The Mountain and the Valley (6 page)

T
he news ricocheted from house to house. Each listener, his own shock subsided to a kind of thought-trembling, himself became a messenger; anticipating the effect of his words in spite of himself: watching almost eagerly for the sudden wiped look on the face of a woman stirring the dinner on the stove, the instant focusing of time and place in the face of a man who glanced at the spade that went loose in his hands as if it were unreal.

Then when all the first shock had settled and the thing was at last really believed, the village seemed to fuse. Women
found in other women, just to see them coming up the path to talk over this terrible thing, a glow as of reconciliation. Men who had been bad friends for years sidled next each other in the groups and took up each other’s remarks, warming at the sound of their own voices.

In the evening a hiatus fell over the place. Spurge and Peter possessed everyone’s mind with a curious kind of distinctiveness the living lacked—as if, by dying, they had achieved their first clear outline of identity.

Each told of the last time he had seen Spurge or Peter, as if something significant could be read out of what he was doing or wearing or saying at that time. “I remember the last time I saw Spurge, he was comin up from the barn with them old cutdown larrigans on. I remember what he said. He said, ‘I guess it’s about time I shed some o’ these clothes, ain’t it?’ ” Or, “The last time Pete was up here, he come to borrow my compass. I don’t think he liked to ask for it. I can see him now. He always set in that chair be the woodbox, didn’t he, Hattie?”

The houses where they lay took on a face of cataleptic awe, as if the dead had communicated to them alone their mystery. A woman, passing from the sink to the stove, would stop suddenly at the window and looking to one or other of the houses try, desperately for an instant, to read their illegible secret. A man, milking, would catch a glimpse of the sinking sun, striking but not surprising the truth from the enigmatic windows. He would let his hands drop for a minute and try to think, for the first time, what it was to be alive.

Then it all became ritual.

There were the visits of condolence: the limbs struck with sudden awkwardness at the door, the entrance so clumsy as to be almost sly. As if at a signal, a gust of fresh sadness welled in visitor and mourner alike when they shook hands. There
would be a nod of indication as the pie or the pan of rolls was slipped unobtrusively onto the pantry shelf, and a nod and the fabrication of a smile of acknowledgment. There were the tears and the surreptitious gauging of the widow’s grief.

The visitors went into the front room as if the floor were perilous walking. There was the moment of willed solemnity, with the face of the visitor pretending to understand what he read, as he or she gazed at the enigmatic face. “He looks lovely, don’t he?” the visitor murmured, as he turned away; while Bess touched protectively the hair of her tender exhibit, or Rachel stood by the window, pleating meticulously the hem of her handkerchief from border to border, as she waited to pull the blind down again.

In the kitchen again, they smiled at the children, Effie or Charlotte. Sometimes the children were proud at being singled out for pity. Sometimes they cried, of necessity or to follow example. Sometimes they sat forlorn, like children after punishment; feeling guilty for having forgotten to be continuously sad.

And when the visitors had left the house, there were the little stories that, in the telling, bound them together closer still. (Rachel and Bess, by reason of their greater sadness, were isolated.) “Grace said that when
she
went in, Bess, poor soul, was in the room, cryin, and mendin his shirt cuff where the frayin showed.” Or, “Rachel won’t eat a bite. I told her she had to eat to keep up her strength, but she won’t touch a thing.”

No one worked the afternoon of the double funeral. The children tried to play, but their games would not move. The day seemed to be waiting. Gathered outside the church, when the time was come, a woman would brush a speck from her husband’s good suit (setting on him so gravenly in the middle of a weekday afternoon); then recall herself to the occasion, as
if habit had betrayed her. Smiles were begun, then stopped halfway, in the conflict between greeting and the observance of solemnity. The black hearse horses moved slowly through the sunlight. They seemed to trail a hush behind them, out of the houses and the fields and the eyes of all that watched.

Inside the church, the spring sunlight struck batedly through the windows, engraving the artificial flower on a mat, or a pulpit moulding or the wrinkle of a face. The leaves of the poplars outside touched the windows remotely. Between stolen scrutiny of the mourners the gaze of the people strayed to the fields. Outside sounds came like sounds over water, deflected by the church-hush inside. The houses and all the men’s handiwork in the fields lay alien between the mountains, as if for this hour the men had no part in them.

Rachel and Charlotte sat in one front seat, Bess and Effie in the one opposite. Rachel’s face was hidden by a long black veil; but Bess’s was exposed. It looked washed out. Something seemed to strike it wherever her eyes fled. When Bess was hurt she was hurt everywhere at once, and all of it showed. The dishevelment of sadness lay almost comically on a face moulded so smooth with laughter and quick impulse.

The two children sat motionless. They were congested with the intensity of child-sadness that nothing can help—until the next hour, merely with coming, takes it entirely away.

Neither looked at all like her mother. Charlotte might have been Bess’s child. There was promise of the same generosity in her body. She had the same lush fruiting in her high-coloured cheeks and heavy black hair. Only a timidity at the sound of her own laughter was different.

Effie was small. There was a fragile blondeness all about her. She shed a sort of light, like the light behind the parchment of a Japanese lantern. Even as a child that not-quite-penetrable
mist about her made her thoughts and actions more illegible than a mask.

The people held up their faces meekly to the rain of solemn words. They heard only the sound, not the heart of them. It wasn’t until the organ began, the one sound which chords with the watcher’s feeling at the enigmatic language of death, that everyone wept.

David looked at Effie. Her face had a pleading, retching, look. He had never seen her cry before. The death-sadness that had blown against him like a breeze, all day long, suddenly sharpened. He felt somehow blameful that Effie cried more lonelily than he. He thought: I’ll marry Effie, that’s what I’ll do. Then she’ll know that whatever happens will happen to us both, and she’ll never cry like that again.

The day stopped and listened at the grave … no more of touch between them after this minute, or sight or sound.

Then, as the handful of dust sprinkled the coffins, even before the heads rose, the day moved again. Swiftly as a breeze, Peter and Spurge passed from fact to memory. The cord with the living began to ravel. Now the grass was ordinary grass only. The fields became familiar weekday fields again. The men, moving away, felt restless in their good clothes and thought of catching up on the time they’d missed. “We need rain,” they said. Or felt for their pipes. And now each woman was different to the others in the way she had been different before.

Rachel and Bess moved off among the groups, careful to keep more than speaking distance apart.

“Is there anything I can do?” the women said to Rachel. She shook her head. “No. I was good to him. I give him a respectable funeral. There’s nothin else anyone can do now. Only time can heal.”

They passed on to Bess. “If there’s anything I can do …”

They spoke a little furtively in spite of themselves. They were anxious to record their offer and move away. The constraint of never knowing on exactly what footing they stood with Bess was back, the parched feeling they always had sudden consciousness of in her presence.

“No, it must be God’s will.” Bess’s face had a glow and a force even now, like when she sang in meeting. “I’ll just have to keep busy, so I don’t have time to
think.”

What would she think they thought as they moved away. Was she a good woman or a bad one? Could anyone cry like that woman’d cried today, if there’d been other men? If you could just be sure.

D
avid kept his eyes on Effie. He kept willing her to detach herself from the others’ attention. Then, when she’d seem about to do so, he’d chill with the thought of speaking this message of his she was so ignorant of. At last he moved beside her. She was staring at a geranium blossom she had plucked from the wreath his mother had made. She thrust it into her pocket quickly. She smiled her light impenetrable smile.

He was tongue-tied. You planned how it would be with someone, seeing ahead how their part must go as certainly as your own. Then when the time came, they started off with an altogether different speech or mood, and your part became useless and wooden. She was smiling. It would sound abrupt and foolish to tell her she would never have to cry alone again.

“Have you learnt your piece for the concert?” he said.

She nodded.

“Mother made me a new dress,” she said. “It’s shot silk. It’s blue and then it goes green.” Her eyes were soft and bright, as if just to speak the word “silk” gave her the touch of it too. “Do you know yours?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go somewhere and say them,” she said.

“All right,” he said.

They went down where the brook crossed the road and wound through the alder-circled meadow on its way to the river. Where they’d be all alone.

They began to speak the lines of the school play.

“Who are you?” she said.

“I came to play with you.”

“I am rich and beautiful,” she answered haughtily, “I’m not allowed to play with beggars.” David was startled. She sounded as if she really was rich. She moved about as if she really had fine clothes on, without knowing it.

“Do you
always
play alone?”

“I like to play alone. No one takes my things, and I never have to laugh or cry unless I want to.”

“I know,” he said. “I play alone too.”

“Are there no other beggars?” she said.

It was his turn to speak proudly. “I am a prince,” he said. At the sound of the word “prince” he became tall and strange and wonderful. “I put on this disguise, to find out what it would be like to play with someone else. See my ring?”

He held out his hand. He could see the great emerald stone as plainly as if it were there; his fingers were long and fine.

“You
are
a prince,” she said. “Oh yes, I see it now. I will ask my father if …” She stopped.

A spontaneous breeze swept the black alders low to the brook. A fresh, awful, gust of sadness came out of the word “father.” The magic of the word “silk” was gone. Her face came through the mist of lightness, twisted like a precarious smile falling apart.

She sank down onto the meadow moss, as if she wanted to make herself small. She hid her face in her arms and sobbed.

David looked at her cheap cotton dress. Her crying seemed to endow it more with forlornness than her face. The word “prince” emptied out of him too. He sat down on the moss beside her and put an arm around her shoulders.

And they knew then what it was like for two people to cry together. The breeze of sadness blew outward now, not inward. Even children can never cry together equally: there is a sort of selfishness in the one whose hurt is the more immediate, a sort of desperation in the one who cannot share equally the burden of that immediacy. But they were crying together.

David found his message easy to say then. He said, “Effie, someday we’ll be married, won’t we?”

Her lips were trembling, but she nodded and nodded.

The word “marry” filled them both. It was like a
place—
a place waiting for you when you got older. It was like a house. You could go in and close the door. The lamp would not flicker in any breeze.

II

It was different with Chris and Charlotte. They maintained an air of having found themselves side by side by accident; though, edging through the groups, their eyes had been on each other, sidelong, all the time.

Just before the funeral Chris had slipped upstairs and
looked at himself in the mirror. He smoothed back his dark heavy hair and straightened his tie. He put his face close to the mirror and passed a thumb over the dark silky shadow beginning on his upper lip. Then he tilted the mirror backward and, turning, watched the back of his coat draw tight across the muscles in his shoulders. His body felt smooth and full beneath it.

He listened. There was no one on the stairs. He stripped quickly to the waist and drew a deep breath, bunching the muscles in his arms and patting his chest. He smiled a lazy, knowing smile at his own eyes in the mirror, and stretched both arms over his head, watching the muscles rise up at his sides. He felt something new and secret. There seemed to be an extra voice inside him now, that he heard only when he was alone.

I’m almost a man, he thought. That was the way they looked: the men who came to the pool sometimes after a hot day’s haying and took off their shirts, rubbing their hard-muscled chests slowly, then bending soberly to slip out of their pants. As they straightened up, their bodies came out with a thicker, harder, completeness than you’d have guessed from the slack bunching of their clothes. Before they walked into the water, they stood for a minute passing their hands almost in an act of modesty up and down over the suddenly thick crotch hair and the hairy thighs and the lazy, stupid-looking, horse-lip heaviness of the parts that hung beneath.

He listened again. Then he opened his own trousers and glanced inside. Yes. Already.

He had never looked in the mirror like that before. He’d never thought of wanting to have a room by himself. Now he wished the room was all his, so every night before he went to bed he could check the growth of his body, in the mirror, and have that wonderful secret feeling.