The Mountain and the Valley (36 page)

But that sometime was never today. Each day’s routine immobilized him by its very immediacy. It had to be cleared away, extinguished, before the real nowness began. Each tomorrow (never doubted, in prospect, as a break in the repetition of today), itself becoming today, was repetitive nevertheless.

He bore the constant pain in his head the same way. He had never sought any cure. He merely accommodated his day
to
it, as a stream little by little comes into a new course around a boulder in its middle.

There had been no conscious moment when the pain ceased to be a contrasted thing, had become a feature. But now it was there, unquestioned, like the climate of his mind. It damped his thoughts so that no one of them ignited brightly or singly. They writhed in a cluster, like the clump of worms you turn out of a can when the day’s fishing is over. The matching of physical effort to the day’s tasks (almost, but with stubbornness never quite, beyond it) became a kind of isolate career.

There were moments when he’d feel a flick of dismay. He’d glance at the bruised-looking winter horizon, coming from the well at dusk, and he didn’t know why, a sigh would catch in his throat. He’d be fleetingly appalled when the year of some event that seemed like yesterday was discovered, on subtraction, to be seven or eight years gone from this one now … or when he’d seen a face of his own age he hadn’t seen for some time, and notice its flexibility gone, the certain promise in it now of what it would someday be, irrevocably …

But the dismay was transient. He wasn’t unhappy.

His loneliness was absolute, but it wasn’t intolerable for being something foreign.

The seed of it had always been there, even when he was at the hub of fellowship with others. (There was never one of
them he could really talk to, though they never doubted that they were talking to
him.)
He withdrew from them in bitterness because he was no longer whole. It was self-willed. Because he was lonely, there was a self-biting satisfaction in deliberately making himself lonelier still. There was a satisfaction in their puzzlement that when he
was
with them, in any occasion he couldn’t avoid, the old wit, the old humour, the absence in him of any isolating mark of the solitary, were still there. And when he withdrew to himself, it wasn’t to a strange place (as
they
would find, forced to their own company). It was the most familiar ground he knew.

At first the neighbours couldn’t believe that he
preferred
to be alone. They still dropped in to spend an evening. Their spastic conversation was embroidered only with staples of comment. (“We better git the snow now than later,” “If we just had what one o’ them fuhllas makes in
one day
 …,” “I tell ya, ya never know from one minute to the next …”) These were as satisfying a coin of intercourse to them as if they were brand new. It never occurred to them that they weren’t equally satisfying to him. David stepped up the tempo of the talk as surely, as neighbourlily, as ever. They never suspected the curious sense of abeyance their presence provoked in him.

But finally they stopped calling. Because David never came into their houses at all.

(Now he sat in the kitchen, evenings, reading from dark to bed—or until the silence, which made a pleasant lapping sound while his grandmother was busy with her rags or her knitting, took on a desperate insistence when she put her work away. She sat, then, her gaze far away, tapping with the very tips of her fingernails … tap, tap, tap … on the nickel clothes bar that ran along the side of the stove. She called it “condoling,” and it besieged his mood almost intolerably.)

And now, working in the fields, the obbligato of ache in his head chimed with the quiet feeding orbits of his thoughts (each one branching immediately, then the branch branching, until he was totally encased in their comfortable delta). It isolated and crystallized him into a kind of absolute self-sufficiency.

If a neighbour approached him there, a sense of bareness would come over him when he looked up. The strange presence precipitated a sudden definition of his own body in his consciousness: the scar, the tentative expression, the inapposite work clothes … The others would seem so solid and opaque, and he’d seem absolutely transparent. He’d talk more animatedly than they (safe in their opacity, they need make no such effort), and they’d notice nothing. But not until after they’d gone would the chime of the ache and the feeding thoughts creep back. They’d congregate, one by one, like animals that have been scattered by a strange footfall; to knit themselves together again and re-establish his completeness.

His neighbours had changed, as the village had changed. The road was paved now. There were cars and radios. A bus line passed the door. There was a railway line along the river. With this grafting from the outside world, the place itself seemed older; as the old who are not remembered are old.

And the people lost their wholeness, the valid stamp of the indigenous. Their clothes were so accentuate a copy of the clothes outside they proclaimed themselves as copy, except to the wearers. In their speech (freckled with current phrases of jocularity copied from the radio), and finally in themselves, they became dilute. They were not transmuted from the imperfect thing into the real, but veined with the shaly amalgam of replica.

It wasn’t so with David.

Part of his loneliness had always been that he could tell the coin from the replica. Just as part of it now was that even in his isolation he was not islanded from the true spirit of the changing times. It was as if a kind of extra sense kept him parallel with it, without dependence upon participation. He had been born with a condition for universality within him. In whatever place or at whatever time or with whatever person he found himself, his first response was not adaption but recognition. He could be old with the old, or young with the young.

That was the part which most made his loneliness absolute. There was no single place he fitted in.

Yet when loneliness is as absolute as that, it can be sustaining.

It builds satisfactions and shields out of countless small things. The comfort of the pillow at night … the successful manoeuvring of an impossibly crooked stick into the firebox … the turnip tops filling exactly the number of bags gauged for them … the two apples eaten at eight o’clock each night … the left index finger held, in a mannerism, against the nose … the alternate day’s shave falling, this week, on Sunday …

Except when, as time went on, glimpses through the blind faith that someday he’d be as young and plastic as ever again, came oftener. They were more defined and shattering than the sigh at the well.

One day he was straightening the perimeter of the woodpile. He did this each day, though he’d be disturbing the pile again the next morning. Steve was passing down the road. He shouted, “Dy’a do it with yer eye, Dave, or dy’a use a compass?”

For a second his fussiness was revealed to him as the most intolerable stigma of all, the stigma of the solitary. And all the
rest of that day he did everything carelessly, approximately. (Though the next day the tidiness returned—not by conscious acceptance but by grooving in again of its own persuasion.)

One day a young boy and a young girl dawdled up the road. He’d seen this couple clowning together countless times before, and felt nothing. But now the work he was at parched in his hand. The very vacuousness of their antics (isolable as they were of everything else in the world) seemed like the only real thing there was. He stood there like the uninvited child.

He’d had no part of girls for a long time. They might only glance at the scar on his face, but he’d be conscious of it all the time. And Bess had married again. He was so convinced that sometime he’d have all the girls he wanted that he hadn’t felt any loss. But now the girls of “sometime” seemed like a trick. He felt an awful reorientation. He had a desperate urge to leap back through the years, physically … to make it himself in that boy’s place.

That night he went to the dance in the schoolhouse.

He danced with the youngest girls there. He was a better dancer than the boys they’d come with, and he kept them giggling almost constantly. But somehow in the little slacks between laughter, in the moments when the music had stopped and they stood, before it began again, with their hands fallen apart, there would be an awkwardness in the girls. It wasn’t of shyness but of perplexity. They seemed more content sitting on the benches with the boys who’d brought them. They’d sit with these boys, not laughing at all; they’d be stiff with shyness. But the engagement of each others’ presences was without interruption.

The ache in his head heightened glaringly. It seemed like a normal feature become in the presence of others insistently protrusive. He left early.

He lay awake a long time that night. He felt the desperate blight of one who, used always to having everything at the party gravitate toward him, for the first time feels what he has only observed, unfeelingly, in
others
before; the getting back only of such response as they’d striven for, their departure unremarked and unprotested.

(But the next morning his headache was worse still, his work that much harder to accomplish. The chime of the extra ache and the extra victory of effort re-established his sufficiency again. The girls of “sometime” were realer than ever.)

Or one night, reading, some passage might ring suddenly like a bell: the portrait of some desire he had never consciously realized, some thrust of identification. He’d slip away, rushingly, transcendently, into the person described or the place … and then settle back again into his chair and this room, crushed almost physically. (But intenser still, then: tomorrow, tomorrow …)

Or again, one day he’d
feel
better. The cast which health puts on things (as impossible to imagine or to believe in, when one is ill, as it is impossible to imagine or to believe in the cast which illness puts on things, when one is well) would be like a clamp taken off his circulation. Then he’d have a stricken glimpse of the years gone by as of an utter emptiness. Their victories over handicap would seem entirely nagative. (Until the ache grained back with such subtle gradualness that its reversing persuasion was unnoticed until it was complete.)

Another afternoon he was raking scatterings of timothy the horse rake couldn’t reach in a rocky corner. A long sleek tourist car stopped at the gate. The man asked if they might get a drink of well water from the pump.

At first only the man spoke. The others in the car continued their private conversation. The way the man worked
the handle only a dribble came. He said to the man, “Perhaps
I
’d better … It has a physics all its own.” The man laughed. The girl, the daughter, with the smooth simple clothes, smiled at him suddenly. The boy, the son, his own age, said, “Temperamental, eh?” as to a friend.

When they drove off, he knew they’d been curiously taken with him. When they went out of sight, he felt like running. He left the tiny windrow unraked, a few goddam wisps of hay … (But that night when the chores were done, he closed the windrow and carried the hay in his arms to the nearest accessible pile.)

Or whenever he’d see the way a wife and husband stood together at a grave … or the way they stood together after one of their children had almost (until he threw up) choked on a chicken bone … or the way a man fastened the safety pin that held his child’s mitten to the sleeve: clumsily, almost without distraction from his conversation with another man, but gentler than his large hands did anything else …

Worst of all was the day he had the accident in town.

A car, turning out from the curb, crumpled the hind wheel of his wagon. It bent the seat irons into a senseless pattern and tumbled his load of vegetables onto the street. They lay crushed and split.

The driver tried to cover up his own guilt with a false belligerence. But David himself wasn’t angry. It was raining, his feet were wet, his head throbbed … He felt only dismay at being plunged into the leading role of a tumultuous situation which depended for its resolution on the manipulation of bluff. Bluff was something he had no talent for, no rehearsal in. He despised it. He wanted just to be out of here, not to have had it happen at all.

He watched the other’s belligerence himself, stolidly and
fearlessly. But he had no talent for gauging when a show of reasonableness would work best, or when insistence on
more
than his rights would be the only means of insuring his rights at least. He wanted his rights, no more, no less. He’d
have
them … but he didn’t know what to do.

A crowd had gathered. He looked at them. He’d never felt the stranger in people so strongly before. A sort of evil seemed to possess their faces: a sly rapturous feeding on the spectacle of other people in an uncertain mess, a gloating in their own uninvolvement.

Then he saw a face among them he knew. Ben Fancy’s. A face from home. He walked over to him in a kind of release.

“He turned out without looking, smack into me,” he said. The desolate collision sound was still in his ears. The desolate collision twistedness was before his eyes.

“I didn’t see it,” Ben said (though he had). He lowered his voice. “But you want to make him pay ya, Dave.”

He looked at Ben’s face again, and he saw what had come of keeping to himself too long. This was no longer a face from home. There was no family feeling in it. There was the same stranger in that face as in the others. He caught his breath. Oh, Father … Mother … Chris … Anna …

Or worst in a way all their own were the glimpses provoked by the trick of a cloud pattern … or the blue dusklight seeming to come upward from the snow … or by any thing, face, thought, or feeling, which he seemed to see exactly, in an ephemeral instant.

There would be an awful challenge about each of these things, to name it. An accusing: as if it had been put there for him, and him alone, to see exactly and to record. As if in having neglected to perceive
every
thing exactly he had been guilty of making the object, as well as himself, incomplete.