exclaimed. “Where’s your cap? You’ll catch your death of cold. Where’s …?”

“I don’t care,” he shouted. It was not an answer to her, but to his own tumbling thoughts. “I’m all right. I don’t care what you say.”

He ran upstairs and into his room. He closed the door and began to tear off his clothes. The orange he’d taken from the tree, to eat after the concert, was lying on the bureau. He didn’t touch it. Its skin was beginning to shrivel.

He heard his mother and father, then Chris and Anna, come in. He heard the nervous jumble of their first words with Ellen.

Martha came to the bottom of the stairs and called, “Dave.” She put her foot on the first step.

“Shut up!” he screamed. “Leave me alone!”

Martha hesitated. Then she went back toward the kitchen.

It was no use. When the other children hurt themselves or were sick, she’d hold them and look into their faces. Strangely enough then, despite the pity or the fear, she’d feel how awful it must be for people who had no children at all. But with David, those were the only times when she seemed to lose him.

She hung up his cap which she’d been carrying. And looking at it on the nail, she felt the most hopeless kind of wretchedness. She didn’t know why, or just what it was; but there was something about David’s clothes when he wasn’t inside them that made her think of all the times when his feet might have been cold, or he might have been hungry somewhere and not wanted to ask anyone for anything to eat, or he might have been frightened, without knowing it, and no one else there.

Joseph said nothing. How could he? Even when David was
willing
to talk he couldn’t seem to find any words that fitted what he meant to say back.

David lay with his eyes closed when Chris came into the room and undressed.

Chris didn’t speak; but after he was in bed a while he let one arm fall across David’s shoulder as if it might have been a movement in his sleep. The only way of reaching out that Chris knew was touch. David was like a stranger when something was wrong. But somehow when Dave was in trouble like this he seemed more like his own brother than ever.

David twisted away from Chris’s arm and moved over to the very edge of the bed. He heard Anna come upstairs. She stopped a minute outside his door. Then he heard her go into her own room.

It wasn’t until the house was completely still that the
anger began to settle. It settled bit by bit, building up a sore quiet lump physically in his heart. He thought of the way he had sworn and bla’guarded. He said over his prayers in fear and pleading.

Then he thought of the door, closed tight. (Chris, who humoured David’s wishes even when they puzzled him, had left it as he’d found it.) He thought of Anna standing there outside the door, but not intruding as much as a word. Of the time his mother had worked at the cost of a new wallpaper all evening and after she’d gone to bed he’d come across her clumsy figures and seen that the multiplication was wrong and she could never afford the wallpaper now. Of the time in town his father had bought him the expensive suit instead of the durable one, because another boy in the store was trying on only the expensive ones. He thought of all the times any of them had surprised him with something they thought he’d always wanted, and then tried not to let him see that they could see it wasn’t what he’d wanted at all. Fiercely, and guiltily now, he thought of all the times in town when they’d fallen back from the counter as better-dressed people approached and he’d separated himself from them a little. (Oh, if it could only happen again.)

He wished the door could blow open, but it wouldn’t. He wished he could make out he wanted a drink and go downstairs and leave the door open when he came up again, but he couldn’t. He wished he could put Chris’s arm back over his shoulder, but he couldn’t. He wished he could open the door and go in and say something to Anna—not about this, just anything—but he couldn’t.

He pulled the quilts over his head. He began to sob. “Anna … Anna …”

The next morning he went to look for the rubber he’d lost. As he came near Jud’s place he kept watching the house,
as if it might suddenly move toward the road. He wasn’t afraid, but he’d desperately not know what attitude to take if Jud himself came out. The anger was no longer there to instruct him.

The snow had drifted over his tracks. Chris found the rubber in the spring, but he said nothing about it.

“A
verage: 96.8.” That braided up all the straggle of last term’s school. (David had gone as far as he could in school here, two grades almost every year.) The wet feet in the swamp and the limb scratches where the crotched fence ran through a thicket were forgotten, now the fence had been gone all around. Close up, the potato rows were ragged. Sometimes the plough, dragged on its side to cover the seed, had lurched, and sometimes the shaggy feet of the horse had plunged into the row itself. But from the house the rows looked perfectly straight and smooth. David was thirteen now; yet the day they went to fix the graves in the old cemetery had still its shut-in magic for him.

The buckboard was broken, so this year they would take two single wagons. Joseph would go ahead with Martha and Ellen, and Chris could bring the other horse, with David and Anna.

“Chris, go see if you can borrow Rachel’s wagon,” Joseph said.

When Chris came back, he said, “Lottie wants to know if she can go too.”

“Oh,” David said. “What’s
she
want to go for?”

“Why, the child can go if she wants to,” Martha said. “Go call to her, Chris.”

“Ohhhhh …” David muttered. He didn’t want Charlotte to go. When anyone else was there you had to watch what you said. You had to remember to talk to them, and see they had a good time. This was one of the days when he wanted least to break hands and take an outsider into their ring. The day they fixed the graves was one of the days when the family was indivisible.

“She said she’d be ready when I come fer the wagon,” Chris said.

“You musta asked her then,” David said accusingly.

“Oh, don’t git so big!” Chris said. “You ain’t runnin everything around here.” His eyes narrowed with the touch of anger. It was something new for Chris to be quick like that with David.

David didn’t say anything. He inhaled his anger. The instant fascination of hating someone he loved caught him. Later in the day, he thought, when Chris had forgotten these words and maybe would say, “Let’s go around the cove fer a swim where the girls can’t see,” he’d say, “No, I don’t think, you go if you like.” Not as if he were sore, but as if swimming with Chris were a little tiresome. Chris’s face would look as if he’d run into something in the dark. And when Chris saw that through all the years, never, never again …

All four rode in the seat. David and Anna couldn’t stand on behind, as they did in the buckboard. That space was now filled with bags of hay for the horse. Charlotte sat on Chris’s knee.

She sat way ahead at first, as if touch had suddenly made her and Chris strangers. But each time Chris leaned forward
to touch up the horse’s flank with the alder switch, she relaxed a little. Then as Chris cradled his knees, with one foot up on the whip socket, she was resting in his lap and the circle of one arm. When he leaned ahead now his cheek touched her hair sometimes. His hand that held the reins through the thumb and forefinger lay lightly against her thigh.

They hardly spoke. But just the slight synchronous sway of their bodies as the wagon moved slowly through the clean June-growing air seemed to soak up their presences, one in the other, like the steady night feeding of animals in a pasture.

Charlotte didn’t block the flow of things this morning as David had feared. It wasn’t as if they were in a
room:
making ice cream in a kettle whirled round inside the dishpan full of ice, or paring winter apples and stringing their quarters in long garlands to dry behind the stove. The minute you’d hear a strange step on the porch then, everything was spoiled. You could go on with what you were doing, but the presence of the outsider glanced about inside the four walls of the room. It seemed to split the single bee-sucking mood of them all over one thing, into fragments.

In the wide-warm June space, it was different. Your thoughts could slide past Charlotte and circle in a groove all by themselves.

They drove along and David felt the old magic. Of the road still there, but no one now to walk it. Of June finding it even in the silence with the green-breathing leaves full as fruit, and nearer the ground, where the shadows hung, the mothlike velvet on the uncurling canes of fern and on the low bushes. He could hear the echo of the voices and the movements which had once made this old place young—hear them with no matching chord of sadness but with simple fascination, because he was so generously young and echoless himself.

He saw exactly the spot on the log road where Effie’s great-great-grandmother had been murdered by a drunken Indian. He’d torn the earrings from her pierced ears; they’d found one in his pocket. The rock maple that her arms had clasped and bent as she prayed had grown tall and rigid now, but the fact was still there in it and in the flat stone beneath that someone had nicked with a sledge hammer to mark the place. The stain of whatever had happened in any place always remained for him there, however long afterward he came to it.

He saw exactly the spot in the road (exactly, because he had remembered the crooked tree that day, to mark it) where he and his father had met Enoch Holland taking his daughter away. She was laughing and waving incessantly; and worse somehow than her look of not knowing that her hair and arms and clothes were parts of her person was the fact that her dress had shirring all about the red sash at her waist. They said she had put on her best dress the night before and danced and danced and danced, all through the house. They could do nothing but stand and watch her because she had the lamp in her hand. The frightful fact was still shiveringly there, in the dust of the road.

He saw the cellar of the old house where his grandparents first lived. Lord Rothesay had once spent the night with them there, on a hunting trip. The Rothesays down the road, who were descendants of the same name and blood as he, wore moose shanks with the hair still on them; but in the morning this one had given his grandfather a gold powderhorn that had come all the way from Austria. The autumn-pulsant stain of that fact marked off the spot exactly from the rest of the field.

And then they rounded a sharp bend and there suddenly the road was freed from the trees. The graveyard sloped upward on one side, and on the other the lake lapped
softly in the sun, like the breathing of someone asleep.

David couldn’t wait for Chris to tie the horse. He and Anna raced up the slope to join the others.

The older ones had stood silently, when they first came, willing a minute’s tribute of intimate recall. Now they were at work. “I wonder if they know we’re here. I like to think so,” Martha said, as she stooped to pluck the first weed.

Joseph had laid his coat over a tombstone and rolled up his shirt sleeves, inward, to the elbow. He was mowing the tall grass from the grave sods. He swung the scythe wide and smooth where the swath was free, and curbed it near the markers with the precision of a knife. Martha had a black stocking drawn like a gaiter over each arm, to protect her from the poison ivy. She was chopping plantain and kootch grass out of the gravel lanes between the graves with the point of a hoe.

The three graves in their plot held Joseph’s father; his brother whose name was also Richard (the one who had died of “brain fever,” the one in the tintype they always said David resembled so much); and another brother, Philip. Philip had fallen in the well when he was only a child. There had never been any picture taken of him. There was none, even in anyone’s mind, now. The graves, one full length, two half length, lay against the unused extension of the plot like notches on a ruler.

Most of the tombstones in the rest of the cemetery were awry. The tall cubical ones (bearing on top a sculpted lamb or urn or open book, and beneath, in copybook script, “Blessed Are They That Sleep In The Lord”) teetered on their foundations. Some of the chalk-white slabs had fallen and split across the lettering. Grass grew through the cracks, and moss lined the grooves of the name. The great black granite stone of an old English general was still satin-smooth, but bird droppings
defaced its flat top. Pickle jars or tin cans burrowed into the sand of other graves. They were rusted with fall rains and held only the skeletons of last year’s flowers.

Yet there was no gloom about the place; only a gentle steeping together of the quiet and the sun and the lake. The black granite stone was warm as flesh to the touch.

Ellen knelt where someday she would lie, smoothing out white lake sand on the surface of her husband’s grave. She felt no sadness. Not even the watered sadness of memory. No pictures sprang into her mind, as they did when she tore rags for a rug. This was the one sure spot, the spot where her husband lay. All of him with her was gathered here, unchangeably ended, nothing to be added now or taken away. It was like a focus of light she stood in so that all the separate images disappeared. The quiet warnings on the tombstones about her—Aged 23 years, Aged 51 years—had no message of urgency or fear. Those were places she had passed. Now years were no longer footholds in the treacherous cliff going up. She had reached the plain. She knelt by her husband’s grave in this focus of peace. She felt nothing but the peace of her hands moving in the warm white sand.