Lights on the Mountain

  “What’ya say we take a break?” Ace said. “I need a smoke.”

  “You just smoked two of those things less than an hour ago,” Jess said irritably, and moved to the other side of the pallet. “What do you say you give your lungs a rest, and help me finish moving this seed?”

  “’Cuz you’re makin’ it look like a one-man job, that’s why.”

  Ace ambled over to the open door and seated himself on a low stack of salt blocks. He leaned back against the wall, pulled a cigarette from his pocket, and tapped it against his palm. As he put it to his lips, he was deliberately nonchalant, lit it slowly, drew hard, and exhaled a thin stream of smoke, regarding Jess with a sly expression. He left the cigarette dangling from his lip and stretched his legs out straight. He waggled his feet.

  “Jess,” he said, examining his legs, “did you ever hear of a phantom limb?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, I know a guy, wasn’t three days in Vietnam when he got his leg blown off stepping on a land mine. Came home draggin’ a stump, swore he still had feeling in it. Said he was all the time gettin’ a sharp, stabbing pain in his foot. He claimed he could wiggle his toes. You believe that?”

  “I don’t know of a reason why I shouldn’t.”

  “Well, I say he’s full of horseshit. Ain’t no way a fellow’s gonna feel something in a foot that ain’t there. Just ain’t no way.” He looked over at Jess, head cocked at a skeptical angle. “What do you think, that all them teeny-tiny pieces he left back there in the jungle are feeling him at the same time?”

  “I don’t know,” Jess said. “Maybe they are.”

  “Naw. They ain’t. And he ain’t wiggling his toes, neither. I’d bet this pack of Marlboros on it.”

  “You’d be wasting your wager on me,” Jess said. “I don’t gamble. And I don’t smoke.”

  “No kiddin’? I never would have took you for a holy roller.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Say, Jess. Harlan just told me this morning about your wife. I’m real sorry to hear it.”

  “Thanks,” Jess said shortly. There had been no sincerity in the man’s tone. He wasn’t about to waste any replying.

  “I never had the pleasure to meet her,” Ace added, looking slighted. He was silent for a moment, examining his cigarette. Then he said, “Was she pretty?”

  Jess grabbed an end-roll of chicken wire and threw it over in the corner, out of the way.

  “Yep.”

  “Pretty as that little Italian woman I see you talking to all the time over at the deli?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember ever comparing my wife to Rose Marie Patterson.”

  Ace paused in his smoking to try out the name. “Rose Marie.”

  He scraped the palms of his hands with his fingernails, then scratched them hard, as if he had got a sudden itch, and stared out the door.

  Jess threw the last bag of seed to the top of the stack and moved over a few feet, to a pallet of oats.

  Ace took another drag from his cigarette.

  “From what I can tell, Jess,” he said, opening his mouth wide to show his tongue, flicking it in a lewd way as he exhaled, “you and that Rose Marie seem like good friends.”

  Jess felt suddenly queasy.

  Ace grinned, an obscene splitting of his lower face. He threw the butt of his cigarette down and crushed it with the heel of his boot, stepped in so close Jess caught the faint, foul smell of a tooth going bad, felt the hot humid rush of the man’s breath in his ear, the ugly hiss of Ace’s suggestion, whispered so low Jess could barely hear it.

  He sat in his big easy chair that evening, nursing his right hand with an ice pack. His fist hadn’t hurt when it was balling up to crack Ace’s jaw. It ached like the dickens now, but he couldn’t feel a thing then. Or hear anything, either, for that matter. He was so far gone by the time he’d hit the man, Harlan had to tell him three times it was over. Ace Vanzandt was out cold. Go home.

  “I said go home, Jesse.”

  The light from the lamp drew a circle around Nellie, lying on the floor at his feet. His Journals lay unread across his knees. Out in the kitchen, Darya had the baby in the sink. She was singing a soft, lilting song as she washed, splashing water in a steady rhythm. Every so often the singing stopped. Then, after a second or two of silence, it would begin again. Jess did not need to see to know that the bathwater would be mingled with tears. He set down the Journals, gingerly, careful of his hand, and taking the ice pack with him, went out to stand on the porch. The air was colder than it had been in a while. Wherever Tsura was tonight, he hoped she was keeping warm.

  He turned toward the east and saw the glow of firelight in the lower field. The travelers had arrived. Suddenly the blank, black space in his memory cleared, a leering face loomed, and he remembered something Ace had said earlier in the day, before Jess had set his jaw sideways.

  “You know, everybody’s sayin’ them travelin’ girls are the friendly type. I’m thinking to ease out that way tonight and see if I can’t make myself acquainted.”

  All his intention to leave Tsura to her forest hermitage flew away in that instant. He threw down the ice pack and thrust his hand into his pocket, ignoring the pain. Truck keys in hand, he stepped off the porch. Ace Vanzandt was the sort of man you could knock into kingdom come and within the hour he’d have found his way back to trouble. Wrong or right, Jess was going to find Tsura.

  13

  HE DROVE THREE MILES down the road, parked on the shoulder, and began his search in the woods that stood on his side of the property line between the farm and what was now monastery land, the Hays’s old place. These woods stood in sassafras, oak, hickory, and the massive old sycamores that guarded Muddy Creek. The woods were bosky here, and he set a slow pace, combing ground dense with vine cover, watching closely for signs of recent change: raw ends of freshly broken twigs, newly turned leaves or, if he was very lucky, footprints pressed into the soft soil.

  Jess knew a little about tracking. His father had often taken him on long searches like this one through the woods when he was a youngster, following the trail of local deer herds and the men that hunted them. Clyde had no Indian blood—a great-grandmother on their mother’s side had first owned Walter’s black walnut eyes and Jess’s hair. But despite this lack, a primitive instinct seemed somehow to rise in Clyde whenever he entered the woods. Jess had always thrilled to the sight of his father’s long nostrils flaring to catch a scent on the breeze or his flinty gaze narrowing as he spotted a set of twin depressions near the base of a tree that meant a man had cooled his heels there.

  Jess stopped suddenly in his tracking and listened, his ear sifting through the forest noise. He had thought he detected a human sound. A rustle of clothing. He stood motionless. After a minute, though, he decided there was nothing out of the ordinary to hear. With his gaze, he sectioned off another square section, keeping it to about twenty-five feet, as his father had taught him to do, and began to scan the ground again in the pieced, patchy light still slanting through the tree canopy.

  Clyde hated a trespasser. Especially a sport-hunting trespasser. There was little that could raise his ire like having men on his land with guns and no prior permission. He didn’t always catch them. Jess recalled vividly sitting up in the darkness as a child, having been awakened by the crack of his father’s old double-barreled shotgun firing into the air. More than once he had crept out of bed and peered down from the window in the upstairs hall to see his father, clad only in his underwear, standing in the light of the porch and shouting into the darkness at some poor city hunter who’d missed the sign out on the road.

  The light was fading fast. It was full dark already in the trees. Jess had seen no sign of Tsura or her camp, which did not surprise him much. Darya’s directions were the sort given by people who could send you to a specific Kosher meat shop on Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, not the kind you needed to find a girl in these hills who was of the forest, and not only living in it. Reluctantly, he de
cided to go back to his truck and drive down to the sled path that ran alongside his own east field. He could park there and walk across the field to the place where he had seen the light of the campfire beginning to burn bright. Before it got too late, he should have a talk with the travelers.

  Ace Vanzandt drove slow around a curve, rubbing his jaw. There was something off, he had decided, with Jess Hazel. Way off. Having his wife die the way she did, so sudden and all, must’ve rattled a screw loose in his head. Flat out, hell-damned crazy, that’s what the man was. Had them long arms too. Like a baboon. You had to watch those stringy, quiet types. Ace knew that. He’d just got plumb careless and forgot.

  There was a little something that would soothe, though, if he could just find it. He drove around another curve, searching for firelight, the shadows of people moving about a field, anything besides the lonesome piece of road he could see by a single beam of headlight. The other one was out. Something was always out on this car because the boss had sold him a lemon. A big, black, gas-eating Buick lemon. Which was just like Harlan Christie. And Ace had got duped by the guys at the bar too. There was nothing going on out here. Nothing at all.

  “Wait, now,” he said suddenly, slowing the car to a crawl. “Look there, Ace. At the edge of them woods.” That was something.

  He leaned across the seat and rolled the passenger-side window down, peering out into the darkness. There it was again.

  A white flash of skirt.

  He could see her now, had a full view of her silhouette. Damn. She was a girl, all right. His hands tingled, a familiar sensation.

  “That, my friend,” he said, talking to himself in a sing-song voice, “ain’t nothin.” He scraped his fingernails down his palms, scratching the itch.

  He switched off the headlights, crept along in the dark to where the woods began, pulled over, and parked. He slid silently out of the car and swung the door closed, careful not to let it make a sound as it latched. Anticipation spread warm through his core as he moved in her direction. He sucked air through his teeth, quickening his pace. It was lucky there was no fence to have to go slithering under on his belly, slowing him down and grinding dirt into his best pair of blue jeans. The field was wide, plowed in dark furrows. He shivered, didn’t care for the eerie feeling it gave him, stretched out there in the darkness. Didn’t care for it at all. It made him think too much of being a child, left to sit alone on the beach at night while his mother went off to play in the grass with a man. “Be a good boy, now,” she’d say, “no following,” with that high girly giggle that was so not like her real laugh. Not her deep, sweet chuckle.

  He never followed, either. No matter how scared he got. The dark water breathing in and out like something alive. The tide rising, pulling at his feet, eating away at the sand.

  “Well, no more,” he murmured softly. “Ace is not a good boy now, Mama. Not a good boy at all.”

  He broke into a kind of squatting trot, bending his knees and keeping low as he ran along the uncut edge of the field. No need to startle her. Not that he minded a good chase, but she was tall and had legs like a deer. Might be too swift to catch. Anyway, he’d almost reached her. She was close enough now to touch.

  Man. This was a gift, that’s what it was. A pure, sweet, beautiful gift left out here under the stars for wicked, bad old Ace Vanzandt to unwrap. And all alone too. No one coming from behind, out of the field. No one going into the woods with her.

  Only him.

  14

  TSURA WAS WALKING as the crow would fly, from woods to field to woods again. She had gone about four miles when she reached the stand of trees that marked the eastern edge of Hazel Valley. The buzzing had grown louder but more concentrated, as if the wasps had found a place to swarm. She had spent the day digging root plants along the banks of Muddy Creek, and although she now had a good offering of sassafras, burdock, and dandelion in her bag to take as a gift to Darya, she thought that she should not have lingered so long. Night had fallen quick and dense, the way it did in autumn, and she was forced to sweep the horizon with her gaze to see what obstacles might lie in her path in the darkness. It was cold. Colder than it had been on previous nights. She blew on her hands, rubbing them together. The bedroll was still in the cave, or she might have stopped to wrap herself in it before pressing on. As she neared the old sled path that led to the apple orchard, she saw that there was firelight in Jess’s east field. She drew nearer still and saw a truck parked in the sled path, and heading westward from it, the long lean figure of a man, making his way across the field toward the fire. Her heart caught. Eli had walked that way, shoulders bowed, head down, as if he had lost something important and would spend the rest of his life looking for it.

  The buzzing had grown very loud, but her spirit was quiet now, detached from the din. No image flashed, no instruction came. Not in the old way. But still she saw. The knowledge was bittersweet, but she saw now why, despite the call of the monastery, she had chosen this direction to come.

  Back at home, the house asleep and quiet, Jess sat in the lamplight again, his Journals open on his knees, gazing at a single line on the page. For a long time, he had been staring at the words without seeing them, but now this one sentence stood out, bold and clear.

  And we proceeded on.

  He smiled a little, with Tsura asleep upstairs in her old room, to think how foolish he had been, believing he was going to save her. There she was, coming alongside him out of nowhere in the dark. Walking in silence with him to the spot where the travelers were camped, then back again to the truck, and home, as if there had never been any trouble between them. All was forgiven. Of her own will, she had come home. And now the Hazel family, what was left of it, would proceed on.

  The travelers had invited them to sit awhile by the fire, and Jess had surprised himself, and probably Tsura, by saying, “All right.” A pipe was being passed around, and a boy with long lank hair and a many-colored coat like Joseph’s offered it to Jess. “Peace pipe,” the boy said, as if he needed explain. Not wishing to be unpeaceful, Jess took it. The smoke rising from the bowl was like that of the wild grapevine he and Walter used to smoke in the woods as boys. Jess had never much liked inhaling it, not as Walter did. Nor had he been very good at it. He set the pipe briefly between his teeth, then passed it on. Once it had gone around the circle a few times and the smell of woodsmoke was mixed with the acrid odor of the stuff in the pipe, the travelers began to talk of the gathering they had been to and of the wondrous things that had taken place. They talked of possibilities, of progress, of a dream that was growing into reality. Spoke of an Earth restored, someday, to such beauty by their efforts, it would come to take the place of heaven in the minds of the enlightened. Mostly though, they talked of themselves. Over and over, though they were none of them anywhere near so young as Tsura, the travelers referred to themselves as children. Jess did not mock, but watching Tsura there at the fire, old and wise as the mountain of her birth and yet younger than any of them, he felt they could not have found a word more fitting.

  When Tsura and Jess had taken their leave of the group and had got into the truck together, Jess turned to her, acutely aware that he would be speaking the first words he had said to her since the night of Gracie’s death. He poured all the depth of his feeling into small, plain words.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yah. Fine.”

  “I’m so glad,” Jess said, his throat tight with emotion. He waited then to see if she would say more. There was so much in his heart, but it was Tsura who had found him, not the other way around. Sensing that she knew all anyway, he waited, silent and hopeful. Reconciliation, if there was to be any, was in her hands. Her next words stunned him. She spoke as if nothing had passed between them at all.

  “Yah. I was just thinking that them people back there talk the same as nuns. Peace. Love. Brother. Sister. But this is different,” she tapped her chest.

  “This?”

  “The light.”

  Jes
s looked at her, still more surprised. The truck cab was dark, but it seemed as if he were staring into the face in the icon all over again, feeling the same sweet fear. Those eyes. They saw so much.

  “Do you often see light in people?” he asked. “I mean, other than nuns?”

  She turned to look at him. “Yah. Sure. You got it,” she said simply. “Not like the nuns, though. I guess they got them prayers. Yours is small. Flickery. Like a lit match.”

  “Well,” Jess said, at a loss, and they drove the rest of the way up the hill to the house in silence.

  When Jess got to work the next day, Harlan came out of the office.

  “Ace won’t be coming in,” he said. “Not for a good while. Several weeks, at least. And don’t think it’s because you made his left ear sit crooked. If that was it, I’d be docking your pay.”

  “Is he sick?” Jess asked, working hard at not looking pleased.

  “Not exactly. It’s kind of a crazy thing, to tell you the truth. He evidently stumbled into the hospital at Ellwood City last night yelling at the top of his lungs about how he’d all of a sudden gone blind, had to get some good samaritan to get him to the Emergency. I guess he wasn’t lying, either. The nurse who called said his corneas had a sort of whitish-blue film over them. He really couldn’t see a thing. It’ll take a specialist, I guess, to know for sure, but the doctor there thinks it may be temporary. Anyway, the nurse said he was raving when he came in, had some crazy, wild story to tell about what happened, but not a bit of what he said made any sense.”

  That sounded to Jess like Ace Vanzandt.

  “What did he say happened?