The Mountain and the Valley (20 page)

She felt it stiffen her lips and creep cold-lip-blue into her thoughts. She felt the gathering wind of it blow everything inward. She felt her body shell over it—the heavy sore-ringing knot of it, blown inaccessibly inward. Even her hands, sorting the potatoes in separate piles, moved only with the numb direction of habit. She felt her breath shoulder again the breathcrushing burden of all the other times Joseph had … These times were instantly shorn of their former dissolution, instantly reaccumulated.

Joseph walked back, leisurely, to the field. He spaced the bags down the row. He dumped the baskets, each in a single expert motion. Martha didn’t stand up to help.

He didn’t mention the stranger. He never communicated even exciting news right away. Coming into the house with it, he’d take off his cap and coat first. Then, beginning with only a hint, he’d wait for Martha to draw it from him with questions.

Martha was silent.

“That was the new doctor,” he said at last. “Doctor Engles, his name is.” He spoke awkwardly. To volunteer even that much was difficult for him.

“What did
he
want?” The words formed in Martha’s mind, but something stopped them on her tongue. Now the moment for reply had been let slip, retreat was sealed.

Joseph glanced at her face. His thoughts turned white. A heaviness sagged suddenly in his muscles, as if a cloud had passed over them. Her hand moved toward the basket as he reached for the handle, to dump it. He waited, but she drew her hand back. He picked up the basket and dumped it, snubbing a sigh. This was the bafflement, before the still-burning anger at something he couldn’t get his hands on set in.

What had he done wrong this time? He didn’t know.

But even when he did, there was never anything he could do. If he said he was sorry, or showed extra thoughtfulness toward her, or tried to make a joke of it, she wouldn’t resist; but she would be patient with his advances, as if they were false. She wouldn’t smile. His words would seem to grow louder and louder in the silence. His advances, rejected, would leave him stung and ashamed for making them.

There was nothing to do but wait. Until the minutes dropping on it, one by one, finally wore it out. Or until some little thing (he never knew just what, or why) flushed through her silence like a drop of dye. Wait … wait … wait … With their silence chaining them together, but as if, if their bodies touched they would make a sudden nightmare sound.

This thing that had come up with the stranger wasn’t like manoeuvring a log onto the trail sled. This wasn’t like the physics of turning a straight furrow, or judging his circuit through a jagged field so that no cock of hay would be hauled farther than necessary and he would wind up nearest the barn. There he was on sure ground. This was something he was helpless to decide, without Martha.

He set the basket down. He
forced
himself to speak again.

“He says he’s out so much nights. He said someone told him maybe he could git Anna to come stay with his wife and go to school in town.”

“
Anna
?”

As the word broke from Martha’s lips the silence unclasped as if a tourniquet had been cut. (As it would rupture instantly if Rachel should say, “You oughta make Joseph lug that water fer ya … but I guess all men are alike” … or when he’d be going to town to get the oxen shod and she’d notice a button off his good suit coat she’d think, because she had nothing cooked in the house, of him eating just the bread and butter in his lunch, uncomplaining even in thought, though the other men in the livery stable would probably have cookies and pie … or when he’d say, as she turned the pages of the catalogue silently, compulsively, though he never said anything like that any other time, “What do
you
want for Christmas?” …)

Anna?
The thought of Anna amongst strangers … the thought of Joseph confused about it … the thought of Joseph confused in any way by strangers, by town men, endowed his very features for her with a fierce cleaving.

“Who mentioned
Anna
to him?” she said. Her voice almost angry.

“He didn’t say. I suppose they meant all right. It’d be a good chance for her to git an education.”

“She’s never been away from home,” Martha said. Anna too polite to let her lonesomeness show, the first night at a strange table … her dress hanging in the closet the first morning she went away … the things she might be doing or saying if she were home …

“Of course it ain’t like she was goin fur,” Joseph said.

“I know,” Martha said, “but she’s only sixteen. She
won’t
be sixteen till August. The fourth,” she added. She was almost
talking to herself. Was it so long the time had been so safe? Why had she never thought about it until the time for separation came?

“He said she wouldn’t have to do no work,” Joseph said. “Just go to school.”

“She’d have to have all new clothes.” The picture of Anna’s small face looking around for another girl to walk home from school with, who had a dress that was made over too …

“I guess we could git her some new things,” Joseph said.

“Joseph,” Martha said, “do
you
think we ought to let her go?”

She saw his thoughts stumble when she put the decision up to him. He had put forth argument in fairness to the case for Anna’s good, while she was arguing for both of them their feelings’ contradiction. But she saw these reasons of his topple, now they stood alone.

“Do you?” he said.

She didn’t answer. “Joe,” she said, “reach me the basket, will you?”

“Now, don’t cry,” he said. “Don’t cry, Martha … no one’s makin her go if she don’t want to go. She don’t have to go if you don’t want her to.”

“I know,” she said. But they both knew Anna would have to go.

She held the bag open for him. “Oh, Joseph …” she said. Her face crumpled completely.

She cried for Anna, because, with Anna ignorant of all this that concerned her, it seemed as if they were plotting against her. And for Joseph. In a sudden rush of hurting closeness, she saw that he and she had come to the end of moving forward; in any of the break and change from now on, they were the ones who would always be left.

The children came through the door in a rush. David and Anna were dancing up and down. Chris was quiet, but his eyes, too, were bounding.

“We got one!” David cried.

“We got a deer!” Anna said.

“Chris got him with one shot!” they said, over and over. They kept looking at Chris. They felt themselves exalted in the act of exalting him.

“This buck was standin there in the little swale where you come round the turn in the log road—you know that turn in the log road?” they said. They repeated it over and over, as they had on the way home. They started at the beginning again as soon as the story was finished.

“Father,” they cried, exalting their father, “you’ll come with us and dress it up after you finish the chores, won’t you? We’ll help with the chores. We’ll take the lantern back to the woods. We know right where it is …”

Oh, how gladly they would help him with the chores. Oh how directly they could take him right to the very spot. They were completely fused by this thing they had done together. It was a thing for such adult respect, because deer were scarce then and wary: and a thing of such chill wonder. They had gone up and put their hands on the deer’s very head; and where was the timidity now that would take it leaping away at the mere glimpse of a human?

“We got a deer, we got a deer …” David sang. He put his arms around Anna and Chris and danced them around the room. Chris’s steps were clumsy, but even he didn’t resist.

They were almost ready to go dress the deer when Martha said, “Anna, how would you like to go to school in town?”

“Why?” Anna said.

Martha told her what had happened.

It was like one day they were all set to start making ice cream. A stranger had come to the door and offered Joseph a fancy price for the woodlot if he’d seal the bargain right now … and while they were talking, in indecision, the ice melted in the pail.

“What did that goddam thing have to come
today
for?” David said.

“David!” Martha said.

He ran, speechless, into the dining room. Anna followed him.

“Why don’t
you
go, Dave?” she whispered. “You’re so far ahead of me. I know you got Grade 12 all by yourself, but you could take more languages or something, for when you go to college …”

“No,” David said, “that ain’t what …” (He couldn’t explain to her how he’d have the best education in the world anyway. His
certainty
of that glossed over the contradiction between going away to get it and the unalterable feature of staying here; but that wasn’t a thing he could make plain.)

“I ain’t goin,” Anna said. But they both knew she must.

“Comin, Dave?” Joseph called.

“No,” David shouted. There was nothing to the deer now but the raw blood-smell, the coarse-hair feeling, the sick-sweetish spilling of the steaming intestines when the knife slipped …

“Are
you
comin, Anna?” Joseph called.

“Not if Dave ain’t,” Anna said.

That evening Anna was amongst them more tenderly than ever before, but more separately. She was like the one who is threatened with sickness, amongst the ashamedly well. For the first time the faces of leaving and of staying were in the
kitchen. They made between quickened touch and quickened response a helpless excommunication. And the thin October light retreated and slept warily in whatever place it was where the glinting caution from the deer’s gelid eyes had fled.

And somehow they knew that, though Anna came back within a month, no amount of willing on anyone’s part could make it quite the same again.

D
avid put on his sport shirt and the brand new white sneakers right after dinner. He stood at the attic window now, watching. The pendant afternoon warmth of late June weighted the air, but he put on his new cap too when the mail team came in sight. His hand shook as he pulled the crown of it jauntily sidewise before the mirror. He ran downstairs.

“Are they comin?” Martha said.

“Yes,” David said. “I’m goin down to the post office to meet them.”

As near as Newbridge was, this was the first time Anna had been home since she went away to school. And Toby Richmond was coming too, for a week’s visit. Anna was to meet him at the train and show him where the mailman could be found.

David wished his mother would take off her apron. But if he asked her to, she’d look hurt if she understood why he asked. If she took it off docilely, without understanding, he’d feel more ashamed still.

He saw Steve sauntering up the road. Damn it, they’d meet exactly at the gate. He stooped to make out he was tying
up his laces. He wanted to be alone when he met Toby and Anna. But Steve waited for him.

He straightened the crown of his cap before he got to the gate. Steve glanced covertly at his new sport shirt and white sneakers. He didn’t say anything, but it was the glance you give a friend in company with someone you’ve both been ridiculing before. David felt the shirt and sneakers like some foolish and betraying feature. They’d been smooth as breath on him when he’d looked at himself in the mirror. Now, with Steve so shielded himself in ordinary clothes, he was conscious of their very outline; grown enormous on him; something to be lifted each time he moved.

“I got the
white
sneakers,” he said, “because they’re so cool. Jazzus, Steve, this shirt’s cool too.”

“Yeah?”

David felt silly again. His explanation had been
too
eager to fool anyone. He felt half angered at himself for this compulsion to cut the whims of his privacy to pieces, before the other boys. He felt half angered at them because their own way seemed so snug inside them. They just looked out
over
it at everyone else. They never had to say anything at all.

He hoped Steve would move along when they got to the post office; but he didn’t. He stood there awkwardly, yet with that maddening self-containment. He’s taking everything in, David thought.

He had planned to take smooth charge of the greeting. But with Steve there, the things he’d had ready to say (“Welcome to the wilds” … “Isn’t this a corking day?”) felt shallow in his mouth. Treacherous, somehow.

“Hi, Dave,” Anna called.

“Hi, Anna.”

The wagon stopped. She sprang out and ran toward
him. There was a moment of indecision in each of them: did the other expect to kiss or not? They didn’t kiss. Only their hands met in a clumsy rush.

“Hi, Toby,” David said.

“Hi, Dave.”

“Ain’t it hot!” David said. He couldn’t bring out “isn’t,” with Steve standing there.

“Hi, Steve,” Anna said, “how are you?”

She didn’t speak as if Steve were among the things wonderful to find still here when she came back, he was just something on the periphery of the moment of arriving. Though he’d felt that Steve was in the way, himself, David wished her greeting had had more rush about it.

“Is this your bag?” Toby said to Anna.