The Mountain and the Valley Read Online Free PDF Page B

all.
    The sailor, Ellen said, had gone with the captain of the man-of-war on an errand to the governor’s house in Halifax. He had waited outside. There was a peacock in the garden. It had fascinated him. He’d thought: If I just had one feather from its tail, to show the other sailors. The bird hadscreamed. The captain had rushed out and there he stood, with the feather in his hand.
    He had run. He had travelled the road by night and the woods by day. Now he was here, and she must hide him until the ship sailed.
    “What would the captain have done to him?” Anna said.
    “He’d have been lashed.”
    Ellen spoke so intensely that Anna peered at her face. Her face didn’t look like that when she told other stories. Older people’s faces had a kind of covering. All the things that happened to them piled up there, one over another. But now her grandmother’s face looked as if some kind of breeze had lifted the covering. What she was telling showed bare as on the day it had taken place.
    “His flesh was strong enough,” she said, “but young flesh is soft. They would have split it.”
    The breeze died and her face was old again. She straightened her apron. “Hark,” she said again. “The rain has stopped.”
    Anna had forgotten to listen to the rain.
    “But what happened?” she urged.
    “He stayed a week,” Ellen said. “I took food to him when your grandfather was in the fields. It was wrong, but …”
    “Did
he
tell you about them places?”
    “Yes. I couldn’t help listening. There would be things to do in the house, but …”
    Anna was enchanted. To think that stealthy words had been spoken about those far places, under these very boards.
    “Where did he go?” she said.
    “The night before he left,” Ellen said, “he told me the sea was a lonesome thing. He meant it, but … I suppose he went back to the sea. Do you know what I think it’s likewhen the sea’s right in you?”
    The breeze brushed her face again. Her face forgot itself like a face struck, at first waking, with the memory of the night’s dream of some time when you were another person. You lie there, listening intently for a sound that you know will never come again.
    “Sometimes when you hear a train whistle and everything turns quiet around you, like the way flowers lie on a grave after the mourners have all gone home, or sometimes in the fall when the hay is cut and it’s moonlight and it seems as if everything is somewhere else—I think the sea is a little like that,” she said. “When a thought of it comes across you, it’s like thinking of some face that’s lonesome for just you. All the faces around you turn strange. You know that the sea’s face some one place, somewhere you’ve never been will be like your own. But child, why do I—?”
    “Oh, I
know,”
Anna said. She didn’t, really. Yet this had a kind of meaning for her just the same.
    The covering fell back on Ellen’s face, more immobile than ever.
    “Is that all?” Anna said.
    “Yes. He told me, that night, he wanted to find work on land somewhere. He asked me to bring him some old clothes. I took the clothes the next morning, but he was gone. I called to him. I thought he might be sleeping. But he was gone.”
    Anna sighed. Partly the nice sigh when a story was over; partly a sigh because the ending to this one was frayed, somehow.
    They brushed the hay dust off their clothes and went out into the sunlight.
    “Your grandfather was a good man,” Ellen said suddenly, almost fiercely. “I loved him.”
    A rainbow arched from mountain to mountain. It was almost faded over the valley, but bright-banded as a new hair ribbon at its roots.
    This was the day that came once a year. It, and the day of its fulfillment, were never repeated. On the day of fulfillment the grass was burdened with its own freshness, and the fullness of its sudden growth made a carpet sound in the air. The blood-red leaves of the maples unfolded overnight on the dark limbs.