The Mountain and the Valley by Ernest Buckler Page A

There’d be a kind of resonance lingering still of all the teakettle-singing words his mother and father had spoken to each other while they were away.
    Chris stayed. He said he’d bring in the night’s wood for Charlotte.
    It’s funny about Chris and Charlotte, David thought. (For a minute Charlotte seemed to like Bess, except for Bess’s great free laugh and something outward-moving about Bess like the spring in their pasture that found its own force amongst the driest rocks.) When Chris went near Charlotte, something in them both seemed to reach out for touch, then recoil. They’d both stand there for a second like two strangers who’d met in a path too narrow for passing.
    He kept glancing down at his new jacket as he walked along the road. Little wrinkles were already showing at the crook of his elbows. He walked on, with his arms held straight at his sides. When they went into the house, he took the jacket off and folded it again the way it had been on the tree. It didn’t seem to him that he could ever take it for everyday and have the sharp creases of the sleeves become round and sloppy.
    He took it off now, because he and Anna were going down to the meadow with the new skates (screwed right onto the boots, like the older boys’), and he might fall. He was going to try crossing one leg over the other, to make a proper smooth turn. He could never manage that with the old spring skates. If anyone was looking when he came to a corner, hejust coasted around it or stopped to make out he was tying his bootlace.
    He was glad now that Chris had stayed at Charlotte’s. Somehow he wouldn’t want Chris to see him, if he failed. Anna was the only one he could bear to have watch him try anything in which he might fail.
    But he didn’t fail.
    They went down the long hill behind the church, in the soft Christmas-kindled air, to the meadow. Its ice shone blue and wide and smooth; so infinitely full of possible paths for the swift skates to take. The brook ran, open, through its middle. Lips of shell ice hung over the brook’s edges. He stood on his skates. And Anna watched.
    The skates felt stiff and strange at first. He could go fast enough on them, straight. But when he tried to turn, it was just as jerky as it had been on the old spring skates. He tried again and again. Once he almost got it, but the next time was no nearer than before.
    Then just at dusk—just when there is that nice lonely feeling about the whole world as you stand below a cold hill at the edge of the trees and it is dusk in the wintertime—just when the dark spruces began to come in closer around the blue meadow ice and the blue ice seemed to stretch farther away toward the other side of the woods, hardening and booming with a far-off sound so it would bruise you if you fell on it and you were alone, but not now, because Anna was there with you, watching—just then, he did it.
    He didn’t know, in his head, how. But he knew the minute he felt the cool flight-smooth dip of it, that it was right. Now his legs knew it, to repeat it, whenever they liked. He was so sure of it now he knew he could do it slower, or faster, or horse it up, or do it any way he liked.He was so sure of it now he knew he wouldn’t even have to test it again. He knew he would be the best skater in the whole world.
    “I did it!” he said to Anna.
    “I know!” she said. “I saw you!” That was the best part of all.
    And then his skates were off, and he was walking back up the hill in his larrigans. The funny feel of them as they touched the ground was almost as treacherous after the swift skates as the skates had been when he’d first put them on.
    He was tired. The little lonely feel of dusk in the wintertime (like dying, when the dying is over and only the stillness is left) was in the wheels of the wagon that stood at the top of the hill with a little fine snow drifting through the spokes, and in the windows of the church, and, looking back, in the meadow they had