Lights on the Mountain

  Just now she was puttering about the kitchen, sweeping the floor with a tiny straw broom he had made as a gift for her birthday. Always curious, alert to the smallest happenings, she had spied a small black beetle among the crumbs and stopped to watch it creep. It was not her way to molest the insect. When it turned, changed direction, and began climbing her bare big toe, she kept very still, waiting until it was safe on the other side before she went back to her sweeping.

  The farrier would come this morning, Eli decided. Pat’s visits were not regular. He came whenever he wished. But always on the first day of May. Eli had no more finished the thought when Tsura stopped sweeping and looked expectantly toward the door. A moment later, there came a knock. He nodded, telling her to go. She dropped her broom and ran to open it.

  Pat stood, as he always did, looking around surprised, as if the door had opened of its own accord. Tsura knew the game well. She stood on his boots and raised her hands, waiting to be swung up to his shoulder where she began to fish in his shirt pocket for a stick of gum.

  “I have a present,” she said solemnly, pointing to her broom. “It’s my birthday.”

  “What?” Pat opened his blue eyes wide, as if in shock. “A spring peeper with a birthday all her own? Never heard of such a thing. All the ones I’m acquainted with celebrate their birthdays together.”

  “Why?” Tsura asked.

  “Well,” Pat said, “because none of ‘em knows for sure which day they hatched. Which is why they throw a party every night of spring. What a ruckus!”

  “Do they get presents?” Tsura asked, wide-eyed now herself.

  “Well, not near so fine as you’ve got there,” Pat said. “They have little need for brooms, you see. But they get presents of such things as frogs long for. I guess you’ve never heard them sing of mud cakes and shoo-fly pies.”

  Tsura shook her head, looking suddenly dejected that she had never heard a tree frog sing a birthday song.

  “Well,” Pat said, quickly, “count your blessings, child.” He swung her in a gentle arc to the floor. “As I said, it’s a mighty joyful noise. But an awful ruckus.”

  Eli saw the sideways glance, Pat avoiding his gaze. Pat knew, because Eli had told him, that Amish children received only the plainest truth about the world and the God who made it for their use. Pat thought it a very fine way of teaching children, he said, but Eli doubted it. Pat, at least, never followed the rule. He said it was his father’s fault because the Badgers had once all been peddlers. It was an unreliable trade, and in all the long, wandering hours, a peddler would spin yarns to keep the next farmwife considering his wares while she listened. If the story was amusing enough, she was put in a better mood to purchase. When it came to telling tales, he had once said, in defense of some fib he had told Tsura, even a half Badger couldn’t help himself. Eli never let on to Pat, but he wouldn’t have put his foot down about the storytelling anyway. It wouldn’t be right to ask Pat to bend to Amish ways when he himself, who had been born to them, couldn’t.

  There was not much of the Amish daughter in Tsura. To be sure of this, Eli had kept the image of his youngest sister, Ruth, always in his mind as he tended to Tsura’s needs, for the two girls were no more alike than a dragonfly and an ant. Ruth was born in the long shadow of womanhood, of sisterhood. The good hand of duty rocked the Amish girl’s cradle. Tsura’s obedience was to something other, something Eli could not see or understand. He only knew that it seemed to bid her to tender, gentle acts, and he tried to leave her free to follow. If his mother would be scandalized to see this girl he was raising, all bare of head, thick, dark curls like a wild cane of blackberries vining down her little back and around her shoulders, well, so be it. It would not be the first time Eli Zook had been the cause of scandal.

  There was a loud thump, suddenly, that brought Eli’s thoughts back to what was happening in the kitchen. The sound had been Pat, stomping his boot against the hard plank floor. Tsura, who was kneeling on the floor, had stopped intently unwrapping the stick of gum she had found in his pocket and was staring up at Pat, dark eyes wide.

  “Tsura,” he said, clapping a hand to his forehead, “we plumb forgot it’s May Day!” He looked at his watch. “Half-past basket time too. Don’t you think you’d better go to the front porch and have a look around?”

  A loud squeaking of hinges answered his question. The next sound was that of the screen door shutting with a bang. Tsura was gone.

  Pat turned. As always, his look was searching. His blue gaze swept Eli head to toe and then moved about the room seeking signs that all was well, and would be well, until he could visit the peak again. Though it pained Eli, he endured with patience. Theirs was a good contract. A handshake agreement. And that look of Pat’s was in it.

  “There’s school to think about this fall,” Pat said. “I guess you’ve considered it.”

  “Yah. I have.”

  “Will you send her?”

  “Nah.”

  “I thought not.”

  They sat without speaking after that. A great deal was said, though, in the silence. Eli explained without words that sending Tsura to school would be akin to shoeing and harnessing one of those wild marsh island ponies Pat always said she reminded him of, the ones that ran about free along the eastern coast. All horses are not born to plow, you know, he said. Yes, Pat agreed, and remarked that the knowledge she already owned would likely be lost on the finest of classroom teachers, anyhow. She was gifted, no doubt, very keen. But her keenness was not of the sort that could be tested or measured in numbers against a mean. Her spirit is made of the same stuff as moth’s wings, strong in flight but easy to crush in the hand. It will be up to you and me, my friend, Pat said, to keep it from injury.

  Eli made a pot of coffee, and they shared it cup by cup, mostly in the same silence. When the coffee was gone, Pat rose from the table.

  “She’ll have found the basket by now, I reckon. The violets.”

  “Yah, the violets,” Eli said, his bare lip twitching with the hint of a smile. “And the sweets.”

  Pat grinned, impenitent.

  “And the sweets.”

  3

  Hazel Valley

  July 1957

  THREE MONTHS AFTER MEETING Gracie Morozov at the dance, Jess was no less stricken. Like a spindly, determined sapling, love had taken strong and rapid root—despite, he always said later, the rocky barrenness of the ground.

  Volunteer love.

  So unlooked for, and yet so insistent.

  What could a man do?

  Jess had only one answer: Let it grow. Tend to it. Cultivate it. Help it along. But let it grow.

  In the dining room his mother had kept a hutch that had a hidden drawer, a place for hiding small valuables. Once Jess had decided, had determined, that he would allow himself to love Gracie in earnest, he rummaged around in it, hunting a certain family heirloom. It was a painful task, for what Millie held dear no thief would consider stealing. Among the things he lifted out and set aside were a crumbling, string-tied packet of Valentine messages his aunts and grandmother had sent across the miles to keep strong the memory of their love; an ivory box, rattling with Jess and Walter’s baby teeth; and a miniature bonnet of tatted lace, made for a baby girl who was born too soon to need it. There was also a snapshot that caused him to feel the heat of recollected shame, for it was of Walter at two, sitting on the floor next to the Hazel family cradle, rocking a swaddled Jess. As a child Jess had got the idea from the photo that human babies (he knew by age nine, of course, how animals managed it) emerged from cocoons like moths. It was a notion he liked a lot and held fast to for longer than he should have. So long that his ignorance became an embarrassment to Walter, who in the frankest of brotherly speeches, given one day as they were riding the bus home from school, finally rid Jess of it.

  The photograph went into the pile, pitifully small, when you considered all it stood for, and Jess went back to rummaging. At last, tucked way back, behind a stack of yellowed
envelopes (letters addressed to a Miss Mildred Jenkins at Slippery Rock State Teacher’s College in Clyde’s narrow, backward-slanting hand), he found what he’d been seeking. The ring. The one his father had given his mother on the day of their engagement, the story of which involved a character unfamiliar to Jess. In it, a reckless, lovesick young Clyde risked an ill-looking winter sky and went sliding over ice-covered hills and rivers to land (on one knee, the story went) in the borough of Slippery Rock. Millie always said she was pleased to accept the ring, insisting that she had worn it all that year at school with a great deal of pride. But when her wedding day had passed, she did as all the Hazel wives before her had done and placed it dutifully back in its green velvet box. Much too fine an adornment, it was generally agreed, for the hand of a dairy farmer’s wife.

  From time to time, Jess remembered, Millie would take the ring out for her boys to admire, slipping it onto her finger, turning it this way and that, so they could see it wink and shine. But when they tried to touch it, she’d wave their hands away, clutching it to her thin little chest, trying in her soft, shy way to be stern.

  “It’s not mine to let you handle,” she’d say. “I’m only keeping it for Walter’s wife.”

  “Millie, you’re a sensible woman,” their father would remark, as she returned the ring to its box. But Jess had seen his mother’s face. She never looked sensible to him, slipping the box back into the drawer, stowing it away out of sight. She looked wistful.

  It was not fancy, the ring. The diamond in it was so small as to be insignificant, and the pearl could hardly be called perfect. But it was made of good gold. It was part of a set too, though Gracie would never own its companion. That was a plain, slim band Millie never took off and was, in fact, wearing still. Of that Jess had made sure, and was never sorry he had, for as it turned out, the ring was to be the only familiar thing about her as she lay in repose. The Jenkins aunts had supplied a portrait from Millie’s youth, her sepia lips and cheeks retouched in an unnatural shade of pink, and the mortician had done his best to copy it. The sister the Jenkins aunts remembered, though, and the woman the neighbors came to view at calling hours, bore scant resemblance to Jess’s mother.

  “So pretty yet. And nearly forty-five.”

  This is what they all said, gazing into her casket.

  But it was Millie at the last Jess kept in his mind, for it somehow eased his hurt. The mournful shade of her dark eyes. The small straight spine, bent as an old woman’s with weariness and fret. Millie had a few friends in Prospect, a couple of acquaintances in Rose Point, people she could count on in a pinch, but not one that could be called close. She was, after all, not the sort of woman who took pleasure in cake walks or church bazaars. She disliked gossip, even the harmless sort, and kept mostly to herself. If those who glanced down at her pale painted corpse and said such kind, foolish things knew little of her burden, Jess could hardly resent their lack. How much, after all, had he really known? How much had Clyde?

  Jess took the ring to a jeweler in Pittsburgh, who put a glass to his eye and inspected it, pronouncing it sound enough for the purpose. And the next day—it was a clear, hot Sunday morning in July—after the cows were milked and turned out to graze, he showered and went into town, to Latona’s Deli. The store was locked and dark, of course, so he went around back as he had done as a boy, climbed the stairs, and rang the bell. Rita came, dressed for church, opened the door, and peered out. She had a spatula in her hand and black-bristled rollers in her silvery dark hair. She peered at Jess, then shook her head, opening the door wide.

  “My God, Jesse,” she said coolly, standing aside to let him pass, “I almost don’t know you. Such a long time, and you so skinny. Like a flagpole. Don’t you eat?”

  In reply Jess only smiled, marveling, as he had always done when entering the Latona’s apartment, that it had somehow nested nine children within its walls. As a guest, he had always liked the chaos, the constant shrill of Rita—who minded the clutter something terrible and yelled and scolded constantly to prevent its overgrowth. And he had envied also, especially once Walter was gone, the closeness, both physical and emotional, of the siblings, who scraped and squabbled as fondly as a pack of dogs. He was hardly inside when she pushed him into a chair at the kitchen table, setting before him a plate of sausage and eggs, scrambled with red peppers, potatoes, and onions.

  “So,” she said, hand on her hip, “what’s up?”

  “I’ve come to ask you to make me a picnic,” Jess said, shoveling the eggs into his mouth. They were surely meant for Pop, but he was suddenly hungry, realizing it must be after eight o’clock, and he had been so eager to get to town he had forgotten to eat breakfast.

  “A picnic?” Rita’s gaze was sharp now. She was the same woman of Jess’s boyhood, aloof and bossy-tongued as a barn cat, and just as helplessly curious.

  “Yep,” he said, “a picnic. I’ll pay, of course.”

  “You want hoagies?”

  “No hoagies. A spread. Chipped ham, salami, kolbassy. Cheese. Olives. Pickled stuff. And whatever else your Russian customers buy.”

  “Russian, huh? Ah, I got it. The special picnic.”

  She left the room then and came back after a little while dressed in everyday clothes, tying on her shop apron, looking pleased with herself.

  “You gonna marry that girl.”

  That afternoon Jess and Gracie walked out to the old orchard with the sun at their backs, carrying a basket packed with Rita’s picnic. They followed the sled path, bees buzzing about their heads as they passed the hives, Jess easing off the path to pick a fistful of poppies, returning to hand them to her as they walked, ducking her into the woods once to show her a walking fern, and while he had her there in the dusky shadow of the trees, stealing a kiss, as if they were a courting couple of old, all the while feeling smug over his picnic idea, for he would already be on his knees, that way, when he asked.

  She accepted.

  Instantly.

  With eyes lit gold. As if only to increase his wonder at such an upstart, insistent love.

  He was overjoyed, of course. Yet he was also dismayed, even a little frightened, for he knew it was only fair to tell her the truth about himself before letting her decide.

  There was this Light, you see.

  When it came down to actually saying it, though, he didn’t. He found that he could not tell her the truth about himself at all. Not the whole of it, anyway. He lay back, stretching himself out on the blanket—one of Millie’s crazy quilts, found in her cedar chest—the lower part of his legs buried in the grass, and fixing his gaze on the sky, said instead that there were a few things she might want to consider before accepting to wed a dairy farmer.

  She was sitting next to him on the quilt at the time, examining the ring. It was a fine fit. He had been surprised, in fact, at how slim her fingers were, how easily it had gone on, once he’d worked it gently past her knuckle. (As slim as Millie’s had been, evidently, for the ring would not need to be sized.)

  “Like what?” she said.

  “Like it’s not all this.” Jess waved his hand in the air, making it walk back the way they had come to the orchard. “All hay and honey and wildflowers.”

  “Well, I know that already,” she said, and a shade of something came into her voice that Jess would learn to know well. A bristling. The only warning he would ever get, along with a yellow flash of her eyes, that she was offended and about to set him straight. “You are forgetting we were farmers once,” she said. “Or, Mama and Papa were. I was only a little girl. But I recall the smell, and the sorrows, of a barnyard, if that’s what you mean. What else?”

  “Money.”

  “Money.”

  Jess kept his eyes on the sky, on the one tiny cloud left in it, now shaping itself into a baby’s fist, dimples and all. If insecurity was to begin flickering now in her eyes, he couldn’t bear to see it.

  “Yes, money,” he said. “It’s scarce. And getting scarcer. Farming is just about on
e of the worst jobs you can have these days. And farms of our kind, well … you should probably marry a salesman, or a lawyer. Or better yet, get to be one yourself.”

  “I don’t care about money.”

  “You might, when there’s none around.”

  At that, Gracie got quiet. She turned her own gaze to the sky, while Jess lay in the grip of dread, working to keep his limbs still. They were goading him to leap up and run. In the end, she only shrugged.

  “You’ve got a lot to learn about me,” she said.

  And that was all.

  It was a promise, though. Jess could hear it in her voice.

  He might have been a dead man she’d stumbled on, lying in the orchard grass, the way she sank to her knees beside him then, and put her hand over his eyes, closing them both at once. Her lips were so, so soft as they landed, barely grazing the skin of his eyelids. Jess trembled and sighed out loud, sick with relief. He had somehow found the girl (or had she found him?) who could love a husk.

  Early the next morning, the telephone rang.

  It was Gracie.

  “How do you feel about the Orthodox Church?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Our marriage hinges on it.”

  Jess was stunned. Very quickly he decided this must be her idea of a joke. Just as quickly, he knew that it wasn’t. There had been no hint of humor in her voice. And suddenly he was irritated.

  “How do I feel about the Orthodox Church? I don’t know a thing about it! That’s how I feel. How do you feel about the Presbyterian Church?”