The Mountain and the Valley (19 page)

Richard had made these frames from the slats of a corded bed. He had broken the point of the awl, she remembered. She remembered that cold chilling anger of his when clumsiness with a tool would thwart him. She had shivered then. She smiled now. She had seen that look since, though without the chill, on Joseph’s face—when the obstinacy of cattle would resist all direction, or when his bafflement at Martha’s unaccountable silences would pass over from stumbling patience, to appeasement, to a seething general rage.

It was queer, she thought, how each of them carried hidden in his face the look of all the others. It flashed out suddenly sometimes though none of the physical features altered.

She had seen Martha’s face as Joseph changed to another partner in a figure of the polka quadrille take on the look of
Anna’s when Anna couldn’t restrain the new kitten in her lap, no matter how tenderly she stroked it. She had seen Christopher’s face, when the answer to an arithmetic problem remained stubbornly different from any his calculations arrived at, dissolve into Joseph’s when Joseph looked out the window the morning he planned to haul the hay he’d got almost made so many times and the rain was beginning again.

More often she’d seen the look of some one of the others fleetingly on David’s flesh.

How like his father’s face (coming in wet to the skin from extricating the oxen from an air hole in the lake ice, beating his snowy cap against the woodbox, drawing the icicles from his eyebrows and moustache, scraping the sleet from his pants legs with a case knife, but not asking Martha for dry clothes till after supper) was David’s, when David had walked all the way home from school with the gash in his foot. He wouldn’t let any woman in any house he passed by put a rag on it. He hadn’t wanted anyone to ask him if it hurt, though his face was white as chalk when they poured in the creolin. She had seen his mother’s face, when Martha would test a strip of new wallpaper against the parlour wall, in his, when he’d look away from the book he was reading and she’d know that he’d recognized the likeness there of someone he would someday be. She had seen Christopher’s face when Christopher would say, “Let’s go look fer some spruce gum, Dave” (after the other boys had gone by on their way swimming without calling to either of them), mirrored in David’s when David would show Christopher an easy way to solve the fractions problem he was apt to have in the examination tomorrow. She’d seen Anna’s face whenever Anna cried, in his, the few times she had ever seen him cry.

She supposed her own face echoed in theirs sometimes too. She couldn’t tell. You had no way of seeing your own face
in the moments when it might be like another’s. But she hoped it did show sometimes in David’s. She loved the children equally. Any moment she caught herself preferring anyone of them she automatically loved the
other
two more intensely. But most assaultingly of all, David seemed to have no face of his own.

She explored the mound of rags in the centre of the canvas.

That had been Joseph’s good suit once. He’d torn it beyond repair, wrestling with Maynard Spruin one election day. He’d caught Maynard peeking through a window in the section of dining room screened off for a polling booth. Maynard was on the opposite side of politics.

You wouldn’t know Joseph on election day, she thought. That one day, he was expansive with all the men on his own side. Just exchanging “Good morning” with one of them made a glow all through him. And though at no other time did he make any show of his physical strength, that day he was cocked for instant fight if anyone of the other side piped up anything against anyone on his. She remembered what he’d said about Maynard. It was so outrageously funny, coming from
Joseph
. “That thing snoopin around and then spillin his guts … with them damn piss-burnt pants on.”

This was brand new.

This was the pair of pants with the braided anchors around the waist that David had started to coax for the minute he saw them in the new summer catalogue. The first time he put them on he walked like a cat in mud, the feeling of long pants over his legs was so strange. But his face shone when he looked down at them. He was going to Sunday school.

Jud Spinney, the tease, was there. “Are you gonna take up the ministry, Dave,” he said, “…  or d’ya lay out to follow the sea?”

David had gone white as a sheet. He had rushed upstairs and trampled the trousers on the floor so it was impossible to send them back. He could never be persuaded to put them on again.

That was Anna’s.

That was the first silk dress any of them had ever possessed. (Except for the one with the lace on the cuffs, which she had brought from England. That one lay in the bureau drawer until it cracked at the folds.) She could see Joseph and Martha now, the day they bought it. She had been with them.

They went into the store to buy gingham for a dress for Anna, and this dress lay on the counter. Martha asked the girl how much it was. When the girl told her, she asked to see some gingham quickly. The girl went back shop to get the gingham. Martha stepped over and held up the dress. Joseph came and stood beside her.

“It is Anna’s size?” he said.

“Oh, I don’t
know,”
Martha said, as if she’d never dreamed of it in connection with Anna. “It’s some price.”

She put the dress down and went back to her place at the counter. The girl showed her the gingham. Martha put her hand beneath it, testing its quality.

“How much did you say that other dress was?” she said. The girl told her again. “Oh yes,” she said. “Well, I think I’ll take about three yards of this.”

Joseph was still looking at the dress. He came over now and whispered to Martha. “If you want that other one, I kin let you have some money.”

“Shhh …” Martha said.

She opened her purse and looked inside. The girl measured off the gingham, ready to tear it across.

“How much did you say that other dress was?” Martha said …

Anna had kept smiling nervously when she first saw it, as if it frightened her a little. But that night (and each night for the next week) she slipped it on for a few minutes, then off again, when she undressed for bed.

She had kept it like new until that Sunday afternoon she saw David going back the mountain road for lady slippers. Martha had urged her to take it off. She called to David, and David called back that he would wait. But Anna was scared he would stroll ahead, out of sight. And if she only walked in the clear spaces, what could happen to it? She turned her ankle, running to catch up with him. The rock she fell against grated an unmendable hole in the skirt.

When Ellen remembered this little extravagance for Anna, she smiled.

She thought of the tea canister on the top of the pantry shelf where Joseph and Martha kept their money. She thought of how many times when Martha had gone to it (to pay the school rates, or settle with the storekeeper, or maybe just to buy a sweet-grass basket from an Indian at the door) she had had to tilt the canister from end to end, picking out the last bits of silver from the pennies, to make up the count.

Yet it was never altogether empty. Somehow that would be the very night Joseph would come in, sorting out some crumpled bills from the twine and matches in his pocket. He’d have money for a calf he’d sold, or the returns from his saw logs, or repayment of a loan he’d made (and forgotten about) to a neighbour.

Ellen didn’t know how it was they always managed to have a little spare cash.

The money for butter and eggs was taken up in trade. The pig and most of the vegetables went into the cellar. If Joseph worked for a neighbour he was paid
back
in work. Yet, somehow, they were never caught helpless by any need that barter couldn’t arrange for.

They didn’t sell off land to make ends meet, as some did. One piece of timber, yes (and that night the lid of the canister would scarcely close, and all the neighbours came in to see the hundred-dollar bill); but all that money had gone into the new house. When Joseph came home from the drive there were ten-dollar bills amongst the one’s—but those all went for the country rates, the tote-load of flour and feed, things like that. There was often two hundred dollars upstairs in the box which held the marriage certificates and the deed and the locks of children’s hair; but that was “cattle money.” It might be borrowed from but must be repaid, against the time when Joseph bought another pair.

They made over and they made do. But they never watched the cent. At a pie social or a tea meeting they spent as freely as if the money were easy-come town-people’s money. The bills were never folded in the canister; nor the denominations separate. There didn’t seem to be any system of balance whatever.

And yet, wherever it came from (she shook her head silently and smiled), there always seemed to be enough for their needs and a little extra. Enough extra for anything, though it had a touch of luxury, that any one of them really had his heart on. A set of portieres for Martha. A shot gun for Chris. A book for David. The silk dress for Anna.

Joseph himself had no private wants; but he unquestioningly accepted the whims of the others as, for them, true necessity.

She could see him and Martha now. They were on their knees, picking up potatoes in the acre field. Soundless with distance, they looked as if they were praying.

J
oseph and Martha knelt facing each other across the double rows. A line of potatoes soaked in the dusty steeping light. They had two baskets. One was for good potatoes; one for the pig’s potatoes—small ones, or scabby ones, or overgrown ones with a hollow heart. Martha’s hands were rough as Joseph’s with brushing the warm dusty earth off each potato she picked up.

They scarcely spoke. Except to check each other, smilingly, when one or the other would confuse the baskets; or to utter an exclamation when the lip of the meal bag which she was holding open would slip, and the potatoes from the basket he was emptying rolled down the side. But their thoughts seemed to hum together in the cidery light, like a bee over clover. Speech broke, rather than forged, the quiet contact between them. The silences between speech spliced it together again.

This was the time of day of the day of the year that Martha loved best. This the place and the work. Her thoughts were alert, but without comment. They moved, but without images, melting through each other like the configurations of clouds. This was like a recess from thought: the still remembering light, the hypnotic movement of her hands and Joseph’s in the gathering.

And though he had no conscious notice of it, even Joseph’s strength burned softer in him, to match Martha’s, like a light turned down. Unity was so in them that any other person who came into their thoughts, even one of the children, was like a second person, not a third.

There was the sudden bark of a gun, far off in the mountain.

“Listen!” Martha said. She didn’t let go of the potato she’d been about to drop in the basket. There was only stillness.

“That’s the way they went,” Joseph said. “I’d laugh if they got one.”

“There’d be more shots if they was firin at a deer,” Martha said. “Listen.” There were no more shots.

“Wouldn’t old Dave be tickled if they ever got a deer!” Joseph said.

Martha dropped the potato into the basket. “Joseph,” she said, “you don’t suppose anything happened, do you? Dave gets so excited.”

“Chris
had the gun,” Joseph said. “Likely the deer was runnin …”

“Chris never fired at a deer before,” Martha said. “You don’t know what might happen if they got excited …”

“Now start worryin,” Joseph said, grinning. “
They’re
all right.”

“Don’t
you
ever worry?”

“What’s the good a worryin?”

“It’s all right to talk, but if you can’t help it …”

She said no more, but the spell of the afternoon was broken. A little ant of fear began to crawl through her mind.

They ran out of bags.

“I’ll git some in the barn,” Joseph said.

“Don’t be long,” Martha said.

There was a hurry in the work now. The afternoon began suddenly to go. The light began to retreat into the hard olive sky.

The potatoes that had lain so easily to be finished in the rows now lay heavily. They weighted against the time left before dusk. She felt chilly. She got the sweater she’d thrown across the fence. She began to scrabble up the potatoes, without stopping to dust them clean. She glanced up the row, trying to split the potatoes up into basketfuls and make the row look short. Then she kept her eye on the ground, because when she did glance up, her work seemed to have made no impression at all.

Both baskets were full and Joseph hadn’t come with the bags. She heaped them, though she knew the crown would fall off when the baskets were lifted for dumping. Then she went along the row, separating good ones from poor ones in little mounds on the ground. Still he didn’t come. She got up and went to the top of the patch to see what was keeping him.

She saw him, with the bags under his arm. He was talking at the gate to a strange man with a strange team. They seemed to be talking leisurely. The man tapped the dashboard with his whip and Joseph moved a small stone with his foot. Joseph would straighten up to move away and the man would draw up the reins, and she’d think suddenly: it won’t take long, with the two of us … But Joseph would put his foot up on a wheel spoke and they’d talk some more.

His back was to the field. He didn’t turn, to wave to her that he’d be right along.

And then it came over her.

Sometimes it would take no more than that: the sight of
Joseph completely taken up in conversation with another man; forgetting that she was waiting or, remembering, making no account of it.

She caught her breath and started back to the baskets. But it was faster than movement. Movement couldn’t lose or shake the wind of exile. It sprang up from nowhere, and she was helpless, once she had felt it, not to feed it. It was like the blue dusk light of August exiling the mountains; or the cold horizon light of winter exiling the skeletons of the prayer-fingered apple trees; or the retreating October light draining the fields.