His questions about Eli were no more prying than the ones Gracie had plied her with since she first came to the farm. But she did not wish to talk about Eli. She had already told them all she ever would. He was gone. Bell too. And there was only her pup, Nellie, left to remind Tsura that life up to now had not been a dream.
Suddenly as Tsura gazed across the eddies, a mink glided across the stream, slipping out of the water within a couple of feet of the sycamore root. He raised up on his haunches and shook his sleek coat until the water stood out on it in oily beads. Then he turned back to gaze at the stream. Following the mink’s gaze, Tsura saw that he was not watching the stream, but another mink trolling along the far bank. Without a sound, the second animal coasted into a narrow tributary, toward a small quiet delta where cattails grew in abundance. He dove under suddenly and vanished, leaving only a ripple as evidence that he’d been there at all.
Tsura reached over with her toe and bumped his leg. He opened his eyes, and she put her finger to her lips, motioning toward the first mink who still sat upright with his back turned to them, his gaze now focused on the spot where the second mink had been. And then, without warning, a familiar electric pain shot through Tsura’s head. And in the next instant the sun grew brighter and flashed, a blinding white light behind her eyes. Her vision grew very sharp, very clear. She saw, not minks in a stream, but something else. She turned to look at him.
“David Busco,” she said softly, “you will not go to the war.”
14
SPRING PASSED, as it often did, in a sleight-of-hand way, infant leaves growing unnoticed until one day they were suddenly spread out over the trees in their full adult size, the pale, delicate chartreuse green of the hills quietly darkening by the hour into deep emerald maturity. Now it was June, and the timothy grass in the valley fields stood thick and lush, ready to cut.
Jess stood in the barn door one morning, watching the herd head out to graze. When the last cow had sauntered over the hill, hindquarters swaying, and dropped out of sight, he looked at his watch. Dawn was spreading pink over the dark horizon. The Busco boys would be driving in any minute. The day would be a long one. It promised to be hot and Jess was already out of sorts. Usually he looked forward to the fellowship of a haying crew. He especially liked having David and Lester with him in the fields, sharing the work. Today, though, he would be forced to divide his thoughts between work and worry, and that had him feeling edgy. So much that he had not had the patience, even, for Becky’s plodding. He had turned her out with the cows. She had not gone, but lingered in the corral now, as if she hoped Jess would have a change of heart and harness her to the wagon.
It was Tsura. Gracie wanted her to stay on at the farm indefinitely. Permanently, it seemed. To her mind the thing was simple, as cut and dried as today’s harvest of grass would soon be. She was, in fact, being uncharacteristically stubborn about it. The girl had sought shelter with them, she said, no one else, and that was reason enough to give it.
Jess was not so sure.
He could not deny feeling a kinship to Tsura—the girl was so much of the earth, so almost made of wind and sky and soil—but she was made of other stuff too. Material that was not of Jess’s world. She disoriented him. And what he couldn’t tell Gracie, not with her fondness for airing out rooms, was that almost since the day Tsura arrived, the place under his ribs he had thought was maybe filled, was at least sealed, had begun cracking open, revealing itself to be yet hollow. The girl was strangely keen. Her black gaze was a mirror, and Jess had no wish to see the man in it, haunted gray eyes peering back at him, the pale reflection of an inward, burrowing self. He sensed she had the power to suddenly unearth that man, naked as a mole, to the sun. It was unnerving, even alarming. No. He could not possibly accept Tsura as Gracie did, as a sister, or a daughter, or any other kind of foster kin. He wanted her away.
The boys came, and by seven-thirty Jess had them in the fields. Lester drove the truck pulling the hay wagon. Jess walked alongside, throwing bales up to David, who stacked them in ascending rows. David worked with quiet concentration, dovetailing the bales into tight-fitting stacks not likely to pitch. But he worked quickly too, always reaching for the next bale before Jess had hoisted it. Not much time had passed before Lester was bored with the job he’d chosen. Driving required less focus than stacking bales. He leaned his head out of the window.
“Saw a girl in the corral with your horse when we drove up, Jess,” he called out.
“Did you?” Jess strode a few paces, squatted for a bale, and handed it up to David.
“You know we did,” Lester said. “Who is she?”
“Well, she’s a girl that until this summer lived in an old house up on Kerry Mountain. And now you know as much as I do.”
Lester craned his neck to lean farther out, raising his voice so his brother would be sure to hear. “David thinks she’s righteous.”
“Now, how would he know that, just seeing her in the corral?”
“Don’t go giving me the business, Jess. You’re not that old,” Lester said. He grinned, casting a sly look toward David, who ignored it. “He thinks she’s a beauty.”
“Ah. Well, he’s right. She is that.”
“I never said a word,” David said, but his face, flushed already from sun and work, turned a deeper shade of red. He leaned down for the hay bale Jess was handing up. Hooking his fingers through the twine, he tossed it into a row, using his hip to drive it hard into an open slot.
Lester’s eyes glinted with satisfaction.
Jess considered the brothers, soon to be parted by yet another war. He remembered Walter, and how much pleasure his brother had always got from deviling Clyde. Walter’s easiness, his unworried ways, which Clyde perceived as indolence, had always run against their father’s grain. Jess grinned, remembering the time his brother had memorized an entire poem for no more reason than orneriness.
Clyde had kept dozens of little moralizing verses in his memory—nicked from his farming quarterlies and used to motivate Walter. His favorite was the “Cheerful Plowman,” a folksy rhyme expounding on the duties that make up a farmer’s life, explaining what could happen if they were neglected or carried out in a poor, inadequate manner. Jess hated rhyming verse and had thought the poem dull, except for the last stanza, which always made him grin:
I once neglected fixing a neck yoke that was weak,
And soon my team was mixing with the fishes in the creek.
Walter had turned the tables on Clyde by perusing his collection of farming periodicals on the sly and filching a poem from The Farm Implement News that suited his purpose. He stayed up late for several nights in a row, learning it. Because they shared a bedroom, Jess had been forced by consequence of proximity to learn it too. He could still recite it:
I’d like to be a boy again, without a woe or care,
with freckles scattered on my face and hayseed in my hair.
I’d like to rise at four o’clock and do a hundred chores
Like saw the wood and feed the hogs
and lock the stable doors.
And herd the hens and watch the bees
and take the mules to drink,
and teach the turkeys how to swim
so that they would not sink.
And milk about a hundred cows and bring in wood to burn,
and stand out in the sun all day
and churn and churn and churn.
And wear my brother’s cast-off clothes
and walk four miles to school,
and get a licking every day for breaking some old rule,
and then go home again at night
and do the chores once more,
and milk the cows and slop the hogs
and feed the mules galore.
And then crawl wearily up the stairs to seek my little bed,
and hear Dad say, “That worthless boy!
He doesn’t earn his bread!”
I’d like to be a boy again, a boy has so much fu
n,
his life is just one round of mirth,
from rise to set of sun.
I guess there’s nothing pleasanter
than closing stable doors,
and herding hens and chasing bees
and doing evening chores.
Jess could almost hear, now, the light, mocking tone of Walter’s voice as he sang the poem out in the darkness. He could feel, too, his own quiet contentment in those days, lying shirtless on top of the sheets on a hot summer’s night, the windows open to ease the heat, safe in the knowledge that he could reach across the space, if need be, and touch his brother’s arm for comfort.
That evening, after the hay was all in, Jess and Gracie were sitting on the porch when Tsura walked up. She held out her hand to Gracie. There was a kitten cupped in her palm.
“That big white cat has moved her litter again,” she said. “She left this one in the old nest. I tried to put it in the new one, but she rolled it back out.”
“It’s a runt,” Jess said, in a tone that made him sound a lot like Clyde. “That mama cat likely knows there’s something wrong. Better to leave well enough alone.”
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” Tsura said firmly.
Jess looked sharply at her. From her expression he could see right away that she was not being contrary. It was only that she believed what she said to be fact, as if she knew the kitten had no malformity.
“Well, in that case,” Gracie said, in a matter-of-fact voice, as if she too believed, “we’d better take care of the poor thing ourselves.” She got up and went into the house. In a moment, she came back with a little glass doll’s bottle. It had a rubber nipple, the right size for a kitten’s mouth.
“Where did you get that?” Jess said, his tone turning harsh. He was irked now to anger. Gracie had been around barn cats long enough to know that nursing a discarded runt was a pointless endeavor. It was as if in Tsura’s company she had gone under a spell. Now she was going to take the girl’s word over her own good sense.
“I found it in the hall closet. It’s been there since before my time. I guess I thought you knew about it.”
Jess was quiet. He had remembered. The bottle went with a doll, the only survivor of the accident because it came sealed in a bubble of plastic. Why Millie, who had only grown sons, would have been carrying a doll around in her purse was a mystery to everyone, one never solved. More mysterious was why Jess had kept it. Death could make a man to do such peculiar things.
With no small amount of bitterness and with a great deal of reluctance, he did as Gracie bid and skimmed cream for the kitten at every milking for the next five days. The kitten ate greedily at every feeding. And by the time it was a week old, it had grown as big as any in the litter. Tsura snuck it back into the nest, and the big white cat began to nurse it along with the rest.
You could have knocked Jess down with a feather.
15
IN THE WHOLE MONTH OF JULY, there was no rain. A drooth, the old valley women said, and Gracie did not think they exaggerated. There was an electric hum to everything. A big hot sun rose and burned ever and ever hotter through the day, parching all the flowers in her garden beds with thirst. Even the birds seemed to be waiting it out, their voices still and hushed, even at dawn. Why a dry summer should pass more slowly than any other kind, she did not know. She only knew that it was—passing far too slowly to suit a woman due to birth her first child at its end. She half believed it was only the rush and flow of the creek, the knowledge that if nowhere else than at the feet of Kerry Mountain water still lived, eternally pushing its way over and through the rocks, that kept her from losing her mind.
She stood in the dark, cool living room one afternoon, wondering if she could take it another minute, she was so hot and anxious. And then, as if to say, “Oh, yes, you can,” Rose Marie’s big station wagon unexpectedly pulled into the drive. Gracie was more than glad to have the distraction. She was shocked, though, to see her friend get out of the car alone and walk around the house to the kitchen door. Then she remembered Rose Marie mentioning over the phone that her brother had offered to take the Patterson children to the zoo in Pittsburgh. (Mike, Rose Marie had said, was playing the doting uncle to impress a woman he was hoping to make his latest wife.) Still it seemed to Gracie an odd, almost eerie sight, Rose Marie without a baby on her hip or a child in tow.
Tsura was in the yard. Gracie watched as she tossed a stick for Nellie to fetch. The dog was six months old now and brimful of pent-up energy. Already she had the temperament of a guard dog—which Jess thought she had very likely inherited from Prince, the Busco’s German Shepherd—but had the open, friendly eyes and stately look of a collie, with her heavy brown coat and full, rough mane, streaked with white. She and Tsura, so tall and whittled, made a striking pair. Rose Marie turned her head to look at them as she passed, keeping an eye on the dog, whose ears and tail had stiffened. She gazed hard at the girl, who gazed serenely back. Gracie watched Rose Marie take in the whorled black thicket of hair that sheltered a wide, smooth forehead, the shape of her long, dark eyes. That beauty you could not deny and barely envied, if at all, it was that far beyond the ordinary.
“Does that girl remind you of anyone?” Rose Marie said, when she was inside. She sank into a chair and fanned herself with her pocketbook. She was winded and flushed from her walk around the house. As if she’d forgotten she’d already asked one question, she quickly posed another. “Feeling good?” she said.
“Feeling fat,” Gracie said, smiling. She turned sideways, to show off her roundness.
“That’s good,” Rose Marie said with an approving nod. She shrugged out of her sweater, revealing a flamingo-pink and yellow plaid sundress.
“Fat is fine when it goes with happy. Me? I’m fat, but not so happy about it. Skip makes sure of that. And I suppose he’s right. Sophie was three last month. Time I stopped eating for two. Problem is, after five babies in ten years, I’m not sure I remember how. Maybe I’d try, though, if he’d shut up about it.” She sighed, shrugging her smooth brown shoulders. “You are so lucky to have married a quiet man. Sometimes I kick myself for introducing you two. If I’d had any sense, I’d have kept him for myself.”
“I’m awfully glad you didn’t,” Gracie said with a smile.
“Speaking of, how is Jess?” Rose Marie said, and Gracie’s smile fell away.
“What?” Rose Marie said, in a voice of mild alarm, her gaze now swift and searching. “What’s wrong?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know what’s wrong.”
“Oh. Well, then.” Rose Marie laughed, relieved. “You’d better assume nothing is.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Gracie said, though she was not convinced. “But he isn’t himself. He’s too quiet, even for Jess. And he’s been staying up far too late at night, reading his Journals.
“Journals?” Rose Marie’s brow scrunched into a puzzled knot. “What sort of journals?”
“Of Lewis and Clark,” Gracie said, raising her voice. The tea kettle had begun its tuneless whistle. She went to the stove, took it off the flame, and poured the tea, leaving it to steep. She came back to the table. Rose Marie still looked puzzled.
“That’s how he settles his mind,” Gracie said. “He’s done it since he was a boy. So I know something is troubling him.”
“That is an odd method for soothing nerves.” Rose Marie said. “But less risky than liquor, I suppose.”
Gracie turned, reaching for cups hanging from pegs on the wall behind her.
At the sight of the cups, Rose Marie laughed and shook her head. “You can’t offer me hot tea on a day like this, Gracie. I’m Sicilian, remember, not Russian.” She rose and went to the cabinet, found a tumbler, and went over to the icebox, opening the freezer door.
“My God, it’s an ice factory in here,” she said. “Six, no seven trays.” She took one out and pulled the lever. The ice in the tray cracked into cubes. “At my house, they’d all be empty. Every single one.”
Gracie laughed, a low, absent chuckle. She was focused on a tightening across her middle. When the baby had got settled again, head down, she could feel a sharp new protrusion through the fabric of her light cotton smock, the small, pointed knob of a knee, or a tiny elbow. She caressed it dreamily. One day, and she could hardly wait for it, she was going to open her own freezer door and find that a child had put the ice tray back empty.
“Don’t worry too much about Jess,” Rose Marie said, seating herself back at the table. “He’s scared and trying to hide it. That’s all.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ducks and cats.”
Gracie tilted her head, her expression quizzical.
“See,” Rose Marie said, “when it comes to starting a family, I always think that women are ducks and men are cats. Both can swim. But the cat’s not nearly so keen on jumping into the water, or as natural-looking doing it.”
“I suppose,” Gracie said, doubtful. “But Jess likes to swim. And he’s good at it. He’s going to be fine as a father. Any man who will break a horse as gently he does will be good with a child. You know that better than me. He doted on you. And he was only a boy then. No, there’s something else. I sense it. And it seems as if it started with Tsura. He didn’t want to let her stay, you know. I had to talk him into it.”
“That’s a twist,” Rose Marie said, with a wry look. “If a girl that lovely and seventeen showed up at my door, I’d be escorting her to the sidewalk. But, then again, I’m not married to Jess Hazel. He never was one to look around much, even before you. And he sure wasn’t after.”
“I might feel as you say, if she were any other attractive girl,” Gracie said quietly, keeping her eyes on her tea. The wistfulness in Rose Marie’s voice had brought forth a forgotten image: Skip, on the night of his and Rose Marie’s wedding, dancing a bridesmaid into a dark corner, his hand sliding smoothly down from the girl’s waist to rest on the soft, intimate curve of her lower hip. And though she knew it couldn’t have been the song that was playing, she heard a rasping voice, the plaintive lament: Lord, a good man is hard to find. “But Tsura isn’t just a lovely girl,” she said lightly, to cover the small, quick ache knotting in her chest. “She’s a lovely soul. There’s something good and pure in her, almost saintly. It draws you in and soothes you in the most natural way, like one of those hot mineral springs people bathe in for healing. You’ll know it the minute you meet her.”
Lights on the Mountain Page 12