Free The Mountain and the Valley by Ernest Buckler

the feet from under the grey sandy snow on the side hills: the day when Ellen touched the softened stubble and felt her hands draw from things the meanings her mind could no longer surprise.
    II
    The school concert was postponed until Christmas. Rachel thought it wouldn’t look right to have it in June.
Some
people might forget in two months, but you couldn’t expect
her
child to feel much like …
    All through the year the words of his part in the play kept flushing in and out of David’s head like an exalting secret. From the time when Christmas was only a word, till the time when it became like some magic lamplight turned up, haloing the days and drawing them toward it.
    The words were something no one else had. For thatreason, everyone who was there when the thought of them came seemed revealedly wonderful, and somehow more fiercely loved, for being so pitiably, humdrumly, outside it.
    He thought of them when Joseph thrust his fork slowly into the great cock of hay, lifting the whole thing except for a few scatterings that clung to the ground, above his head: settling it carefully into place on the side of the load and then walking patiently alongside the snail-slow oxen on the sun-parched stubble, hawing or geeing them to the next cock. He had a surging, binding, kind of pity for his father—so drugged with patience. His father wasn’t drawn to the moment ahead, as he was, but pushed to it by the moment behind. He would try desperately to help him, with another fork. (Though, piercing more than he could lift to the load, the hay would break apart and fall about his shoulders.)
    He’d feel the same binding pity for his mother, when her thoughts seemed to slip away from her and weave in and out of their own accord, like the knitting needles she watched in her hands as she rocked gently back and forth. Or for his grandmother, when she tore the map-shaped parts of clothing into rags for a rug, as if motion of her hands were the only kind of movement left to her.
    He thought of them when Chris was dropping seed potatoes, aligning the odd one that tumbled out of place, with his foot; pressing it into the soft brooch-coils of manure automatically. He’d say, “It’ll soon be time for swimmin, Chris”—so that Chris could break away a second from the steadiness of the furrow; so that he could think of his naked body in the water and have somewhere outside the moment to go, too.
    He thought of them, with Effie; but the bond with her wasn’t of pity: he knew she had the thought of her silk dress in the same way.
    And to think of them, with Anna, was best of all. For Anna was like a second safety: a place he would still have—to go to, if his secret thoughts ever failed.
    The words gave him a more selfish sort of safety when he was with the ones he
didn’t
love.
    Sunday afternoons, perhaps, when the men dropped in to see his father. They’d sit in the kitchen, slicing their apples with a jackknife and holding the slice between thumb and knife as they bit into it, talking and silent in seesaw pendulum. Their thoughts seemed to sprawl drowsily, like a cat asleep. Later they’d all stroll to the barn to look at Joseph’s stock. They’d slide their hands lazily over the cows’ flanks or feel the oxen’s coos. They’d turn their backs to urinate against a manager, watching the operation meditatively and speaking over their shoulders; then make a slow motion of rump-withdrawal after the moment of finishing and, turning again, patiently manipulate their buttons. They’d take their final leave so haltingly it was like a rope fraying apart. They would seem, beside himself, like people tied.
    Or when the women came to a quilting. So neat there seemed to be a little of Sunday in them; neat with their stitches, and as if their talk were quilted together too, with their needles; like
one person
over the tea … so terribly without private excitement like his.
    Or, with the other children, when they gathered the slippery