The Mountain and the Valley (45 page)

Though the will remained unbroken, it was the mood
after
all these. The movement was reversed. Even the sensations of his own flesh had become outside. The inside was nothing but one great white naked eye of self-consciousness, with only its own looking to look at. The frozen landscape made no echo inside him. There was no tendril of interaction.

And then (in the reverse of what happens when you stare at a pattern of lines until suddenly the pattern moves off the page and cleaves to your retina), as he looked at the frozen landscape it was as if the outline of the frozen landscape
became
his consciousness: that inside and outside were not two things, but one—the bare shape of what his eyes saw.

His legs moved automatically. He spread the wires of the fence apart and bent to pass through them. A barb caught in his pants. A little gust of irritation bifurcated the inside from the outside again. He extricated the barb from the cloth and let the wires fall back into place.

As he straightened, a dizziness whorled in his head like the sinuousness of the medicine he’d taken as a child, when it was poured into water. He waited for the darkness to thin away.

He walked quickly down the sidehill of the pasture, and there was the log road before him, shining and straight. Sled loads of wood had compressed it hard and smooth. Until you were close enough to see the yellow urine-holes of the men and horses, and the manure and hubble-peak ground brown into the whiteness, the runner tracks shone like isinglass.

He stepped out onto the smooth road. All at once walking became almost effortless, as if his flesh had levitated.

The road crossed the swamp, dotted with alders and clumps of reed, before it disappeared into the dark shelf of spruces at the foot of the mountain. A team of horses was coming across the swamp toward him. Grey moustaches of frost ringed their nervous nostrils. They lifted their sharp-shod feet daintily. Their necks arched nervously sidewise as if a play of heat lightning were never still in their muscles. Their flesh shuddered with it as when, in the summertime, they tried to dislodge a fly.

It was Steve’s team, David saw, as they came closer.

Steve sat on a bag of hay at the front of the load. He held the reins tightly in one hand, and in the other a long peeled switch. Now and then he’d flick a shred of bark or lichen off the wood with it, or let the frayed tip of it drag alongside the sled. He watched intently the little wake of granulate snow that followed the runner as the runner sheared through the crust.

His mind was still too. But not in the way that David’s was.

No thought shaped itself into the boundaries of singleness or clarity; but the ingredients of thoughts slid and mixed together in his head softly. They rose and fell smoothly in the bright hard day, the way the sled runners rode up against rocks
by the side of the road now and then, and then slipped smoothly back into the track. Health was in him like a cadence. It was memoried only with the bright day-memory of food or heat or cold, or the shivering night-memory of softer flesh against his own. He wasn’t conscious of his body at all. It was neither inside nor outside.

Steve’s half-thoughts made a cadence only slightly louder than the unattended cadence of his flesh. They drifted upward from his mind, then thinned away, like a column of smoke flattening out and dissolving in a lazy air.

He had a half-plan forward (to dig a well?) … a half-reflection backward (the log
leaning
right, but the wind wrong) … a half-picture of some face in another time (with maybe a wisp of half-sadness), or of some word that had been spoken or would be spoken (not heard now as from a tongue but like a word read). The smile or the frown appropriate to it came through partly to his lips. He had a half-shimmer of a touch (another child maybe … his son’s face seemed like the only possible way a son of his
could
look, but what might a girl look like?) … a half-recognizance of now (the sled runners worn thin—then the smell of the coal in the forge and the sound of the bright hammer-clink on the bright-hot steel) …

He had lived as many years as David, but time itself was a thing he would never hear or see. There was inside and outside for him too, but he would never look at the eye of his own watching. He saw the trees and the fields. Yet in a way he didn’t see them at all. A tree was a tree, a thing for the axe. A field was a field. You hauled across it when it was frozen, ploughed it when it was soft. That’s all there was to it.

Steve came close. The image of the fields was replaced in David’s consciousness by the image of his own face, obtrusive and transparent at the same time.

He and Steve kept their glances awkwardly apart. They gave no indication they had seen each other until the distance between them was just right for the first words of recognition. But as soon as they had spoken, the awkwardness disappeared. David’s mind deliberately suspended its own nature. It assumed the cast of Steve’s. He could synchronize his behaviour with any of theirs now. He could put their thoughts into words; and hearing them spoken, they’d be as pleased as if they’d been able to find the words themselves.

Steve would expect some congratulatory remark about his new team, then some reference to the body. The body was Steve’s one steady joke.

David glanced along the load. “Cord or better?” he said.

“Yeah. Little better’n a cord, I think … Nine, ten feet.”

Steve stretched out one leg and drew a packet of makings from his overall pocket. He rolled a cigarette. David straightened the nigh horse’s breeching.

“Nice little team. Twelve hundred?”

“The mare’s around twelve. Horse’s a little heavier.”

“A little quick, ain’t they? But I’d rather have em that way … and willin.”

“They’re willin all right. I musta had thirteen feet on em yistiddy … green wood. Look, them things jist rabbit-jumped that raise be the house there.” He ran the switch over the washboard of wrinkles in his high leather boots.

“How’s the goin?” David said.

“Beautiful. She’s a little scratchy on the pavement, but the mountain’s beautiful. Hell, I had to bridle the front sled too. Goin choppin?”

“No, I guess it’s too late today. Just takin a little cruise around.”

“I see a nice pocket a second growth up there on you
when I was huntin this fall. I don’t believe it’s had an axe in it since yer grandfather cut there.”

“No, I guess it ain’t. I’ll have to strike that some day soon.”

There was a moment’s silence. Steve put the reins under his rump. He flailed his arms a couple of times around his chest.

“Sharp, today, what?” he said.

“Yeah,” David said. “Should have a mitten for the old thing today.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. A little smile lit in his eyes, as if some secret place had been tickled behind the slow dark face.

“I guess you’ll pull something up over it tonight, eh?” David said.

“You’re damn right,” Steve said.

He laughed out loud. David laughed too and moved off.

Steve started the horses. A minute or so later he reined them up again.

“That’s what
you
wanta git, Dave,” he called, “a little thing to pull over it these cold nights.”

“That’s what I got to do,” David called back. “Save on wood, eh?” But he was far enough away that Steve couldn’t see his face clearly. It wasn’t necessary to fabricate a smile this time.

Steve moved on. His thoughts were defined, now.

Tonight. Yes, sir, boy. The little smile nestled through all his flesh. He glanced at David. Comical duck. Make a dog laugh. Queer bugger. Choppin! Hell, he just goes up there and roams around. I see him roamin around up there last week. Funny bugger. Not much like old Joe. Kee-roust,
that
man could chop. Dave ain’t strong, though, I guess. (“Not strong” was like the name of some place in his son’s geography, where people with strange customs lived.) Wonder how his heart is these days. No good to ask him. Can’t git nothin outa him.
Queer bugger. Good bugger, though. Never see him flustered. Never see him mad but that once—the night Chris picked out the smallest pack of moosemeat fer him to carry. Never know them two was brothers. Smart bugger. Smart as hell. God, that thing could spell in school … And figures … And books … Funny it never got him nowheres. Nothin stuck up about him, though. Wonder if he ever gut around that Bess Delahunt after she married agin … er that girl a hers … what was her name—Effie? Plan he did. Never find out from
him
, though. Close. (“Git over there, Molly! Where the hell d’ya think ye’re …?”) Roamin up there all be himself and it cold enough to … Comical duck. What was that he said, now? … 
oh
, yes. The secret little smile came back. You’re darned right he’d pull it up over tonight … (How did that new song on the radio go—“You’re my filligiducha, shinimarucha …”? He hummed it, amused.)

He glanced back once, at the bend of the road. David had gone out of sight. He shook his head. Comical duck …

David moved along the road. His mind was still again. The scrub spruce became thicker nearer the end of the pasture, but he could still glimpse the bare fields through them. Even the ghosts of whatever things had happened here seemed to have fled. A no-memory was in the trees bleaker than the cold.

He came to the pole bridge at the foot of the mountain.

The brook was frozen inward from the rocky banks, hard and colourless. Only at small open spaces near the centre could the water be seen. It hung in drops from the scalloped lips of the ice and flowed coldly over the drowned reeds beneath.

He stopped at the bridge. He stared at the pads of a rabbit track. They were stalked like mushrooms by the snow thawing beneath them, then freezing again. His gaze was
like a child’s at print he can’t read. The cold air’s circle of contact with his head defined his head’s heaviness.

Then he began to feel the air like a hand at his temples. It sent a little of its coolness inside, drew a little of the heaviness out. It made a little shrug in the stillness like the first deep breath after a long quiet hour in a closed room.

And then a little blood began to steal back into the day’s flesh. A little pulse crept back into the road and the trees, like flesh made face by the information of invisible thoughts behind it. A living movement began to come into the insensible movement of the brook, as a trouble melts and moves as it begins to be told. Everything he looked at was refocused (though not quite instantly: the voice that breaks into sleep is woven into the dream for a second, before the second of waking).

His mind had a new stillness now. When a quarrel’s heat is past, and then the friend’s devaluation is past too, there is only overture necessary for reconciliation. Just before the inundation of peace made again, there is that sort of stillness then. Tendrils of thought began to curl outward. The way his grandmother and the fields had seemed to him struck him with a kind of penitence; as if they had been docile before some wounding on his part. Even his illness seemed like some guilt of his own.

He took a long deep breath. And then he began to climb the mountain.

II

The mountain rose with immediate sharpness from the beach of the pasture. The spruces at its base were impenetrable to the eye. There was no breeze, but a sigh hung in their branches all the time.

David walked along the road through the spruces. He bent forward to the incline. The beating of his heart brought a kind of lightness to his body now. The cold air and the rush of his blood thinned the ache and the emptiness, distributed it more tolerably throughout all his flesh. A brightness played over his thoughts, like the quickening of fever.

He stopped a minute at a spot where the road levelled off. He noticed two cigarette butts on a bare patch by the flat rock. He lit a cigarette, himself, and looked around. He could see nothing but the spruces, from turn to turn, and the smooth white lane between them. The sight of the houses and the bare fields (stripping as the first cast of dawn that sentences the wakeful’s last hope of sleep) could not reach him at all. He was alone. Now he was absolutely alone.

He said, “It’s perfect here.” Involuntarily. Aloud.

With the use of his tongue, the sound of it suddenly in the stillness broke the grip on his thinking as the first halting words of forgiveness do. The face came back to everything.

Shape and colour reached out to him like voices. The black-green sweep of the spruces’ lower limbs like an inhalation sustained immobile in the chest of the tree … the yellow-green of the hemlock branches, twig-laced in a snow crystal pattern, like a breath outward … the lemon-green murmurous-needled pine overturned by the wind, its ragged anchor of roots and earth like the shape of the thunder of its own falling … And, beneath the trees, was the other, inchboundaried, earth-clinging forest: the brown-green moss and the mayflower runners and botany-book topknots; the grey-green, antlered lichens. And here was a stump that had once been green, but now was white as bone; and there was a grey rock, heavy with its own unshapeliness. It had never had any touch of green at all, nor ever would …

He thought of the fields. Unseen, they no longer seemed bare. He thought of the people in the valley. Now they were out of sight, his own face moved kindredly among them. They were pliant in his mind’s eye to whatever aspect he cast them in. His thought didn’t fall back before them, as it did before the shrivelling light of their physical presence. (Angry words you have ready dissolve if the other is unexpectedly smiling; the joke dissolves if he is sullen.)

He could think of anything now. Everything seemed to be an aspect of something else. There seemed to be a thread of similarity running through the whole world. A shape could be like a sound; a feeling like a shape; a smell the shadow of a touch … His senses seemed to run together.

He looked at the high blue sky and he heard again the first sound of his father’s sleighbells coming home from town (holding his breath at the corner of the house, to make the listening more intense). He felt again the touch of the ground under his feet as he ran inside to tell Chris and Anna and to wonder together what his father had brought them. He tasted again the water that ran cool and clean even in the dusty summer beneath the scooped-out banks where the ferns grew. He smelled the thick safe smell of the spruces and he felt again the touch of Anna’s hand the day she’d left her play to pick blueberries to buy herself the silk dress on the catalogue cover. It had come dark and she hadn’t come home and he, of them all, had been the one to find her. She had been lost and crying, and he had cried too—because he had found her, and somehow too because she had only a few berries in her dipper and those were full of green ones and leaves …