The Mountain and the Valley (7 page)

But when he spoke to Charlotte, only the parts of his body which were exposed felt large.

“You going up the road tonight?” he said.

“I don’t know. If Mother don’t want me to stay with her. You?”

“I guess. If you do.”

“I imagine I kin,” she said.

He nodded, and moved awkwardly away. Speech between them was always halting. It was as if they thought in one language but had to speak in another, choosing only those words their clumsy mastery of the second language could translate.

But when he was back with the other boys, he felt the nice firmness in his muscles again—to look at Charlotte without her knowing it and wish he could be walking alone with her after dark.

(That wouldn’t happen, though. The girls always walked ahead, in groups, the boys behind. Their progress was clotted and slow. The boys whispered together, with one of them letting out a lewd “Wheeeee!” now and then; the girls whispered together and giggled constantly. Now and then one of the girls would shout something derisive to the boys, or one of the boys would shout something teasing to the girls. One of the girls might break ranks to clout one of the boys in mock indignation, but she’d race quickly back to her own group.

When they turned and came homeward again, the groups would lose one member after another, as this or that house was reached; but the remaining girls still stayed together and the remaining boys together. And if, finally, there was a single boy and a single girl left, they’d talk with sudden soberness about school or something as they walked purposefully home, the clowning struck out of them entirely.)

How can Rachel and Charlotte run that place now? Chris thought. Lottie’ll have to get married.

What would it be like to be married? he thought. Mark Corbett was married, and he was only sixteen—only two years older than himself. But when they teased Mark at the wood-splitting frolics about his back getting weak, he didn’t take it up like he used to when they kidded him about girls at the Baptizing Pool. He just smiled—like he’d found something that, once you’d found it, you didn’t even have to talk about it any more.

Two more years. If you went into a room with a girl and she was your wife and she took off her things, even the very last one, and there was nothing at all to have to guess through—he caught his breath—what would it be like? If you woke in the night and it wasn’t David, but a girl, beside you. If you touched her and there was no dress over any of those places.

He wished he had a room of his own.

III

“What will we have for supper?” Charlotte said to her mother. The rocker Rachel sat in seemed to move by itself. She gazed out the window as if the level of her vision passed above anything that was to be seen. She kept pleating and unpleating the handkerchief she held in her lap.

“Supper?” The tone of her mother’s voice made Charlotte feel guilty for having thought of eating. “You git what you like, dear. I don’t want anything.”

Charlotte got herself some bread and molasses and a cup of milk.

There was always food in the pantry, but never anything fancy: no boughten cookies, no frosting on the sponge
cake, never an orange, except at Christmas. They didn’t make toast in the morning. They never made the blueberries into a fungy, as Mrs Canaan did—they just stewed them. And in the summer they never fixed up potatoes
on
the lettuce as Mrs Canaan did; the lettuce was in a bowl by itself and the vinegar beside it. The plate of cheese when the minister came to supper was the only frivolous food they ever had.

Our house isn’t like Canaan’s house at all, Charlotte thought. The curtains didn’t have ruffles, the kitchen had no mats on the floor, the organ was always closed so it wouldn’t swell in the dampness, the banisters were just square wooden sticks. The only pictures they had on the wall were the enlarged ones of her grandfather and grandmother, the only book was the Bible on the centre-table in the front room. She didn’t mean the Bible shouldn’t be there (and once it was there, how could you replace it?); but she’d seen Mrs Canaan move theirs sometimes, to make room for a jar of daisies, and it didn’t seem as if there was any sin in that.

She thought of Chris; and before she could help it, she felt a little inward touch at the way his pants slimmed down so smoothly over his haunches and the suggestion of a bulge in front which she’d glimpsed sometimes as he walked towards her.

“Kin I go up the road tonight, Mother?” she said.

“If you
feel
like it, child.”

As her mother spoke, suddenly Charlotte didn’t feel like it at all. She thought of Rachel sitting there, with the lamp not lit, folding and unfolding her handkerchief in the darkness. She felt traitorous for the way she’d thought of the Canaans. She almost hated them. She began to cry.

“No, I
don’t
feel like it,” she sobbed. “I feel awful.”

“It’s hard,” Rachel said. “It’s hard, child, ain’t it?”

“I couldn’t leave you alone, Mother,” Charlotte cried. “Not now.”

“I didn’t think you would, dear,” Rachel said. She shifted her gaze from the window and sighed. “If I had just a crust of bread, Lottie. I don’t know, I might try …”

IV

After supper the sun shone lonesome in the church windows. The meadow hens trailed their lonesome cries as they flew upward from the swamps.

“I think I should take a run down to see Bess,” Martha said to Joseph. “Poor soul, let her be what she is, I …”

“I don’t see nothin wrong with the woman,” Joseph said. “If some of these damned gospel-grinders’d keep their jaws shut.”

David had never heard his father speak so short in the house.

It was the way he spoke outside, sometimes, when one of the men had kept at a joke until it became a malice. He judged so seldom that his fierce opinions on things you’d never have thought such a quiet man would have any feeling about, when they did come, came as a kind of shock. The men never tempted him further when he spoke like that. It was funny the way they’d drop a thing immediately, without resentment when Joseph snubbed it.

David glanced, alerted, at his mother’s face.

Sometimes when his father spoke sharply, there’d be no open quarrel, but her face would look as if everything retreated behind her lips and eyes. For a day or two after that, his father’s voice didn’t seem to reach her at all.

But this was one of the times when the savagery of his father’s expression struck her the alternate way. She looked at
him with a kind of wondering indulgence in her smile; as if, if she let herself begin to laugh outright at what he’d said (“gospel-grinders”!), she’d be helpless to stop.

“You don’t think I’m a gospel-grinder, do you?” she said.

“No,” Joseph said, “I didn’t mean you.”

He smiled too. He looked half-abashed, and lurkingly half-pleased that his remark had turned out to be a funny one. For an instant they seemed newly wonderful to each other.

“Bess shouldn’t give them a
chance
to talk, though,” Martha said, holding onto the thing a little yet.

Joseph didn’t reply. He’d said what he had to say, and it was over.

“Better ask her how she’s off for wood,” he said. “Maybe we would git her up a frolic.”

The spring-sad dusk echoed with irrevocability.

Walking down the road, Martha thought: How will they ever get along? Rachel could sell some timberland maybe. (Poor Spurge, she’d never let him sell a stick while he was alive. He had to go on working, whether he felt like it or not.) But what would Bess ever do? There’d be some way, she supposed. Things had happened to so many families in Entremont which made it impossible, really impossible, for them to get along; yet somehow they had. But how could you get along without your husband?

How would she ever get along without Joseph? Not to walk with him through the garden rows the first Sunday after planting and look for sprouts … not to wait to put the tea down at noon until she heard him scraping the dirt from his boots on the edge of the porch step … not there in the evenings, when everyone else was older than you or younger, unless you were the one who had travelled the same path … not there in bed beside her at night, more sheltering than
sleep itself … “There must be strength given.” She said the words aloud.

She was almost at Bess’s gate. She glanced at her dooryard, Poor soul, there
was
no wood there. That was a good idea of Joseph’s. Not right away, but as soon as Bess felt like giving the men their suppers.

Would the men be joking about Bess again (she knew they
did)
by that time? she thought. Would they tease Joseph if Bess’s arm touched his neck when she reached over his shoulder to fill up his plate? Would Bess herself be laughing again by that time?

She walked slower. Then she stood still. Maybe Bess would rather be alone tonight, she said to herself.

She hesitated; then she turned and walked homeward. She stopped for a few minutes at Rachel’s on the way.

V

While Martha was gone, Ellen sewed a meal bag into the mat frames with twine. Anna held the side pieces taut as she fixed them securely with the iron clamps. She rested the frames on the tops of four chairs and marked in the border scrolls with Joseph’s carpenter pencil, dipped in brown dye.

Anna chose the rags as she began to hook—so nearly the ones Ellen would have chosen herself that almost none had to be rejected. She told Anna some little thing about the garment from which each rag had come.

That was the skirt she’d worn the night of Joseph’s saluting. Her feet had still moved so lightly they’d made her lead the Lancers and the Eights.

That was the dress that had come so like a gift to Martha. The catalogue dress she’d ordered had been out of stock and they’d substituted one for twice the price. She’d
found the very dress on a coloured page. She had kept it good, for years.

That was the blouse David had worn the first time his father took him to town, but it had rained on the way home and all the colours had run.

That was the dress Anna herself was baptized in. The sunlight had fallen so brightly just where Joseph stood with her by the church window that she’d begun to laugh and try to catch it.

“Grammie,” Anna said suddenly, “what is ‘dead’?”

Ellen’s hook went slack for a minute in the loop of a rag. I don’t know. It isn’t sound or silence. It isn’t here or there; now or then. It isn’t laughing or crying. Or sleeping or waking. It isn’t any of the things we know or like any of them.

“I can’t tell you, child,” she said. It wasn’t day or night. It wasn’t health or sickness.

“Is it like old?”

No. They were wrong, it wasn’t like old. You came nearer and nearer to it, but you could never touch it. It was as strange to the old as it was to the young.

“No, it isn’t like ‘old,’ ” she said.

“That man in the barn,” Anna said. “Is he dead?”

“I think so,” she said: “I think he must have died when he was very young.” The picture of him had always gone blank whenever she tried to think of him as a man grown old.

“If he died when he was young, would it be like ‘young’ then?”

“Yes.” Yes, she thought, with him, death would be like “young.”

“It will be like young when my husband dies too,” Anna said.

“Hush, child!” Ellen said. “Hush.”

I
n the country the day is the determinant. The work, the thoughts, the feelings, to match it, follow. Some years use only a few variants of the day. That year had them all; so that it was a sort of lifetime. If all the possible kinds of day are present, then too are all the possible feelings; if not in shape, in some sort of shadow.

They would never need to see another spring than that, to know spring thoroughly. From the first day Martha left the kitchen door open, to dry the scrubbed floor … through all the days between: the day of the rushing sound in the dark spruce mountain (that husky, susurrant night Joseph looked down at his nakedness as he stood by the bed, and felt in one instant’s edification everything there was in the feel of man and woman and of having children), the day of the wild roses on the stone wall … until the last one, when dust first dulled the ploughshare’s moist gleam. That day the sun watermarked the red-ochred shop where Martha had hung out the hams. The children, coming home from school, carried their jackets like burdens. There was no hunger for food in them today; they were satiate with the heat returning, miraculously unchanged.

All of summer they knew: the day of the daisy-trembling in the still hypnotic air (if the day had been enough otherwise to make the concatenations of the moment a hair’s-breadth different, Anna wouldn’t have seen a sudden undulance lick the grass and felt, in essence, all the things her heart would never actually find): the day the mowing machine dribbled the shocked clover between its chattering teeth, and spongy sprouts of last year’s potatoes, thrown behind the shop, grew sickly in the unwinking heat, almost to the eaves … until the
day that was full of green to the last brimming: the white-green of the poplars and the oat field and the river: the storm-green of the orchard and the spruce mountain: the black-green of the potato tops: the green-green of the garden.

Joseph walked back to the woodlot that day and blazed a road for the fall chopping; but not quite yet was there any yellow in the umbrella ferns. When Martha dug the mess of potatoes for dinner, their skin still chafed off under her fingers and root tendrils still clung to them like quills. She parted the green crepe folds on an ear of corn; but the kernels were not quite yellow. And when the children came up the road from the Baptizing Pool, they thought for the first time of an apple. They went to the orchard. The apples
looked
like apples now, the way green apples didn’t; but when they bit into one there was no yellow in the taste—not until tomorrow.

All of fall they would know that year. The first day the sun overslept, then cut faster than ever through the leftover coolness of the night; and a leaf drifted down from the chestnut tree before the house, as if undecided after it had left the twig. (As at a sign, Joseph mowed the first swath of oats for the cows, and Martha put sheets over the tomato vines that smelled sharply of harvest under the full moon, and even Chris opened his books after supper, without prompting.) The others followed: the day of the dug potatoes lying in the dusty sunshine like fruit in a mist-thin wine: the day of the frost-starched grass and the still yellow smell of the sweet fern or the huckleberry or anything your foot crushed: the day of the yellow apple on the yellow ground (If the day when David stood listening to the soundlessness of the pasture dying had not been exactly as it was, he wouldn’t have looked up suddenly at the coloured stillness of the hardwood mountain and seen in the mountain all the things that
were beyond it) … until the day when ice first needled across the water in the cows’ tub.