The Mountain and the Valley (40 page)

And then Toby nudged him to sing too. He nudged Anna, who was holding up the coupler key that stuck from disuse, to sing. Then they were all singing together. His voice and Anna’s were reedy and thin; but singing with Toby, it was as if the good clean lighthearted way Toby sang were in their voices too.

He looked at his face in the mirror. It looked filled out now and all the waiting gone from it, as a face smooths out before the fire, after it has been old looking and pinched about the mouth with sharp cold.

And singing there, all together, with the true climbing tone of the organ and the drink absolutely solvent in him now, it was a new kind of moment altogether.

They sang a few songs. Then Toby popped out and brought them in another drink. It was mid-afternoon before they went back to the kitchen.

As they passed through the narrow hallway, Anna’s arm brushed Toby’s hat off the the clothes rack.

David picked it up. He held it in his hand a minute, examining the gold braid on the anchor.

“Try it on, Dave,” Anna said.

David put the hat on. It fitted, but the stiff weight of it felt strange. He thought how odd it must look with his faded overalls.

“No,” Anna laughed, “not
straight
like that.” She reached up and tilted it to one side. “There!”

David tried to strike a comic pose to cover his embarrassment.

“Say,” Toby said, “that looks all
right.”

“Do you know something?” Anna exclaimed. “You two look alike. With that hat on, you look alike. Stand over there alongside each other, till I see.”

Toby and David seemed to feel a sudden awkwardness then. David just smiled and hung the hat on the hook again.

When it was time for the chores, Toby went to the barn with him. But the ease of the afternoon wasn’t there somehow, when they were alone with each other. They fell apart, single and separate, as two magnetized particles do when the medium which conducts the current between them is removed.

Each of them seemed to be watching a little. Toby was as intent in exploration of the barn as he’d been in exploration of the house. (How did the grab fork
reach
the hay? Did the calves have names? I guess the old cows really go for that corn-meal, eh?) But their conversation was only question and answer. It seemed tied to sober fact. Because of his best uniform Toby had to watch where he stepped; and one of them seemed always to be ducking aside to let the other pass. And when David poured out what water the calf didn’t drink,
into another pail (so that after three or four days the leftovers would fill it), he did it stealthily, when Toby wasn’t looking. If Toby asked about it, how could he explain that, no, there was lots of water, it was just a little habit of squaring things off?

He’d been so long with only his thoughts to talk to. In the company of a second person (with no third person there also, to take away the directness between him and the other) these disengaged thoughts listened so loudly they headed off his tongue.

The mist of the drinks was thinning now. The pain pushed back through. It had an added insistence, as if he’d been disloyal to it. Going back to the house he fell in behind Toby. It seemed as if the pain were showing through the back of his head; if Toby came behind
him
, he’d feel that awful transparency.

But it was as easy as ever again that evening.

They couldn’t decide what to do. Finally each wrote out a suggestion. They dropped them into Toby’s hat. Toby drew one out.

“Do jigsaws!” he announced triumphantly.

“Jigsaws?” Anna said. “Toby,
you
put that crazy suggestion in there.”

“
I
know,” he said. “There’s a whole flock of jigsaws in the closet. Swell ones.”

“Toby, you
weren’t
snooping in the closet!” She looked at him as if it were this constant little exasperation with him, more than anything, that made her love him so fiercely.

They cleared off the table and did jigsaws. They were all together in one thing again. There was that curious gaiety about it of adults playing at a child’s pastime. Toby hummed as he scrutinized the pieces from every angle, trying, rejecting, exclaiming softly when one slipped into place. They passed
pieces (not for my section but possibly for yours) back and forth, silently. Their attention was all focused outward on the puzzle. It left everything else free to flow together. None of the awkwardness of having to fit speech together or to match each other’s moods was there at all.

David lingered downstairs after Toby and Anna had gone to bed.

He waited until he heard their door close. Then he tiptoed into the hall. He took down Toby’s hat. He put it on his head and looked in the mirror. Then he tilted the hat to one side and assumed a gay careless smile. He thought of the free way Toby had, and of the far places. The hat doesn’t look funny on me, he thought. We do look alike. It could be me …

“Dave,” Anna called, “will you look in the big suitcase and see if I brought my face cream?”

He put the hat back on the hook as if he had been stung. She couldn’t see him, but he felt as if he had been surprised in an act of indescribable foolishness.

T
he next afternoon they went hunting in the old orchards.

A big American company had bought these farms solely for their timber. The company had no interest in the houses or the fields. The people had moved to town. The houses just stood there. Their doors were open and their windows broken out by hunters. The walls were still upright; but the kitchen floors sagged toward the cellar, the plaster had warped and crumbled.

They came to the old Delacey house first.

“Let’s go through it,” Toby said. He was excited as a child.

They went through the house. Their voices echoed hollowly in the empty rooms. It gave Anna a funny feeling to look at the wallpaper: the pattern of roses which it had taken Mrs. Delacey so many evenings to decide on and then to hang with flour paste. It still brightened the walls, though there was no eye now to see.

Toby poked about eagerly in the closets. He popped back to show them whatever object he happened to find.

He found the lace insert from a shirtwaist front, discarded after the buttons had been cut off. (“Now who do you suppose wore that?”) A yellowed letter. (“I. Was. So. Sad. To—something or other—That. Clara. Is—something—oh, yes—Gone. How. You. Must. Miss. Her. Only. Time. Will …”). A snowshoe. (“Look, Dave, couldn’t you take that home and make a mate for it?” But he laid it down and promptly forgot it.)

“Don’t look,” he called once, like a child. Then he came out of a bedroom with a braided oat-straw hat, bobbing with artificial cherries, on his head. He had an old maribou stole around his neck. They laughed until Anna got hysterical.

He even found a jar of preserves. The Delaceys must have missed it when they cleaned out the pantry. “Shall we break it open,” he said, “and see if they’re still good?”

“No,” Anna said, “let’s not.”

No, David thought, let’s not. He didn’t know why.

They went out again into the still fall sunshine.

It was a perfect afternoon, intimately warm and absolutely quiet. The sunshine plated the dry leaves on the apple trees. It poured, like rain, through their branches. It was like a fruit missed when the others were picked: now the essence of absolute ripeness, just before it drops off itself.

Nothing visited these orchards but the timid partridges, to bud in the apple trees, at dusk; and the soft-eyed deer. They
had such a trigger-ready shyness in them that their eyes seemed scarcely to rest on anything for two consecutive instants or their feet to rest, quite, on the ground. There was a funny atmosphere about these abandoned fields when you came there on an afternoon like this. It was as if you had stumbled, like children in a fairy tale, on some niche that time itself had wondrously missed.

There were no partridges in the trees about the house.

“There’s a back orchard,” David said. “Do you want to try that?”

“You go,” Anna said, “you and Toby. I’ll wait here.” She sat down on a sun-warmed rock in the field.

“Okay,” Toby said. “Let’s go, eh, Dave?”

“Okay,” David said.

But he felt the constraint again. Hunting there alone, falls before, his thoughts had woven quietly in and through each other like the interstitial weavings of a puff of smoke. They’d been the perfect company. He shrank from walking back there now with someone else. These thoughts would be like a third person the other couldn’t see. The obligation to talk would make an awkwardness between them.

He glanced back at Anna. She was sitting absolutely still on the rock, looking straight ahead. Her chin was cupped in one palm. He knew what she was trying to do. She was letting her mind float. She was trying to melt into the very texture of the afternoon … to know it completely, and so hold onto it forever.

Toby stopped to urinate as soon as Anna was out of sight.

“God, it’s swell back here,” he said. “So darned quiet.” They both stood urinating pensively. Then he added, a little self-consciously, as adult men do when they first joke
together about women, “Fair place to bring a girl, eh?”

A grin came bold out of lurking, into David’s eyes. He nodded. “Yeh. Wouldn’t do her a helluva lot of good to yell for mother back here, would it?”

They both laughed then.

It was the way two boys laugh who have both been uncomfortable in someone’s parlour, though neither’s fidget is realized by the other until they are outside and one of them grimaces back at the house and exhales a prodigiously drawn-out fart. The awkwardness disappeared as suddenly as that. When two men have laughed together as they did over a joke about women they are never strangers again.

“I guess you bring all your girls back here, eh, Dave?” Toby said.

“No,” David said, “I never had many girls.” He didn’t boast. He didn’t mind admitting to Toby now that he hadn’t had an awful lot to do with women. “I guess it’s when you
sailors
are around that the girls have to stitch up their gussets.”

“I dunno,” Toby said. “Some of the boys maybe. I never broke my neck over em myself.”

He said it as if women were fine and natural all right, but, hell, that wasn’t the only thing there was—he couldn’t be bothered chasing his legs off after it. That was the way it struck David now too. He had the good feeling then that he’d had when he tried on Toby’s hat and they’d looked alike and he’d thought, it might be me.

They came to the edge of the back orchard.

“You remember Effie?” David began. “Well …”

But Toby grasped his arm suddenly and pointed to the partridge. It didn’t matter about girls now.

The partridge trotted across the ground, darting its neck out nervously, folding and unfolding its tail. It flew before
they could get a shot. They stood perfectly still, cocking their guns, their eyes on the tree. The flock in the tree began its warning twitter. They were hidden by the leaves. They twittered and then whirred all at once into flight.

Both men shot at once, and the headlong motion of two birds crumpled suddenly in midair.

David and Toby ran under the tree and picked them up. Their warm bodies huddled bonelessly, a drop of blood at the point of each beak. The men stroked the soft feathers that covered the wildness, the nervousness, they had tamed with death. They stroked them with that curious tenderness a hunter feels for the thing he kills.

And walking back to the old house again with this other who was like him, David felt the man-fibre they both shared, even with his pain, and the man-togetherness. Having spoken of and felt the same way about the thing that
made
them men, the way a man feels about a woman, there was less loneliness in him than at any other time he had walked here before. There was less loneliness, in a way, than if he were walking here with a woman; for though a woman you might love, your love was only possible because she was different. The only people who can take loneliness away are the people who are the same.

For the first time there was less awkwardness between him and Toby
without
Anna there. Nothing remained of the awkwardness except the conscience that it had all gone.

Toby held his partridge up for Anna to see, when they came in sight of her. David did the same. Anna too touched the birds tenderly; but her tenderness was of a different sort. She touched the shred of leaf still clamped in one of their beaks.

“Aw,” she said, “it seems kind of a shame, doesn’t it?”

There was only the newspaper in the mailbox that night. Times before when the mailman had left the paper only, David would feel the day go suddenly remote. It didn’t matter tonight.

They didn’t open the paper until they’d kindled the fire for supper. Then Anna spread it out on the table.

“Toby!” she exclaimed. “Here’s a big picture of the
Apache!”

“Where?” he said. He moved over to the table.

“Oh, Lord!” Anna said. “She’s been sunk.”

She said “sunk” as if it were a heavy word, swallowed rather than uttered; as if it turned her half sick.