The Mountain and the Valley (41 page)

“She
has?” Toby said. His voice went casual all at once, as if Anna’s discovery had turned out to be no more than an ordinary bit of news.

“Here’s a picture of Rod Martin,” Anna went on quickly. “Toby, isn’t Rod the kid that had dinner with us last Christmas?”

“Yeh,” Toby said. “Missing?” But he didn’t lean over and look at the picture himself.

“Yes,” Anna said. She sat down in the chair by the table. One arm was still in a sleeve of the jacket she had started to slip off. “He told me he broke that little piece off his front tooth acting smart on a bicycle,” she said. “He helped me dry the dishes …” It might be true about the others, but there must be some mistake about Rod.

“I saw him down at the canteen a coupla nights before we left,” Toby said.

Anna looked at him suddenly, as if she had a desperate need to touch him.

But he fished the back part of the paper, the part with the funnies in it, and took it over to the couch. He read it idly.
It might have been a magazine he’d seen so often that now he followed the lines of the advertisements too.

David said nothing at all. He had a sense of being outside this. He felt that he shouldn’t look at the paper at all.

“I’ll help you get supper, Dave,” Anna said, “…  in a minute.”

After supper Toby took the front part of the paper and sat in by the radio, alone. His face was no soberer than usual, but he was reading with a funny sort of brightness. He didn’t get up and go to the barn with David when David went to do the chores. David had a feeling that even Anna was outside now, that there’d been nothing real about any of the afternoon before.

But no one spoke of it again, and then it was over; and the next day David and Toby went to town for the beer. That was the best day of all.

David was topping turnips on the sidehill when Toby came over after dinner.

“Dave,” he said, “do you realize we’re all out of beer?”

“No,” David said. “Now that’s bad!”

“Suppose,” Toby said, “if I gave you a hand with the turnips, we could hop the bus and …?”

“I guess so,” David said. “Sure, I guess so.” For an instant he thought: I could just about finish this job by supper. He hesitated. “Unless,” he said, “you hop the bus, just
you
go …”

“Aw, you might as well come along too,” Toby said. “I’ll help you finish the turnips.”

So Toby got another knife, and they worked up the rows together.

He didn’t have David’s practiced knack. David slashed off the root tendrils, then switched the turnip end for end and
severed the neck of leaves at the top with a single blow. Toby wasn’t fussy about clipping the root tendrils clean. Sometimes he cut into the turnip itself. He didn’t pile the tops, as David did. He just left them wherever they fell in the row. I’ll have to go over his work again tomorrow, David thought.

But he slowed his own pace to match Toby’s, so they could keep close enough together to talk. It made him think of times when you were a child and there was somewhere to go, but you had work; then another child pitched in and helped you so you could both go, and the simplest remarks you made to each other had a ring of exciting conspiracy. The pain was like a far-off tune again.

There wasn’t much time before the bus was due. They dressed in a rush, with Anna speeding them on their way. It was like the times when he’d decide he didn’t want to go to the fair in town. Then when it was too late to speak a chance with the mailman he’d want to go desperately. His mother would bustle about, like Anna did now. She’d speak a chance for him with someone else. She’d liberate him from the sulkiness with himself for having let the first chance slip by.

They called back and forth from bedroom to bedroom about what kind of beer they’d get (though there was plenty of time for that decision, on the bus), and Toby borrowed one of David’s shirts. (“Sure you won’t mind, Dave?” “Hell, no …” “You’re sure?” “Sure …”) They were like boys: making the glow of doing each other small favours and of receiving them from each other, more emphatic still, by mock remonstrance.

When they got on the bus David tried to head Toby off, buying the tickets. But Toby thrust an elbow into his ribs, grimacing with the corner of his mouth. There was a slight scuffle, and Toby paid for both.

It wasn’t like getting on the bus alone.

The people in the bus all seemed friendly today. When you got on the bus alone, all the faces seemed ready to be against you. You were sitting in the bus with someone else today. You watched lazily out of the window, speaking once in a while, and clowning a little. You looked, containedly, at the strange people who got on: the way the others who had been on the bus together looked at you when
you
got on alone.

A girl two seats ahead reached down and straightened the seam in her stocking. Toby clucked his tongue softly against the roof of his mouth. David winked. They grinned at each other knowingly, both feeling the same thing about a woman’s leg. The bus slid along past a man fall-ploughing on a hillside. David looked at him, not with condescension exactly, but without curiosity or identification: the way the others looked at you when they went by in the bus and
you
were ploughing alongside the road.

On the way back, each had a carton of beer under his arm. There was another scuffle for the tickets. This time David won. And all the way home, all through the bus, they were the focus of that unreasonable little sense of amusement which the sight of two people bringing home something to drink always provokes.

It was nothing more than that. And afterward David wondered what had been so special about it.

Until it came to him all at once: there hadn’t been any
thinking
about it. He hadn’t thought about the way it was, at all, all the time. Even the thinking that the awkwardness had all gone was gone too.

It must be like that with all the people who had friends. It must be like that with all the people who didn’t get on the bus alone. Everything in his life had been black and white before. Now, for the first time, there was colour.

O
ne day toward the end of Toby’s leave, he and Anna went in to see Ellen, between buses.

They hadn’t sent word that they were here: that would bring her straight home. They had all agreed it’d be a shame to break up her vacation (and, though the motive was not consciously admitted, their unit of just three). “But we couldn’t go back without seeing her,” Anna said. “If anything should happen …” To her … or to Toby? It was a sentence that she never finished, even in her mind.

When they asked David to go too, he made an excuse that the butcher might come to look at his fat steer. He wanted to be alone today. Alone the
good
way: cosily, protectedly, with the thought of the others coming back at night. Something formless was swarming in his mind. He must be delivered of it—by seeing its shape projected onto the scribbler page.

Every so often he must milk his mind like this. If he didn’t, it felt fetid with the decay of infant ideas, born with all their features but never freed to breath … or else dry and rattling with their bones, like the skeletons of beetles cocooned in the corner of the window sash.

He watched the bus go out of sight. Then he brought his scribbler and pencil out to the kitchen table.

He knew, without seeking, what his subject would be today.

This would be a boy who knew what everything was like. Who knew exactly about … well, for instance, war. He’d never seen a war, but that didn’t matter. He knew whenever he saw two soldiers walk down the street how it was with them: Some quickness kept flowing—no,
running
—from their uniforms into their faces.

He made a note: “a quickness kept running into their faces.”

And immediately the first was released, other facets of that picture came tumbling on its heels: “Danger joined them like an extra kind of health.” “The distance from them to the other people in the street was greater than the step between …”

He felt the excitement he always felt when the crust of an idea was first broken, when the first sentence lay outside him. But, as always, one sentence accomplished didn’t leave that much less to be told. The idea fronded suddenly like a million-capillaried chart of the bloodstream. He felt the panic of having to encompass every bit of it.

How could he do it, to get it all in?

Could this boy be telling, maybe, what he saw when he looked at the pictures of war?

Or wait, no. Why couldn’t you make it sound as if it were this boy’s
own
face in all the pictures?

It wouldn’t be credible, but he was telling it that way because (this wouldn’t come out till the end—yes,
yes
, that was the way to do it) he was … sick; he’d never been
any
where, but he had to make them believe it was his face in all the pictures, so he could have the war over with. He couldn’t have it over with, like the others who’d been there and returned got it over with, unless they believed he knew how every bit of it was. You could put in somewhere, “Are you listening?” Yes, that’d be the title: “Thanks for Listening.”

A whole line came to him, out of nowhere. He didn’t know where it would fit, but he wrote it down. “Maybe you didn’t recognize me sometimes because a face looks different with the blood on the outside …”

You’d start out with going away: One time the picture showed him with his girl, and one time with his wife. It was
easier somehow to leave the wife than the girl, because when it was the wife the other things were all in
her
somehow, and when he remembered her that took care of everything at once. How desperately hard they tried that last minute to … to … “to drain the whole draught of the her-and-me.”

He said the phrase out loud. It was true. It was his. He felt like crying. Oh, it was wonderful, to be able to do a thing like this …

Then the great flurry of how it was with
everything
blizzarded inside his head, the things that
always
came to him after the first line: How you could love the land’s face and the day’s face, but how they never loved you back; the sun would come out brighter than usual the day your father died, and the wind would cut, as blind and relentless as ever, the night your brother was lost in the woods … How a man could be trapped by his own nature … How, though you cut open his flesh you still couldn’t penetrate the skin of separateness each man walked around in … How this place had aged, with change … How the knitted warmth between its people had ravelled, until each was almost as alone in his own distraction now as the city people were …

He shook his head, as if to scatter a swarm of gnats. He came back to the single thing he’d chosen to say today. He put together the lines of it in his head. He saw the very script of them there. He added there, erased there, got them almost as they must stay, before he wrote them down on the paper.

(If I tell you about the time I saved a battle, don’t think I’m trying to sound brave. I’m just trying to tell it truly. I
was
brave that day, though. I needn’t have crept up to throw the grenades into their ammunition pile. I was alone. No one would have known I’d seen that chance. I could have crept the other way. I thought of that. No matter where you are there’s
nothing like staying alive. But I didn’t. And after they gave me the medal in the picture I’d make wisecracks about it with the other guys, but sometimes I’d touch the ribbon in the dark, like the first prize I won at school …

And do you remember the quiet picture on deck that morning of the invasion, the morning we had the bread and wine before the battle? The very-white of the padre’s garments and the bare cross against the sun on the sea looked sort of beautiful, didn’t they? Well, that was a true picture. We’d been cursing before, and we’d be cursing after, but I think we were glad to do this thing together. I think our rough feet knew enough to tread gently then …)

Or would that make him sound like he was a soft guy? He wasn’t a soft guy, that had to be plain.

(One night we were talking about what we wanted most when we came back. When it came
my
turn I said what I wanted most was to jump square-footed into one of those goddammed apple pies we were all over here fighting for. They laughed a new way then, and I knew I was all right with them. It was the best feeling in the world to know that it wouldn’t do for any
outside
guy to kid me for being small.

And there were the girls. Sometimes there’d be two or three of us, and two or three girls, and it wasn’t any tea party. We were young and no one was going to keep anything away from us we felt like; and we did it because it was the one thing we were all alike in and doing together in a strange land where one of us would have been lost by himself …)

He had never felt as fluent as today. He felt complex, manifold,
furnished
. It was just the opposite to what he felt when others were there: so much simpler and less intricate than they.

He tightened for a minute when he came to the part where this boy’s friend was killed beside him, and the part
where his friend saw
him
die. But then it came right out, quickly and whole. So much smoother than the rest that what had gone before seemed all elbows, yoked down with the wrong words like a clumsy translation.

(We were always together, Tony and I. The sea was in us both, like a song we knew the tune of, but never the words. The land was fine. You looked ahead to it. But when you got there it was always a little like coming home and finding the others gone. If the sea is in both of you like that, you stick together like the only two people who speak the same tongue in a strange country.

There was no picture the morning Tony died. I don’t think there was anything a picture would have shown. We were there alone and Tony’s breath was tracing a tune, when the bullet came. I saw all the hearing and the seeing and the touching go out of him like a breeze. All at once the breath with the soft tune on it went I don’t know where. I saw the strange whisper of death on his face even before his body fell to the deck.