Free The Mountain and the Valley by Ernest Buckler Page B

read the words in it, as if even reading might soil the wonderfully sleek pages.
    They came to him when the teacher walked beside the desks meditating on whose work to place the ( I ), seeming to make up her mind and then change it again, and then finally he felt her arm coming over his shoulder. Or in the satin moment of waking … or in the woollen moment just before sleep.
    He’d think of them then, and be
doubly
translated. It would seem as if he touched the very quick of the day.
    They went through him shiveringly, like cold or heat. He felt his heart really get bigger. But they weren’t like any other excitement.
    Not like when you hit the ball and then ran to the tree and back, with your breath all gone and your side all shouting, just before the ball got back too; or when the calf you were leading suddenly began to caper and then run like the wind, you couldn’t stop him, you could barely hang onto the chain, and then the laughing struck you, and as you bounced along, your feet barely touching the ground, the laughter gaining in you with each step, you seemed to be lifted right out of the bright daylight still. Nor like when you said, “Yeh, she gives twice as big a mess as that, but her mind wasn’t on her
milk
today at all,” or “Rachel’s face looks as if she was settin on a pot all the time,” and the
rest
of them laughed.
    They weren’t that kind of wonderful. They had a snugness about them.
    They were more like in the haymow when the rain was on the roof; or under the tent he and Chris had made out of meal bags, when the last flap had been fastened on tight with shingle nails and the last bit of sunlight shut out; or the moment in bed at night when his body and Chris’s next it made a puddle of warmth in the shockingly cold blankets, with the thoughts of the day (when he had been running andlaughing) sinking away from his body as softly as bare toes in the warm dust.
    They were still more like when his father took him with him to buy a pair of cattle, the horse trotting at first through the same stretch of woods and then slowing its pace, and Joseph holding the whip against the spokes of the turning wheel so that the hollow tick of it made a core of stillness as they crept so beautifully saving-the-time along. Or when the other men all came to help shoe the bad ox and he’d sit on the top beam of the haymow and watch them lash its flailing legs into the slings on the barn floor; in it, but above it and outside it at the same time. Or with Chris, walking by the churchyard at night, and thinking of walking by the churchyard alone.
    Or were they most of all, he would think sometimes, like when Anna would fall asleep on the lounge before it was time for bed and he’d cover her up gently with a coat? Her breath would come so softly without any movement he could see, like the smell of a flower, that he’d think with a shimmer of the most beautiful sadness, because she wasn’t: What if she were dead?
    Or were they most of all like Christmas itself?

CHAPTER VIII
    T here were the three days: the day before Christmas, the day of Christmas, and the day after. Those three days lamplight spread with a different softness over the blue-cold snow. Faces were all unlocked; thought and feeling were open and warm to the touch. Even inanimate things came close, as if they had a blood of their own running through them.
    On the afternoon of the first day the cold relaxed suddenly, like a frozen rag dipped in water. Distances seemed toshrink. The dark spruce mountain moved nearer, with the bodies of the trees dark as before rain.
    Martha had done up all her housework before noon, and the afternoon had the feel of Saturday. It was a parenthesis in time—before the sharp expectancy began to build with the dusk and spark to its full brightness when the lamp was lit. There were so many places it was wonderful to be that afternoon that David was scarcely still a minute.
    He went outside and made a snowman. The snow was