Lights on the Mountain

  Tsura barely heeded his words, all out of meaning, but she listened hard to his tone. It was rising more now and falling less. He was growing hoarse, and more and more not himself. She tried to soothe him with soft, gentle speech, with feeble reminders of Pat’s friendship, knowing, even as she spoke, that she had no more power to stop the swelling roil in his head than she had to still the waters of Muddy Creek.

  Yesterday, he had begun to call her Ruth.

  Tomorrow he would be at the crest of this spell.

  And she would be alone.

  6

  THE HOUSE SMELLED OF DINNER when Jess got home. Gracie was in the kitchen. She had a meat fork in her hand and tended a sizzling skillet. He could see that she was pleased, her eyes warming to the color of spiced rum, as he told her about the pup.

  “A farm needs a dog,” she said brightly. “Haven’t I always said that? You’ll see. She will be as smart as a whip. Another Gretchen.”

  “Sure,” Jess said, wondering, as he headed out to the barn, how she could say such a thing.

  Her words echoed as Jess began readying the shed for milking. Another Gretchen. Gracie had not understood, evidently, when Jess had told her the story, that there could only ever be one Gretchen. One curly haired, little yellow mutt plucked from the berm out on Highway 422, where somebody had dumped her. One foundling dog to arrive at the farm sitting on the front seat of the station wagon, Walter looking as proud as if he’d brought a girl home to meet the family. She was skinny and flea-ridden and rag-eared and had an awkward, too-long tail, but Walter loved her. Trouble was, she decided to love Clyde.

  And only Clyde.

  Everywhere he went from the day she arrived, Gretchen was at his heel. He’d say, “Get, dog,” and she’d light out for a calf that had strayed from the herd. Or, “Sic,” when a rat was bold enough to show itself in the barn, and she’d growl and bare her small sharp teeth and tear off after it. The day she died, from a blow to the head she’d irked a bull into giving her, Jess watched his father come back from burying her, his head sunk low on his shoulders, saw how his feet dragged slow as he walked across the field, having left her body beneath the rock pile. That night at dinner he hardly ate, sat so tight-lipped and downcast it frightened Jess to see him. That had lasted until the end of dinner, when Clyde looked across the table at Walter, his eyes dark and menacing, and said, “Not another goddamned stray dog, do you hear? I’ll shoot it myself.”

  And though Walter never got the chance to bring home another dog, Jess had heard the strangle of pain in his father’s voice. He had always believed Clyde meant it.

  “Strange day,” he said to Gracie, when they had sat down to supper. “They hired a new man to work in the warehouse. A carnie, no less. Shifty-eyed as any I’ve ever seen. And his name is Ace, if you can believe it. A man with a crooked eye and name like Ace drifts in the from the Butler fair, and what does Harlan do but give him a job. And then, to top that, Pat sends me up the mountain to the House of Usher, looking for a dog.”

  He told her then about the man, Eli Zook, his house, the feverish look in his hot blue eyes, the odd behavior of his daughter, and what in general appeared to him to be an Amish lifestyle gone weirdly awry.

  “That Zook, he’s strange enough. But the girl,” Jess stopped, feeling hesitant, for some reason, to describe Zook’s daughter. The breathtaking, dark wildness of her beauty. Her fearful gaze.

  “Well, you know what they say,” Gracie said, in a matter-of-fact tone, putting a thigh of fricasseed chicken on his plate along with a helping of the green beans and baby onions she had canned last summer.

  “I doubt it. What do they say?”

  “Where there’s a door, there’s a wolf.”

  “Who says that? Must be Russian, ’cause I don’t follow.” Jess reached over the stack of black rye for a slice of store-bought, the soft white stuff Gracie detested and only put out for him.

  “Well, the door is a metaphor for the mind, which is the only way into the heart. And the danger is—,” she broke off, shaking her head. “Forget it. Russian sayings never make sense to you. And when I try to explain, they don’t make sense to me.”

  She was quiet for a minute, thinking. Then she said, “I haven’t met Mr. Zook. But he’s human, right? And don’t we all suffer? We all have weaknesses. Injuries. Battle scars. Sins. Even the Amish. Straw hats and horse-drawn buggies don’t buy paradise. Or else none of us would need a savior.”

  “Well,” Jess mumbled, suddenly discomfited. He slathered an excess of butter on his bread. In a decade of marriage, he had yet to discover a better method than sidling for dealing with Gracie’s religion. A pious Russian’s world fairly teemed with unseen spirits, good and evil, locked in a powerful struggle over the human soul. And Jess had never known anyone who talked as naturally as they did of sin. How Gracie could be so tranquil, believing as she did, he could not fathom. Jess remembered the girl again, then, and the eerie way she had seemed to see right through—no, inside—him. He rubbed his arms, smoothing down the hairs. “There is something weird in the air up at that house. I’ll give you that,” he said. “Hey, I almost forgot.” He stood to his feet and reached into his back pocket. He held out the rag doll. It was a little handmade thing, dressed in a dingy, white flannel gown, sewn with large crude stitches.

  “How old did you say this girl was?” Gracie asked, taking the doll. She turned it slowly over in her hand to look at its face. She traced the sleeping eyes with her finger, and the tiny dash of a mouth, drawn in charcoal.

  “She’s one of those that makes it hard to tell. When I first saw her, I’d have said sixteen or seventeen. Now I’d guess her more at eighteen or nineteen.”

  “And you’re sure they are father and daughter?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say I was sure,” Jess said. “But Zook is at least thirty years older, maybe more. One of those things you just sort of gather, I suppose.”

  Gracie was quiet. She held the doll in her lap, almost reverently. And on her face was a look such as Jess had seen only a few times before in their marriage, when he had interrupted her at prayer. It was a look he could never quite put there himself, however hard he tried. She sat that way for a long while, stroking the doll’s head with her finger and smoothing the little dress.

  At dusk Jess stuck his head around the back door. Gracie was at the sink, washing the supper dishes.

  “Got a few things to finish doing down at the barn.”

  “I thought we were going to look at the catalog,” she said. “You need some new flannel shirts before it gets any colder.”

  “What’s wrong with the ones I’ve got?”

  “They’re aging into Swiss cheese.” She pointed with a soapy finger to a jagged hole below his shirt pocket. “That fabric’s worn too thin to mend anymore.”

  “Maybe I should get some of those cowboy kind,” he said. “The ones with the fancy piping on the pockets, and snaps.”

  Gracie smiled. “Maybe you should, one or two. They aren’t as practical as these ones you’re wearing now, though. Buttons are easier to replace than snaps. I can make the order. I just thought we were going to look at it together this evening.”

  “We still can. What I’ve got to do won’t take long.”

  She glanced up at him, rinsing a glass.

  “Wait,” she said. She put the glass in the dish drainer and dried her hands on a towel.

  Jess waited at the door, watching her exchange her slippers for garden clogs and her apron for a coat.

  In the barn Gracie rubbed Becky’s neck and let her nibble sweet feed from her palm while Jess fussed around fastening things up for the night. Unaccustomed as he was to have her with him at his work, he lingered in his tasks, savoring the moment.

  It wasn’t necessary, but just to stretch the time he went up to the hayloft and brought down four bales of alfalfa and stacked them in the feed room. Then he took down the tack, rearranging it on the opposite wall. After looking at it there for a while, he moved i
t back to its usual place. Finally, he emptied a bag of oats into the feed bin and brought out a bale of the hay, setting it against the outside wall of the tack room for Becky’s morning meal. There was no more to do after that, so he walked over to the stall where Gracie stood stroking Becky’s muzzle, kicking aside, as he went, an old bird’s nest lying in the alley.

  “What kind of nest is that?” she asked.

  “Swallow, I guess. Only bird I know dumb enough to build a nursery in a barn full of cats.”

  “I like swallows,” she said, “with their split tails and dark underwings. They look so pretty when they fly. They make me think of figure skaters, the way they slip low and fast just above the ground, then go to cutting circles way up high.”

  “They make an awful mess in here. That’s all I know. Last year a pair of ’em raised their brood right over Becky’s stall. Just a shovelful of garden dirt to mix in with all the fertilizer they made, and you might have grown a bed of spinach on her back.” Jess bent and picked up the nest. It was an intricate thing, made mostly of mud pellets, lined with downy feathers and what looked to be a wad of coarse black hair stolen from Becky’s tail.

  “But, you are right,” he said. “They are pretty. S’pose that’s why I can’t bring myself to run ’em off. Hey, I know a little something that’ll make you like them more,” Jess said suddenly. He was pleased to have a bit of knowledge he could use to impress her. “They mate for life.”

  “What? The same two birds come back to this barn every year?”

  “That’s what they say, though I can’t prove it. They all look alike to me.”

  Gracie was quiet. She stroked Becky’s nose, gazing off at something Jess couldn’t see.

  Just after dawn the next morning, when Jess had finished with the milking, he came up from below and saw the door to the hayloft was open. Climbing the stairs, he found Gracie spreading quilts across a pile of loose hay.

  7

  WHEN THEY GOT INTO BED THAT NIGHT, he heard her breaths grow even almost instantly. He lay on his back next to her, elbows up, head resting in his hands. He felt wakeful, loathe to end the day. He grinned then, remembering. “Hey, Gracie,” he’d said, softly, stepping through the loft door. “Hay is for horses,” she’d replied. There was no milk delivered. They’d passed the entire middle span of the day up there. Just like a pair of swallows.

  “What?” Gracie suddenly asked. Jess turned his head and saw that she was awake, her eyes half-open.

  “What do you mean, what?”

  “What were you smiling about, just now?”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Yes, you were. Tell me.”

  “You were snoring like a fat old granny is all.”

  “Oh,” she said, closing her eyes.

  Jess gazed down at her. He felt as though all the goodness in all the world had flown in to roost in his chest. If he had need of a savior, as Gracie said all men did, then by God she was his.

  “Jess,” Gracie said, her eyes still closed.

  “Hmm.”

  “Tell me about Walter.”

  “Walter?”

  “Yes,” she opened her eyes again. She rolled onto her side to look at him. “You know, Walter? Your only brother? The one who went to war. The one you never talk about unless it’s a story from when you were boys. I want to know the man. My brother-in-law.”

  Jess had to admire her cleverness, for she had thought to catch him in that place between wake and sleep, when a man is least wary, vulnerable to sharing more of himself than is wise. She was right, of course. He did not talk of Walter. Tried, most days, not to even think of him. The way he saw it, brotherly love came seeded in a man at birth and grew up very naturally right along with him. Losing it was like the uprooting of a great tree. What was the use in forever standing beside a great, gaping hole, gazing into it, measuring its depth?

  Suddenly every nerve he owned was on alert, the old familiar uneasiness spreading through his core, threatening to displace his peace. For comfort, he stroked Gracie’s shoulder. She lay quietly, letting him work the small sharp bones with his thumb, like a child kneading the satin binding of his blanket. Her eyes burned bright in the darkness. Where there’s a door, there’s a wolf, she had said of the man on Kerry Mountain. What really haunted the Zook place, Jess did not know. Nor did he care. He had his own set of fangs to worry about. His was a hollow-bellied creature, forever on the prowl. Only that fire which blazed in Gracie’s eyes kept it at bay.

  “We’ll talk about this another time, good woman,” he lied then, and bent to plant a kiss on the curve of her cheek. “Just now you’ve got me wonderful tired.”

  At that, Gracie laughed gently, her voice soft and low. A sound that, for Jess, dispelled all gloom.

  Somewhere in the darkness a rooster crowed. In her attic bedroom, Tsura woke with a start. Without rising to look, she knew that she was alone in the house. Eli was gone. Bell too. And though the knowledge pained her, she knew that this time they would not return. There was something more she knew, for she had just seen it as she slept. The woman was no longer just one person. She was two. A child was coming to the valley below.

  8

  SOME WEEKS AFTER Gracie had wooed him in the barn loft, Jess woke one morning before dawn, chilled and shivering. The temperature had dropped at least ten degrees overnight, and the bite of cold was sharp. He rose from the bed, careful not to disturb Gracie, and laid an extra quilt over her sleeping form. Pausing by the bed, he stood still and quiet for a moment, fighting the urge to crawl back in next to her warmth. The moon was waning, and in the half dark her silhouette curved against the gray of the bedroom wall. His eyes traced the line that ran from her shoulder to the scoop of her waist, then made the gentle climb to the rise of her hip.

  Although she dozed heavily in the early hours, she was by night a light sleeper and heard every sound, most of them common to an old, drafty house. It was hardly worth the effort, she always said, to try and wake Jess—if not calf or foal, he was dead to it, a myth he only allowed her to maintain because he was fond of watching her sit up in bed with eyes trained on the door, clutching the little gold cross at her neck for protection.

  While he stood watching, she stirred, and the shape on the wall shifted, taking another, no less fetching form as she rolled to her other side. Her shadow had a new fullness to it, Jess decided, and the thought pleased him, since for years now her yearning had kept her very thin. He gazed a second longer before turning reluctantly away, heading for the kitchen and a cup of coffee.

  Once the percolator had done its job and he had finished off a first steaming cup (filling-station coffee, Gracie always called it, disdaining to partake), he began to hunt around for something to read. He spied an envelope then, perched atop yesterday’s newspaper. It was addressed to him but unsealed. Gracie had already opened it. When Jess looked at the date, he saw why she had. It was the letter Pop had delivered in the rain, weeks back. She must have found it in the pocket of his coat. He shook out the contents. There was a note, handwritten on plain blue stationery and sent in an airmail envelope, which was addressed to Clyde and Millie at the farm. Folded inside the note was a photo. Half a photo, rather. It had been torn down the center, separating a couple. The picture had been taken from a distance, but it seemed to Jess that the girl in it was happy. She smiled, anyway, squinting into the sun, one hand reaching for a dark curl that had escaped her scarf, the other tucked into the pocket of her coat. A set of square-nailed male fingers curved around her waist. Jess unfolded the letter.

  I’m real sorry it’s taken me so long to write this. My wife says I’m a man of good intentions and that’s mostly all. Awful sorry, too, about your son. All these years, and I still feel bad that I got to come home, and he didn’t. Walter was a good friend of mine, good friend to all the guys in our company, always trying to keep our spirits light, which wasn’t as easy as it sounds. I know I could get real low sometimes, especially at night. It was awful cold and dark as a cave in o
ur bunkers at night. If I would light one of the candles my mother sent regular, so I wouldn’t have a reason not to write, Walter would tell us about your farm. The way he described it sure could take your mind off things for a while. I used to ask him if he was sure he wasn’t Jewish, the way he talked on all the time about the promised land. To a boy from Detroit, it seemed like a stretched tale, all those woods thick with deer and wild turkey, the cold rushing creeks and the green of your wide, high-rolling hills, all that milk and honey, but I did always want to visit someday and see for myself. Maybe I still will. I hope to stay here on earth awhile longer, and the doc says there’s no reason why I shouldn’t, so long as the one kidney holds out. But I know for sure that when I do leave this world, I’m going to a bleaker, colder, darker hole than any old bunker in Korea ever was. I’m not a righteous man, and that’s just the plain truth. The only mercy I can wish for is that my side of the river will be in ear’s reach of Walter’s, so’s we can pick up the stories where we left off.

  I was wounded on patrol the night before we were set to move on Pork Chop Hill. Took my bullet in the lower back where it nicked a kidney, which is why I’ve only got the one. Knowing I’d be going home, and he might not, Walter gave me this photo. Asked me to make sure she stayed safe, as if he was handing me a real girl and not a picture of one. I’ve kept it all these years. I suppose because it reminded me of something I wanted to make sure and not forget. You see, Walter never carried any of us across a river on his back or did anything else Washington would call an act of honor, as far as I know. But there ought to be a medal. For lightening a brother’s load. For keeping his feet from sinking. For shining just enough light for him to see by. My God, how he could make us laugh. The candle stub is from the last night he told stories in our bunker. I stuck it behind my ear when I left for patrol. It was still there when I was carried into the hospital in Japan. I guess I hope maybe you’ll light it in his memory. And think of me too.