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Informationen zum Autor ERNEST BUCKLER was the author of numerous books of short stories and essays and two novels. His many honours included honorary degrees from Dalhousie University and the University of New Brunswick and the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. Chapter 1 David Canaan had lived in Entremont all his thirty years. As far back as childhood, whenever anger had dishevelled him, or confusion, or the tick, tick, tick, of emptiness like he felt today, he had sought the log road that went to the top of the mountain. As he moved along this road, somewhere the twist of anger would loosen; a shaft of clarity would strike through the scud of confusion; blood would creep back into the pulse and pallor of the emptiness. He would take happiness there, to be alone with it; as another child might keep hidden for a day a toy that wasn’t his. He stood at the kitchen window now, watching the highway. The highway was irregularly noduled with whitewashed wooden houses. It cut through the Annapolis Valley; and on either side of it lay the flat frozen fields. On the north side, the fields and orchards ran down to the big bend of the river, cut wide by the Fundy tides. Blocks of grimy, sun-eaten ice were piled up in Druidic formations on the river’s banks, where the tides had tumbled them. The North Mountain rose sharply beyond the river. It was solid blue in the afternoon light of December that was pale and sharp as starlight, except for the milky ways of choppings where traces of the first snow never quite disappeared. On the south side of the highway, beyond the barn and the pastures, the South Mountain rose. Solid blue too at the bottom where the dark spruces huddled close, but snow-grey higher up where the sudden steepness and the leafless hardwood began. At the peak the gaunt limbs of the maples could be seen like the bones of hands all along the lemon-coloured horizon. The mountain slopes were less than a mile high at their topmost point but they shut the valley in completely. The afternoon stillness simmered soundlessly in the kitchen. The soft flutter of flame in the stove, the heat-tick of the stove itself, and the gentle rocking of the tea kettle with its own steam, were quieter than silence. The mat hook which his grandmother held in her right hand made a steady staccato like the sounds of seconds dropping, as it punctured the meshes of the meal bag, to draw up loop after loop of the rag she held in her left hand beneath. His head was physically heavy. An ache fountained somewhere above the scar that sickled, like a smile-scar, from the corner of his mouth to his left temple. It never rose to actual pain, but it seeped through his whole head like the penetration of a night fog that crept up from the marshes. Occasionally he moved his head from side to side, as a deer does that tries to dislodge, by the flick of tongue to flank, the bullet wound that hurts and puzzles him. His breath came smoothly, but as if it beat back and forth between two weights; one blocking the limit of inhalation and one the limit of exhalation. Rain had taken the first snow on the fields. Then the sudden cold had come. Islands of milk-ice speckled the brown fields where the withered aftergrass held the snow longest, and in the ploughed land gravel was frozen into the lips of the brown sod like stones in a setting. Sockets of rocks which the plough had dislodged were frozen smooth as moulds. Honeycombs of ice stood white in the valleys of adjacent rows. In the flat dead furrows the ice shone enamelled and colourless in the glance of the sun that slanted, without warmth, from the bruised lids of the sky. The twisted arms of the apple trees and the bushes along the line fence looked locked and separate, as if all their life had fled its own nakedness. Detail came clearly enough to David’s sight; but it was as if another ...
