Light from Distant Stars

by Shawn Smucker

  Cohen looks up and down the street again. He glances at all the windows, all the dozens of windows in the dozens of houses, afraid he’ll see someone looking out at him, someone watching him wipe his bloody finger on the rolled-up parchment of sycamore bark.

  He feels a sob rise in his throat, thick with sadness and anger and regret. His father is dead.

  four

  The Teacher

  In 1984, on bleary-eyed Sunday mornings, when the Holy Spirit was less of a shout and more of a whisper, there was Sunday school with Miss Flynne. Ah, Miss Flynne, the slight young woman barely escaped from girlhood who stood meekly at the front of their chaos. She would raise her hand halfway, then use that hand to adjust her glasses, as if she had never intended to quiet them. She would clear her throat gently, then louder. She was pretty when she stood at the edge of anger, her cheeks flushed, her soft mouth a firm line.

  Miss Flynne sometimes took off her shoes and socks in those moments when it seemed the chaos could never be put back inside the box, and Cohen always marveled at the exquisite whiteness of her feet, the slenderness of her toes, the bright glossy green of her toenail polish. It seemed rather fancy to him, and also a bit strange. Weren’t her feet cold? His own mother rarely took off her socks in their house. It seemed like something the people in his church would not approve of if they knew about it.

  But who in the church besides her Sunday school class would ever see her bare feet? Who would ever see her as he did in that moment, removing her shoes, her socks? She moved slowly, and he could tell she no longer heard the children but had become completely engrossed in that small unwrapping. She draped the bright whiteness of her socks over a chair at the front of the room, and that was when he saw her initials close to the top, almost hidden under a frill of lace.

  HMF.

  He knew the F stood for Flynne, but what of the H? The M? He spent those first chaotic moments of Sunday school trying to guess Miss Flynne’s first and middle names.

  Heather Madeline?

  Harriet Madison?

  Holly Miriam?

  He sighed. It seemed a nice thing to contemplate on a dreary Sunday morning while the anarchy of the class boiled around him. But a certain kind of stillness settled in the room as Miss Flynne took advantage of the greatest weakness of any nine-year-old: curiosity.

  At the front of the class, she situated a felt board with felt Bible characters that somehow stuck, and they stared out at Cohen. Without saying a word, Miss Flynne went about arranging the flat people on the pale blue board, and that quieted some of the Sunday school students. They wanted to see what the morning’s story would be. She moved slowly, either out of great concern for the careful placement of the flannel people or because she was delaying the moment she would have to confront the children.

  When the scene was set, she lifted her Bible up in front of her bright green eyes and spoke, and when she read the Bible, she became a proclaiming angel, and no volume level was unattainable. She was transformed from a timid mouse to some kind of powerful cherub. The children froze in place, waiting for their imminent demise.

  Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand. Belshazzar, whiles he tasted the wine, commanded to bring the golden and silver vessels which his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple which was in Jerusalem; that the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, might drink therein. Then they brought the golden vessels that were taken out of the temple of the house of God which was at Jerusalem; and the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, drank in them. They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone. In the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the wall of the king’s palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the king’s countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another.

  At the words “came forth fingers of a man’s hand,” every child finally went silent, imagining a bodiless hand carving lines in a plaster wall, frightening the most powerful man in the world. Jared Simms, sitting at the back of the class, sucked in his breath and held it. Little Mary Everett, the same age as Cohen but the height and weight of a five-year-old, peed in her chair. Cohen knew because she did it often and he expected it in moments like that. He saw the drops begin to drip from the metal folding seat.

  The vision of a bodiless hand haunted Cohen’s dreams for three solid nights, so that sometimes, even when he was awake, he thought he could see the hand coming toward him through the reflection in his window, index finger extended, preparing to write some portentous message on his own wall. Or perhaps directly on him, the way God had marked Cain.

  What would that hand have written? What message could have possibly prepared nine-year-old Cohen for the future of his childhood, the crumbling of his family, or the arrival of the Beast?

  He was so young. He knew nothing of messages that could terrify a king. He knew nothing of a lions’ den or the heady aroma of red wine when a person’s nose was deep inside the stemmed glass. He knew only of hot summer nights, lying on the sanctuary floor, listening to his father’s voice rain down, or cool Sunday mornings in the basement of the church, staring from Miss Flynne’s green eyes to her green toenail polish to her white socks still perched on the chair.

  HMF.

  five

  The Phone Call

  Cohen drives into the VFW parking lot a few miles outside the city. If he keeps going for another ninety minutes, he would lose himself in Philadelphia, those endless streets and back alleys, those cratered avenues and narrow passages, the place where his mother and sister fled when he was a child. Only his sister came back. On his days off he sometimes drives into that city, vast and imposing. He likes that the streets there don’t recognize him.

  A few lonely cars are parked in front of the VFW, but it is a quiet building lost in between towns. He doesn’t remember at any point in his entire life actually seeing anyone coming out of or going into the building. The sign out front is always changing, from “VFW Bingo Tonight” to “Oyster Soup Night” to “Pancake Breakfast This Saturday.” But he has never seen anyone standing at the sign, arranging the letters. He smiles to himself, imagining a mysterious, bodiless hand forming the messages.

  Cohen pulls around behind the VFW and follows a stone lane that leads down the hill. He can see the baseball field from there, nestled in a flat space at the bottom. A train track lines the first-base side of the diamond, and beyond that, farmers’ fields go on for miles, stretching out to forest-covered hills. It’s sometimes hard to imagine the city is only a few miles away, all concrete and intersections and traffic lights.

  The flurries stopped at some point during the drive, as if they suddenly remembered it’s March and there is no real place for them. The sky is low and cold. A sporadic breeze whips the treetops before fading to nothing.

  Back when he was nine years old and his parents were still together and they all lived happily in the country, he rode his bike all over this area, where the air smelled like hay or manure or spring mud depending on the day, and where you could tell the month by what was growing in the fields or how tall the corn was. He’d wandered the wide creek beds, forded every stream, fished in every bend. Sometimes, like today, it feels almost unbearable, the presence of his past.

  He gets out of the car and walks gingerly through the soggy grass, the earth giving way beneath him. He sees three small children squatting close to the train tracks. Each of them is in their own world, digging into an old sandpile with small sticks, ignoring the cold day, the low clouds, the expansive fields that threaten to engulf them. They seem completely fine with their own smallness, and they go on poking the earth like tiny mosquitoes on the back of an elephant.

  The flurries come down again, and they provide a stark contrast to the boys p
laying baseball, one team wearing candy-green uniforms, the other in stop-sign red. Both teams are sponsored by local businesses, the names of which are emblazoned in large, all-capital letters across the front of the uniforms. Parents offer up encouragement, then silence swells as each pitch spins toward the catcher.

  Cohen played on this field when he was young, on a team sponsored by a local business, Lengacher’s Cheese. Their hats and uniforms were a pumpkin orange with white letters. He remembers the adjustable bands on the hats with their small line of tabs that fit neatly into the line of holes. He remembers how the leather glove felt on his hand, smooth and worn and essential, as if he had managed to love baseball enough that his own hand had grown, expanded, and padded itself. But not all of it is the same: the old chain-link fences have been replaced with new ones, and the bases actually attach to the field—when he was young, they were rubber mats you threw down and tried not to slip on.

  Cohen drifts in behind his sister—she stands on the ground beyond the end of the aluminum bleachers, eyes intent on the field. He stops and stares at the back of her for a moment. Everything seems forced now that he knows what he knows about their father. How should he approach her? How should he talk to her? He is nervous that he’ll slip up, say something he shouldn’t yet know. He takes a deep breath and smiles and wraps his arms around her from behind, pinning her arms to her side. He picks her up a few inches off the ground.

  “Whoa!” he exclaims. “You are heavy with child.”

  She pushes at his arms and he lowers her back to the ground. She shakes her head. “Always tactful, my brother,” she says in her scratchy voice, and Cohen thinks again that if someone didn’t know her, they’d assume she was a smoker. She rolls her eyes. “Besides, as you well know, it’s ‘heavy with children.’” She cups her hands around her mouth and shouts, “Let’s go, Johnny!”

  She turns to Cohen and puts one arm around his shoulders in a side hug, as if trying to make up for implying he isn’t tactful. He recognizes the gesture. She is so kind she can’t even pretend to insult without immediately apologizing.

  He nudges up against her. “Still two babies in there, huh?”

  She rolls her eyes again, doesn’t even dignify his question with a response.

  “Where’s he playing? I can’t see him.”

  “He’s on first,” she says.

  “That’s where all the action is.”

  “Yep.”

  “C’mon, Johnny!” Cohen shouts, wanting to make sure his nephew knows he’s there. The boy is ten and in a phase where all he talks about is baseball. Well, he’s also in an astronomy phase, so it’s mostly baseball and outer space.

  Cohen remembers those days—the crack of the bat, the feel of the ball nestling into his glove, the smacking sound of a tight catch. These memories of childhood baseball are almost primitive. They awaken something instinctual in him, something basic. These feelings are connected to his father, and a deep sadness returns, weighs him down, always flanked with anger and regret.

  He remembers baseball with his father. The ball floated through the air, red seams spinning like the rings around a planet. There was always the smell of cut grass, the clippings gathering on his white shoes. He reached up and caught the ball, and his father shouted something encouraging so that he swelled from the deepest part of his chest. He smiled and yet always tried to hide his smile—it seemed unmanly to be affected by praise. It seemed one should take it in stride, as if it was expected. He threw the ball back to his father, harder this time, and again he watched the spinning seams, again he heard the ball smack deep into the leather.

  He feels for his phone, deep in his overcoat pocket. A wave of guilt washes over him as he looks at the screen. No one has called. How long would it take for someone to find his father? Would they call him first, or would they call the police? It would be so much easier if they called him first—he could go to the funeral home, he could be the second one there. This would excuse the presence of anything out of the ordinary: his fingerprints, or that thin slice of a mark in the otherwise perfectly round puddle of blood. He begins to doubt his decision not to call the police.

  “Hello. Earth to Cohen,” Kaye says playfully.

  “Sorry.”

  “I said, have you talked to Dad this afternoon?”

  He swallows hard. “Nah. No. I’ve been out and about.”

  She nods. “Strange,” she says, more to herself than to Cohen. “I don’t know why he’s not answering his phone.”

  It’s Cohen’s turn to nod. He tries to shout for his nephew again, tries to cheer him on, but there’s a strange obstruction in his throat, like a kink in a hose, and he stops halfway through, coughs.

  “Are you sick?” she asks without looking at him.

  “Allergies, I think.”

  She nods again, stepping to the side and trying to see around a newcomer who has stopped directly in front of them. “This weather’s been crazy. Makes my skin ache. Does Dad need one of us? Didn’t two come in last night?” She hugs her round stomach close, shivering as another burst of wind sweeps down the hill.

  “Say I should be there, Kaye. You don’t have to beat around the bush.”

  “Well,” she says, casting him a glance, “I can’t do everything around here. I am growing humans, after all.”

  He loves her. Without his father, she will be all he has left. She and Johnny. And the twins, whoever they end up being. He doubts his resolve for a moment. She means more to him than every other person in his life combined. Why shouldn’t he tell her he found their father? Why didn’t he call someone? What good was this deception?

  He wraps an arm around Kaye’s shoulders. “I hear you. Yeah, okay, I’ll make my way over there. I planned on working all night tonight anyway. Are you coming in tomorrow?”

  She’s not listening. She’s looking back at the field and hopping up and down. “Yes!” she screams. “Nice catch, Johnny!” She looks at Cohen and punches him proudly in the shoulder. Her eyes say, Did you see that?

  “Do they always play in this weather?” he asks, catching snowflakes as the flurries turn into a legitimate snow, the kind that sticks to the grass and the leaves and coats the tops of people’s heads, the slopes of their shoulders.

  She shrugs. “It’s rare to have this kind of weather during baseball season. But they do seem to start earlier every year.”

  Cohen looks over his shoulder and can no longer see the faraway hills beyond the train tracks. The wind picks up, driving the snow in horizontal lines, and everyone in the bleachers pulls their coats closer or plunges their hands into their pockets. The boys look like turtles, all of them pulling their heads down inside their collarbones, their shoulders rising against the weather. They blow into their hands, and their breath clouds out in bursts of white.

  Many things happen at once. The umpire, dressed in black and wearing a black face mask, stands up and waves both arms back and forth like a man on the tarmac waving off an airplane, calling off the game. The snow falls harder and mixes with sleet, stinging the skin. The train whistle sounds from far off, a distant warning.

  And Cohen’s phone rings. He feels it buzz in his pocket, like a lost bee.

  But he’s caught up in the mass movement of the fleeing crowd shielding themselves from the sleet and the snow, everyone trying to find their child so they can move to the shelter of their car. There is the sound of aluminum baseball bats being thrown into a canvas bag, the clanging of soles banging their way down the wet aluminum bleachers. The coaches’ sons have been charged with retrieving the bases, and they disappear into the whiteout. The sleet taps against the chain-link fence posts with the lightest of pings.

  Cohen reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone. “Hello? Beth?” he shouts into the phone, the wind crackling the sound in his receiver. He cannot hear her over the sound of the baseball bats and the shouting and the snowstorm and the sleet on metal. And the train whistle again, closer.

  “Wait a minute,” he say
s without waiting for a reply. He looks up. He remembers the children playing beside the train tracks, but he can’t see the tracks anymore through the heavy snow, so he veers over in that direction. The train whistle sounds again, and he feels panic rising, a sickening sense of being too slow to stop a future he can nearly see. Once, he had to work with a body hit by a train. He had to walk parents in to view their teenage child, pieced back together with what had been found.

  “Hey!” he shouts blindly into the storm, holding his phone at his side, getting closer to the tracks. “Where are you kids at? Get out of here!” The train approaches, only a few hundred yards away, a single bright light pointing the way. “Hey!”

  He pushes his way through the snow like someone lost among a clothesline of drying sheets. He arrives at the sandpile. The children are gone. They’ve fled the storm too.

  When the train passes, it brings a sense of anger with it, and those far-off hidden fields roil in its wake. Its whistle blast fills Cohen—in that second, it is everything. He waits fifteen seconds, thirty seconds, and the train passes.

  He turns and tries to find Kaye, sees she is already in her car, and remembers Beth is on the phone. Beth, who thinks she is delivering the most horrible news she could possibly bear. Beth, who must have walked into the funeral home basement and found his father.

  Cohen crosses the parking lot. Headlights and brake lights are everywhere as the teams disperse, and car exhaust belches out into the early spring parking lot.

  Where is the sun? he wonders. Where is the sun?

  “Beth, are you still there?” he says into the phone while jogging toward Kaye’s car. He holds up one finger to Kaye, asking her to wait.

  “Cohen, what are you doing? Are you listening to me? Did you hear what I said?” Beth asks. Her voice sounds drawn out, like a long string of sap about to break under its own weight.

  “No,” he says. “It’s snowing here. It’s windy. I can’t hear anything. I’m with Kaye.”