The Mountain and the Valley (17 page)

“I wonder if I got burnt today,” David said foolishly. He unbuttoned his shirt at the waist. He wanted her to think of him being naked.

“Dave,” she said, “what did you have to show me?”

“I can’t tell you.”

It began to feel late. This part of the road they knew seemed to have left itself and followed the road beyond.

“Dave,” she said, “is it much further? I gotta fill my kittle.”

“It’s right here,” he said.

Miraculously, it was. A little patch of ground the tree limbs hid completely.

They crawled beneath the low-hanging branches.

“It’s like a little house,” Effie said. “Was that it, Dave? Was that all it was?”

“Set down,” he said. They sat down.

Their bodies touched, but he sensed Effie’s sensing of his own strangeness today.

“Effie …” His breath came short and shaken. “Effie …” he said,
“let’s
 …”

He’d mentioned it, the moment was really now. His consciousness emptied of everything save the fact of him and Effie sitting there, exactly as they did. It was like a single surging sound.

She looked at him, not understanding. “Let’s what?”

“You
know,” he said. He didn’t look at her.

She understood then.

He waited for her to pretend anger (like the girls did when you yelled “mad dog backwards” at them). Maybe she’d slap him or get up and run away. He needn’t run fast enough to catch her. She didn’t move.

“I can’t,” she said.

She wasn’t angry. She looked at him as if she wished, the first time he’d asked her for anything, why did it have to be this?

“Why can’t you?”

A real boldness sprang up. She was resisting. They would
wrestle a little. He could tell himself he wouldn’t want to hurt her, and let her go.

“I couldn’t,” she said. Her look still asked him please to understand that if it were
anything
else …

He put his arm around her. Now the surface of the moment was broken, now she knew, a flow was coming back.

“Come on, Effie,” he said,
“let’s
 …”

He wasn’t ready for what happened then.

“All right, Dave,” she said, “with you …”

She spoke with a kind of awful docility. As if, if it was something he
had
to do. As if, if anything denied him would make a quarrel between them. As if …

“ ‘Effie loves David.’ ” The silly chant other kids had mocked them with sometimes came suddenly into his head.

“Love” had been only a word before. Like “sickness” or “death.” Now, all at once, it was like a page that had had only the blind side turned to you. When you picked it up and turned it over, there was the meaning, written plain and alive. It lay warm in your hand. “ ‘Effie loves David.’ ” He could see her gathering up the discard of his every action and keeping it inside her, pitiably secret. He felt as if he had stepped into a strange place of light. Everywhere he looked mirrors threw back and complicated his image.

It made him feel big and spreading; and it made him feel lost. It made him feel like the times there had been presents for him he couldn’t believe were his; and it made him feel like, when getting well, you looked back to the time when, with the sickness, everything had been so deliciously contained. It made him feel like the time he’d overheard them saying he had such an open little face they could hug him and he’d never thought of his face at all, as a thing for anyone to notice; and it made him feel like the sad-sweet look back at the lonely
passed-over road when you first came in sight of the houses.

It made him feel rich; and it made him feel destitute. There was no room anywhere inside him now where he could keep the things that sprang to life only at his turning of the lock. She too had a key.

She was still looking at him that funny way. He looked at her and spoke earnestly for the first time.

“You don’t have to, Effie,” he said.

But she stood up and began to undo the hooks and eyes on her made-over skirt. She lay it across a limb. Then she moved it to the ground, so the pleats wouldn’t muss and she wouldn’t get any balsam on it. I never knew she was so small underneath, he thought. She looked like Anna did, when Anna was a child, taking off her clothes at night, dead tired. She looked like a child undressing for bed.

He saw the secret, drawing, flesh-look exposed. Then the fact that it was Effie was suddenly no more in the way. His body responded as instantly as a heartbeat to fear. Thought went out, as if from a blow. It quickened so fast there was no following it. The core of all searching met with the focus of all receptivity in a swoon of helplessness. Sensation peeled back, like tight-packed leaves, to layer, to deeper layer, to the convolute essence of hot, moist desire.

The almost instant climax stung like a throbbing of wires all through him. It exquisitely contracted and scattered him at the same time. When Effie moved toward him, of herself, he tried to fix her in his thought (not even then completely swamped), like someone trying desperately to see through the clamour of sudden blindness. He tried to absorb every bit of her in a kind of swallowing.

And then when he lay relaxed, he couldn’t tell if everything had come inside him, or if everything had been lost. Or
was this simply the most complete weariness he had ever known?

A squirrel set up a shrill complaining chatter on the limb above. The moment splintered. The secrecy was all gone.

And right then, he heard the dry limb snap and the conspiratorial “Shhhhhh …” The boys must have sneaked up on them! The soft pelt of sensation turned inside out, like fur pelts on his father’s stretchers exposing their lardy underside smeared with burst capillaries of blood.

“Quick!” he said.

He tried to help Effie fasten the hooks and eyes on her skirt. The inhibiting mystery of her clothes was gone now. He had a new feeling for them. He touched them now as if they were a pitiably helpless part of her, like a limb that had lost its locomotion. His very sense of possession gave an almost total clumsiness to his hands.

They began to run. The boys located them exactly with the sound of their running. They began to laugh and shout.

“Waaaaa-hoooo,” Steve called.

“Shut your goddam mouth!” David shouted.

His voice split with anger. He’d like to kill every one of them, coldly, inexorably. They’d beg for mercy and plead that it was only a joke—unable to believe till the very last that he could do it to them, remembering who they were—but he’d be merciless and unreachable as a stranger. The pride he was to have felt before them never came into his head.

They circled toward the meeting house lot, where cover was thickest. He couldn’t take time to hold back the branches for Effie. She followed, stumbling, behind him. The limb of a dead fir made a triangular tear in her skirt. A wild-rose bush scraped her leg so the blood came.

“My kittle,” she whispered.

David thought of her kettle. It wasn’t even half full of berries. He saw the tear in her skirt and the branch of blood scabbing on her leg. He wished the boys would fall and break their necks. He wished a sharp limb would go straight through them.

They circled toward the road again. The others were almost in sight behind them.

“Lie down,” he said. “Hide.”

They hid in a tight clump of pasture spruce. They pressed tight together, but there was no feeling between them now except the impossible need of contraction to physical invisibility. They almost burst with holding their breath after running.

“Listen,” he heard Howie say, almost upon them. “I don’t hear em. They must be on the road.”

The boys circled away then.

David saw them looking up and down the road. He could see that with it under their feet the whole chase suddenly didn’t matter much. They walked along the road, half-relieved, he could tell: if he and Effie
had
been in the road they didn’t have anything prepared, to do or to say. They’d just have felt foolish. He knew they hadn’t really seen anything. He almost forgave them.

Then one of them spotted Effie’s kettle. Most of the boys went on. The thing was entirely finished for them. But a last flicker of interest fanned up in Howie and Steve—they thought it would be a good joke to hide the kettle.

David’s anger flashed back as if his face had been struck. Boy, he thought, if I could just come up behind them with a whip … I’d slash them … I would, I would … I’d slash their goddam fingers right open. Handling Effie’s kettle, and giggling so smart! He felt about her kettle now as he’d felt about her skirt; as he felt about everything that belonged to her.
Somehow he seemed to have exposed it in a pitifully vulnerable light. He seemed to have a responsibility now for everything her hands had ever touched.

The boys didn’t make much of hiding Effie’s kettle. It was only a halfhearted gesture, like the last turnip thrown on Hallowe’en after the feeling of going-home had set in. They moved along the road and disappeared over the top of the hill. David and Effie were finally alone.

He turned to her as a man turns to a woman at night in the kitchen when callers have just gone home. She is setting things to rights again, smoothing out this interruption mirrored in the posture of the empty chairs and the insides of the apple peelings browning alongside the whole apples in the bowl. He turns to say something to her. She is the one place always to come back to.

Effie didn’t look up. She kept smoothing the lip of the tear in her skirt back into place. She aligned the blue and red and green threads of the plaid, so that as long as she didn’t move the skirt looked intact.

She kept her head bent and turned away from him. He saw that she was crying. She wasn’t crying for anyone to see; but as if she’d be all right, as if it wasn’t anyone’s fault; as if, if you didn’t talk to her, she could keep it quiet.

David had never had a girl cry because of him before. He was helpless.

“I won’t tell, Effie,” was all he could think of to say. “I won’t tell a
soul
, honest I won’t.”

They went to search for the kettle. He watched her small arms part the bushes, when her back was toward him. And knowing that she loved him, David felt as if all the furniture of his mind and feeling would never stand dark and alone again, but in a lamplight; and he felt a kind of loss. She was like a part
of himself that had slipped away where he could never again be able to watch it all the time. It might be hurt without his knowing it—beyond the cure of being brought back inside and thoroughly apprehended. He thought how he’d been going to marry the loveliest or richest or most famous woman in the world. That seemed like a different time.

He looked at the feather-stitching on Effie’s skirt. It was neat even under the hem. He thought of how the only beautiful things she’d ever had were her flesh and her hair: the things her own body had given her. What could he
bring
her, he thought? What was the perfect thing she had always wanted?

They searched and searched for the kettle. They couldn’t find it anywhere.

A
nna stood at the long pane inside the church. Dead flies lay parchment-dry on the sill and the safe, cloistered, paint-and-hymn-book smell was all about her. She was watching for David’s head to come over the top of the hill. At last it came in sight and she ran out to meet him and Effie.

It was the first time that David, looking up and seeing Anna come toward him, had seen her as a stranger. The olderness of the thing he and Effie had done left her behind.

“Hi, Effie,” Anna called. And then, immediately, “Dave, there’s a letter for you at the house!”

A letter! A letter lying there on the table … with his name on it … with its message to be devoured privately, uncomplicated by the exactions of the writer’s face.

Effie and Anna suddenly shifted places in his mind. Anna was let in again, and Effie left out.

Sometimes he had foolish but compelling intimations. Something would tell him that if he didn’t pick up that particular stone and place it on top of that other, disaster would strike before the day was through. His eye would catch a particular tree along the horizon, and he’d think: That tree will be chopped down in exactly two years and fifteen days.

One flashed through his mind now: If I pass that letter from my right hand to my left before I open it, Anna will be safe all her life.

He didn’t know why, but the complex magic a letter held for him erased the simple magic of what he’d done with Effie almost utterly. She had that sudden anaemia of meaning a puzzle he’d been putting together would have, or the supper dishes, or a sock his mother had partly knit, when he opened the door and saw them again, after the Magic Lantern show in the schoolhouse.

Effie felt him leave. She kept pace beside him; but as if she could never catch up, no matter how many quick steps she took to his one.

“Did you open it?” he said to Anna.

“No,” she said. “It’s from Halifax.”

“You could have opened it.” She could have. Anyone else opening it would spoil the whole thing, but Anna could have.

He had sent his name in to a correspondence club in the newspaper. This letter must be from a city boy or girl he had never seen. What could a city boy or girl be like?

The handwriting ran free across the page. Where there had been a mistake in spelling, the word was crossed out, not erased. The message ended where the page ended. Not as if it had exhausted itself; but as if, what was the sense of
digging out more paper, to prolong it?

It said:

David read it over and over. It baffled him. He could find almost no message in it—where then did he get the feeling that this was some kind of turning point in his life?

While Joseph, that afternoon, felt how the clover was drying just right in the perfect balance of sun and breeze. The summer-pulsing strength of his body was like an only sound in the soundless day. None of it was word-shaped and clear, but he felt the earth he owned contained in the touch of his feet. The buildings and the mountains he looked at were contained in his eyes. And contained in him also, safely as the lull of the August-blue sky, were the children (though they were by themselves at play), and Martha (though he could not see her in the house).