Lights on the Mountain

  There was a line already in front of the delivery door, two wagons and two pickup trucks. Jess would have to wait his turn to unload. The Amish team horses fidgeted nervously in their harnesses while the drivers carried on a conversation in their brand of German. Even with the rumble of the idling truck engines, Jess could hear their companionable tone. When his turn came, he set his milk cans out, lining them up on the loading dock. Just as he finished, Jakob Miller, the factory foreman, came out to the truck in his apron. He didn’t bother with small greetings, didn’t mention the morning fog, didn’t bring up the unusually warm autumn weather. He laid his hand on the bedrail of the truck, staring off toward the road.

  “You want your payment now, Jesse?” he said.

  Jess tried to remember a single moment in all the years he’d been selling milk to the cheese factory when Jakob Miller had looked him in the eye. There wasn’t one that he could bring to mind.

  “No need to pay me now,” he said. “You can just mail it to the house. Same as always.”

  “I have some news, Jesse,” Jakob said. “Not such good news.”

  Jess laughed. “What could be so bad, Jakob? I’m already selling you Grade A milk for a Β price. You’ve got something worse than that?”

  Jakob’s forehead knotted under the brim of his hat. He looked down, as if examining the leather toes of his boots. “Yah. I do,” he said soberly. “You know since they quit hauling milk out of Portersville, there’s been too much coming in here, with all the little farms needing somewhere to go with it. Now I gotta cut back. Hazel milk is clean, and you been selling here a long time, so I’m only cutting you to two days. The others is gonna get one.”

  Jakob was right. This was bad news. But Jess had known worse. And thanks to his change-wary Hazel blood, he had been checking the winds of progress for a long time. That they blew ill now came as no real surprise. Still, he thought he might bargain. But before he could open his mouth to speak, he saw in Jakob’s face that there would be no friendly negotiation. In Jakob Miller’s tight, close world, Jess was a fellow human—but of another species. Mostly, he was not Amish.

  Within minutes of leaving the factory, Jess had also left behind the spare Amish countryside—stark whitewashed houses with single-curtained windows set alongside neat, spreading fields—and was back in Butler County, where the farms were hidden away behind the trees and hills and had to be stumbled on like duck’s nests. He found himself pondering the laws of human kinship. They were laws nowhere recorded, as far as Jess knew, but binding just the same. A brother by blood might be always a stranger. And though you shared no family ties, a friend like Pat Badger could become your next of kin, someone you could trust with your life. But there would always be those, like Jakob, who were destined, were decreed, to remain a mere acquaintance.

  10

  DAVID SLEPT FITFULLY, his eyelids twitching. Tsura turned away and gazed out the hospital window. She wondered if the other buildings she could see along the street were as cold inside as this one. A steady, frigid wind blew from a slotted opening in the ceiling. The unnatural temperature made her uneasy when it was so warm outside. She moved her chair a little closer to the bed, so as not to feel the blast directly. At the sound of her rustling, David opened his eyes. They were glazed and dark with pain. They fixed themselves to hers.

  “Tsura.”

  “Yah,” she said. “I’m here.”

  “We didn’t make it to the gorge.”

  “Yah. We didn’t make it to the gorge.”

  “What happened?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Nope.”

  “Nothing?”

  “I remember we were going to the mill. And I remember the possum. After that, it all goes black.”

  “Yah. When you swerved for the possum, we got off the road pretty bad. Over the cliff and into a tree. Good strong tree, though. It stopped us falling all the way down.”

  “Good tree,” David agreed. “You weren’t hurt?”

  “Not a little bit.”

  “Good tree,” David said again, and closed his eyes.

  The doctor had put something into his arm with a needle to help with the pain. It seemed also to make him sleep. Tsura was glad. The longer he slept, the longer it would be until he learned that the bones in his legs were broken in such a way that he might never walk again, and if he did, it would not be with ease. Although there was nothing more she wanted to see from it, she turned back to the window and gazed out. There was a smell of death in this place, underneath all the other odors. David was alive, at least. And he would not go to war.

  Tsura could not help thinking of Eli then, passing alone on a hilltop into that world he had spent so many morbid hours fearing. Why he was so haunted she would never know. But she was glad he was free of the curse. How she longed sometimes, though, to see his gray eyes clear and shining as he showed her some new trick he had taught Bell to do, or to hear him say roughly, “Girl, your pies is getting better. Though you still do not bake so good as my mother.” Eli had really missed his family. So much so that when he was in a spell he would call her Ruth, his favorite sister’s name. He talked little about it, but she did know that he had not gone away on his own. He had been sent.

  “Amish law,” Eli said. “A man must submit, must bend his will, or be put out.” She knew, though, that he could not repent the things he did that his people found so upsetting, could not dam the thoughts and plans that rushed into his head unbidden at times and left him so disordered. Amish life was order. Without repentance, Eli had said, when she protested, there could be no forgiveness. No possibility of a reunion. This was also the Amish way. Tsura was secretly glad she had not been born Amish and so was unbound to keep their laws. In their stead, she had been pleased to grant Eli a full pardon.

  He did not say it, but Tsura understood that his people had put him out only because they had not known what else to do. And it was being sent away from their own that had brought Eli and her mother together. A husbandless gypsy girl, heavy with child, sheltered on a rain-soaked night in the house of a mad Amish man. “A pair of mountain castaways,” Pat Badger always called them, when telling Tsura the story of her birth. “A most peculiar alliance.”

  The door to David’s hospital room suddenly swung open, and a nurse entered, bringing with her a smell of rubbing alcohol and cigarette smoke.

  “I need to check vitals,” she said briskly, taking David’s wrist in her hand. He stirred but did not open his eyes. While the nurse stared at her watch, she took deep breaths and let them out slowly, like a sigh. She had a permanently weary look. The deep creases at the corners of her mouth turned down, and there were dark half-moon shadows under her eyes. Her fingernails were yellow. She wrote something on the chart at the end of the bed. She lifted the bag of fluid hanging on the metal rack, examined it, and wrote on her chart again. When she was done, she looked over at Tsura.

  “You must be family,” she said with a quick, sly wink. Tsura understood the woman was saying one thing and meaning something else. What it was she did mean Tsura did not know, and did not wish explained. She looked at the floor and kept silent.

  A few minutes after the nurse had gone, Lester arrived with Margit Busco. “My Got, he’s unconscious,” Margit said, shuffling over as quickly as her old stiff hips would let her to David’s side.

  “You heard the nurse, Anya,” Lester said. “They’ve sedated him. It’s not so bad as it looks, I’m sure.”

  “Two smashed kneecaps? A snapped femur? A crushed pelvis? How you can say it’s not so bad? I don’t like that nurse, Lester. Her uniform is dirty, and she smokes. I smell it. You gonna go ask the doctor to get some better nurse for our Davit.”

  “One old chimney sniffs out another,” Lester grinned, shaking his head. Margit Busco didn’t smile. She looked frightened. Lester put his arm around his tiny grandmother. He stroked her back, rubbing the hump where her spine bowed out. “Anya,” he said gently. “She’s done a good job. Look a
t him. He thinks he’s passed out under that big sycamore, down by the creek. Anyway, if I asked for a better nurse, they’d send a worse one. I promise.”

  Margit still clutched Lester’s arm, but she seemed soothed.

  Tsura listened. Her heart ached to hear their familial talk. She felt keenly alone. Quietly, without being seen, she rose and left the room.

  Jess stood at the kitchen window, watching the headlights pass as Margit and Lester left again for the hospital. There was just no way, he’d decided, to be ready for what life would bring. You could tune to the rhythm of the seasons, live by the almanac, plant and harvest crops with the blessing of the moon. You could make plans and figure on the outcome, increasing your stock by methods handed across generations. All with an optimism born of experience. But for all your careful plotting toward every eventuality, all your scanning the horizon and keeping your hand to the plow, there would come an instant when the planet would jerk to a sudden halt. Nothing you could do but stand still and wait.

  Gracie had thought hardship was allowed by God as a kind of training for the soul. Suffering was not only a natural part of life, a thing to be endured until it passed, as animals do. It could transform. You could emerge from its darkness with more light than you had. Be better than you were. Become a saint. It was this belief of hers that used to secretly comfort Jess, because it allowed him to yield his anxiousness to her certainty. “It will be all right,” she would say in a tone that caused Jess to believe that it would. Even when he knew for sure that it couldn’t. He could hear her saying it now, for incredibly—though the reality of Gracie was fading, and some days he worked hard to recall the scent of her hair or the warm, gold glow of her eyes—his impression of her was strong, her voice in his head as calm and reassuring as it had ever been, perhaps more.

  He was surprised to find himself considering that she may have had it right about suffering. He had never wanted to believe it could have meaning, but what if it did? What if it could transform darkness into light? One thing was sure, it was the lot of humans to suffer. And his father’s way, the way of stark reality—“This is all there is, son. Look for more and you’ll miss it”—had left the wrong taste in his mouth. There was no sweetness in it. It was salt when he craved honey. It had served him all right, for a time, had perhaps even kept him alive, but it wasn’t enough now. He needed more.

  The percolator sputtered and fell quiet. Jess went to the cupboard and took down a cup. Looking across the way, he saw a soft, unsteady glow at the Busco house, a flickering he guessed to be candlelight. Margit’s sister-in-law, Nora, would be praying. On the wall of the Busco kitchen, he knew, there hung a flowery-bordered picture of a swarthy, Hungarian Jesus holding his own heart, red and glowing, in the palm of his hand. As a boy, Jess had found the image disturbing. Irresistibly so. He had in fact worked awfully hard to peel his gaze away from it. He could not fathom what sort of comfort such an image might have to offer. After a time, though, he learned that the picture was sacred to the family, brought from the old country by Margit’s father, and that in difficult hours a candle would be lit in front of it to burn day and night for as long as the trouble lasted, much as oil lamps now burned before the faces of saints in almost every room of Jess’s own home. He had sometimes thought Gracie too fervent in her religion, all the repenting and rejoicing, so many feasts and fasts. Her piety was mild next to Darya’s.

  Nellie whined at the back door, and Jess left the window to go over and let her in. She breezed past him, trolled along the baseboards for remnants of last night’s meal, found a good-sized chunk of bread that would never have been there in Gracie’s day, and then lay down with it cradled between her paws, her tail thumping a victory tune against the floor. He looked again at the flickering light across the way and thought of the Busco women and all the times over their many years they would have had need to light that candle, thought of all the times he might have lit one too, had he been the candle-lighting kind. He found himself going into the living room, then, and standing before the icons.

  The lampada was cold and dark. Darya had been busy with the baby, had just gone back to bed after the four-o’clock feeding. Jess didn’t attempt to light it. Instead, he rummaged in the drawer and found a taper and a match. He set the taper in the little brass candle-stand and lit it. When the wick had caught, and the flame was burning bright, he stood for a long moment, gazing into the eyes of Christ. His heart was full. Wordlessly, he poured out his ache for Gracie, confessed that he could not hold their child in his arms for fear that if he loved her, she too would be taken away. Released, as well, his burden over Tsura, his need to find her and ask her to come home. Finally, he requested a measure of mercy for David. Was any of this prayer? Jess didn’t know. He hoped it was.

  11

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON Jess stopped by Rose Marie’s house to return a dish, one of many he had been bringing back since the days of the funeral. Food was love to Rose Marie. Of course, her big warm family was still whole. She did not understand yet, and Jess hoped she would have no need to, not for a long time, how loss filled your whole being, even your belly. Jess himself had grown very lean, almost skeletal, as if because he and Gracie were one flesh his had naturally gone with her to the grave. In fact, the only person at the farm with any appetite at all right now was an infant. Rose Marie did not know it, but her lasagnas had more than once been slipped next door for the Busco boys to consume.

  Rose Marie looked tired. Aside from missing Gracie, Jess knew she had worries of her own. Her husband’s chronic unfaithfulness had at last been presented to her in such a way that she couldn’t overlook it. Skip had fallen in love.

  Jess did not stay long. But over a quick cup of coffee in her quiet kitchen (it being a school day), he mentioned that he was looking for Tsura, that he had thought to traipse the woods along Muddy Creek that afternoon before evening chores to see if he could find her.

  “You make it sound as if she’s lost,” Rose Marie said with a wan, dry smile when he had finished. “From just the little I know of Tsura, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out she’s staying away for reasons of her own.” She smiled, gave Jess a gentler, more sympathetic look. “She’s an odd one, that girl. Have you considered that this may have nothing to do with you?”

  Jess had, in fact, not considered it. And it gave him a great deal to think about on the drive home. Not once in all his fretting had it crossed his mind to wonder if Tsura might have a reason other than his ill-treatment of her for retreating, the way she had, to the woods. “It happens, you know,” Rose Marie had finished flatly, “that we sometimes overestimate our own importance.” And though Jess suspected she was talking to herself as much as to him, he had to consider that where he was concerned, she had touched on a truth.

  Considering the matter, it seemed to Jess that he was being humbled on purpose, as if having stood for a few brief moments before the icon of Christ, he was now somehow standing within it, viewing himself through those all-seeing eyes. And from this view it was pretty clear that he had acquired more than just his father’s so-called natural way of taking his place the world. He had also acquired his stiff-neckedness. “There’s a way seems right to man,” he remembered Orville Hays saying, “and oft times it isn’t.” Jess wondered then if this was to be the response to his prayer. (If indeed such silent groaning was prayer.) God, after all these years, speaking to him in voices he could recognize. Or (and this was a sorrowful thought, weighted with regret) it could be that God had been speaking all along, and Jess only could not hear because he was not with any real amount of honesty listening. To be sure, there had been a great deal of motioning toward it, of cupping his hand to his ear and craning his neck heavenward. But he had begun to suspect himself now, and pretty strongly, of also plugging the sound hole with his thumb. For as Millie used to say, once you knew, you had to do.

  Tsura woke to the ringing of the monastery bells. She rose and gathered together her small belongings, putting into the cotton drawst
ring bag—along with the two hardboiled eggs and rye and onion sandwich it still held—a box of matches and the toiletry set Gracie had given her and taught her to use. She folded her bedroll into a neat bundle, setting it on the limestone ledge where she had slept. Outside she went to the place in the rocky, moss-coated hillside where water trickled out in a thin, cold stream from some high hidden source. She cupped her hands and drank deeply, then cleaned her teeth and washed her face and ran a comb over her curls.

  She was disturbed in her spirit. To the east, she felt the firm, gentle pull of the monastery. From the west came an unsettling hum, like the gathering of wasps, about which she had received no knowledge or instruction, but which seemed to be drawing her just the same. For the first time in her life she was unsure which direction to take. After a moment, she had decided. She would go west.

  12

  THE FELLOW HARLAN had hired for warehouse help had a low, snide way. Working with him, Jess wanted all the time to feel his back pocket and make sure his wallet was still there. Ace was one of those types, too, who had a way of being busy when the boss was around, always lazing when he wasn’t, forever jagging around or asking fresh, forward questions that bent your nerves and left you feeling jittery. Just all around the sort of man you couldn’t trust or like. Jess was not pleased, his first day back at the feed store, to be stuck in the warehouse with him. But there were no deliveries to make, and since Harlan was the boss, he had no choice. At the moment, Ace was on Jess’s side of the pallet of grass seed they were supposed be unloading, crowding him into the wall.