The Mountain and the Valley Read Free Page B

the young) melted together. The breath of them all seemed to lift in one single breath.
    The kitchen had been witness to everything in their lives, and so was like one of them. If strangers, with different tread and different plans and other thoughts, should ever come to inhabit it, all the light would go out of its face.
    Joseph had just finished milking. He was washing his hands at the sink. Martha gathered the muslin strainer over the lip of the milk pail.
    Her features were each too generous to allow her prettiness. But she had soft light hair, and true light eyes, and whatever her face did it did all the way, in smiling or in sadness.
    She enjoyed these morning chores: scalding the creamers, brushing crumbs off the pitted face of the stove with a hawk wing, doing the chamber work—making the untidy waking face of the house orderly again. Most other women she knew found their morning work a burden and a waste. Their faces looked hot and ravelled as they worked about the stove. They didn’t seem to come alive until they’d changed their dress after dinner and gone out to talk with another woman. But even when she was alone in her own house, her tasks were like a kind of conversation. The objects she touched had animacy. Even in the morning she wore a dress of bright print.
    Ellen sat on the lounge. She was ripping old garments apart at the seams; then nicking each section with the scissors; then tearing them, with quick clean strokes, into rags for a rug.
    Anna sat beside her. She kept picking out sections of the brightest coloured garments and holding them up to her as if she were testing dresses at a counter.
    “Gosh,
that’s
a pretty colour,” David said. Everything seemed beautiful this morning.
    “I don’t know which I think is the prettiest,” Anna said, “this one or that one. Which do you?”
    “Oh, this one,” he said. “Or … I don’t know. Which do you?”
    Anna had almost no look of the others. She was David’s twin, but her hair and her eyes were dark. Her face had the delicacy of the child who is beautiful before its time: a tiny replicaperfection that gave it a vulnerable look. She would always keep that trace of prettiness in that same soft childlike way.
    “Well, if everyone’s washed,” Martha said.
    The food had a ghostly taste to David, like food in a dream. It just took time. The fresh bread with the faint smell of milk and hands in it he swallowed almost without chewing. He couldn’t touch his egg.
    “Eat your egg,” Martha said. “You’ll be hungry.”
    “Aw, Mother, I won’t be
hungry!”
Always that: Would you be hungry, or tired, or warm enough? If he could only make them see how meaningless the possibility of being hungry later on was.
    “You’ll see whether you’re hungry or not,” Chris said. “You never walked there before.”
    “Oh, I can walk as far as you can!” But he wasn’t angry. He knew that if any argument really went against him, Chris would switch back to his side.
    “Joseph,” Martha said, “do you thing it’s too far for David, way back there? You don’t know how far it
is
, Dave.”
    “Let the child go.” Ellen whispered it, but David heard. He loved her.
    “
Yes
, Mother.” He looked at his father. “Dad, you
said
I could.” He was almost crying. It would be awful if this was one of the times when nothing could make his mother understand how full you were of never being tired or cold or hungry.
    “What do you think, Dave?” Joseph said. “Think you kin walk that far?”
    “Sure I can! Mother’s always so
scared.”
    “Oh, I don’t know,” Joseph said, “I guess maybe he kin go. We’ll take it easy. What do you think, Martha?”
    “Well,” Martha said, “if he’d keep his jacket buttoned, and promised me to
tell
you if he starts to get tired.”
    His mother was suddenly wonderful when she began to waver like that. He promised her all these things, yes, yes, truly, from the bottom of his heart.
    Joseph looked at David the