Lights on the Mountain

  “That is gift, you know,” said a voice.

  He turned and saw that the priest had made it to the top of the hill. The hill was steep, and when Jess had passed the man, he had been walking a quick pace, yet he was hardly out of breath. He could see now that the priest was older than he had appeared from a distance. But to match his youthful stride, he had an open expression, a boyish shine to his dark eyes. His beard was sparse, stiff, and grizzled. Jess realized then that he must have been staring, because the man smiled and said, “A gift, I said. To hear the quiet. Silence is a good teacher, but most of us make poor students.”

  Jess nodded mutely, suddenly sorry for his religious lack. There was a special greeting, he knew, for a priest, but he could not for the life of him remember what it was.

  “You are a farmer,” the priest said, nodding toward the truck.

  “Yes, sir,” Jess said, “I am. Hazel Valley Dairy. Just down the road.”

  “Ah. That explains it. A man of the earth. Your ear is trained. I came to here from Detroit. And before that, Bucaresti. A very noisy city. As all cities are, I suppose. Anyway, I had to learn to get used to this,” he said, waving his hand. “It made me go a little crazy at first.”

  “I’ve never been to a city larger than Pittsburgh,” Jess said, grinning. “I’ll tell you, though, I only go there when I can’t get out of it. And I’m always glad to get home.”

  A group of nuns came out of the long building then. They crossed the courtyard in silence and went into the chapel.

  The priest suddenly gripped Jess by the arm, “Come,” he said. “It’s time for the service.”

  Surprised, Jess resisted, gently freeing himself. He had not considered that there would be services happening, though he should have, for Darya had mentioned at breakfast that tonight Jesus would go to the cross and that she and Ivan would take the baby, and possibly Tsura, and they would all be in church for hours. “It will be difficult, of course,” she had said, with a small long-suffering shrug that told Jess it was useless to protest.

  “Oh, well,” he protested now to the priest, “I’ve got milk in the truck.”

  “Leave it,” the priest said. “It’s cold enough out here. It will keep.”

  Jess was forced to admit he was right. It was cold enough for the milk to keep. Before he knew what was happening, he had followed the priest inside and found himself standing in the back of the church.

  Three hours later, he left the chapel, reeling.

  “You can take your milk to the kitchen now,” the priest said, stopping Jess as he was crossing the courtyard, already emptied of nuns. “Once that’s done, you can come down to the guesthouse, if you like. We are allowed a little wine this evening. Consolation for the Savior’s suffering. If you would consent to share a glass with me, perhaps we could talk. I have an idea I would like to put before you. A business proposal, of sorts.”

  Jess found his way to the kitchen. It was a spacious room with high ceilings and tall doors, no need to duck his head as he wheeled in the cans of milk. Inside, all was clean and quiet, except for a lone nun who was setting a tea tray with small glasses. Next to the tray sat a bottle of clear red wine. The nun reached for it and began to pour the glasses full. He hesitated, uneasy. He had no idea how to speak to a nun, or if he even should. She glanced up.

  “You can put the milk in there,” she said, and pointed to the pantry where, he could see now, there were several large refrigerators. There was a long counter in that room lined with clean, gallon glass jars. Jess poured the milk off into the jars and moved them to the refrigerators to keep cool. When he came out, the nun had gone.

  The priest introduced himself as Father Daniel. He was a visiting priest, he explained, down from New York to do the monastery’s Holy Week services.

  “Are you sure you are a farmer and not a soldier?” he asked, handing Jess a juice tumbler full of a darker, redder wine than the young nun would be serving her sisters about now. “You have just stood through one of the longest and most intense services of the church year.”

  “To be honest, I didn’t want it to end,” Jess said. He had a sudden urge to speak freely. It seemed absurd not to, for although before tonight he would have argued against the possibility, he saw that he had found a wider gaze than Pat’s. “You see,” he went on, “I’ve recently lost my wife. Tonight, the service, it was so mournful, yet I somehow felt lighter, ached for Gracie less than I have since she died. I’ve been trying to think why that might be.”

  “He is a man of sorrows, acquainted with our grief.”

  “Christ.”

  “Christ.”

  “Yes,” Jess said quietly, still taking it all in. “I didn’t know that before tonight.”

  Father Daniel peered into his glass. For a moment he was silent. Then he said, “I’m going to tell you something not many people know. I once also had a beloved wife. And while I was in prison for this,” he touched his cross, “she was lonely and afraid and took comfort in another man’s embrace. I got the news from a guard who knew her lover. Hearing you talk of the ache you feel for your wife, I remember my pain—worse than any beating I received in prison—and I feel compassion for yours. I understand your suffering, or so I think, because I’ve compared it to mine. But I’ll tell you another secret, my friend. This is not true compassion. This is empathy. An emotion which, although very good, comes tainted by all the usual human self-trickery. I believe I care for you when really it is myself I care for most. The proof of this falseness is how soon we weary of empathy when we are required to have it for someone too long. Our stores are limited. Quickly used up. You know this. How long since your wife died?”

  “Eight months.”

  “Eight months. Not yet a year. And only a month, or at the most three, before people stopped asking how you’re holding up. If I’m wrong, you may say it.”

  Jess was silent.

  “Yes, well. No surprise. Only Christ, who is pure of even the breath of self-deceit, with no other motive than love, can truly abide our suffering. He accepts to endure it with us indefinitely, never grows uncomfortable or glances away embarrassed from our pain. This is what you felt tonight. The unaccustomed lightness, the joy, if you will, of such a limitless, untiring compassion. You say you didn’t know,” Father Daniel said, pausing to drink, “but the truth is that like the rest of humanity, you have only forgotten. That is the way of things with Christ. He has long known us. Long loved us. Yet we are always only just getting to know Him.”

  “Why do it, then?”

  “Because we must.”

  “Yes,” Jess said, and sighed. “We must.”

  He was quiet for a moment, thinking of the light on the mountain all those years ago. He sighed again, rueful. How much he had indeed forgotten. Such a long, longing time it had been.

  “There is a prayer we make to Christ,” Father Daniel said, his voice growing tenderer, as if he’d heard Jess’s thoughts, knew the reason for his sigh. “‘Wound my heart with love for you.’ Is that not a strange request? It’s madness! And yet, don’t we understand it, you and me? At least a little. From the moment I saw you, I said to myself, now here’s a pilgrim I recognize. A fellow wounded. He has heard tales of a singular healing salve and has been limping about the earth to find out if one truly exists. Tonight, you’ve made a discovery. Yes, this miraculous ointment does exist. And what is it? More madness! More sweet pain to be endured. More sorrow mingled with joy. It’s love.”

  Here, Father Daniel paused. He gazed intensely at Jess for an instant, his dark eyes lit. Then he said, “You have arrived in Gilead, brother. And I must warn you. This balm burns like fire.”

  When Jess opened the door at home, he heard Galina fussing. He went upstairs and found her with a sodden diaper, the seat of her pajamas soaked through. Darya came to the door.

  “It’s all right,” he said quietly. “I’ve got her.”

  Darya hesitated, her mouth working as if she would protest, but soon she turned and shuf
fled back down the hall. The bedsprings groaned once, then got quiet.

  Jess removed Galina’s pajamas, marveling at their small size, and unpinned the wet diaper. On the dresser was a stack of clean diapers, neatly folded. He slipped one under her bottom and fiddled anxiously with it for a while, pinning and repinning. Diapering, it turned out, was not the easy task Darya made it appear. Galina was all belly. She had no more hips than Jess did. But there were no belt loops on a diaper, evidently. After several tries, he pinned it for the last time. Her fussing had grown louder, more fretful. She was out of patience. It was time to admit he lacked the skill to fit it snug. There wasn’t a basket or a pail that he could find, so with a guilty glance down the dark hall, he left the wet things in a heap on the floor. He searched the dresser drawer until he found a set of footed pajamas. As he snapped her into them, her cries turned to wails.

  “Easy, now,” he said. “Easy.”

  He stroked her soft head, soothing her in the only way he knew how, as he would a horse. She went back to fussing quietly. He carried her down to the living room, sinking with her into his big, deep chair. With her small fat thigh gripped in his hand, her head resting in the crook of his arm, he pulled her close. He crossed his legs, making a nest for her, a position he soon realized, leaning back to test it, suited him too. He had no sooner relaxed, though, and got comfortable when the thought struck him that she might be hungry, and he tensed again. This was something he hadn’t considered. He hoped like everything then that she wasn’t, for he would be forced to wake Darya, and he didn’t want to do that. This baby daughter of his felt good to him, her small warm body nestled against his. He wanted nothing more in the world right now than to just sit with her in this settled-down way. As if she understood, Galina got quiet. She gazed sleepily around, eyelids drooping. Jess bent to her ear.

  “Your papa’s been in church tonight,” he murmured. “What do you think of that?”

  The next instant he felt her go limp. She was asleep. With his head resting against the pillowed back of the chair, he closed his own eyes.

  What an evening it had been. In his whole life, he had only stepped four times in a church: once to see Rose Marie wed, once to be wed himself, once to bury his wife, and once to see their child baptized. No wonder he had been caught so off guard tonight. He didn’t know, even now, what to make of it all. Couldn’t fathom what had happened as he’d stood in that dark, smoky chapel with his knees threatening to buckle. Father Daniel, his old back bent to shoulder a massive wooden cross. The gentle lament of the nuns. Lord, that sound alone had been enough to break his heart. It was the light on the peak, and the going of Walter, and the truck plowing over Old Line Bridge, and the muteness of the moon, and the stillborn calf, and Gracie’s loving and Gracie’s leaving, and the forlorn cries of her baby, and meeting with the sad, strong faces of Darya and Ivan all the livelong day. It was Ivan in the milking shed, blessing the cow. It was wine in a juice tumbler.

  It was all that that made him uneasy with Tsura.

  It was the eyes in the icon.

  The smell of coffee woke him. When he opened his eyes, he saw that Darya stood next to his chair. The hint of a smile played at the corner of her sober mouth. She held out her arms for the baby, still asleep.

  When Jess had finished two cups of coffee, strong and hot and black, he dressed for chores and went outside. There, in the long, thin beam of the barn light, he could see Tsura standing alone on the rise of hill. She was facing east. Jess walked down the hill toward her, toward the sounds of a gently stirring earth, away from the lowing cows and the milking shed. She did not turn as he approached but kept her back to him and her eyes on the dawn. They stood and talked a long while, waiting together for the sun to scale Kerry Mountain and break free of the peak. When at last it did appear in the sky, huge and red and lit with morning fire, Jess was blinded for the briefest moment. By the time his vision had cleared, she was gone.

  In the meantime, the cows had grown desperate. They complained now in voices that could not be ignored. Jess turned and went to them, his mind still with Tsura. “It was her,” she had said, explaining to him in her plain way how she had stood with Gracie in the monastery church, saw in the icon of the Holy Virgin the sad, kind eyes that matched the voice she had heeded all her life. Seeing those eyes and the hands that were full of child, full of God, Tsura understood whose hands it had been that were always held outstretched, ready to help her, quick to save.

  And looking at her as she spoke of these things, the hollows of her eyes cast pale and gray in the shadow of the mountain, Jess had seen how tired Tsura was, her patience wearied with longing, and felt his heart align with hers. At long last, he understood.

  On Ascension Day, Tsura was received as a novice at the monastery. The whole family went out to Mill Bend to commune together and celebrate the feast, even little Galina. Seeing Tsura with the nuns for the first time, Jess had a taste of the bittersweet he knew there must have been in choosing to pledge herself to such a life. She did not look as natural as the others did at prayer, not as she looked sitting cross-legged on the ledge in the spring house, conversing with a toad as with a bosom friend. But it was right. Even a thick-headed fool like him could see it. She wasn’t just where she longed to be. She was where she belonged. Her face was as bright as the morning sun.

  19

  ONE EVENING IN LATE JUNE, in the pink glow before sunset, Jess was unhooking Becky from the plow when he saw an old car rattling its way up the lane. It was a small moss-green coupe, a make and model he didn’t recognize. It came closer, and Jess could see the little car was not old at all, only hard used. It did not continue up the drive to the house but turned left at the split in the lane, pulled down by the corral gate, and stopped. Both doors opened at the same time, and a boy and girl got out, merging together as they came around the hood. They linked hands and walked toward Jess.

  “Hey,” the girl called out.

  “Hey,” Jess called back, and bent to unbuckle Becky’s harness. When he raised his head, he saw that they had come to stand beside him. It was the girl again who said, with a swaying, 1-2-3 cadence to her speech that reminded him of Millie’s, “Nice evening. Isn’t it?”

  “It is that.”

  “And a handmade sky too.”

  “Well, now, there I can’t agree, not knowing what a handmade sky is.”

  “My Aunt Zona says when the sky looks like that, Our Lady is piecing a quilt, to lay on the knees of God.”

  Jess gazed long at the girl, her head tilted heavenward, and then at the sky. He saw that it had turned a deep rose, cut horizontally with slender blue strips of darkness.

  “I don’t doubt it,” he said.

  “We heard at the delicatessen in town that you sell fresh cow’s milk,” the boy said, in an accent that told Jess he was well to the south and west of home. New Hampshire, maybe. Or Connecticut.

  “You heard partly right,” Jess said. “I used to sell milk to the Amish for cheese.”

  “And now you don’t?”

  “And now I don’t.”

  “Well, would you consider selling us a gallon anyway?”

  “I might.”

  “If you did, what would be the price of it?”

  Jess thought that was a good question and showed a lick of sense. For from what he could see, any amount he named would be more than they could afford.

  Freed from her harness and collar, Becky quivered head to tail, then sneezed the field dust from her nostrils in a thick wet spray. The boy let go of the girl’s hand and stepped back. Jess grinned and slung the harness over his shoulder. He slapped Becky on the rump, and she walked off toward the barn. He took up the collar and followed. After a few steps, he stopped and looked back at the couple. They stood in the same spot, hands linked again, watching.

  When Jess entered the barn, Becky was already waiting in her stall. He set the tack down against the outside wall, fed her three flakes of hay, and as an afterthought, a can of oats, beca
use he had worked her pretty hard. Ivan’s big Hampshire sow, housed temporarily in the stall next to Becky’s, heard the sound of feeding going on and rose heavily to her feet, grunting quietly. Hearing the sow, the lambs in the stall adjacent began to bleat. Raising their own meat, and selling the dairy’s milk to the nuns, as Father Daniel proposed, were parts of the plan Ivan and Darya had helped Jess make to bring the farm to self-sufficiency. The sow was in pig. She would be moved in the morning to the new farrowing pen. Jess wiped down the collar and harness with a rag, took them into the tack room, and hung them on the wall. When he came out again, the couple was standing in the barn alley.

  She was tall and slender, her skin the dark, glossy brown of a husked chestnut. An orange turban covered her hair. He was fair, with a broad, freckled face. Twists of light-red hair fell across the collar of his many-colored coat. She wore only a long sweater against the chill air and had sandals on her feet. The tips of her toes peeped out from the hem of her skirt.

  A swallow dipped into the barn then, skimmed over their heads, and landed in the rafters.

  “Did you see that?” the girl said in her voice like a waltz. “I felt the wind under its wings as it flew over.”

  “What kind of bird is it?” the boy asked.

  “It’s a barn swallow,” Jess said. “There’s a pair of them up there, working on a nest. I’ve been luring the cats up to the house all week, feeding them liver paste from a can, to give the birds a fighting chance.”