Read Online The Mountain and the Valley by Ernest Buckler - Free Book Online Page B

didn’t; but when they bit into one there was no yellow in the taste—not until tomorrow.
    All of fall they would know that year. The first day the sun overslept, then cut faster than ever through the leftover coolness of the night; and a leaf drifted down from the chestnut tree before the house, as if undecided after it had left the twig. (As at a sign, Joseph mowed the first swath of oats for the cows, and Martha put sheets over the tomato vines that smelled sharply of harvest under the full moon, and even Chris opened his books after supper, without prompting.) The others followed: the day of the dug potatoes lying in the dusty sunshine like fruit in a mist-thin wine: the day of the frost-starched grass and the still yellow smell of the sweet fern or the huckleberry or anything your foot crushed: the day of the yellow apple on the yellow ground (If the day when David stood listening to the soundlessness of the pasture dying had not been exactly as it was, he wouldn’t have looked up suddenly at the coloured stillness of the hardwood mountain and seen in the mountain all the things thatwere beyond it) … until the day when ice first needled across the water in the cows’ tub.
    That night Joseph built the first warm-smelling fire in the room stove when he came in at dusk with the partridges he’d shot dangling from his belt, and Martha shook the needled earth from the dahlia bulbs that were to go into the cellar, and the children touched the chestnuts in the quick dusk as if their chocolate shapes shining in the cold leaves held in them the smoothness of all the days that were gone. (The sun went under a cloud when Martha looked out and saw Joseph walking toward the house, so that he seemed to be walking in darkness almost and the supper she’d been waiting for him seemed later than it was. If it hadn’t, she would never have glimpsed every feature of her love for him, in a single instant’s focus.)
    And that year had all the days of winter. The day when the ploughed land was honeycombed with frost and the first snow caught like feathers in the yellow aftergrass (when Joseph covered the strawberry bed and the rosebush with straw, and Martha creased the clothes she took off the line like cardboard to get them into the basket, and the bodies of the children looked larger and darker and they seemed to play closer together) … the day clammy-flaked snow and rain came together and larrigan toes were bleached grey (because arteries of rain broke up the reflection of Chris’s face as he glimpsed it in the window just
then
, he knew the loneliness of them for whom loneliness of the flesh is never recognized for what it is) … the day when fine fierce frost blew in the air and everywhere a damp mitten touched a latch a coating of wool was drawn off, like raw flesh from bone.
    There was the day snow, falling like sleep, piled up in the limb-cornices, and weighted birches over the log road likesomeone frozen in a perfect curtsy: the soft day after that, when shoulders of snow slumped off the black-boled trees like discarded garments, and the ground snow was stained urine-yellow with the peckings of steady twig-drip, and steam rose from the backs of the horses like their own manure steaming behind them in the stable: and the day after that, when the sun lay on the lava curves of drifts in the field like yellow silk on a woman’s thighs and breasts. (Joseph warned out the men to break the roads, and the shadows of great cubes of snow, sliced out with one movement of the shovel and tumbled onto the high banks, angled with underwater refraction down the steep sides of the tunnel and out over the blindingly bright tracks of the sled runners. Martha shut the drafts on the stove and went down the road, to call, in the bright-beckoning, woman-cosy afternoon. The children played in a kind of time suspension, as if even suppertime had withdrawn its encroaching tendrils.) … To the day when the first trickle not of rain cut