The Mountain and the Valley (42 page)

I said, “Tony!” but I knew. And then after I knew, I put my arm beneath his shoulder before I called the others, and I said “Tony” again.

And I suppose when I said “Tony” the second time I meant all the bright times we’d had because we were young together in a place where death was jealous of our breath. I suppose I meant the first moment of never-again dark on the day. I suppose I meant the wonder that his flesh was no lighter for all that had gone from it. I suppose I meant that he was dead, but that somehow I’d save his part of the pain and the laughing in the world for him always, fiercely somewhere, where it could never be lost … I don’t think we were fighting for liberty or justice or any fancy things like that in this war. I think we were fighting for the guy next us …

And I remember the morning it came to me. I had more time than Tony. There had been pain, and now there was no pain, so I knew. But Tony was such a good guy to have with you then that there was hardly any thinking at all.

For Tony had done all the things, even the ones you’d missed. He’d been in all the places—even this one, so it couldn’t be a strange place for the young. And so there was no evening part to it, and you didn’t think of the springs that would come again, for someone else. Because it was the first time you had ever seen Tony quiet like this. You knew it was the same way with him now that it was with you that other day, when it was your arm and his breath. And in a minute like that when it’s clear how another can have
for
you the things you might have had for yourself, the meaning of everything else is clear too. That’s why the day didn’t seem dark or too soon …)

It was getting late. He forgot that it was time for the bus. He tore the pages out of the scribbler and read them over. He sat there, with the luxurious feeling of being spent with accomplished expression.

He didn’t hear the bus stop. He didn’t see Toby and Anna until they came in the door. He felt that instant denuding when he saw them. The mirror of his consciousness was stripped of everything but the reflection of his own face: pale, tentative, and struck with the long burning scar.

He tried to scrabble the pages together and get them out of sight before Toby reached the table. But one fluttered to the floor. Toby picked it up.

“What are you writing, Dave?” he said, laughing. “Love letters or your will?” He began to read aloud. “ ‘When they write the story of this war, no one will mention me. No one guessed that any of those faces was mine …’ What the …?”

David grabbed the sheet from his hand almost savagely.
If Toby read what he’d written, he thought he’d die. The whole thing seemed unutterably shameful. How could he have put down anything so damned sickly and foolish? War was about as much like that as … He opened the stove and thrust the papers into the flames.

“What
were
you writing, Dave?” Toby pressed him, half amused, half baffled, “a story or something?”

David saw Anna shake her head.

“Nothing,” he said. He turned quickly to Anna. “How was Grandmother?”

“Fine,” Anna said. “Bless her, she was so glad to see us.”

“She was swell,” Toby said.

“She kept saying Toby reminded her of someone. She couldn’t seem to drop it,” Anna said. She hesitated. “Dave, she looks well, but, I mean … do you think her mind, a little …?”

“No,” David said. “Only she forgets.”

“Ahhhhhh,” Toby groaned pleasurably. “How about a beer?”

“Okay,” David said. “Sure.”

They had a beer. And a second. And a third. And along about the fourth beer, with Toby and Anna there, David reread the story off his mind. The validity crept back into it all over again.

T
hat was Tuesday, and this was Thursday. Today Toby and Anna were walking up the winding road that went to the top of the mountain.

David had wanted to go too; but he had known, even as they coaxed him to come, that it was a day when the
man-and-wife feeling between them was a thing explicit. It was a day for
them
to be alone. He said he had to stay home and bank the pigpen and the stable—an early snow might come any time.

They were walking up the winding road that went to the top of the mountain. Leaving the fields behind, and the houses and the people in the valley and the restless river that moved in and out with the tide. There were only three days left before Toby went back to his ship, but the shadow of his going away wasn’t heavy on the days yet. They didn’t speak about his going away at all.

The first grey days of November were past, when the earth lay defeated and colourless and old; and today it was suddenly warm again. Not the sad October warmth, the pale gold hanging in the air of the gently dying afternoons, but like the hopeful spring warmth again. It was Indian Summer.

Pools of dead leaves lay ankle deep in the log road, rusty and dry. The sun was all over in the bright blue sky. It smiled on the needles of the spruces and slid down the pale silver poplars. It settled warm and steady on the dry leaves and the grey rocks. There was a strange sound of stillness about it all. As if the pine needles and the dead leaves and the grey rocks and the clean-smelling brook with the pole bridge they passed over were all singing together a quiet song, like the drowsy hum of wires or of bees. It was as if all the things of the earth were meeting together in reprieve, before each of them died its own separate way.

At the foot of the mountain they began to walk through the spruces. The spruces had a thick safe smell. They were like a cushion between them and the valley where the people talked and moved and the nervous river ran. They soaked in the sunshine and the stillness and kept it close. And through the spruces Anna could see nothing.

She could see nothing but Toby’s face. His dark skin, darkly pale with health beneath the moist-looking hair, and a good look in his eyes when he laughed. She knew it was the one face for her among all the others. She had never been so sure of that as she was today. It had been wonderful since they were home here. They had sloughed off the city way. He hadn’t left her once. She hadn’t had to watch at all.

And now in the centre of the safe woods-stillness, shut out from everything but the road that wound up to the top of the mountain, she didn’t think about his going away. That didn’t seem real. This seemed like the shut-in time of a dream. It didn’t seem real that in three days someone would be trying to kill him.

They stopped for a cigarette, sitting close together on a flat stone. I could reach out and touch his face, she thought. Flesh, she thought, there’s nothing quite like it. There’s nothing quite like Toby’s strong young flesh to have near me in the quiet woods.

They didn’t talk much. Their thoughts had an almost antiphonal, churchy sound in their heads, with the spell of the day. Ordinary words didn’t quite fit them. They were silent as children are, in a place so enchanting that they don’t trust themselves to speak about it, because it is splendid beyond anything they’ve been used to at home.

They looked at their cigarettes soberly; blowing out pale funnels of smoke and watching them spread and melt away in the calm air. One dwarf maple in the clearing still clung stubbornly to its topknot of flame. The leaves swayed a little, absently, but there was no breeze you could feel.

“It’s perfect here, isn’t it?” Anna said at last.

“It sure is,” Toby said.

“It
is
perfect, though, isn’t it?” she said. “You couldn’t want it any better than this.”

“We should have brought the gun along,” he said. “There might be a deer.”

“No,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to shoot a deer today, Toby.”

Hunting had been fine yesterday. She hadn’t thought of weariness, tramping after the wounded buck and looking for traces of blood on the leaves, and somehow you didn’t think of the buck, sick and puzzled and bleeding in the dark. But she didn’t like to think of blood on the leaves today.

“This is Thursday,” he said, “isn’t it? Thursday … Friday … Sat—”

“This is Thursday,” she said quickly, “all day.” Friday and Saturday couldn’t get at this afternoon yet. Nothing could get at it through the dark quiet spruces. She looked at the road, winding up and out of sight to the top of the mountain.

There was no sound but their quiet breathing. The woods didn’t seem to be breathing this afternoon, but she supposed it must be going on, very softly. It was funny about breathing, she thought. It went on steadily, keeping you alive, but you weren’t conscious of it at all. It was like being with Toby. Just being together with him made all the difference in the world, even if neither of you said a word, and you didn’t have to think about it at all. But when you did stop to think of being alive with Toby, it was sort of wonderful.

“You know something?” she said. “I’m absolutely sure I love you.”

“Well?” he said.

“Nothing. I just wanted to say it.”

He looked at her and laughed, completely puzzled.

“I could kiss you if I wanted to, couldn’t I?” she said.

“I don’t see why not,” he said. “Say, what is this?”

“Oh, don’t look so scared,” she said. “I’m not going to.
But I
could
. That’s all I was thinking about.”

She looked at him, with the smile—incredulous, enveloping, and somehow idolatrous—that she always had for him whenever she pointed out some vagary of his that he couldn’t be made to see was anything out of the ordinary. As if these vagaries centred him in a kind of light, that she stood at the edges of and absorbed a funny kind of warmth from.

“Last night when we were doing that crossword puzzle, you said a seven letter word for ‘opulence’ was ‘wealthy’! You tried it: w-e-a-l-.”

“What if I did?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said. “But you did.”

“It could have been,” he said.

“No, it couldn’t have been,” she laughed. “ ‘Wealthy’ is the
adjective.”

“I know,” he said. “But some of those things are cockeyed.”

He didn’t see. He was never right about little things like that. He had the same artless way about these puzzles that he had about everything. They’d had a lot of silly fun over these puzzles they’d never think of bothering with in the city. They had a lot of silly fun together that other people never had at all. I love him, she thought, and I could touch him. The dry leaves swayed quietly on the branch, as if they were remembering a breeze, faintly.

They threw their cigarettes away and went along the road that wound up to the top of the mountain.

Now it was steeper, and they were leaving the spruces behind. There was nothing but hardwood when they came nearer the top. The bare hardwood gave a light-spreading feel of space. The straight pillars of birch and the great worn maples locked their branches as they reached into the sky,
their quiet shadows laced together on the ground. There was age and strength in the hardwood, with the still spaces among the bare limbs clean as shavings. She could see a long way through the bare limbs, but not beyond them. And through the hardwood with the clean warm-grey limbs was the winding path their feet would take to the top of the mountain.

As they left the valley farther and farther behind, the valley didn’t seem real. The spruces were between them and the valley, keeping the time safe. And now, with the climbing steeper, a lightness lifted in her heart. It was like the swimming peace of wine.

“Do you want to go to the top?” he said.

“Oh yes,” she said. “Let’s go right to the top. You can look down over the whole valley.”

She could feel the muscle of his arm, hard and warm through the sleeve of his jacket, as he held it lightly.

He was thinking. They didn’t know he ever stopped to think, but he did. It’s nice up here, he was thinking. There’s a sort of haze about it. It’s almost like dreaming. It must be very still here when there’s no one on the road. It wouldn’t be any fun to walk up here alone. Her face is small and happy. Her face is soft and gets broken so easily. There’s a soft smell to her hair, like a child’s hair. She has kind of a dreamy way to her thinking, I guess that’s the woman’s way. She lives a lot of ways a man doesn’t even know about, like a child. A man has to keep a woman safe, like he would a child. A woman is always like a child. I won’t like her eyes when I go away, like the whole world was a wind or something blowing against her face. I’m only a man. I have only one way of thinking and I can’t do anything to help her. They’ll be like a child’s eyes outside the window. Her face is small
and happy now, though. We’ve been together, and now the man’s way or the woman’s way alone isn’t enough for either of us. It’s a funny thing you can’t think through, the way it is with a man and a woman. A man has no way of thinking it out. A man doesn’t have to think about it at all. But this is nice, he thought … touching her arm, and the child’s smell of her hair, and the bare maples happening here along the road that goes to the top of the mountain … Indian Summer is the nicest time of all.

They were coming near the top now, bending more as the climbing became steeper still.

“Sometimes it’s nice and quiet like this when we’re out at sea,” he said.

“No, Toby, it can’t be. I don’t like the sea.”

The sun was overhead and the stillness was loud and moist-smelling and clean. The trees were thinning now but, looking back, they covered the side of the mountain like a great blanket; and you couldn’t see where the road wound up and through them. It was as if the road had escaped at last out of the valley, up and through the trees, and found the safe quiet place it was looking for.

Anna felt a strange excitement, as if she too were coming to the peak of the day. It was like the Christmas so long ago when David gave her the little ring with the bright red stone. (What ever became of it? she thought. I should have kept it as long as I lived.) The tree was in and the room trimmed and the nuts and candy in the bowls; and there was an hour left before supper for her and David to talk, hushed with the smell of the tree, about something each knew the other was getting, but refusing to disclose what it was. An hour when everything was ready for Christmas, but before time had begun to eat into Christmas Eve itself.