The Mountain and the Valley (33 page)

The good part of it was, he was like his face. He never dissembled about anything. When he liked being with her
better than anything else he could think of at the moment, she knew it for sure.

It was the bad part of it too, later, at the party.

He danced every chance he got with Faye Maclean. That wouldn’t be dissembling either. She began to talk faster and laugh harder with her own partners.

And then she saw Faye leave him abruptly. Some outlandishly frank remark of his, she supposed. She watched what happened. Whenever he’d move toward Faye after that, to ask for another dance, Faye would include his movement in her general glance until he was almost up to her; then casually turn her head the other way.

He sat by himself then. He didn’t try to look as if he weren’t lonely, the way anyone else tries to cover loneliness up. He looked like a boy who has the feeling of being snubbed, without recognizing it or realizing that any of it may be showing on his face.

He was watching
her
now. She danced past, laughing with Jack Newlin. She avoided his eye deliberately. Suddenly it was a wonderful party. For some crazy reason (David could have told her why, or Martha) she loved him harder than ever before because Faye—how could she?—would rather dance with someone else.

The first minute she was alone, he came over and sat beside her.

“Having a good time?” he said.

“Mmmmm,” she said. “It’s a good party, isn’t it?”

“I’ve seen better,” he said. (Oh Toby, you crazy … nobody lets
on
, if they’re not having as good a time as everyone else.)

“Aren’t you enjoying yourself?” she said.

“No,” he said. “Let’s beat it.”

She laughed, helpless. How could you pay anyone back for making you jealous, if, when you came up to their defences, their defences were all unashamedly down? He didn’t do anything according to the rules.

“But, Toby, we couldn’t leave so early,” she said. “What would we say to Faye? It’s her party.”

He smiled then, the good quick way. “No kidding,” he said, “would you go? I’ll fix it up with Faye.”

He would, she thought. He’d probably just tell her he wasn’t having a good time, because that happened to be the truth. She doesn’t mean a thing to him. He’d rather be with me.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll go. But you better let
me
explain to Faye.”

Out in the street it was wonderful. It was the first time she knew he really loved her, better than he’d ever love anyone else. He doesn’t know it, she thought, but I do.

Some of the stores were still open. Every so often when they’d come into the shine of a lighted window he’d squeeze her shoulder a little. He’d give her a clear kidding smile, with just enough shyness in it to make it absolutely theirs.

None of the party was left in his head now at all. But something else was, she could tell.

“Toby,” she said, “what’s on your mind? You’re up to something.”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” he said.

“Is it about me?”

“Sure it’s about you! What do you think?”

“Is it something nice?”

“Pretty nice,” he said. The crazy artless way he smiled was like a touch.

“Tell me,” she said.

He made like a frown. “Oh, I couldn’t do
that.”

He’s going to buy me something, she thought. He always bought her something when he felt good like this. So that he could stand back, unabashedly, and watch her pleasure at it. It wouldn’t be anything thoughtful, anything he’d remembered her wanting. It would be a
present
. An extravagant child-present.

“Hmmmm,” he said. “Let’s see what they have in here.”

They went inside. They were at the counter before it dawned on her what was really in his mind.

It was a jewellery shop. He pointed to a tray of diamonds beneath the glass.

“Could we have a look at those?” he said to the man. A sudden self-consciousness was mixed up with the kidding now.

The man placed the tray on the counter.

“Toby,” Anna whispered, “what are you
doing?”

“What’s it look like?” he said. “We’ve been working up to this, what’s the sense of fooling around?”

“But Toby …”

She felt half hysterical. The man was watching them. She just stood there and looked at the tray.

“Unh, unh!” Toby said. He held his hand over the row of large diamonds at the top. “Don’t get any ideas now.”

She laughed, helplessly. (And why was it, right then, looking at Toby’s face completely fulfilled with the present moment, that it was David’s inconsummate face she thought of? What about David, now …?)

“Toby,” she began, not knowing what to say, “how do you know I …? Maybe I don’t
want
to …”

“You better.”

He spoke with mock sternness. But his eyes were happy, delighted at her confusion. It was exactly the way he’d watched her confusion when he looked her up the first day he’d been
stationed in Halifax again. He was a sailor now. She’d seen him almost every day when she first came here. Then the Navy had stationed him in other ports, until last month. He’d assumed that they’d start in again right where they’d left off … as if it had been overnight he’d been away, instead of all that time without a single letter.

She gave his shin a little push with the toe of her shoe: it was no use …

“All right,” she said. “That one then.”

His face really sobered. “Oh now, I was only kidding,” he said. “I guess I can stand you a better one than that.”

Anna knew that was all the lover’s speech there’d ever be. But something about it reminded her of that crazy kind of tenderness of his that wasn’t like anyone else’s at all. She had a little trouble to talk.

“No,” she said. “I like that one, honest. I love it.”

Out in the street, he studied her again. He was pretty happy with himself and the whole thing.

“Well …?” he said.

She looked at him, to reply. All at once his close unwithholding face struck her so hard she had to turn her face away.

“What’s this? What’s this?” he said. But she knew he was pleased that she was almost crying.

“Nothing,” she said. She pounded his arm gently, helplessly, with her small fist. “Nothing …”

She was to feel like crying again that night—when she opened the package of tenderloin. She saw how patiently each slice had been wrapped in waxed paper from the cornflake boxes. She pictured all the talk that would have gone on while they were preparing it. She knew how they had covertly warmed themselves at the thought of her pleasure in this remembrance of her.

And then she felt like crying because she’d been so long away she wasn’t as touched as they’d believe. She felt like crying as for a kind of guilt: that she had an evening dress, but didn’t think of it as a “good” dress now; that she said “the show,” instead of “the moving pictures”; that the sight of strangers no longer sealed her into the family unit, as it used to do when they’d be having an ice cream in the restaurant in town. Tenderloin used to be so special a treat for them that it made the night they had it for supper almost like Christmas. She felt like crying, because, when she tasted a slice of it now, it didn’t taste much different from the pork she could order any day here.

They’d thought the night this arrived it would be the big thing of that evening; and this was the night Toby had asked her to marry him. If Toby should ask her what was in the package, she was afraid, not wanting him to laugh, that she would lie …

T
he work of the knife and saw was done now. Martha was selecting the pieces to be given away.

“Will that be all right for Ora?” She held up a piece of shoulder, patting its edges into firmer shape. She scraped the bone dust from the saw off it with the knife. “Or had I better put a little piece of rib with it? She always sends a good piece.”

“Suit yourself,” Joseph said.

She tried a section of rib with the piece of shoulder. “What do you think?” she said.

“There’s lots a rib in the
pan
there fer us,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. Again she felt the unaccountable surge of warmth at this small concurrence. “That looks better. I hate to send anyone a mean-looking piece.”

“How about Bess?” Joseph said. “Gut anything looked out fer her?”

“No.”

Joseph took it as an answer to his question. It was not. It was the automatic syllable of negation. No! Not when the morning was so perfect.

Sometimes, most times, Bess’s name would fall from Joseph’s lips as harmlessly as any other. She never knew when or why these spells would strike her. She was never prepared for them. But now Bess’s name was like a rock thrown into the morning’s surface.

Her mind ceased to work sensibly before she could examine the cause and discard it. She felt the instant sense of isolation, forsakeness. Her perceptions converged inwards. The fascination of speechlessness settled on her like a weight. Her own hands, the overall jumper of Joseph’s she was wearing, his clumsy rubbers on her feet, were like things seen on another woman—someone outside herself.

Joseph was poking about amongst the pieces.

“That one’ll do, won’t it?” he said.

“Yes.”

She spoke as if her voice wouldn’t carry to him at all. Single words she could still find, but the swift-flaking silence was covering the sentences.

Joseph began to pluck out some bristles that had been missed.

She glanced out the door, as if for escape. It was as if she were in dusk while the others were in daylight. The soaking fields seemed grimy in their own rags of mist. The branches of
the apple trees were praying fingers stony with lost hope. The pieces of pork looked raw and bloody.

“His father before him …”

She had never believed a word of Rachel’s insinuation. But the thought of Joseph being a man flashed into her mind. He’d be helpless not to feel, when he took the pork to Bess’s door, the thing of Bess being a woman (a thing which she, another woman, could never feel). That was suddenly more isolating than any thought of him forsaking her deliberately.

Joseph glanced out the door to see what was holding her gaze.

“Hey … 
Milledge,”
he shouted abruptly. Milledge Bain was just disappearing into the stretch of road the house hid.

“Hey … Milledge,” he called again. “Do you wanta take a look at that heifer now? I gut her in the barn.”

He didn’t
place
the piece of pork anywhere. He just dropped it. He ran toward the road, without glancing back.

Martha put Bess’s piece of pork alongside the others that were to be given away. She put the hams into the dishpan. She carried them, one at a time, to the cellar, and laid them in the bottom of the barrel. The weight of them made her arms tremble. Then she carried panfuls of smaller pieces.

She fitted them around the sides of the barrel as expertly as she’d ever done. But her hands moved with the information of habit only. She had no thoughts, only the scars of thoughts, in her brain. The disc of her sentience moved faster and faster, until all the separate impressions on it became a steady blur of white.

She saw the men come back from the barn. Joseph chatted leisurely with Milledge in the road, as if his work and hers had been forgotten. His back was turned to her.
Everything
seemed to turn the other way then. Finally.

When Joseph did come back to the shop something in his face told her that, for the moment, the thing of the pork was superseded. She knew he was waiting for her to ask if Milledge had bought the heifer. She couldn’t.

“Where’s the hams?” he said at last.

“In the barrel,” she said.

She had, somehow, to answer a direct question. If she shrank from reply, she shrank worse still from anything that would make the situation overt.

“Milledge took the heifer,” Joseph said.

She felt like running, because she couldn’t speak. She could, must, answer questions; but she couldn’t volunteer anything. She kept piling the pieces of pork into the pan.

“Did ya take the bacon pieces too?” Joseph said.

“Yes.”

“I was comin in a minute.”

She started with the pan to the door.

“He give me forty dollars,” Joseph said.

She hesitated in the doorway. His words stopped her physically. For a second her mind almost came clear again. She very nearly spoke. (This was what had superseded the pork. He was always like that when he’d got a good price for anything. He’d bring the news to her almost sheepishly, like a present to be searched for in a pocket. He’d maintain his quiet, as if he didn’t understand her glad exclamations, though the funny slow smile on his face belied that.)

The moment for reply slipped away. And once it had passed it seemed to rush so fast and far away she couldn’t reclaim it. She felt desperately like running again. She went through the door.

Joseph glanced at her face. He focused it, for the first time that morning, out of his general glance. He knew from
the look on her face, as if it were cold, that somehow the morning had gone off the track. He put the good news about the heifer back into his mind again, a little sullenly with unadmitted hurt. He put it back like a present that has been refused.

“I’ll
take that pan,” he said. His voice had a touch of impatience.

Martha relinquished it to him, helplessly.

Down cellar, they packed the last pieces of pork into the barrel.

Joseph was silent now too. Martha was his weather. Her moods settled into the very grain of him. Their sense of being at once so cripplingly close together and so strainingly far apart seemed to make the cellar too cramped to hold them both. Sometimes their hands touched. Martha’s hair brushed his face as they lifted the pieces from the pan. Then, it seemed as if the cord on which their awareness of each other was hung must snap. Visibly or audibly.

The pan was almost empty. Martha took a potato from the bin and went upstairs. She dropped it into the pot of pickle on the stove. It sank. The pickle wasn’t strong enough. She added salt, and stirred, until the potato floated. She rinsed the potato off and put it on the pantry shelf, to be cooked with the others at noon. Then she carried the great pot of pickle downstairs.