The Mountain and the Valley Read Online Free PDF Page A

board or helped raise a rafter. Spurge Gorman had hewn the cross from the great mountain ash he’d looked out for axe handles; and Peter Delahunt had fixed the cross to the steeple. The bishop from Halifax had consecrated the new burial ground only last week.
    (Martha’s hands had stopped cold at her work whenever she’d thought of having him to dinner. She’d wanted to get their own dinner out of the way first, but Ellen said no,
not
to act in any way extraordinary, Joseph said, “Hell, he’s only a man.”
    It was easy as could be once he was inside the house. He was a smiling man who made you feel like smiling too. His boots were skinned at the toe. He smoked a pipe. He ate heartily, and remarked about her carrot fern. She’d felt pride almost to tears to see his great Ring resting on David’s head when he asked David what he wanted to be. She’d wished he could stay to supper.)
    The church was cool inside. It had a stillness all of its own. Anna liked the organ-and-prayer-book smell, the smell of new paint and lumber. She liked the hollow sound of her voice and steps, echoing among the pews.
    But for Ellen the mystery still dwelt in the old church four miles down the road. Her husband had helped build that one. Now he lay beside it. It too was a building made by human hands like any other building and that settlement was deserted now, but she felt that the mystery breathed there all by itself whether there was the sound of voices on the road or not.
    They left the church. As they came close to the house, a fine rain gathered suddenly out of nowhere. The sun stillshone. You could see where the skirt of the shower stopped; short of the mountain on one side and short of the river on the other. Who did that painting my father had in the big hall, Ellen thought, that looked like this? The rain silky and transparent in the air, but green on the grass and pink on the maples. His name began with a “C.”
    “Quickly,” she said. “Run.”
    “Oh no,” Anna said, “let’s go in the barn.” In the barn you could sit safe and dry and hear the rain on the roof.
    The cows and oxen lurched to their feet. They stretched their whole length, languidly. Patch, the horse, threw up his head. His sleek skin rippled nervously. He stamped his sharp-shod feet heavily in the stall. Ellen let him sweep up a handful of oats from her hand with his cool leathery lips. The oat-dribble mixed with green bit-dribble at the corners of his mouth.
    Anna was afraid of the horse. She drew her grandmother away, into the barn-floor. They sat on two feed boxes. The barn-floor was dark after the bright sunlight outside, and cool. There was the dusty smell of hay. Motes defined a ribbon of sunshine that came from the window above the scaffold. Every tiny knothole in the boards was a star of light. The rain made a plushy sound on the roof. Anna felt a fascinating shiver of secrecy.
    “Tell me a story,” she said. “Tell me when
you
were a little girl.”
    “I’m not sure I remember so long ago,” Ellen said.
    Anna sighed. Her grandmother would never talk to her about England. It must have something to do with things she’d overheard her father say. Ellen’s parents had thought her husband wasn’t good enough for her. He was older than she was. He was proud and stubborn. He’d never let her mentiontheir names. He’d never let her write back home. Not a line.
    If she insisted, Ellen would put her off. (“Did I ever tell you about the Governor of Annapolis—or Port Royal, then—who died on a voyage back from France? They put his body in the sea, but they brought his heart on and buried it. I’ll take you to Annapolis sometime and show you the very spot.” Or, “Did you know that the road to town—
it
used to be called LeCroix, so many trails branched there, before they changed it to Newbridge—was only a footpath when I came here?” Or, “Did I tell you about the dry summer when the fires were so thick around us? The sky was dark