The Mountain and the Valley (15 page)

“When you drink …”

She began to drink. Concentric circles distorted the image. Chris leaned over and pressed her face down to the water so that her nose touched it.

“Chris,” she squealed, “I knew … darn
you.”

She put one hand in the small of his back to push herself up to her knees. She felt the hard, twisting trunk-smoothness that the clothes hid. She could have got up all the way, but she hesitated a minute. Then she made a move as if to push
his
head into the water.

They wrestled and laughed. And then they were wrestling, but they weren’t laughing. They moved only slightly, and silently. Neither’s grip relaxed, even when it might have, either in victory or defeat. They clung to each other as if the arms might be willing to let go, but as if there were a kind of suction in each other’s flesh.

They didn’t speak, because they knew what they were doing now. They knew the ducking had no part in it. Their
face were fixed, like the face of someone holding back an expression of pain. They didn’t speak. By not naming it, by making the motions of resisting it, it would come as a thing that just happened and there would be no blame of having willed it.

“No!” Charlotte said at last. “Chris! No …”

But the miracle of discovering each other was too accessible. Their physical secrecies had had a distance about them before, different from the distance of space. Now these secrecies were as near as the overalls he slipped down every day and the dress that Charlotte pulled over her head every night before she went to bed. Their clothes were no heavier to lift than clothes off the line; and he and Charlotte were both there.

For an instant, the rawness of the flesh-look of first discovery was in them both, and the adjustment of imagination to fact in each particular of it. She was taken off guard by the whiteness, all at once, of his buttocks, and the little hammock of cords in the back of his bent knees. He was surprised by the little hollow, like a breath-cup, between her startling breasts and the fleshier girl-flesh of her thighs. None of it was beautiful like a leaf or a flower or the soft smell of the breeze. All of it had that flesh-raw stupid look; but all of it the moist, drawing, tantalizing shock. Seen now by the so simple disclosure of lifted clothing, there was no more now of mystery and wonder about it. It made each of them more immediately and consumingly knowledgeable of the other than the face, for all its expression, ever could.

The first shock to him was that her part was of no outward intimacy. It had a name, and because of that he’d expected a thing of some (he didn’t know just what) features. But because it was negative and hidden, he felt the inundation in his own flesh gaining a life and a rush like water as it is
forced into a small channel. It was crowded the more distillingly sharp by its own pinpoint contraction, and drawn the more swimmingly and rivingly to this bud-pink focus both of infinite secrecy and of total information.

The shock to her was the dark, outward grossness of his part: the flesh-dumb, vein-blind weight. Its terrible purplish urgency, its eyeless olderness, marked it off from any other part of his body.

“No,” she said again. “Chris … no …” But she didn’t move.

The swift, spilling search was sharp and clear and then over, like the note of a bird. But it wasn’t as Chris had known it, alone: the mounting wash of sensation, oscillating between dismemberment and fusion; then the exquisite draining of all his limbs and the sweet-crucifying blast of forgetfulness; then the drum of it hollow and hollower echoing. Now the drum of it was soft and proudly contained, the voice of it was kept.

Only he had the moment of complete forgetting. But it was he who, even as he conquered, was by the very conquering made naked. It was she who owned all his defenseless secrecies now.

Charlotte sat up and picked the pieces of crushed fern off her thigh. Chris touched gently the imprint of them on her flesh. He felt pride and shame together for having put it there. She moved away a little. The separateness came back quicker to her. She stood up and straightened her clothing. He smiled at her, shyly, but taking her all in. Before they could speak of it and heighten it, the day began to return to them both.

They didn’t mention it; but walking back the path, Chris felt all the pendulous itch gone from his flesh. The heat fell shadowed through the trees that bore their miniature samples of leaves like bright green flowers, and through the chalk-white
blossoms of the wild pear and the bursting dye-purple of the sheep kill. He tipped his cap on the back of his head. He felt a jaunty strength throughout his whole body. It wasn’t like any other strength, even of muscles. He had found the one place to go that took in all the others, as near as Charlotte and as often as they were together. He had discovered the one transcendent appetite (so wonderfully because almost by chance, and as if no one else had ever done so) and the food for it at the same time. All of it possible now, directly, without having to touch just the edges of it, making out you were doing something else. He gave Charlotte a slap on the rump.

They walked side by side down the road. There was a kind of steaming closeness between them. The tantalizing flesh-secret, discovered together, was deposited safe beyond the need of watchfulness now, one in the other.

“Chris,” Charlotte said, “what will Mother say?”

“She won’t say nothin. She won’t know.”

“What if anyone should find out?”

“Oh, who
gives
a goddam!” he said.

“Chris Canaan,” she said, “you stop your swearin!”

“All right,” he said softly. With this jaunty new mastery he found it wonderful to be tenderly penitent to her.

He set the pail down in the road.

“Kee-
roust
, ain’t it hot!” he said.

“Chris,” she said, “now you
stop
that, do you hear?”

He ducked his cap ahead over one eye. He caught her and reached down the back of her neck, to tickle her. She disengaged herself—not angrily, just indifferently. She walked on ahead. He picked up the pail again.

“Listen,” he said, “I forgot about the swearin. Honest.”

Charlotte smiled. She knew there’d be no more swearing today.

It was almost time to go home. Joseph was carrying the tools down from the graveyard. Chris began the before-departure check of odds and ends. This was an adult concern he’d always left to his father before. Charlotte stayed apart. She didn’t busy herself collecting the baskets as you were supposed to do when you’d been taken on a picnic with others. She was afraid there was something about her another woman would notice, just to be near.

“Chris,” David said, “are we goin for a swim?”

“It’s too late,” Chris said.

“Oh, it ain’t too
late. They’ll
wait for us.”

“It’s too late,” Chris said. “We’re goin home,
ain’t
we, Charlotte.”

Anna sat on David’s knee again going home, but Charlotte squeezed into the seat between him and Chris.

“You can drive better without me stuck up in front,” she said to Chris. “There’s lotsa room this way.”

“Do you want to drive?” Chris said.

“I can’t,” she said.

“Go on,” he said. He passed her the reins. “Just hold em tight goin down the hills so the horse don’t stumble, that’s all they are to it.” It felt good to humour her, to let her try a man’s thing, a thing that was his.

The horse broke wind, in an endless series of staccato puffs.

“Speak up, speak up—don’t stutter,” David wanted to say. But he didn’t. Charlotte wouldn’t laugh. She only laughed at things that fell into a
pattern
of what was supposed to be funny. She didn’t understand the patternless fun
they
had when they were alone together at all. Damn her, he thought, she had to come this special day and spoil the whole thing. It could have been just us, together.

He looked back once at the graveyard and the lake.

The near-evening sun seemed to thicken the grass and varnish it with the bright yellow-green before thunder. It varnished the poles of the wooden fence with a thin bone-white shining. The lake shone in it too, but drawn out thin and intense like the shadow of moonlight. And yet it seemed as if (recoiling from a shaft of loneliness so bright it struck at the very quick) the whole place had drawn all its life back within itself. It was like a house you’ve always lived in, at the moment of leaving. It would never bring its life out for them again, just for them alone.

“That Starratt boy was only seventeen years old when he drowned,” David said.

Never to have done it once, Chris thought, maybe not once.

When they were undressing that night, David noticed that Chris’s fly was buttoned up crooked.

“What happened, Chris?” he said, kidding, “did you get a crack at her old mus’ntouchit up to the spring?”

“Don’t you tell anyone!” Chris said.

It was like a slap.

David felt small and strange. He felt like when you’d been helping the men, working as equals, and then they went in to the keg in the woodshed and when they came out they didn’t notice you were there at all. He felt betrayed. He felt almost a sudden hatred of Chris.

He’d been able to do it, himself, for a month now. He’d
thought
about what it would be like, but he’d never really thought about
doing
it. It was like getting married or having children or going away to work. You knew you’d be doing it sometime for sure, but it was among those things that went
with “older”—it seemed like something not quite real.

He’d do it now all right, he thought, lying in bed. He’d get even with Chris.

He planned it feverishly, lying there. He planned Effie’s part as well as his own, the way he always planned the other’s too when the other wasn’t present. He made it as real as fact.

They’d be walking up the mountain and he’d say, “Are you hot?” She’d say, “Anybody’d be hot today.” He’d say, “I’m not. I’m frozen stiff.” “Dave,” she’d say, laughing, “you’re foolish.” “All right,” he’d say (giving her a teasing, devilish, enigmatic smile), “wanta bet?” “What’ll I bet?” she’d say. “That new skirt?” he’d say (with another smile). “I guess,” she’d say. And then he’d show her where he was frozen.

He thought of the whole lost month he might have been doing it, with irremediable anguish. But he’d make up for that. He’d show them whether he was a kid or not. He’d do it so many more times than Chris, so many more times than
any
one else …

“I’m through with school, that’s one thing,” Chris thought, lying there. “Athens is the capital of Greece. England exports cutlery. The earth revolves every twenty-four hours because … Balls!”

T
he summer David was fourteen had every day like August. The sky was so purely blue from morning till night it had a kind of ringing, like the heat-hum of the locusts. Joseph no more than glanced at it for possible rain before he cut the clover or stripped the shop roof. Martha could wash any day she chose. There was no wasteful mosaic
in the sunset even, to disturb Ellen with a haunting uneasiness over memories that were inexpressible. The children ceased to look at the window, first thing when they awoke, to see if rain had blotched the pane or webbed the intertices of the screen.

The sunlight was so clear when it touched the ash-white shingles on the barn in the morning it seemed more unsubstantial than space itself; and at the same time so equable as it explored the green leaves in the afternoon as to seem almost tangible. There was something almost audible about it. It might have been a transmutation of the tick of the flying grass-hoppers that swivelled, as if on axles, in the dusty road.

Yet nothing parched. Other summers of drought the edges of the potato leaves crumbled to the touch like a flake of burnt paper; the hummocks in the pasture which the cows had grazed short browned like a weathered knuckle. This summer each night’s dew was reviving as sleep. Little hairnets of it clung to the glistening grass in the early mornings when Joseph went to the barn. His feet left tracks in it. It shone like drops of mercury on the cabbage leaves until almost noon. When Martha went to the garden to pluck a cucumber for dinner off the crisp furry vines, the dew was still releasing, like a crushing between the fingers, the sharp smell of the tomato stalks. It lingered in the rhomboid shadows of the buildings until, as at a signal for the full symphony of heat to begin, the first locust sounded its brass.

The swamps cracked open like a buttermilk pie. Bugs tented in the alders and gauzed their leaves. The cow path to the brook (through the pines dropping their immaculately scalloped cones, the poplars rattling their leaves like silver coins, the red pyramids of bunchberries, the lush green ferns patterned like snow crystals, and the sudden storms of small white butterflies) was firm as stone. But the brook itself ran
cool and clear over its white sandy bottom. Waterbugs twinkled across it on their lightning pontoons like the sun glint on its surface split into sudden arrows by the rubbery lips of the cows in the hot-ringing afternoons.

In the afternoons a steady heat, like Sunday hush, seemed to bring the mountains closer. It gave them a dreamy light-greenness. They looked like
pictures
of mountains. The clear blue heat outlined everything with stereoscopic immaculacy. The repleteness in the air, as if the thirst of growing were forever slaked, gave it an almost churchy texture. Even in the stifling backhouse, where a dead fly forever lay imprisoned in an abandoned cobweb, David would feel it. In the stuporous, trancelike afternoons the tools of planting—the spade against the wall or the harrow with the earth of spring caked on its comma-like teeth—lay as if their work would never have to be repeated.

Then in the blue evenings the dew began to make a clamminess in the hay while it was still dusk. Scarves of haze blued and exiled the mountains. Later, the breath of the whole blue night was bated with the pulsating hum of insects.

II

The water was low where the brook ran under the bridge. The boys undressed on the bridge in the hot blue afternoon. They loitered there, clowning in a sudden exuberance the first moment of bare-free nakedness released. They walked the rail. They cut their initials in it or rude diamond shapes supposed to represent that part of a girl known to them in imagination only. They aimed corkscrews of urine at the shrill-green piss frogs that sat on the singed moss of rocks protruding above the shallow current. They dropped an alder branch into the brook on one side of the bridge; then raced
to the other side, with stones in their hands, to see which one could hit first the white broomed-up end of it, as it came in sight again no one knew where.