The Mountain and the Valley (27 page)

He saw all their faces cameo-clear as remembered faces of the newly dead.

He looked both ways up and down the road. Then he turned and began to walk toward home. It was like the time in school when he’d made the page of 5’s perfect beyond possible repetition—and then spilt ink all over the page. He’d begun again on a new page; but each figure he formed he drew his lips tight as he pressed on the pencil. Its imprint was on his very quick.

He came to the bridge. He could see the house again. The ash of the quarrel, of blows given and felt, was tamped down physically into his flesh. The soreness was drawn out
wire-thin, pendant at the corners of his lips. Suddenly he put his head into the only place left to hide: the crook of his elbow along the rail of the bridge. He began to sob. He sobbed because he could neither leave nor stay. He sobbed because he was neither one thing nor the other.

He stole up the back stairs and changed his clothes. His face looked as if he had slept in it. It felt exposed and babbling when he walked through the kitchen again. He kept his head bent forward under his cap. He thought if anyone knew what had happened or mentioned it, he would die.

But no one did. “Dave,” his mother said, “what are you runnin in and out about?” She was smiling.

He went out into the chipyard. He glanced at his father’s face, he couldn’t help it. For the first time an old man’s eyes seemed to look out from behind the windows of his father’s own.

He placed a block of wood in the hollow that carrying-through blows of the axe had hacked in the splitting-rest. He struck the block with the axe. It didn’t divide. Only a crack twisted through its sinews.

“Stand it up on its end, Dave,” Joseph said. “Sometimes you can git them tough ones that way.”

“Like this?” David said. He stood the block upright and struck it again.

The axe clove the block this time, clean through to the ground. Never in his life had he felt such a crying-warm surge of release.

“Did you get a good chore done today?” Martha said at the supper table.

“We hauled the big rock,” Joseph said. He didn’t look David’s way. There was a steady current between them. Each
body seemed to reach for the other’s magnetic field, but with contact set up a disorganizing confusion.

“Not the
big
rock?” Martha said. “How did you ever …?”

“Dave and I landed her,” Joseph said.

“Ya never!” Chris exclaimed.

Ellen said nothing.

  The lamp in her room was still lit when David went to bed. She came to the doorway. She held out something in her hand. “Take it,” she whispered. “I want you to have it.”

“But what …?” he said. It was a tiny locket.

“Shhhhhh.”

He turned the locket over in his hand when he got to the attic. It didn’t look as if anyone had ever worn it. He opened the catch and looked inside. There was an old-fashioned picture beneath the oval glass. The face of a sailor about his own age. It was one of those pictures where the eyes always follow you. He frowned. What an odd keepsake for her to give him.
Tonight
 … And so secretly …

He closed the locket again and put it in the matchbox. But the restless eyes still seemed to follow and tantalize him. The face was familiar. He’d seen it somewhere before.

And then suddenly he knew where he’d seen a face like that. He was looking at it right there in the mirror. This locket had something to do with what had happened today. She’d sensed somehow what had happened. She’d sensed it because she too knew what it was like when the moonlight was on the fields when the hay was first cut and you stepped outside and it was lovely, but like a mocking … like everything was somewhere else.

He went to sleep at once, though. He was eighteen.

E
ach year marks the tree with another ring, the cow’s horn with another wrinkle. But until you were twenty, you were not marked. If one day was lost, the others closed over it so quickly that, looking back, there was a continuous surface. Everything was this side of the future.

It was only when you thought back to the way you’d done the same thing you were doing now, in another year, that you could see any change in yourself.

You lifted a cock of hay in one forkful when you were sixteen, and remembered your enormous pride in doing that at fifteen. The argument of your feeling then was completely undecipherable now. You walked down the road when you were seventeen. You still clowned with the other boys; but if you listened to the boys of sixteen now, the particular horsing of that year seemed childish. Swimming seemed the same at eighteen as at seventeen; but if you thought of the way you swam then—not because it was a hot day, not because anything, just swimming till it began to get late—why, you thought, had you felt nothing vacuous about it? You still blushed when you polkaed out at nineteen. But if you thought about polkaing out last year, wanting them to think you were wriggling against the girl, that you were drunk, you felt silly for yourself at eighteen (now you could be with Bess whenever you liked, now you’d actually
been
drunk) as you’d feel silly for a stranger.

Your thoughts were more varied when you were nineteen than when you were eighteen; but less smoky, less involuntary, less assaulting. Now they stiffened a little, just on examination. You reined them like a colt you’d taught to take the bit. You could put them back, if you wanted, when they started to come out. Some things hurt you, coming into your mind of
themselves maybe only a month ago. You couldn’t
make
the same things hurt you now.

There was a kind of insolence in your flesh and thoughts when you were nineteen. Each day you felt the attainment, the security, of being as you really were, for the first time. (Remembering another day when that had seemed equally true, but in the light of today could be seen as false, didn’t shake that security.) It could be tripped up. A joke you took the literal letter of, instead of the harmless intent, could do it; or a stab of child-anger or child-fear; or finding yourself in a situation in any way strange. But it could be established again instantly, as soon as you were alone. You felt as old as anyone then—but with the knowledge, so certain as to be undefiant, that you would always be young.

Yet the conduit to childhood wasn’t entirely sealed over. A child’s visionary enthusiasms still surprised you at times, trapped you into delight without judgement.

David’s heart leapt the moment Joseph spoke that morning.

“Dave,” Joseph said, “what do ya say we go back to the top of the mountain and see if that keel-piece is sound, and look out some knees?”

They were building vessels in Annapolis that year. The only tree in the village tall and large and straight enough to be hewn for a keel was on Joseph’s land. It had stood as a landmark in the woods since his father’s time. Knees were solid right angles of bole and root.

David’s excitement was mixed of the thoughts of the mountain (though he was nineteen he’d never been to the very top yet) and the thought of their own timber going across the seas to far parts of the world. It was the childish excitement all over again that had always orbited any extraordinary job:
setting off in the ox wagon to pick Snow apples in the township orchard, where bear tracks could be seen at the very door of the tumbling old house: shoeing the nervous horse: rocking up a new well. He’d always found a strange thrill in watching, without responsibility, his father’s strength and sureness in the accomplishment of these things.

“We should all go,” Martha said. She said it in a joking way but David knew she was throwing it out half seriously.

“Come on!” he said eagerly. He’d never thought of making a picnic of it—that was a wonderful idea. “You will, won’t you? You’ll go too, won’t you, Chris?”

“Sure,” Chris said, “I guess so.”

“I haven’t done my chamber work,” Martha said.

“Ohhhhh, let it go,” David said.

“I suppose we could have an early dinner,” she said.

“Let’s
take
our dinner,” David said.

“I suppose I could do the work after I come home,” she said.

“The work’ll keep,” Joseph said.

“I’m not ready,” she said. But she was putting forth denial without conviction. She used to do that with David, when he knew she intended to indulge him all the time.

“Come on, Mother,” he said. “Please come with us.”

“We’ll wait for you,” Joseph said.

“Well … Oh no, I couldn’t!”

“You can … you can so …”

Waiting for her to pack the lunch was as exciting as it had been waiting for the older ones to take them some place special when they were children.

Martha was just working the nutmeg tin of tea down the side of the basket when a car drove in the yard. Its horn
tooted in code fashion. Brakes snubbed it to a reckless stop, within a foot of the porch.

“There’s a car!” she said. “It’s strangers—and
look
at me.”

“Oh, god
dam
them!”

“David!” Ellen said.

Then Martha’s voice boomed. “It’s Anna,” she cried, “and Toby.”

“Oh good!” David shouted. He felt a touch of Christmas.

They crowded out the doorway. Exclamations and promiscuous greeting flared up like kerosine thrown on the kitchen fire in the morning. Then these died down. Each began to greet the other individually,
attending
to question and answer.

And then David felt the strange toppling that always came at the sight of Toby. The instant resolve that before they met
next
time he must build himself up somehow, to equality. When Toby had come and gone, the way of the village grooved back into David like a more stubborn grain; but the instant Toby appeared again he was the one point of orient.

The smooth way Toby was dressed seemed to expose a sudden deceit in his own clothes. He felt defensive. He was compelled to snub him with unresponsiveness.

“What do you think of her?” Toby said to David. He swept the car with his eye, the way Joseph ran his hand along an ox’s rump.

“She’s quite a boat,” David said.

Toby immediately yanked up the hood and began detailing her features to David. He forgot the others, isolated Anna even. David had no interest in cars except in their appearance. But Toby assumed one without question. He had the same old unwitholding grin.

“We were just getting ready to go back for the keel,” David said casually.

Toby looked baffled. He put down the hood.

Anna looked at them then. “What’s the matter, Dave?” she said, laughing. “Aren’t you glad to see us?”

He felt ashamed. Her suggestion was so patently ridiculous she could speak it as a joke, but he felt more ashamed than if she were voicing any real doubt.

Anna looked about the fields, checking them with her memory of them. The look on her face made her stand suddenly alone. Then she ran into the house. The silk stockings encased her insteps so like a natural skin that it didn’t seem possible her feet had ever gone bare. The trim brown suit fraternized with her body as smoothly as Toby’s clothes did with his. But her face wasn’t metallic and unsurprisable, as other city faces were. It was still soft and discovering.

“Were you really going somewhere?” Anna said when she saw the lunch basket.

“We was goin back to the top of the mountain,” Chris said.

David frowned at him. This wasn’t the time to say that, bluntly, without motive.

“Oh, that’s a shame,” Anna said. “But go ahead … now don’t let us stop you.”

“I’ll bet we will!” Martha said. “Unless you’d come with us.”

“We couldn’t,” Anna said, “really. We have to get back this afternoon.”

“You ain’t drivin all the way back to Halifax tonight?” Joseph said.

“Sure,” Toby said. David wished his father hadn’t shown such incredulity at the idea of a trip from Halifax and back in one day.

“You go ahead just the same,” Toby said. “We’ll stay here with Dave. You weren’t going, were you, Dave?”

“Well …”

“ ‘Well …’ ” Anna mimicked good-naturedly. “You
planned
to go, now didn’t you, Dave?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

When Toby singled him out from the others as his and Anna’s special company, he felt his allegiance slip back to the spirit of the trip. He had a sudden feeling of hurt at the thought of the others going off alone. The picnic mood which he could always infuse in them would fall apart without him.

“I
know,” Toby said. “Why don’t we take the car and all go?”

“We couldn’t take the car, dear,” Anna said. Quietly, indulgently. “It’s only a log road.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Toby said. “It’s a good log road,
isn’t
it, Dave. We could strike it from that road below the hill there.”

“Oh, we couldn’t take the car,” Martha said.
“Could
we, Joseph.”

“I don’t think so,” Joseph said.

“Where would you turn?” Chris said.

Toby looked crestfallen. David felt a shift to Toby’s side. The others had the rights of it; but why did they always have to come out with so many sensible, indisputable reasons against anything a little foolhardy? Toby would think he had the same pinching caution as they had.

“It’s no use, Toby …” he said.

“One of us would have to stay home anyway,” Martha said. “There wouldn’t be room for us all.”

“We really couldn’t take the car, Toby,” Anna said. Almost whispering. She wished too, though she knew they
were right, that they’d let him try it.

“Okay,” Toby said. David knew he’d accept whatever they decided, but that he still couldn’t see why they couldn’t take the car.

“I’ll stay home,” Ellen spoke up suddenly. “I’ll keep the fire. There are only one, two, three … six of you …”

“What do you say, Mr. Canaan?” Toby said. With an unexpected ally in Ellen, he was all eagerness again.

“Well …” Joseph said, “I don’t know. Whatever the rest
think
 …”

“Okay,” Toby said. He spoke as if it were all settled. “Anna, you and I and Dave get in front, and your mother and father and Chris in the back … eh?”

Just before they were ready to start, Toby winked at David and nodded toward the shop. He went to the shop. David followed.