Lights on the Mountain

  “Are you Presbyterian?”

  “No.”

  Gracie sighed. “If you want to marry me, Jess, it will have to be in my church. You must understand how important this is. And not just to me, to my parents. You know I’m all they have.”

  She decreed this with such bravery, the way Jess had imagined telling her about the Light. And he had no doubt she meant it, every word. For if there was anything he knew about Gracie Morozov after three months of loving her, it was that she was serious about God. It wasn’t a thing she talked about endlessly like some religious girls Jess had known—she seemed to take her faith as a natural gift, much as she did the shine and gloss of her hair or the unusual hue of her eyes, and rarely spoke of it directly, but he would have to be a fool not to see how it affected everything she said and did. They had never even been on a real date until the picnic in the orchard. All their evenings had been spent sitting on her porch, the curtains not even drawn on the front room window. One thing was sure, though, he wasn’t about to take back his proposal. Not marry Gracie. The thought panicked him. He could more easily give up air now, stop breathing in and out. The Hazels had once all been Quakers, but that was generations back. And though Jess had sometimes thought it would have made things a good deal easier, and wished like everything they had, Clyde and Millie had left him no religion to call his own. He saw no other way but to agree to Gracie’s terms and accepted to be baptized. To the voice, so still and small, that urged him to consider the cavern in his chest, he turned a deaf ear. Gracie believed in one God, the Father Almighty. He believed in Gracie. That, he reasoned, would be faith enough.

  Of course, he was not fitting into the font at Holy Transfiguration Church. And so it was that at the age of twenty-three, Jess joined the Christian fold standing on ancestral land, for it was into the waters of Muddy Creek that Father Antony took him by the hand and brought him—Jess floating on his back like a felled pine, the creek trying to carry him downstream, the priest calmly retrieving him, taking him three times under. Once for the Father. Once for the Son. Once for the Holy Spirit.

  4

  THEY WERE MARRIED on a Sunday in early November. The hills were iced in the first white snow, the trees in the churchyard draped in it, as if in fine, hand-worked lace, and Gracie was so luminous in a long-sleeved gown of cream-white silk, so serene as Father Antony took their hands, linking them together for life (The child of God, Galina, is wed to the child of God, Jesse), so plainly honest (Have you promised yourself to any other man? I have not, Reverend Father), Jess nearly wept.

  There were no pews.

  No spectators posing as guests.

  Mike and Rose Marie were there, and Peggy Badger, without Pat, who stayed out on the lawn, wishing his very best to all who walked past, stomping his feet to keep warm, and regretfully declining all invitations to come into the church. Inside, the guests were stacked about the nave like firewood all cut and stored for the winter. Jess and Gracie, holding lit candles—beeswax, to show the purity of their prayer, and of their hearts’ intentions—stood in the center of them, surrounded, upheld, by all the hope, all the goodwill.

  It was cold outside, though not bitterly, yet very hot in the church, what with all the oil lamps lit and burning before all the grave, dark eyes of saints, and the press of guests crowded in so close, their faces fairly lit and shining, radiating their warmth. More than once during the long, mysterious ceremony, Jess felt his knees buckle.

  He felt so faint, in fact, that when Father Antony finally took up the crowns, a small, low groan escaped his lips, causing Gracie’s mama to cast him a sharp look. It was a sound of relief, though, and that was all, for at last he understood something of what was happening and knew that it was almost over. Gracie had explained this portion of the ceremony in detail:

  “You’ll be crowned,” she’d said.

  “Wait,” Jess had said, “Hold up a minute. Are you telling me this involves a blow to the head?”

  “You might feel as if that’s what happened, by the time it’s over,” she said, smiling, indulging him, despite her general seriousness toward anything to do with the wedding, in the corniness of his joke. “We wear crowns. Like royalty. Only our crowns will only look like gold, and the jewels will be made of colored glass. And you will feel ridiculous. But that’s all right, because the crowns are only there to show that marriage makes us martyrs, in a way.”

  “Martyrs,” Jess said. “You and me.”

  “Yes,” Gracie said.

  “That’s awfully morbid, don’t you think? You Russians sure take a funny view of things.”

  “I don’t think it’s funny at all,” Gracie said, all soberness now. “Or morbid either. Vechnaya Pamyat, I say. Memory Eternal to the self-centered Galina Morozov. I die for you. You die for me. And together, we live. Don’t you think that’s the most beautiful, hopeful thing you’ve ever heard?”

  “I think it sounds plain crazy,” Jess had said, softly. She was so grave, so in earnest. He fought the urge to take her full in his arms right then, to feel all her good warmth, not just that of her smile or her eyes. She promised such sweetness. He had known such bitterness. But he had agreed to her terms. No loving of that kind until the honeymoon. Jess shook his head, as much to clear it, keep it from getting ahead of itself, as to demonstrate his point. “Where’s my crown?” he said. “I’m all in.”

  He was too.

  Jesse Hazel was all in.

  PART THREE

  1

  Hazel Valley

  October 18, 1969

  ON A COLD, WET FALL DAY, Jess sat at the kitchen table, staring at a page he had torn from the calendar weeks ago and for some reason had not thrown away. September was old news. It was well into October, half the month already gone. Soon enough the year would be gone also. A year that, in the proper way of things, had been of staggering importance to some folks in the world and unremarked by others. Who in Vietnam, for instance, could care that the waters of Muddy Creek were soon to be impounded to form a lake? A place for city folks to fish and swim and run the motors off their speedboats. He crumpled the calendar page into a ball, took aim, and threw it across the kitchen, where it landed on the floor beside the wastebasket. He looked over at Gracie. She hadn’t moved, stood as still and quiet as she had all morning, gazing out the backdoor window. Watching the rain.

  Come the tenth of next month, they would mark twelve years together. Of which all but the first two (slow and sweet) had shot by at a speed he couldn’t fathom. For a dozen years, he’d been loving Gracie, and he was still in wonderment over the fact, though here he sat, with his elbows on the table, in the kitchen she had made her own, filling it with sights and smells and sounds wonderfully strange to Jess, and surely all the more to his ghosts.

  She ate salted fish and pickled pork fat. She fermented bread to make a drink she called kvass (fermented everything, it seemed to Jess). She lit beeswax candles and oil lamps to pray, hung the lamps from gilded chains to swing and sway before icons—images of her sober saints painted on scraps of wood—paying them curious devotion. She liked American music, especially jazz, and played it loud from the speakers of the hi-fi stereo cabinet that was a wedding gift from her parents, Ivan and Darya. She had her own way, too, of running what she claimed as her portion of the farm, which consisted, the best Jess could figure, of the house, the garden, and a coop full of uppity, pure-bred hens. Particular about the cleanliness of her house, she’d let go the two women Jess had finally got to come on opposite Mondays every week to clean the floors and do his washing. Opal first, then Liz.

  Jess had been a little sorry over Opal, for she was a kind woman and like Margit Busco had insisted on cooking for Jess, leaving the freezer full of casseroles he could thaw and reheat. She was some sort of eldress in her church, though, and Jess had to admit, when Gracie complained, that she did preach Jesus to anyone who happened into the house. He had in truth mostly avoided her, leaving her pay on the kitchen table and keeping to the barn until
he saw the taillights of her big Buick as she pulled away down the lane.

  Liz was a McKee, descended of the McKees who were one of the first white families to settle the borough, and married to a Christie, another large old settling family. The girl was quiet enough—no sermons—but lazy. When she wasn’t standing on the porch smoking cigarettes and staring moon-eyed at Jess as he went about his work, she was swabbing the floors with dirty mop water, leaving stains along edges of the living room rugs. Gracie had little patience for the preaching, and none for the sloth. How she had let both women down so carefully, each convinced that leaving the job was her own idea, was still a puzzle to Jess. But then, it was just that way with his wife.

  Jess sipped at his coffee. His wife! How much he still savored those words. She had lifted the curtain aside (gone was the faded, soot-stained gingham of Jess’s childhood; her windows were hung in plain white linen, crisp and clean) to better see the rain. It ran zigzag down the window, like an old woman’s tears. He was reminded of his mother, for weather like this had always set Millie brooding. “A rain in autumn is a melancholy guest,” she used to say, her gaze mournfully darkened, chin cradled in her small hand. And because he had passed many a dreary fall day cooped up inside when he wanted to be digging fence holes or mending tack or plowing a field, Jess had always thought his mother had spoken right. Gracie, though, did not agree. She was fond of rain, whatever the season.

  Peculiar fond, he had sometimes thought, when they first married, watching her rush into the house at the first glimpse of a darkening sky to hustle her begonias out onto the front step. She would stand under the roof of the porch then, content as a garden toad, to watch it coming down. And in weather too harsh for porches and flowers, he would often find her wedged into a corner of the divan, the curtains opened wide to the storm, peacefully knitting. Most often she would be working a skein of yarn into mittens for one of Rose Marie’s older children or fashioning a sweater for the newest baby. Sometimes, though, it was a pair of thick warm socks for him. Jess liked to hear the noise her needles made, their pleasant tap, tap, tap, keeping quiet rhythm with the rain.

  This was not to be that kind of morning. He guessed the rain on the roof today must sound to her ears like small, pattering feet. And there would be no tucking into a cozy corner and knitting—a tiny sweater would be her undoing. It had been more than an hour, and he had not seen her venture beyond the kitchen window.

  “There goes my apple-picking,” she said.

  She turned from the window to face him, hands folded over her chest, eyebrows knit into a taut line across her forehead.

  “Well, it’s just a trip out to the orchard,” he replied. “Nobody called off a wedding.”

  As soon as he spoke, he regretted it. He had not meant to sound so brusque. What he had hoped was to see her smile. He hitched his chair closer to the table and slumped over his coffee cup, watching her from the corner of his eye. She acted as if she hadn’t heard, turning to the window again and pressing her nose against the glass. She tapped with one finger a patch of lighter gray no bigger than a cat’s foot and barely visible under the top of the frame.

  “You know, I think it will quit soon, from the looks of it over there.”

  “Can’t store wet apples,” Jess warned, in a gentler voice. He slipped the plastic sleeve from his newspaper and twisted off the rubber band, dropping it into the jar next to the salt shaker. “Better wait until tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow is Sunday,” she said.

  “Well, then, the minute you get home from the service, I’ll take you down there myself. In the pickup.”

  “There won’t be a need for that,” she said, her back still to him. “The sled track is packed hard as paved road. A day’s rain won’t muddy it. If it’s going to be tomorrow afternoon, Mama will probably want to come with me, and her car has those big tires. It will do fine.”

  She sighed again, peering closer at the patch, as if willing it to widen. With eyes fixed on the sky, she reached down and unfastened the tail of the thick braid she had plaited her hair into before bed the night before. Slender fingers darted between the sections, freeing, combing, smoothing. Then, as quickly as she had undone the hair, she divided and plaited it again, jerking without mercy at the strands until the braid hung limp and obedient at her shoulder. A heaviness settled into Jess’s own chest.

  “Can’t you be glad for the rain, Gracie?” he asked. “Old Elijah didn’t beg the good Lord for it as hard as you have the last two months.”

  “Oh, I am,” she said. “I am.”

  But Jess could plainly see that she was not. He put down his newspaper and took her by the hand. He pulled her to his chest and held her close. She pressed her cheek against the soft flannel of his shirt as if seeking comfort. But the muscles strung tight along her narrow back told his hands the truth. She was humoring him, letting him soothe her for his sake.

  It wasn’t the rain, laying down blankets of rusted yellow leaves and ruining her apple-picking that had dimmed the light in Gracie’s eyes. Jess had watched her fumbling with her apron strings this morning, feeling blindly for each step as she came down the stairs. Yesterday she’d thought a baby might be on the way. Today she knew one wasn’t. Handyman that he was, Jess could not fix shattered hope. He pulled on his boots, shrugged into his coat, drained his coffee cup, and escaped through the kitchen door. Rain pelted his head and shoulders all the way to the barn.

  Becky nickered low as he ducked in. She turned her flanks to the rear of the stall and pressed her chest against the lower half door, stretching her neck toward Jess. Her nose softly quivered, wet nostrils flaring wide as she tried to catch his scent. In the gloom her black coat seemed dull, the color flat. No glints of mahogany shone through from underneath, as they did in direct sunlight. She lowered her head and rolled it sideways to observe Jess with a kind, dark eye.

  “Mornin’ girl.”

  Jess held his hand out, and she rested her chin in his palm, encouraging him to dig his fingertips into the stiff whorled slash of white between her eyes, to scratch the only place she couldn’t find a way to reach. He obliged, and when he had finished scratching, she velveted his cheeks with her muzzle, mingling her warm breath with his. Her greeting, along with the heated, earthy odors stirred up by her hooves, cheered him considerably.

  He went into the tack room and lifted a hoof pick from its nail, found a curry comb and a stiff brush, and scooped up a quarter can of oats. He led the big horse out of the stall, clipped a lead rope to her halter and tied it to the handle of the feed room door, then poured the oats into the bucket already hanging there. While she lipped the oats, he ran a hand down her foreleg, clicking his tongue as he reached the fetlock. She cocked her leg at the knee and lifted her hoof. He peeled out and flicked onto the barn floor a disc of manure-packed straw the size of a dinner plate. When each hoof had been cleaned, he turned his attention to her coat, running the curry comb over it in circular motions. All the while he listened to the rain pound the barn’s tin roof, savoring the comfort a man could find in a mundane task.

  Dread and hope had sat side by side in his chest the last few days. He was almost relieved the disappointment was here in front of them to deal with, the suspense done with for a time. For Gracie, he tried to keep faith, as she still did. But after ten years, and too many mornings like this one, he could not match her yearning. Truth be told, he never had. All he had ever longed for, all he had needed, he found in full measure in Gracie. Sure, her sorrow grieved him, but mostly for her sake. Mostly. No heir at all, and Hazel Valley would pass someday into the hands of strangers, folks who would either gather the fruit of his family’s labor or disesteem it completely, leaving it to rot underfoot. If not for fear of that eventuality, Jess admitted (though only to himself, and once or twice, to Becky), he could be content to grow old with only Gracie. Together, though alone.

  Near noon, Jess’s stomach began to call for dinner. He stopped his work and headed for the house. As he reached the
top of the hill, he saw the mail car circling through the drive. It was Pop Latona. Ever since the big new supermarket had opened in Ellwood City and started tempting away the deli’s customers, Pop had been working half-time of a morning, sorting and then carrying the Rose Point mail. Rose Marie said the job had been a godsend. Pop was old-world, and the fickleness of his customers had just about done him in. Working for the US Postal Service, Pop didn’t have to worry about anyone being fickle. Loyalty had nothing to do with it. Folks either had mail, or they didn’t.

  “Thought it was not a good idea, putting this in the box.” Pop rolled his window down, just enough to slide an envelope out without letting the rain in. “That’s the heavy paper,” he said. “Maybe something important.”

  “Thanks, Pop,” Jess said. While the old man watched, chewing anxiously on his mustache, Jess made a show of stowing the envelope away safe in his coat, slipping it into the dry inside pocket.

  On the back porch, Jess took off his boots, stacking them as Millie had taught her boys to do, side by side on the mat. He stopped just inside the kitchen door, inhaling the good smell of the stew Gracie had made for supper the night before. She was setting a bowl on the table for him as he entered the kitchen. She took a chair across from Jess’s, pulling her sweater so tight he could see the sharp points of her shoulder blades under the light wool fabric. Steam rose up from the bowls.

  “Mmmm, boy,” Jess said, brightly, “my belly was recalling this just now. Kept pokin’ me to come on up here and see if you were serving leftovers.”

  She smiled. A thin, bare smile.

  Jess spooned in a bite of the stew. It did taste fine. Gracie had a particular way with herbs and seasonings, and the flavors had honeymooned overnight, turning what had already been good into a savory reward. He lifted out a bay leaf and set it on the bowl flange, then busied himself with eating. But soon his own chewing and swallowing began to sound vulgar to his ears against her silence. Another time he would have enjoyed seconds. Now, when the last spoonful of stew was gone, he stood up.