The Signal Flame

by Andrew Krivak

  Mom, Bo said, and folded the paper and pushed it away from him. He stood up and walked to the counter and stared out the kitchen window with his back to her, then turned. I held your grandchild. You can’t live in that past. Not anymore.

  Hannah’s eyes were fixed on the table and she said nothing. Years ago, when she cornered her son Sam and asked him if it was Ruth Younger he had been driving around town, and he stood defiant and said yes, that it was, she came at him with an anger that had been building up for two decades. She grabbed him by the arm and dragged him up the stairs (and he let her, knowing that to fight against her would be far worse) to her own bedroom and pinned that arm behind his back so he was forced to the ground in front of the nightstand, where a photograph of Becks and Hannah Konar sat from the summer of their wedding, the two of them browned and windblown, standing in front of the paddock where they kept the horses. She spoke into her son’s ear as he tried to wriggle out of the painful position but dared not rise and disobey his mother: I want you to see what you lost to a Younger. Then she pushed him hard so that his face slammed into the brass handles on the drawers, and he looked up at her and said, I’m sorry, Mom. But she’s not the reason he’s gone.

  She drew a deep breath and looked up from the table at Bo. I told Father Tom she’s welcome here. Until she can get on her feet and go back to work and rent a place, or—

  Bo waited for her to finish, but her voice hung there.

  Or what? he said.

  Or until Sam comes home and they sort things out and find a place of their own.

  Bo shook his head. I’ll go get her Monday morning in the Dart.

  Can you go in to work late? she asked.

  I own the place, he said.

  She stood. We’ll need to clear out a room. She can stay in Papa’s.

  She won’t make the stairs.

  Yes, she will, Hannah said. I’ll take care of her.

  She picked up Bo’s plate and utensils and brought them to the sink and rinsed them. They stood side by side, Hannah facing the window, Bo looking down at the table.

  Hannah said, I was thinking the other day about how hard it’s becoming to keep this place. There’s so much to do. Grass mowed. Trees pruned. Chickens fed. One day Miss Wayne’s going to give up the ghost, and then what?

  Then you won’t have to feed her, Bo said. Besides, weren’t you just talking a little while ago about getting an actual milking cow?

  It was just talk.

  Well, I’ll do what I can. I’d do more if it weren’t for the mill. It’s humming. This flood year’s going to turn out to be our best year yet.

  Good, she said. That’s good. Old Father Blok used to say, The Lord works, too. It’s hard to let Him, though.

  Well, I don’t know about the Lord, but my men are working their asses off, and it’s my job to make sure it’s not for nothing.

  On Saturday morning Bo put the Briggs & Stratton from the barn into his truck and drove to the hill house and cut the rest of the lawn. By the time he had finished, eleven o’clock, a thermometer on the north side of the barn said it was eighty-five degrees. Cicadas whirred and he raked up the mowed grass and pulled it to the edge of the field and left it with the grass he had cut the day before. There was no rain forecast, so he went inside the house and on each floor opened the windows a crack at the top, then went outside, loaded the mower on the truck, and drove back to the farm.

  Hannah was in the kitchen baking bread in spite of the heat, and she asked Bo if there was anything he wanted her to pick up at the store, since she was going out later to shop for the week. Bo thanked her and said he had what he needed, then sat down at the desk in the foyer and picked up the phone.

  He called Matt Devlin, a plumber friend of his in Dardan, and asked how he was making out with all of the repair work going on after the flood.

  It’s a dream and a nightmare rolled into one, Bo, Matt said. I got plenty of business, but it’s business I don’t want. You been in any of those houses? I’m doing a few in Kingston and Forty Fort, and I can’t get the smell out of my nose. It’s toxic shit, man, like dead animal left under a wet rug and forgotten. And you can’t tell anyone they ought to do it the right way when the wrong way costs a lot less.

  Bo asked if there was any chance he could do some work on a house in Dardan. New water heater, Bo said, sweat some pipes, hook up propane, and put in a gas stove. New kitchen sink. Then redo a bathroom. I’ll give you what they’re paying you in the city.

  There was quiet on the other end of the line, and Bo added, I’ll need an electrician, too, and a good carpenter. Someone who does drywall and can fix a porch right. There’s steady work into September. By then they’ll be wanting you back in the city to fix all the hack work the fly-by-nights did in the first place.

  Matt said, All right, Bo. You got a deal. I know just the boys. You give me the address and I’ll swing by on Tuesday at five. We can have a look and I’ll get some numbers back to you by Friday. How’s that sound?

  That sounds good, Bo said, and hung up the phone.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  THE AIR WAS THICK AND unmoving when Bo left the farm at sunrise on Monday morning and stopped at St. Michael’s to pick up Father Rovnávaha. They drove out of town through the pass and across the river into Wilkes-Barre on the Market Street Bridge, then followed detours through the warrens of streets and avenues, past buildings that bore watermarks like the bows of square and overladen boats that had plied their way through a foul sea before coming back to anchor. They had rolled down the windows in the car for the heat, until the noise of the machinery hauling refuse and mud and the smell of that same mix made them roll the windows back up and sweat for the few miles it took to rise out of the valley on the east side.

  In the parking lot of the VA, the priest took a moment to slide a white tab collar into his black shirt, then opened his door and got out. Bo sat in the driver’s side. Rovnávaha came around the back of the car and said through the window, You coming?

  You go, Bo said. I’ll wait here.

  It was twenty minutes before he saw the man’s towering figure reemerge and pushing Ruth Younger in a wheelchair. Her black hair was brushed and came down to just below her ears in an uneven bob. She wore a New York Jets football jersey with the number 12 on it, and it was tucked into a pair of Levi’s cinched with an army-surplus web belt at the waist. Bo got out of the Dart and put his hand on the fender so he had something to lean against. Ruth stopped halfway to him, lifted herself out of the chair, and walked the last ten yards to the car. She had a slight limp and pointed to the outsize Keds sneakers she wore, as though these alone were the reason why she had spent so much time in the hospital behind her. He reached for her and hugged her, his arms wrapping around her entire body, so slight had she become, and he let her head rest against his chest. He looked up at the priest, who was watching them and nodding, then said quietly to the top of Ruth’s head, We’ll get you some clothes that fit. I’m just glad you’re here with us.

  She sat in the backseat of the car with her shoulder against the window glass. As they drove back down into Wilkes-Barre, the priest talked about what had been torn down and what was being rebuilt in Dardan, as though the destruction and decay in the streets of the city were not what they would find in the mountains, and that this might be a comfort to her (though she had lost her father and her baby, and the house on Holly Street along the Flats had been swept with the others off its foundation and down into the pass). Bo glanced into the rearview mirror and saw her turn from the window and face the front to ask the priest if he knew whether the Phillies had won their game against the Cardinals.

  Talk about what needs tearing down, Rovnávaha said. They lost six to nothing. Twitchell was on the mound.

  No sound rose then from the back, and when Bo peered in the mirror again, Ruth was not in view. Rovnávaha looked over his shoulder and saw her lying down with hands under her head and feet and knees curled up on the seat.

 
She’s asleep, he said, and looked back out at the houses and streets of the city along the flood plain, the morning like any other but for those whose work it was to decide in the single block of home or business that made up their world what could be saved and what could not. Rovnávaha seemed to study the landscape and then spoke as if he and Bo had been having a long conversation on the ways of God and men, waving his hand at the scene outside and asking, Who is worse off? These folks pulling trash and soaking rugs and furniture from their store? Or that girl in the backseat who lost in one day what most would mourn in a lifetime?

  Bo shook his head. You tell me, Father.

  It’s not for me to tell. Each would have to stand and speak, plead his or her case, and even then, who could judge? Do we know what was inside that store? he said as his head followed a sign on a building they had just passed. Clocks. No doubt generations of clocks and the knowledge to repair them. Were they lost? he asked, and Bo said nothing. The clocks, yes, the priest went on. The knowledge, though? I would say no, if they are horologists worth going to with your timepiece. But she is as alone in this world now as her great-grandfather Augustin was when he stepped off that ship in New York Harbor from Galway. Or your grandfather, he said, and turned to Bo. Aliens, Scripture called them. No land. No country. Only God, though for some, not even that.

  Augustin? Bo asked.

  The priest looked over his shoulder again to make sure Ruth was asleep, and then turned to the front. Augustin Younger, he said. I never knew the man. He’s the thing of stories now, I suppose. Blok knew him. He and Father Bozak used to dine often at Augustin and Klára Younger’s house. It was Augustin Younger who told Bozak when he came home from the war, There’s need of a church back here, Father, though Augustin never had need for one himself, I was told. Fell away but couldn’t stand seeing anyone hate the Church just because it was the Church.

  Like another man we once knew, Bo said.

  Two trees, same forest, said Rovnávaha. Your grandfather would have liked Augustin Younger, from what Blok said.

  It was Paul’s father, Walter, he took the land from, Bo said.

  Not took. Your grandfather bought it fair and square. Lots of men from that time forgot how it came to them in the first place, the priest said.

  How did it? Bo asked. Come to the Youngers, I mean.

  Well, Augustin wasn’t a Younger then. He was Patrick Kelleher, son of an Irish silversmith named Bartley Kelleher.

  BK, Bo said.

  You know? Rovnávaha asked.

  Something I found.

  Rovnávaha looked at him and said, Well, Patrick arrived in New York Harbor from Galway on a Sunday in February 1863, hoping to get to Mass at the cathedral on Mott Street, the story goes, after which he was told he’d find help getting lodging and a job. But recruiters caught him at the docks and said there was plenty of work and food if he joined the Union Army. So the boy took up the uniform and musket and blanket roll and marched south and became a soldier between Newark and the fields of Gettysburg. In July of that year he was one of the few soldiers of the Irish Brigade left standing. Still he marched and lined up and fought wherever they told him to line up and fight, and lay down to sleep whenever they told him the fight was done, until the priest whom the brigade had paid to march with them announced one morning in April of ’65 that Lee had surrendered to Grant in a courthouse in Virginia. Patrick was eighteen.

  Rovnávaha reached into his clerical shirt and pulled out a plain cheroot, rolled down the window halfway, and lit the cigar with a black crackle Zippo he took out of the front pocket of his trousers.

  You don’t mind, do you? he asked, and Bo shook his head.

  The priest drew on the cigar and blew the smoke toward the window and said, Now, somewhere along the way, Kelleher had been folded into the 116th Pennsylvania and become friends with a kid named Michael Zlodej from a town called Dardan.

  I know that name, Bo said.

  Of course you do.

  No, I mean Zlodej.

  I know. If you listened to your grandfather at all, you would have heard it when he talked about his own father. Kelleher and Zlodej fought side by side from Maryland into Virginia, and the Irishman thought his luck was catchy, until the Pennsylvanian took a musket ball straight in the belly and died slow and angry, cursing the Confederates and begging Patrick to tell his family in Dardan he had died with the Lord’s name on his lips. So Patrick swore he would, and when the war was over and they discharged him in Baltimore, he set out north to Havre de Grace, and followed the Susquehanna across the Mason-Dixon Line, until, after weeks of walking, he came to Wilkes-Barre and crossed at Market Street and walked west to the town of Luzerne. There was a creek there that poured out of a rocky pass, and Patrick was told all he needed to do was stick to the slopes and rising hills that the water skirted and he’d come to Dardan. The Pennsylvanian, he said, used to speak of his town as a cross between Mount Ararat and the Garden of Eden. Patrick thought he was exaggerating, mixing biblical metaphors, but as he climbed into the mountains and got closer and closer to town, he no longer thought the Pennsylvanian’s evocation of paradise and the land on which an ark might settle was wrong.

  Rovnávaha smoked and looked out the window of the car as though considering the truthfulness of these words as well, then went on. The Zlodej family lived west of the town center, and after a month of journeying on foot to the last place in America he ever expected to journey, that Irish boy who had turned from stranger to soldier back to stranger sat down in the kitchen of a log cabin and ate a bowl of venison stew with a glass of water so cold in the heat of summer that he choked on it as though it were the first time he’d ever tasted water. And when they asked him what his name was, he remembered whose feast day fell on the twenty-eighth of August, and he said in as flat a voice as he could so as to press the Galway from it, Augustin. And then he remembered the sign he saw along the Susquehanna as he passed through the town of Sunbury, the Young Family Funeral Home, and he said to them, Augustin Younger’s my name.

  And he told the father, mother, and twin sister of the one they called Mike, that the Pennsylvanian had died bravely in battle, and that his last words were a whisper of love and farewell to his family, which Augustin Younger had come all that way to deliver, for he had made an earlier vow on the fields of Gettysburg never to utter the name of the Lord again.

  Since he had nowhere to go, the family took him in. The father got him a job rounding up rattlesnakes with the crews felling timber for the railroad companies. He met the truck in Noxen before the sun was up and drove out to Williamsport and hiked into the eastern Alleghenies with leather boots to the knee, a knife, a hooked stick, and a burlap sack. The men were paid by the snake, but after the first day, when the others were bringing in twenty and thirty snakes a day, Augustin had none. Nor did he fare any better the second and third day, so that by the time it was Thursday of the first week, they called him Saint Patrick, and the foreman who ran the hunt gave him five dollars for his time and sent him back to Dardan.

  He’d have been just another mick in the coal mines if he hadn’t gone into the feed mill to buy a ticket on the light-gauge train that ran to Luzerne and seen the help-wanted sign for a laborer to unload the feed that came to the mill on the same train. He took the sign down and gave it to a man behind the register and said he could start right there if the man was expecting what was on the twelve o’clock. The man glanced up from his till and asked the boy where he was from, and Augustin said, Not from anywhere since Gettysburg, but I assure you, sir, I’ve lifted my fair share of deadweight.

  The man, George Dockens, told him the pay was a dollar a day. Six dollars a week if there was nothing left to stack, sweep, or unload when it was time to knock off on Friday. Augustin worked through that Friday and the next, and by the time it was Thanksgiving, George Dockens had put him in charge of the books and rented him a room and asked him to close up on Saturday evenings.

  Rovnávaha finished his cigar and flicked it out
of the car as they drove past an old lumberyard at the light. He spat a piece of tobacco from his mouth and said, Now comes the part about the girl. When Klára Zlodej, twin sister of the Pennsylvanian, rode into Dardan, she made a point of coming to the feed mill, first for nothing more than chicken feed and then for nothing at all except to see Augustin, how he was faring, and—the way she told it to Blok—to see if there was any light behind those dark green eyes of his that betrayed a fondness for her. But she saw nothing, or at least nothing she could tell, until the week before Thanksgiving, when she came to hand-deliver an invitation to him from her mother to share Thanksgiving at their table.

  Augustin read the note and looked up at the girl, saw the same sharp features and full mouth that seemed so alive and combative on her brother, and he knew that this town to which the Pennsylvanian had sent him as an emissary of his last words was the town where he would live, the young woman in front of him the woman he would love, and the dirt and dust he swept off the wooden floor-boards of Dockens Feed Mill every afternoon dirt and dust of the same into which he’d be buried. So he folded the note, slid it into the front pocket of his leather apron, and said to Klára, Tell Mrs. Zlodej that her invitation is what I’ll be thankful for on that day. And they were married the following summer. Walter was their only child, born in the spring of 1880.

  Bo glanced into the mirror to see if Ruth was still asleep, rolled down his window, and accelerated onto the highway.

  So how’d they get all that land? he asked Rovnávaha.

  Slowly, the priest said. Every couple of years Zlodej would buy a parcel here or there until he owned pretty much all of the outerlying forest, before most of it was clear-cut. The timber alone in those days made him a rich man, though you never would have known it. When he died, it all went to Klára, and the Younger family became the largest landowners in Dardan.

  And what happened to Walter? Bo asked.