The Mountain and the Valley (14 page)

Joseph and Martha thought as they worked.

But their thoughts had an echo quality too, like the sounds of their voices hollowing in the sigh of the pines and the lapping of the lake. The pictures of memory played and faded against their minds as pictures play and fade against the mind as you read. They were on the cliffs still. All around them was the record (Aged 43 years, Aged 46 years) that the place where each stood could be a place of danger. But the fact had no insistence for them. As always when they worked together, their thoughts fed quietly in small circles, keeping the perimeter of each other’s presence always in sight. They
felt that bondage so much freer than freedom that neither wandered far enough to tauten the cord. They were on the cliff, but the cord between them was like the cord between climbers, so that neither thought of falling.

David and Anna gathered up the grass Joseph mowed and threw it across the fence. When that was done they darted about, reading the tombstones.

Sometimes David stood beside a grave and willed himself to know just what it was to be standing at the spot where someone lay no longer alive. But the thing had no language for him. The inaccessible mystery itself, coming physically from the ground, kept brushing away the thought that was seeking to touch it.

He calculated from the tombstones how long ago each of the dead had been born. 105 … 129 … 200 years ago, exactly! Maybe that man had had parts of England or France in his eyes once. Maybe he had run into the forest and hidden—beside that old tree maybe, or that one—when they sighted the overpowering enemy fleet sailing into Annapolis Basin. Where was all that now? The lake lapped gently, and all the stain of the word “ago” was suddenly in that spot. It made a rushing stillness that spoke to some other sense than hearing.

He kept calling to his father or mother: Who was this one, and how did that one die?

They were farmers, they told him, or blacksmiths, or brickmakers, or coopers, or woodsmen, or soldiers; or they made harnesses, or had grist mills or carding mills, or …

“I know, but wasn’t there something else about them?”

It was Ellen who told him that.

Daniel Worthylake had shaved shingles all day long, the year round; Ambrose Fowler had made boots and butter moulds and coffins. This one, whose name was Gregoria
Ramona Antonia, the Duke of Wellington had brought to England from Spain. He had tired of her and married her off to a sergeant bound for Annapolis. She had diamond bracelets, but the sergeant couldn’t understand a word she spoke; and that one, Valentine Robichaud (Anna giggled), was four axe handles tall and his wife, Diadam, no bigger than Anna. Nathan Hardwick was an odd one—when Lord Rothesay offered him a cigar he said, “Never touch the cursed stuff,” and Oliver Delacey always took off his cap when he ate outdoors, even in a blizzard.

“And did you know that the Goldsmiths there … did you know that Peter Goldsmith’s great-great-great-uncle, I guess it would be, wrote that poem in your Reader?”

“ ‘The Deserted Village’?” David exclaimed. “Gosh, I bet Pete don’t know that, or he’d learn to recite it better.”

And Delia Holland had “warnings”—she was forever seeing people coming up the road who had never stepped from home. And one day Lydia Comeau took the priest from Halifax into the front room to show him her collection of tree punks and there was her husband, cutting his thick toenail. Caleb Tyler was too bashful to pass a woman in the road, he’d hide in the bushes, and the Swift man there was of the same family as Dean Swift, a famous writer (how could there be no mark of that on Aaron Swift now, David thought, to reduce the townspeople who were proud of such empty things themselves, when he hauled wood into their back yards?), and Matthew Larrimore had a long overcoat exactly the colour of his sorrel horse. Phoebe Brewer used to tell them to lock their doors nights when they went to bed, because sometimes something came over her so she didn’t know what she might do. She went down to the mill one day and held her wrists against the saw.

And they died of consumption and black diphtheria (three to a family) and scratches that didn’t heal. This one died because the doctor was drunk and didn’t scald the handsaw he took his crushed leg off with, and that one had to be laid out under an apple tree because her tissues were so swollen with fluid they dripped constantly. These three Elcorn brothers were always kept home so they wouldn’t catch anything; but they all died within a week, of some strange disease that no one else who took food and helped at the house while they were sick ever came down with.

And some of them died in bed suddenly of age or childbirth; and some of them suddenly outdoors, from the stroke of an axe or the falling of a tree or the terror of a horse. And Barney Starratt there died because he didn’t rest on the big rock in the centre of the lake, as his companion did, the Sunday morning they both started to swim across.

David touched his tombstone. “Aged 17 years.” These were the graves where David felt the strangest spell of all. How could it happen to the young? They couldn’t have been
watching
.

The stain of young flesh was in those spots almost reachably, then more unreachably than any. Their faces seemed clarified by this great stubborn mistake: their always-mobile faces and then the great incongruous error of quiet. He felt almost a jealousy of them. It seemed as if they had done some bright extra thing. They had made the stain brightest of all by their very unconsciousness of having put together the shiveringly matchless words “died” and “young.” He, the watcher, though he felt that, could only stand there and grow still. He felt a little loneliness for never having known them. He felt a little loneliness because he knew that, conscious of knowing what it
was
to share a careless thing, he never would.

He looked at Anna’s face and thought, if one of them were she! This thought he struck himself with brought him so near tears, because it was
not
she, that a sudden sun-shiver on the lake seemed to pass right through his body.

Charlotte was helping Chris. Sometimes when they reached for the same tuft of weed his hand would touch hers or they’d catch a scent of each other’s sweat. Their thought then, the first conscious one so far, would be more like a sigh.

Why did the pines they ate under at noon (so thick that only island-shaped patches of the white lake could be seen through them) have anything to do with the food? Why, because it was outdoors and here, did the basket his mother brought from the wagon, with the immaculate napkin tucked over the top, have that quality of excitement, though he knew everything it contained: and why did she bring a lump to his throat, almost, because she carried it? The way his father moved the boiling kettle on the end of the crotched stick up and down in the flame was only an ordinary motion; why did he watch it as if his father were making some sort of miracle for him? Why, when the milk was discovered in a self-sealer or the butter in a jar or the pepper and salt, mixed together, in a twist of newspaper, did they have a brand-new texture, like a thing of Christmas? And why, when dinner was over, did the pines seem as if they had the little torpor of noonday food in them too?

There was no work for the children in the afternoon. They stayed by the lake a while.

There was no constraint between any two of them, to make a fifth presence. The group was fluid. And yet it was as if, if the day were suddenly split by an instant of hydrolysis, David and Anna would be at one pole and (though there was hardly ever any direct communication between them) Chris
and Charlotte at the other.

It was the nice resting part of the day, before the day began to go. Anna looked across the lake. Its soft tongues licked the shore and then drew gently back. She seemed to be sucked out with it, floating and bodiless. The mountain across the lake looked like the far-off furniture of a dream. David looked across the lake. The day seemed concentrated in this one spot. The mountain looked to him as if, with one great leap, he could touch it.

The sun began to be afternoon-hot now. Some of its warmth, slipping heavy from its grip, fell of its own weight onto the ground.

“I’m thirsty,” Charlotte said. “Was there any water left?”

Chris alerted. “That’s warm,” he said. “Let’s go down to the spring and git some fresh.”

C
hris and Charlotte took the pail and started down the road to the spring.

“It’s hot,” he said, “ain’t it?”

“Yes,” she said, “it’s real hot.”

Now they were alone, question and answer perched awkwardly on each other.

“Got any garden seeds in yet?” he said.

“No,” she said, “have you?”

“No. I mean,
yes
, we got all ours in. Have you?”

“No. We have to wait till we can get a team to help us.”

“I’ll help you,” he said.

“Oh, that’ll be fine.”

“Sure, I’ll help ya. We got ours all done.”

Silence was between them again, like the road dust settling after tiny whirlwinds had spun it for a second. They walked along with half the road between them.

“Are you going to the pie social?” Chris said.

“I imagine. Are you?”

“I imagine.”

“I bet I know what kind of a pie you’re goin to take.”

“I bet you don’t.”

“Will you tell me if I guess right?”

“I can’t.”

Charlotte stepped around a pock in the road and walked closer to him.

“You’re gittin burnt,” Chris said.

“Where?” she said.

“Turn around.”

She stopped and turned. He stood close behind her and put his hand on her neck.

“All along there,” he said. He ran his fingers along the neck-rim of her dress and beneath it. She bent her head forward. “Sore?” he said. He touched her neck here and there.

“No.”

She turned again. She adjusted the neck of her dress as if she had just pulled it over her head and were shaking herself into it straight.

“You’re burnt too,” she said. She ran her fingers along the brown bulge of muscle above his elbow.

“Oh, that ain’t sore now,” he said.

The pail swung against her thigh. He shifted it to his other hand.

“Boy, I got burnt all over swimmin down here last year,” he said.

“You
did?”

“Do you burn when you go swimmin?” he said.

“I can’t swim.”

“I know, but when you just go in, down to the brook.”

“Mother won’t let me go down to the brook. She says I’ll git sores.”

An emperor butterfly fastened itself to a spot in the warm road. It moved its black-and-gold mosaic wings up and down idly, like the chest movements of breathing. A devil’s darnneedle held itself motionless in the warm air. Its long parchment wings blurred almost to invisibility with their swift beat.

“Was it hot in your room last night?” Chris said.

“A little.”

“Where do you sleep?”

“Over the ell.”

“It was hot enough in
our
room last night. We never had a stitch on us.”

There was a long silence.

“That time the doctor tested your lungs—” Chris stopped. “Did … did he say you was all right?”

Charlotte looked confused. “Why yes,” she said. “That was almost a year ago. I’m all right.”

He thought, almost agonizingly: to be a doctor … to be that bunch of alders by the Baptizing Pool when the girls went in swimming … to be the mirror in Charlotte’s bureau …

He laughed. “Boy,” he said, with such a great show of amusement as might eat up the silence all at once, “you shoulda seen Bess yesterday. She got caught crawlin through that barb-wire fence be the short cut. She couldn’t budge one way or the other.”

“Did she tear her dress?”

“No,” he said. “Oh, a little, but she just had to stand there, all humped over, till I got her loose.”

“I’d liked to heard her,” Charlotte said. “I bet she made some kind of a time.”

They both laughed, but their laughter was too loud. It stopped too suddenly.

“It’s hot,” she said, “ain’t it.”

“Yes
, sir,” he said, “it’s hot.”

He held back the bushes so they wouldn’t switch in her face as he walked before her going down the path. She watched the movement of his smooth solid hips. Their circumference was no larger than that of the circle where his shirt was tucked in tight at his firm round waist. She stole privy glances at the small patch of bare skin showing where his shirt was torn inside the angle of his braces. It was a whiter, more flesh-coloured, sample than his face, of the skin beneath his clothes.

Chris felt the haymow woods-secrecy, the June-softness, the crackling warmth, and the shadowed light on the dried leaves of last year. It spread, physically, in his body. There was a kind of pleasant, fever-moist weight about his groin.

The spring extended in a dark pocket beneath the root of a fallen tree, so that the bank made a little ledge over it. It was never dry, but now it was shallow. You could dip out one pailful only, in a quick scoop, before it roiled.

They sat down a minute on the bank. The heat sighed gently in the leaves. It was too nice to move.

“Do you want a drink before we dip into it?” he said.

“You drink first,” she said.

Chris lay down flat on the ground. The support of the earth didn’t relieve the weight in his groin. It made it more tantalizing still.

The peak of his cap touched the water. He tossed the cap aside. His face showed in the dark pool: the dark hair falling
forward: and silkier, like wet chest hair, on his dark-pale water-smooth face the shadow of the beard beginning at the corner of his lips. When he touched his lips to the water, the pattern of his face wobbled like the patterns he and David used to make of their faces in the curved surface of the copper teakettle.

He finished drinking and rolled over on his side, but he didn’t rise.

“Lottie,” he said, “look at your face in the water.”

“What for?”

“Well, just look.”

Charlotte lay down cautiously and bent over the pool. Her face showed in it like a ripe fruit.

“I don’t see anythin,” she said.