The Mountain and the Valley (24 page)

M
artha was papering a bedroom. She was completely happy. She hummed a hymn with unconscious repetition. For years she had agreed with the other women that it would be a shame to cover up the new plaster. But the walls had always seemed faceless.

Now, with the crisp slice of the scissors edging the roll, the old feeling of secret indulgence was back. She felt excited, matching the roses in adjacent strips where the paper would cut with least waste, or when she found amongst the odd pieces a bit which would fit exactly under a window or over a door. The pattern grew steadily along the blind walls until, when the streamer of border closed its circuit, a bloom struck suddenly into the room. The smell of flour paste, and of springtime the first morning you could hoist the upstairs window and shake the mats against the side of the house where shingle flies swarmed in the first warmth, was better even than the smell of cotton you nicked and then tore the length of the weave, or of geranium leaves, or of nutmeg.

Housecleaning made the other women peevish. Martha loved it: airing disuse from clothes; turning the
dejected fillings of straw ticks onto the trash pile (there was a curious satisfaction in watching flame level the house’s excrescence of the past year); and then, when the ticks were swollen enormous again with fresh straw, sewing up their gaping stomachs.

She read again the clippings of weddings or deaths she came across tucked away in a closet; and when she came across a child’s garment that had been kept out of sentiment, she’d shake it out and put it away once more. The little heart-sprain these things gave her was almost pleasant.

She liked the crackle of the paste drying out as she lay in bed, and the smell of moist woodwork in the cavernous-echoing rooms. Tomorrow they’d have their curtain ruffles crisp as shavings again, and their bureau scarves renewed and chaste as communion clothes. She delighted in the sweep of the floorcloth softening the cling of paper fragments or specks of whitewash on the floor. Even the grime on the side of the pail as she poured the gritty water down the sink pleased her, knowing that the grime was no longer on the woodwork. It was as if the house were a living thing. As she refreshed it she renewed her own flesh.

And each year there’d be at least one thing totally new.

This year there was the wallpaper, and a mirror for David’s room. Small things, if you considered all the evening’s calculations on the back of a calendar that had gone into them; but new, just the same. And maybe next year, or some year, the piano …

She looked toward the acre field. She could see Joseph and David clearing rock. She had the perfect contentment of a woman happy in her own work and watching her men work at something beyond her strength.

Ellen’s mat had a landscape pattern. Each year, in her mats, the house reabsorbed its own residue of discarded clothing. She sorted out her colours.

Brown, for the earth. That would do. That was the first Christmas present they’d ever got for Joseph; a boughten sweater. It was merely something he needed; but you could see he was pleased that they had wrapped it and kept it secret from him until the very day.

Pink, for the sky. She could see Martha fluffing that scarf out at her neck now. It was the only piece of silk she’d ever worn. Joseph had searched for it with the lantern a whole hour the night it blew off the line, but he hadn’t come across it until the next spring. It was bleached and torn where the winter winds had fretted it against the wild-rose bush.

All the brighter colours were dyed, but she had no trouble to remember the cloth.

Dark green, for the stalk: that was an Indian suit of Christopher’s. Lighter green, for the leaf: that was part of the same suit. It had been David’s, after Christopher outgrew it. Though it was no fault of Martha’s needle, she could never seem to make over Christopher’s clothes that they didn’t look burden some on David. And after a while he wouldn’t wear them at all. Even now, if he got on a sock of Christopher’s or his father’s he’d change it the minute he discovered his mistake.

Blue, for the flower. That was the dress Anna wore the day she went to work in Halifax. It was the one on the cover of the catalogue. It didn’t look as if she’d worn it after she got there. Maybe the other girls in the office wore different clothes. Maybe the boy she mentioned so often in her letters—Toby, was that his name?—hadn’t liked it.

Was it one year, or two, that Anna had been in Halifax?

Sometimes there’d be a sudden confusion about the years lately. She’d feel as if she were waking from an overlong daytime sleep, and for a second not knowing if it were morning or evening or in what room she lay. The years were like a ribbon she was in the act of pleating. The far end of it stretched out flat; but in the part her hand held, two creases were almost indistinguishable from one.

Halifax … that’s where the sailor had come from that time. I wonder where he went, she thought. I wonder if he is dead …

She looked at Joseph and David (why was there no clear memory of one’s own strength when it was gone?) lifting the heavy rocks onto the wagon. That was the first field Richard cleared; flat as your hand, when the clover had made sod. But with the years of ploughing, rocks showed up again. There were always more rocks beneath.

J
oseph and David were working alone in the field. Ed Goucher had come for Chris to help on the woodsaw.

They never ask to hire me, David thought. They bring me their damned old letters to answer or their papers to fill out, but they never offer me a day’s work. Just because I’m studying languages … they think it has something to do with weakness. He picked up one of the rocks Joseph had left for the two of them to handle together. A surge of petulance strengthened him beyond any summonable physical power.

“Wait, Dave …” Joseph sprang to help him.

But David broke the rock’s leaden root to the ground. A dizzying rush of blood strained against his eyeballs as he threw
it into the cart body. It smashed against the upright plank on the far side and tipped the plank into the air. Joseph brushed the small rocks that tumbled beneath the plank. He braced it in place with another stone.

Dave is tired, he thought, and he’s fighting it. You can’t do that. You have to let it come and go, quietly, and remembering it after supper, it’s sort of like a nice soft tune in your muscles.

This was one of the days when David felt as if the wick inside him were damp. There was a sludge in his feelings. His thoughts smouldered like green wood with all the drafts closed. He felt pulpy, his face the colour of paper in a puddle. It seemed as if the work, rather than his breathing, dragged him along the minutes. He felt the doggedness (though he wasn’t tired) of afterexhaustion.

All day long his mind had grated against the peevish enmity of trifles. The cow tossed her head just as he was about to fasten her chain and struck him with her horn. There wasn’t a match to be found in any pocket when his cigarette was rolled. The water seeped clammy into his woollen sock through the crack in his boot. A stone dropped on his toe. His face was splashed with muck when a rock they were pushing against slipped back into its muddy socket. It gave him something like grinding pleasure to let the damn rock
fall
on his toe if it wanted to,
not
to wring out his dripping mittens,
not
to wipe the dirty water off his face …

Other days like this, he could escape in thought. He’d think of a stubborn problem in binomials, and maybe it would fall apart all at once. Every step toward the solution would be clear as a path. He’d think of a letter maybe being posted to him somewhere this very minute. Or just some aspect of the day—the faint bronze water wash of spring sunshine on the
bare limbs, or the fan of water that roiled mesmerically behind the wheel as it turned in a rut—would glint for an instant like the microcosm of some blinding truth. It would release him.

Today there was no leaven in any thought he could summon.

They didn’t talk as they picked up the rocks and threw them into the cart. But Joseph didn’t notice anything wrong at first. They seldom did talk when they worked together, and he had started the day with his own spirits high.

He was a quiet man. But that didn’t mean that the things of the day passed through him unaffecting; any more than that food was less transmuted by the chemistry of his body than by that of another, in a way particular to him. His feelings weren’t word-shaped, like David’s. There was no page in his mind or heart where their tracery was legible to himself. But they made a tune in him just the same. He couldn’t write the notes that made it up, if he tried. But whether he could translate them into words or not, the notes were there:

This is my own land. This is a child of my own flesh helping me clear it. This is the smart one. I love them all alike, but this is the one I am proudest of. But he’s not ashamed of me. He’s not smart just for himself, he’s smart for all of us. He’s not above us. It doesn’t take him away.

Anna is pretty and Chris is strong. But Anna is pretty and Chris is strong for all of us. I am their father. We are all together.

Martha is papering a room, and the smoke goes up straight and peaceful from the chimney. Martha is my wife. When we were married, it was like having my own hay in the barn and watching the others still mowing and wondering if the rain would come. She watches for me when it nears suppertime, and when she sees me scraping the mud off my boots in
the chipyard, she puts the tea down. Whenever I go amongst strangers she leaves her work until I’ve got into my good clothes, as if it were a sad or a dangerous mission. She speaks my name in her mind whenever she is faced with a decision. We are together.

The night we moved into the new house all the neighbours came and it was like between brothers with all of us. We are all together here. I stroll across the field any time of the day I like. I go see how Willis is getting along with his wagon shed; but the time I lose doesn’t make any gap in my work. This is my land. It is there when I come home from town. In town their faces go stiff, hurrying after their eyes. They plant a shrub in their back yard, trying to make space of it. They lift up things in the stores and ask the price. The house-smell clings to the women-faced men and to whatever they do. My land fits me loose and easy, like my old clothes. That rock there is one my father rolled out, and my son’s sons will look at these rocks I am rolling out today. Someone of my own name will always live in my house.

My life tastes like fresh bread. The days roll down the week like a wheel. Then it is Sunday and the wheel is still and we walk through the garden and try a hill of new potatoes, or go to the back pasture to see how much the steers have grown. All the time of Sunday is free and unallotted, like visiting time. I start summer and winter rolling down the year with my sled runners and the whetting of my mower blade. When one season tires, there’s another; fresh and freshening, from its year’s rest.

The notes of things gone by added their faint counterpoint like the dying echoes of a bell: the pulling of the weed next the plant in the sprouting rows; the first clean “slythhhhh” of the scythe in the swath after the scythe had been ground; the
sound of the cowbell in the cool deep swamp where the tender grass started the milk; Martha dividing the raspberries evenly and then heaping the children’s dishes from the tops of his and hers; all of them going to the barn together to see the new calf; the rainy day or the blustery one coming just when you
felt
like a rest …

Dave is tired, he thought. He’s quick, when something goes wrong with his work on the farm. But he’s quick like you’re quick with your own child: it’s not like a stranger being quick with your child. This land is his, too. We are together.

Joseph hummed a fiddle tune.

David winced. When he worked with his father, there was no constraint between them so long as their relationship, whether of harmony or dissonance, was tacit. But if any of it showed openly, in word or act, he was as embarrassed as when his mother tried the toilet door and he was inside. The expansiveness of his father’s today—especially his embellishment of the tune with little variations (meant to be tripping, but clumsy)—gritted against his feelings like sandpaper.

Joseph eased the oxen into a gentle start, pressing downward on their horns. He cracked the whip over their backs, without actually striking them. “Haw, Bright, Brown … Easy, boys,
easy
 …” The muscles sucked in at their necks and flanks. The heavy load crept forward.

David followed, behind the cart. He had to curb his stride to keep pace with the oxen. They rolled their docile bodies from side to side, depositing their hoofs with great cautiousness on the ground. The pace of an ox, he thought! He looked at them with hatred almost. For a minute it seemed as if the oxen were responsible for the draftless, unfocused resentment in him.

He would grow old here, he thought, like his father. That’s what it would be like: the pace of an ox. Lifting their feet with such horrible patience. No revolt in them against the gall of the yoke straps, even when Joseph braced his knee against their noses and yanked the straps tighter still. They held their heads down, drawing the heavy rocks. Their eyes saw only the ground. He built up the picture and the dismay of himself being old here. It gave him the same self-biting pleasure he’d felt when he let the muddy water stiffen on his face.