The Mountain and the Valley (5 page)

She bent to see if the butter had begun to gather. As she straightened, she caught a glimpse of someone’s shadow pass the window. She felt the instant defocus an unidentified movement provokes. She glanced at the clock, almost frowning.
There was a step on the porch, and Rachel Gorman came through the door.

Martha felt the morning sag. She put away the nice feeling of being alone. She didn’t know why she always dreaded to see Rachel come. But somehow when Rachel had left it was hard to go back to the way you’d been thinking before she came. Somehow, though you couldn’t trace it exactly to anything Rachel had said, you’d find yourself rankling about something.

She glanced at her apron to see if any cream had splashed on it. Rachel was always spotless.

“Come in, come in,” she called. “Good morning.”

“Good mornin.”

Rachel’s thin grey hair was drawn into a tight bun on the top of her head. The enormous black eyes in her skimpy face were deceptively canine-wistful. They could take complete charge of her other features in a second. Caution seemed to limit any smile as soon as it began.

“Isn’t this some day?” Martha said. “It makes you feel like living. Set down.”

Rachel sat by the window, where she could keep her eye on the road.

“Yes,” she said. “But nothin’ll start up if we don’t git a rain. I thought we’d git a shower this mornin, but it didn’t amount to nothin.”

A picture of the land after a warm rain flashed through Martha’s mind. The warm rain, and then the spilling green of the grass taking all the roughness from the fields. Feeling the freedom of no-coat when you stepped outside. The sun coming through the mist that lifted cleanly from the sides of the immaculate blue mountains, just before dark, and varnishing everything with yellow-green shadow.

“We’ll likely git enough rain next month,” Rachel said, “when it’s plantin time. We’ll git more’n we want then.”

When Rachel spoke the picture changed. Martha saw the day of seeding. How often the rain
did
come then; steady at first, then sulking in the damp-breathing clouds, refusing to declare itself. Drops of it would chandelier the trees, hanging sullenly on every twig; and the sodden grass would be slovenly underfoot.

“Are you all alone?” Rachel said.

“Yes,” Martha said. “Joseph took the boys back to the camp. I don’t know just where Grammie and Anna are.”

“That’ll be a long tramp fer David,” Rachel said. “I suppose I’m foolish”—she smiled her beginning-of-a-smile—“but I’d be worried sick, if I was you.”

“I didn’t want him to go,” Martha said, “but Joseph seemed to think …”

“I know,” Rachel said. “Men don’t see any danger in anything.”

It
is
too long a tramp for David, where he isn’t strong, Martha thought. It was a crazy idea. She felt almost angry at Joseph.

“Did Spurge go on the drive?” she said.

“Yes,” Rachel said. “Why he always hankers so to git away on that drive, I don’t know. It leaves me all the milkin—and my hands so cramped up with rheumatism now!” she sighed. “But I suppose nothin could make em any worse. And maybe it’s all right. Likely we’ll have a wet spring, and he couldn’t do nothin around the place anyway.”

“And you have Charlotte,” Martha said.

“Charlotte,” Rachel sighed. “Bless her. She hardly leaves me alone a minute.”

“Charlotte
is
a sensible girl,” Martha said.

Rachel smiled. “Well, I always
tried
to bring her up
right. None o’ this gaddin around every night with
her
. I don’t know what some women are thinkin about, the way they let their young girls run around. If anything happens, they only got themselves to blame. I never have anything like
that
to worry about.”

Martha wondered what particular woman Rachel referred to.

“I often wonder,” Rachel said, “if someday Charlotte and your Chris … they seem to like each other.”

Oh no, Martha thought quickly. She didn’t quite know why.

“She was goin around with that Effie Delahunt, but I soon put a stop to that.”

“But do you think there’s any harm in Effie?” Martha said. “Why, she’s only a child, and I always thought, well, such a gentle one.”

“No,” Rachel said. “I don’t say there’s any harm in her. I wouldn’t condemn
any
one. But if she turns out bad, she comes rightly by it. Her mother before her.
You
know that, Martha. And I don’t want Charlotte mixed up with either of em. If I had a young boy, I’d warn him too.”

She must mean David, Martha thought. But that was ridiculous. Effie was such a child, even if she was thirteen; and David, though he was so smart he seemed twice his age sometimes, was really only eleven.

Rachel glanced out of the window. “Ain’t that her now?” she said.

“Effie?”

“No. Her mother. Bess. Comin up the road. Is she comin here?”

Martha looked out of the window. “Yes, that’s Bess. But I don’t think she’s coming here. She hardly ever comes here.”

“I shouldn’t think she’d feel like goin’ anywhere,” Rachel said, “if she had any shame at all. I don’t know where Pete Delahunt’s eyes are!”

For some reason Martha felt like taking Bess’s side.

“Well now, Rachel,” she said, “I don’t know whether to believe all the stories you hear or not. I couldn’t say
I
ever saw anything out of the way with Bess, myself. She’s got that manner with her, I know, but I suppose she can’t help it. She’s offhand like that with everyone.”

“Yes,” Rachel said. “Well, as I say, I don’t want to condemn anyone. But I don’t think it’s right to shield anyone, either.”

Who’s shielding anyone? Martha thought. Things she’d heard about Rachel’s own husband and Bess came into her mind, and before she could stop herself she was doing it the way Rachel did.

“And you can’t blame
her
altogether, if it
is
so,” she said. “The men are as bad as she is. You’d be surprised if you knew which of them, too.”

“Maybe,” Rachel said patiently. “But she chins up to em, and what can they do? Did you see her chinnin up to Joseph after service the other night? And after shoutin the hymns louder’n anyone! I knew Joseph didn’t
want
to have anything to do with her, but she kept chinnin up to him, he had to be civil, I suppose.”

“Joseph don’t want anything to do with her!”

“I know,” Rachel said. “That’s what I say.”

There was a short bristling silence. Martha’s morning was tarnished. She felt bitterness toward Bess for the first time. Maybe those things
were
true.

“I’ll tell you what I run over fer,” Rachel said quickly. “I was wonderin if you’d finished with the quiltin’ frames.”

“Why, didn’t you get them back?” Martha said. “I let Esther Barnaby have them, and she said she’d send them back to you.”

Rachel hesitated a minute. “Would she do a thing like that?” she said, in a small, wondering voice.

Would she do a thing like
what
, Martha thought irritably. Esther was her best friend.

“I saw them frames there,” Rachel said, “and sez I, they’re my frames. But she said, no, you didn’t say anything about em being mine, she’d have to return em to you.” She smiled. “I suppose she wasn’t quite through with em.”

“You must have misunderstood her, Rachel,” Martha said, “I told her they was yours, plain as anything.”

“Oh, I knew
you
wouldn’t let her think they was yours,” Rachel said quickly. “She musta made that out of whole cloth.”

“She must have forgotten,” Martha said.

“Maybe,” Rachel said. “Oh, it doesn’t matter. Only I just thought I’d mention it to you sometime.” She hesitated. “They
say
she fibs, you know.”

They did say she fibbed, Martha thought. But surely Esther wouldn’t deliberately put her in the wrong like that. It gave her a bad feeling to think Esther might try to put her in the wrong.

“Well, I’ll see that you get them, Rachel,” she said. I’ll go right over there today, she thought, and thrash this thing out.

Rachel rose. “What time’s it gittin to be?” she said. “I told Charlotte I was just—Why, Martha,” she exclaimed, “that looks like David. No, no, back there on Delahunt’s road. See? And the men from the drive, ain’t it? Suppose they’s anything wrong?”

Martha’s eyes collected David and Christopher quickly from the first group, but where was Joseph? She searched the
next group frantically, frantically—ah, there was Joseph too. She relaxed. She thought, I didn’t see any chinnin up to Joseph, Rachel always …

And then she thought, Bess Delahunt knows
better
than to show her nose in here, the brazen …

II

“Hark!” Joseph said, when he heard the voices.

They stopped and listened. There was absolute silence for a minute. Please make it not a voice, David prayed. The time Anna had fever he’d wake in the night to hear the cry and then the silence. He’d pray: please, she’s going back to sleep … if it can only be quiet an instant longer. But she would cry again.

And now the voices came again, this time beyond doubt. They were men’s voices, just around the bend of the dark road. But they were sober and spaced. They weren’t like the ordinary voices of men walking and talking together in the morning. There was no laughter.

They didn’t call any greeting when they came in sight.

“It’s the men on the drive,” Joseph said. “They only went back a Tuesday. What …?”

The moment he saw the other men, the day changed. The adult way came back to him, he wasn’t the same man who had searched for the fishing pole. Somehow David knew they wouldn’t be going back on the mountain today at all. Why did I ever say we would wait? he thought.

The men didn’t speak until they came to the bridge.

“Joseph.” Their heads dipped sidewise, the way they dipped their heads and spoke your name only, when they came into the kitchen just before a funeral began.

“What’s wrong, fuhllas?” Joseph said.

Quickly, not to hear their answer, David ran a few steps
along the mountain road. He had to touch it, anyway, before he knew indisputably that the day was over.

When he came to the bridge again, the men were in a group about Joseph. Their solemnity was shattered. Each one was telling over and over whatever part of it he himself had seen.

“I was standin be the still-water there, and …”

“I
heard
this shoutin, but thinks I, it’s jist …”

“It couldn’ta bin five minutes before that I …”

They repeated again and again the things they’d said to each other along the road, asking each other over and over again for sanction.

“Spurge Gorman had no business on the drive, clumsy as he was. But the poor bugger always seemed so glad to git away.”

“Pete’s a good swimmer. Spurge musta drug him under, mustn’t he?”

“There wasn’t a goddam sign of em after they once went down, was they?”

“It couldn’ta bin over seven, eight, feet deep there, could it?”

“I suppose some’ll always think they was somethin funny about it, but what would Pete want to drown hisself or Spurge Gorman fer?”

Joseph kept saying, “My God. Well, my God.”

“What happened?” David whispered to Chris. Chris’s face was the colour of wet paper.

“Charlotte’s father fell off a log, as far as they know, and Pete Delahunt tried to save him and they drownded.”

“Effie’s father?”

Chris nodded.

They didn’t speak any more. It was as though the day had burst and parts of it were striking all around them.

Joseph turned. “Boys,” he said, “Spurge Gorman and Bess’s man have been drowned, so I guess …”

David couldn’t think straight at all. He was breaking off the end of his fishing pole without waiting to unwind the line. He was thinking crazily that the trout he’d caught would lay there in the damp moss until the moss dried and then its slippery soft-spotted skin would be tight and wrinkled as a dry pig’s bladder.

The men walked homeward, bonded together by what had happened like chastened children.

The sunlight crackled clean in the lichens on the rocks. The brook sounds of the first birds struck clean-piercing through the fern-cool air, like the shiver of running water. The floor of the woods was brown; but boxberries, fruited before the leaf was green, speckled it with red, umbrella mosses with a hint of green, and star-flowers, blossoming before the leaf, shone as water-washed a white as the cable of a moist cobweb when the sun slid down it. The air widened with listening and the shadow-freshness of promise.

The air smelled of water. The damp-springing water of the pollywog pools. The water soaking in leaves and needles where the shade was thick. And the sun-whitened water of the running brook—that soaked into the lungs of Spurge and Peter as other men, farther behind, carried them home on their shoulders.

The men were mostly silent. But now and then they spoke about their work, the season, even a smirking joke that had to do with women. This had no relation to the shock that was basic in all their minds, but David didn’t understand that. He didn’t know that adult speech was merely an instrument of disguise. Their remarks seemed heartless to him. He didn’t see how they could talk at all. He hadn’t said a word, even to Chris.

He could think only of Effie’s face—she loved her father. He felt an awful guilt, to be without suffering himself, to have his own father so wonderfully safe beside him. He wished that somehow he himself could be struck sick.

“To think Pete went all through the war, without a scratch,” Seth Lachine said, “Wypress, Verdoon, and … and then right here.”

“That’s the way she goes,” Joseph said.

Suddenly David wasn’t with them at all.

There were different faces around him. They were lying on the ground and bullets were whining over their heads. And then he got up and ran toward the German trench with the invincible, invulnerable strength that comes after you are tired out; and when the others saw him charging so bravely they all got up and shouted and ran with him. And suddenly, like waking from a muddled dream, he knew exactly what he was going to be. He was going to be the greatest general in the whole world.