The Mountain and the Valley (18 page)

He went to the house, pretending he was thirsty, to tell Martha of his sudden plan. Always before a plan was something that only came, slowly, of an evening.

Martha’s Saturday work was done. The lamp chimneys were shined, the floor scrubbed, her body bathed and clad in the gingham dress with the ironing creases still uncrumpled. The smell of fresh bread was clean in the sunny kitchen where it lay on the bread board to cool.

Seeing Joseph come toward the house, she felt, without word-shaped thought, the same containment as he. As if it
were a garden they had planted together. Now the hard days of weeding and hoeing were over; yet such straggling fret at the time was absorbed, as a necessary part of the completeness, in the fullness of the growing. It was safe at last for her and Joseph to be spectators at their own peace. Depending for variety on the news brought in that such and such a thing had happened to someone else. Hearing, and interested to hear, of change; but feeling only of containment.

Joseph turned from the pump, his hand still on the dipper of well water.

“Martha,” he said, “I bin thinkin. I think I’ll git some logs out this winter and build you a new house.”

That was the night of the social. While the others were dressing, David got out the dictionary and the box of writing paper. He composed his reply to the city boy excitedly. He wrote it out first on a scribbler page, then copied it very carefully.

The schoolhouse window was raised. Chris and Charlotte, waiting their turn to polka out, rested their elbows on the sill. They gazed out into the sensuous August dark. The sting of the fiddle music and the drinks he’d had made an urgent spilling in Chris’s flesh. Even the bold swing of the
dancing couldn’t drain it away.

He whispered to Charlotte, “Let’s go fer a walk after this one, and cool off.”

She protested. “Chris Canaan,” she said, “you’ve been drinkin! I can smell it on your breath.”

But she went.

They went behind the boulder where the “Hunters” used to hide when the school kids played “Moose.”

On their way back they had their first quarrel. Charlotte said she’d promised her mother she’d come home as soon as the pies were sold. She was bound he’d leave too. Go home before it was done? When it was ended so soon, anyway? My God, when you saw Seth bending to put his fiddle in the case and Jim reaching for the cover of his harp …

That was the first night that what he got from Charlotte hadn’t seemed to Chris like the single miraculous thing, to be found in a single place. Maybe there was lots of it. Maybe he could find it better somewhere else—without this dinging at him that seemed to come up every time, with her.

Martha joked Joseph about his elaborate caution with her pie on the way to the schoolhouse. Its paper wrapping was drawn up into a tent and caught with a safety pin at the top, so the frosting wouldn’t muss.

But she didn’t laugh when her pie went cheap and Joseph paid three dollars for Bess’s. She didn’t join in the laughter when Bess took the wreath of artificial flowers from her pie and draped it about Joseph’s neck. (Though how could Joseph do anything else but leave it there while they ate?)

When she had gathered her own plates and forks together, to go, she went up to him. He was chatting with the other men. “Are you goin home tonight?” she said. She carried the empty plates home herself.

And that night in bed, she said, “You
knew
her pie.”

She put the words into her own mouth, to be denied; then when she heard them spoken, some dreadful fascination forced her to act as if they were believed.

She was impotent against the fascination of the silence she sickened herself with for the next two days. She watched Joseph stumbling against it, bewildered; but she was helpless to break it. Until a pain more riving than any before struck through her chest and, when it was spent, released them both into the most trusting peace they had ever known. Nothing could have made her believe that the silence was to come back on her, again, and again.

That was the summer that had almost every day like August. That was the night the weather broke.

Ellen awakened, late in the night, at the sound of the rain. She put out a hand to touch her husband. “Richard,” she said. He wasn’t there. For the first time in her life her mind wouldn’t obey her. She couldn’t make it focus, to tell her what had happened or where she was.

T
his was the day of evocative light: the thin October light of after-ripeness. It put everything just beyond touch, beckoned the thought to where the substance had fled.

The mountain was haloed with it, as with the dusty gossamer rain of light a painting sometimes sheds. In the fields the grass was brown. Piles of potato stalks were withered and black. The goldenrod rusted toward dust, and the squawweed was lint-grey. But the albino light, simmering patiently in the aspic air like a sound after the ear for it is gone, lacquered them like the shells of the pumpkins piled before the shop. It hung clearly and expandingly between the branches of the chestnut tree before the house, bare now as a tree a child draws. The bones of the tree seemed to have a luminosity of their own. It diamonded the bits of glass on the ground, prodigally and sadly, because it would not come again. It furred a strand of the wire fence with light distilled pure and memoryless from the light of summer. It steeped in the shingles. It hung hazy, and most nearly tangible, over the river. There it was like the face-light of someone forgotten, and remembered again on awaking from a dream.

The pasture decayed gently, lingering after sentience, and lacquered after death with the wistful fall-stain: the burning red of the hardhacks, the blood-red of the wild-rose berries, and the age-brown of the wafered alder leaves. The mud of the mountain road flaked like pie crust. But wherever a puddle remained in the ruts from last night’s rain the yellow light sought it as a mirror. It looked for its own face but made no image but the bright reflection of its own transparency. Farther along, where the trees met over the road, the road was plated with the crisp coins of light. They showered through the spaces between the leaves; and beneath the leaves themselves, a dark aqueous filament of shadow trembled.

Further still, in the mountain proper, the light seemed to emanate from the trees. Jets and sprays of it from the red-burning maples hushed the dark spruces and soaked through the white-shining bones of twigs on the ground and through the crumbling bones of the crust-brown ferns. In the clearings, the fronded sea of ferns repeated it suddenly and threw it back like an exhalation. And at the very top of the mountain against the moted lemon sky, the cidery yellow-green leaves of the birches and poplars shed it with their ceaseless movement like the shiver of waves under the sun. They refracted it like leaves of glass; spilled it like a pool of yellow lint onto the freckling of fallen leaves that glinted with it on the ground beneath.

This was the day when, all sentience fled, all things of the country shed the last light of after-memory. Its unwithheld entirety stained as quietly as a shadow. It claimed, by its drawing stillness, that you know it perfectly and so possess it; as you could not. It beckoned you, by its very undemanding, to touch what was unreachable. It asked you, because it had no heart or tongue, to feel you knew not what and to find words for what was inexpressible.

In the afternoon, two people might sit, close together and silent, on a windfall. They would break twigs and drop them one after another onto the ground. The aqueous warmth and the musing yellow light would bask at their temples. They would look away, from mountain to mountain. They would have the feeling of floating that you get when you stare too steadily at the sea. Each of them would sense the same tug of the October light asking them to feel something they had never sensed before. But even in the same feeling of failure to do this, their separate thoughts couldn’t quite touch.

This was the October day in Entremont when, at dusk, the spilling yellow light, imperfectly known and so unpossessed, retreated into the bones of the trees. Into the unyielding olive sky. The gleaming bones of the trees stamped their dark shapes immaculately against the exiled horizon.

As the light retreated, the silence sprang up with the same shivering stain the light had had. The feeding silence of the bluejay’s dark sweep across the road … the partridge whirr … the straight flight of the dark crow against the deepening sky … the caution of the deer mincing out toward the orchard’s edge … the caution of the hunter’s foot on the dry leaf. And then the silence of the moment when the first faint urine smell of rotted leaves came from the earth, and the memory-smell of apples lain too long on the ground, and the sudden camphor-breath that came from any shade stepped into, the moment the gun barrel first felt cooler than the gun’s stock on the palm. The breath-suspending silence of the gun sight in the second of perfect steadiness, and then the spreading silence of the gun’s bark, and then the silence of the bird not flying away …

Ellen could see the mountain from both kitchen windows of the new house. She was binding the edges of a meal bag for rug canvas.

The new house was nearer the road. Nothing in it was skimped. All rooms save the attic had square walls. Its novelties were the talk of everyone: the banisters carved in the shape of hourglasses, a built-in china closet for the cheese dish, the cut-glass vinegar cruet, the maple leaf cake plate, the good cups and saucers.

The other women would walk through the house with Martha, of an afternoon. They shared this new thing of hers in the sisterly way they shared a death, or a birth, or a judgement passed upon any absent one who had set herself apart from them by some unconventional act. They’d say,
“My
old house looks so shabby when I go back home.” Then Martha would feel a glow: not of pride, but of feeling that if it
were
of pride they wouldn’t be saying those things.

It was the same with the men. The fashioning of any new structure (if it were only a tongue for a truck wagon or the hewing of a sill) was a thing of engrossing liveliness in the strolling pace of their day’s work. They’d look up at the new house with Joseph and say, “By God, Joe, you built her big and high while you was at it, didn’t you?” Joseph would say, “Yeh, I guess she oughta last me out.” And he too would feel a curious humbleness for having the largest house in the village; one he wouldn’t have felt at all if his house had been the smallest.

Martha rearranged the furniture from the old house every day at first. It had to be spaced so thinly to go around that the pieces seemed to lose touch with each other. The walls yawned backward from them. The tables and chairs had a bare and helpless look.

But when Ellen’s rugs were laid on the floors they brought a contractual warmth into each room. Then the new window curtains lidded the impersonal daylight with the same
contractual friendliness. They changed the spaces that had stood like extra furniture between the separate chairs to a kind of conversation link.

Martha went to the door of each room each night before she went to bed. Sometimes Joseph would stand in the door beside her; inarticulate, but somehow made complete by her pride in his gift. One thing only Martha couldn’t confess to him. (There were so many things they
needed.)
No matter how often she alternated the wicker rocker with the Morris chair in the southwest corner of the parlour, all she could see when she looked in that corner was the piano that wasn’t there.

The children each had a room now.

David had chosen the attic. He couldn’t explain to them why. From the attic windows he could see everywhere. He could see all the houses and all the fields and all the roads, right to the horizon. When he closed the door behind him, there was the exciting feeling of being unreachably alone. It wasn’t the isolation of real severance (that was intolerable), but a cosy isolation of his own making. The sounds that came up to him were blurred beyond insistence by the height. They were just loud enough to remind him that company was to be had whenever he chose it.

To the others the new house held the excitement of novelty. But not to Ellen. She still found her sorcery in the unalterables she had brought with her from the old house: the tintype of her husband … her pictures of the Virgin … the locket with the sailor’s picture inside … the remnants of cloth each still permeated with the wearer’s presence … the waxberry bush she had dug up and transplanted, and (though they said it would rot the shingles) the old hop vine …

She still found enchantment in the day itself. The days of the year did not change. (The day was always an added one,
in whatever company; it shaped the climate of the mind as surely as a word or a smile or a touch.) The day of this year, coming again, was no older than it had been in a year gone by. Of all the company who had been there then, only the day could return exactly as before; and so bring word of them.

This October day made the climate of remembrance in her thoughts. She missed the face of the old kitchen.

The cloth she bound the rug with was the lining of a black coat. It was the coat she had bought for the day she and Richard followed the span of hearse horses that bore their first son so slowly to the churchyard. She alone of the family had known the death of a part of you which lived in another. She caught her breath. But the memory of her tears that day was like the October light. It beckoned where the quick couldn’t be touched. She hadn’t cried fresh tears for so long.

She sewed the bag into the wooden frames with darnneedle and twine.