The Mountain and the Valley (4 page)

E
llen took Anna to see the fawn. It darted its glances and twitched its ears and flesh as if its muscles moved by dainty triggers. Anna tried to make herself feel the wonder of being close enough to a living wild animal to touch it. But something in the circumstance’s being actual robbed it of the excitement she’d expected.

“Why didn’t the mother hide it?” she said.

“A hunter must have wounded her last fall,” Ellen said, “and the snow was so deep. She was too weak to move. She had no milk.”

The fawn looked suddenly at Anna; then its lost glance, unbounded by the coop, darted to the woods. Anna knew that even if she put her hands on its side she couldn’t touch it really. She had a sick, shivery, feeling.

“Let’s go,” she said.

They walked aimlessly back across the fields, searching for signs of new life in the earth. There was a feeling of lift and stir in the ground. The ploughed land was brown; but far off, around a house or wherever water trickled, the fields had a cast of green. The gun-metal buds of the apple trees were fattening. The row of sugar maples behind the barn had a faint salmon blush.

“I’ll put my squash in the outside row, this year,” Ellen said, “so they’ll have more room to run.” Any seed she touched seemed to prosper. Her hands were still white and delicate, despite their years with hack and hoe.

They stopped at the new church.

Joseph had given the site for it, as well as his share of lumber and time. Everyone in the place (Baptists and Catholics too) had driven a nail or laid a board or helped raise a rafter. Spurge Gorman had hewn the cross from the great mountain ash he’d looked out for axe handles; and Peter Delahunt had fixed the cross to the steeple. The bishop from Halifax had consecrated the new burial ground only last week.

(Martha’s hands had stopped cold at her work whenever she’d thought of having him to dinner. She’d wanted to get their own dinner out of the way first, but Ellen said no,
not
to act in any way extraordinary, Joseph said, “Hell, he’s only a man.”

It was easy as could be once he was inside the house. He was a smiling man who made you feel like smiling too. His boots were skinned at the toe. He smoked a pipe. He ate heartily, and remarked about her carrot fern. She’d felt pride almost to tears to see his great Ring resting on David’s head when he asked David what he wanted to be. She’d wished he could stay to supper.)

The church was cool inside. It had a stillness all of its own. Anna liked the organ-and-prayer-book smell, the smell of new paint and lumber. She liked the hollow sound of her voice and steps, echoing among the pews.

But for Ellen the mystery still dwelt in the old church four miles down the road. Her husband had helped build that one. Now he lay beside it. It too was a building made by human hands like any other building and that settlement was deserted now, but she felt that the mystery breathed there all by itself whether there was the sound of voices on the road or not.

They left the church. As they came close to the house, a fine rain gathered suddenly out of nowhere. The sun still
shone. You could see where the skirt of the shower stopped; short of the mountain on one side and short of the river on the other. Who did that painting my father had in the big hall, Ellen thought, that looked like this? The rain silky and transparent in the air, but green on the grass and pink on the maples. His name began with a “C.”

“Quickly,” she said. “Run.”

“Oh no,” Anna said, “let’s go in the barn.” In the barn you could sit safe and dry and hear the rain on the roof.

The cows and oxen lurched to their feet. They stretched their whole length, languidly. Patch, the horse, threw up his head. His sleek skin rippled nervously. He stamped his sharp-shod feet heavily in the stall. Ellen let him sweep up a handful of oats from her hand with his cool leathery lips. The oat-dribble mixed with green bit-dribble at the corners of his mouth.

Anna was afraid of the horse. She drew her grandmother away, into the barn-floor. They sat on two feed boxes. The barn-floor was dark after the bright sunlight outside, and cool. There was the dusty smell of hay. Motes defined a ribbon of sunshine that came from the window above the scaffold. Every tiny knothole in the boards was a star of light. The rain made a plushy sound on the roof. Anna felt a fascinating shiver of secrecy.

“Tell me a story,” she said. “Tell me when
you
were a little girl.”

“I’m not sure I remember so long ago,” Ellen said.

Anna sighed. Her grandmother would never talk to her about England. It must have something to do with things she’d overheard her father say. Ellen’s parents had thought her husband wasn’t good enough for her. He was older than she was. He was proud and stubborn. He’d never let her mention
their names. He’d never let her write back home. Not a line.

If she insisted, Ellen would put her off. (“Did I ever tell you about the Governor of Annapolis—or Port Royal, then—who died on a voyage back from France? They put his body in the sea, but they brought his heart on and buried it. I’ll take you to Annapolis sometime and show you the very spot.” Or, “Did you know that the road to town—
it
used to be called LeCroix, so many trails branched there, before they changed it to Newbridge—was only a footpath when I came here?” Or, “Did I tell you about the dry summer when the fires were so thick around us? The sky was dark as evening all day and the caribous came right out to the edge of the fields. Even the men went to the church and prayed.”)

Or she’d tell her again about the time a robber came into their house at night. He thought she was alone. Her husband identified him for the sheriff the next day by a bayonet cut he’d given him in the dark. It turned out to be a man he knew. Richard could eat no supper that night; but he said justice must be done. He was that kind of man.

Or about the two moose hunters with the gold snuffboxes. Joseph was playing in the yard when they stopped to ask directions. They poured his small hands so full of silver dollars that some spilled out on the ground. That was a hard year, but the silver dollars lay inside the clock all winter. Until Richard could find who the men were and return their money.

But if Anna said, “Where did you learn to waltz like
that?”
she’d only smile.

“Well, tell me about somewhere,” Anna said now. “Not about here.”

Ellen thought for a minute. She looked as if a frightening idea had come to her. One of those secret things you are suddenly tempted to tell no one else but a child.

“I could tell you about the places where they’ve never seen snow,” she said.

“Never?”

Ellen seemed to be talking to herself.

“Or where the sea is blue as—what’s the bluest thing you can think of?—and you can always smell spices.”

“Where did
you
see them places?” Anna said.

Ellen hesitated. “Right here,” she said.

“Right
here?”

Ellen started to rise. “Hark,” she said. “Is the rain over?”

“No,” Anna pleaded. “No. Tell me that.”

“If I told you something,” Ellen said very softly, “would you promise not to … never?”

“Yes. Oh, yes!”

“Do you see that scaffold?” Ellen said. “I hid a man there once.”

Oh, this was wonderful. “Was he a bad man?” “No, he was young.”

“You too?”

“Yes.”

Ellen smoothed her apron with her hands. She said, “One day …” Anna let all the questions curl up, cosy and delicious, inside her.

“One spring day”—Ellen spoke slowly, as if the facts she could remember, but some other part of it was hard to find again—“your grandfather and I were planting potatoes in the burntland. I came back to the house first, to kindle the fire for supper. I went inside and there was a man standing there. He said, ‘I
thought
you might come first.’ He had on a sailor’s middy.”

“Did you screech?” Anna said.

“No,” Ellen said. “I don’t know why I wasn’t afraid. The
woods weren’t cleared to the river then. I couldn’t see Richard. But I wasn’t afraid. I picked up the poker we had for the pigs’ potatoes, but when he smiled, I saw he meant no harm. A sailor looks like a child when he smiles.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” Ellen spoke as if she were trying to get the story straight for herself, not for Anna. “But something keeps their eyes new, like a child’s eyes.”

Anna didn’t understand. This wasn’t such a good story. “What did Grandfather say?”

“I didn’t tell him. It was wrong, but he wouldn’t have understood. He’d have notified the authorities. If he’d been in the sailor’s place, he’d have given
himself
up. So what could I do? The sailor kept saying, ‘I was afraid you might be an
older
woman.’ As if one young person couldn’t think of betraying another. I’d never thought about what it was to be young, before, I was always with older people here. But I thought of it then. I felt sort of frightened. Someday my youth would be gone. I wouldn’t even notice when. So I hid him. I only meant to hide him for one night.”

She spoke as if she were trying to justify something to herself. She’d forgotten that she’d left out the facts of the story.

“But what did he have to hide for?” Anna said. “Did he steal?”

“Yes.” Ellen smiled. “A peacock feather.”

Anna giggled. This was a real story after all.

The sailor, Ellen said, had gone with the captain of the man-of-war on an errand to the governor’s house in Halifax. He had waited outside. There was a peacock in the garden. It had fascinated him. He’d thought: If I just had one feather from its tail, to show the other sailors. The bird had
screamed. The captain had rushed out and there he stood, with the feather in his hand.

He had run. He had travelled the road by night and the woods by day. Now he was here, and she must hide him until the ship sailed.

“What would the captain have done to him?” Anna said.

“He’d have been lashed.”

Ellen spoke so intensely that Anna peered at her face. Her face didn’t look like that when she told other stories. Older people’s faces had a kind of covering. All the things that happened to them piled up there, one over another. But now her grandmother’s face looked as if some kind of breeze had lifted the covering. What she was telling showed bare as on the day it had taken place.

“His flesh was strong enough,” she said, “but young flesh is soft. They would have split it.”

The breeze died and her face was old again. She straightened her apron. “Hark,” she said again. “The rain has stopped.”

Anna had forgotten to listen to the rain.

“But what happened?” she urged.

“He stayed a week,” Ellen said. “I took food to him when your grandfather was in the fields. It was wrong, but …”

“Did
he
tell you about them places?”

“Yes. I couldn’t help listening. There would be things to do in the house, but …”

Anna was enchanted. To think that stealthy words had been spoken about those far places, under these very boards.

“Where did he go?” she said.

“The night before he left,” Ellen said, “he told me the sea was a lonesome thing. He meant it, but … I suppose he went back to the sea. Do you know what I think it’s like
when the sea’s right in you?”

The breeze brushed her face again. Her face forgot itself like a face struck, at first waking, with the memory of the night’s dream of some time when you were another person. You lie there, listening intently for a sound that you know will never come again.

“Sometimes when you hear a train whistle and everything turns quiet around you, like the way flowers lie on a grave after the mourners have all gone home, or sometimes in the fall when the hay is cut and it’s moonlight and it seems as if everything is somewhere else—I think the sea is a little like that,” she said. “When a thought of it comes across you, it’s like thinking of some face that’s lonesome for just you. All the faces around you turn strange. You know that the sea’s face some one place, somewhere you’ve never been will be like your own. But child, why do I—?”

“Oh, I
know,”
Anna said. She didn’t, really. Yet this had a kind of meaning for her just the same.

The covering fell back on Ellen’s face, more immobile than ever.

“Is that all?” Anna said.

“Yes. He told me, that night, he wanted to find work on land somewhere. He asked me to bring him some old clothes. I took the clothes the next morning, but he was gone. I called to him. I thought he might be sleeping. But he was gone.”

Anna sighed. Partly the nice sigh when a story was over; partly a sigh because the ending to this one was frayed, somehow.

They brushed the hay dust off their clothes and went out into the sunlight.

“Your grandfather was a good man,” Ellen said suddenly, almost fiercely. “I loved him.”

A rainbow arched from mountain to mountain. It was almost faded over the valley, but bright-banded as a new hair ribbon at its roots.

This was the day that came once a year. It, and the day of its fulfillment, were never repeated. On the day of fulfillment the grass was burdened with its own freshness, and the fullness of its sudden growth made a carpet sound in the air. The blood-red leaves of the maples unfolded overnight on the dark limbs. The sun warmed the shadows and dusted the ploughed land. The smell everywhere was thick with green breathing and sun. But this day had only the shadow-cleanness of promise. The only smell in the air was of cool water.

“Grammie,” Anna said, “I think I’ll marry a sailor.”

I
n the house, Martha’s hands darted about with quiet skill. She opened her kitchen door and placed the round varnished stone against it. She scalded the churn, and fetched the jug of cream from the cellar. As her arms moved rhythmically at the dash of the churn, spinning it simultaneously with each upward or downward thrust, her thought fed calmly, like an animal grazing.

It was pleasant to be alone in the house. There was no loneliness when the others were away, but not isolably away, each happy with his own things. It was pleasant to have all the tasks of a new year at the threshold, but none of them clamorous yet.