The Mountain and the Valley (2 page)

“What do you see, child?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“Is someone coming?”

“No.”

Herb Hennessey was coming up the road, but he wouldn’t be coming here. He’d never gone into another house, as far back as when David was a child. He’d been the strangest creature in the world to the children.

There was music … Was it, “I’ll take the high road, and you take the low road …”? No. It was before that. Quicker music. She began to hum, in a high quavery voice. “But me and my true love will never meet again …” David’s fingers tightened against his palms. She hummed the tune over and over and over.

“Is someone coming?” she said.

“No.”

Pink. That was Anna’s. That was the hair ribbon Anna had worn the Sunday afternoon she got lost trying to follow David’s tracks back the log road. They had found the ribbon first, caught on the limb of a tree, and then they had found Anna.

“That sailor was here yesterday,” she said. “The one Anna married.”

Or was it the fugitive sailor she’d hidden in the hay loft once? But that wasn’t yesterday … was it? Or was it the man she couldn’t quite remember, the one who had worn that fine coat? She hadn’t dared to tell him about the sailor, even when she slept by his side that night. No, it was Anna’s sailor. They were married. But Anna was David’s twin, and David wasn’t married. Anna was only eight years old. She had on a flannel petticoat with red feather-stitching all around the hem. Where was Anna?

Red … Red …

Yes, that was red. That was a tablecloth. The neighbours had given it to Joseph and Martha, the night of the surprise party at the new house. It had tassels all around the edge. They used it only on Sundays. The blood stain was still there in the centre. They had laid David on the table that day they carried him into the house, without waiting to take off the cloth. No washing could ever get the stain out. They had all sat around the table yesterday—Joseph there, and Martha there, and Christopher and David and Anna, and the lamp in the centre by the sugar bowl. And was that other man there too, the one with the fine coat, the one she had danced with that time? Where were they all? Wasn’t his name Richard?

“Have you fed the hens, David?” she said.

“It’s only two o’clock,” he said.

“It will soon be dark. If you don’t feed them before dark, they won’t fly down to eat.”

“It’s not dark yet.” He said it as if he were repeating a lesson. He had said it yesterday and the day before and the day before that.

She filled the space between two circles with strips of the tablecloth, and clipped the loops close with her scissors. Blue … She searched for a strip of blue.

“Have you fed the hens, David?” she said.

He turned then, suddenly. His mouth twitched once, as if from a blow that can have no other response. In a single movement he took his cap from the row of hooks beside the window and put it on his head. He took his jacket from the next hook.

Ellen turned. “Where are you going, child, at this time of day?”

“Not very far,” he said.

“Will you be warm enough? You’re not half clad.”

“Yes,
yes
, I’ll be warm enough.”

“Don’t fall.”

He put on his jacket and filled up the stove again. He hesitated. “The stove’s all right till I get back,” he said. He had to say
something
, because he had spoken to her sharply.

He opened the door and went quickly past the window, toward the road that went to the top of the mountain.

Blue … blue … Yes, that was blue. That was David’s. That was the blanket they’d wrapped David and Anna in the night they were born. But David is not a baby. How …?

She turned. “David,” she began, “how …?”

There was no one in the room.
David
was here. Where was David?

A
caucus of hens outside the window wakened David.

There was nothing repetitive about the mornings then. Each one was brand new, with a gift’s private shine. Until the voices of late evening began to sound like voices over water. Then, quite suddenly, sleep discarded it entirely. You awoke again, all at once. The instant thought that another day had something ready for you made a really physical tickling in your heart.

David opened his eyes. April air plucked at the curtains like breath behind a veil. It held a hint of real warmth to come, but the linen chill of the night still sharpened it. Clean limb shadows palpitated with precision and immaculacy on the breathing ground outside. The whole morning glistened fresh as the flesh of an alder sapling when the bark was first peeled from it to make a whistle. It glinted bright as the split rock-maple, flashing for a minute in the sun as it was tossed onto the woodpile.

A ribbon of sunlight stained the softwood floor and made a warm-looking spot on the bedside rug his grandmother had hooked. It spotlit the cool white bureau. David
narrowed his eyelids, distorting the furniture of the room into macabre patterns.

Then something jumped in his heart the way water flashed right through your bare-free body when you took the first plunge into the Baptizing Pool.

This was the very day!

This was the day his father had promised to take Chris and him fishing. The brook started beyond the crest of the mountain. And when it was dark, they wouldn’t come home. They’d eat at the camp, and
sleep
there. He’d never seen anything but the mouth of the dark log road before; but today they’d walk on it, farther and farther into the deep, safe, unfathomable, magically-sleeping woods. The voices from the houses would be soundless and far off. The only sound would be the soft undulant hush of darkness. He could feel the touch of the road in his feet, like a kind of dancing.

He could hardly wait to get started, to leave the house behind. It would try him to keep the slow pace of his father and Chris. He’d want to run on ahead. Yet, somehow, having his father and Chris
with
him would make him more securely alone with his mind’s shining population than ever.

A confirming glow flashed back from everything he looked at in the room. Most of all from the face of his brother sleeping beside him. I never noticed before, he thought: Chris has got a wonderful face!

“Chris!” he said. “Chris!”

“Unhh?” Chris said. “What?”

Chris and David didn’t look like brothers, except with some trick of light or flicker of some transient thought. Even asleep, without the eyes imposing their definition on the other features, they had no feature alike. David’s body was thin. His
sun-faded hair was fine as corn tassel. Chris’s hair was dark. Something like the lip-moistness of sleep seemed to cling in it, as it clung in his firm brown flesh. David’s eyes were so clear a blue they gave his face the look of a face in too strong a light. Everything beneath it seemed ready to surface there instantly. Chris’s eyes were blue too, but the blue was layered. They roiled, but they didn’t expose.

When Chris slept, his lips fell apart a little. When David slept, his lips seemed to rest on a line of junction so fragile that even his breath must be careful not to rupture it.

Chris opened one eye. He stretched both arms over his head. He drew his muscles taut, then let them subside all at once. He lay perfectly still for a minute, then threw back the quilts and stepped out of bed. He yawned and pulled up the woollen shirt he’d slept in, scratching his hips. He reached for his clothes on the chair and began to dress.

David’s clothes were in a tangle on the floor. His drawers were still inside his pants. His shirt sleeves were inside out. One of the garters that pinned to his waist was under the bed.

He ran to the window before he pulled on his drawers. To make sure the weather had declared itself to be fine all day. The others always had to be so certain about the weather before they’d let him go anywhere like this.

“I think I’ll leave off this old woollen shirt,” he said.

“What?” Chris said. “You don’t know how cold it gits, back there at night.”

“Cold!” It was a word that had no more real sense than the “meanings” in his speller.

“You’ll see,” Chris said.

David heard his mother and father talking downstairs. There was no special excitement in their voices. It was funny, they hardly seemed to know what was going on, sometimes.

“Is it fun back at the camp, Chris?” he asked. His face puckered up in a smile of excitement to hear the answer he was already certain of.

“Sure,” Chris said.

“I dreamed about it last night,” David said.

Chris’s hand hesitated for a second on a button. His own dream came back to him. It made the room seem small and strange.

“I dreamed,” David said, “you and Dad and me was on the log road, only it was funny”—he laughed—“all the trees was trimmed up like Christmas trees. And then it was like there was two of me. I was walkin with you, and still I was walkin by myself on this other road that
didn’t
have any trees on it. I saw the camp on this other road and went and told us on the log road, but when we come back to the other road the camp was gone … and we walked and walked, and I guess that’s all, we didn’t get to the camp. Did you dream about the camp, Chris?”

“No,” Chris said.

He couldn’t tell David about his dream. There wasn’t any story to it. It wasn’t a crazy dream like David’s.

He was walking down Gorman Hill. Halfway down you couldn’t see any of the houses in the village at all, just the smoke from their chimneys. He was going swimming in the Baptizing Pool that was suddenly deep like a varicose rupture in the shallow vein of the brook. Some of the sweetish freshwater smell of the meadow seemed to get into the dream. He met Bess Delahunt on the bridge, and she kissed him.

That was nothing new. Bess was always kissing young boys and squeezing them in her big warm arms. Only suddenly he didn’t have any clothes on. And his body didn’t feel small and scared, as it had in dreams of nakedness before. It didn’t feel like being naked in front of his mother or any of the
other women. Bess didn’t seem to notice it at all. And there was something else today besides just the squirming minute of face-nearness and the woman-smell of Bess’s black hair and the body-smell of her arms. Your own body seemed to swell in a dizzy clamorous way you could hardly stand it was so sweet. Every bit of it ran up to the spot where Bess’s flesh touched you, and then drained back, and then ran up again, faster and faster.

That was all. The dream shifted. He was at the pool with the other boys, not remembering her at all. And yet he felt as if he’d been someplace new; where he’d seen what people were really like. He’d never noticed before how flesh-whiteness and flesh-moistness were like no other whiteness or moistness, to see or to touch. His own flesh seemed to have a new light inside it. He knew that whenever he saw Bess again now he’d feel awake (though why only with Bess, and not with any of the other women?), a shadow of the same thing he’d felt in the dream.

“David?” Martha called from the foot of the stairs.

Chris felt a sudden shame at the sound of his mother’s voice. He started out of the room.

“Wait for me,” David cried.

“I’m just goin downstairs!” Chris said.

“Please
wait for me, Chris,” David said. He couldn’t bear for Chris to get started on the day first.

“Ohhhhh,” Chris said.

He sat down on the bed and waited.

David’s crazy whims never made any kind of sense to him, but he always gave in to them. He played more often with other boys than with David; but when the other boys had left and he’d see David’s slight body coming toward home in the dusk, he liked Dave so much better than the other boys it almost made him cry.

He smiled. That crazy dream of Dave’s. Yet that part about not getting there was kind of like his own dream, just the same. His flesh didn’t seem to quite get there, either … would it ever? He looked at David’s face. You could tell that David’s flesh had never felt that way.

David saw him smile. God, he thought, Chris looks like Dad this morning! That’s the way the older ones watched your kind of fun; just watched and smiled—the way you watched the kitten with a ball.

“Chris,” he said, “what if the old Jersey gets her quim hot while we’re gone? Hadn’t we better leave a note for the bull?”

Chris laughed outright. He could always bring them close again, with what each one liked to laugh at, every time.

II

“I told you to wake me when
you
got up,” David said to his mother.

“Well, I wanted to get the kitchen warm first,” Martha said.

The thin spring sunshine reached through the window and latticed the boards of the kitchen floor with long still shadows of table and chair legs, and twisting shadows of the steam from the kettle and the rising breath of the breakfast food. It was the kitchen the sun seemed to seek out the year round. In the summer it basked there, bodily, like a cat; and even when the winter wind mourned outside, fingers of it reached through the frost-fur on the tiny panes and touched the handle of the stove lifter or the curve of a rocker or a hand.

The kitchen was the perimeter of Martha’s whole life. She dressed it as carefully as she would a child. She had small wherewithal to make beauty with; but just as you could
feather-stitch Anna’s petticoat with bright thread, though it was only flannelette, so you could pleat the curtains instead of letting them hang flat. The kitchen was nearer to her than a voice. Her feet travelled there in the steep mornings and in the quick-declining afternoons. She thought there the slow thoughts that come and go silently when you are working alone, without speech. When she was outside it she felt strange. And for Joseph too, though he never thought of it consciously, it was like an anchor: the one small corner safe from the sweat of the fields and the fret of the seasons.

When the day’s work was done and supper over, the kitchen seemed to smile. The other rooms seemed faceless beside it. Martha would sit near the lamp, sewing or mending, thinking quietly, but not clearly on anything at once, the way a woman does when she is tired and dark has come again. For a minute Joseph would sit motionless in the rocker after he’d pulled off his heavy boots, and curl his toes up and down in his woollen socks; he’d be tired from the plough or the axe, but the pattern of all the steps he’d taken outside that day would make a kind of far-off song in his blood. The children would still be busy, but the quick day-planning would be gone out of them; and Ellen would be young again, going back to her youth in the evening as the old do.