The Mountain and the Valley Read Free Page A

again now he’d feel awake (though why only with Bess, and not with any of the other women?), a shadow of the same thing he’d felt in the dream.
    “David?” Martha called from the foot of the stairs.
    Chris felt a sudden shame at the sound of his mother’s voice. He started out of the room.
    “Wait for me,” David cried.
    “I’m just goin downstairs!” Chris said.
    “Please
wait for me, Chris,” David said. He couldn’t bear for Chris to get started on the day first.
    “Ohhhhh,” Chris said.
    He sat down on the bed and waited.
    David’s crazy whims never made any kind of sense to him, but he always gave in to them. He played more often with other boys than with David; but when the other boys had left and he’d see David’s slight body coming toward home in the dusk, he liked Dave so much better than the other boys it almost made him cry.
    He smiled. That crazy dream of Dave’s. Yet that part about not getting there was kind of like his own dream, just the same. His flesh didn’t seem to quite get there, either … would it ever? He looked at David’s face. You could tell that David’s flesh had never felt that way.
    David saw him smile. God, he thought, Chris looks like Dad this morning! That’s the way the older ones watched your kind of fun; just watched and smiled—the way you watched the kitten with a ball.
    “Chris,” he said, “what if the old Jersey gets her quim hot while we’re gone? Hadn’t we better leave a note for the bull?”
    Chris laughed outright. He could always bring them close again, with what each one liked to laugh at, every time.
    II
    “I told you to wake me when
you
got up,” David said to his mother.
    “Well, I wanted to get the kitchen warm first,” Martha said.
    The thin spring sunshine reached through the window and latticed the boards of the kitchen floor with long still shadows of table and chair legs, and twisting shadows of the steam from the kettle and the rising breath of the breakfast food. It was the kitchen the sun seemed to seek out the year round. In the summer it basked there, bodily, like a cat; and even when the winter wind mourned outside, fingers of it reached through the frost-fur on the tiny panes and touched the handle of the stove lifter or the curve of a rocker or a hand.
    The kitchen was the perimeter of Martha’s whole life. She dressed it as carefully as she would a child. She had small wherewithal to make beauty with; but just as you couldfeather-stitch Anna’s petticoat with bright thread, though it was only flannelette, so you could pleat the curtains instead of letting them hang flat. The kitchen was nearer to her than a voice. Her feet travelled there in the steep mornings and in the quick-declining afternoons. She thought there the slow thoughts that come and go silently when you are working alone, without speech. When she was outside it she felt strange. And for Joseph too, though he never thought of it consciously, it was like an anchor: the one small corner safe from the sweat of the fields and the fret of the seasons.
    When the day’s work was done and supper over, the kitchen seemed to smile. The other rooms seemed faceless beside it. Martha would sit near the lamp, sewing or mending, thinking quietly, but not clearly on anything at once, the way a woman does when she is tired and dark has come again. For a minute Joseph would sit motionless in the rocker after he’d pulled off his heavy boots, and curl his toes up and down in his woollen socks; he’d be tired from the plough or the axe, but the pattern of all the steps he’d taken outside that day would make a kind of far-off song in his blood. The children would still be busy, but the quick day-planning would be gone out of them; and Ellen would be young again, going back to her youth in the evening as the old do.
    The kitchen’s heart would seem to beat with a great peace then. The paths of the day which had been separate for each (patterned for the old, patternless for