The Mountain and the Valley (35 page)

When Martha got to the foot of the mountain, the sun was so warm she took off the jumper of Joseph’s she’d slipped over her shoulders, and lay it on the pole bridge. She spread it out flat, not to miss it on the way back. What is he doing? she thought. The dinner will be cold. She tried to remember whether or not she had filled the stove before she left.

“Joseph,” she called.

There was no answer. There was only that odd hollowness about the silence when you call to someone in the woods and there is no reply.

She felt no anxiety; but with her voice dropping down into the woods alone, the urgency to meet him began to have a little clamour about it. She followed his tracks up the mountain, walking faster now. She walked faster at each bend in the road, thinking surely she would see him when she turned it.

Now and then she called. Sometimes she stopped and held her breath, to catch the sound of the oxen’s tinklers. But
there was only the soughing of the breeze in the trees, stiller than silence.

The sun slid way past noon, way past dinner time. An irrevocable lateness seemed to quicken in the air.

Then she was running, and calling at the same time. Her breath clucked in her throat. Joseph’s not-answering made the remoteness in everything about her suddenly inimical. It struck like bells. It struck for some awful extra moment of time she’d stepped into, inextricably—one that everyone else was ignorant of and safe from.

And then, when she was almost to the top of the mountain, she heard the tinklers. She sat down on a stone, weak with relief. Tears started suddenly for love of their familiar sound.

Joseph would be walking in front of the oxen, coming down the mountain. She listened for him to give them a command. She listened for the sound of the bells to grow. There … that one was nearer, and that one, and … that one
seemed
fainter but it couldn’t be. Sometimes the cow bells would sound fainter and fainter though they were coming toward you, right up until you saw them. Yes, listen,
that
one was nearer …

“Joseph,” she called, “Joseph …”

But the breeze was against her. And now when she listened she couldn’t hear the bells at all. The silence sounded
its
bell once more, like the bell for recess over. She felt the cramp of fear returning.

She began to run again. And then she saw the oxen. They glanced up at her, but their eyes didn’t change. She looked at their big, warm, friendly bulks. She smiled.

“Joseph,” she called, not very loud this time. He must be right there.

And then she screamed.

She screamed, and then she stopped screaming. She moved toward him, and then stopped moving. She sobbed, and stopped sobbing. She shivered, and stopped shivering. She said, “Joseph, Joseph …” and then she stopped saying “Joseph, Joseph …”

And then, with Joseph lying there as if all the deafness in the world were smiling out at her from him, the quick-flaking silence began to close in on her, and the forsakenness.

She put her apron over her face. She whispered, “Joseph, you forsook me … you forsook me …”

II

David and Ellen came in sight of the house.

“You put in the curtain stuff, didn’t you, Dave?” Ellen said.

“Yes,” David said. “It’s under the seat.”

“I think it’s just what she wanted,” Ellen said. “It’s got all the colours of the paper in it. You didn’t lose the pig money?”

“No.”

He felt the thick, exciting roll of money in his inside pocket. He thought of counting it out into his father’s hand, down to the exact penny. His father would truly wish that he’d spent some of it for himself, but wouldn’t be surprised that he hadn’t. He’d ask him to take five dollars (the present-like amount) now … two dollars then,
any
way. Somehow this offer to share, from whichever of them happened to have money, and the go-on-with-you protests against it, always made them all feel like crying.

“When
did Joseph take the sods away from the house?” Ellen asked.

“This morning,” he said. “Early.”

“
I
didn’t notice,” she said. “The house always looks kind of bare after the banking is taken away, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I remember one year the sods froze up early and he had to bank it with brush. We all went with him to get the spruces. He stuck whole trees all along the house, and the rest of us piled branches in behind them. They caught the snow. I think it was the warmest winter we ever had.”

“
I
remember,” David said.

They drove into the yard. No one came to the door.

When David glanced at the door-shut, fire-out, banking-bare, blind-eyed house, he had one of those odd feelings that struck him sometimes, he never knew why. Suddenly whatever he looked at would have the air about it of a November dusk, the night before the first snow. It would seem as if everything had gone by while he slept, down the road, and now he’d never catch up with it. He had, for a moment, a feeling as if he and his grandmother were the only things animate in the whole world.

Ellen stepped onto the footrest of the wagon.

“Just steady me a little,” she said.

David put his hand under her elbow.

“All right,” he said. “I’ve got you.”

“H
ave you gathered all the vegetables?” Ellen said.

“All but the cabbage,” David said.

“You better get in the cabbage,” she said. “This is Hallowe’en.”

“I’m getting them now.”

“Put on your mittens.”

“Ohhhh … mittens …”

“It’s cold,” Ellen said.

“I don’t need any mittens,” David said. Gentler, the second time.

“No, I suppose you’re young …”

Her mind stayed clear, except for asking things over. But, late years, she felt the cold.

David always keeps a nice warm fire though, she thought. David is a good boy. It’s a quiet life for him here with me, alone; but he never complains. He’s like his father that way. His back bears whatever settles on it. He doesn’t try to shrug it off. Yet I can see Martha in him too … when he’s lonesome or hurt, when he doesn’t know that his face is giving him away. Yes, and sometimes Christopher, and sometimes Anna. He’s
like them all. Sometimes, she thought, I couldn’t say how, he reminds me of that boy in the hayloft. For a second she felt an inner warmth. I wish, she almost thought, it could
be
 …

Then she glanced across the bare, stretching, October fields. Rain-sodden leaves from the bare trees clung in the aftergrass. Only the blackened heaps of potato tops remained in the garden rows. She felt colder again.

“Is everything locked up?” she said. “This is Hallowe’en.”

“They never bother
us,”
David said. He put on his cap and jumper and went to the field.

Ellen moved the mat frames closer to the stove. More than ever, lately, her hooking had become a kind of visiting. Memory could bring back the image of the others, but not the tune of them. These pieces of cloth which had lain sometime against their flesh could bring them right into the room.

That was the lining of the coat Joseph had worn the day he got their last Christmas tree. She had washed it and brushed the lint from the seams, but a spot of dried balsam still clung. There weren’t many things of his left now, they were almost all used up. Could it be five years ago? Could it be almost five years for Martha too? Not many things of hers were left now either.

That was her apron. An apron had always seemed like one of her features. The doctor said her heart must have been bad for a long time … but what did he know about the kind of heart sickness that left her housecleaning untouched, and the same dress on her in the afternoon as in the morning, and her dahlia bulbs in the earth, that fall, to freeze? What did he know about that look her clothes had, like the coat of a sick animal … and that look on her face all the time, as if she had to translate everything that was said to her? as if verbs had lost
their meaning, because the only language that beat in her was description (of one thing), spoken in the heartless key of the wind? What did the doctor know, for all his instruments and learning, about that look on her face as if there were no place in the world
for
a look like that?

She sighed and turned to the newer garments.

Brown. That was a shirt of Christopher’s. It came from the big bundle he’d brought over the day before he went away to war. Charlotte could hook, but Rachel wouldn’t allow a mat in the house. She said they were too dusty. Chris in England … Who’d have thought that
he’d
be the one, the only one, of them to see her homeland? She glanced at his letter on the windowsill. The big letters of the address were childish looking, and the short stubby sentences inside were helpless to communicate anything.

There seemed to be something Christopher and David wanted to say to each other that day. She’d felt it, when Chris suggested suddenly that they go look at the cattle. But she knew they hadn’t been able to say it even when they were alone in the barn; for when they came back Chris had suggested they go look at the pigs. She knew they hadn’t said it there either, or at all: she’d seen the way David touched Christopher’s clumsy bundle of clothing afterward, when he thought her eyes were turned away.

David took a bath the next morning and went to town himself. She knew he’d tried to enlist too. She knew he had lied about his health. Futilely. Because she had seen him kneeling before the basket of drop apples he was cutting up for the cows that night. Suddenly he’d thrown two or three of the apples fiercely against the shop wall …

White. That was the blouse Anna had worn the day she and Toby were married. The day before Toby’s destroyer took
him to the Channel. That was the one time David had gone to the city. He’d given Anna away. She could never find out how he’d liked it there. He’d never discuss it at all.

And white again. An old suit of Toby’s tropical whites. Anna had sent it home. She thought David might get some wear out of it. And strangely enough, he had. He never
would
wear anyone else’s clothes. But he had worn that.

Beneath it was a bright check. How had that got in with
this
bundle? Those were David’s first pair of long pants. He’d bought them with the prize money for that essay. No one had even known he’d sent it in …

She paused and looked toward the field.

How strange it is, she thought, that David, of all of them, is left here. Whether, as it sometimes seemed, he had a love of this place as binding as blood, or as it sometimes seemed, a hatred of it so dark and stubborn as to fascinate him beyond the fascination of any possible kind of love, she didn’t know.

If it hadn’t been for me, she thought … if it hadn’t been for his health … would he have gone away? He can learn to do anything. Even farming, which comes most unnatural to him, he can now do well. If he’d gone some place where he might have found the thing that was
meant
for him … I wonder if my sisters ever had any grandsons, she thought … and what they are doing in England.

She watched David’s movements in the field. He moves like someone who never thinks that anyone else thinks about him, she thought. David is a good boy …

She drew the frame a little closer still to the fire. At the touch of extra warmth, she felt content. She always felt content when the crop was gathered and the day growing cold, but the fire burning brightly in the kitchen stove.

David moved rhythmically in the field, pulling one cabbage after another. He clove off the tortuous root cluster with a single slice of the knife, discarded the saucer-shaped outer leaves crisped at the rim or stencilled by the summer’s bugs, and placed the tight heads in piles.

His face and clothes seemed pinched, as if in reflection of the day. A pinched November blueness was in the air. The shabby air hung motionless from the stripped trees and skeletons of caraway. Rain-dark clouds clung, motionless and curled at the edges, to the rim of the bare mountain. The buildings looked dark and closed in on themselves. There seemed to be a nearsightedness about everything. David’s thoughts clung low to his brain, like the clouds that curled above the mountain.

He’d never rebelled at being left here to take care of Ellen. He’d taken up that future the same way he accepted any circumstance. He’d go on wearing his thin clothing long into the winter, though he
had
woollen clothing in the closet. He’d continue work in his bare head in the sickening heat, though the other men went to the house for their straw hats. He’d climb, a thousand times, two steps in one over the broken ladder rung (until one day he’d fix the rung, and then go on, in a kind of panic, to fix the button on the barn door, the loose shingles on the shop … until everything on the place was mended).

It didn’t seem like five years that he’d been alone here.

It didn’t seem like any time at all. These years were like a kind of suspension, before time became really, movingly now again. Though never consciously called up, an absolute conviction was always there: sometime, somewhere, just as surely as ever, everything was still waiting.