The Mountain and the Valley (3 page)

The kitchen’s heart would seem to beat with a great peace then. The paths of the day which had been separate for each (patterned for the old, patternless for the young) melted together. The breath of them all seemed to lift in one single breath.

The kitchen had been witness to everything in their lives, and so was like one of them. If strangers, with different tread and different plans and other thoughts, should ever come to inhabit it, all the light would go out of its face.

Joseph had just finished milking. He was washing his hands at the sink. Martha gathered the muslin strainer over the lip of the milk pail.

Her features were each too generous to allow her prettiness. But she had soft light hair, and true light eyes, and whatever her face did it did all the way, in smiling or in sadness.

She enjoyed these morning chores: scalding the creamers, brushing crumbs off the pitted face of the stove with a hawk wing, doing the chamber work—making the untidy waking face of the house orderly again. Most other women she knew found their morning work a burden and a waste. Their faces looked hot and ravelled as they worked about the stove. They didn’t seem to come alive until they’d changed their dress after dinner and gone out to talk with another woman. But even when she was alone in her own house, her tasks were like a kind of conversation. The objects she touched had animacy. Even in the morning she wore a dress of bright print.

Ellen sat on the lounge. She was ripping old garments apart at the seams; then nicking each section with the scissors; then tearing them, with quick clean strokes, into rags for a rug.

Anna sat beside her. She kept picking out sections of the brightest coloured garments and holding them up to her as if she were testing dresses at a counter.

“Gosh,
that’s
a pretty colour,” David said. Everything seemed beautiful this morning.

“I don’t know which I think is the prettiest,” Anna said, “this one or that one. Which do you?”

“Oh, this one,” he said. “Or … I don’t know. Which do you?”

Anna had almost no look of the others. She was David’s twin, but her hair and her eyes were dark. Her face had the delicacy of the child who is beautiful before its time: a tiny replica
perfection that gave it a vulnerable look. She would always keep that trace of prettiness in that same soft childlike way.

“Well, if everyone’s washed,” Martha said.

The food had a ghostly taste to David, like food in a dream. It just took time. The fresh bread with the faint smell of milk and hands in it he swallowed almost without chewing. He couldn’t touch his egg.

“Eat your egg,” Martha said. “You’ll be hungry.”

“Aw, Mother, I won’t be
hungry!”
Always that: Would you be hungry, or tired, or warm enough? If he could only make them see how meaningless the possibility of being hungry later on was.

“You’ll see whether you’re hungry or not,” Chris said. “You never walked there before.”

“Oh, I can walk as far as you can!” But he wasn’t angry. He knew that if any argument really went against him, Chris would switch back to his side.

“Joseph,” Martha said, “do you thing it’s too far for David, way back there? You don’t know how far it
is
, Dave.”

“Let the child go.” Ellen whispered it, but David heard. He loved her.

“
Yes
, Mother.” He looked at his father. “Dad, you
said
I could.” He was almost crying. It would be awful if this was one of the times when nothing could make his mother understand how full you were of never being tired or cold or hungry.

“What do you think, Dave?” Joseph said. “Think you kin walk that far?”

“Sure I can! Mother’s always so
scared.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Joseph said, “I guess maybe he kin go. We’ll take it easy. What do you think, Martha?”

“Well,” Martha said, “if he’d keep his jacket buttoned, and promised me to
tell
you if he starts to get tired.”

His mother was suddenly wonderful when she began to waver like that. He promised her all these things, yes, yes, truly, from the bottom of his heart.

Joseph looked at David the way he always did when he let him have his way about some small thing. A slow humouring smile gathered in his eyes, although it wasn’t quite overt in his lips.

Joseph’s body wasn’t heavy, but it was corded with muscles that rose everywhere at the slightest movement. He had a slow, handsome face: dark hair; dark sober eyes; and blood showed healthy beneath the beard shadow on his cheeks, even after shaving. As soon as they left youth behind, most of the men in Entremont got a cold-pinched look about the flesh in the hollows under their cheekbones, their hair was like lodged beach grass, their eyes like puddle water. But Joseph was without that cragginess. He could exchange clothes with a city man and you couldn’t tell that those weren’t the clothes he’d always worn (though the city man would look lost in Joseph’s).

He was a slow man, but his life beat was no less varied than Martha’s for being inarticulate. They said his nerve was strong enough to “cut off your head and put it back on again.” (Once he had chopped a man’s leg free from a jam between two logs, with a hand so steady the axe kept grazing the man’s larrigan but never nicked it.) But he was a kind man, with no thought of the shame of being thought kind. He was not brittle anywhere, not spotted anywhere with softness; yet he was tender. It showed in the way he’d look at a new rug Ellen spread out before him, though he could find nothing to say; or the way he’d hold up the sweet pea vines Martha had planted in the vegetable rows, carefully from the hoe; or the way he’d look at the children sometimes, though he hesitated
to touch them. He almost never laughed aloud, but there was no severity whatever in him. His anger came seldom, but when it did—in loyalty to a friend, or at lies or meanness or pretence—it was fierce and deep.

His lack of fear (so utter it wasn’t a matter of courage at all) and a kind of stubborn thoughtlessness to alter circumstances for his own ease were local legend. He’d work all day with an axe so dull any other man would have walked three miles to grind. When he came to a slough on his way to the woods, he wouldn’t pick his steps around it, he’d walk straight through. He’d dive to the bottom of the cold stream for a saw they’d lost cutting ice, and finish the rest of the morning’s work in his wet drawers. But he never thought of any of this as a thing that gave effect. He did it that way when he was alone. The other men joked about the things Joseph did, but they loved him as no other man in the place was loved.

“I’m goin,” David whispered to Anna, pulsing with glee.

Anna would know exactly how he felt. They didn’t act alike, or think alike; but she watched him and listened to him as if he were the final reference for everything. He knew that she alone understood everything he told her, exactly.

“I asked Mother if I could go,” Anna said, “but she said I couldn’t.”

David’s mood brought up short. He felt as if he’d betrayed her. He’d never thought of Anna wanting to go. She didn’t coax or tease, once she’d been told “no.” She must have wanted to go terribly, to have asked at all.

“I tell you, Anna,” he said, “don’t you wait for me, you go see the fawn Syd’s father caught, and get Grandmother to tell you a brand new story.” He wanted to think of her doing something special without him, to make up for this thing he was doing that excluded her.

She nodded. He saw that she was almost crying.

“A girl couldn’t go way back there, Anna,” he said. Then it came to him how awful it was when the others said something reasonable like that to him, and Anna helpless to argue even, as he did.

“Listen, Anna,” he said desperately. “I’ll go today, see, so I’ll know the way. Then someday I’ll take
you
back. Just the two of us.”

“All right.” She smiled.

Suddenly, because she couldn’t go, because she didn’t know she looked as if she were almost crying. David loved her fiercer than he’d ever loved anything before.

“Anna,” he said, “look at the way Chris’s hair’s stickin up. It looks like a scairt cat.” She laughed, in spite of herself.

Anna watched them cross the road. Water sighed in the great holes of the road where the frost had collapsed. The mail team passed by. Fans of muddy water fell constantly from the spokes of the wheels. She watched them go across the field and over the pole-fence and across the pasture and out of sight. But she didn’t call to them, and the tears didn’t fall.

III

The sun was warm now, really warm. It came close enough not only to dry the dead leaves on the ground but to make a rustling among them. David could feel it through his jacket, and as he walked dampness gathered where his cap was tight in front. He pushed his cap back. The air felt cool and clean on his forehead. Joseph and Chris didn’t loosen any of their clothing. They never seemed to feel the weight of their heavy garments, even in the hot summer.

I hope we won’t meet anyone, David thought. Just us together. This was one of the few times when his father had
given himself over entirely to a day of pleasure. No part of him was absent in thoughts of work. When he cut the alder for a fishing pole, he searched and searched until he spotted the perfectly straight one you couldn’t see yourself. When he made the whistle, he didn’t do it practically, like a job. He did it so carefully and so perfectly as you wanted it that you wondered how it was possible. You couldn’t imagine him ever making a whistle for himself, when he was a child.

“Dad,” David said, “can you see the camp quite a ways before you get there, or is it …?”

“Oh I guess maybe you kin see it, a little ways,” Joseph said.

David started to say, “Dad, will you let
me
build the fire in the camp stove tonight?” Then he hesitated.

He knew that his father could refuse him nothing. Yet why was it easier to ask his mother for things, even if he had to plead and argue?

When he was alone with his father, he didn’t know what to say. The quick things in his mind sounded foolish even to himself. Not that Joseph would laugh at them. There’d be an anxiety in him almost, to listen and to understand. But somehow David would be struck shy when he started to talk; and then, when he didn’t speak true to his thoughts, he’d feel as if he were keeping a secret from the person he could most trust.

Chris had no such trouble.

He could talk and talk, whether his father answered or not; or they could work in absolute silence without any constraint. All the time David worked alone with his father, he’d be afraid something would come up he couldn’t do, something he couldn’t lift. He knew his father wouldn’t mention his clumsiness or weakness, but still he didn’t want him to see. Chris never seemed to be afraid that anything would be
beyond his strength. He didn’t feel that way at all about his father seeing.

(The funny thing, when Chris asked his father for anything, Joseph would argue with him the way Martha argued with David.)

Sometimes when all three worked together, David would try to imitate their sober speech. He’d wish his thoughts could just move along with the pace of the day, as theirs did. But this morning he wouldn’t part with his secret extra senses for anything.

As they came close to the mountain, it was so exciting David was almost afraid. He almost wished there was some way he could save it. The second time was never as good.

They came to the bridge at the end of the pasture. The brook started high-up, from a spring. It was shallow here because of damming above, so that logs could be driven down the mountain part of it. But it ran exultantly. Glinting and leap-frogging, in the sun. Cool and smooth, under the scooped-out banks. Twisting and tumbling over its own heels on its way to the river, and from the river to the sea.

Joseph and Chris stopped to urinate on the bridge. They used their whole hand, like a shield. David urinated into the brook, so that he could think of it going all the way out to the sea. He held his hand as they did. He was going up on the mountain.

“Do you want to fish here a while, Dave, and have dinner?” Joseph said. “Spell you a little before we strike the mountain.”

“No,” David said. How was it possible for his father to consider waiting and going on, and have the tug of both choices equal?

“Yeh, let’s do that,” Chris said.

David started to protest. Then he felt a twinge of the appetite he’d believed forever dead. He thought: Yes, let’s wait till we eat. Then there’ll be nothing—not hunger, not tired, not a thing—to spoil it. Let’s wait. I can be near the mountain and save it at the same time.

He fished by himself, a little upstream; so he could hear the others, but not see them. He looked at the bubble-coins on the surface of the water and let his mind not-think. He seemed to be floating along with the brook. He felt the sun through his jacket, and waited for the tug on his line that would be firmer than the tug of the current. Whenever he looked at the mountain and made the sun-shiver in his mind into a conscious thought, he knew this was the best time he’d ever had.

Soon fire was catching in the little tent of dry sticks his father (who else could have?) discovered you couldn’t imagine where. The brook water came to a boil in a sudden volcano. It spun the tea leaves round and round in the black boiling kettle, and a little of it hissed out on the flames. He sat on a sun-warmed rock, with his father’s coat beneath him. The tea in the tin cups had a little taste of smoke in it. The egg slipped out of its shell smooth as glass. His teeth found layers of cold meat beautifully between the thick-buttered bread. It was like food had never been before.

He thought, we could do this every day! We will! We’ll come back here and eat every day!

Joseph lit his pipe. He tightened the shoulder straps of his pack where they tied around the mouth of the meal bag and the potato pocketed in each bottom corner. They rinsed the tins in the brook and put them back inside the pack.

The food was warm in David and the sun was shining and no part of the day had begun to decline and they were
crossing the bridge to start to climb the mountain, when they heard the voices.