Lights on the Mountain

  Rose Marie looked unimpressed, even skeptical. “Maybe,” she shrugged. “Maybe not. I’m still passing for Catholic, but there are days when I doubt there was ever any such thing as a saint. And if there was, I have a feeling they’ve gone extinct now. To tell the truth, if it weren’t for knowing you, I’m not sure I could believe in souls at all, much less one that’s naturally good and pure, like you say.”

  “You sound like Jess,” Gracie said. “He just finds her odd. And that’s too bad,” she added slyly. “Because I think she hears from angels. But we can talk about something else.”

  16

  JESS GREW MORE AND MORE UNSURE, as the days went by, that he could take much more of Tsura. Very often while guiding Becky through a field or settling himself under a cow, he would go over in his mind what he would say to convince Gracie. He never got far.

  “I want her gone,” he would say, and Gracie would go into early labor, putting an end to the discussion.

  The girl wasn’t going anywhere. He just had to accept it, find a way to deal with it. But the closer Gracie’s due date grew, the closer to the house Tsura stayed. She had stopped her wild roaming with Nellie through the woods and berry canes. Quit too her habit of heading to cool her feet in the old spring house or going down to wade Muddy Creek in the heat of the afternoon. She was always underfoot now. Haunting Gracie, it seemed to Jess, and increasing his own disquiet.

  “Son, you’re tight as a drawn bow,” Pat Badger said when Jess ran smack into him at the Feed & Seed.

  Which, looking back, Jess could see was about the rightest statement Pat ever made.

  PART FOUR

  1

  IN THE SECOND WEEK OF SEPTEMBER, Jess awakened with a start. Nellie’s wet nose brushed against his hand. She whined a little. He and Gracie were sleeping in the first-floor bedroom. The baby was a week overdue, and climbing the stairs made Gracie’s legs swell.

  The bedroom had been Clyde and Millie’s. Jess still felt strange sleeping in the folks’ big wrought-iron bed.

  He lay with his eyes open to the darkness, orienting himself. Though he could not see it, he knew there was an overnight case sitting under the window straight ahead, crosswise from the bedpost. It seemed ages since he had watched Gracie pack it. Inside were pajamas strewn with tiny yellow flowers, a robe, slippers, a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush, the Pond’s night cream she never went to bed without, her hairbrush, and a miniature double-faced icon fitted with tiny brass hinges, so it could be stood on a table or folded up and stored away. The little suitcase, all packed, latched, and ready to go, had seemed so hopeful then, so expectant. Like Gracie.

  Jess comforted himself with the knowledge that everything was all right, for only the day before Doc had reassured them that Gracie’s due date wasn’t set in stone. He said it was perfectly normal for a first baby, for any baby, to be late by a week.

  “Maybe so,” Gracie had said irritably to Jess when Doc was out of earshot. “But by my estimations, this one is late by two.”

  Nellie whined again, more insistent, just as Jess was dozing off. He sat up this time, coming fully awake. The hands on the clock glowed green. It was 2:15. When Nellie had last been let out before chore time, she had disturbed a nest of skunks.

  “Upstairs,” he hissed, pushing her away with his hand.

  Nellie didn’t move. He glanced at Gracie. She was sleeping soundly, rolled onto her left side with her back to him, belly resting on the mattress. Jess got reluctantly to his feet. He climbed the stairs with Nellie on his heels, leading her back to Tsura’s room—the small alcove bedroom at the end of the hall where Millie had always done her sewing. When the baby was big enough to move from cradle to crib, Gracie had said, just last night, then Tsura could take the big room downstairs, and the little sewing room could become a nursery. It had given Jess a bad feeling when Gracie said that. But whether the feeling sprang from the notion of Tsura living in Clyde and Millie’s old room or the realization that Gracie still intended her stay to be permanent, he couldn’t tell.

  At the top of the stairs, he could see that the door to the girl’s room stood wide. The covers had been thrown back, and the bed was empty. A cold, inexplicable fear seized Jess’s chest when he saw it. He turned and almost ran down the stairs. As he came through the door of the bedroom, he could see, in the dim light from the upstairs hall, a small white figure. It was Tsura, he realized wildly in the next second. And the sight of her standing in her long nightgown over Gracie, like some ghostly spirit of the night, confounded Jess’s mind, even as it angered him. He did not know if she had been in the room all the time or if she had somehow managed to reach it first without crossing his path. However she had managed it, one thing was certain. She had no business being there at all.

  Gracie lay on her side as he had left her, in a deep sleep. No, Jess realized then, and his heart stumbled. Everything was wrong. Gracie slept lightly by trait. She should have been awake long before now, wondering why Nellie was moaning and what he and Tsura were doing milling about the house. He reached out with a trembling hand and touched her hair, her arm, her face. She lay still. Jess’s legs buckled. His breath felt hot and dry. He thought he might be sick. He tore back the bedclothes in a quick, feverish movement and shouted her name. She was so still. Too still. He groped her form, feeling his way along it in the darkness with blind hands, as if he did not know it inch for inch. He barked at Tsura to turn on the light. The old push-button switch clicked and the overhead light flashed on, cruel and bright, revealing the room too suddenly. Tsura cried out, a small, stark wail. Gracie lay as still as glass, the thin material of her gown wrapped tightly around her legs and swollen torso. Her skin shone a pale, translucent gray. Jess whirled away, headed for the telephone. But when Tsura cried out again, he paused, glancing back. Gracie lay as still as ever. Tsura pointed to her nightgown, shifting of its own accord. Jess froze half-turned in the doorway, gazing at the scene in the bed. A salt statue, he would later think, watching helplessly over his shoulder as his life was reduced to ash. The nightgown twitched again, then moved in a slow, taut wave across Gracie’s belly as the baby changed positions.

  Jess ran to the phone in earnest then, and when Doc had been called and the ambulance was on the way, he ran back into the bedroom, only to see Tsura making a strange motion with her hand over the length of the bed. Later, when his senses returned, it would dawn on him that she was only trying to help Gracie and the baby, signing them with a cross, the way Gracie had likely taught her to do. It would be days, though, before Jess would recall anything about the moment—before he would even think of Tsura again. Now, standing over his wife, the girl seemed a dark, dread messenger, the spirit of old doom. And Jess came undone.

  2

  A SLOW NIGHTMARE BEGAN. Jess went out on the porch to watch for the ambulance. Soon it came shrieking down the lane with red lights flashing, a grotesque sight against the dark, quiet hills, and as it pulled up in front of the house, the door was already opening. “Where is she?” Doc shouted as he rolled out. He heaved his bulk quickly up the steps and followed Jess into the house.

  Inside, Doc headed for the stairs. “Not there,” Jess said, and took him by the arm, led him into the bedroom. But the sight of his wife, so pale and small and still, shocked him all over again. The words he had been about to speak froze on his tongue. Doc didn’t need them anyway. He was already feeling for Gracie’s pulse, his jaw set at a grim angle. Sickness rose in Jess’s throat. He turned sharply on his heel and left the room.

  When the ambulance medics entered, Jess showed them to the door of the bedroom, but declined to enter. He closed the door to the room and brought a chair from the kitchen, then sat down to wait in the hall, preferring the terror of the unknown to what he might chance to see. His heart had gone wild, beating all out of time, unnerved as he was to the point of exhaustion. Too many nights he had knelt in the darkness to aid an animal in trouble. He had no doubt the situation in the bedroom was a grave one.

&n
bsp; A sudden gust of warm wind blew in through the open living room windows, lifting the curtains in two white wings. Gracie was human. And, as she’d once said of Zook, she had all the usual frailties and weakness. Sins, she called them, without flinching. But Jess knew she did not fear death. Not as he did. She was as unmoved by the winds of doubt as Kerry Mountain. The valley and the farm and all that she cherished on the good earth paled next to the kingdom of heaven. And for the first time since he was a boy, Jess wished in anguish to own such certainty. With it, he felt he might pray. As it was, he could only groan.

  There was a sound of activity in the bedroom, then the low, rough rumble of Doc’s voice giving orders, and a scraping, as if the bed were being scooted across the floor. And in the next instant, a baby’s small, furious cry. Minutes later, Doc strode out carrying the baby, bundled in his white coat. The medics followed behind with the gurney. Jess leaped to his feet, his eyes searching beyond the men to the figure they carried. They walked quickly past, hurrying the gurney down the steps and into the ambulance. Jess caught a bare, fleeting glimpse of Gracie’s still form, covered with a sheet, and Doc’s mouth, a bleak, gray slash, as he said, “Best follow in your own truck, Jesse.”

  3

  AT THE HOSPITAL, Jess sat stricken and numb in the hall while the hospital doctor spoke in hushed tones to him of what he already knew. Gracie was gone. In a daze, he got up, went to the water fountain, and pushed the button down with his thumb. After a moment, he took his thumb away and turned around, having no idea if he had taken a drink. Anyway, he wasn’t thirsty. He saw Rose Marie coming down the hall toward him. She looked as haggard as he felt. Blue eye shadow streaked across her lids, her false lashes looked as though she had glued them on in the dark, and her hair had not been set. He wondered when she had dyed her curls that brassy red shade and thought it didn’t suit her.

  “Hey, Rose Marie,” he said.

  “Hey,” she said, hugging his waist. “I just came from the nursery.” She gave a tiny smile. “I got to hold her. They’re amazed, you know, by how healthy she is, considering. They’re calling it a miracle. We’re all calling it a miracle,” she said, reaching for his hand.

  Jess had no reply to that. He took his hand away. Rose Marie shook her head, pressing her lips tightly together.

  “Is it what they’re saying? A heart defect?”

  “I guess,” Jess said, dully. “That’s what Doc believes. He says it’s rare, but he has seen it once or twice. A malformed valve. She would have had it since birth. But we won’t know without an autopsy.”

  “Is there going to be an autopsy?”

  “Probably not. Darya has a big problem with it. And for once, I think we agree on something. I don’t want anyone … It just wouldn’t help. Knowing isn’t going to bring her back.”

  “No, of course not. I hate to talk about such hard things so soon, Jess, but there are going to be decisions to make. I’m here to help if you want me to, but let the Morozovs in, will you? Being Russian, there may be customs—things they do that we don’t, or that we do and they don’t. Anyway, they’re taking this very hard. Just try and remember, if you can, that they’ve lost her too.”

  Jess watched her until she reached the door. He sighed, turning away. His knees felt weak, and he was lightheaded.

  4

  JESS OBEDIENTLY DID as Rose Marie said. He brought the Morozovs into the funeral plans. The truth was that he handed them over completely. There was to be no embalming. According to their custom, Gracie’s own mother would wash and dress her body, and Ivan and Jess would fashion from wood—pine, or perhaps cedar—the casket in which she would be laid. She would then be taken to the church, where a psalter vigil would be kept until the next morning, when Father Antony would perform the funeral service. Jess felt sure the arrangements were just as Gracie would have wished. Nothing that was proposed surprised him. There was even some relief in it. He could not have borne to send Gracie off from a funeral parlor like the one that had buried his folks, anyway—could not have stood again, even for an hour, another pale, hunched mortician with a moist handshake and a familiar way of speaking of someone else’s dead. Nor did he believe his warm-hearted wife would have rested easily in a cold, metal coffin.

  As the hours passed and the time for Gracie’s burial approached, Jess found that the thing which gripped him was no ordinary sadness. That grief he was familiar with. It held a seed of hope, for it came marked by a season. The mourning period. You endured for a time, and then you brought your grieving to an end, much to the relief of others. Jess sensed that this was something else. This was a sorrow without season, without end. One to abide with. Perhaps forever.

  Three days later, Gracie rested in the triple-domed shadow of Holy Transfiguration Church, her grave marked in the Russian way, by a white three-bar cross. Along the road to the churchyard cemetery, the goldenrod was in glorious blaze, and Jess could hardly bear to see it. Gracie had so loved to walk along the gold-topped fencerows in autumn. And he had always thought she mingled so naturally with that wildflower, moving in her gentle way among the slender waving stalks.

  It was a well-attended funeral. And a lovely memorial, more than one person who was there later told Jess. A beautiful, ancient rite. Prayers that made it seem as if Gracie spoke on behalf of her own soul. Very moving, they said. But Jess had little memory of it. He would at odd moments smell faintly the odors of myrrh and frankincense, hear snatches of something that had been chanted in English—all things are vanity, and life is but a shadow … in the sweetness of Thy beauty, O Christ, give rest to her whom Thou hast chosen—and he would see Darya bending her face to Gracie’s for a last kiss. But even then—despite the proper smells, the appointed prayers, the scenes that all told him the funeral had taken place in reality—his memory would have a vagueness to it, as if he had stumbled into another man’s dream.

  He did recall vividly a church packed with friends and loved ones, many of them faces he hadn’t seen since his and Gracie’s wedding. Rose Marie was there of course, and Mike, with Pop and Rita. The Buscos had come, all four. And Gracie’s nuns, in robes the color of mourning. Even Pat Badger was there in the church, with Peggy. And once they were graveside, Jess remembered, Pat had laid an arm across Jess’s back. They’d stayed that way during the entire, mercifully brief burial service, Pat squeezing his shoulder in a painful grip. And when Father Antony had nodded to David and Lester, who had helped carry the coffin and had then stood by to fill the grave, Jess had listened dry-eyed for the all-too-familiar sound, steeling his heart as the first shovelful of earth rained down. With each awful thud, Darya sobbed.

  That evening, when all the people had gone, and Jess could be alone with his sorrow, he went back to the cemetery. He walked slowly down the hill, winding through the forest of crosses, his stomach twisted into a knot of dread. And then, just below the second rise, he saw it. The grave mound. As he drew near, he could smell the fresh, raw earth and the perfume of the funeral flowers—fragile hothouse stems set into blocks of hard green foam, arranged over the grave in groups to hide the dirt. They were meant to soothe, he knew, to soften a harsh truth, but they did not manage it. The truth was bitterer for the pretense. He moved a little closer then and saw lying on a bare patch near the foot of the grave a sturdy spray of goldenrod. And for the first time since Gracie’s death, he remembered Tsura. She had often brought to Gracie wildflowers picked on her wanderings. He had to acknowledge, if vaguely, his heart too heavy with grief to bear the added weight of guilt, that it must have been Tsura who had brought the goldenrod, forced because of him to steal to Gracie’s grave in secret.

  Gracie’s folks came out of the house when Jess got home, to watch him come down the lane. They stood very close, Darya leaning into Ivan. Seen from a distance, the pair made a single forlorn figure. Jess swung left at the split and pulled the truck below the barn. He had no wish to mingle his pain with theirs. There was no denying the help they had been since that terrible night. He couldn’t ha
ve done it without them. But it was a damned uncomfortable arrangement, to say the least.

  5

  IN THE WEE HOURS, Jess heard the scream of a barn owl. He rose from his chair and went to the open window, pulling back the curtain to peer out into the darkness. The night had been warm, but the air was cool now that dawn approached. A breeze blew in, lifting his hair and the fabric of his shirt. He gazed into the bassinet at his feet, at the swaddled baby. Darya had bound her in a cocoon of blankets, tighter than a Chinese foot. He looked out the window again, watched as the owl flew in on silent wings and landed on the near edge of the barn roof. There was a pale full moon, casting enough light that Jess could see a small animal pinned in the owl’s talons. A vole, most likely, snatched up from the corral floor where rodents often gleaned the manure piles for kernels of undigested grain. The vole struggled mightily in the bird’s grasp. The owl bent its head to the animal, then gazed away, as if contemplating mercy. Jess had traveled little, other than vicariously in books. Still, if there existed on earth an eerier creature than the common barn owl, all ghost-faced and hollow-eyed, he would need to see it for proof. He had seen birds of prey with their bounty enough times to know there would be no reprieve for the vole. He dropped the curtain and went back to his chair.