The Mountain and the Valley by Ernest Buckler

Bess said. “We couldn’t lug a very big one.”
    She always spoke like that about anything of her own. The others seemed to think that nothing pretty should rightfully
belong
to her. Somehow, if she disparaged it first, she could prevent them from taking her custody of it away.
    “Why didn’t you ask Father?” David said. “He’d have got you a tree.” Chris frowned at him. David didn’t understand.
    “We
wanted
a small tree,” Effie said. “We could carry it all right, couldn’t we, Mother?”
    She seemed to put a fence around it. She too knew how her mother was deflected by the other women whenever their paths came close to touching. She resented beforehand any surprise that they could have special things like anyone else.
    There wasn’t much for Effie but the silk dress for the concert. Her silk dress and Anna’s woollen one were like the plant and the flower again. They all touched the silk, Chris twice. It made David think of the play.
    He whispered to Effie, “Do you know your part?”
    She whispered, “Yes, do you?”
    Something they shared then lifted their feet off the day.
    They seemed to forget for a minute where Chris and Anna were to be found. She withdrew her protectiveness from the tree. She stood looking at it
with
him; as if, if it
shouldn’t
be beautiful there would be no hurt in accepting that judgement from him now. As if, if you both knew what beautiful
was
, it wouldn’t matter what anything of yours looked like to the other.
    “We better go,” Chris said, “if we’re goin to Charlotte’s.” Bess slipped some candy into their pockets as they left. It wasn’t a bit like the skimpy-tasting candy the women made for church socials. David wondered why his mother never said anything when he told her how wonderful Bess’s candy tasted. When they came home from Bess’s, she never said like she did when they carne from another house: What did they have for supper? Was she cleaned up? Did she ask you what
I
was doing?
    “Dave,”
Chris said, outside, “what made you say that about Father gettin em a tree?”
    “Why?”
    “Why, Chris?” Anna said.
    “Ohhhh, never mind.”
    They went to Charlotte’s. Charlotte had no tree. When they went into Rachel’s kitchen, it was as if they’d gone in
out
of Christmas.
    Rachel rocked by the window in the cushionless chair. On no day in their house did the moments move faster or slower. Time was something captive in that room always; something she wore away, bit by slow bit, with each movement of her rocker. There was no echo of the laugh of someone who’d just gone. No lingering of a sentence spoken in the day’s work, when a thing was tried one way and then another (“What do
you
think?”); or of a hum in the day’s planning. There was only a kind of smell of walls, of the doily under the Bible on the centre table, the bare kerosene smell of the lamp that stood on the mirrorless bureau beside the bed when time had finally been worn away till nine o’clock.
    David could hardly sit still. It was like the long dry sermon when there was only a handful at church.
    “What did you get, Lottie?” Anna said.
    “I got these shoes,” Charlotte said. She held out one foot.
    “She needed em, so I give em to her last week.” Rachel said. “There wasn’t any sense keepin em.”
    Wouldn’t that be awful, David and Anna both thought; but Charlotte didn’t seem to mind.
    “And I got some scribblers.”
    “We didn’t make much fuss,” Rachel said. “We didn’t feel much like Christmas this year.” She sighed. “I’ll be glad when it’s over.”
    “Was you down to Effie’s?” Charlotte said.
    “Yes.”
    “I shouldn’t think Bess’d feel much like Christmas, either,” Rachel said. She sighed again. “I should think remorse …”
    David whispered to Anna, “Let’s go.”
    He took a long breath outside. He looked toward their own house. There’d be the smell of oranges in it and the cosy, personal smell of the tree.