Free The Mountain and the Valley by Ernest Buckler Page A

pollywogs in their hands; or dragged the two bottles behind them with miniature ox yokes on their necks; or when he met them drawing their sleds up the hill as his speed grew and grew, going down, till the Big Rock moved too, and it seemed as if the others were coasting in the dark.
    The words were a kind of refuge when the moment was bare, stripped right down to time and place.
    These were the days when the December freshet lay manure-water-yellow over the ice in the flats and grey vapour curled from the eaten snow into the sodden air. His woollen clothing had a urine smell about it, and his father might start to file the crosscut saw, or his mother might lay the pattern on her apron material, or he could hear Chris somewhere with a hammer, but it didn’t seem to be the kind of day for keeping
at
anything. Or when the hot sickly marsh-smell came up out of the dry-brooked meadow, and the spongy moss roots stuck in the hay he raked out of his father’s heel prints in the swath. He’d feel tired enough for noon, but it was nowhere near noon yet.
    He thought of the words too, when the moment was already brimming.
    That was when he’d hear the shiver of the sleighbells as the shafts were pulled out of their tugs at the horse’s sides, and then his father came into the house with the one magic paper bag in the pocket of his bearskin coat that you could tell held something special. Or when one of the men referred to something his father had done, in a good-natured perplexity that Joseph could never be made to see anything extraordinary in it, himself: the time he’d climbed into the bull pen, without even a cudgel, to ring the cross bull’s nose; or the time he’d clamped a scooped-out potato over the spurting head artery of the man who’d fallen on a ledge; or one of the times when his rare anger had had a comical effect, though no one dared laugh.
    The men told these things about Joseph pridefully—as if they might be telling them about themselves. Maybe Joseph would half-smile and say, “Git me my tobacco, will ya, son?” The asking of this little favour and the granting of it seemed to make a gentle conspiracy between them. When he passed the tobacco to Joseph and touched the broad hairyhand that was like the way his father was with the men (his quiet face was like the way he was about the house), he’d think, “This is my father.”
    He’d think of the words in the play then, to make the moment really spill over.
    He thought of them too, when his mother would give him her best stew kettle for the sap to drip in and say, “Now don’t you lose it, mind”: and he’d almost burst with the fervid promise that he wouldn’t lose it. Or when she’d come downstairs from changing her dress. Somehow her woman-softness made a lull in the afternoon so he could look at the pictures in a new book without seeming to borrow from the time that was for other things.
    He thought of them in the magic moment when his grandmother said, “Did I ever tell you about the time …?” Or with Anna, when they were all playing hide-and-seek and it was almost dark and suddenly she looked frighteningly small as she stood against the house, with her arms across her eyes and her skirt drawn up so the red hemstitching on her flannelette petticoat showed, counting, “Five, ten, fifteen, twenty …” The others seemed to run so cruelly fast then and hide so securely that he’d hide close to her and almost exposed, so that he could feel her small, soft, searching, defenseless hand gladden desperately as it felt over his face, and it wouldn’t matter to her then where the others were hiding at all.
    He thought of them when he was all alone: when he put on the new sneakers with the black rubber soles so shining he could hardly bear to take the first step on the ground. Or when he took the brand new Reader in a room by himself and passed his fingers over the scooped-out lettering on the bright covers and there’d be a delicious guilt as he