The Mountain and the Valley (22 page)

But David felt suddenly defensive for Toby. It might have been Chris who was the stranger.

“Well, that’s what it’s for, ain’t it?” he said. “It ain’t a parlour.”

For a minute Chris seemed to have the same stupid indrawn spying as Steve.

T
oby slept in the attic with David. It was the first time David had ever shared that room. Toby stood naked over the suitcase, fishing out pajamas. (The boys here had a shyness about their bodies anywhere except swimming. They’d slip down their pants and sidle in under the sheets almost secretly.) David stripped down to his shirt. He wished he had pajamas. He’d get pajamas before Toby came again. And a wrist watch.

In bed, talk sprouted with a new ease. Their words seemed to rise straight up from their mouths and, when their force was spent, fall into each other’s mind and germinate leisurely.

Toby’s watch had a luminous dial. “Is that your watch shining?” David said.

“Yeah,” Toby said, “it shows in the dark. See?” He waved his arm about. “Look,” he said, with his instant generosity, “do you want to wear it while I’m here?”

“Oh, I might break it,” David said.

“You can’t hurt it,” Toby said. He was already undoing the fastener.

David put it on. The defining feel of the strap on his wrist seemed to crystallize all his wavering edges into one clean core. It transported him beyond this room like a magic talisman.

They talked with an interplay of affinity and divergence. It would always be there, in the way one led and the other followed, by turns.

Toby chuckled when David told him about the things of the country. But even then David knew that Toby’s interest was in their novelty only. He had to transmute them in the telling. He had to make them discardable as anything but a basis for fun. He knew that if Toby found himself alone in the country, it would have no language for him at all. Toby would never understand how the country spoke to him strongest when no one else was there. He had to hide that.

Toby told him about the things of the city. He never doubted they were the only real ones. He wasn’t bragging. He was giving them to David too. (“Dave, you’ve got to come visit
me
. I’ll show you …”) David listened eagerly and with identification. He found it more wonderful than anything before to have this boy from the city recognize in him the first person who’d ever understood anything he described, exactly. He felt the most exquisite flattery in the halt of Toby’s enthusiasms when his own lagged.

For even then Toby’s quick enthusiasms failed to distinguish (as David could) between the rich and the scant, just because both were bustling or new. He’d feel, before he’d gone far, David’s halt; and deferring to David even then, his own enthusiasm would crumple.

“I’ll take you to see the shows … Sometimes besides the moving picture they have jugglers and dancers and …”

“Yeah, I’d like to,” David said.

(He, David, came out on the stage. He clowned first, so they almost burst, laughing. Then he began to sing. It was a sad song. It got so quiet he could hear someone sob, and afterwards they clapped and clapped. They couldn’t believe it …)

“We’ll go down to the docks. I’ll take you on some of the big ships. There’s ships in Halifax, you know, from all over the world.”

“
There
is?”

(The ship glided softly into the harbour, spending exactly its own momentum. He waved to the people on the pier. He felt an exquisite twist of sadness and safety mixed. He was sad because so soon these same faces would be getting smaller and smaller as they waved to him when his ship was going somewhere else. Yet he was safe, because there were so many places in the world to go. There would always be some new place that he had never seen …)

“You better come vacation time, Dave. Then we can swim and play tennis and—can you play tennis?”

“No.”

(Who is that new boy? He swam right across the Arm. It’s the same one was playing tennis. He’s got some way he hits the ball so you can’t possibly get it back …)

“Oh yes, and don’t let me forget to take you down where the trains go under the Arm bridge. We try to throw apple cores down the smoke stack. First one does, the rest have to buy him a banana split.”

Toby felt David halt. That was thin. He halted too. They lay silent for a while.

“What are you going to do?” Toby said.

“Do?”

“Yeah. Be?”

“I don’t know,” David said. “What are you?”

“I’m going to be an explorer,” Toby said. “Dave,” he said eagerly, “let’s both be explorers. We’ll have more fun than anyone.”

“All right,” David said.

(Now they were swinging up the streets of all the strange places together. They were the only two people in the world who had the same beckon of somewhere else in them.) I have a friend, he thought. This is what it’s like to have a friend. It’s like the kitchen fire on your hands when you come in from pulling turnips in November. It’s like the time I had three mugs of Ave’s beer. (Someone tried to throw him out the night they were both roaring drunk in the saloon, but Toby sobered up that hot minute and knocked the bastard flat. The time a cutthroat came after Toby with a knife he rushed between them and knocked the tough flat. He was so strong then he could have knocked
any
one down …)

“I guess explorers see some funny sights down around the Equator there,” Toby said.

In the subtle communication that was always between them, David knew that Toby meant girls. It was funny: he and Steve could come right out coarse about girls, but it wasn’t half as stimulating as he and Toby just hinting at it.

“I guess they kind of skimp on the petticoats,” David said.

Toby chuckled. “I wonder what they do in a gale.”

“I wonder,” David said. “I guess you’d have to keep your eyes shut—or else put a muzzle on it.”

They didn’t say any more. They just lay there, silently. They were like two people who have sensed in each other the same amusement with a serious speaker, but cannot commit themselves to any further conspiracy, right there, than a wink. They thought about each other thinking about girls.

David was tempted to tell Toby about him and Effie. But somehow he hesitated. Just Toby’s
thinking
of doing it with a girl seemed to endow him with the getting-it-prowess more securely than his own actual deed.

He looked at the wrist watch gleaming outside the quilt.

“Toby,” he said, “did you wind it?” He wouldn’t dare, himself.

But Toby was asleep. He could always drop thought for sleep like that: in that instant abandonment of the now for the next.

David lay awake, thinking: I have a friend. What he’d been missing all his life had been a reflection of himself anywhere. Now he had discovered it at last.

But why, when the house was quiet with the sound the silence makes to the only one awake, why did he think of the others—his mother and father and Chris? He pictured their faces. Defenceless in sleep, somehow they bore marks on them (which only he could see) of the way he’d felt toward them throughout the afternoon and evening. Why did he feel that he couldn’t wait till morning to talk to them, in front of Toby, about something Toby couldn’t share? Why did he want to creep downstairs and awaken them, pretending he’d heard someone call, making them assure him over and over, until they began to laugh about it, that they were all right?

T
here were marks that stayed on David himself from Toby’s visit. They soon scarred over; but so thinly, that even a duplication of the same shade of weather that had been there then would rupture them.

There was the moment of stepping back into the kitchen after Toby and Anna had left, with the voice of the room itself packed and gone: that first moment, after the illusion, when you have to go back to what you really are.

And the moment at the Baptizing Pool.

The other boys acted so queer with Toby. You’d think he had an invisible circle around him, bounding a limit of trespass. When he said, “Eh?” or “Shucks,” they looked down at the ground. They kept horsing with each other, louder and foolisher when he was there than they ever did: it was obviously for his benefit. But the minute he
spoke
to one of them, they’d drop it. Their faces would turn serious all at once, like someone half deaf.

Toby folded his pants before he hung them on the bridge rail. He told them he collected stamps. Why couldn’t they see there wasn’t anything soft about that? Why did they look as if they were waiting for something to pass over? (When Toby could swim faster than
any
of them, and was hung like a stud horse.) Why couldn’t they see that the slant way Toby talked about girls was twice as lusty as the way they sang, “My name is Jim Bowser, My rod is a rouser …”?

That day at the Baptizing Pool when Toby asked if anyone had a piece of paper in his pockets, they didn’t ask him what was wrong with grass. They just looked at the ground in their foolish sanctimonious way. But later, when he called to David, “Don’t you think it’s about time to quit?” Art giggled outright. (“Quit”!) They all looked at David. They actually invited him to snicker.

His glance caromed past theirs, to Toby’s. “It’s immaterial to me,” he called back.

It was never quite the same with the other boys after that moment. Not ever.

He would always remember too the moment when he and Toby and Anna turned back on their way to the top of the mountain.

The day they started to walk up the mountain, a single tatter of cloud coasted across the bright blue sky. A film of
thick sunshine covered the shapes of the spruces and the rocks and the moss as if they were wet with it. Chris was hoeing.

“Where ya goin?” he said.

“Just for a walk,” David said.

Chris looked up and down the rows. “If I thought I could finish these Monday,” he said, “I’d go
with
you.”

David remembered the rare times his father would give them an opening like that. It was his way of letting them know he might be persuaded to drop his work. They always jumped at it with incredible gladness. He knew that Chris was waiting for just such persuasion now.

“Oh, we may just go as far as the bridge,” he said.

Everyone has one place that seems like his own, one place he wants to take his friend. With David, it was the mountain. Somehow it
had
to be just him and Toby and Anna.

He glanced back before they went over the crown of the hill. Chris was leaning on his hoe, watching them.

Halfway up, past the pole bridge, the road turned and ran crosswise across the ridge before curving sharply upward again. He started to eulogize the mountain, for Toby.

“You can see the whole valley up a ways farther,” he said. “You can’t hear a sound, but you can see the whole thing.”

“You can’t see it as plain as you can when you’re in there, can you?” Toby said, with his sudden devastating frankness.

“Well, no,” David said, “but …”

Toby laughed his puzzled, whim-destroying laugh. “Is that all there is to it, Dave?” he said. “Is
that
all we’re going way up there for?”

“I guess,” David said.

“It isn’t like it was a
real
mountain,” Toby said. “What makes you think it’s so wonderful?”

David didn’t reply. The thought of the mountain went as lint-grey as the toes of his larrigans in November slush.

He remembered the time Chris had persuaded his mother to let him, David, go to the pung races on the lake too; though it was the one spot where the older boys liked best to swarm around together, without any kids tagging along. How when he couldn’t keep up with the big boys when they started off on a race of their own, alongside the horses, Chris pretended a stitch in his side so they’d
both
have an excuse to drop behind. He thought: After the way I put him off today, Chris will never ask to go anywhere with me again.

“Let’s go back, if Toby doesn’t want to go any farther,” Anna said quickly. “You and I can go some other time, Dave.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t want to go,” Toby said. “I bet it’s great up there, honest.”

But David was already turning. “I guess we won’t bother going up today,” he said.

He saw how the suddenness of Toby’s veering off, just when they were surest of him, would always be able to desiccate their most vulnerable fancies. And (in Toby’s over-conciliation, at Anna’s “You and I, Dave …”) he knew how they could always make Toby suffer for it. He couldn’t stand isolation. They had that exquisite power which only the lonely have (because they can bear their part of the isolation, from habit), of inflicting it on him.

Yes, and he would always remember the night before Toby went away.

They were walking up the road just after the rain. They met Effie coming from the store. She had a kerosene can in her hand. A potato was stuck on the spout to keep the oil from spilling. Her face was a small white blur in the near-darkness.

“Hi, Effie,” David said.

“Hi, Dave.”

“This is Toby Richmond, Effie,” he said.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hi,” Toby said.

She angled out awkwardly, to pass.

“Wait a minute,” David said. “What’s your rush?”

“I got a cold,” she said. “I got to go home.”

Suddenly he had to do what he did. He had to show Toby he went all the way with girls. But he was glad it wasn’t daylight. He was glad he didn’t have to see the look on Effie’s face: part shyness, part hurt; but worst of all, forbearance.

“Got a flannel on your chest?” he said. “Let’s see …”

“Dave,” she said, “stop.”

“You said you had a cold, didn’t you?” he said. Very reasonable. Very serious. “I gotta see if you got a flannel on, haven’t I?”

He held her and tickled her under the arms. She had to laugh, but it was only physical reaction. He could feel her shrinking from the sound of her own laughter. He knew she was wishing herself away from here, terribly, because this stranger was watching.

“Dave,” she said. “I gotta go home. Mother’s waitin for the oil. She’s settin in the dark.”

“I’ll go with you.”