Joseph leaned forward and shook his head to be rid of the spell, as a dog shakes water from its ears. “Elizabeth,” he said, “We’re coming to the pass.”
She untied her veil and laid it back over her hat. Her eyes came slowly to life. “I must have been asleep,” she said.
“I too. My eyes were open and I was asleep. But here is the pass.”
The mountain was split. Two naked shoulders of smooth limestone dropped cleanly down, verging a little together, and at the bottom there was only room for the river bed. The road itself was blasted out of the cliffside, ten feet above the surface of the water. Midway in the pass where the constrained river flowed swift and deep and silently, a rough monolith rose out of the water, cutting and mangling the current like a boat prow driving speedily upstream, making an angry swirling whisper. The sun was behind the mountain now, but through the pass they could see the trembling light of it falling on the valley of Our Lady. The wagon had driven into the chill blue shade of the white cliffs. The horses, having reached the top of the long foothill slope, walked easily enough, but they stretched their necks and snorted at the river far below them, under the road.
Joseph took a shorter grip on the lines and his right foot moved out and rested lightly on the brake He looked down on the serene water and he felt a gush of pure warm pleasure in anticipation of the valley he would see in a moment. He turned to look at Elizabeth, for he wanted to tell her of the pleasure. He saw that her face had gone haggard and that her eyes were horrified.
She cried, “I want to stop, dear. I’m afraid” She was staring through the cleft into the sunlit valley.
Joseph pulled up the horses and set the brake. He looked at her questioningly. “I didn’t know. Is it the narrow road and the stream below?”
“No, it is not.”
He stepped to the ground, then, and held out a hand to her; but when he tried to lead her toward the pass she pulled her hand away from him and stood shivering in the shade. And he thought, “I must try to tell her. I’ve never tried to tell her things like this. It’s seemed too difficult a thing, but now I’ll have to try to tell her,” and he practiced in his mind the thing he must try to say. “Elizabeth,” he cried in his mind, “can you hear me? I am cold with a thing to say, and prayerful for a way to say it.” His eyes widened and he was entranced. “I have thought without words,” he said in his mind. “A man told me once that was not possible, but I have thought—Elizabeth, listen to me. Christ nailed up might be more than a symbol of all pain. He might in very truth contain all pain. And a man standing on a hilltop with his arms outstretched, a symbol of the symbol, he too might be a reservoir of all the pain that ever was.”
For a moment she broke into his thinking, crying, “Joseph, I’m afraid.”
And then his thought went on, “Listen, Elizabeth. Do not be afraid. I tell you I have thought without words. Now let me grope a moment among the words, tasting them, trying them. This is a space between the real and the clean, unwavering real, undistorted by the senses. Here is a boundary. Yesterday we were married and it was no marriage. This is our marriage—through the pass—entering the passage like sperm and egg that have become a single unit of pregnancy. This is a symbol of the undistorted real. I have a moment in my heart, different in shape, in texture, in duration from any other moment. Why, Elizabeth, this is all marriage that has ever been, contained in our moment.” And he said in his mind, “Christ in His little time on the nails carried within His body all the suffering that ever was, and in Him it was undistorted.”
He had been upon a star, and now the hills rushed back and robbed him of his aloneness and of his naked thinking. His arms and hands felt heavy and dead, hanging like weights on thick cords from the shoulders that were tired of supporting them.
Elizabeth saw how his mouth had gone loose with hopelessness and how his eyes had lost the red gleaming of a moment before. She cried, “Joseph, what is it you want? What are you asking me to do?”
Twice he tried to answer, but a thickness in his throat prohibited speech. He coughed the passage free. “I want to go through the pass,” he said hoarsely.
“I’m afraid, Joseph. I don’t know why, but I’m terribly afraid.”
He broke his lethargy then and coiled one of the swinging weights about her waist. “There’s nothing to be afraid of, dear. This is nothing. I have been far too much alone. It seems to mean something to me to go through the pass with you.’
She shivered against him and looked fearfully at the dismal blue shadow of the pass. “I’ll go, Joseph,” she said miserably. “I’ll have to go, but I’ll be leaving myself behind. I’ll think of myself standing here looking through at the new one who will be on the other side.”
She remembered sharply how she had served cambric tea in tiny tin cups to three little girls, how they had reminded each other, “We’re ladies now. Ladies always hold their hands like this.” And she remembered how she had tried to catch her doll’s dream in a handkerchief.
“Joseph,” she said. “It’s a bitter thing to be a woman. I’m afraid to be. Everything I’ve been or thought of will stay outside the pass. I’ll be a grown woman on the other side. I thought it might come gradually. This is too quick.” And she remembered how her mother said, “When you’re big, Elizabeth, you’ll know hurt, but it won’t be the kind of hurt you think. It’ll be a hurt that can’t be reached with a curing kiss.”
“I’ll go now, Joseph,” she said quietly. “I’ve been foolish. You’ll have to expect so much foolishness from me.”
The weight left Joseph then. His arm tightened about her waist and he urged her forward tenderly. She knew, although her head was bent, how he gazed down on her and how his eyes were gentle. They walked slowly through the pass, in the blue shade of it. Joseph laughed softly. “There may be pains more sharp than delight, Elizabeth, like sucking a hot peppermint that burns your tongue. The bitterness of being a woman may be an ecstasy.”
His voice ceased and their footsteps rang on the stone road and clashed back and forth between the cliffs. Elizabeth closed her eyes, relying on Joseph’s arm to guide her. She tried to close her mind, to plunge it into darkness, but she heard the angry whisper of the monolith in the river, and she felt the stone chill in the air.
And then the air grew warm; there was no longer rock under her feet. Her eyelids turned black-red and then yellow-red over her eyes. Joseph stopped and drew her tightly against his side. “Now we are through, Elizabeth. Now it is done.”
She opened her eyes and looked about on the closed valley. The land was dancing in the shimmer of the sun and the trees, clannish little families of white oaks, stirred slightly under the wind that brought excitement to a sloping afternoon. The village of Our Lady was before them, houses brown with weathering and green with rose vines, picket fences burning with a soft fire of nasturtiums. Elizabeth cried out sharply with relief, “I’ve been having a bad dream. I’ve been asleep. I’ll forget the dream now. It wasn’t real.”
Joseph’s eyes were radiant. “It’s not so bitter, then, to be a woman?” he asked.
“It isn’t any different. Nothing seems changed. I hadn’t realized how beautiful the valley is.”
‘Wait here,” he said. “I’ll go back and bring the horses through.”
But when he was gone, Elizabeth cried sadly, for she had a vision of a child in short starched skirts and with pigtails down her back, who stood outside the pass and looked anxiously in, stood on one foot and then on the other, hopped nervously and kicked a stone into the stream. For a moment the vision waited as Elizabeth remembered waiting on a street corner for her father, and then the child turned miserably away and walked slowly toward Monterey. Elizabeth was sorry for her, “For it’s a bitter thing to be a child,” she thought. “There are so many clean new surfaces to scratch.”
11
THE team came through the pass, the horses lifting their feet high, moving diagonally, cocking their heads at the stream while Joseph held tight reins on them and set the brake to shrieking. Once off the narrow place, the horses settled down and their long journey reasserted itself. Joseph pulled up and helped Elizabeth to her seat. She settled herself primly, drew her duster about her knees and dropped the veil over her face.