The Mountain and the Valley (46 page)

He felt the touch of the log road under his feet and he smelled the incarnate oranges on the Christmas tree. He tasted again the incredibly translucent saluting “wine.” You barely
sipped it at first so it would never end, then more fearfully still when it did lower in the cup; but it was sweeter somehow when it was almost all gone …

He saw the grey rocks and he felt again the great ashen bolt of sickness that came out of the barn floor into his stomach the second before unconsciousness, and saw the shadow of the mailbox on the road the day he’d opened Anna’s letter and the word “telegram” struck at his eyes … He heard a jay cry, and he saw the light strike through the branches again after his first blindness in the daytime, that first time with Effie …

It was as if time were not a movement now, but flat. Like space. Things past or future were not downstream or upstream on a one-way river, but in rooms. They were all on the same level. You could walk from room to room and look at them, without ascent or descent. It was as if the slope of time had levelled off at this moment. It didn’t go by while you were reaching out to touch it. It was waiting for you. It waited for you to straighten things out, before it moved on.

He moved on. The brook crossed the road higher up. He lay flat and drank. His face was mirrored in the brook. It was parched looking as with sleeplessness. The blood of his thoughts made no fulness in his cheeks or eyes. Strands of hair escaped raggedly under his dislocated cap. He didn’t remark his face in the brook; or how, when his lips touched the water, its image wobbled and disintegrated.

When he rose, the blackness swam in his head again. He stood and waited for it to clear.

I’m tired, he thought, I should go back. But it wasn’t like the tired when you had to lift not only the dreaded log but your muscles too. It was like after that, a long time after that. Then any of the logs was possible to lift, because your muscles were bottomless.

He walked on.

And now he was halfway up the mountain, where the leafless hardwood began. Past the branch road where he and Chris had built the lean- to and believed that made them feel like men for the first time; past the branch road where he had done the thing with Effie that he’d thought was the miraculous short cut to manhood, but hadn’t really changed anything; past the highest point of the brook that had held all their images at some time or other as they knelt to drink, and now fell downward behind him.

The road elbowed here. It cut perfectly flat across the mountain, then turned sharply upward again.

The hardwood, unlike the spruces, stood singly and separate: the gaunt grey-bare maples with half shells of fungus along their sides; the slim white-bare birches with kidney-shaped dappling of brown on their curling yellow-lined bark; the shining-bare silver poplars; and the heavy-bare lizard-barked beeches. The cold yellow sun and the thin cold air hung and breathed in the spaces between them, like a great centrifugal eddy of lightness. Their limbless trunks broke into a twist of searching branches as they reached higher against the sky. They were as still as their own laced shadows in the soundless air. There was no green here at all. Last summer’s leaves lay on the ground, carpeted tight with the cold. Their membraneous yellow was diamonded with white pinpoints of frost.

There was a clearing on the left. Here switches of maple sprouted from the stumps. They had the pink blush of blood.

And along the road here, there was the pink blood too. David remembered the shots he’d heard yesterday as he watered the cows. A tiny trail showed on the runner tracks, where the blood had stained brightly at first, then fainter as it honeycombed into the icy crust. It had gathered and
dropped steadily from the loose body of a rabbit in some hunter’s hand.

He stopped again, to rest.

And, turning, suddenly across the clearing and swiftly downward over the dark shoulder of the spruces, in the swimming mist of lightness like a breath caught in falling, he saw far-off and beneath him and in every sharp detail the whole stretch of the soundless valley. This stretch of the road was on his own woodlot. He was alone. The safe wall of spruces was protectedly between him and the valley. And far below him he could see his own house and his own fields.

A cloud skimmed the sun. With it, a wide skirt of shadow slid swiftly along the road, then disappeared. He had seen a momentary undulation ribbon through the oatfield like that on a still summer’s afternoon.

And suddenly a breaker of exaltation rushed through him in just such way.

It was the thing that comes only once or twice ever, without hint or warning. It was the complete translation to another time. There is no other shock so sweet, no transfiguration so utter.

It is not a
memory
of that time: there is no echo quality to it. It is something that deliberate memory (with the changed perspective of the years between changing the very object it lights) cannot achieve at all. It is not a returning: you are there for the first time, immediately. No one has been away, nothing has changed—the time or the place or the faces. The years between have been shed. There is an original glow on the faces like on the objects of home. It is like a flash of immortality: nothing behind you is sealed, you can live it again. You can begin again …

A spring of tears caught in David’s flesh. He wasn’t standing on the road at all.

He was waking that clean April morning and touching Chris’s face to wake him too and tell him that the very day was here at last—the day they were going back to the camp on the mountain. And he saw how wonderful his father’s face was for
not
knowing (as he himself did) what a splendid thing he was doing as he adjusted the strap lengths of his pack … and his mother’s for not knowing what mystery she dealt in as she packed the food … and his grandmother’s for not knowing his legs could never get tired … and Chris’s for not knowing how wonderful he was because he was going too … and Anna’s because (all at once he thought he was going to cry) she had to stay home. And because they didn’t know (as he did) that the road of all the days ahead would be long and wonderful because they walked together …

And then, again and again, like the mounting of music that keeps passing the melody from one instrument to another, he was translated to other moments …

He was lying in bed after the dance, wider awake than he could ever be in the daylight. The swirl of the dancers he’d watched from a corner, the eddies of laughter, and the heartswinging fiddle music moved livelier than ever in his brain. But there was a kind of hunger following along behind it all, and reaching for it.

And then, all at once, the answer to it came. A quiet spread out over all the loose ends of excitement. It gathered them up into a swimming peace. It was so beautifully simple: When he grew up he’d be the best fiddle player in the whole world …

(They were dancing past now, his music springing in their movements. They were smiling at him. And then they stopped dancing and came and stood beside him, quietly. They looked at him with a shining in their eyes, as if they
couldn’t understand how it was
possible
for anyone to play like that. And he was so proud and humble both. And he loved them, he loved
everything
, when he heard his own music and saw the way they looked at him. It was so wonderful and easy and he had
found
this thing he could do.)

And then he was sitting in the schoolroom …

The afternoon sun dozed on the jack-knife designs cut into his desk and on the Map of the World and the Globe and the softwood floor. A bee was buzzing against the bottles of molasses lined up along the windowsill. The room was like an island of hush inside the great whispering
out
side of the ripe fruit on the huckleberry bushes and the ball waiting to be thrown and the long steep hill. And he tried the arithmetic problem that was three grades ahead of him. He tried it several ways, and then he saw that the number he was dividing with this time was the same odd one (139) as the denominator in the fractional part of the answer at the back of the book. Everything inside his mind was gathered up in one great shiver of unity. He knew he’d be the most famous mathematician there ever was …

He was in the kitchen,
again
, that day they were talking about the drive … and suddenly he rushed out and broke the jam. He could hear the great shout from the bank, as he leapt from log to log, because no one had believed it could be done …

And then he was in town. In the tent at the fair. The strangers were crowding about him, and his father’s hand had never seemed such a good thing to have in his. Then the man and girl with the bright scarlet shirts came out on the platform and danced. They were so wonderful you couldn’t imagine what sort of thing they could be saying to each other when they stepped back inside the curtain. And then he was driving home after dark and sleep was so near that if you closed your
eyes the wagon seemed to be going backwards … and suddenly he knew he’d be the most wonderful dancer that people had ever seen …

And then he picked up the magazine that blustery afternoon. He saw the pictures of sailors leaning over the rail of a ship, and he knew he’d be the only man who ever went every single place in the world and did everything in the whole world there was to do …

And then, abruptly, he was standing on the road again. The trees were back in their places. The moment of translation had passed as quickly as it had come.

He lit another cigarette and went on. The road climbed sharply now, and straight, to the top of the mountain.

His heart was beating fast. And now the voices of the things he saw had an edge of insistence. A sharper, drawing, eating challenge. They began to swarm. They asked, and then listened, to be heard exactly. He had felt this insistence of theirs before, but never as now. Never so bold and relentless, giving him no quarter whatever.

His mind was not confused: that was the exquisite tantalization. If he took the voices one at a time, his listening could trace sharp and clear every vein of their story.

And yet some unquenchable leaven in the mind’s thirst kept sending it back for the taste of complete realization it just missed. Even if you listened thoroughly, they seemed to wait, with that awful, chiding stillness, for something more. The mere
presence
of the objects about him was like a kind of accusation. It was as if you’d been given eyes for the first time; your first sight was met by the teeming insatiable hunger to be seen, of everything there was. The swarming multitude of all the voices it was physically impossible to attend to gave him a sense of exquisite guilt.

The fact of that maple growing exactly that way; that beech; that pine … That little cloud that way and no other; that little cloud I didn’t see, exactly the way
it
was … The road running that way; and all the runner tracks laced over it exactly as they are … The number of the leaves; the exact number of all the leaves … That birch; the trees behind that birch … The sun; exactly the way that shadow is under that poplar; exactly the way the shadow was there yesterday … That cradle hill; exactly the number of all the cradle hills; the shape exactly of all the cradle hills I do not see … That limb twisted that way and exactly that shade of grey … yes, the twigs on that limb; exactly the way each twig is bent; yes, yes, the
leaf
on that twig; exactly the way the veins are in that leaf and no other way; exactly the way the sap is inside each vein I cannot see … The number of needles on all the spruces; exactly the way each one is bent; and the way the one I didn’t see moved in the wind yesterday; the way the cells inside that one needle were; yes, exactly the way the sun made a shadow on that needle in the smaller-than-a-second of that morning a year and twenty-two days ago … The exact way the log chain spun itself a little channel in the snow on the road; yes, exactly the way that one lump of snow spun that day; the way the one crystal and the smaller-than-crystal of that lump of snow spun that day; exactly
what
it was; and the motion of it, and the colour of it; and the shadow of it; in that very place, unlike any other … And exactly the number of crystals of the snow in other places and other times that I didn’t see …

The voices became suddenly infinite. Each one fanned at the touch of thought into another infinite divisibility.

They sounded and rushed in his head until it seemed as if he must go out
into
these things. He must
be
a tree and a stone and a shadow and a crystal of snow and a thread of moss and
the veining of a leaf. He must be exactly as each of them was, everywhere and in all times; or the guilt, the exquisite parching for the taste of completion, would never be allayed at all.

The road rose sharper still toward the top of the mountain.

Now the hardwood was greater. The limbs began higher up on the trunk, and the breath of the cold sunlight in the spaces between them lifted lighter and lighter.

Time was moving again, faster than ever now. Each moment just escaped the reach of the moment before it.

And David’s legs began to move faster. Without direction from his mind. They moved now like the limbs of one who has run until he can run no longer, yet runs on because the voice of his frightened child is still calling. His heart was beating faster too. He didn’t hear it at all.

And now the fact of exactly the way that
faces
happened to be—exactly that way because of exactly all the
feelings
behind them—added its cry to the voices of the objects about him. It was a more exquisite accusing still.

 … the face of my father nights in the kitchen listening to Anna hear my spellings, hearing a son of his own flesh spell correctly words he himself didn’t even know the meaning of … His face the day the hay was perfect to haul in and then the wagon wheel struck a rock and broke. When he unhooked the horses from the wagon the nigh one tangled in the traces and sprained her hip so she could barely put her foot to the ground. Then suddenly the wind came and flattened the corn, but the rain didn’t come; and then we got out the single wagon after the wind died down and put the single horse between the shafts and Father smiled at me and said, “We’ll lick her yet, son”: and then, right then, the first great drops of rain came … And his face the night the day’s work
was all done and the lonesome-shadowing sun sank red in the windows of the church and the barn and in the needled-over puddles by the woodpile and Mother came in from the line with the chilled clothes in her arms, still silent, and the long silent evening and the long silent night were ahead.