The Mountain and the Valley (30 page)

“Let
go
of em, let
go
of em,” Chris shouted. “Grab her front legs.” A pig’s hind toenails could slash like a razor.

David held on. He felt blindingly strong.

Chris ran to the pig’s head, still watching him. He and Steve rolled her over on her back. The point of Joseph’s knife dented the tough throat skin. Then the “slshhhhhh” of bright blood crimsoned his knuckles and the back of his thumb, to the wrist.

They stood back. The pig flopped and bled, flopped and
bled. Her body went limp and lolly. A fat smile fixed itself solidly on her caricature of a face. Joseph dug a clot of blood from her throat. Ben had been pretending to look for a clean place to lay the gun down. He came over now. His finger sought out almost tenderly the tiny smudge so accurately between her eyes.

“Well, sir,” he said, straightening. “I mind one time we killed a pig fer Cale …”

David started to drag the pig toward the opening. He felt so blindingly strong …

“Wait till I git the rope and the hook,” Chris called. “No sense luggin yer guts out.”

The rope was on the grass. The others all went for the hook, as if three of them could fetch it quicker than one.

David kept inching the pig forward even as Chris made the slip knot in the rope. Chris stooped to clinch it around the pig’s foot. David knew their hands must touch. He flung the foot down. Chris gave him an odd glance.

“What’s the matter with
you?”
he said.

“What’s the matter …? What’s the matter …?” He hadn’t meant to speak at all. His anger spilled the words out—though it couldn’t supply any that made sense. He could only parrot the sentence just spoken.

“I just said you didn’t like to see anything killed,” Chris said. “What was there about
that
to …?”

Oh, if the damn fools only had sense enough to let what they’d said lay. They kept dinging at it, making it worse. He wished he could get hold of Chris’s
voice
somehow. He’d tear it to pieces.

The men strained on the rope. The grass was greased with light snow. They drew the pig’s carcase over it, to the barn door.

As they tugged the pig up over the barn sill, David was crowded against the wall. The point of a nail ripped along the back of his hand.

“God!” he said, startled by the exclamation of the pain. But he didn’t release his hold.

“What’d ya do?” Joseph said. “Nothin, nothin.”

“He tore his hand,” Chris said. His own grip slackened.

“God!” the others said. They glanced at the blood. “Now! Everyone!” They kept lurching on the rope.

Inside the barn, the throb of his ignored hand seemed to synchronize his anger on a steady track. The calm, biting, beautiful part of it began.

Oh, it would be fine someday when they’d be yarding logs (and Chris, wanting to spare him, would try to reach the butt of each one before he did), to grasp the big butt of all and ask
Steve
to give him a lift on it … Or someday that had been tiresome at the Exhibition Chris would come to him and say, “Do you wanta go home now?” (when it was getting late anywhere, and people who’d had a better time than they were starting to leave, was one of the times being brothers became explicit), and he’d say, “No. But you take the horse and go if you like. I’ll get a chance home …”

Now the pig was actually landed, the men asked about his hand.

“Don’t it hurt?” Ben said.

“No.”

“A nail, was it?” Steve said.

He kept his hand turned away from them, deliberately. He felt the stranger in them. They accepted so willingly, so without dispute, his answer that his wound was nothing.

Ben blew his nose, holding a finger against one nostril, then against the other. “I give one of
my
fingers … that one,
no, that one … a hell of a clout with the hammer yistiddy,” he said. They turned to the pig again.

Chris came over then. “Let’s
see
your hand,” he said. He took it in his own and turned it over. “You better git somethin
on
that,” he said. He spoke loud, as if accusing the others somehow for accepting David’s word.

For a second David felt a lurch in his anger, as if he’d glimpsed treachery in it. He could have let it go flaccid.

“Why don’t you go to the house?” Joseph said. He was making cautious, expert slits in the pig’s hocks to expose the gam strings.

“Oh, I won’t go to the house!” David snatched his hand away from Chris’s and reached for the gam stick.

He spread the pig’s legs and fixed the notches under the gam strings. But when he let go, one point of the stick slipped free. It struck him sharply in the palm. His anger sparked again with the physical sting, focused again on Chris.

“Dave ain’t used to spreadin gams,” Ben laughed.

It was only the alternative routine joke: if you didn’t exaggerate another’s sex experience, you minimized it. But David chose to take it as a slight. He let it, also, grind his anger brighter.

“He’s used to spreadin em with his knees,” Chris said.

Again David felt the footing of his anger lurch. Chris never said anything like that. He was saying it now to save even a joke going against him. It was one of those times when Chris came out with that odd perceptiveness you’d never suspected in him. You wondered suddenly how much he understood about everything else.

“Let’s see, Dave,” Joseph said.

He took the gam stick from David’s hand. He fitted it so expertly that David’s anger righted itself again. Goddam them
all
 …

Joseph tied one end of the rope to the centre of the gam stick. He coiled the other end and threw it into the air. It went sailing above the pole that bridged the big beams, twenty feet up; but it didn’t drop back on the other side. There was a rafter support running diagonally to the big beam. A spike was sticking out from it. The loop in the end of the rope hooked itself over the spike as neatly as a quoit.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Ben said. “I bet you couldn’t do that agin, Joe.”

“Now what?” Joseph said. He tried to shake the rope clear. It wouldn’t let go. “Chris, go git the long ladder.”

“We don’t need no ladder,” David said. “I can reach it. I’ll go out on the big beam.”

“Yes, and break yer neck,” Joseph said.

“Oh, break your ass …”

He felt so blindingly sure …

Joseph said no more. He wasn’t really worried: he’d have seen nothing extraordinary in walking the beam himself.

David glanced at Chris, waiting for him to say, “You know you git dizzy when you climb.” He hated him for the words before they were spoken. But Chris didn’t open his mouth. It was that assaulting perceptiveness again.

The others didn’t protest his plan at all. And once again David felt the stranger in them. Not that it was a matter of indifference to them whether he fell or not, but because they denied him the danger. They assumed so unconcernedly (because it was no one close to them) that he would
not
fall—and coming back, not having fallen, where was the achievement in walking fifteen feet or so of beam?

He started up the ladder that went to the head scaffold. The ladder was tied securely, but Chris held it just the same. He ran across the scaffold and climbed up the short ladder
nailed to the big beam. He stepped out onto the beam.

He stood on the beam. He glanced down. And suddenly where was the momentum of his anger?

He felt it gone, with the sudden hollowness you feel when you slip your hand into your pocket and your purse is not there. The barn floor looked stranger than distance alone could make it. It was only twenty feet away—no farther than the kitchen sink from the dining-room table. If he went down the ladders and stood on it, it would become as neutral again as the ground. But, glancing down, it had a yawning look. It was magnetic as an eye to anything loose above it. It had an impact of shock, of faint.

They were watching him. He had to move. His knees felt as if walking had been explained to them, but this were the first time they’d tried it.

Only fifteen feet to go, he told himself … five steps … no farther than from the pantry to the stove … on a beam twice as wide as the board we used to walk on when the path was muddy in the spring … only ten seconds … just ten seconds to keep steady … the time it took to lace a boot …

He made it. He clutched the support. Like a drowner.

They were watching him, but without anxiety. The barn floor was still sucking at his breath. He pulled in his breath with a great effort, got a hold on it. He unloosed the rope and tossed it across the pole.

It was half over. He turned and looked back at the scaffold. Ten seconds away. As close as that. Just ten seconds, not glancing down … He glanced down. The others had grasped the rope. They had hoisted the pig off the floor already.

Only Chris was looking up at him. He looked at Chris. He saw Chris looking up to the top of the hill, when they were
all swimming. Someone was calling and they knew something had happened, though they couldn’t make out which one of them it concerned, and it was one of the times when being brothers became explicit.

And then, with exactly the feeling he had often had in a dream of falling, he fell.

He knew nothing about Chris carrying him to the house and laying him on the dining-room table without taking off the cloth, though blood was streaming from the sickle-shaped gash where his cheek had struck the rim of the scalding barrel … or of the pig’s flesh setting in wrinkles while the water grew cold … or of his father’s cold rage when the doctor’s horse came in sight, walking. Steve went back later to pick up his cap. He slipped the tablecloth from under David, with a sort of apology in him for being exempt from the unseemliness which these actions would hold if one of the family performed them. But David didn’t know that. Nor did he see Ellen put her hand not to her head or her heart, when they told her, but to her mouth, as if it were her breath that was threatened.

He knew nothing, the next morning, of Anna rushing from Toby’s car to Martha’s arms, and they grasping each other as if it were one of
them
who had been hurt … or of Toby looking at him as if rupture of the body were something so baffling he refused to admit it. He didn’t see Anna look at Toby when Toby made reference to the record speed of their trip; as if she felt like frowning, but as if, if she did frown, that would admit something about
him
which must be inadmissible.

He knew nothing until the next afternoon. He remembered opening his eyes. They were all standing there, dressed, in his room. He had the instant feeling that he’d overslept, so long that now he’d never catch up with them.

And he was always to remember Chris standing alone by his bed that night. Chris looked as if something he couldn’t find words for hung heavily in his arms and legs. He looked as if he wanted to touch him. At last he said, “Was it what I said, Dave? I didn’t mean …” He wanted to answer, “What …? Oh,
that …”
and smile. But he couldn’t. He didn’t smile. He said, “Would you ask someone to bring me a drink?”

He remembered the awful feeling when Chris turned and left the room. A feeling that the chance was gone to fix this thing up between them: that something was going to happen to Chris himself soon. If you try to resolve an old misunderstanding with someone back from being away, it’s impossible: the meantime of absence, though over, makes the thing’s immediacy irretrievable. This thing that was going to happen to Chris would separate them like that. This thing now must go forever unresolved.

M
ost mornings there was pain. It wasn’t exclamatory, but a bleaching ache that whitened his senses like thumb pressure whitens flesh.

For the first time he knew steady pain, not as something that grazed him in passing, but as a thing resident inside. Yet he didn’t wrestle with it. When they asked him if his head hurt, he said no. He let the pattern of the pain imprint itself on him; as if by grudging a thing, whose nature it was to be fought against, and such reaction, he could deny it.

He personalized it: as if it were blows struck first in pardonable anger but continued, through momentum, to unjust excess; and then, achieving no effect other than intensification
of his privacy, became the weapon of their own defeat. He lay there, listening to it, hating it, but subtly possessing it.

But sometimes, in the afternoons, he would doze and awake and the pain would be gone. The thumb would be relaxed. The blood would course colourful through the vein again.

Then it would seem as if the pain had been something made real only by his attitude toward it, that it had tired itself out, vanished so completely there could be no seed of it left. If someone asked him then if his head hurt, he’d say, “No. But it hurt like hell this morning.” They would seem to glow, for asking him about his head—now that the ache was gone.

There would be a quality quite wonderful in these afternoons then. Lying there, exempt from any possible task, listening to the others below go about
their
tasks (tasks with so much brighter faces on them, now that someone in the house had been grazed by death but miraculously not struck down), there would be a strange heightening of perception in him. There would be instants when the simplest things—a chance undulation of the curtain frill in the breeze, the sound of his mother’s mixing spoon against the bowl—would be suddenly, sweepingly, shot with universality. As if he had happened on some shockingly bright phrase in the very language of meaning.

That afternoon there was the instant with the book.

It was a book Dr. Engles had sent him. It was different from any book he’d ever read. It was supposed to be a good book; but at first it seemed dusty, like something old.

And then his eyes fell on one sentence: “He turned back to the empty house and his heart bent forward against a wind.” He caught his breath. That’s exactly the way
he
’d felt when anyone had gone away.

Then there was: “A shaft of memory stabbed him like the slash of a branch against a window pane in the night …,” “the sound of crickets winding their watches …,” “Lint made a knitting pattern in the interstices of the screen,” “It was that shocking cry of a child in extreme pain, which you mistake at first for laughing …” He had the flooding shock of hearing things stated exactly for the first time.