The Mountain and the Valley (44 page)

This was the toppling moment of clarity which comes once to everyone, when he sees the face of his whole life in every detail. He saw then that the unquestioned premise all his calculations had been built on was false. He realized for the first time that his feet must go on in their present path, because all the crossroad junctions had been left irretrievably far behind. Anything your own hands had built, he had always thought, your own hands could destroy. You could build a wall about yourself, for safety’s sake, but whenever you chose you could level it. That wasn’t true, he saw now. After a while you could beat against the wall all you liked, but it was indestructible. The cast of loneliness became pitted in your flesh. It was as plain for others to see and shy away from as the slouch of a convict.

I will always be a stranger to everybody, he thought—the others know that I don’t know what any of their things is like. My own life brimmed and emptied so soon, and I could never fill it again.

A montage of all the things he had never done with someone else flashed on the screen of his brain. Then they fragmented into pictures. Each one was realized completely and simultaneously in a single instant, as a whole day’s happenings may pass in the elastic time of a moment’s dream. The tidy little pleasures he’d had by himself—the pleasures that had tricked him—shrivelled like dried peas.

He had never gone on a fishing trip with them, sitting sidewise in the front seat so he could clown with the ones in back, leaning over to cramp their knee tendons with his grip, when they pretended they were going to stop the car and open his fly the next girl they came to … No man had ever shouted, in a mock argument when everyone was drinking, “Where’s Dave? Where’s Dave?” and then come over and put an arm over his shoulder and said, confidentially, “Dave … listen … now tell us the truth. Did
you
ever know me to …?”

No woman had ever been watching for him when he was late for a meal or late from town or late from anything else—scaring herself deliberately (so she could flush the consciousness of what their belonging to each other really meant to her) with the thought, what if anything has happened to him? … He would never, never now, sit with a wife and child at the school closing, with the child’s gamin face lit up and the water glistening on his subdued hair but his eyes flagging a little when he wasn’t called up for any prize … or, for some reason, put his arm about this woman when they’d come across a wilted thistle (not a bunch of daisies or a sheaf of goldenrod, but a thistle) that the child
had toted around through the whole day’s trip, in a broken preserve bottle.…

No, nor never stand, never now, and watch a child watch the train of the circus they couldn’t afford to go see in town pass through the cut, with the child’s face hurting him more than anything he had ever felt, and yet everything else in the world suddenly devaluated beside the exaltation of the child’s belonging to him … He would never keep repeating, “Did you see it plain?” after the deer ran across the clearing, so that each time the child answered “Oh yes!” the child could have the excitement all over again …

He stood there immobile.

There had been a war, but he hadn’t been in it. There had been these things while he was alive and young, but they’d all been for other men. The trains had all gone by. The grey smoke settled on the fields and he was standing there alone, with a hack.

They went away to war and maybe they’d never come back. There was always that maybe-the-last-time brightness rushing along with them in the trains. It bonded them together. They went with the trains, laughing and thoughtless. They took with them all the life from the valleys they left, but they didn’t see that. They never stayed at the station to see the grey smoke settling on the faces of the people turning home, settling on the bare fields.

And what if Rod
is
dead today? You had a drink with him last night. And the sadness isn’t the same when you drink again tonight as though you’d known each other some other way. This drink tonight has a funny brightness, because the one you’re drinking with knew Rod too. The little badge of maybe-the-last-time that neither of you can see except on the other burns brighter still. They forget Rod, he thought. They
remember their wives and their friends. But it’s the funny way they remember Rod all the time, even when he’s out of mind, that’s real. The way their wives cry and their friends miss them has no part in it like that at all.

He thought of Toby at the pulse of all this, with a fierce jealousy. It had
always
been like that for Toby. They went away together in the trains, but it wasn’t like the way they rode with you in the bus. They sang the sailor’s hymn on the deck, that day of the big morning, but it wasn’t like the singing in the parlour that day. There was incongruous brightness about it being a hymn (like “Aged 17” on the tombstone that day) and about Rod not being there now who had had a drink with you when death was at his elbow. The little things of the farm had been fun for Toby, but they were things for a leave only. Now they were nothing to him. Toby had never talked to him about the day of the big morning. He was outside …

A hard ball of new misery came at him (as if he were a figure shot at in the booth of a fair, one with sentience no one knew about). It struck him and set his lips working: he had been Toby’s friend
here
, but that would mean nothing to Toby now. He’d never had that little badge, he’d never had a drink with any of the Rods …

He fought back with desperate, foolish plans.

When Toby comes back, he thought, I’ll do something to put
him
outside, something he’ll be jealous of … But then he knew that nothing he could ever do would put Toby outside as
he
was outside this. He knew that even if Toby was killed—more than ever, if Toby should be killed—he was beaten.

He heard Toby’s voice, as clearly as if he were there, singing the sailor’s hymn that morning clear and strong above
all the others’ voices. A blind hatred of Toby went through him. It seemed as if that were a part of his own life he was seeing—his life stolen before his eyes, and drawn away just fast enough that he was always a step behind when he gave chase. It wasn’t fair. His face was like Toby’s … the hat didn’t look funny on him …

A wild longing possessed him. He
had
to be inside, singing on the deck that day of the big morning, with the little badge that was invisible except to the others on him too … He
had
to be inside and, cruelly as they and as thoughtlessly, put everyone else outside … leave even wives to cry, with that beautiful thoughtless cruelty. They walked ahead in the trains, together. They didn’t do some chore, carefully, at dusk, with no one there.

He looked about the field. The afternoon was grey and still with the train gone. He looked about like someone looking for a place to run, the blind way people run out of doors when their clothes are on fire.

The thought of the night chores came to him: filling the coffee tin to the second nail scratch with middlings because the calf was now two months old; dipping the cracked corn for the hens from the wooden box he’d built to hold just enough from one feed delivery day to the next; straining the milk into the creamer if the mess seemed smaller than usual, as if by straining it slowly he could make it rise higher; wondering if it would rise high enough to surface exactly level with the glass gauge on the side … And, later, the book he’d be reading. The damned, airless, tricking book … They walked ahead in the trains—there was always that company, that maybe-the-last-time brightness—and the smoke of the train settled behind them and the train of your own life went by and left you standing there in the field.

A sudden gust of tears surged against his breath. It broke with a little cluck. He caught his lower lip hard between his teeth. His face puckered as if all its nerves had been struck at once. The scar burned white as moonlight in the chill afternoon.

“Damn you,” he shouted to Toby, “I’m not crying for you …”

And then he raised the hack high above his head, till the pain of his head ran freely down his arm and down his whole side. He moved for the first time. Quickly, almost running, he rushed up the row with a wild comical stagger. He slashed at the pulpy flesh of the parsnips blindly, wherever the hack fell, the whole length of the long even row.

And then the hack was still in his hands again, and in his mind there was only a stillness like the stillness of snow sifting through the spokes of the wagon wheels or the moonlight on the frozen road or the dark brook at night when the children have all taken their laughing home …

It was dusk when Anna called him to supper.

He was on his knees, patting the torn flesh of the parsnips back into shape as best he could. Maybe if he put sods around them in the cellar, they wouldn’t spoil. There was no trace of thinking on his face now. Nothing but the crusted smudge of a tear track he had wiped at with his dusty hand.

He glanced at Anna’s face when he came into the kitchen. She didn’t look as if she had cried at all.

“Weren’t you cold, Dave,” she said, “with just that thin jacket on?”

“No,” he said, “I didn’t mind it.”

They didn’t mention Toby. They moved about as if each were clumsy with some secret guilt.

They sat down to the table and Anna picked up her fork.

And then—what was there about starting to eat the first meal alone?—she dropped the fork and began to sob. Totally, collapsing, like a child you can do nothing to distract.

“Don’t cry, Anna,” David said softly. “He’ll be all right.” He hesitated. “He waved to us,” he said.

Anna’s disordered face shifted back into shape again with a single movement. She gathered up her breath. She brushed away the betraying tears with one hand. Her face composed itself into such quiet it had a blunted look.

“Did the potatoes get done?” she said. She drew in her breath quickly whenever the words threatened to break. “I don’t know, I don’t seem to have much
for
your supper tonight, Dave.”

“This is fine,” David said.

Anna, Anna, Anna … Her name sang in his head.

Now, even with Anna … even with Anna now … he was outside.

He was measuring out the middlings for the calf when the bus came. It stopped and Ellen got out. She started toward the house with her suitcase.

“Leave it there,” David called to her from the shop door. “I’ll get it.”

“Well, don’t run, child,” she called back. “Now don’t run.”

“Child”!

This day … this day …

The pail of skim milk was almost more than his left arm could support on the way to the barn, but he didn’t shift it to the right or set it down, halfway, and rest. Something
unplastic, unbent, unshuffling in him, still drove straight ahead. His father, Joseph, would keep chopping as long as he could see, though his axe was dull and his feet were cold and the rest of the crew had given in to the blizzard hours ago.

THE MOUNTAIN

D
avid stood at the window now, watching the highway.

An ache fountained somewhere above the scar. It never rose to actual pain, but it seeped through his whole head. Rain had taken the first snow on the fields and then the sudden cold had come. Detail came clearly enough to his sight, but it was as if another glass, beyond the glass of the window pane, covered everything, made touch between any two things impossible.

He stood absolutely still.

“What are you doing, David?” Ellen turned from the rug.

He didn’t reply.

“What are you looking at, child?” she asked again.

“Nothing,” he said.

She turned back to the rug.

“Have you fed the hens, David?” she said.

“It’s only two o’clock,” he said.

“It will soon be dark …”

“It’s not dark yet.”

She filled the spaces between two circles with strips of the tablecloth. Blue … she searched for a strip of blue.

“Have you fed the hens, David?” she said.

He turned then, suddenly. In a single movement he took his cap from the row of hooks beside the window and put it on his head. He took his jacket from the next hook.

Ellen turned. “Where are you going, child, at this time of day?”

“Not very far,” he said.

“Will you be warm enough? You’re not half clad.”

“Yes,
yes
, I’ll be warm enough.”

“Don’t fall.”

He put on his jacket and filled up the stove again. He hesitated. “The stove’s all right till I get back,” he said.

Blue … blue …

Yes, that was blue. That was David’s. That was a blanket. That was the blanket they’d wrapped David and Anna in the night they were born. They were twins. But David was not a baby. How …?

She turned. “David,” she began, “how …?”

There was no one in the room.
David
was here. Where was David?

David walked down the path to the gate. The wind had turned the mailbox at right angles to the road: the mailman would think there were letters to go tomorrow. He straightened it automatically. He stepped into the road without looking.

A car swerved and its horn blew. He started. The sound of the horn gave him that instant sense of exposure. The woman in front looked at him idly, without break in her conversation with the driver. His glance didn’t follow the car when it had passed.

He went across the road slowly, his eyes on the ground, then past the barn and over the bars between the cow yard and
the pasture. In the pasture his step quickened. He hurried across the cradle hills and around the bunches of juniper and alders, to the road that went to the top of the mountain.

His mind was still. The headache and the beating of his heart and flesh were suspended, with a downward tension, from his brain. They were in his head like a sound. His flesh had weight without solidity. His thoughts clung tight to his brain, like a fog that hugs the fields. There was no beat in the day. Time was not a movement, but a
feature
of the frozen fields.

It was not the mood of defeat. Defeat pushes the inside back a little, but the inside and the outside remain distinct. Nor of despair, when the gap widens further still: there is still the bridge of conscious loneliness. Nor of apathy, when the inside is routed completely and the outside moves in to fill the vacuum.