The Mountain and the Valley (34 page)

Joseph looked up. “What are you luggin that pickle for?” he said. “I’d a got it in a minute.” She didn’t answer.

She lifted the pickle to pour it over the meat.

“Here,” he said. He grasped the handle himself. “Can’t you wait a second?”

“I can do it,” she said.

“Well, do it then!” he shouted.

The moment he heard his own words, his breath lurched, as if to suck them back. But it was too late. Now the gap was acknowledged, it split wide open. He felt a helpless tumbling, as if off a ladder after the first lost step. There was nothing to do now but act according to his words.

He rushed out of the cellar. Martha … Martha … Martha … His thoughts were everyone of her. They swirled upward like a flock of small birds rising from a bush … rising in a cloud and flying in a cloud, darting around and past each other. The outline of the cloud shifts from instant to instant, but never strands or breaks apart.

Martha’s thoughts were different. At the sound of Joseph’s voice—Joseph the first, with his own mouth, to make the situation overt—they clustered tight. Birds
settle
on a bush that way.

In the shop again, Joseph began to skin the meat from the pig’s skull.

His thoughts shook. Now what got into her
today
…? Just because he wasn’t right there to carry the meat down cellar … When any other time …

She never wanted him to wait on her. Why, he’d
seen
her … she’d work so uncomplainingly in the hay field or helping him unload wood that he’d forget that she had only a woman’s strength until he’d catch her taking advantage of his trip to the pump to lie down flat in the racks; or until he’d pause to straighten a stick that had landed crooked on the pile, and notice her sink down for a minute on the sled bench. She wouldn’t tell him she was going to wash quilts the day he went to the Exhibition. When he’d ask her why she didn’t get him to carry the water before he left, she’d say, “Oh, I didn’t want you to miss the ox pull. I didn’t mind.” Or days when he’d be burning brush or at some other job he couldn’t
leave till dark, coming across the pasture he’d think of having to fumble around with a lantern doing the chores … and then when he went into the kitchen she’d never say a word about waiting supper and she’d have milked, herself, and got in the wood and water. If he said, “Why didn’t you make the children carry in the wood?” she’d smile and say, “Oh, they was busy,” or something.

She was always making excuses like that, for other people … she was
more
than fair. She’d give in too, lots of times when he’d be too proud-spirited himself to do it. Yes, and most times she didn’t get worked up over trifles as much as
he
did. She’d say, “ ‘Where’s that hammer? Where’s that hammer?’ Fwaa .. da .. da .. da .. da ..”; mocking his everlasting seriousness, but laughing, and after a minute he’d be laughing too.

Then why today … over a little thing like …? What came over her when she had these spells?

“It’s her,” or “It’s him.” These words he’d heard others use, about two people who had quarrelled, came into his mind. It can’t be her, he thought. It must be me. His temper ran out suddenly; as the half faith in one of the two possible decisions does when the other has been finally reached.

And suddenly he had a glimpse of Martha as startlingly clear as if it were the only snapshot of her that had ever been taken and kept. He saw her watching by the pasture bars (with an old jumper of his held over her shoulders) when it was past the time for him to come home from chopping, just before she turned and saw him coming home another way. He saw her hands, memoried with work, lying outside the patchwork quilt some morning he had awakened first.

The head was done. He thrust a wire through the fleshy part of a rib flap. They always hung the ribs up in the shop,
to keep them cool. He hesitated. This would be an excuse to speak to her.

He put the rib down and went back to the cellar. Martha was putting a last sprinkling of coarse salt on the pickle.

“Will I hang up the ribs in the shop?” he said.

“You always do.”

Her voice sounded crippled. The bafflement struck again. It flinted the temper afresh.

It was always like that.

Outside, work would draw out the anger, as the heat of the oven door drew out frost in the axe bitt. It would be easy to go inside and make it up with her. But inside again, her silence seemed to give a shrillness to the rattle of the dishes or the stove brush or anything she handled. And words seemed to come out in the same shrivelling pitch. They struck about the room and left the silence afterward still warier and more huddled.

He couldn’t do it
without
words, either.

He couldn’t dig a trench for her sweet peas as an overture. It would be as if he were taking advantage of someone sick—someone who must watch, but was powerless to correct any line of it that went intolerably in the wrong direction. Or if he let his resentment take itself out against some other object—in a curse at the stove cover that dropped on his toe or a rough shove at the cat that kept whining to be let out—it would seem as if he had struck her. She’d make him think of one time he’d given a cow he’d been chasing one final blow with the switch, after she was tied up. When he went to milk that night she was crouching in the stall.

He could do nothing. The silence would tick so against his nerves that he’d leave the house.

He left the cellar now and went back to the shop. He
sighed, as he sighed sometimes when his hay was all in cock and an unrelenting spell of wet weather set in.

He began to clean up the shop. His thoughts smouldered now. They could find no air for their combustion.

The pictures of other times like this came and went in his mind like photographs dropped one by one into a flame. The face still smiles fixedly, even as the flame licks it.

Once she’d been struck with that sudden pain she had sometimes. He’d held a dipper of water to her lips, and as soon as she could speak she’d said, “You spilled it on your coat.”

Another time, the timber company’s representative had stopped for him to go in town and help him look up some deeds (they’d have dinner at the restaurant). She’d brought out his good coat and his good cap and whispered, “There’s money in
my
purse.” And another time he’d crushed his fingernail beneath a rock. He’d bored a hole in the nail with the point of his jack-knife to let the black blood out, but it had still throbbed at night so he couldn’t sleep. She’d got up and made a bread poultice and she’d said, “Is that too hot? You got to have it as hot as you can bear it …”

What made her speak, those times? Why was it that when the spell was broken they seemed closer than ever? They never mentioned what had gone before. Not a dreg of spite or clumsiness or shame was left.

He thought: We might have gone back to cut the keel this morning … I was waiting till some time we could go together. I know she wants to go when I go …

He thought, if the flue should burn out and catch on the dry shingles … or if the horse should kick me …

And then suddenly his thought sounded to him as it would if another man were hearing him speak it. A new kind of anger struck him, for harbouring such womanish softness.
Of all the goddam … Letting a woman make a goddam sawney out of me …

He’d go back alone and cut the keel. Maybe she wanted to go, maybe she didn’t. He didn’t
give
a damn. He’d just go. He didn’t have to tell any damned women everywhere he went. He didn’t have to ask any damn woman everything he did. If he was late for dinner, he didn’t care. Yes, he’d take the oxen too, and snig it out to the road after he’d cut it. He didn’t care if it was five o’clock in the after
noon
before he got home.

And she’d speak first, by God, if he had to keep quiet the rest of his life.

Martha watched him yoke the oxen. Her gaze was as incurious as an invalid’s staring at his own pale hands. Silence seemed to puff out from the separateness, the singleness, of everything she looked at. It settled inside her. Her own speechlessness leeched at her brain.

The sudden, single sunburst of pain gave no warning.

It bolted through her chest and down her arm—red, swift, shining. Each of its sharp knives cut at anything that clung. It melted the thick flakes of silence instantly. It forced her lips, before anything else could stay them, to cry out.

She gripped the window sash. And then like a light flaming intensely bright the second before it goes out, the pain flamed bright and then it was dark.

When Martha opened her eyes, she was lying on the lounge.

She didn’t remember sinking there. I must have fainted, she thought. I’m glad none of the others were here: they worry so. I suppose I should have kept on with that liniment. But it didn’t seem to do much good, and there were so many other things …

She sat there, crying a little, she didn’t know why. The silence inside her was gone. She felt weak, but whole. The kitchen things looked friendly again, manipulatable to her touch.

She stood up and looked toward the barn. Why, it must have been only a second—Joseph was still yoking the oxen.

She saw him yank upward on the yoke, as if in petulance, when the oxen bent their heads to the sprigs of new grass. Afterwards, when the straps were finally tight, he patted the oxen momentarily at the crown of curly hair between their eyes. Again she had the feeling of husband-and-wife as a thing explicit.

She didn’t know why. It always came at such odd times. When they were ready for bed and he’d turn to her and say, “All right?” just before he bent over to puff out the lamp … or when David used to come home with a prize for arithmetic and Joseph would look at her, as if it were she who had won it … or when the crowd would be thinning out at a pie social. She’d cease listening for a minute to what some other woman was saying and look at him, and he’d have ceased listening to what some man was saying to him, and they’d both know at the same moment that it was time to go.

She felt like speaking. She went to the door and called to him, “Joseph, will you be late?”

But he didn’t hear her. The wind was blowing away from him. He turned the oxen back the log road.

The touch of sun at the hollow of his throat made Joseph’s heavy jacket for the first time this year a winter thing. For the first time the soft wind in the stirring trees was close and of this place alone.

Now another year was beginning for him and Martha, a kind of repeated lifetime. He adjusted his step to the measured pace of the oxen … on this earth that was his in the same way that he and Martha belonged to each other. His temper was drawn out again like liquid that loses its strength if left uncovered in the open air.

The soreness between him and Martha still weighted him, but it was encysted. His sentience was still leashed to it, but the leash became more and more elastic.

His thoughts—or less like thoughts than like exhalations of shifting pictures which his mind didn’t quite call up in outline—slipped ahead. His feeling borrowed ahead from times when
some
how (
some
how, as always) this thing now would be resolved and past. The both-tired closeness nights after the sap gathering, when they wouldn’t light the lamp before bedtime; and the feeling, after they’d both laid their clothing across the same chair, of the sweet clean bed … The box he’d place in a sunny spot for Martha to sit on the day she cut the seed potatoes for him to drop, slicing them gravely and surely, so that each piece had two eyes … The touch on his hands of the dry mittens which she’d warmed on the oven door and brought to him when he came into the yard with the second load of wood; when the pair he’d started with were clammy and cold …

He thought, explicitly, of his plan to snig out the keel and keep her waiting all afternoon. He didn’t see how it had ever sounded right to him. How could it ever have been
his?
He had a clear picture of the day in town when the thought had come to him for the first time: she hadn’t had a new hat for three years.

He wished he hadn’t brought the oxen. He began to hurry. He thought of turning back. Then he thought: I’ll just
cut
the keel, I won’t even limb it out. I’ll come straight back.

M
artha fried some tenderloin until it was almost brittle. That was how Joseph liked it. Then she took the meat from the pan and made his favourite flour gravy. She got the single bottle of quince she’d been saving for company, from the cellar. That was his favourite preserve. Then she got out the tablecloth (which she could no more omit, even if she were eating alone, than she could sit through a Sunday afternoon without changing her dress) and set the table.

It was almost noon.

She sat down to wait for him, with her darning. She always had the same feeling when she darned a hole in Joseph’s socks or mended a tear in his coat: as if she might be bandaging a patient child’s small wound. As her fingers moved, each of her sensations was like a messenger of good news. She had the feeling which comes so seldom, consciously, that you wouldn’t want to be anyone else in the whole world.

It was half past twelve, and still Joseph hadn’t come.

“I’ll go and meet him,” she thought, “he can’t be far. He’s never late if he can help it.”

She put the meat and gravy on the back of the stove. Then she closed the drafts and left the house.

(She didn’t know that Joseph was dead.

“With the keel money and the pig money and the money for the heifer, I’ll buy her a piano.” That was the thought he’d been so busy with. He didn’t notice how the keel-piece was swaying in the breeze as his axe clove deeper and deeper into its butt. The tree had no obedience in its heart,
except to physics. It fell exactly when it must. His thoughts and his breath, strong as they were in their own way, were insubstantial, and powerless against it. One great branch pinned him to the ground, and its physics satisfied, itself lay still. The oxen glanced up, then began to browse again.

There wasn’t an instant of pain. There was only a second of upward-darting alarm, like the instant of almost-flight in a bird before the shot strikes. But Martha would never know that. There was no break in his flesh, but the blood gathered cold and blue beneath the skin. And wherever his thoughts had gone now—wherever the knowledge of just how to locate the ham joint exactly, or the core of loneliness in him that no face and no words but hers could quite reach—she would never be able to find them.)