Lights on the Mountain

  Harlan laughed.

  “Well, now, there’s the crazy part. He claimed all he did was grab a pretty girl by the waist.”

  15

  CHRISTMAS CAME and went unremarked. It was only when he saw the wreaths still up on Main Street in Rose Point after New Year’s, and he thought of the one Gracie had always made for Becky’s stall door, that Jess realized he had missed it. Russian Christmas on the seventh of January was less festive than usual too, though not at all forgotten. Ivan and Darya left the baby with Tsura and went to the midnight Nativity Vigil at the Russian Orthodox church in New Castle. The drive was worth it, Ivan said, because Father Antony tended to pray more in English than Darya cared to hear on Christmas night, when she was always homesick. Jess milked alone next morning because Ivan slept in. After a breakfast prepared so late in the day it was almost dinner, the old man dozed again in Jess’s chair while Darya crept upstairs with small furtive gifts for Tsura and a garish, grinning stuffed monkey to put in the baby’s crib.

  Jess was blue for days.

  Later in the month, toward the end, it snowed eleven inches. A clean, thick white blanket of down that in the night quietly settled itself over the old snow, grown dingy and tired. Jess rose to a world refreshed. Seeing the farm looking so brightened, so hopeful, he felt a flicker of hope in his own chest, a spark of the wonder he’d felt on such a morning as a child. Even the cows seemed cheered, almost charmed. They still stood knee deep in it when he and Ivan reached the milking shed, the entire herd so quiet and content, though their bags were full and dragging the snow, that Jess finally had to ask the boss cow to bring them in. He went about his work with a lighter step, his back straighter and his shoulders lifted, like a horse whose load has been ever so slightly lessened. Only when he left the barn and went up the hill to the house did his mood fall. Sitting down to breakfast, Jess saw that Tsura’s chair at the table was empty. Not to worry, Darya said, Tsura would be back before lunch. But when Jess asked where it was she had gone, Darya suddenly forgot her English. She lapsed into Russian, trying to explain. Suspecting strongly that he was being deceived anyway, Jess did not stay to listen. He laid his napkin next to his plate and rose from his chair, no longer hungry.

  On Groundhog Day, Rose Marie called Jess at the feed store to ask if he would come by her house when he got off work. And hearing a worrisome dullness in her voice, Jess quickly agreed.

  “Skip got his divorce,” she said flatly before hanging up. “I got served this morning at 9:05. It’s not even noon yet, and he’s already moved out. Gone. Like he never lived here. Like I had all these kids on my own.”

  “Lord, Rose Marie,” Jess said quietly. “What will you do?”

  “I’m going to sell this place and move in with the folks,” she said. “And I need your help.”

  “Sure. Of course. What sort of help?”

  “Your shoulder, mostly. And a ladder, so I can cry on it.”

  Jess was not all that surprised at Rose Marie’s news, more so to hear the shock she’d received in her voice. It must be one thing, he decided, while driving over to her house after work, for a woman to know she has never been precious to her husband, that though they’ve been married twelve years, there was never a time when he held her love in awe or found her trust in him sacred enough not to break. Another thing altogether to have the proof of his lack served up to her on a plate in writing.

  “Are you sure about this?” Jess said, looking around Rose Marie’s rambling old four-bedroom house, once he was there. “There can’t be more than nine hundred square feet of living space in your folks’ apartment. You’ll be stacked in like cordwood.”

  “Don’t forget I grew up in that apartment,” she said. “We managed it all right. And I don’t see how I have a choice,” she said, flatly giving a shrug. “Skip has turned out to be quite a bit more than a cheat. He’s a con artist. I don’t know what he had to pay that fancy Pittsburgh lawyer, but whatever it was, the man made it well worth his while. The pittance I’ll be getting each month isn’t enough to feed a canary, much less five children.”

  Jess did not know what to say to that. He was worried for her, though, losing her husband and now her home, having to move into a flat no bigger than a cigar box with her parents. A whole life lost in a fell swoop. It was a kind of sudden death. There would be grief in it, he realized, and the thought pained him. He wished for a solution. A memory struck him then, a conversation he and Gracie had once had. She had just come home from church and was fussing about the kitchen as she always did, getting Jess’s noon meal and making tea for herself.

  “Jess,” she had said, sitting down at the table with her cup, watching him go at the plate of eggs, wolfing down fried potatoes and bacon, “how far would you go to help a friend?” Church often provoked soberness in her, made her thoughtful. Jess hadn’t been in the mood right then for deep conversation. He had laughed, he remembered.

  “What, am I going to need a train ticket?”

  “No,” she’d said, still serious. “At least, I don’t think so. I was just thinking of the sick man in the Gospel. The one whose friends let him down with ropes through a hole they made in the roof of a house.” She sipped her tea, her eyes on his face. “I’m just wondering. Would we trouble ourselves that much for someone?”

  Jess had laughed at her, again saying “we.” Gracie’s heart was a five-star hotel, had a smiling porter out front waving folks inside. His was the one-room shack.

  But what if right now, here in front of him, was the chance to remodel? Add on. Expand.

  “Hey, Rose Marie,” he said slowly. She had just put a slice of panettone on a plate for him, had the coffee pot in one hand, and was reaching for a cup with the other. “Why don’t you and the kids move out to the farm. Live with me?”

  Rose Marie set down the coffee pot slowly, as if she feared dropping it. She turned from the counter to face Jess, her brown eyes wide with shock.

  “I’m dead serious. Even with the Morozovs and Tsura, there’s room.”

  “You forgot the baby.”

  “And the baby.”

  “No,” she said firmly, shaking her head. “It would be the same as shacking up, in the eyes of this town. The deli customers would make my folks miserable over it. They’d never live it down.”

  He was relieved to hear her say it. For it was pure craziness, of course. Trouble was, it seemed that now a stranger had taken charge of his jaw and was opening it again to speak. A man who had by nature more kindness, more compassion, more courage than Jess.

  “Then let’s get married,” he said.

  “My God, Jess!” she said. “Now you’re just absurd.” She appeared to consider it, though, crossed her arms and gazed off, looking out the window. And when she turned her eyes to his again, there was a look in them Jess had never seen. They were suddenly velveted, dark and warm. He stood stock still, floored. And then, unexpectedly, stirred. But she said, quickly, “No.” And though her voice was soft, even trembling a little, her meaning was firm. She turned away then, opened a drawer, and took out a spoon. When she swung around again, the look was gone. She had tears in her eyes. Waving her hand for Jess to sit, she set out the sugar bowl and the spoon, filled the cups with coffee.

  Jess took a chair, his legs grateful to be sitting.

  “Let’s talk about you,” she said, blotting at her eyes with the cuff of her blouse. She spoke now in her old, sisterly way. “How are things with Tsura? Are you two getting along?”

  “Oh, sure. We get along fine,” Jess said.

  “Really? Because fine is not what I hear in your voice.”

  “Well, we do,” he insisted.

  She frowned.

  “It’s only that—well, I guess I thought she’d be happier, being handed a family. Her heart’s just not in it. Not with us.”

  “Where is it, do you think?”

  “I’m not qualified to say.” Jess felt himself sinking. “All I know is,” he said dully, “it seems to be in the woods.
She goes there often enough.”

  Rose Marie looked at him, eyebrows raised in surprise.

  “It’s not the woods she goes to, Jess,” she said gently. “I thought you knew that. It’s the convent. The nuns.”

  Jess sat up straight.

  “What nuns?” he said. “Gracie’s nuns? How do you know?”

  “David Busco. He’s been bringing Mama fish on Fridays.”

  Jess set his cup down. He pushed his chair away from the table and set his hands on his knees. A sudden dispirited, helpless feeling seeped into his chest, as if a storm had begun to blow and things he thought he’d buttoned down fast were loose and flapping in the wind.

  “Why,” he said slowly, “if Tsura’s keen on seeing nuns, all she needs is to ask. I’d drive her out to Mill Bend anytime she wants, in the truck.”

  Rose Marie’s eyes shifted to the wall opposite the sink, where there was a bare spot in need of paint. For a long silent moment, she peered intently at it.

  Jess shifted in his chair uneasy. “Seems like you don’t believe me.”

  She didn’t answer, only rose quietly and fetched the coffee pot from the stove, poured them both another cup. They sat in uncomfortable silence for a while then, drinking. As they sat, Jess tried to imagine Tsura, in whom it seemed there was no guile, sneaking off in secret to see the nuns.

  “Hey,” Rose Marie said suddenly, in a false, bright tone designed to end the silence, “did you hear there’s a hippie couple squatting in Zook’s house, up on Kerry Mountain?”

  “No,” he said absently. “I didn’t hear.”

  “There is,” Rose Marie said. “Mama said they came into the deli the other day, asking to sample the cheese. She said they acted like it was as natural as rain, a white boy and a colored girl, walking around in her store, holding hands.”

  “Well,” Jess said, and trailed off, considering now the watchfulness in a certain set of coal-black eyes. Watching. Watching. Always watching. And waiting. Waiting for what? A blessing from him to go the monastery? He wasn’t a priest. Hell, he wasn’t even a father.

  Rose Marie laughed. “You didn’t hear all right. Not a word I’ve said.”

  “I did too. A hippie couple in the deli, buying cheese.”

  “Sampling cheese,” she said dryly. “And holding hands.”

  16

  WINTER GREW BITTER as it wore on. It was harsher than any in Jess’s recent memory and tested him sore.

  At the beginning of February, Jakob Miller stopped buying Hazel Valley milk completely, and Jess was forced to take full-time shifts at the Feed & Seed. In March the time for Lent came and the Morozovs began to fast. Ivan’s eyes, which had begun to show a certain jolly glint, especially in the company of Tsura, became once more sad and pensive. Darya too, perhaps because she could not comfort Ivan with cabbage rolls or pirozhki, seemed distant, preoccupied, less the reassuring presence Jess had come to depend on her to be. Only Tsura and the baby, who had never eaten meat in any case, did not seem to suffer in the two long months of deprivation.

  Tsura was the same as ever. She did not seem happy. But Jess could not call her sad. Watching her day after day, helping Darya care for the baby or willingly taking on chores around the house, he was ever more baffled, even vexed at times, by her behavior. She had wings but did not choose to fly.

  In the last week of March, Father Antony finally baptized the baby, a thing Darya had been pressing for since at least October.

  “What’s the rush?” Jess had said obstinately when she first brought it up. “She’s only been in the world a few weeks. When would she have found time to sin?”

  Darya was a practical, and clever, woman. “The small baby is much easier to baptize than the big one,” she said simply, to which Jess, having no experience with baptism other than his own, had no ready reply.

  Only afterward, when Jess climbed the stairs to Tsura’s room that Saturday evening of the baptism, did he learn what was in his heart. Only then did he know why he had resisted so long.

  The baby was asleep in her crib. Jess crossed the room to look. A small nightlight glowed above the changing table. By its soft light, he could just make out the features that so often made him ache, the reasons he could not allow himself to gaze too closely at her. The unmistakable Russian roundness to the tip of her nose. The precious, Gracie-like curve where her ear joined her tiny jaw. She was illumined, according to Father Antony. “The child of God, Galina,” he’d said, taking her three times under.

  Illumined. Newly lit. Like a match.

  She did have a certain glow, which Jess admitted could be the effect of the nightlight, for whether it was new or not, he could not say. There was something he could say, though, or he believed he could, here in this room, so tenderly lit. Her name. Gracie’s name.

  He laid his hand ever so gently on the small of the baby’s back. She was warm, sweating. He spoke tentatively at first, whispering, trying it out, “Galina.” And then he said it again, without hesitation, “Galina.”

  Suddenly she inhaled, drawing a long, quick breath in her sleep, as if startled in a dream. As she exhaled she sighed, shuddering, and Jess felt all the strength of her breath, her life, under his hand.

  He began to shake.

  And then, as if his shaking had at long last set his throat free, he began to weep. Undammed, the tears flowed in two continuous streams from his eyes, coursing down his face, soaking into the fabric of the baby’s pajamas. They had been waiting a lifetime, those tears. For the longest time he just stood there, weeping in the darkness, his hand on Galina’s back.

  He wept and wept.

  17

  BY THE TIME SPRING ARRIVED, it had become all too clear to Jess that Tsura would rather be at the monastery than at the farm. It was depressing, watching her stay when she didn’t want to. This he said, with no small amount of bitterness, to Pat one cold, cloudless blue morning in April.

  The dogwoods were in early first bloom, adorned like brides in petals of cleanest white. “The wise virgins,” Gracie used to remark, every year when they flowered. They stood out so pure and virtuous, she said, awake and watchful, not like the oaks and hickories.

  Jess and Pat were standing that morning out by the barnyard fence, watching Becky try out a new set of shoes. Tsura was a short distance away on the flat crest of the hill, in view but out of earshot, filling a basket with beets from the garden for Darya’s soup. “She’s biding, Jesse.”

  “Biding?”

  “Waiting.”

  “On what?”’

  “You.”

  “Me? Why waiting on me? What have I got to do with it?”

  Pat didn’t answer. He looked at the ground, dug a crevice in the dirt with the toe of his boot. Jess flushed, felt the heat of anger creep over his neck. He’d seen that look before.

  “You think she’s here against her will.”

  “Not at all,” Pat said mildly. “I’m saying it’s Tsura’s will that’s keeping her here. She’s gracing you. Loving you. Look, Jesse, you think she needs you. Needs family. But she doesn’t. Not as you do. And if you’ve got some idea of penance, forget it. Any ill that was done came only to good. She’s God’s child. Born of the mountain dawn. She’s not like the rest of us, you see, because she knows why she’s alive. What she’s for. She’s always known, in her queer, wise way.”

  Jess was sorry now that he had spoken, for he knew already that he would not be pleased with the way this talk had gone when it was over and done.

  “But everyone needs everyone else,” he protested. “Isn’t that what you always say? That together is the only way any of this works?”

  “I do say that. And I believe it.”

  “You’re not too keen on set-down religion, either, the way I remember it,” Jess said. “You hate such rules and regulations.”

  “I do. But I’m not Tsura. For her kind, laws are only a different sort of freedom. Put her in jail and she’ll sit there all right, but she’ll be slipping through the bars at
the same time, circling the valley on wings, high and free as a lark.” Pat scuffed at the dirt again, shaking his head. “You think me so wise. She makes nonsense of me, that girl.”

  Jess would later have to agree, seeing that Pat had this time got it wrong.

  Tsura was biding, all right. She was waiting on a word. But not from Jess.

  18

  IN WHAT SEEMED TO Jess a mighty strange coincidence, he got a call from the abbess at the monastery that came only a day after his talk with Pat. Easter was just a few days away, she said, and the nuns wanted to make a kind of soft, quick cheese for baking sweets. Did the dairy have any extra milk to sell?

  As he drove over late that afternoon with a ten-gallon milk can and two one-gallon cans of cream strapped behind the cab of his truck, Jess had no idea what he would see, not the slightest notion what a monastery looked like. He knew, because he had seen them from afar at the cemetery when they’d come for Gracie’s burial, that the habits of these nuns were not the calf-length dress and simple kerchief Sister Vittoria had worn to teach at Mike and Rose Marie’s school. The women at the funeral had been fully covered in long robes belted at the waist, had a kind of scarf draped over their heads, and a stiff, round hat. Everything was black. That was all he knew—and he admitted that it was not very much—of his wife’s beloved nuns.

  His first thought, as he drove through the arch-covered entrance, was that Zodie and Orville wouldn’t know their old place. The house, fresh with warm brown paint, had been neatened up with flowers and a new brick walk to the porch. As Jess passed by it, a priest came out of the door, strode purposefully off the porch, and headed down the path, black robes swirling about his feet.

  The main part of the monastery was set farther back from the entrance, away from the house, down a short but winding road. Perched on the last hill was a large chapel with a freestanding bell tower, surrounded by more neat flower beds that formed a cross-shaped courtyard. Across the courtyard stood a long, low building he decided must be the nuns' living quarters. He pulled into that drive and parked, got out, walked around to the truck bed, and began unstrapping the load of milk. There was a light wind, rustling the branches of the elms and oaks. And behind the chapel he could hear the creek rushing, hidden by a stand of thick woods. Below those sounds, though, there was a quiet to the place. A stillness that caused him to stop reaching for a milk can and just wait for a moment, taking it in.