The Mountain and the Valley (21 page)

“Bag”! Steve’s eye asked David’s to join in a smirk. David looked away.

Anna turned quickly to Toby. “No,” she said. “Oh, yes, that’s mine.”

In that instant of Anna’s deflected interest, David had a sense of loss. He felt the having-travelled-together of the other two; the stupid, static, sense of the one who waits. When Anna turned and gathered him up once more in the smile of arriving, he felt it sharper still. It seemed as if now Anna would never come home by herself. She’d always bring with her something a little strange; if only the having-been-away, the travel-muss in her clothes. He had lost all control of the greeting. He felt the spying rigidity of the one who waits, before the mobile freedom of the one who comes.

Toby picked up Anna’s suitcase. David picked up Toby’s. They started up the road.

“Dave,” the mailman called, “tell yer mother I’ll settle with her fer them berries.”

“All right.”

“Tell her I couldn’t git only five cents a quart …”

“All right, all right.” Oh, why couldn’t he shut up about those old berries, in front of Toby!

Steve was fishing out the mailbag from the back seat.

“So long, Steve,” David called. It sounded silly, but he had to say something to Steve. He felt, somehow, as if he had betrayed him.

David and Toby scarcely exchanged remarks. Each was thinking of the letters he’d written to the other. Each felt a crippling embarrassment in the consciousness that the other was secretly comparing him with the self-portrait of his own words.

Yet it wasn’t the awkwardness between strangers. Even then it was the self-consciousness of two people, either of whom in the presence of the other, by reason of some affinity, feels himself on a stage. Alert for the other’s reaction, he can’t quite let his behaviour fall where it may. They communicated through Anna. Even then, it was as if the three of them were a unit.

“How long did it take to come out?” David said, looking at Anna.

“Oh, about four hours. Wasn’t it, Toby?”

“Just about,” Toby said.

He glanced at his wrist watch. David had never known a boy who owned a wrist watch. I’ll save every cent I get, for a wrist watch, he thought.

“How about the fellow in the ox cart?” Toby said to Anna.

“Oh, yes!” Anna exclaimed. “We met Angus—you know how his team’s always right in the middle of the road—laying back on a sack of straw.” (“Sack”? He felt the little thrust of loss again. They’d always called it “bag.” Pronouncing all her
“ings” now too.) “He jumped up so quick his pipe fell right out of his mouth onto the straw. It was the funniest thing …”

“Did the sack catch?” David said.

“It almost,” Anna said. “It looked so darn funny.”

“He certainly thumped that old sack,” Toby said. They both laughed as if it were happening all over again.

David stiffened. He had the sense of the one who is never there, who is told only. He felt the inhibition you feel when someone whose laughter has always been conspiratorial with you alone, tells you of laughing with another.

But when he saw that Toby’s glance at him was tentative (he’d never dreamed that anyone from the city could be tentative like himself), the stiffness melted. It was as if Toby and Anna would never be quite sure they’d been right about the way a thing had struck them until they’d told him and he’d confirmed it. They both looked relieved when he laughed too.

David and Toby were the same height, but they couldn’t have looked less alike. The bones of David’s face were already squaring. They weighted it with the subtle cast of man-heaviness. But it would always be a face you could recognize from its snapshot as a child. His eyes would slip the leash of adult slowness all at once. There was a tic of uncertainty at his mouth when something snubbed a smile. He had nervous blond hair. He seemed to bear his clothes, rather than fill them. Toby’s hair was black. Its contrast with his arrestingly light blue eyes (waiting without impatience, but with constant readiness, for something good to light them up) gave his skin a kind of sensual pallor. His smooth body was coordinated with his clothes. His suit looked as if there had never been a first time for putting it on. His shoes, his
hat
, had the look of experience.

Yet there was a curious identification between the two boys. It was different from David’s identification with the boys
here. The part of him which he must withhold from them was released now. It was like a second language come full-worded to him, without any learning. He was like this city boy too. He pictured himself in Toby’s clothes. They’d look like a part of him too, even when they lay over a chair.

And Toby was shy! He felt his own shyness vanish.

“I hope Mother’s got the trapeza all set,” he said.

“Dave,” Anna said, “what are you trying to get through you?”

“Got the table set for supper, I mean. I’m studying some Greek books I got from Mr Kendall.”

“Oh,” Anna said. “Mr Kendall’s the minister from Newbridge,” she explained to Toby.

“He went to Oxford,” David said to Anna. “He said he knew where Grandmother’s people’s estate was.”

“Did he?” There was no prompting in Anna’s question. She’d seen through what he was doing. He wasn’t telling
her—
she’d heard Mr Kendall say that herself. He’d tried too soon to make it sound as if they weren’t really country people, as if finding themselves in the country was just a quirk of circumstance.

“Do you like that old language stuff?” Toby said. “I hate it.”

“I like it all right,” David said, suddenly crestfallen.

“I guess you have to be really clever …” Toby said, as quickly conciliatory.

“Dr Engles said you must be some smart to pass the provincial exams for Grade 12, just studying home,” Anna said.

“Ohhhh …” David said, twisting with embarrassment.

“Did David?” Toby exclaimed. “Is that
right?”

“Ohhhh, Anna,” David said. “What makes you …?”

“How’s Mother?” Anna said quickly, “and Father? … and Chris …?”

Even then she kept watching David and Toby, keeping the balance between them. She was always to do that when the three of them were together. Switching the discussion when it had got to a point where, if it went any farther, something might happen to it. Shifting to Toby’s side when his quick enthusiasms, racing beyond reason (as she could see, herself) were vulnerable (though, strangely, David was the more imaginative of the two) to the penetration of David’s common sense. Adding to David when Toby’s unconsciously shattering frankness subtracted from David in the place where it hurt her most to see David reduced: his imagination. Even then, she knew that Toby would be her husband, as certainly as she knew that David was her brother.

A slow smile crinkled in David’s eyes.

“Did the old horse have any trouble with his drawstring today?” he said.

He could level his seriousness all at once, with a foolery slanted just right for whomever he might be with; so that, remembering his seriousness other times, their feeling for him was intensified by a gentle incredulity. Toby’s eyes flicked into alignment with his.

“David!” Anna said.

“It’d make a good horn,” Toby said. He glanced exclusively at David, in such a way as to excuse Anna from listening.

“Yeah,” David said. “Maybe Angus could hitch a kazoo up to it.” It was his way of leading up the other’s suggestion, step by step, to its consummant statement.

“David!” Anna said again.

“I didn’t say anything,” he said innocently.

“He didn’t say anything,” Toby said.

That was the way they’d always join in a gentle teasing she wasn’t entirely unwilling to submit to. They were a unit. It wasn’t at all like when Charlotte was the extra one with him and Chris.

“There’s Mother,” Anna said. “Hi, Mother …”

Martha was waiting in the doorway, She didn’t come out to the gate, because of Toby. Joseph and Chris stood in the doorway behind her. Anna ran ahead.

David and Toby were left behind. The suitcases were suddenly burdensome. It was as if the three of them had been keeping a ball in the air and now it had fallen to the ground.

“Did you get my letter?” David said awkwardly. “I didn’t know if you’d want to come or not.”

“Sure, I wanted to come,” Toby said. “Did you get mine?”

“Yeah,” David said.

“It’s hot, isn’t it?” David said.

“It sure is.”

Anna was home again.

She couldn’t seem to stay still. She’d start with a dish from the pantry to the dining room, helping her mother get supper, and then, forgetting the dish in her hand, walk into the hall and look around the parlour, or walk to one of the windows and look out over the fields. She’d go down cellar for a bottle of preserves and call up, “What’s this big barrel with the tub over it?” She’d come back without the preserves.

Martha whispered to her to sit down and entertain Toby. But she couldn’t sit down. She’d say a few words to Toby, then she’d be getting a drink at the pump and glancing into the mirror over the sink, or lifting the stove cover, or slipping a pickle into her mouth from the pickle dish. She’d open the
sideboard drawer to get the good knives and she’d say, “Where did this picture come from?” She’d look at the picture and forget all about the knives. She’d say to her father, “Have you cut any hay yet?” or to Chris (for the second or third time), “How are you, Chris?” She’d smile all the way at them as she spoke, but turn before they had time to answer, and trace the pattern of the new kitchen tablecloth with her finger.

She was home again, but her hair was flattened with the ring of her hatband, and she had on her good dress in the afternoon. All the familiar things seemed to slant away from her in a funny perspective, as if she were getting used to new glasses.

David was restless in a different way.

It was wonderful to have Anna home again. It was fine to have Toby too. But somehow the excitement of having them both together wasn’t quite the total of having them separately. One seemed to take away from the other. And there was the ineptitude of his family with strangers. His grandmother, who could have guided things so smoothly, was visiting in Annapolis.

He couldn’t help wishing his father and Chris would make some remark right after the introduction. The clumsiness of shaking Toby’s hand seemed to hang in the air. He couldn’t help the sense of contraction, as if to stop his hearing, when his mother said, “Pleased to meet you” instead of “How do you do?” He couldn’t help wishing that if Chris had been going to change his clothes at all, he’d put on his good shirt and good shoes too, not just his good coat. It seemed only to accent his country look. Why couldn’t his mother have waited till they were alone to ask, “Did Horace say anything about the berries?” Why did his father have to turn to Chris so
soon
and say, “That grass’s showin brown in the acre field, did ya notice it? We
oughta strike that tomorrow”? It sounded private and intrusive. And they
knew
how to speak grammatically: they noticed when anyone else made mistakes just because he didn’t know any better. Why could they never take the trouble to show it?

Excepting Anna, he felt a curious responsibility for his family’s behaviour. He was some sort of interpreter between them and Toby. He had to keep his finger firmly on the conversation. Guiding it this way or that. Shearing off quickly, by some interjection of his own, a question or an answer which he knew would be wrong.

But whenever he stepped out of the room, the whole thing would fall apart. Toby and Chris and his father would sit there speechless.

And the others didn’t take away the directness between him and Toby, as Anna did. He could feel that funny segregating attention between him and Toby. Each caught what the other reflected, like following mirrors.

He wished his mother wouldn’t beckon to Anna in the pantry and whisper, “Give
him
that china cup, won’t you.” He had to talk loud to cover it, and even then wasn’t sure that Toby didn’t hear.

And when they sat down to supper, he wished his mother
hadn’t
put on the butter knife. Anyone could see that Chris and his father weren’t taking any butter for fear they’d fumble it. He wished she
hadn’t
made such an obvious thing of straining the tea in the pantry; that she
hadn’t
given Toby the one linen napkin.

He put one elbow on the table casually, and twisted the salt cellar about. He tried to say something light and laughable. But nothing relaxed them. They didn’t take half what they wanted of any special thing like the sweet pumpkin pickle when it was passed. He wished they’d let the finish of the meal
die out gradually—but they pushed their chairs all back at once when the last bite was swallowed, as if at a signal. His mother stacked the cups and saucers nearest her, for carrying back to the pantry. He wished she would wait until they were out of the room.

“Where’s the toilet?” Toby whispered to David in the evening.

“Outside,” David said. “I’ll show you.”

(That damned old backhouse! The walls and even the box that held the catalogue were papered with parlour paper, twenty-cent border and all, but …)

Chris got up too. “I’m just showin Toby the toilet,” David whispered. (He felt embarrassed, somehow, using the word “toilet” with Chris.) But Chris followed them.

They stepped off the platform.

“I guess I’ll drain my potatoes too,” Chris said. He moved off a step and began to urinate, meditatively, on the grass. He tried to make it men-together amongst them.

Toby seemed to hesitate about urinating there.

“It’s the second door on the shop,” David said, “with the button on it. Take a coarse sight, and curb your trajectory.” He spoke as if he were really a visitor in this place himself,
denying
any part of its crudity except as the basis for a joke.

Toby laughed. David glanced around to see if Chris had caught what he said. He felt sheepish to have Chris hear him talk like that.

“He must be scairt he’ll git cold in it,” Chris said, when Toby had closed the door. He came close to David, assuming common ground with him in smirking at a stranger’s unorthodoxy. It was a convention in the country that men never used an outhouse. They went behind it, and urinated against the wall; or used the shovel in the barn.