The Mountain and the Valley (9 page)

He went outside and made a snowman. The snow was so packy it left a track right down to the grass roots. It was a perfect day to be alone with, the only confidant of its mysteries. Yet it was equally nice to be with people. The claim of their ordinary work was suspended today, no one’s busyness was any kind of pushing aside.

He went inside and sat close to his grandmother. He asked her a string of questions; not for information, but because he was young and she was old. To let her feel that she was helping him get things straight was the only way he knew to give her some of the splendid feeling he had so guiltily more of.

He went out again where Chris was sawing wood. How could Chris
stand
there like that, today … his shoulders moved so patiently, the saw sank with such maddening slowness. Yet because he did, he was somehow wonderful. When a block fell, David would thrust the stick ahead on the saw-horse with such a prodigal surge of helpfulness beyond what the weight of the wood asked for that Chris would have to push it back a little before he made the next cut.

He went back into the house and stood at the table where his mother was mixing doughnuts.

Everything was clean as sunshine. The yellow-shining mixing bowl in the centre of the smooth hardwood bread board; the circles of pure white where the sieve had stood; the
measuring cup with the flour-white stain of milk and soda on its sides; and the flat yellow-white rings of the doughnuts themselves lying beside the open-mouthed jug that held the lard, drift-smooth at the centre and crinkled like pie crust along the sides. His mother carried the doughnuts to the stove, flat on her palm, and dropped them one by one into the hot fat. He followed her, watching. They’d sink to the bottom. Then, after a fascinating second of total disappearance, they’d loom dark below the surface, then float all at once, brown and hissing all over. It had never been like this, watching her make doughnuts before.

He went into the pantry and smelled the fruit cakes that lay on the inverted pans they’d been cooked in. He opened the bag of nuts and rolled one in his palm; then put it back. He put his hand deep down into the bag and rolled all the nuts through his fingers: the smooth hazelnuts that the hammer would split so precisely: the crinkled walnuts with the lung-shaped kernels so fragile that if he got one out all in one piece he’d give it to Anna: the flat black butternuts whose meat clove so tightly to the shell that if you ever got one out whole you saved it to the very last.

Then he leaned over and smelled the bag of oranges. He didn’t touch it. He closed his eyes and smelled it only. The sharp, sweet, reminding, fulfilling, smell of the oranges was so incarnate of tomorrow it was delight almost to sinfulness.

He went out and sat beside Anna. She was on her knees before the lounge, turning the pages of the catalogue. They played “Which Do You Like the Best?” with the coloured pages. Anna would point to the incredibly beaded silk dress that the girl wore standing in a great archway with the sunlight streaming across it, as her choice. He’d say, “Oh, I do, too.” And as his hand touched Anna’s small reaching hand and as he looked at her small reaching face, he almost cried with
the knowing that some Christmas Day, when he had all that money he was going to have, he’d remember every single thing that Anna had liked the best. She’d find every one of them beneath the tree when she got up in the morning.

He went out where his father was preparing the base for the tree. All the work-distraction was gone from his father today, and David knew that even if so few pieces of board were to be found as to defeat anyone else, his father would still be able to fix something that was perfect.

Joseph lay one crosspiece in the groove of the other. He said to David, “Think you could hold her just like that, son, till I drive the nails?”

“Oh yes,” David said, “yes.” He strove with such intense willingness to hold them so exactly that every bit of his strength and mind was soaked up. He touched the axe that would cut the tree. The bright cold touch of it shone straight through him.

He ran in to tell Anna it was almost time. He waited for her to button her gaiters. He was taut almost to pallor when Joseph stepped from the shop door, crooked the axe handle under one arm, and spat on the blade for one final touch of the whetstone.

“Chris,” he called, “we’re
goin!”

“All right,” Chris said. “You go on. I guess I’ll finish the wood.”

How
could
Chris stay here? How could anyone
wait
anywhere today? It was almost impossible to be still even in the place where the thing was going on.

Joseph walked straight toward the dark spruce mountain. David and Anna would fall behind, as they made imprints of their supine bodies in the snow; then run to catch up. They would rush ahead, to simulate rabbit tracks with their
mittens—the palms for the parallel prints of the two back feet, the thumb the single print where the front feet struck together; then stand and wait. Their thoughts orbited the thought of the tree in the same way their bodies orbited Joseph’s.

“Anna, if anyone walked right through the mountain, weeks and weeks, I wonder where he’d come out …”

“Dave, hold your eyes almost shut, it looks like water …”

“There’s one, there’s one …” But when they came to it the branches on the far side were uneven.

Joseph himself stopped to examine a tree.

“Father, the best ones are way back, ain’t they?” David said quickly. This
was
a good tree, but it wouldn’t be any fun if they found the perfect tree almost at once.

“There’s one …” But it was a cat spruce.

“There’s one …” But the spike at the top was crooked.

“There’s one, Father …” But a squirrel’s nest of brown growth spoiled the middle limbs.

Joseph found the perfect fir, just short of the mountain. The children had missed it, though their tracks were all about. He went to it from the road, straight as a die. The bottom limbs were ragged, but those could be cut off; and above them, the circlets of the upward-angling branches were perfect. The trunk was straight and round. The green of the needles was dark and rich, right to the soft-breathing tip.

“How about this one?” Joseph said.

The children said nothing, looking at the lower limbs.

“From here up,” Joseph said. He nicked the bark with his axe.

“Yes, oh yes,” they cried then. “That’s the best tree anyone could find, ain’t it, Father?” The ridiculous momentary doubt of their father’s judgement made them more joyous than ever.

They fell silent as Joseph tramped the snow about the base of the tree, to chop it. David made out he was shaking snow from his mitten. He took off Anna’s mitten too, pretending to see if there was any snow in hers. He stood there holding her mitten-warmed hand, not saying anything, and watched his father strike the first shivering blow.

The tree made a sort of sigh as it swept through the soft air and touched the soft snow. Then the moment broke. The children came close and touched the green limbs. They thrust their faces between them—into the dark green silence. They smelled the dark green, cosy, exciting smell of the whole day in the balsam blisters on the trunk.

Joseph stood and waited: the good kind of waiting, with no older-hurry in him. Then he lifted the tree to his shoulders, both arms spread out to steady it at either end.

The twins walked close behind him. They let the swaying branches touch their faces. They walked straight now, because the first cast of dusk had begun to spread from the mountain. The first dusk-stiffening of the snow and a shadow of the first night-wonder were beginning. Now the things of the day fell behind them; because all that part of the day which could be kept warm and near was in the tree, and they were taking the tree home, into the house, where all the warm things of after-dark belonged.

Anna whispered to David, “I got somethin for you, Dave.”

And he whispered, “I got somethin for you, too.”

“What?”

“Oh, I can’t tell.”

Then they guessed. Each guess was made deliberately small, so there’d be no chance that the other would be hurt by knowing that his present was less than the vision of it. Each of
them felt that whatever they had for each other all their lives would have something of the magic, close-binding smell of the fir boughs somewhere in it, like the presents for each other of no other two people in the world.

Martha had huddled the furniture in the dining room together, to clear a corner for the tree.

“Aw, Mother,” David said, “you said you’d wait!”

His mother laughed. “I just moved the sofa and mats a little,” she said. “I didn’t touch the trimmings. Do you think it’s too late to put them up before supper?”

“No,” David cried, “no. I’m not a bit hungry.”

“I suppose if supper’s late it’ll make you late with your chores, won’t it?” she said to Joseph.

“Well,” Joseph said, “I suppose I
could
do em before supper.” He hesitated. “Or do you want me to help you with the trimmin?”

“Oh, yes,” David said. “Help us.”

He wanted everyone to be in on it. Especially his father. It was wonderful when his father helped them with something that wasn’t work,
inside
the house.

David fanned open the great accordion-folding bell (because of one little flaw his mother had got it—it didn’t seem possible—for only a quarter). He tied the two smaller bells on the hooks of the blinds. Then he and his father and Chris took off their boots. They stood on chairs in their stocking feet and hung the hemlock garlands Ellen had made; around the casings and from the four ceiling corners of the room to a juncture at its centre, where the great bell was to be suspended.

Someone would say, “Pass the scissors?” and David would say,
“Sure,”
beating with gladness to do them any small
favours. Martha would stand back and say, “A little lower on that side,” and they’d say, “Like that? Like that? More still?” all full of that wonderful patience to make it perfect. Everyone would laugh when someone slipped off a chair. His father would say, “Why wouldn’t some red berries look good in there?” and to hear his
father
say a thing like that filled the room with something really splendid. Sometimes he’d step on Anna’s toe as they busied back and forth. He’d say, “Oh, Anna, did that hurt?” and she’d laugh and say, “No, it didn’t hurt.” He’d say, “Are you
sure?”
and just that would be wonderful.

The dusk thickened and the smell of the hemlock grew soft as lamplight in the room. The trimming was done and the pieces swept up and put into the stove.

Then Joseph brought in the tree, backward through the door so the limbs wouldn’t break. No one spoke as be stood it in the space in the corner. It just came to the ceiling. It was perfect. Suddenly the room was whole. Its heart began to beat.

They ate in the dining room that night. David smelled the roast spare ribs that had been kept frozen in the shop. He felt now how hungry he’d been all the time.

The room was snug with the bunching of the furniture and the little splendour of eating there on a weekday. And when Martha held the match to the lamp wick, all at once the yellow lamplight soft-shadowed their faces (with the blood running warm in them after being out in the cold) like a flood and gathered the room all in from outside the windows. It touched the tree and the hemlock and the great red bell with the flaw no one could even notice, like a soft breath added to the beating of the room’s heart: went out and came back with a kind of smile. The smell of the tree grew suddenly and the memory of the smell of the oranges and the feel of the nuts. In that instant suddenly, ecstatically, burstingly, buoyantly,
enclosingly, sharply, safely, stingingly, watchfully, batedly, mountingly, softly, ever so softly, it was Christmas Eve.

The special Christmas Eve food lit their flesh like the lamplight lit the room. Even Christopher talked fast. Even the older ones spoke as if their thoughts had come down from the place where they circled, half-attentive, other nights.

David glanced out of the window. He saw “Old Herb Hennessey” walking down the road. When Herb went into his house tonight there’d be no fire in the stove, and after supper he’d sit and read the paper and it would be just like any other night.

David watched the blur of his heavy body move down the road in the almost-dark. It seemed as if no sound was coming from him anywhere, even if you were there where his feet were falling. He felt the funniest, scariest kind of pity for Herb. He felt the sweetest, safest sort of exaltation: that such a thing could be, however incredibly, but not ever for him. (He was to wonder, years later, if this now were some sort of justice for the unconscious cruelty in that thought.)

When he went to help his father with the chores, great-flaked Christmas snow began to fall against the sides of the yellow lantern. The barn smelled warm and cosy. He secretly poked in extra hay to the cows, because it was Christmas Eve. The torture of being outside the house was an exquisite one, because the tree was there to go back to.

All evening long, some things (the faces, the conversation) were open as never before. Other things (the packages somewhere in the closet, the sound of nuts tumbled into a bowl behind the closed pantry door) were bewitchingly secret. There were the last desperate entreaties of him and Anna on the stairs: to call each other in the morning and
please
not to go down first. His prayers were over so quickly they might
have been read at a glance from some bright sheet in his mind. Then the blanket warmth and the tiredness in him stole out to meet each other.

He lay beside Chris and listened to the voices downstairs behind the closed doors, the footsteps, the rustlings. He tried to identify them at first: Would that be hanging oranges on the boughs? Would that be a sled for Chris? That sound of paper, were they unwrapping a doll for Anna? Would that be some swift gleaming thing like skates, for him?

Then the sounds began to wave and flicker through the candlelight of drowsiness and warmth.

He whispered to Chris, “Chris, when you learn to skate fast, is it the best fun of anything?” “Kind of,” Chris said. He whispered, “Chris, someday let’s go way back to the top of the mountain,” and Chris said, “Maybe.” He whispered, “Chris, how old is Herb Hennessey? Is he four times as old as us?” and Chris said, “I guess.” The pauses between questions and reply got longer. He said, “Chris, are you asleep?” There was no answer at all. He thought, “How
could
Chris go to sleep?”