The Mountain and the Valley (23 page)

“You don’t have to.”

“
I
know,
I
know,” he said, “but I guess I better. Let’s cut across the field.”

“I got a cold,” Effie said. “The field’s wet.”

“Aw, it’s not wet enough to
hurt.”
He laughed meaningfully. “I kinda like the field after dark, don’t you?”

He whispered to Toby, “Wait here. It doesn’t take me long.”

There was no pleasure in it, in the field. The spasm was as flat as the whirring of a clock just before it strikes the hour. He hated himself, thinking of the ruining look on Effie’s face: the look of trying to accept, without knowing what it was, his reason for shaming her.

They upset the oilcan. The potato came off the spout and the oil soaked one side of Effie’s skirt.

“Dave,” she said, “it’s all over my skirt. What’ll I do?”

“It’ll evaporate,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“Sure,” he said. “It won’t show.”

“You don’t have to walk home with me,” she said.

“Sure?”

“No, I ain’t scared.”

“You’re
sure?”

“Yes,” she said. “Goodnight, Dave.”

“Well … goodnight, then,” he said.

He ran back to the road. “That feels better now,” he said to Toby.

“It does, eh?” Toby said. His voice was smiling; but with no more special smiling than it might have had for anything else amusing.

And in that moment David knew he could never outdistance Toby in anything he thought Toby would envy, however he might be willing to betray himself trying. Toby would always remain ahead, by not having to make the effort at all.

He thought of the little white patch in the darkness that Effie’s damp handkerchief had made. She’d kept it clutched in her small palm the whole time.

T
hat was Wednesday night. On Thursday Bess had the doctor for Effie.

The neighbours all stuck by their windows in a kind of suspension while the doctor’s horse was tied at the gate. When the horse was gone, David ran down the road.

“What did he say?” he asked Bess.

Bess was beaming. The doctor had been there. He had left medicine. Now everything would be all right.

“Oh, he used some big word,” she said. “I didn’t like to ask him over. But I guess she just wasn’t careful with her cold. Now I look back on it, Dave, you know she hasn’t been well for a long time.”

“He said she’d be all right, didn’t he?”

“Sure. I mean, he didn’t say, exactly, but—” (her face fell) “Dave, it wouldn’t be anything serious, would it?”

“What did he say?”

“Well, he just said, ‘Give her that medicine and I’ll come back again Monday.’ It couldn’t be anything serious or he’d a …”

She hadn’t really questioned the doctor at all. Her awe of him, her consciousness of the room’s shabbiness in spite of the scrubbing she’d given it from top to bottom, her anxiousness to be alone with Effie (with the awful dread of the doctor coming, turned to the wonderful feeling of the doctor having come and gone) had been so in her that she couldn’t.

“Would you like to see her?” she said to David.

“Yeah, while I’m here …”

“How do you feel?” he said to Effie.

“I’m better, I think,” she said. “The doctor left me some medicine. Taste it. It tastes like peppermint.”

He tasted it. “It does, don’t it?” he said.

That’s about all the conversation they had. He tried to think of some way to seek absolution for last night, he could think of nothing else; but with Bess standing there, there was nothing he could say.

The rest of it happened within a week.

Saturday, about the time when the afternoon is first shadowed with Sunday coming, he met Howie in the road.

“My God, Dave,” Howie said, “I was just comin up to tell ya. Did ya know Effie’s dead?”

It was as if Howie had thrown a rock inside his head. “Dead”? “Dead”? “Dead”? … The word whirled about in his brain like a crazy deafening stone. It came to rest right where he drew his breath and where his heart beat.

He thought of the way Howie had called to Effie that day on the meadow. He let him have it with his fist. Right in the mouth.

Sunday night the women came to Bess’s once more with the pies and rolls. They said, “I don’t know, she was such a
sweet
child. I remember one day …” They asked what Effie’s favourite hymns were. Bess lit the lamp before dark; her face had a look of subtle dismemberment.

Monday morning, early, the men went to the graveyard, by way of the pasture, so that Bess wouldn’t see them and the shovels they carried. And Monday afternoon neighbours carried in the extra chairs just before three o’clock.

When the last chord of the last hymn had died away, there was a moment of dreadful hush before the scrape of chairs on the floor as people moved again. They looked out the window, away from Bess—at fragments of the brand new sheet Bess had torn up so Effie would have clean handkerchiefs when
the doctor came, flapping on the line. The carriers straddled their fingers, to draw the grey cotton gloves taut. They lifted Effie with an awkward tenderness: as if it were some sort of guilt that their strength found the burden so light.

In bed, Monday night, David tried to hide from the unremittent now. He tried to pretend that, by sheer will, he could reach back through the transparent (but so maddeningly impenetrable) partition of time, to switch the course of their actions at some place or other. It would have been so easy …

(Bess turned her head away from Effie when she sneezed. Or the first time Effie coughed, Bess made her go to bed, and tomorrow she’ll say, “Oh, I
did
have a little cold, but Mother put me to bed and put some raccoon oil on my chest. I’m all right now.” And now she still had the fields in her eyes … the parts of her body still sent messages to each other … her hand reached up to check the breeze in her hair …

Or—God,
God
yes—when Toby and I met her in the road I whispered to him, “I bet you wish she was your girl.” She heard me. It made her feel bashful, but in a good way. I whispered to her, “He’s going away tomorrow. If your cold’s better, we’ll go raspberryin, I know where they’re just hangin …” She said, “My cold’ll be all right tomorrow.” I kissed her, as if I had to do it even if Toby
did
see. She said, “You’ll get my cold.” I said, “I don’t care.” She knew I didn’t care. The grass wasn’t wet [it wasn’t, it wasn’t], and I didn’t breathe a word of what we did, to Toby. And now she was asleep, with her breath floating her along from one minute to the next.)

Then a sudden gust of fact would bare the pretence, without warning. The stillness in Effie’s face like a loneliness so intense it gives to the face an effect of smiling. Her hair parted on the wrong side. Her locket turned inward on her
neck forever; though he’d seen her straighten it on the chain, time and time again, so that the garnet showed. The lightness in her body like the look of a child that has cried itself to sleep—like Anna’s the day he’d conquered one of her rare tempers in the presence of someone else and later he had looked at her, with all her little stubbornnesses gathered inside her, so pitifully more exposed than she thought, in the protectiveness of sleep; and he couldn’t waken her, to put the thing she had wanted back into her hand.

The summer night made a moted stillness outside the window. The stillness in the picture of Effie’s face gave it a fugitive cast. He couldn’t quite reach it even with crying. He buried his face in the pillow. But the crush of “never” got in behind everything, like a light that shows red even if you clasp your fingers over it. The spring sunset when the slush was chilling again in the road, but the doorstep had dried off white and clean, and you turned toward her house before you thought … the day in October when the leaves sifted down from the twigs like sleepwalkers, but Effie not there … and dusk in winter when the sun burned red as fire in the church windows, but if you went and touched them they would be as cold as the sky …

There was nowhere in the world he could run where it wouldn’t be true. Effie was dead. He couldn’t tell her anything. He hadn’t even caught her cold.

He could not remember, afterwards, just when the crippling disease of death-sadness first shaded off into something more like an inoculation against it.

The first few days his mind was sore all over and without appetite.

Then there was the day when taste for the present crept back without notice.

There was the day Steve said Herb Hennessey looked like “somethin that was sent fer and couldn’t come,” and he laughed. The thought of Effie followed almost instantly, and the sudden stitch in his heart was baring and bending as ever. But it didn’t last.

And then (how long after that?) there was the day when he thought of Effie as he planned the camp he would build at the top of the mountain and write a book in, and the stitch didn’t come at all. It didn’t come with waiting. Then he
tried
to bring it back. He felt a wash of stillness, but it was echo, not voice; he had begun to
remember
her.

He looked toward the graveyard. But the stitch was still filmed over, unreachable. He felt a kind of panic.

It was just dusk. He went down the road and up the path to her house. There, surely, he could recapture it.

Bess was sitting close to the lamp, spelling out the news in the paper.

“Dave!” she cried. “It’s so good to see someone.”

The women didn’t drop into Bess’s so often now. Or stay so long. If they had bread in the oven, or soft soap to watch in the leach barrel, they might say, “I don’t know, maybe Bess’d rather be
alone.”
When she brought back their dishes, clean as wax, they didn’t “fill up” the minute she came through the door. If she seemed to come oftener to any one woman’s house than to any other’s, that woman wouldn’t press her to stay. They said now, “The poor thing
seemed
to feel bad …”

“I just thought I’d …” David said.

“Ain’t I glad you did! No, this chair here, I never liked the back in that one.” She moved the chair out
for
him, with the overanxious hospitality of one who never has callers unless they come on some mission.

David looked about the kitchen. He could see Effie’s
scribblers on the mantelpiece, with the fixity there now of whatever mistakes in multiplication she had made. He saw the table her elbows rested on nights he’d be passing along the road and glimpse her through the window; when the vulnerable look she always had whenever he watched her sitting back- to would assault him so. He saw the toes of her moccasin slippers, aligned exactly at the foot of the couch. But even here he couldn’t bring the stitch back. He felt desperate.

“Oh Dave”—Bess’s thought that had lacked audience so long burst out into speech—“it’s so lonesome I’m just about … I had to change her room around today. I couldn’t stand lookin at it just like she … Come see.”

They went into Effie’s room.

“See? I moved the bed over there be the closet. There’s all her dresses, bless her heart. I told the women they could have em, anyone could use em … I told em they could come git anything they wanted fer a keepsake, bless her.” She half sighed. “They never have. Dave, ain’t they somethin
you’d
like, to remember her by? Wouldn’t you like that bracelet she wore in the concert? Bless her heart, she stood so still, didn’t she, Dave? Do you remember?”

“Yes, I remember,” he said. “Yes, Bess, I would.”

He slipped the bracelet into his pocket. But the film was still there. He wished he’d never come. He wished Bess would stop talking that awful singsong about it.

“I don’t know …” Bess shook her head back and forth. “If the dear Lord didn’t give anyone strength … I guess he fits the back to the burden. But it’s hard …”

“I know,” David said stupidly. “But you have to keep up.”

“She always thought so much of you, Dave. Bless her heart, she always thought so much of
you
.”

David felt a sting in his throat at that. He could cry—but he could keep from crying, too.

Suddenly Bess began to sob. “Oh Dave, I’ll never see her agin.” She threw her arms about his neck and leaned against him. He put his arms on her shoulders, to steady her.

And then, because he couldn’t bring it back at the sight of Effie’s clothes, a sort of fury possessed him. A sullen self-biting fury because the only thing he could feel, clearly, was the stirring wash of Bess’s so-softly-capacious body against him and the drowning smell of her black hair and the faint burdening scent of her armpits. He felt only Bess’s gusty sensuality. It wouldn’t cramp and confuse you as Effie’s gentleness had done.

He had a savage urge to do it with Bess, in this very room. To stoke his frustration (as always) with bitter and bitterer self-destruction. To shock back the immediacy of the death-sadness by the very shame of defiling it.

It wasn’t in any forgetting of Effie that Bess did it with him. She could attend to only one thing at a time—the thing that was strongest in her at the moment. She justified her own desire with the persuasion (invented, then truly believed) that the Lord would
want
her to help this poor forlorn boy.

Afterwards David cried; but the film was still there.

That was the rainy summer. The grass thrived, lush and lolling. By fall it had covered Effie’s grave completely.

You could take a short cut through the graveyard to the acre field. One day that fall, David came across Bess clipping grass off the sods.

They didn’t greet each other immediately, as they would have done, meeting anywhere else. But the minute’s duty silence was no longer the automatic stitch that two people who have borne identical suffering feel at sight of each other.
It was a thing of will. The line their hearts had drawn around this piece of ground was gone. Now the only thing separating it from the rest of the field was the visible border of sod.

David’s sense of guilt about Effie’s cold and the wet grass was mistaken. The big word the doctor had used, the one Bess couldn’t remember, was “leukemia.” But David never knew that.

The guilt soon passed from voice to echo. But it was the first thing he could tell
no
one. It taught him that secrecy about anything (even a hateful thing like this) made it a possession of curious inviolability, and tempted him to collect more. The essence of childhood is that the past is never thought of as something that might have been different. He was never, even for a moment, all child again.