Lights on the Mountain

  “I believe I’ll make a fire. Take off the chill.”

  “It is cold,” she said, shivering. “Seems as though my bones need a sweater of their own. It would be wasteful, I suppose, to use the furnace so early in the season.”

  “Well,” he said, “I would hate to use up coal on nothing but a rainy day. Never know this time of year when we could get a real cold snap, and there we’d be, short on fuel. A fire’s nicer than furnace heat anyhow, don’t you think? You can make yourself a cup of tea and sit up to the fireplace the way you do, with your feet on the hearth.”

  He took his soup bowl to the sink and ran water in it, gave it a swipe with the dish mop, and left it to soak. When he turned around again, he saw Gracie’s hands clenched, her knuckles white, saw that her spoon rested clean and shiny on her folded napkin, and his chest tightened. He came over, and dried his hands on the towel still slung across her shoulder.

  “I’ll go down to the basement,” he said, “and make sure the furnace is up to snuff. And if the fire doesn’t do it for you, we’ll have it on. Cost be damned. How’s that?”

  “No, don’t do it,” she said. “Now that you’ve mentioned it, a hot wood fire does sound nice.”

  She looked up at Jess then, meeting his gaze for the first time all day. Her lower lip trembled ever so slightly before she caught it with her teeth, and he saw the slenderness of the thread she had been trying not to break. He reached down and brought her to him, folding her into his arms, held her close and tight. He felt her give, shoulders jerking in silent spasms, tears soaking into his shirt.

  “Jess,” she said, after a long time.

  “Still here.”

  “Thank you.” Her voice was moist and thick, muffled by his shirt.

  “For what?”

  “For this. Because I know you don’t understand. I know you can’t

  feel it.”

  Jess took her by the chin, tilted her head until she was looking up at him. He wiped a tear from her cheek with his thumb.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t understand. But who ever told you a man needs to understand a thing in order to feel it?”

  She shook her head then, fresh tears pooling in her eyes, and buried her face in his shirt.

  Only the day before, Jess had stacked the far wall of the back porch halfway to the ceiling with firewood. He took up three logs of scrub oak, brought them into the front room, and laid them, along with some cedar scraps from the kindling basket and a few crumpled pages of newspaper, in the fireplace. Then he struck a match on the hearthstone, touched it to the paper, and got down on his knees to blow on it, coaxing. The newspaper caught, ignited the kindling, and disappeared in a quick puff of ash. Flames licked at the logs in a fierce, hungry burst, then quieted, burning slow and steady. He found the scorch of a fire’s heat on his eyeballs pleasing, tilted back on his heels, and succumbed to the fire’s lure. Work could wait.

  “I forget, from year to year, how friendly a fire can seem on a cold day,” Gracie said.

  Jess looked up, studied her face as she came into the room. Her cheeks were red-splotched, and the soft flesh beneath the curve of her lip was swollen, but she was dry-eyed. He was relieved to see it. She had brought with her a cup of tea, had her knitting basket hooked over her arm. “It tempts me to forget my work,” she said. “I could put on a record. Sheherezade, maybe. Or Nat King Cole. Just sit the afternoon away.”

  “I can’t see a thing wrong with that,” Jess replied, poking the fire. “If there is a particle of dust or dirt anywhere in this house, it’ll die on its own of loneliness. Hey, maybe I’ll go get my Journals and join you. You and me and Lewis and Clark can sit before the fire together, just the four of us, like old folks, reading and knitting.”

  “There are other books, you know, Jess,” Gracie said, but she was laughing. It was not her usual easy laugh. Not that one, like the trill of a wood thrush, which caused Jess to think hard for things to say to keep it rippling from her throat. But, a laugh nonetheless. She slid a chair close, slipped off her socks, and propped her feet on the hearth, stretching her slim, long-knuckled toes toward the fire. She fell quiet again, sipping her tea, but the silence had changed. It was no longer between them.

  Jess got quiet too. He was relieved that harmony had been restored so easily and so soon, but not surprised. It was just that way with Gracie. She was as supple as a willow branch bending to the wind. With each disappointment she somehow emerged with hope intact. Her flexibility amazed him, though it was true that he marveled at it from a distance, the way a man with no legs admires a circus acrobat.

  2

  THE RAIN DID QUIT, just as Gracie had predicted, though not until sometime during the night. After milking, Jess ate a cold breakfast alone, because Gracie had gone early to church, then headed back to the barn for Becky. With the ground so dry before, he knew it would make for easy plowing. The big horse cast a scornful glance at the tractor parked under the shed, eyeing the machine sideways as he led her out to a spot just past the kitchen garden.

  “No need to get so high and mighty,” Jess chided softly, chuckling. “A half acre is all we get to turn. Gracie says a potato patch ought to be closer to the house. She’s Russki, you know, so there’s no use arguing.”

  Becky’s ears flickered and twisted to catch the sound of Jess’s voice. She lifted her head then, assuming a dignified air, as if to declare that work of any size was work, and not at all beneath her. She stood quiet and patient while he fastened the harness to the plow. When it was secure, he threw the reins over his shoulders and gripped the wooden handles.

  “Step up, Beck,” he said, and they were busting through sod, turning the last bit of yesterday’s melancholy under, burying it deep under black, rich soil.

  The horse plodded forward with Jess and the plow following behind. Slices of sod curved away from the blade like cloth cut from the bolt. With the sun above his right shoulder, glinting through the clouds in an uninspired way, he guided Becky in a measured path, turning her to the right or left with little more than a “gee” or “haw” at the end of each row. As she heaved through furrow after furrow, he lavished her quietly with compliments and praise.

  Standing at nineteen hands, the draft horse was tall. Percherons generally topped out at seventeen. And while he allowed that her black color was acceptable, if not exactly desirable, Pat Badger claimed she was a mite leggy for the breed. But Jess didn’t mind that. He was pretty leggy himself. By the age of twenty-one, he had topped out at a ropy six foot eight. She made him a good match. What the farrier deemed flaws he found endearing, only made him fonder of her. Anyway, whatever Becky might be lacking in conformation she made up for in character. Jess had never known a horse so eager to work. Sometimes, in a sentimental moment, he could almost believe she labored purely for love.

  When Clyde and Millie died and it had fallen to Jess to decide how the farm should be run, he had kept Becky—a filly then, and unbroken—for the simple pleasure of training her to the harness himself. He sold the old working mare, Maggie, and her plow-mate, Big Jake. The pair had a few good years left in them and brought a fair price. It was enough for a tractor, secondhand, so Jess bought a 1938 Johnny Popper that Harlan Christie at the Feed & Seed was selling cheap. The tractor ran fine and made for quick work. Sitting high on the seat of it, though, bumping down a row with the motor growling and the exhaust popping, Jess found himself in unexpected sympathy with Clyde, for it made a poor substitute for a day in the fields with Becky, her powerful straining running through the harness reins to his hands, the smell of horse sweat, leather, soil, and grass filling his nostrils, the slap, slap jingle of tack riding the breeze.

  At midmorning, Gracie stood in church, waiting to make confession. A silver-haired reader had just finished chanting the hours in Old Slavonic, his voice halting and raspy, and now a younger man, long reddish-blond hair caught back in a ponytail, was beginning them all over again, this time in English. Gracie understood both. “Thou who
at every season and every hour, in heaven and on earth, art worshiped and glorified, O Christ God, long-suffering, merciful, and compassionate. Who loves the just and shows mercy on the sinner …” He chanted in the Russian style, the words running along a straight monotone line, with one or two occasionally dipping below or above it. He was only a boy, Gracie realized, looking at him more closely, seeing the rounded flesh of his cheeks, the awkward, self-conscious way he hunched over the chanter’s stand. His voice had already changed, though. It was deep and pure. No trace of an accent. That was how she intended it to be with the Hazel children. She would speak only Russian to them, and Jess would speak only English. She felt it was important that their children … their children … had it really been ten years? Who could blame Jess for doubting? But there would be children. And she wanted them to be at ease, as poor Jess still wasn’t, with her parents. She imagined her father, grinning like an infant himself as he bounced her firstborn on his knee. It was a familiar scene, one she called to her imagination often, and it dismayed her to find the image hazy.

  She turned her attention to the confession line then. It seemed longer than usual this morning. But then, autumn was the season of repentance. She’d decided that a few years ago, while standing in a line about as long as this one, eager as the rest for a chance to dust off her soul. Of course, she knew that Great Lent was the proper time for taking inventory of weaknesses and failings. And she knew too that the specially written prayers and services, especially those of Holy Week, did foster deep repentance. But her own experience and powers of observation told her that late fall—wet, cold, and barren trees and shorter days—provoked a more voluntary contrition. The autumn penitent was a melancholy spirit in search of relief.

  Suddenly she found her focus, her mind peaceful again. It was for that reason that she had come: Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation.

  At last her turn arrived, and Gracie stepped forward. She kissed first the cross and the gospel and then the icon of Christ. Under the weight of his tender gaze and with Father Antony’s brocade stole smelling of beeswax and incense lying heavy on her head, she laid her burden down. All the despondency she had been indulging in since discovering that she was not, this time, to be a mother, lifted away as she spoke, leaving her soul light, her mind free.

  “The child of God, Galina, is absolved. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” Father Antony said, when she had finished. Gracie turned and made a small bow to those still waiting, feeling that they were each her kin. She went then and set a candle before the icon of the Holy Virgin’s mother. Her request to St. Anna was the usual one, the same petition she had been making for years, but this time she did it with freshened faith. When the candle was lit and burning bright, she took a place by the door. From there she could slip quickly away after the service, and get home in time to make sure Jess ate something hot and sustaining for the midday meal.

  It seemed to Jess that no time at all had passed when he saw Gracie’s flock of Dominicker hens come scuttling up the hill to the safety of the chicken coop. He grinned, trying to think of a sight more absurd than a chicken at a dead run. Just after the hens had gone to roost, Gracie came out of the house carrying the kitchen scrap bucket. She stopped just inside the chicken-house door and upturned the pail, slinging in the day’s vegetable peelings and the soured cheese curds she insisted on as an aid to good digestion.

  He called, “Ho, Beck,” and the big horse slowed, easing to a halt. Jess heard the rush of wings as the chickens unperched to see what bounty Gracie had brought.

  Dusk-darkened mounds of earth now sat in rows where before there had been only sod. As he stood on the hill behind the house, gazing across the flat crest of it at the black rectangle of soil he had just exposed, his eye caught a flicker of movement east of the barn. He gathered the reins into his left hand and laid his right along his brow, squinting his eyes, filtering the haze of the evening sun. It was a person. A girl, he realized, when the tall, slight figure bent and caught her skirt in her hand, and guessed her to be about sixteen. Jess watched as the girl lifted her head, doe-like, as if to scent the air, then turned and ran swiftly north, toward the creek. He kept his eye on her until she was a speck in the distance. Then he lifted the reins and gave Becky’s rump a gentle tap.

  “Get up,” he said.

  It was sundown by the time he had unhooked Becky from the plow and freed her from the harness. He stood at the edge of the turned plot with the horse at his left shoulder, squatted and picked up a clod, turned it over in his hands, then set it back down in the plot, dirt side up.

  “Gracie’s got some Irishers in the bin now,” he said, half to himself and half to the horse. “And don’t potatoes love sod. She could sow ’em, just for grins. If I dug the rows deep, any luck at all and she’d have little ones to harvest by early spring.”

  Becky pushed her muzzle into the small of his back. He stood and leaned against her muscled shoulder, reached up, and worked her ear with his fingers, folding it over like the finger of a glove, tugging on it absently while he considered the fruits of their labor. It was only a garden plot to be sure. A common, common thing to a farmer’s wife. But the job was well done. A decent offering. All, it seemed, Jess’s lot to give. Simple acts and small pleasures. Never the desires of her heart.

  He turned back toward the barn, thinking that he would reward Becky with a flake or two of alfalfa and relieve his cows of their milk—creatures of such extreme habit they were already at the barn, begging to be let into the milking shed. Becky measured her step to his, kept pace with him all the way down the hill, treading on his shadow. The evening sun was no longer listless. It shone down bright and strong, touching the leaf carpet underfoot, burnishing it copper here, gold there. From the woods that bordered his fields, the odor of composting leaves and other plant matter reached Jess’s nostrils on the wind. Yesterday’s rain had released into the air the scent of autumn, delayed until now by a late Indian summer. Necessary as growth, the decay and dormancy stalled by drought was finally underway. The air was cool now, but he saw that the recent hot weather had fooled a migratory bird or two into lingering longer than was wise. A pair of mourning doves were among those who had missed the call. They keened softly from the barn eaves. Becky stopped to whiff an acorn lying in the path and Jess halted, waiting for her.

  Gracie was brighter today, he thought, glancing up to the house where the light had gone on in the kitchen. When she returned home from church at noon, she seemed almost to have put the disappointment of yesterday behind her. But Jess knew, and only too well, that sometime, maybe not next month, or even next year, but sometime, she would have reason to believe again and they would have it all to do over.

  Endometriosis. That’s what Dr. Cohen at the university hospital over in Pittsburgh had written on his chart when Jess and Gracie finally consulted him after they had been married two years and still no child was on the way. He said Gracie had rogue cells growing over her womb and a baby couldn’t grow inside it. Not to give up, though—she still had a 50 percent chance of conceiving. She should feel lucky to be one of those rare women for whom the condition was silent, who suffered little discomfort with it.

  Jess had thought the doctor awfully glib in the delivery of his diagnosis, casually slashing their chances at a baby by half, saying Gracie didn’t suffer, as if that white coat he wore were an extra layer of skin that kept him from feeling his patients’ pain. But Gracie had turned to Jess with the hope of a casino gambler glazing her eyes. She seemed to think 50 percent was a sure-thing bet.

  When they’d got home from the hospital and had a bite of supper, Jess eased volume nine of the World Book Encyclopedia set from the bookshelf in the living room and took it down to the barn with him. Once the weaning calves had drained their bottles and Becky was bedded in fresh straw, he tilted back on a sack of oats, flipped the book open under the tack room light, and read all about the witch-grass creeping over Gracie’s insides. He knew then the
y’d been offered no sure thing.

  After that, Jess had suggested adoption. He was shocked to find her reluctant. For if he had ever met a woman made to love another mother’s child, it was Gracie. After a little more consideration, though, he believed he understood. Gracie was not opposed to adoption. She was opposed to accepting the fate the doctor prescribed for her. If God had pronounced her as good as barren, well then, she would have to be resigned. But a doctor was not God, so she was not resigned. Not resigned at all.

  Becky nosed the acorn, rolling and sniffing the nut in an almost canine fashion. Jess watched absently. A thought struck him then, sudden and hopeful.

  “Say, Beck,” he murmured, “I just got myself an idea.”

  3

  TSURA BUNCHED THE HEM OF HER SKIRT tight in her fist and ran for the creek, full breaths shoving hard against her ribs. She knew he had seen her, the man with the horse. She was sure he thought her a thief, gleaning ears of feeder corn in his fields, but time was too precious now to worry over it. The temperature was dropping fast and another rain was coming. She could feel the swell of moisture in the air, the cold and damp of the earth under her bare feet, but she would not make it home before the sun set.

  Eli fretted when she didn’t return before dark, but she knew there would be no scolding her this time. For days now, he had been in a spell. When his mind was turned that way, he did not mark her absence any more than he would have her presence, had she stayed to keep him company. Up on the mountain she heard the faint sound of a dog barking. Bell. The dog had followed Tsura as far as the door this morning with her tail held low and then turned back to lie down on the floor at Eli’s feet. She was beginning to show with her litter, but she would have stayed, regardless. When still a pup, Bell had made it her duty to stand guard over his body—for however long his mind journeyed away.