Lights on the Mountain

  As soon as she reached the creek bank, her feet found the hollowed path with sycamore roots stacked like the rungs of a ladder. They led her down to the spot where on opposite sides of the stream huge square stones lay in stacks almost touching and formed a kind of footbridge. She bent and grasped the hem of her skirt, pulled it through her knees, and tucked it firmly into the waistband, the way she always did when fording the stream or scaling a hillside. She stretched her legs wide at the gap between the boulders, hungry white waters gushing beneath, and quickly crossed. Once she reached the opposite bank, she grabbed the arm of a sapling oak and pulled herself to sit on the rock it grew above, drawing a few quick, deep breaths before she began her ascent. The sun was well gone now, and she must make her way in the dark.

  All the slithering creatures were bedded down for the winter. Tsura was glad for that. One hot summer night she had reached up for a root and pulled down instead a writhing pair of copperheads seeking prey together in the darkness. Too stunned to strike, the snakes fell hissing to the ledge below.

  She put her hand in her pocket, shivering at the memory, and touched the little velvet drawstring pouch. Her heart wished to believe that the fresh alfalfa she filled it with each summer had some power to protect her, but it always failed just short of faith. She had too many times seen the same tender leaves being pulled up by the roots in great clumps by grazing livestock, or trampled underfoot by a deer herd seized with the urge to play at twilight. No, she carried the pouch because it had been her mother’s. And filled it because Maria had thought alfalfa lucky. She opened the other pocket then and peeked in to see that the little picture she carried with her always was secure, and that the goldenrod she had gathered and dried at the end of summer was safe too, lying next to it. She had made the goldenrod into a small bouquet. She would leave it at the grave on her way up to the house.

  The place wasn’t marked. She touched the cross at her neck, a remnant of her mother. If Maria had known she was going to die, she might have asked Eli to make one like it, though larger of course, for her grave and he would have done it. But she hadn’t known, hadn’t asked, and there was no cross. There was not even a stone. Tsura had only just found her way to the spot one sunlit morning and knew it was under that hill of soft grass and Queen Anne’s lace that her mother lay. Her mother. The woman, the girl, who had managed to live long enough to give Tsura her life and her name.

  Her discovery of the grave had unsettled Eli.

  “You could not know this. You should not know it. How is it that you know?”

  Every so often, knowledge came to her with a lightning-white flash behind the sockets of her eyes. More often she was simply compelled to head in a certain direction and went, the way a bird finds her own nest in a forest thick with trees. Always she obeyed the sure, quiet, voice that urged her to each deed and action. Such doings, so natural to Tsura, Eli thought very unnatural. He did not forbid her, of course. He had never forbidden her anything. But not wishing to cause him worry, she had learned to carry them out mostly in secret.

  A sudden cold breeze swirled up from the creek and she shivered, glancing around. The darkness had deepened while she sat. She rose and began to make a quick climb. Without seeing it, she knew that directly above her head the trunk of a scrub cedar sapling sprouted from a crack in the ledge. She reached up and grasped it. Then she felt around with her right foot until she located the first cleft in the gnarled limestone knee of the mountainside. She wedged her toes in tight, working them until she felt sure of their grip, then shifted her weight a little to test the strength of the rock. It held firm. Balanced on her right leg, she swung the left out and gripped with the strong, limber toes of that foot a web of exposed roots. Once she had secured her footing, she groped with her free hand for a sucker limb that protruded near the base of the hickory growing just above. In this creeping, spiderish way, she hoisted her body up the hillside, every cranny as familiar to her fingers as the folds of her own ear, until finally she breached the last set of rocks and broke out into the open.

  She stopped and turned, taking a last lingering look at the valley below. The moon had risen, and in its soft white light the powerful stream she had just crossed in darkness seemed a gentle, trickling brook. In the distance, across the fields on a hilltop, the lit windows of the farmhouse shone yellow against the darker hills behind. She was not done with it, she knew. But the cord pulling her toward the valley had slackened for now.

  Slowly, purposefully, she turned her back on the tall, quiet farmer and his wife, so empty-armed, and set her face toward home. Her eyes sought the crooked path to the house she had hewn and worn herself, ascending and descending Kerry Mountain. A familiar whistle reached her ears on the wind, like that of a groundhog sow calling for her young. She quickened her pace. From the back of the house just ahead, the kitchen lamps glowed. A dark figure stood silhouetted in the door. Eli was waiting.

  4

  HAPPEN TO KNOW where I might find a good dog?”

  The farrier’s grunt was the only answer Jess got to his question. Pat Badger had the lower portion of Becky’s left hind between his knees and his teeth clamped around a half-dozen nails. He picked up a shoe, fitted it to the last new-trimmed hoof to be shod, pounded it into shape on his anvil, and attached it with the nails, tapping each one into the hoof wall with firm precision. Once he had checked to make sure the hoof had expansion room the width of his thick thumbnail, he let the leg drop, and Becky shifted her weight back to all four. Pat turned and gazed out the barn door for a long moment, his expression exceedingly ponderous and sober, it seemed to Jess, considering the everyday nature of the question.

  “I suppose I do,” he said at long last. “That is, I know where there’s going to be a litter pretty soon. If you’re not looking for a pure breed. The pups will be a little bit collie, but what else, I couldn’t rightly say.”

  Though he was several inches shy of matching Jess’s rangy height, turned sideways Pat made two of him, just as he once had Jess’s father. And though he must be closing in on eighty about now, the man was still a mountain. Held peace like one too, conserving words as if his mouth had become permanently crimped around the tools of his trade. Jess watched him taking off his leather apron, wordlessly packing up his tools, and it struck him how important the farrier’s friendship was to him. Pat’s words were like his horses, tested thoroughly for soundness before he would consider sending them out into the world. It was because of this that Jess always heeded what he had to say, if sometimes he could not act as Pat advised. It had been that way when Pat encouraged him in his senior year of high school to take a scholarship he was offered to study at the state university. There was a measure of grace in everything, he said, and Jess’s good mind was a gift. The scholarship, too, was a gift. So was the knowledge Jess could bring back home to share. The grace in this case, as Pat saw it, was threefold: a gift inside a gift inside a gift.

  Clyde, who had never seen eye to eye with Pat Badger on much of anything (if Pat said a horse was seventeen hands, Clyde would head to the tool shed for his measuring stick), had his own view on the scholarship. Nothing, he reminded Jess, was free. “I’m not telling you not to go,” his father had said, in the same gentle, persuasive tone he used to get Big Jake pulling his way, “But you can’t do it thinking you’ll improve yourself for this life. What they’ve got, well, it isn’t needed here. I’ve seen it more than once, boys who leave these hills whole and hale and come home maimed. Either they have become profiteers, trading their birthrights for a bite of stew, or they are poets, down on their knees in the worship of nature. Misfits. All. God help ’em. In fact, I don’t believe there’s a creature on earth I pity more than an educated farmer.”

  Jess had wanted to protest, but had no example of his own to hold up, not even Pat. For with his penchant for turning workhorses into dandies, Pat was the very image of Clyde’s misfit. Anyway, the truth was that be it war or education or the lure of a factory paycheck that took them awa
y, most never returned. It was this Clyde feared. Not that Jess would come back ill-suited for farming, but that he would not come back at all. And though Jess had wished only for his father to bless him and say a plain, “Go,” he would have stayed regardless, for all he’d ever wanted was to continue as he was, content. And if the peace he’d counted on was not as easy to come by as he had hoped, he had no regret over having not gone. Though he did consider, every now and again, as he was lighting a lamp, sitting down to read at the end of a long day, what things he might have learned.

  Jess paid Pat in cash, insisting, as always (you had to almost pry Pat’s large fist open and close the money inside), and wrote down the address of the fellow with the litter of pups. Pat had hardly pulled away when his pickup came to a halt. Jess left the barn door and strode the distance. Pat sat with great shoulders slumped, hands on his knees, blue eyes only half-visible under his wool driving cap as he gazed past Jess’s shoulder at the fallow south field, his mind working at something important.

  “About them pups,” he said, finally. “I wouldn’t be afraid to take one myself if I needed a good dog. The fellow that has ’em keeps an old buggy horse pretty long in the tooth. I’ve been tending to it now and again for years. He’s a good customer, and a friend. But I can’t vouch for him, you understand.”

  Jess nodded, though he didn’t, of course. Didn’t understand at all. He watched Pat drive away, wondering what sort of man it could be Pat couldn’t vouch for, yet so readily claimed as a friend.

  It was not long before hope showed up again in Gracie’s eyes, as Jess had known it would. And seeing it, his foreboding returned.

  He sensed danger ahead.

  A blind fork in the road.

  A frequent waking vision began to haunt him in which Gracie took her dream-child and left him at the split, the road closing up behind them so that he couldn’t follow. It was distressing to have vague worries transformed into such vivid, real-seeming scenes. What he needed was to find a distraction for her, some way to shift her focus. The thought returned to get her a dog, one of those pups Pat had told him about. It was about time, after all. There hadn’t been a dog on the place in years.

  5

  ΤHE OLD FEED TRUCK GROANED as Jess shifted into granny gear. He ground his way up the steep, narrowly winding road, spotting, as he neared the top, a house through the bare trees—an ancient wooden frame, large and gaunt and set way back from the road, as if it disliked being seen. He pulled into the drive, just a stretch of bare packed dirt, and parked. There was another dirt path, he saw, leading from the back door of the house to a three-sided shed, freshly built, for the wood was still raw and white. Beyond it lay the wall of trees lining the cliff that jutted out over Hazel Valley. Pat had neglected to mention that these folks were Jess and Gracie’s neighbors, had they been hatched out of a crow’s nest.

  This was the old Smiley place. The crazy old hermit woman who had lived here was already ages old when Jess was small. Violet Smiley raised pigs she coddled like children. She had been gone a long, long time, and under mysterious circumstances, as he recalled, sparking several grisly legends passed dutifully from child to child in his grade at school, the most popular one being that she had tripped and fallen one night and been eaten alive by her own hogs. That this was impossible—for Violet’s whole place had been found bare of everything: hogs and chickens and rickety, threadbare old furniture, pointing more to a whisking away or a purposeful retreat than a devouring—didn’t keep them from preferring it to the other stories. If Jess were a crow and flew a straight northerly path that cut through the stand of woods bordering his own east fields, crossed Muddy Creek, and continued at an angle up the sharply tilted mountainside, he would find himself at Violet’s back door. His skin pricked as he dropped his long legs down from the truck and walked up on the porch, Pat Badger’s cryptic statement echoing through his head. “I can’t vouch for him, you understand.”

  He knocked at the front door and got no answer. After waiting a moment, he went back to the truck and got the sack of kibble he had been sent to bring. He hoisted it to his shoulder, then stepped around to the back of the house, parting on the way a flock of mismatched chickens busy rolling up the leaf-rug to get at the wintering insects burrowed underneath. One Polish hen with a dramatic topknot of feathers squawked as if he meant to catch her for stew and flew up to sit on a rotting fence post.

  A girl appeared like a phantom out of nowhere, skirted the corner of the house, and then vanished behind the lean-to shed.

  “You got some business?”

  Jess whirled. A man with a straw hat set down low over a shock of grizzled, lanky hair stood facing him. He was dressed Amish, and the accent was right, but aside from that there was not much that spoke to Jess of Plain folk. Even more out of place was the old blue Ford pickup truck Pat Badger used to drive. It was parked as if it belonged, alongside the garage.

  “Got a delivery for you,” Jess said, jerking his thumb toward the truck, parked with the side of the cab visible that had painted on it a rose of Sharon in full pink bloom and the words Rose Point Feed & Seed. Jess had been driving for Harlan Christie a couple of days a week since milk orders had begun getting whittled at the cheese factory a year ago. “Barter for an order of brooms, I was told. And I’ve got a bit of business of my own. Pat says you might have a litter of pups needing homes.”

  At that, the man turned without speaking and headed abruptly toward the shed. Jess followed behind with the sack of kibble. He hung back a little, checking around for the girl. He was sure now that it was the same girl he had seen crossing his lower field, although on that evening he had only caught a glimpse. He saw her then, on the west side of the shed, out of sight of the man. She saw that he saw and held her finger to her lips, shaking her head. As their eyes met Jess got a brief, strange sensation, almost a shock, as if he’d touched a hot electric fence. The girl broke gaze first. And Jess had the odd idea that she did it as a kind of favor, as if she knew he couldn’t have managed it on his own.

  The kennel the man had set up was a wonder in the rude, dirt-floored shed. A collie mix with a lustrous mane lay in a wooden whelping crate, curled around a single fat pup, working the teat. The crate was lined with fresh straw, and beside it sat two pottery bowls, a blue one filled with clean water and a yellow one with kibble. Jess dropped the sack of dog food next to the crate and folded to the ground, sitting on his boot heels to look in the box. The dog held Jess’s gaze, then lowered her head to roll the satiated pup to its back, swabbing its belly with her tongue.

  “Born six weeks,” the man said, speaking his words hurriedly, impatiently, as if he had little time for showing pups to strangers. “She had three. Two girls and one boy. I just got this one girl left. The others was runty, only lived a few hours.”

  “Do you know the sire?”

  The man passed his hand over his brow, settling and resettling his straw hat in the jerky, rhythmic motion of a tic. His face had a worn, tired look etched into it, the skin around his mouth permanently furrowed with lines dug deep. At the same time there was a fevered excitement about the way he spoke and moved, the look in his eye: pupils large and dark, the rim of visible iris glittering with the intense, hot blue of an August sky. When he spoke, his words were rushed, impatient.

  “Yah. I know him,” he said. “Big shepherd from the valley was up here during her time. He comes again, I’m gonna stick him on a pitchfork and set him out on the road for them to see that don’t know how to keep a dog at home.”

  Jess blinked, ill at ease in earnest now. Though the care taken for the collie bitch seemed to point to its emptiness, it was a harsh statement. He couldn’t help thinking of the Busco dog, the one Margit had got to guard the fruit stand when she had to leave it unattended. That dog was a huge black shepherd of some type, he knew. And a male. He went to the whelping crate and bent to let the collie scent his hand, keeping the man in full sight.

  She was in obvious good health and had a peace
about her Jess couldn’t deny. Not the sign of an ill-handled dog. He picked up the pup. When he laid her on her back along his palm, she struggled against the position, a sure sign of wits, Clyde always said. Jess took his delivery pad out of his coat pocket and wrote on the top page.

  “I’ll take her.” He handed first the pup to the man and then the slip, ripped from the pad. “You can call me at that number when she’s full weaned.”

  In three long strides, he reached the truck and swung himself up by the handle. He looked around for the girl. She was at the door of the truck, holding up a small rag doll, shaking it, as if to say she wanted Jess to take it. The instant the doll was in his hand, she was suddenly gone, as if spirited away. Jess started the truck and backed down the drive, taking it slow. He saw her then, sitting on the steps of the porch. She hugged her knees and stared at Jess, her eyes boring a hole through the windshield.

  When the truck lights had gone out of sight, Eli came around the house to where Tsura was sitting on the step. He began to rave, as she had thought he would. It had been her reason for staying out of sight. She knew it would take all he had to keep a hold on his senses with a stranger about. Now that they were alone, he could let down, give himself up to the brewing storm. He was upset about the man from the valley, the “giant,” he called him, and as he fretted, his words took on the sharp, rise-and-fall sound Tsura so hated to hear. Once, he stopped abruptly, paced the yard for a moment without speaking, then came back and stared at her with eyes gone wary and wild. “Why?” he shouted, as if Pat had some darker reason than dogs for sending the man to the mountain. Eli’s mind was troubled for sure when it led him to mistrust Pat Badger.