The Mountain and the Valley (25 page)

Joseph manoeuvred the cart close to the stone wall. He lay the whip across the oxen’s horns and scratched their foreheads briefly, under the straps, for having hauled such a good load.

“Is your end all right, Dave?” he said.

“I guess so,” David said.

They began to unload.

“Look, Dave,” Joseph said, “I think I kin swing your end in closer there. No need to carry em.”

David didn’t say anything. He waited with elaborate patience while the wagon moved. “Hufe, boys,” Joseph said, “Hufe …” He backed the oxen, tapping gently on their noses with the butt of the whip.

“There,” Joseph said. “Ain’t that a little better?”

“It’s all right,” David said.

He unloaded a few more from the ground. Then he got up on the cart. He threw them onto a spot which would have been nearer as the cart sat first.

When the cart was almost empty, Joseph lifted the side plank. A rock tumbled down and struck David’s hand.

“Ouch!” he said. “Jesus!”

“God,” Joseph said, “did it ketch ya? Did it hurt ya, Dave?”

“No,” David said. He didn’t take off his mitten to look at the bruise.

“I never saw your
hand
there,” Joseph said. “Didn’t it hurt?”

“No … No …” He scraped the rest of the rocks off onto the ground.

Joseph lay the side planks of the cart flat and hitched his rump up, backwards, onto the body. “We might as well ride,” he said. “Haw …” But David walked behind, back to the field.

They loaded the piles of small rocks then, working from opposite sides of the cart.

At the fourth stop there were two piles on David’s side. One a little way from the cart, but they’d never be any closer to it again. Joseph didn’t notice it. When the piles next the cart had been loaded, he moved on. David didn’t say anything. He just stood there until the cart stopped. Then he began to carry the rocks ahead.

“Hell,” Joseph said. “Was they another one there? Why didn’t you sing out? Don’t carry em! I’ll hufe up.”

David dropped the rock he had in his hand and waited.

“Hufe,” Joseph said to the oxen, “hufe
up
 …” He didn’t speak so gently to them. He tapped their noses a little harder with the whip handle. He’d stopped humming.

The big boulder was left to the last.

Joseph’s father had ploughed around it, and moved around it, all his life. Joseph thought this team could haul it away. The other men had always told him no team on earth could budge it, but he had thought, secretly: Some damp day the drag will slip good, if we can manage to load it, I’ll show them what my boys can do. He’d thought, secretly, of showing them this rock someday on the stone wall. He’d
thought of hearing them exclaim, “Well, I’ll be goddammed!”

He’d dug around it with the grub hoe. He lacked David’s physics to tell him where its centre of gravity was, but he knew exactly where to put the bunk hook of the chain so that the strain would come just right.

He took the oxen off the wagon and put them on the drag. He hauled the drag into place: just far enough off so the rock would topple onto it, but not bind against the edge and slide the drag too. David watched him silently. He didn’t say, “Just an inch farther … easy … easy … whoa!”

Joseph tried the boulder with a long two-by-four pry. It moved slightly. “Ahhhhhhh?” he said. “Git me a couple rocks fer a bite, Dave.”

David got two rocks.

“No,” Joseph said, “them’s no good.”

“Well, which ones do you want then?” David said.

“What’s them two over there be the fence?”

You could see, when you got up to them, that these rocks were no good. David brought them back just the same. He threw them down.

“No …” Joseph said. “Where’s them two you brought first? I didn’t notice they had a flat side.”

Joseph tilted up the pry. David placed the rocks, one on top of the other, beneath it, next the boulder.

“Back a mite,” Joseph said. “Jist a hair.”

“All right,” David said, “you do it.”

Joseph fixed the rocks. Then they both pressed down on the far end of the pry. They took the strain as gradually as possible so that the pry wouldn’t slip from the crevice in the boulder, or the bite tumble. The boulder moved a couple of inches out of its socket. “Ahhhhhhh?” Joseph said. The boulder moved up a few inches more.

“I’ll hold her,” Joseph said. “You git another rock and chuck underneath. We wanta save what we got, she’s riz some. Then we’ll take a higher bite.”

“You get it,” David said. He took the strain of the boulder. Joseph went to search for a chocking stone.

“Does it hold hard?” he called to David.

“No.”

The muscles of his arms were trembling. The relentless weight of the boulder threatened from second to quivering second to split him from consciousness almost. His father seemed to take his time. He held on doggedly.

Joseph returned with a rock. When he tossed it underneath, it struck and collapsed the bite. The whole structure went limp. The pry fell useless to the ground. The boulder sank back into its socket.

“Well, hell …” Joseph said.

David said nothing. He set about placing the pry again as if he’d expected this to happen. They raised the boulder once more. Just as Joseph went to chock it this time, the oxen started.

“Whoa,” Joseph roared, right under David’s ear, “Goddam it, whoa!”

He went around and took the oxen off the drag. “Gimme a hand, Dave,” he said. “We’ll have to pull the drag back into place.”

“What am I going to do with this pry?” David said. “Let it go?”

“Oh,” Joseph said. “Well, all right …”

He tugged the drag back into position himself. David’s muscles trembled so he was afraid they’d shake the pry loose. Joseph came back and threw the rock under the boulder. Two more hoists and the boulder was enough out of the ground to try the chain on it.

Joseph took the chain off the drag and hitched the grab hook through the ox yoke. David might have held the loose end up off the ground while the oxen turned, so they wouldn’t step over it. He didn’t move. Joseph had to thread the chain back between their bellies.

He placed the bunk hook for David to hold, then he circled the chain around the boulder so the tension would come in the right spot. He gave the chain a sharp yank to make sure the bunk wouldn’t slip. It pinned David’s mitten against the side of the rock.

“For …” David said. “Can’t you wait till I get my hand out?”

The bunk seemed to be firm. Joseph went ahead of the oxen and eased them forward gently. The first pull, the chain sprang into the air, loose and flaccid. But the second time it held taut. The boulder tilted upright. For a minute it seemed to hold its breath. Then it tipped onto the drag.

“Whoa!” Joseph said.

But the oxen didn’t stop quite short. The boulder slid on off the other side of the drag.

“WHOA!” Joseph roared. “You’re hellish anxious all of a sudden,
ain’t
cha!” He leaned over the oxen’s horns and gave them several sharp blows with the whip. They started again, with the sting of the lash, dragging the boulder still farther. It settled to rest on its flattest side.

David knew his father’s temper was a reflection of his own mood; yet he felt a sudden flare of his own temper, as if justly, in return.
“Jeeeeesus … Jeeeeesus
 …” he muttered under his breath.

“Take the chain off the rock, Dave,” Joseph said. “We’ll have to haul the drag around on this side agin.”

David unhooked the bunk. He gave a savage yank at the chain.

“You can’t get it off
now,”
he said. When Joseph had struck the oxen, the second roll of the boulder had pinned the chain to the earth.

“Well, git me the one I dropped off up there be the fence,” Joseph said.

David walked back to the fence. “Where is it?” he called. “I don’t see any chain.”

“No,” Joseph called, “over this way. Ta yer left. Yer
left.”

“I
see it.
I
see it.”

The very first try, the boulder swivelled perfectly onto the drag and lay steady on its base. They chinked it with small stones so it wouldn’t teeter off when the drag was in motion.

“Are you going to saw that beech?” David said.

“Well …” Joseph said, “if you ain’t too tired. If yer hand don’t hurt too much.”

“I didn’t say my hand hurt,” David said.

He turned and walked away, toward the dooryard.

Joseph let the oxen take their wind every rod or so. He boosted the drag with a crowbar at each new start, and they just managed it to the stone wall. He manoeuvred the drag to the brink of a slight decline and kicked out the chinking.

Un
loading was no trouble whatever. A single lunge with the crowbar sent the boulder toppling downward of its own weight. He sighed.

But it wasn’t the kind of sigh he’d anticipated whenever he’d pictured the boulder leaving the drag. (He’d even fancied the words he or David might say: “Roll, damn ya. Roll wherever ya like now.”) He could see the stripes of raised-up hair where the lash had struck the oxen’s backs and David hadn’t even turned, to watch this crowning moment of their connivance and victory.

“Haw, Bright,” he said. The hammers that struck the
notes of his feelings were padded and damp. “Haw …”

David was really tired now. A tired cord stretched between his temples. Blood throbbed heavy in his throat. The fatigue tuned his thoughts to a sharp feverish resonance.

Anyone to spend their youth in this God-forsaken hole instead of the city … the same damn talk … the same damn faces, every day and every day … the same damn coop of trees to look at … walking over and over your own tracks, like a damned ox. In the city there’d be movement, and something to feed your mind all the time. Your mind wouldn’t spin empty and clacking, like the rollers of the thresher when the feeder got behind with the grain.

What was the good of learning here? All they thought about was Iiftin’ and luggin’. They thought if anyone was smart it was like being half foolish. You had to cripple every damn thought you had, every damn thing you did, so they wouldn’t look at you funny. In the city …

A sudden breaker swept over him (as it would sometimes when a woman’s face, seen in a magazine, would invite his body in an instant flash and it would seem as if he could step right into the page and touch her anywhere). He thought of all the women in the city. Whether you knew them or not, just to look at them and think of it … Bess … always the same, even if he did believe her that he’d been the only one except her husband …

The breaker drained back. It sucked the voice out of the fields. Last fall’s aftergrass lay withered and matted on the ground. Muddy water runnelled down the frost holes in the road. A dribble of excrement stained the white tail feathers of the Leghorns scratching in the wet sawdust of the dooryard. The boards of the barn were bleached grey. The sense of touch seemed to leave him completely. It was like a
rainy day when he’d read everything in the house and whenever he moved his arms or legs he could catch the stale smell of sweat in his woollen underwear. The day had the sickly smell of scalded chicken feathers.

I’d like to get out of this place so damn quick, he thought … I’d like to go so damn far …

We won’t saw the whole log, Joseph thought. We’ll just saw a couple of cuts. Then Dave can do whatever he likes.

(With uneasiness inside, the notes of the outside day struck in him sharper still: the well brimming clear and cool again, the floating ring of ice to be lifted out in one piece now and shattered … the cows locking their horns languidly, at the lee side of the barn … the first dry spot in the road presaging dust … the green grass springing up already in the rake tracks where he’d scraped the chips inward around the edge of the dooryard … the trees bare as the face of someone sleeping, but something soft in the air already brushing against their winter’s trance …)

I’ll make out I have to do something else, Joseph thought, after the first cut or so. Dave is young. I suppose this work does get tiresome sometimes.

But that was reason, not understanding. He used to get weary here when
he
was young, but he was never fretful. There was no monotony in it. Matching the strength to the task had always been tiring; but never tiresome.

The great beech drag-log was a dead weight. They rolled it up on the saw horses with their peavies. One clinched and rolled it, then held it for the other to clinch and roll. When it was high enough, David braced it with his body. Joseph drove the Z-shaped iron dogs, one point into the log, the other into the saw horse.

David’s muscles began to tremble again.

“Kin ya hold her?” Joseph said.

“I guess so.”

“She won’t roll on ya?”

“I got it, I got it.”

They began to saw, watching the saw’s descent with a kind of mesmeric intentness. It seemed to David as if he and his father and the log were bound together in an inescapable circuit. The saw sank quickly through the crown of the log, but when its upper edge disappeared into the log’s wide heart, the groove deepened with maddening slowness.

David’s muscles caught their breath between pulls; but the next instant (would it be really impossible this time?) it was necessary to pull again.

It got so he was pulling with the pit of his stomach, not his arms. The log was like a menacing concentration of all the weight in the world. He turned his face sidewise, to hide its uncontrollable twitching. He knew it was the colour of slush. It got so he was suspended somewhere by his arms. The weight of his body was intolerable, but he was unable to touch ground with his feet. It got so his whole body was full of ashes. It got so his will trembled as uncontrollably as his arms.

“Don’t press on her quite so
hard
, Dave,” Joseph said. “It cuts better, and it makes it easier fer ya.”

David let the saw go so limp it buckled.

“Oh, I don’t mean let her go loose altogether,” Joseph said.

David rode it then with every bit of strength left in him.

“I wonder …” Joseph said. He stopped, and lifted the saw clear.

“What are you doing now?” David said.