The Mountain and the Valley (8 page)

That night Joseph built the first warm-smelling fire in the room stove when he came in at dusk with the partridges he’d shot dangling from his belt, and Martha shook the needled earth from the dahlia bulbs that were to go into the cellar, and the children touched the chestnuts in the quick dusk as if their chocolate shapes shining in the cold leaves held in them the smoothness of all the days that were gone. (The sun went under a cloud when Martha looked out and saw Joseph walking toward the house, so that he seemed to be walking in darkness almost and the supper she’d been waiting for him seemed later than it was. If it hadn’t, she would never have glimpsed every feature of her love for him, in a single instant’s focus.)

And that year had all the days of winter. The day when the ploughed land was honeycombed with frost and the first snow caught like feathers in the yellow aftergrass (when Joseph covered the strawberry bed and the rosebush with straw, and Martha creased the clothes she took off the line like cardboard to get them into the basket, and the bodies of the children looked larger and darker and they seemed to play closer together) … the day clammy-flaked snow and rain came together and larrigan toes were bleached grey (because arteries of rain broke up the reflection of Chris’s face as he glimpsed it in the window just
then
, he knew the loneliness of them for whom loneliness of the flesh is never recognized for what it is) … the day when fine fierce frost blew in the air and everywhere a damp mitten touched a latch a coating of wool was drawn off, like raw flesh from bone.

There was the day snow, falling like sleep, piled up in the limb-cornices, and weighted birches over the log road like
someone frozen in a perfect curtsy: the soft day after that, when shoulders of snow slumped off the black-boled trees like discarded garments, and the ground snow was stained urine-yellow with the peckings of steady twig-drip, and steam rose from the backs of the horses like their own manure steaming behind them in the stable: and the day after that, when the sun lay on the lava curves of drifts in the field like yellow silk on a woman’s thighs and breasts. (Joseph warned out the men to break the roads, and the shadows of great cubes of snow, sliced out with one movement of the shovel and tumbled onto the high banks, angled with underwater refraction down the steep sides of the tunnel and out over the blindingly bright tracks of the sled runners. Martha shut the drafts on the stove and went down the road, to call, in the bright-beckoning, woman-cosy afternoon. The children played in a kind of time suspension, as if even suppertime had withdrawn its encroaching tendrils.) … To the day when the first trickle not of rain cut the feet from under the grey sandy snow on the side hills: the day when Ellen touched the softened stubble and felt her hands draw from things the meanings her mind could no longer surprise.

II

The school concert was postponed until Christmas. Rachel thought it wouldn’t look right to have it in June.
Some
people might forget in two months, but you couldn’t expect
her
child to feel much like …

All through the year the words of his part in the play kept flushing in and out of David’s head like an exalting secret. From the time when Christmas was only a word, till the time when it became like some magic lamplight turned up, haloing the days and drawing them toward it.

The words were something no one else had. For that
reason, everyone who was there when the thought of them came seemed revealedly wonderful, and somehow more fiercely loved, for being so pitiably, humdrumly, outside it.

He thought of them when Joseph thrust his fork slowly into the great cock of hay, lifting the whole thing except for a few scatterings that clung to the ground, above his head: settling it carefully into place on the side of the load and then walking patiently alongside the snail-slow oxen on the sun-parched stubble, hawing or geeing them to the next cock. He had a surging, binding, kind of pity for his father—so drugged with patience. His father wasn’t drawn to the moment ahead, as he was, but pushed to it by the moment behind. He would try desperately to help him, with another fork. (Though, piercing more than he could lift to the load, the hay would break apart and fall about his shoulders.)

He’d feel the same binding pity for his mother, when her thoughts seemed to slip away from her and weave in and out of their own accord, like the knitting needles she watched in her hands as she rocked gently back and forth. Or for his grandmother, when she tore the map-shaped parts of clothing into rags for a rug, as if motion of her hands were the only kind of movement left to her.

He thought of them when Chris was dropping seed potatoes, aligning the odd one that tumbled out of place, with his foot; pressing it into the soft brooch-coils of manure automatically. He’d say, “It’ll soon be time for swimmin, Chris”—so that Chris could break away a second from the steadiness of the furrow; so that he could think of his naked body in the water and have somewhere outside the moment to go, too.

He thought of them, with Effie; but the bond with her wasn’t of pity: he knew she had the thought of her silk dress in the same way.

And to think of them, with Anna, was best of all. For Anna was like a second safety: a place he would still have—to go to, if his secret thoughts ever failed.

The words gave him a more selfish sort of safety when he was with the ones he
didn’t
love.

Sunday afternoons, perhaps, when the men dropped in to see his father. They’d sit in the kitchen, slicing their apples with a jackknife and holding the slice between thumb and knife as they bit into it, talking and silent in seesaw pendulum. Their thoughts seemed to sprawl drowsily, like a cat asleep. Later they’d all stroll to the barn to look at Joseph’s stock. They’d slide their hands lazily over the cows’ flanks or feel the oxen’s coos. They’d turn their backs to urinate against a manager, watching the operation meditatively and speaking over their shoulders; then make a slow motion of rump-withdrawal after the moment of finishing and, turning again, patiently manipulate their buttons. They’d take their final leave so haltingly it was like a rope fraying apart. They would seem, beside himself, like people tied.

Or when the women came to a quilting. So neat there seemed to be a little of Sunday in them; neat with their stitches, and as if their talk were quilted together too, with their needles; like
one person
over the tea … so terribly without private excitement like his.

Or, with the other children, when they gathered the slippery pollywogs in their hands; or dragged the two bottles behind them with miniature ox yokes on their necks; or when he met them drawing their sleds up the hill as his speed grew and grew, going down, till the Big Rock moved too, and it seemed as if the others were coasting in the dark.

The words were a kind of refuge when the moment was bare, stripped right down to time and place.

These were the days when the December freshet lay manure-water-yellow over the ice in the flats and grey vapour curled from the eaten snow into the sodden air. His woollen clothing had a urine smell about it, and his father might start to file the crosscut saw, or his mother might lay the pattern on her apron material, or he could hear Chris somewhere with a hammer, but it didn’t seem to be the kind of day for keeping
at
anything. Or when the hot sickly marsh-smell came up out of the dry-brooked meadow, and the spongy moss roots stuck in the hay he raked out of his father’s heel prints in the swath. He’d feel tired enough for noon, but it was nowhere near noon yet.

He thought of the words too, when the moment was already brimming.

That was when he’d hear the shiver of the sleighbells as the shafts were pulled out of their tugs at the horse’s sides, and then his father came into the house with the one magic paper bag in the pocket of his bearskin coat that you could tell held something special. Or when one of the men referred to something his father had done, in a good-natured perplexity that Joseph could never be made to see anything extraordinary in it, himself: the time he’d climbed into the bull pen, without even a cudgel, to ring the cross bull’s nose; or the time he’d clamped a scooped-out potato over the spurting head artery of the man who’d fallen on a ledge; or one of the times when his rare anger had had a comical effect, though no one dared laugh.

The men told these things about Joseph pridefully—as if they might be telling them about themselves. Maybe Joseph would half-smile and say, “Git me my tobacco, will ya, son?” The asking of this little favour and the granting of it seemed to make a gentle conspiracy between them. When he passed the tobacco to Joseph and touched the broad hairy
hand that was like the way his father was with the men (his quiet face was like the way he was about the house), he’d think, “This is my father.”

He’d think of the words in the play then, to make the moment really spill over.

He thought of them too, when his mother would give him her best stew kettle for the sap to drip in and say, “Now don’t you lose it, mind”: and he’d almost burst with the fervid promise that he wouldn’t lose it. Or when she’d come downstairs from changing her dress. Somehow her woman-softness made a lull in the afternoon so he could look at the pictures in a new book without seeming to borrow from the time that was for other things.

He thought of them in the magic moment when his grandmother said, “Did I ever tell you about the time …?” Or with Anna, when they were all playing hide-and-seek and it was almost dark and suddenly she looked frighteningly small as she stood against the house, with her arms across her eyes and her skirt drawn up so the red hemstitching on her flannelette petticoat showed, counting, “Five, ten, fifteen, twenty …” The others seemed to run so cruelly fast then and hide so securely that he’d hide close to her and almost exposed, so that he could feel her small, soft, searching, defenseless hand gladden desperately as it felt over his face, and it wouldn’t matter to her then where the others were hiding at all.

He thought of them when he was all alone: when he put on the new sneakers with the black rubber soles so shining he could hardly bear to take the first step on the ground. Or when he took the brand new Reader in a room by himself and passed his fingers over the scooped-out lettering on the bright covers and there’d be a delicious guilt as he read the words in it, as if even reading might soil the wonderfully sleek pages.

They came to him when the teacher walked beside the desks meditating on whose work to place the (
I
), seeming to make up her mind and then change it again, and then finally he felt her arm coming over his shoulder. Or in the satin moment of waking … or in the woollen moment just before sleep.

He’d think of them then, and be
doubly
translated. It would seem as if he touched the very quick of the day.

They went through him shiveringly, like cold or heat. He felt his heart really get bigger. But they weren’t like any other excitement.

Not like when you hit the ball and then ran to the tree and back, with your breath all gone and your side all shouting, just before the ball got back too; or when the calf you were leading suddenly began to caper and then run like the wind, you couldn’t stop him, you could barely hang onto the chain, and then the laughing struck you, and as you bounced along, your feet barely touching the ground, the laughter gaining in you with each step, you seemed to be lifted right out of the bright daylight still. Nor like when you said, “Yeh, she gives twice as big a mess as that, but her mind wasn’t on her
milk
today at all,” or “Rachel’s face looks as if she was settin on a pot all the time,” and the
rest
of them laughed.

They weren’t that kind of wonderful. They had a snugness about them.

They were more like in the haymow when the rain was on the roof; or under the tent he and Chris had made out of meal bags, when the last flap had been fastened on tight with shingle nails and the last bit of sunlight shut out; or the moment in bed at night when his body and Chris’s next it made a puddle of warmth in the shockingly cold blankets, with the thoughts of the day (when he had been running and
laughing) sinking away from his body as softly as bare toes in the warm dust.

They were still more like when his father took him with him to buy a pair of cattle, the horse trotting at first through the same stretch of woods and then slowing its pace, and Joseph holding the whip against the spokes of the turning wheel so that the hollow tick of it made a core of stillness as they crept so beautifully saving-the-time along. Or when the other men all came to help shoe the bad ox and he’d sit on the top beam of the haymow and watch them lash its flailing legs into the slings on the barn floor; in it, but above it and outside it at the same time. Or with Chris, walking by the churchyard at night, and thinking of walking by the churchyard alone.

Or were they most of all, he would think sometimes, like when Anna would fall asleep on the lounge before it was time for bed and he’d cover her up gently with a coat? Her breath would come so softly without any movement he could see, like the smell of a flower, that he’d think with a shimmer of the most beautiful sadness, because she wasn’t: What if she were dead?

Or were they most of all like Christmas itself?

T
here were the three days: the day before Christmas, the day of Christmas, and the day after. Those three days lamplight spread with a different softness over the blue-cold snow. Faces were all unlocked; thought and feeling were open and warm to the touch. Even inanimate things came close, as if they had a blood of their own running through them.

On the afternoon of the first day the cold relaxed suddenly, like a frozen rag dipped in water. Distances seemed to
shrink. The dark spruce mountain moved nearer, with the bodies of the trees dark as before rain.

Martha had done up all her housework before noon, and the afternoon had the feel of Saturday. It was a parenthesis in time—before the sharp expectancy began to build with the dusk and spark to its full brightness when the lamp was lit. There were so many places it was wonderful to be that afternoon that David was scarcely still a minute.