The Mountain and the Valley (43 page)

Then they were really at the top of the mountain, standing close together in the flat clearing beneath the single great pine, looking down over the whole valley. Down over the hardwood and the dark back of the spruces, over the patches of pasture and field, and so far-off and soundlessly the houses and the dark thread of the road, and further still the silver-twisting thread of the river. It was like the intactile landscape of a dream. Tiny specks of cars moved in and out of sight along the thread of road, but not hearing them, it didn’t seem as if they were real.

And standing alongside her own husband’s flesh beneath the single cool pine at the top of the mountain, looking down through the Indian Summer air over the long steep wall of trees to the sun-soaked valley where the houses looked like houses in a stereoscope and the people made no sound, the life they’d left in the valley seemed like a dream. It seemed as if this minute on the top of the mountain they’d been climbing to was the peak of her whole life.

She drew a quick breath and her heart lifted inside her.

It lasted, and she couldn’t speak. And Toby didn’t speak. It lasted for one long minute.

Then for the first time she felt a small breeze starting, against her cheek; and the fear came. The fear came all at once. As it used to do when she was a child and had been too happy. She saw the look on her own face, small and pale, as if she had glimpsed it suddenly, passing a mirror.

She knew that Toby was going away.

She stood perfectly still until he spoke. It seemed a long time before he spoke.

“Well,” he said, “shall we start down again? Or do you want to rest a while?”

“No,” she said, “we might as well go now.”

And then they were going down the mountain and it began to turn cold and she knew that Toby would be leaving tomorrow. They would never have the other two days together at all. The time began to go. This would be the last day; and the day before the going is shadowed with the going, so that there is no free time left.

It was different, going down the mountain.

The sun began to move strange down the sky. The sky changed, as if all the summer life had gone out of it. It was blue and strange, like the sea. The sea would be in Toby’s mouth, when he could swim no longer. She hated the sea. The sky was cold and lonely and had no breath in its blue lips, and the broken fingers of the trees couldn’t reach up to touch it. The sun crept cold into the cores of the trees. The whole afternoon seemed full of all the things that lived without feeling or breath: the mateless sun and the memoryless trees and the tired road and the bruised sky and the chill breeze that was the breath of all the dead things in the world, moving bare as a ghost among the withered leaves.

“It’s turning cold, don’t you think?” Toby said. “Do you feel it?”

“Yes,” she said, “there’s a cold breeze.”

She drew her jacket tighter about her. It was a jacket of Toby’s, with the cuffs rolled up. She had on a pair of David’s work gloves, that her hands were lost in. The happiness in her face had given a comical air to the clothes, coming up. But now these clothes gave their definition to her. She looked small inside them. As a child looks small who has no
other
clothes but the discards, always cruelly too large, of someone else.

“And it was so
darned
nice a little while ago,” Toby said. “Indian Summer. It’s treacherous.”

They came to the hardwood again, going down. The trees were weary and separate now. They were memoryless and old. The pale sunlight falling through their grey branches was like the gaunt hiding place of death. She shivered, although the air wasn’t cold enough to make her shiver.

“Tired?” he said.

“No,” she said, “I’m not tired.”

She didn’t want to talk. Her voice had an empty sound to her, and it was hard to find any words at all.

“It won’t take long to go back,” he said. “We can walk faster, and it always seems to be shorter going back, did you ever notice that?”

The time was going fast now, and there was no way to stop it. It was going so fast she couldn’t think.

Then they were at the stone again where they had sat and smoked. She saw the crumpled ends of their cigarettes. She picked up the dead cigarettes and put them into her pocket. He laughed at her. It was really cold now.

“What was
that
for?” he said.

“Those were the cigarettes we smoked, going up,” she said.

“I know
that,”
he said; but she couldn’t explain.

“Look,” he laughed, “the breeze has taken off those last three leaves. Don’t you want them too?”

“Will you wait?” she said. “You wait, won’t you? Don’t walk ahead.”

“Of course I won’t silly. Don’t look so scared.”

“No,” she said, “never mind. I couldn’t find the right ones. I don’t want them.” She took the crumpled cigarette ends out of her pocket again, and dropped them in the road.

They were coming into the valley now, and as they came nearer and nearer the end of the road, the time went faster and faster … the little time of the last day. There was nothing you
could do to stop it, and she was frightened.

“You’re shivering,” he said. “Are you cold?”

“No,” she said, “I’m not cold. Are you cold?” The short useful sentences were the only ones she could find. A great cold stone was rolled in the path of her thinking.

The time was going now and there was no safe day left between tonight and tomorrow.

“Anna,” he said, “is something wrong? You’re so … I don’t know what. What’s wrong?”

“It was just Indian Summer,” she said.

“What?” he said.
“What
was just Indian Summer?”

“There’s nothing wrong, Toby,” she lied. “Really there isn’t.”

He doesn’t know, she thought. He doesn’t know at all, and I can’t tell him. It’s too late now to say anything. You can’t remember how to say anything at the last but the short wooden sentences. The city talk is gone altogether. If there’s anything that should be said, it’s too late to say it now, because the numbness is there like the winter in the hardwood with the darkness coming to it now, unspeaking. You can only try to keep your eyes off his face.

They came to the spruces again, going down. In the spruces it was really dark. It was hard to see the road. She stumbled. The great ashen darkness seemed to puff out of the spruces like smoke; and if you stepped off the road into them you’d be lost at once and they wouldn’t hear your cries. She thought of the buck they had wounded yesterday, sick and puzzled and bleeding in the dark.

They came nearer and nearer the valley, passing the brook that separated the valley from the mountain. Thin splinters of ice needled out from the sides of the brook, and under the pole bridge it made a shivering night sound as it ran.

Then they had left the road altogether and were out in the level fields.

It was lighter in the fields, but looking back, the mountain was a single great cloud of night, and the road they had travelled was all swallowed up. She wondered how they had found they way down it at all.

She could see the house now, waiting for them. And walking toward it, she dreaded it, like some dumb hostile thing. She hated the way their footsteps kept shortening the distance from it, steadily.

It was like the time David was delirious with fever when he was a child and she would play outside as long as she could possibly see, trying to forget a little as she played the coal at her heart. Trying to make herself believe that nothing could happen to him as long as she kept the sun and the fields and the mountain in sight
for
him. But when it came dark she could think of nothing else but going back into the house, where the silence was that would mean he was no better; and as she’d come nearer and nearer the door, it was like it was now.

David was in the stable. The mailman had brought a registered letter for Toby. He had signed for it and propped it up against the dipper, in the centre of the kitchen table.

Toby guessed what the message in the official envelope would be before he opened it, and when he read it the few words were perfectly clear. But he read them over and over. He didn’t like to take his eyes from them, to tell her.

“I’ve got to go back, Anna,” he said at last. “Tomorrow.”

“I know,” she said. “I knew it.”

“But how could you know?”

She didn’t answer. But she put her hands on his face and her mouth hurt, because she knew that after tomorrow she
would never see his face again.

“You’ll have to catch the
morning
bus,” she said.

T
oby took the morning bus to town. The train would bring him back past the farm, but there was no station here. Anna didn’t go to Halifax with him. It would be easier to go back alone to their rooms in Halifax from here, than from the waterfront.

The bus was due at eleven-thirty.

Breakfast talk started out the same as always; but as the morning wore on, it slackened. It became two hours and then one hour before the bus was due. Then the conversation seemed to run down entirely. It seemed as if Toby and Anna had used up all the last-minute things too soon. Now there was nothing to do but watch the clock and the road.

They had an early dinner. As soon as the dishes were cleared away, David invented chores for himself outdoors. He felt the spectator’s subtle banishment and guilt. Though when he did come into the house there didn’t seem to be anything private going on between Toby and Anna: no kissing or confidences.

They just kept moving about, from room to room. They glanced at each other awkwardly, as if they didn’t want to let each other out of sight, but as if there was no way they could stand close enough together to stop the bus from coming.

The packing was finished. Anna had folded Toby’s clothes in the suitcase as soberly as if she were composing someone’s limbs. The suitcase stood, accusing, in the centre of the kitchen floor; as if
it
were what had betrayed them.

The clock struck eleven. Toby put on his greatcoat and picked up his hat. They both looked at each other as if, if they’d only realized
before
that soberness was a more binding thing than smiling …

“Have you got your scarf?” Anna said, though his scarf was in plain sight about his neck.

“Yes,” Toby said.

Then after a little she said, “You’re sure you’ve got your pen?”

She’d asked him that, but he put his hand to his inside pocket once more.

The unfinished jigsaw puzzle had been transferred from the kitchen table to the centre table in the front room. One of them would pick up a piece of the jigsaw now and then, in passing, and try to fit it in somewhere; but the piece was never the right one. Then one would move to the sink, taking a sip of water from the dipper; or to the fireplace, lifting up an object from the mantelpiece; or to the window, looking down the road; and after a minute the other would move alongside. But they wouldn’t stand in any one place long. There was no place in the house they could find to stand that would stop the bus from coming.

David carried the suitcase to the road. He watched for the bus there, by himself.

When the bus shot into sight, coming fast around the far corner, he ran in and tapped on the window. Toby signalled okay to him, but he didn’t come out at once. The bus was rushing closer. David tapped again. Toby came to the door, then turned. David saw his arms reach out. The bus was almost opposite the house. Toby dashed out then. He gave David a glancing handshake as he ran to the road. “Good luck,” David said, and Toby called back, “Okay, boy, thanks for everything.”

The bus slowed down and Toby got on. Its motor idled a minute while Toby bought his ticket. Then it picked up volume, and the bus began to creep away. And then, gathering speed all at once, the bus went faster and faster around the corner out of sight.

Anna was still standing at the window when David went into the house. She didn’t turn. She just said, “Was the bus crowded?”

“No,” David said, “not bad.”

He went to the shop and picked up his hack and went over to the field next the railway cut.

The train would pass this field. Toby will be looking toward the house, he thought. He’ll see me. We’ll wave to each other, and I can tell Anna that Toby waved to us.

He was at the top of a row when he heard the noise of the train. He ran down to the bottom, close to the tracks.

But when the great nose of the train came in sight, thundering nearer and nearer the cut, the old awkwardness came back. He dropped down on one knee, pretending to tie his bootlace. When Toby sees me, he thought, he’ll wave. Then I’ll look up, as if I just
happened
to be here, and wave back.

Toby wasn’t in the first car, but he saw him in the second, clearly. He was walking ahead through the train with another sailor. As the train came opposite the field, he turned to the other sailor and said something. Both of them appeared to laugh. He doesn’t have to wait with them, like he does with others, David thought.

He stood up straight then, and waved.

But Toby didn’t glance once, not once, toward the house or the field. The train went by.

David stood rooted in the row. He leaned on the hack he’d brought with him to dig out the stubborn parsnips. He
followed the train with his eyes. The train wound quickly through the cut. The grey cloud of its smoke thinned and settled over the trees. The clucking of its rails became a far-off clatter. And then the whistle of the train blew ever so distantly for the next station, and the whole train had disappeared from the day.

A hollowness sucked suddenly against his breath. Toby’s knife still lay there, abandoned beside the carelessly topped turnips … and Toby had gone away in the train. All the thinking came back in a rush.

But the panic wasn’t only that the one friend he’d ever had had gone away. It was more than that.
It was always someone else
that things happened to, that was the panic of it …

He looked at the apple trees he had pruned to such perfect shape, and so proudly, in the spring that was gone. A baring and frightening light shone suddenly on his own life. It was like a strip of daybreak striking down a long naked corridor.