Sincerely yours,
Jess gazed at the photo, seeing a thing he had not wished to, even from the safety of Gracie’s arms, as it rose unbidden to the light for a reckoning.
Walter, the evening before his departure, coming into the milking shed to undress his heart and lay it bare to Clyde. And Jess, eavesdropping from the milk room, listening spellbound as his brother confessed a deep and abiding love for a girl named Maria. Jess felt again the shock, the quick stab of pain he had felt then, as he realized Walter had kept him in the dark. More painful for Jess was the reminder that in the life of brothers there inevitably comes that closing of a door that has always stood open, the end of innocence and all the freedom of boyhood, a time that for Jess and Walter had begun according to nature but could not end in the same way. What should have been a brief period of secrecy and separation now stretched into eternity.
9
WALTER WAS SMITTEN. He wanted to marry the girl. This Jess heard him say one evening during milking. Jess had known something was on Walter’s mind, for he usually rushed through Friday-evening chores, eager as he always was to get to town. That night he had gone about his work in quiet, moving around the barn at a slow, thoughtful pace. Then, midway through the milking, he had risen suddenly from his stool. Taking the partially filled milk bucket with him, he left the cow waiting and approached Clyde at his own. When Walter was finished speaking, Clyde milked in silence for what seemed to Jess an eternity. When he spoke at last, without raising his head from his task, it was in a voice so cold and jeering Jess knew without seeing them that his father’s gray eyes were as flat as stones.
“What you are pining for, Walter,” he said, “is known among men as a gypsy slut. It’s an old tale, to be sure. Don’t be the fool who tells it.”
And that was the end of the matter. Almost.
The girl herself had come to the farm once, after Walter had gone. The katydids had been harping about the heat, Jess remembered, so it must have been well into summer. They had all been sitting down to dinner when the bell rang. Millie had got up to answer, calling, once she was there, for Clyde. She had come back to the table alone, saying Clyde was going to drive the girl back to the gypsy camp in the truck. Dinner was well over—dishes all washed and dried and put away in the cupboard—when he returned. It was Jess’s guess that she had been given more than a lift home, for she had never come around again.
Now, Jess gazed again at the photo. He ran his finger along its torn edge. He touched the dimple in the girl’s cheek, brushed with his thumb the fingers of his brother’s hand. So, Clyde had not managed to level Walter’s hope after all. Hadn’t turned yearning into old, tired lust. Here was the proof. Carried in a pocket, perhaps, next to Walter’s heart as a talisman against Clyde’s anti-blessing. There seemed something almost holy about the photo, then, like one of Gracie’s icons.
Jess slipped it into his shirt pocket. The image of his carefree brother’s courage. Material evidence, Gracie would say, of an unseen reality.
10
LATER THAT MORNING, when Jess had turned the cows out on hay, he drove over to the Hays place. The pump on the well had a faulty switch, and he wanted to see what needed to be done to fix it. Gracie’s parents, Ivan and Darya, were coming to visit. And if Jess knew anything, it was that it would not do to have Morozovs in the house and no water for tea.
More than a decade of marriage to Gracie, and he still couldn’t warm to his in-laws.
Nor, he knew, could they warm to him.
Gracie was their only child, born when Darya was forty-seven, and Jess had stolen her away. It was from her mother that Gracie had got her suppleness, her strong, lithe limbs. They walked about the earth as water would, if it had arms and legs. Only in the last few years had Darya finally started showing her age, growing heavier and slower now with every year that passed. She had Gracie’s amber eyes too, but Darya’s were cooler and flickered with impatience at Jess’s bashful fumbling. Once in a while he thought he caught the scantest, palest flash of her daughter’s kindness in them, but it came and went so quickly he could never be quite sure.
Gracie’s papa was a man of medium height, or slightly more (the top of Ivan’s head would reach Jess’s shoulder, anyway, if they were to stand side by side), with a thick, wide chest and strong old miner’s arms he seemed always to keep crossed. He was balding, and what hair remained stood in two funny, owlish tufts atop his head. Gracie and her mama were joined at the heart, but it had always been Ivan who hung the moon over Gracie’s earth at night. There were times when, with no small amount of jealousy, Jess suspected she also gave her father credit for the sun. On occasions like this evening’s dinner, with Ivan and Darya and Gracie all together at once, Jess was the fourth leg on a three-legged stool. An awkward leg he made too, cut of inferior American wood, far too long and poorly turned. He set the whole stool off its neat little feet.
He had reached the Hays place, a piece of wooly, untilled land Orville and Zodie had bought tamed and let go wild. Zodie was a dowser, a water-witcher. With a forked stick, she found water, and with a special rig and truck, Orville brought it up. The witching was something Jess’s family had never taken seriously, though it was a fact that the Hays had a high rate of success at striking water on the first try. Gracie was never skeptical when there was the scantest reason to believe, though, and would have Zodie and her wand at the farm in an instant, Jess knew, if the Hazel well should ever run dry.
“What’s the news, Jesse?” Orville said. “Don’t never see you this time of the day, ’less it’s in the feed truck.”
“Well trouble,” Jess said. “Bad switch or some odd thing. Leaves us bone dry at times. Where are you going with your wife’s good laying hens, Orville? Those aren’t fryers, so I know you’re not taking them to the sale.”
“I guess you didn’t hear,” Orville said, leaning against the hood of the truck. “As of last week, I ain’t in the well business no more. Hasn’t been too enjoyable of late, anyhow, what with young folks rushing off the farms like rats in a flood.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Jess said, taken aback.
“You ain’t,” Orville said. “But you ain’t like the rest, Jesse boy. And your well don’t need more’n a look-see, maybe once a blue moon. You can’t keep me in a living thataway. No more’n Pat Badger can survive shoeing that one draft horse you keep just for fun. Him and me will be down to the welfare office together, holding hands.” Orville grinned. He paused to pull out his tobacco pouch, pinched a generous wad between his fingers, and filled his lean cheek. After working the tobacco soberly for a while with his tongue, he spat on the ground in a thick brown stream. “I won’t be one of those who goes on all the time about the good old days. They wasn’t good for all, and that’s a fact. But it did used to be that the first thing a pair needed after a honeymoon was a parcel of family land and a tap of good water from deep underground.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, his hand on the hip of his pants. “Them were good days for me. And they’re gone. Young folks now have got some need to live right up agin’ one another and drink that bleachy town water from plastic pipes.”
Jess shook his head. “Not me. I hate town water.”
“I done told you, Jesse. We ain’t figurin’ you into this. All I know is what used to be ain’t no more. And Zodie says if we must be poor again, she wants to do it in the company of our own. So that’s what we’re doing. Headin’ home. Truth? After forty years I still can’t think of these hills as mountains, anyhow.” Orville grinned, then spit. “Guess I’d just a whole lot rather be up in mama’s lap than messin’ about her feet.” He put his truck in gear. “Now, I’d come and rewire your switch or whatever needs doing, just for old time’s sake, Jesse boy. You know I would. But these hens ain’t gettin’ any younger. I’d better get ’em to the sale.” His expression changed then, into a look Jess would never have believed had been on the face of Orville Hays if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. It was, as Jess later d
escribed it to Gracie, downright tender, almost motherly. He stared in shock as Orville, whose eyes had grown moist, took out a grimy handkerchief and wiped them.
“Zodie says I’m gettin’ as weepy and as windy as an old preacher man,” he said, wadding the handkerchief into a ball, closing his fist around it. “And I can’t argue with her. I tell you, Jesse, leavin’ this valley has me feelin’ kindly toward folks in some way I didn’t used to. Get to thinkin’ up all sorts of loving things to say to ’em before I go. Before we ain’t neighbors no more.” He shook his head. “It’s pathetic.”
“I could use a word, Orville.” Jess said seriously.
“I ain’t got much,” Orville said, looking bashful now, and unmistakably pleased. “But, I guess I have been thinkin’ on you some. Thinkin’ of your pap, and how all-fired stiff-necked he could be. Now, I know I ain’t tellin’ you nothin’ in that. But there’s a way seems right to such a man. Oft times it isn’t. Just flat out isn’t. I guess what I’d say to you is it’s all right to seek a map. Ask for help. There ain’t a bit of shame in getting yourself pointed in the right direction.”
Jess had always had a great deal of respect for folks like Orville and Zodie Hays. If you could part the thorns and brambles, weren’t so thin-skinned you couldn’t take the scratches and pricks, you could learn a great deal from their speech. He understood, thinking it over as he was driving home, that Orville was leaving a scrap of himself in his words, much as the old will seed their neighbor’s homes as death draws nigh—bringing them the seeds of a strain of pepper hot enough to swell their lips and bring tears to their eyes, or the chair they always sit in when they’ve stopped by on their way to town—things that have no value other than the power to keep calling the person to mind when they have been long gone.
And this word Orville had left him—seek a map, ask directions—it was good seed. Jess wasn’t saying it wasn’t. It was having Orville bring Clyde into things that had him pondering again as he followed a meandering Muddy Creek road past snug, smoking houses and snow-draped fields, taking the long way around Kerry Mountain to get home.
His thoughts were not easy ones.
Those nights so long ago when he had lain awake listening to the folks argue.
He heard again the sound of his mother’s gentle weeping. Only now, just before she broke down in tears, Millie’s tone was not one of disagreement. She was pleading.
“There’s no other way, Clyde. Only this one is right.”
“My dear Millie, there is never only one way to do a thing. No one right, nor ever one wrong.”
They were at some crossroads. His father wanted to go in a direction his mother didn’t like. A way that was terrible wrong to Millie.
Knowledge seeped slowly into Jess’s bones, like the ache of an oncoming illness. He knew it was all true, and at the same time that it couldn’t possibly be. He saw his mother, pictured her deliberately, seated on a stool in the barn, her spare, slight frame wrapped in his father’s big canvas coat, shoulders hunched against the cold, reading paperback westerns to Clyde as he milked. And there were his parents at the kitchen table, their dark heads (they had only a strand or two of gray between them) set close together, poring through seed manuals or going over accounts in the farm’s ledgers. In the light of such companionable images, his disquiet should have eased obediently away, but there was the photo of the girl, burning like a hot coal of truth, in his shirt pocket.
He happened to know a thing about gypsies that went crosswise with what Clyde had said that evening to Walter, for he had once seen a gypsy man slap his daughter silly outside the door of Latona’s Deli, just for flirting with Mike. And the truth of it was that the girl had not been flirting at all. She’d only flinched away when Mike tried to grab her by a handful of skirt. To her father just coming out the door, it must have appeared like a flounce designed to fetch, for the man hit her hard, causing her to stumble and fall, knocking her head against the heavy glass window. Jess’s gut had twisted as she righted herself and straightened her dress, only to have her father take her by a coil of her dark hair and drag her away. She never made a sound. Mike had laughed, though, an obnoxious “heh, heh, heh,” telling his brother Sully about it inside the deli.
Sully had laughed too. “Heh, heh, heh.”
Things had changed a great deal since that incident. Gypsies were either far fewer now, or they were far harder to pick out of a crowd. And it was unlikely that a father of any sort would feel free to slap his child about the head. Not in public. There were no laws against that nasty laugh of Mike’s yet, though. And that was too bad. That laugh still gave Jess a pain in his gut.
Before the photo, Jess hadn’t thought to consider whether Maria might have had a father like that girl’s. But what if she did? If she’d had trouble because of Walter, it could have brought her to the house that night looking for him. And if it did, then this was the cause of Millie’s tears. It would also be why the arguing had finally halted, for she might plead with Clyde, even push, but she would never cross him. Like Jess, she feared worse than a disease the awful weight of his silence.
But even as he acknowledged, with a kind of vague dread, that one thing might have to do with the other he saw his father’s face, set hard as cast iron. Don’t neb in another man’s mess, Jesse. You’ll be the one with shit on your nose. And taking the photo from his pocket, he slid it into the glove compartment and slammed the door shut. The clang of metal against metal rang through the cab. The sound was both hollow and filled with shame. Jess ignored it, wiping the sweat from his hand on the knee of his pants. He jerked down the window and put his head out, feeling the sting of cold air on his face.
When he reached home, he swung the truck around at the drive and pulled down to the barn. Gracie was sharp-eyed when it came to spotting trouble, and she knew about the letter. He needed to gather his wits entirely before going up to the house. Something was amiss, though—he could tell that as soon as he stepped through the door. Becky was all kinds of nervous, tossing her head and rolling her eyes. “Ho, Beck,” Jess said softly, looking quickly around. And there, crouched on a hay bale in the corner, was the girl, huddled under a ratted old sleigh blanket with a dog. She clutched the dog to her chest, staring at Jess with black moon eyes.
11
WHILE JESS WAS BRINGING HIS MIND around to accept what his eyes already knew—that the girl with the wise look he’d tried hard to forget had slipped down from the mountain and was sitting before him on a bale of last year’s hay—Gracie stood in the kitchen up at the house with her back to the warm stove, waiting for the buzz of the kitchen timer.
She was baking prosphora, loaves of communion bread, for church. The yeasty smell had gone from the kitchen, and she knew the bread would soon be done. The timer went off then, and she turned to the oven and took out the loaves. There were five of them, small and round. She set them side by side on a wire rack to cool. With a finger, she soberly traced the letters imprinted in the center of each one. ICXC. Jesus Christ. NIKA. Conqueror of hell and death. The action was a prayer, a love letter. The bread she had formed with her hands, pressed in the old way with a carved wooden seal and then baked to a tender brown crust, would become in a mystery the very body of Christ that she herself would then be given, as medicine from a spoon, to eat in Holy Communion. She did not take the task lightly, and never contemplated it too long. She covered the loaves with a cloth and left them on the counter to cool.
Going to the sink where the breakfast dishes were soaking, she picked up a brush and began absently scrubbing the stains from a coffee mug. She had another mystery now to contemplate: the secret quickening of life in her womb.
Jess and the girl climbed the hill in silence. From the corner of his eye, he saw her staring at the big stone house as they climbed, and he wondered how the structure, so dear to him, appeared to her eyes. In winter, unadorned by foliage, the house stood tall and square and starkly plain. But inviting, too, he thought, with its wide-hipped front porch
and two smoking chimneys, especially when you compared it to Zook’s bleak place. It was plain, though, for aside from a quilt of fieldstones, harvested during clearing and cobbled to the outer walls, it had not been built to delight, only to endure.
The quiet was broken suddenly by the loud honking of geese. Somehow Jess had missed the low approach of the flock. The girl had not. She stood as still as a post, the dog held tight to her chest, gazing up at the sky. The birds were straight above the house now, so close you could hear each one’s separate cry, the beat of its wings. The geese were not keeping to a V pattern as they flew but cut a straight line below the clouds. There was a fair space of sky between the flock and the lead goose. She had taken a premature notion to head home, it seemed, and the others were scrambling to follow. In a matter of seconds, the whole long line was gone, just a faint dark spot on the quiet blue sky. When Jess looked over at the girl, the hair stood up on his neck, exactly as it had that evening on the mountain, when she’d stared him down from Zook’s porch step.
There was no curiosity in her expression. No awe.
She had a look of alarm, as if the geese had been a flock of ghosts.
At dinner that evening, Jess was in a foul mood, sullen because the Morozovs had come, and because Gracie had laid the drop-leaf maple table in the dining room, the one room in the house she and Jess never used. They always ate in what Jess felt was good, plain comfort at the knotted, wide-planked table his grandfather had fashioned when the big oak at the corner of the lane was struck by lightning. Jess disliked the dining room. He thought it a foolish waste of space. It was small and cramped, filled with fussy furniture and crystal glass and delicate bone china, objects he could never reconcile with what he knew of Hazel women.
Lights on the Mountain Page 10