The Mountain and the Valley (31 page)

Suddenly he knew how to surmount everything. That loneliness he’d always had … it got forgotten, maybe, weeded over … but none of it had ever been conquered. (And all that time the key to freedom had been lying in these lines, this book.) There was only one way to possess anything: to
say
it exactly. Then it would be outside you, captured and conquered.

There was a scribbler by the bed. He reached for it and a pencil.

He wrote quickly, “Roger was angry with his brother.” He hesitated. When he did, a listening seemed to spring up in everything around. It stiffened him. But he forced himself to go on. “He didn’t want to climb the ladder, but something made him. His brother’s face looked …” He thought: sad? … sober? … hurt? … 
struck
. Yes, sure. “His brother’s face looked struck.”

He couldn’t go any farther. The cleansing cathartic of the first accurate line
(there
was the thing itself, outside him, on the page) made him close his eyes. He felt as if he were going to cry.

His mother’s voice brought him up short.

“Is that Rachel coming?” he heard her say to Chris. They were alone in the kitchen.

“Yeahhhhh,” Chris said disgustedly, “that’s
her
.”

“Is she past Ora’s gate?”

“Yeahhh. She’s comin here. What does
that
old bitch want?”

“Christopher!”

David slipped the scribbler under his pillow. Rachel might be coming to see
him
. He could just hear her. She’d whisper to his mother outside the door, “Well, that’s fine … if Doctor Engles
knows
. He’s made so many mistakes …” He could see her looking at him and saying, “Well,
Daaaaaavid
 …” She’d draw out the syllables of his name as if she were comforting someone at a funeral.

And if the scribbler were in sight, she’d be sure to pick it up. She’d open it to that very page. She’d never come into the house that she hadn’t brought up something that someone wanted to keep hidden. The thought of Rachel being the first one to look at these words he’d just written was awful.

He heard Chris go out. Then he heard the sound of the door again, as Rachel came in. He didn’t hear her voice.

He heard his mother say, “Come
in
, Rachel. No, no, take the rocker.” It was funny, he still didn’t hear Rachel’s voice.

He went to the head of the attic stairs.

“Don’t look at this kitchen!” Martha said. “Things have been kind of upside down here lately, and …”

Then he heard Rachel speak.

“I don’t know what I’ve done that this had to come to me,” she said.

“Why, Rachel,” Martha exclaimed. “What’s wrong?”

“I’ve worked and I’ve slaved. I always tried to do what was right …”

“Of course you have, Rachel. But, tell me … What …?”

“I ain’t got nothin agin
you
, Martha. Maybe you know nothin about it, I don’t know. I
saw
him skin out.”

“Who?” Martha said, completely perplexed. “You mean Chris? But what’s Chris got to do with …?”

“Ask him,” Rachel said. “Jist ask him.”

“Of course,” Martha said. “If Chris’s done something to you, I’ll call him.” There was an edge on her voice.

“I musta bin blind,” Rachel went on, “to ever allowed it. I don’t know what I was thinkin about. But there, I thought I could trust him. I thought he was a good boy.”

“Chris
is
a good boy,” Martha said.

The edge in his mother’s voice was sharper still. He knew she was fighting to control it, to avoid an overt scene. He could see her face. It would look as if it had been manoeuvred into a corner. It would be a little flushed, as if she’d been working over a hot stove.

“Call him,” Rachel said.
“Call
him. I want you to hear everything that’s said, Martha. I don’t go behind anyone’s back. When I have anything to say I say it right to their face.”

The old bitch! He could see Rachel’s face too. Her hair’d be drawn back tight from her forehead. Her eyes’d be feeding on this trumped-up drama. Her mouth’d be set in that line of uncompromising woe.

He heard his mother call Chris. Chris must have dodged out to the shop. He came in almost immediately.

“Hullo,” he said grumpily. Rachel didn’t answer.

“Chris,” Martha said, “Rachel says you’ve done something to injure her. She wanted me to call you.”

“Injure her?” Chris said. “What have
I
done?”

“No,” Rachel said, “you haven’t done anything. You stand there and …” Her voice went choppy. “She was all I had. I worked and I slaved … and now you’ve ruined her. You’re as cruel as the grave.”

Oh God, David thought. Charlotte. She’s trapped him.

But it didn’t seem as if either Chris or Charlotte was to blame. It was always like that with any bad news that Rachel brought. No matter how plain her own innocence, you still felt, if it hadn’t been for her, the old … if she hadn’t
attracted
it …

  A chasm of silence split the afternoon.

He could see his mother’s face: as if she had caught her breath just too late to fend off this blow on it. He could see Chris’s: muddled with shame—not because of what he’d done, but because it must be discussed before his mother. He’d look like he did the time he’d had to ask her to make a bread poultice for a boil on his groin.

“Chris,” Martha said at last, “is that true?”

“You needn’t lie,” Rachel put in, “you needn’t lie …”

“Who the hell’s going to lie?” Chris shouted.

“My children don’t lie, Rachel,” Martha said. “If Chris’s got mixed up with your girl, he’ll say so.”

She didn’t use Charlotte’s name. She made it sound as if Charlotte were entirely to blame. If Rachel had come at it directly, in plain anger or plain grief … but she always premised beforehand that you’d be unreasonable or unfair, so that’s the way you were.

Rachel paid no attention to anything they said.

“She told me it was you, and I know she was tellin the truth. She might get led astray, poor child, but I know she won’t
lie.”

“Chris,” Martha said, “did you know this?”

“No, I never. She never said nothin about …”

David heard the pump. Chris must be standing by the pump: In blind desperation for some kind, any kind, of action, he was ludicrously pumping himself a drink.

“I’ll marry her,” he kept repeating, “I’ll marry her.”

“I blame myself,” Rachel intoned, ignoring him still. “I blame myself. I shoulda bin warned. His father before him …”

“Now, that’s enough, Rachel,” Martha said, “that’s just enough …”

“Yes, shield him,” Rachel said, “shield him. You’ve always shielded em all. I hate to say this, I know you got sickness in the house, Martha, but …”

“Oh, you stinkin old bitch!” David screamed.

Then he ran back into the room. He slammed the door, to shut it all out.

He didn’t open the door again until Rachel was gone.

There was that stillness in the kitchen of an explosion over but the fragments still arcing back silently to the ground. He could see Chris’s face: with no place to look. He could see his mother’s: it would be the face of someone picking up the first bit of ravaged furniture from the steaming ashes of a fire, more in recognition than in salvage.

“Put a stick in,” she said to Chris.

He heard the noise of the stove cover. Then the noise of the door as Chris went out.

Then Martha called to him. He’d never heard such weariness in a voice before.

“Dave, do you want anything?”

“No,” he said, “I’m all right.”

Chris was gone. They would still see him every day, but he had gone. It was too late now to show penitence for his own actions in the barn. You could only wash out a thing like that when the colours were fresh, when the hurt was still commensurate with the forgiveness. This new thing had revoked that hurt’s immediacy.
That
Chris was gone now.

He caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror as he climbed into bed. It was pale and indeterminate. It looked as if it were waiting for some deposit of experience to focus it. The sickle-shaped scar caught up one corner of his mouth in a kind of weak smiling.

The situation between him and Chris suddenly shifted its perspective then. The things that happened to Chris had blood in them. They were newslike. They complicated him, changed him. People looked at him differently afterward. The things that happened to himself were pale, and narrative only. He stayed the same.

Suddenly, hurtingly, he was
glad
he had withheld annulment of this soreness between them. He was desperately glad that he
hadn’t
thrown away his only equalizing weapon.

He took the scribbler from under the pillow and reread the lines he’d written. They had the same stupid fixity as the lines of cracked plaster in the ceiling. There was nothing in them, to come alive as often as they were seen. They were as empty as his name and address scribbled across the white spaces of the catalogue cover in a moment of boredom.

He took his pencil and blacked them out completely, obliterating even the loops of the letters.

And then, like the gradual stealth of a train’s rumble in the distance so that you can’t tell exactly which moment you hear it first, he felt the pain returning.

I
n the spring there were two pigs: one to keep and one to sell. Joseph and Martha cut up the larger one for the barrel. David and Ellen took the other to town. It was
wrapped in a sheet, its rigid hind legs sticking out beyond the back of the riding wagon.

“I think about three yards o’ that curtain stuff,” Martha said to Ellen. “Not too dear, y’know.”

“Blue?” Ellen said.

“Yes,” Martha said. “Like’s in the paper.”

“If
you
see anything you want, Dave,” Joseph said, “a book er anything, why, take it outa the pig money.”

“Yeah,” David said. “Couldn’t you cut that thing in two so it’d all shove in under the seat?”

“It can’t git away,” Joseph said.

That wasn’t what bothered David. He was thinking of the drive through town. They’d attract a casual glance from the town people, then be dismissed as a young man and an old woman bringing a pig to market.

He despised most of the town people—especially its laughable bigwigs and those who paid them petty court.

They didn’t seem like people it would be possible to know, or to be known by. They lacked the rich soil of his neighbours’ original simplicity. They lacked too the rich soil of those people in the city who had gone beyond this artificial complexity of theirs to simplicity again. (He wouldn’t have minded
them
seeing the pig at all. He had an affinity with them as inexplicable as the incidence of epidemic in a spot where no contagion could possibly have been carried.) The town people seemed to have only a thin personal topsoil. Nothing grew on it but a sparse crop of self-assurance. They were absolutely unresponsive to anything outside their own narrow communion.

He despised them, but he hated them too: they could make him feel so self-conscious.

He might despise the merchant who’d stop in the midst of counting out pay for the pig to wait on any well-dressed
customer who came in. He’d think that if he and the town people were together with the originally simple of the country or the ultimately simple of the city, he could leave them as gawkingly on the fringe as if they were an audience at a party for the players themselves. But he’d feel awkward just the same. He’d despised the conversations he heard on the street. These interchanges were almost incestuous, so like their own average they were. He’d feel the vital variety of the people at home. But he’d know that if the home people were with him, he’d be in constant jeopardy lest they do or say something characteristic, to attract that inquisitive, then dismissing, glance.

He lacked his grandmother’s quiet authority. She had no consciousness of it, or of any need to assert it. Hers might be the humble business of bartering a firkin of butter across the counter, but no one interrupted her. Or if one did, she had a way of glancing at him without interruption of her own speech. It was
she
who held the storekeeper’s attention, and the other who backed up inside.

His headache was bad this morning. It was like a weather in his brain, dark and humid. He suspended thought.

But as they drove along, the pain lost out to the clamour of firstness in the air, as the sound of a train going the other way thins out until you can’t be sure which minute you hear it last. A sense of earned lassitude followed. Then came the rush of communicativeness from everything he looked at, as if in congratulation. Then this new need to possess these things by describing them exactly in his mind. (The water trickled in the ruts like? … like? … anxiety. It was his, now.)

And then the whole multiplicity of them clamoured to be known exactly, and so possessed. The never-quite-exactness of the twinning of thing and word for it was so tantalizing he
was glad when his grandmother spoke. It was like a hand on his shoulder bringing him back from an unmanageable dream.

“Don’t forget the meat,” Ellen said.

They came in sight of Rachel’s house.

Joseph had thumbed out the long rope of tenderloin, intact, from its socket between the ribs and the lard. Half of it was for Chris and Charlotte.

“If
she
comes to the door,” Martha had prompted David, “just ask for Chris and Charlotte and give it to one of them.” Martha and Rachel weren’t speaking.

They didn’t go to the door. Chris was beside the road. He was opening a ditch the spring freshets had clogged.

He doesn’t look as if he lived here, David thought. He looks as if he were working for them. Working and thinking. It gave him a sudden pang to see
Chris
thinking that way as he worked. It reminded him of someone who had never gone to school, trying to trace out the letters of his own name.

Chris was so preoccupied he didn’t see them until David spoke.

“She plugged up?” David said.

He started. “Uh? Oh. Yeah. Hi, Dave, Gram. Goin to town?”

“Yes,” Ellen said. “Where’s that package, Dave? Martha sent along a fry of tenderloin.”