The Mountain and the Valley (26 page)

“We better see how she’s comin out.” He nicked off block lengths all along the log. There was an odd length left at the end.

“That block’s too short, Dave,” he said. “We better shift her over a few inches so she’ll come out even.”

“Well, Jesus!” David said.

All that grind wasted! A sudden puff of exasperation over-rode the embarrassment that always stifled any exchange of sharp words between him and his father. The fatigue flared up and focused his random anger. He was struck, for a second, by the dusty look in his father’s eyes. The lines in his father’s face grooved paler than the day-old beard—his father was tired too. But he couldn’t stop. His anger slipped fluent into his own language.

“We exhaust ourselves and then when we’re halfway through you decide the goddam block’s too short! If you could ever decide anything in advance …” His voice was high and trembly. His glance rushed about. His feet trod nervously on the ground.

“Now don’t git high,” Joseph said.

He felt struck, sick. Not by David’s anger, but by the words he’d used. He’d known that David possessed words like that; but he’d thought they were Sunday things, like the gold watch fob of his own that lay in the drawer. He thought now: They really belong to him. He’s using them against me. He’s not just tired, or quick. This place is no kin to him at all, the way it is to me.

“Who’s gettin high?” David said. “Anybody with any intelligence could see that …”

“All right, all right,” Joseph said. He picked up the saw, to put it away.

“Oh, go to hell!” David shouted. It didn’t make sense. But those were the only words left in his head.

The fuse of Joseph’s own anger was suddenly touched.

“Don’t you want killin,” he said, “you … you goddam
snot.” His hand shot across the log and clouted David across the mouth. “Don’t you tell
me
to go to hell …”

David’s first savage reflex was to strike back, to annihilate.

And then the fascinating whisper told him not to move … to let the blow dry on his face like the muddy water. It was more grindingly sweet than anything he’d ever known. He didn’t move. Oh, he’d never wipe
that
blow off his face … They made out they thought he was so smart. Then they called him a goddam snot. Oh, he’d never wipe that off either …

“I’d like to go so far away from this goddam hole …” he said.

“Well, go then,” Joseph said.

“I
will
go.” He turned and ran toward the house. I’ll go so goddam far …

Joseph put the saw in the new cut. He began to saw alone. He watched the sawdust follow the teeth of the saw as before; but a vibration inside him seemed to sever senses from object. A single note sounded in his feelings: I struck my son! I struck
David
. Oh, David … David … David …

D
avid ran past Ellen in the kitchen, and upstairs.

His mother heard him tearing up to the attic. “David,” she called, “did you clean off your boots?”

He didn’t answer.

His dishevelled face showed in the new mirror. It was as shockingly bright as a face feeding on a forbidden book. He tore off his old clothes. He put on his new suit and got his
twenty dollars from the matchbox in the bureau drawer. He didn’t take anything else. The lettering on his calculus text caught in his eyes like something dead lying there with its face uncovered. He didn’t look back as he went out the door.

“David,” Martha called again as she heard him coming down, “now look at that mud. And I just scrubbed them stairs!” He didn’t answer.

He didn’t feel his fatigue as he ran down the road. He ran down the long hill, and along the spring-cool road to town. The propulsion of the anger transcended the physical process of tiring. He had one complete thought amongst the tumbling phrases of feeling: I’m going to Halifax, where Toby and Anna are. The things he passed had no familiar voice. They were like objects seen from a train window.

He stopped running, to wash his face and hands in the brook. When he started on again he walked.

And then time stopped running with him and settled back into its own pace. The clamour of the anger began to drop too, and its suspension of all other voices. The trees and the road settled back into their familiar places, as the earth becomes familiar again, and solid, after stepping off a boat. The water-weakness in his knees crept back, stealthily, as if it had been waiting its chance.

The clauses of his thoughts tumbled slower in his mind, like the final revolutions of the barrel churn after the foot had been taken from the pedal. The fragments that belonged together joined, as kernels of butter precipitate and gather: It was sixteen miles to town. It was four o’clock. There would be no train until tomorrow. Where would he stay tonight? He had nothing but his good suit and twenty dollars. What would he tell Anna? It would be hard to tell Anna he was never going to write home. It would be hard
to ask her never to mention his name to them again …

The anger settled slowly in his limbs. It felt quiet and sore.

He kept walking ahead, but doggedly. His legs had to depend on their own power. The familiarity of each tree seemed to obstruct his forward movement. It was like walking through a thicket of cobwebs. Determination, not the self-fuelling anger, was the only impulse now. He kept on now because, having started, there was nothing else to do. His mouth looked like the mouth of a child who doesn’t dare to cry.

He didn’t hear the car until the horn blew, right behind him. He started. The glance of the strange faces seemed to precipitate his own face suddenly, reassemble it. It was the final touch of invalidation to the dying anger.

“Can you tell us how far we are from Newbridge?” the woman said.

“About sixteen miles,” he said.

“Thank you.”

He knew from the way she smiled and spoke that they were city people. She smiled as if it were an
outside
gesture, like a movement of hands or feet. This was a bigger car than any of the town cars. These were the people the town people tried to imitate. They had that immunity from surprise the town people could never quite catch. That automatic ease. These were city people. They looked as if they didn’t
know
they were in a fine car, as if they didn’t
know
they were dressed up. Their eyes were like a dog’s eyes in the heat. They took little bites out of whatever they looked at, lazily, without tasting.

“Sixteen more miles of this road, dear,” she said to the man. “Of our short cut!” She didn’t look at him directly.

“Sixteen, eh?” the man said.

He knew they were city people the way they spoke to each other. There was no question-and-answer about it; no
word louder for meaning’s sake than any other. The speaker didn’t glance at the silent one to see if his silence meant disinterest or anything wrong. The man didn’t look silly (or any way at all) when she called him “dear.” She said the word as if it might be his name.

He knew how they did it, because he could do it exactly the same way.

The man stepped on the starter.

“Are you going far?” the woman said.

The musical languor of her voice made her questions all sound like statements. She kept speaking for the man, as his mother would never have done for his father; though it was plain that for the man she was only an annexation. These were city people. They didn’t seem to permeate each other all the time, like his mother and father did. They were merely sitting there side by side.

“I’m going to Newbridge,” David said.

“Well come
along
then,” she said.

“Thank you very much,” David said.

He wiped his feet carefully before getting into the back seat. He thought: I am wiping off my feet. I left mud all over Mother’s stairs. She had just scrubbed them. He almost hated these people.

When the car was in motion again, the woman swung sidewise in her seat. She cuddled her legs as if she were in a chair. Her smile came again, automatically with the movement of her body.

“Do you live here?” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

I mean, I
did
live here, he thought. He had never seen so clearly how the field sloped up behind the barn. You could lie in the grass and, squinting your eyes, make the mountain come
as small and close as you liked. He had never felt so plainly the arching of his bare toes on the hay stubble … or heard so sharply his father’s voice that night they were all lost …

The trees were moving again now. He felt as if he were in a train, being carried beyond his destination.

“Do you work in Newbridge?” the woman said.

The trees fled by. “I am going to Halifax,” he said.

“Oh,
are
you?” she said.

He could see her glancing at his father in the dooryard as she passed, commenting casually to the man beside her and then selecting, as if the landscape were on a tray, something else to look at. He saw the fraying of his father’s sweater at the cuffs.

She faced front again. She had established, with a few words, his being there in the back seat; that circumstance could lie relaxed now, without further attention.

“If Alex is going to be there, darling,” she said to the man, “I don’t see why you have to go too. I don’t see why you couldn’t just write …”

“You can’t put anything into a letter,” he said. “And you know Alex!”

“But two days on that appalling train,” she said.

“I know, I know.”

David didn’t know what they were talking about. He felt cramped, trying not to listen. He felt stung, having them discuss something personal before him as if he weren’t there.

The trees went by. “Excuse me,” David said, “but around that next turn is usually a bit of a morass.”

The woman looked at him suddenly. She might have mistaken him all along for someone else. Then she glanced directly at her husband.

The man glanced back over his shoulder for the first time. “What education have you got?” he said abruptly.

“Matriculation,” David said, “and some college texts I’ve studied myself.”

“Really!” the woman said. “What are you going to do in Halifax? Where are you going to stay?”

“I have a sister there,” David said.

“Oh?” She spoke as if Anna were irrelevant. (He thought of Anna as a child. Anna will go wherever
I
go, he thought fiercely.)

“Has your family
always
lived here?” the man said.

“Yes,” he said. “My grandfather came out first with the governor’s party, when he was quite young … and then, heaven knows why, came back later and took up a grant of land.” He didn’t thrust out the implication that they weren’t quite the ordinary people they might seem. He planted it, as they would, under a light cover of amusement.

“Did
he!” the woman said. “I think that’s very interesting.”

“Why don’t you look us up in Halifax?” the man said. “I might have something for you in the office.”

“We live in Halifax,” the woman said. “We have a son about your age. He’s taller than Ted, isn’t he, darling, but really they look a little
alike
, don’t you think?”

Now they weren’t feeding on him with desultory questions, without stirring outside themselves. They were
communicating
with him. They were all talking together as if they were all alike. He talked to them their way. There was nothing angular about their speech. They laughed as if they
decided
how much anything should amuse them. It was like the knack of a fluid dance that came to him without practice.

He talked with them as they talked … with a bright chording soreness in his heart. It was like the time he’d broken the bobsled his father had made him, coasting. He’d said things to make the other boys laugh harder than he’d ever been
able to make them laugh before, as he finished smashing it, deliberately and utterly, on the Big Rock.

“Now look us up, won’t you?” the man said again. “Write down the address, Clare. There’s a pad in the side pocket.”

“Thank you,” David said. “I certainly shall.”

The woman was writing down the address. The trees sped by. He thought of having used words like “shall” against his father, who had none of his own to match them or to defend himself with.

“Oh,” he said suddenly. “I’m terribly sorry … but could you let me out? I forgot something. I have to go back.”

“Oh,” the woman said. “Stop, dear. What a
shame.”

The man glanced at his wrist watch. He looked up and down the road. There was no place to turn.

“We could wait,” he said, “fifteen, twenty minutes …”

“No, please don’t,” David said. “Thank you very much.” He was opening the door.

“But if you’re going to Halifax,” the woman said, “how will you get back to Newbridge? Will you have to walk?”

“I’ll manage it somehow,” David said.

He was outside the car now. He wished they would stop talking and let him go. It was like times he’d been sick to his stomach: if the others would only just leave him alone, so he could go off by himself where they wouldn’t see.

“Now, aren’t we stupid?” the woman exclaimed. “You could drive right to Halifax
with
us. Of course we’ll wait.”

“No, please don’t,” David said. “It might take me quite a while. Thank you very much, though.”

He watched them out of sight. He looked toward home. He felt as if he were in a no man’s land. He felt as if time had turned into space, and was crushing against him. He felt as if he must leap somewhere out of the now, but everywhere it was now.

He thought of the woman’s idling glance at his father sawing alone, and he thought of the time in town he’d wished his father would put on his coat so the sweat marks beneath his braces wouldn’t show. He thought of the time the men had laughed when he crouched back from the ox and his father had said, “Dave ain’t scared of him,
are
ya, Dave. Pat him” … taking his hand though, first. He thought of the woman’s hands as she wrote out the address so smoothly, and he thought of his mother’s hands calculating so clumsily the cost of linoleum for a room. He thought of her, tired, scrubbing the stair steps all over again. He thought of the woman cataloguing Anna as just anybody, and he thought of him and Anna going there sometime maybe, and Anna behaving almost the right way but not quite. He remembered thinking he wouldn’t volunteer any information about his awkward brother, and he thought of the time someone had called Chris “stupid” and Chris had said, “Well, I bet I
am
right. You ask Dave …” He thought of his grandmother, and he thought how often he’d made plans for his future in her presence, for years when she knew she couldn’t possibly still be there.