The Mountain and the Valley (16 page)

Then, suddenly, David started to run. He crippled, with toes curled inward, over the harsh gravel in the road, till he came to the path. The path led across the meadow and past the sawdust heap where rotted timbers of an old up-and-down mill stood, to the deep Baptizing Pool. When his feet struck the soft yielding moss, his running smoothed out into ecstatic speed.

The others swarmed after him. They shouted questions that neither asked nor waited for answer. They laughed at anything, everything. At the strawberry mark on Howie’s buttock, at Snook’s wrestling with the cobweb that smeared his face when he ducked under an overhanging alder, at the ravelling of blouse cotton that clung to the back of Manley’s head like a queue. David braked suddenly and toppled the whole column behind him, like a bunch of dominoes. It convulsed them. They saw a tuft of grey moss hanging from a dead spruce the beavers’ flooding had killed. It reminded them in spasmic, convulsing recognition (though they had never seen one), of an old witch’s crotch. They laughed at the bobbing of their own appendages as they ran, at the sun, at the water, at the afternoon, at just the feeling (never dreaming what it was) of being young. Summer impregnated their flesh like the flesh of Early Transparents.

David was in the thick of it at the pool.

With another boy alone, he was always conscious of there being nothing but his own company to feed the other’s attention. Their moods would never quite dovetail. He’d have to keep trimming and adapting the way he really felt. But in a group, his private part was sucked suddenly inward, like rags
of smoke by a draft. None of it showed, to make a strangeness with the others. It didn’t nag him for release. He could be with them then, immediately, more immediately than any two of
them
could be together by themselves. He could spark any plan of theirs into a shape which they could see was much more exactly what they’d really had in mind.

Because of that, they all liked him in a special way. There was a kind of waiting to respond to him, like the smile kept half-ready in the presence of someone who may be depended on to come out with something funny. It wasn’t brotherly liking, but a kind of narcissism. He seemed forever, by the twist of essentiality he gave to whatever they said or did, to be disclosing and illuminating a part of themselves they’d never recognized before. They weren’t envious of him or jealous to be his special friend. It was a proprietary liking: though (and yet because) they were duller than he, self-warmingly protective.

He belonged, equally, with the youngest and the oldest.

He swarmed with the youngest ones first. Their absorption was complete with nothing beyond incessant movement. (“Look, fuhllas, I’m gonna do a belly-flapper, look …)” They shouted. (“Listen, fuhllas, listen, let’s all …”) They concentrated intently on one tiny plan after another: to stalk a devil’s darnneedle (“Stay back, stay
back
 … Dave’s got an idea”): to see who could stay under water the longest (“I did … You didn’t … Did … Didn’t … Did, did, did …”): to make a dam across the narrowest part of the current (“Quick—gimme some moss. Hear what Dave said, fuhllas? Says we oughta shave Bess Delahunt, we’d git some moss”).

Then he lay on the bank with the big boys.

He was a full member in the subtle conclave of their olderness. They teased him. (“I guess Dave’s been eatin eggs, the
way he’s bin shinin around Effie lately”), and he teased back (“Yeah? Well, tell em about the time you struck a double yolk and you know
who
got her petticoat slit from asshole to appetite”). It wasn’t like the tantalizing way they teased the other kids at all. He was inside the subtle line where encroachment by the younger kids stopped. The physical sign of olderness on their bodies strutted so surely in them that sometimes they didn’t have to talk big at all. It was ungainly in them when they were with grownups, whose mere presence forced it into conscious secrecy; but when they were with each other, conspiratorially tacit in them with a moist, heady lolling.

They lay on the bank and let the pattern of August stamp itself on them as on young wandering animals. It wasn’t like the parent-pattern of summer at all, tied to the day’s tasks. They heard only the language of water against flesh, the conversation of sun and nakedness. They felt only the smooth slide of muscle and the stirring of their own seed. It wasn’t really overt, but there, like the sedimentation of some deliciously accomplished memory.

The drowsy anaesthetic of after swimming was in their bodies when Effie came in sight at the top of the hill. She had a lard kettle in her hand. She was going blueberrying in the barrens along the mountain road. Mike Benson spied her first.

“Effie,” he called, “come on down. Dave’s got something
for
ya.”

“Don’t!” David said. If it had been any other girl, he’d have thought up some crazy antic himself. But he didn’t like it being Effie.

“Aw, shit, she can’t hear,” Mike said.

“What would ya do if she did come down, Dave?” Steve Sproul said.

“What do you think?” David said, in spite of himself.
“What would
you
do?”

“Onnnhhhhhh.” Steve made a nasty sound through his nose. He wriggled his naked body against the moss.

Howie grabbed David’s wrist and pushed him out into the open. “Effie,” he called, in a high clowning voice. “Oh, Effie.”

“Aw, don’t,” David said; but laughing and only half-protesting. He knew they were only acting brave because the girl was a safe distance away.

“What’s the matter, Dave?” Howie kidded him, “are ya scared?”

Even as he answered, he felt the hurting stab of betrayal, but he had to say what he did. “I bet I wasn’t as scared as you’d be,” he said.

Howie was put off his thought so suddenly it was almost comical. He stared at David with wavering half-belief.

“You never did. Dave, did you ever, honest, what?”

David didn’t say a word. He just looked wise.

“Dave, you old
bu
gger!” Steve said. He poked him in the shoulder. “When, David? Come on, tell us.”

“You sly old
bastard!”
Snook said. They all gathered round him.

“G’way. G’way,” David said. He shooed them off with his hands.

He just looked wise; he didn’t commit himself one way or the other. He acted the way the boys who had really done it, did: except for that curiously teasing smile, you’d think they’d just as soon no one knew. The boys looked at him with a half-grudging, half-exalting, “you-old-bugger” grin. It made him feel wonderful.

Steve began to have trouble with his body. “Look at Steve,” they screamed delightedly. Steve plunged into the
water. They all rushed in after him, trying to drag him out. David sat on the bank. He just looked wise. They wrestled in the water.

“I guess I’ll go now, fuhllas,” David said.

The wrestling stopped. Grasp fell from grasp with comical suddenness.

“Aw, Dave, for God’s
sake,”
they said, “why? We just gut here.”

“I know,” he said. “But I guess I’ll go.”

“We was goin down to let the beaver dam out,” they said. (Was he crazy, to have forgotten that?) “We was goin down the road to hunt porkypines in the old orchards.”

“You don’t have to leave,” he said. “You can stay.”

“Yeah, but—aw, fer God’s sake, Dave, whatta ya gonna
go
fer? Where’ya goin?”

“I dunno,” he said. “I guess I’ll go.”

He got up and started toward the bridge.

He was halfway up the path before the implication he’d baited for them sprung. He heard them whispering and giggling. They called to him then, in a chorus of mincing, teasingly knowing voices: “Oh Da-ave, where are you go-ing?” He just dismissed them with a flap of his hands.

What he was letting them think about Effie struck clear in his head. He felt like that day he’d actually cuffed Anna for trying to follow him to the store. A woman he hadn’t known was watching laughed a siding-in-with-him laugh and he’d turned and seen Anna trudging back home, small with rejection. But he had to keep on with it now.

They called to him while he dressed. “Oh Da-ave, don’t fall i-in.”

“You’re crazy,” he called back.

“Oh, Da-ave, watch out fer the bri-ars.”

“I don’t know what you’re talkin about.”

He dressed and walked up the road. The other boys went back into their fun again.

H
e was alone now in this thing he’d got himself into.

He had the cold sensation he always felt when the time was now for a thing (no matter how pleasant) which had hitherto been left to lie in the comfortable realm of the any-moment-he-chose possible. The bushes and the long hill struck in his mind with an exacting emergence from background. He thought, with overwhelming clarity, how wonderful it would have been dawdling down the road with the other boys in the safe-hot afternoon, nothing clamorous in any of them.

He tried to breast the minutes before the act by skipping thought of the act itself. He thought of how it would be afterwards: the doing of it would be proudly and safely in him forever, for the other boys to see: he’d never have to face it again for the first time. Or if he did think of the act itself, he thought of Effie providing it, but not really
in
it. That’s the way he thought of it nights in bed, or in the haymow, or beneath a tree whose branches almost touched the ground.

The girl he’d called up then wouldn’t be anyone quite actual. It would be a girl, or (very often) a woman, he’d seen in a magazine or heard about in a story. Or a girl he made up in his mind. She’d have no actual features; except the hot, coarse, feature of wanting to do it with him matching the way he wanted to do it with her. His body would respond instantly then.

If
then
he thought of any girl he did know (she also shorn of features, in the secrecy and in the photography-without-depth of memory), he knew he could be free and confident with her, too. Yet with that girl the next day, actually—now a girl who had said this or that, or done this or that, or whom he remembered having seen one time looking as if she wanted to cry—the suddenly added dimension of her presence would expose and cripple his desire.

He wished he could do it with Effie as if somehow she wasn’t there.

He saw the back of Effie’s head over a cradle hill.

He crept up behind her. He felt that funny guilt and power you feel, watching someone for whom you have a plan; while he or she, unaware, seems to steep in the formless thoughts that come and go when the hands are busy and one is alone.

“Oh Dave,” Effie said. “You scared me.”

She smiled the afteralarm smile. The breeze-lightness came back to her soft marigold face and her soft light body. It seemed as fragilely attached to her as the grey puff of stamens to dandelion stalks in the fall. She trusted him so utterly that the thought of
dis
trust was never there even to deny. David felt like a friend turned enemy without the other’s knowledge.

“Thick?” he said.

“Not very.”

He saw that the bottom of her kettle was barely covered she picked so slowly, not to get in any leaves or green ones.

He wished somehow that her kettle had been full. He wanted to sit down and help her fill it. The sound of a mowing machine would come to them faintly, but they themselves would be working at something that didn’t drive or tire. There’d be the clean afterswimming feel of his
clothes on his body, and the shine of the blueberries inching up the clean, shining inside of the kettle, and the clean girl-smell of Effie’s hair when they’d both bend over the same brush sometimes.

“Let’s go back the road a ways,” he said.

“There’s none back there,” she said.

“I got somethin to show you,” he said.

“What?”

“I can’t tell.”

“Is it far back?”

“Not very far.”

“Will I take my kittle?” she said.

“No,” he said. “We can find it agin.”

She put her kettle on top of the cradle hill, and broke off two alder branches to mark the place. Something about her doing that stabbed him again with the sense of betrayal.

They walked along the road. He felt the secrecy of the woods and the genital-consciousness it always gave him. He kept glancing about for a spot that was completely screened.

But the spruce that seemed at first to tent the ground beneath had a branch missing, like a window. A finger of sun reached nakedly through the cluster of pines he’d thought opaque. A stripping eye of light everywhere came between the urgency and the act.

He put on a bold, roguish insinuation, as you would a coat. But it didn’t feel right. It was like it used to be when they’d be playing hopscotch. They’d both be absorbed in it on exactly the same plane of enjoyment. Then an older boy would come along and he’d begin to clown. He’d toss the stone into the squares without taking aim. He’d hop in a squat—as if the only way you could be bothered with such a simple game was to poke fun at it. Effie would still play it seriously, and
after the other boy had gone he would play it seriously again too; but it wouldn’t be quite the same.

He tried to steer the talk as he had planned it, alone. It wouldn’t seem to go that way at all. The only feature about Effie then had been one of receptivity. The answers he put in her mouth seemed the only ones possible if he said so and so. Now she replied differently altogether.

“It’s hot, ain’t it?” he began.

“Mmmmm,” she said. “But I like it.” She put her face up against the sunshine.

“I’m frozen stiff,” he said.

“Silly.”

“Yeah? Well, I’ll bet you your skirt I am.”

She just laughed. She was rubbing the soft knobs of a squaw-weed blossom against her chin.

“Dave,” she said, “what does it feel like? Feel it.”

He felt the blossom. “Moths?” he said.

“Yes,” she cried. “Moths—it does, doesn’t it?”

They always felt an instant closeness when both saw the same likeness of something else in what to others was never more than just the thing it was. David couldn’t go back to the “frozen” business now. It was used up.

But he put on the clumsy roguishness again. And now Effie began to notice that something was wrong between them. She noticed that something, apart from the turn of the talk between them, was steering his mind. She walked along, quieter, waiting for it to wear itself out.