The Mountain and the Valley (47 page)

 … yes, and my
mother’s
face that night … And the next night when Father looked at the flowered wallpaper she’d put on alone and silently all through the day and said, “That’s the prettiest paper we ever had” … Her face that day in town she had on her best voile dress and the town woman came into the store clothed in silk beneath her fur coat and with shining black gloves. His mother had held the flaps of her coat tight together over her own dress with her bare hands and he’d wished suddenly that he could kiss her … And her face that day she’d come from behind them when they carried his father to the house, holding her apron down tight against the wind with both hands …

He was almost running now, as if in escape. But the faces pursued him, with the relentless challenge of exactly how each one was.

 … his grandmother’s face sometimes when she was busy and they’d mention England or the sea and she’d look out the window for a minute and her hands would lie still in her lap … And her face (and the town woman’s face) when the town woman said to her, “We’re collecting all around for the novelty sale, Mrs. Canaan—but of course we don’t expect you to spare anything you need,” and she answered, “I have a cup of my grandmother’s that Queen Anne drank from once … but I don’t suppose any of
you
women would have occasion to use that here, would you?”

 … and Chris’s face nights when he’d come in from the plough and Charlotte would say, “Chris! Look at your feet!
Do you think I
like
to scrub?” He’d go back and wipe his feet on the grass and stand a minute in the yard and then walk slowly to the barn, though there was nothing in the barn to be done … And his face the day he came back, after the layoff at the factory, and Charlotte hadn’t gone to meet him at the station … And the day a month ago when he said, “She’s left me. They’ve rented the place to me and gone to live with the old bitch’s mother in Beaverbrook” … And every night now when he drops in to see how we’re getting along but I never say, “Why don’t you come home with us?” … And his face the day I showed him Toby’s wrist watch and he said, “Could I wear it fer an hour er so?” and I said, “No. You might break it.”

 … yes, and Toby’s face (why was the challenge just to listen to it exactly, so much sharper than the old challenge to make his own like it?) the night they’d been playing that foolish game of Telegrams. Toby said, “I know. D-A-V-I-D. ‘Dave’s Arotic. Very. Interested. Dames.’ ” and Anna said, “But its ‘e,’ dear. E-rotic,” and I said, “How about, ‘David’s Appendage Very Interested Dames’?”, and we all laughed … And Anna’s face a minute after, when Toby said, “Dave, you oughta see some of those dames in Naples” … And her face the day—he looked about him as if for some place to run, the way he’d looked about the field that afternoon three years ago when Toby went away for the last time—the day she was playing blindman’s buff with the other children. When it was her turn to hide her eyes the other children giggled together and then ran home and left her standing there and I went out and said, “Anna, I know where there’s a robin’s nest” … And her face a week ago when he’d said, “Why don’t you
stay
home, Anna?” He knew from the look on it that, now, she’d be less lonely working in the city.

 … yes, and his own that day too, feeling the most awful blankness he’d felt yet, for knowing that he didn’t really mind that Anna didn’t want to stay … And the face of Chris and of Anna and his own face, if he could have seen it, that day they got turned around on the mountain. They thought they must be almost in sight of the fields, and then they came again to the same tree they’d left an hour ago …

He brushed at his forehead, as if he’d run into a cluster of floating cobwebs.

But there was Rachel’s face at the window when Bess would go down by and she’d say, “It’s no wonder Effie’s no better’n she oughta be” … And the faces of the men at the frolic when Bess would go down by and they’d wink at each other and make indecent motions with their hips.

 … and Bess’s own face the morning of the Christmas tree at school when the rest of them stopped for Effie, with their teacher’s presents of handkerchiefs or cakes of Baby’s Own Soap wrapped in tissue paper in their hands. The women who collected for the treat hadn’t called for Bess’s fudge that she’d put the extra nuts and raisins in, and she had no present for Effie to take at all. Then, desperately, she took the new feed calendar off the wall and wrapped it up in a cylinder of brown paper and all the children snickered because anyone could tell it was only an old calendar … And her face the day I was working alongside the road and she went by blindly with her apron on in the middle of the afternoon, choking out to herself, “Fred, I never … I never, since I married you … You had to listen to Rachel. God
knows
I never, not once …” And Fred’s face (and theirs) that same night when the brook-smell was cool on the Baptizing bank and he knelt and put his hand on her wet clinging hair. He looked at the others as if he’d strike them when they tried to
help him carry her home and he carried her away all alone.

 … and Effie’s face too, that day of her sickness, the first time I’d ever seen her in bed; looking in Bess’s clean soft bed as if that were the only place she’d ever belonged, and forgiving me without understanding for the tear the bushes had made in her skin and for the stain of kerosene on it.

 … yes, and Steve’s face when he’d pick up a magazine off the lounge and make out he was reading the lines but his eyes would be slinking sidewise to any pictures of girls on the opposite page … And Jud’s, setting off the day the rate collector caught him in the barn and just as the rate collector went behind the brindle heifer she coughed and her bowels moved at the same time …

He smiled at that. For a couple of minutes the listening lulled and slackened altogether.

Then as the climbing became sharper still and the sunlight still brighter in the cold spaces between the larger trees, the accusing quickened again. It was like the woodsaw gaining such speed that the teeth disappeared.

All the faces there were everywhere else in the world, at every time, waited for him to give the thought to exactly how each of them was. (What about the Englishman or the Frenchman or the Micmac who might have stood on this very spot exactly how long ago?) There was the listening fact of the presence outside him of every eye, every lash, every smile-wrinkle of every cheek that had ever been; possible to be known, but unattended, because he had never seen them … And the frightening clarity … I could realize the whole content of everything there is, he thought, if they didn’t swarm so.

He came to the spot in the road where he could see the keel-piece. They had never limbed it out. They had let it lay
there when they cut and hauled the rest of the wood around it. He looked at it.

I can think of my father sinking his axe again and again into the keel, he thought, and then the wind coming and the tree falling, and the single thought seems to contain it all. But just as I move on to something else the thought breaks down like a stream forking in the sand. Then the forks fork. Then the forks’ forks fork, like the chicken-wire pattern of atoms …

There is the branch of the tree growing exactly that way because it has stood there exactly that number of seconds and because its roots broke and wandered exactly as they did under the earth (and under that map-shaped patch of shell ice with the algebraic equations—what is my calculus book?—for its million kidney-shaped markings and parabolas and “Nude Descending a Staircase” patterns—what is the mind of a man who would draw like that?—exactly as they are), and because the sun shone on it that particular way in some second gone by. The blood in my father’s body ran exactly that way because the elbow moved exactly so and because he glanced up at the sky so that the skin puckered beneath one eye exactly as it did. The foot, standing where it was (If we hadn’t taken the car that first day!) when the tree fell, contained the implication of everything that bent it to this spot exactly that way and then. The hands’ muscles moved as they did because the chemistry of food into tissue was exactly so … And exactly what was his hand, with the chemistry of the hair on the back of it exactly so, and there then, partly because of exactly all the things it had touched: my mother’s face, and Anna’s and Chris’s, and mine …? And “hand” is a word, and what is a word? … And “n” is a letter in the word, shaped exactly that way, and sounded by exactly that movement of the tongue, and in exactly how many other words? And behind the tiniest delta
in the tiniest line in my father’s cheek, and behind the smallest of the smallest arcs of movement of his arms, were implicit exactly all the thoughts that led him here … exactly here … exactly then …

All the
thoughts
there were, at every time!

A new panic struck him. All the thoughts behind every face, at every time … They had a
double
accusing, because of themselves
and
of the things they mirrored. They were shapeless and infiltrate through each other. Their fluctuate form was not traceable in space or boundable by time. It was broader than space, and faster than time, and not containable by definite quantity in either. But each one was exactly as it was, just the same …

He halted suddenly.

“Stop!” he cried. Aloud.

But the voices didn’t stop.

They added a new voice to their frenzied forking, to the bright singing stinging scream of clarity in the accusation of the unattended. Exactly how did the voice
itself
fluctuate, according to the exact inexactness of the listener’s listening?

He thought: Myself amongst them,
thinking
of myself amongst them …

He screamed “Stop!” again.

But as if in answer, yet another still-quicker multiplying multitude was added. (As if, though the first charge was unanswerable, yet if it were somehow answered, he would be free … and then a sudden overwhelming accusation was seen beyond that one.) Suddenly there were all the voices of all things everywhere at all times as they
might
have been. If the wind had been exactly that infinitesimal way different sometime … If somewhere some face had smiled a hair’s breadth differently … If only one thought had shaped itself exactly
that little way other than the way it did … Then all the rest of it … He heard the crushing screaming challenge of the infinite permutations of the possible … the billion raised to the billionth power …

He screamed, “Stop, stop …”

Then he thought: Myself screaming “Stop.” Then he thought: Myself thinking of myself screaming “Stop,” thinking of myself thinking of myself thinking of …

And then he put his arms about the great pine and thrust his forehead against its hard body. He screamed, “Stop … Stop … Stop … 
STOP
 …”

And then he raised his head and he saw that he was at the very top of the mountain.

He had been within sight of this great solitary pine before, but he had never stood beneath it. It was beyond the last ridge of the great hardwood. Beyond it the lane of the road levelled off between low-clinging scrub, and then fell.

He looked down at the valley and the river and the road beside his house.

His own house was tiny and far-off but clear in every detail, like a model of itself. He looked over the hardwood and the spruces and the patchwork of choppings and the whole stretch of the log road, twisting and turning through the trees and then rising sharp and straight to the top of the mountain. Everything was beneath him now. The breath of falling caught in the distance and the clear sharp air.

Sometimes after a long stretch of freezing the wires sing with the cold. The ice is bound and shining with it. The ground and the trees are locked with the bearing of it. All things have hidden their blood away from it, but their voices and features are sharper still. Then the air that has been taut with the stillness of it relaxes at one definite instant.

As then, the air softened now, all at once, as he stood there.

And, without warning, suddenly again, the translation came.

All the voices were soaked up at once. Not in a vanishing, but as the piercing clamour of nerves in fever is soaked up in sleep. Sleep is the answer. At the moment of waking again their voices are still there, but the finding of the answer goes out over them, smoothening and softening and absorbent as firelight. There is no accusing in them now. They are like the challenging strangeness of a figure walking back- to along the road. As you come closer it turns and discloses the face of a friend.

He stood there, looking down over the mountain and the valley, and it was as if the sun-shadow passed swiftly over all the voices as the sun-shadow had swept across the road.

I will
tell
it, he thought rushingly: that is the answer.

I know how it is with everything. I will put it down and they will see that I know.

(Once, while he was still in school, he had composed a petition from all the men in the village, asking the government for a daily mail. When he read it back to them they heard the voice of their own reason speaking exactly in his. Their warm wonder at his little miracle of finding the words for it that they themselves couldn’t find, or recognize for the words of their own thoughts until they heard him speak them, made him and them so fluid together that it worked in him like a kind of tears.)

As he thought of telling these things exactly, all the voices came close about him. They weren’t swarming now. He went out into them until there was no inside left. He saw at last how you could
become
the thing you told.

It wouldn’t be necessary to take them one by one. That’s where he’d been wrong. All he’d have to do … oh, it was so gloriously simple … was to find their single core of meaning. It was manifest not differently but only in different aspects, in them all. That would be enough. A single beam of light is enough to light all the shadows, by turning it from one to another.

He didn’t consider
how
he would find it. (The words he’d put in the scribbler before now had never fallen smooth over the shape of the remembrance, or enclosed it all. But the minute he put the scribbler away the perfect ones seemed surely possible to be found the next time.) Nor how long it might take. (If you took a hundred years, then—though neither this thought was explicit nor reason’s denial of it, for the swelling moment to transcend—he would live a hundred years.) He knew only that he would do it … It would make him the greatest writer in the whole world.