The Signal Flame

by Andrew Krivak

  The story Rovnávaha knew firsthand and heard from the lips of Paul Younger was how Becks Konar had died. Paul Younger had chosen Rovnávaha for confession over Blok (Rovnávaha understood) because the new priest would not have known anyone yet in the town of Dardan, and Paul Younger would be judged for his own sins. What Rovnávaha would never tell Hannah was how hard the man wept that day when he confessed to having been unfaithful to his wife with a prostitute (which was why she had left him when their daughter was three months old) and the belief that this sin was what had guided the bullet into the heart of Becks Konar. I couldn’t stop the blood, Father. I couldn’t stop it, he said as he wept like a boy, the two of them in that dimly lit room for so long that the parishioners outside gave up and went home. Rovnávaha did his best to convince Paul Younger that God does not hold a man’s sins as a weapon against him but loves all men regardless of those conditions they place on themselves. To which Younger replied, Then God is more of a fool than I guessed. And he rose from that confessional, never to set foot in St. Michael the Archangel church again.

  What Rovnávaha said to her was, It’s time, Hannah. It’s time you thought of the gift that Sam and Ruth have given to you and Paul. The chance to forget what misfortune has shaped the past, and to forgive one another. And yourselves. Once and for all.

  Except my husband and my son are both gone now, she said.

  Rovnávaha leaned forward and took her hand. After what you just told me about Becks? he said. You believe that? In your heart, you believe Sam won’t come back?

  She shook her head and told him she thought every day about Sam and knew he was still alive, just as she had with Becks, no matter how much time had gone by. There were days when she would try to imagine what her son might be doing or thinking at that moment. What kind of pain he might be in. And she would be overcome with her own pain and the desire to escape into sleep, where she would see her son in her dreams.

  And I don’t welcome them, Father. Those dreams. I never have. Because the people of them are not people but ghosts. And my son is no ghost.

  Then welcome the Youngers, the priest said, and you welcome Sam. Into this house. And your grandchild with them. All you have to do is say the word, open the door, and put food on the table as you have for me, as you have for your sons, and this will all be healed. I promise you. It will all be healed.

  She let his words settle into the quiet and then said, I can do that for the girl. But him, too?

  He needs it the most, the priest said.

  She pulled her hand back to her side and bowed her head. Outside, gusts of wind pushed against the loose screen on the open window above the sink, and she glanced up at it but did not rise to close it. There had been a phoebe calling near that same window in the morning, and she watched young squirrels jump from the apple trees and thought this day might turn out to be fine. But all she could see now were the undersides of leaves on those trees pulled back by the wind and black clouds gathering in the sky, and then the rain as it poured down once again over all of Dardan.

  part 2

  WHILE THE EARTH REMAINS

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  SOLSTICE APPROACHED, BUT THE LIGHT from day to day lengthened as though from behind a veil, so flat, thickset, and general were the cloud cover and its rain, from sunup to sundown. What had been a world of lush green in May had turned cinereal in hue as it leaned toward saturation and growing rot in June. Those who moved through this, intent on their desire to work and live regardless, walked hunched and ashen as well. Some believed in omens and portents yet would not say so. Others hoped—out loud in the stores and bars and diners, and quietly in their homes to themselves—that if this branch of storms had to bend down upon them for whatever reason God might allow, it would not break over them in those mountains.

  In the late spring of 1972, low pressure was stationary over most of the Northeast, and Pennsylvania, from the border with New York’s southern tier to the Mason-Dixon Line, saw more rain in three weeks than it had since the flood before the war, all the old folks said, and they meant the flood of ’36. The rain was a follow-on to the deep melting snowpack that had been accumulating in the higher elevations since December, so that long before the first day of summer, the ground was sodden and gave like a sponge wherever it was not covered with pavement or concrete, until those surfaces, too, began to crack and buckle.

  On a Monday, June 19, after the television anchorman announced a U.S. declaration of victory against NVA forces in the months-long battle of An Lộc, and a short-lived airline pilots’ strike, the local weatherman reported that over the weekend a tropical storm from the Yucatán had drifted across the Gulf of Mexico and become the first hurricane of the season. It came ashore again near the Florida panhandle, tracked across Georgia, and went out to sea around North Carolina on the twenty-first before coming back ashore, grown now, near New York and pushing inland. On the twenty-second, that same Pennsylvania weatherman forecasted light rain for the Wyoming Valley from the weakened but dogged low as it moved north, but he intoned cautiously that a nontropical front was coming in directly from the west, and he did not know what might happen when the two met. On the twenty-third, the rains came hard and never let up, and the creeks and rivers of northeastern Pennsylvania’s towns and cities (the waters already held at bay with stacked sandbags and whispered prayers) rose to a height that the work of those hands could no longer hold.

  Bo pulled up to the mill on Thursday night and unloaded his pickup of food, two transistor radios, batteries, and three full five-gallon fuel cans. He took a Mossberg twelve-gauge and a box of shells from the metal cabinet where he kept it locked and sat in his office watching the news and footage of a river that seemed to hover above the city of Wilkes-Barre in its false banks like the slime trail of some outsize gastropod. He had sent the men home and made himself watchman, not knowing who or what would come down that highway in the night. The pond behind the tally shed was rising, but the men had sandbagged it well, and there was enough surrounding forest that Bo believed it would not be a threat to the heart of the mill. Now all he had to do was wait and see just how bad the hurricane that had drifted north would be for the folks who lived along the Salamander and the Susquehanna.

  Ruth Younger went into labor that night. Her aunt Mary, who had midwifed a handful of animals and two other babies whose mothers could not get to the hospital, walked one street over on the Flats in the dark and rain and put water on to boil and asked her brother to cut up some old bedsheets for rags, turn off the overhead light in his daughter’s room, and bring in a lamp.

  The Flats in Dardan were a plateaulike stretch of stone fields on the creek’s plane just before it dropped into the cut of Troy Pass. Between the wars, anyone could get cheap land there and build a cheap house on it. Paul Younger moved into one of the last saltboxes to be erected in the 1930s. Before the first flood. When his father, Walter, passed away and Paul found out the twenty acres of Younger land that he had planned to farm belonged to Jozef Vinich.

  He finished cutting up the bedsheet with his wife’s old sewing shears and wondered where she was, if she would even care that her daughter was having a baby. She left me, not the girl, he thought. When he was done, he took the towel-size remnants into the room at the back of the house. What had been panting and cries in the early evening were screams now, and he watched his daughter writhe until his sister said, She’s going to be fine.

  He went outside and stood on the porch and smoked and drank coffee and stared at the swollen creek. He had never seen it this high, and he began to go over in his mind a plan to get Ruth and the baby and him up to higher ground, as soon as that baby decided to be born. And what ground after that? They could stay in Dardan, even though it looked more and more like Sam Konar was not coming home. Or they could go. West, it would have to be. Let the baby get a little older, pack up the car, and head out to California. Oregon, maybe. He liked the sound of Oregon. They called those mountains the Cascades.


  He had gone inside to make another pot of coffee when Mary pushed into the kitchen from the bedroom and stopped by the wall. She looked tired and pale and her voice trembled when she spoke. She needs to get to a hospital.

  Now? Younger put his coffee down. How long have I—

  Mary glanced in the direction of a windup cuckoo on the wall as it struck five. I’m going to call an ambulance, she said.

  No. I’ll get the car started.

  Paul, the baby’s back to front. She needs a doctor.

  And she’ll get one sooner if we get her in that car and drive, he said, and went outside. Mary could hear the Country Squire struggling to turn over, and she went to the phone and dialed and got an operator who took her address, and then the line went dead.

  It took another five minutes for the two of them to get Ruth into the back of the station wagon, where they had put the seats down, and lay her sideways on a bed of blankets and pillows, her head behind the driver and her feet touching the back of the bench seat on the passenger side.

  Mary yelled to Ruth as though she were hard of hearing, You’re going to be fine, honey! The baby just needs a little help to come on out, that’s all.

  There was a contraction, and Ruth howled and pitched forward and vomited. Paul jumped into the driver’s seat and Mary grabbed him by the shoulder. They’ll be here any minute.

  We don’t have a minute from what I can see. Now get in the car.

  Mary shook her head and got in on the passenger side, and Paul Younger gunned the old Ford out onto the road.

  Bo woke from a dream too shifting and dim to survive out of sleep. He had been sitting in the chair against the wall, and he grabbed the shotgun and stood and went to the door and looked out at the rain and the dark. He passed a finger through the corner of both eyes and turned to check the clock and heard the police scanner on his desk request an ambulance at 26 Holly Street. It took a moment for the address to come to him. Sam had told him years ago, She lives down in the Flats on Holly Street with her dad. It had to be. She had said the baby was due in June. He wished now that he had checked in on her at the store every week, not just to take her a letter. But there was work. And there was the house. A good man is good to his brother, Bohumír. Jeff was due in around seven-thirty. He could call the hospital then. He walked over to the desk and picked up the phone, and the line was dead. He dropped it and grabbed his oilskin duster from a hook on the back of the door and put it on to keep the shotgun dry, then he ran outside and across the yard to his truck.

  He listened to channel nine on the CB as he drove in the direction of town, but he heard no further mention of Paul Younger’s address in the Flats. He switched over to nineteen and asked for a break and got a trucker going the opposite direction out of Dardan on 118.

  As he came down the long hill into the town center the clutch slipped on the Dodge and he whispered, Not now, braked the truck to a slow crawl on the blacktop, and thought, They could only have gone one way.

  He still had Dardan to get through, and as he approached, all he could see in the drab dawn were the lights of police cars and what looked like hooded monks of yellow and black along the creek, passing burlap sacks from where one monk half-filled a bag with sand, twisted the top, and passed it to another monk, who passed it along to another, who stacked the bag on top of a crude bunker near the bridge. The traffic light was flashing red, and Bo was making his way toward it when a policeman in a rain poncho walked out in front of him. Bo slammed on the brakes and the truck skidded to a stop. He rolled down his window and the policeman came over and said, Nothing but National Guard trucks getting through, Mr. Konar.

  Bo recognized him as the brother of one of the boys who used to work for him at the mill, a kid Bo fired for coming in hungover and smoking outside of the break room. His name was Kozick.

  You haven’t seen an ambulance head down to the Flats, have you, Jimmy?

  The cop looked past Bo to the passenger side and shook his head. Sorry, Mr. Konar. Everyone down there’s coming out. You’re going to have to go around the long way if you want to get up to your place now.

  The wipers seemed to beat in time to the gusts of rain against the windshield, and Bo took in the scene of sandbaggers, cops, and evacuees coming up from the neighborhoods along the creek in the light.

  All right, he said. I’ll try my luck on the back roads. He pointed to the line of sandbaggers. Looks like they need you over there.

  The cop turned around fast, and Bo punched the gas and shifted hard through all three gears, right through two sets of lights and out onto the long stretch of highway that wound down along Salamander Creek into the pass.

  He switched the CB back to channel nine to listen for any traffic that might be coming after him, but all he heard with any clarity was a 10-52 for a heart attack. In his rearview mirror he saw a state police car moving fast in his direction, then crossing the highway at a gap in the median and heading back toward town with its lights on. He came up fast on the sign for Elm Street that led into the Flats, and he downshifted and pumped the brakes to make the turn, the back wheels skittering before coming to a stop at the old stringer bridge. Bo got out and stood on the highway side and watched the water coursing and splashing as it surged past, the entire structure throbbing in place, and he wondered if it would even be there when he needed it. He could hear more sirens heading in the direction of town, and he knew that if he drove over the bridge, he was not going to find Ruth at the house anyway. He got into his truck and backed out onto the highway.

  He kept his speed at fifty. A line of army-surplus trucks lumbered toward him from out of the valley in the westbound lane like a diminished caravan of returning soldiers. It occurred to him that he did not know what he was looking for or what he would find if he got all the way through the pass into the town of Luzerne and was stopped by rising water. Another state police cruiser came around the bend behind the convoy, slowed down, and hit the lights. Bo accelerated and felt the rear end of the pickup lift with a gust of wind so that he was looking at the berm, where fresh skid marks led into a wire guardrail that was pushed over like an old fence. He kept his eye on the spot, hit the brakes, and counter-steered. The truck swerved and planed and slid to a stop on the narrow shoulder.

  He jumped out and ran over to the gap in the guardrail and could see the wreck below nestled among the trees. He got back in his truck and reversed it to the edge of the ravine, then got out again and reached into the bed for the rope and crawled underneath and tied it fast to the truck’s frame. He looked up to see the lights of the statie approaching, then he heaved the other end of the rope down the bank and disappeared along its length.

  The station wagon had pushed a good-size maple out by the roots and come to rest on top of it. Bo dropped headlong, his boots cumbrous in the terrain of wet rocks and leaves, the duster too heavy, and his hands losing their grip on the sopping rope. He could see the back wheels of the car spinning in a groove of dirt, and he swung around to the driver’s side, where Paul Younger was slumped over the steering wheel, blood seeping from his ears. Bo felt for a neck pulse and pushed the dead man’s foot off the accelerator. The wheels stopped and the engine idled and Bo reached over and shut the car off. He went around to the passenger side, where Mary Younger lay in the dirt and leaves next to the open door. He peered in the back at the flattened platform of blankets and pillows smeared with vomit. That door was open, too, but he could not see Ruth. He heard footsteps and snapping branches and looked up to see the trooper bounding down the hill along the rope.

  Bo left the car and strode farther along the bank in the direction of the creek, and that was where he saw her, leaning against a tree on the slope as if she had crawled on her hands and knees and then stopped to rest. She had on a T-shirt and was white and naked from the belly down, her eyes open, her face without mark or bruise or trace of blood, and she held the baby in her arms.

  Ruth! he shouted above the roar of creek water. He approached and slowed. He c
ould see the scarlet pool in which she sat, the rain having washed her clean as she bled into the ground. She seemed to gaze right through him. He knelt down and put his ear to her lips and felt her breath, then took off his coat and draped it around her shoulders. He reached to take the baby, inert and gray and also washed of mess by the rain, and she held tighter, squeezing the tiny mass to her breasts, and Bo could see the cord and the afterbirth that clung to her. He knelt close and whispered, It’s Bo, Ruth. I’m right here.

  Ruth looked at him then as though she had come out of a daydream and let him take the lifeless form from her. It was a girl, and he pulled out his knife and cut the umbilicus and held the baby to his shirt, cupped his hand to catch the rain, and poured the water over her head three times.

  There, he said, now you can go be with your father.

  He placed her back in Ruth’s arms and whispered, She’s beautiful, and Ruth pulled her baby in close, huddled under the cover of the duster, and began to wail.

  Mary Younger’s heart had stopped beating by the time the firemen had gotten her to the side of the highway in a litter, and she could not be revived. One of the paramedics came over to Bo and said they had to get out of there fast if Ruth was going to live. Bo knew him from high school and said, I’ll follow you, Chip.

  He made a move for the door, and Chip put his arm out in front of him. Listen, Bo. We can’t get a coroner for those two. You’re going to have to bring them with you in the back of your truck.