Lights on the Mountain Read online

  PRAISE FOR LIGHTS ON THE MOUNTAIN

  “It is a great satisfaction to read this book and feel how deeply I may ponder it and find no effort lacking. All the threads are fully spun, all woven together. It is a well-made whole.”

  —MELINDA JOHNSON, author of Shepherding Sam

  “Tuggle has a wonderfully poetic voice that makes this story as deep and rich as the ancient ground beneath the characters’ feet. It is a delight to the senses in the way she grounds us in the sights, sounds, and scents of the Pennsylvania mountains, and a refreshment for the spirit in the way she shows us the spiritual reality existing within and around the physical world.”

  —BEV COOKE, author of Royal Monastic and Keeper of the Light

  “A wise and warm exploration of the bonds of farm life, faith, and the saving grace of family.”

  —MICHAEL HEATON, author of the Minister of Culture column, The Plain Dealer

  “Jess leads a quiet country life, but one interrupted by catastrophe. An early experience of the divine marks him, but he spends years learning to appreciate it, years in which those he loves, faithful and otherwise, shape his way of being in the world. Being with him is at once comfortable and challenging, but the rhythms of a farm life and the warmth of the men and women who live it, beautifully imagined, allow us a certain refreshment and even, perhaps, moments of light.”

  —M. BERRY, Missouri State University

  “Lights on the Mountain has no unnecessary or trite characters. All, especially Jess, are given the time needed to discover and enter into the deep peace that comes from finding the solid ground chosen for them by their Lord. Truly the sign of a good book. I was quite disappointed to reach the end.”

  —REV. MOTHER MAGDALENA

  “This novel glows with a quiet beauty. The characters live. The love stories transcend any romance novel I’ve ever read, while remaining rooted in Pennsylvania soil. Gorgeously written, the very turns of phrase help readers see the world in new ways. Tuggle may well have birthed a new genre, a decidedly American Eastern Orthodox literary fiction.”

  —LESLIE BAYNES, Associate Professor of New Testament, Missouri State University

  “Like a Russian nesting doll, except every layer is richer, the deeper you go. Gorgeous prose, complicated characterization, and a barely evident sense of provident grace combine to make this a book that forces you to stop, listen to the silences between words, and glory in the beauty hidden there. A book to return to again and again.”

  —NICHOLAS KOTAR, author of The Song of the Sirin and the Raven Son series

  LIGHTS

  ON THE

  MOUNTAIN

  A NOVEL

  CHERYL ANNE TUGGLE

  PARACLETE PRESS

  BREWSTER, MASSACHUSETTS

  2019 First Printing

  Lights on the Mountain:

  A Novel

  Copyright © 2019 Cheryl Anne Tuggle

  ISBN 978-1-64060-166-6

  Paraclete Fiction is an imprint of Paraclete Press, Inc., the Paraclete Fiction name and logo (wing) are trademarks of Paraclete Press, Inc.

  Lights on the Mountain is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Tuggle, Cheryl Anne, 1964- author.

  Title: Lights on the mountain : a novel / Cheryl Anne Tuggle.

  Description: Brewster, Massachusetts : Paraclete Press, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018031179 | ISBN 9781640601666 (paperback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: RELIGION / Christianity / Literature & the Arts. | FICTION / Christian / General. | FICTION / Religious. | GSAFD: Christian fiction

  Classification: LCC PS3620.U375 L54 2018 | DDC 813.6/—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031179

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in an electronic retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Published by Paraclete Press | Brewster, Massachusetts | www.paracletepress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Get thee out of thy country,

  and from thy kindred,

  and from thy father’s house,

  unto a land that I will show thee.

  —GENESIS 12:1 (KJV)

  Dawn and resurrection are synonymous.

  —VICTOR HUGO

  To earth hast Thou come down O Master, to save Adam; and not finding him on earth, Thou hast descended into hell, seeking him there.

  —LAMENTATIONS OF HOLY SATURDAY

  For my husband, who is proof that a good man is not so very hard to find and to the nuns

  IT WAS FOREORDAINED. That’s what Gracie’s mama would claim when all that was to take place had taken place. And though Darya Morozov was a religious woman, sure of many things Jess Hazel considered too uncertain to be certain, there were times. Maybe a beam of October sun would come slipping through the window and set Galina’s hair on fire. Or David Busco would go limping home from Muddy Creek in a red blaze of dusk, fish basket heavy with trout. Times when Jess would remember Kerry Mountain transfigured at dawn, a lesser Sinai of the Allegheny Plateau, and be obliged to admit that Gracie’s mama might be right. There was, after all, no proof she wasn’t.

  Perhaps it all was in some unfathomable way meant to happen as it did. For as Darya put it: How else does the tall, tall man with the sober jaw and the eyes planted so deep find the girl who can see the promise of harvest in them? Unless she believes, as Gracie did, that farmers may also be saints and mountain-dwelling fools, holy.

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  PART FOUR

  PART ONE

  1

  Hazel Valley

  Prospect, Pennsylvania

  May 1, 1952

  5:53 AM

  WHEN JESS HAZEL LEFT the warmth of the house that morning of the Light and trudged down the hill to the barn, he did it with unusual reluctance. He was in a dark mood, tired to the bone after another long night of poor sleep. The conversation between his parents, low and tense and punctuated by his mother’s sobs, had gone so late it was early by the time it ended. How early, he did not know. If he had risen to check the time, Clyde and Millie would have known he was lying awake in the room above theirs, every nerve stretched tight. What he did know was that by 5:30, when he’d left his bed unrested, all sound had ceased. And he knew that down in the kitchen, the percolator, which should have been working at a pot of coffee strong enough to get him through chores, was as cold and silent as the house. Seeing it, he had crept back upstairs to finish dressing in the dark, cursing the bed across from his own. Cursing the absence of his only brother in it.

  The Fourth of July would mark a year since Walter had up and joined the Marines, got himself shipped off to Parris Island for basic training and from there to Korea, to help solve that peck of trouble. Jess missed him with the pain of a phantom limb. Two years and three months between them, but he and Walter were as close as twins. So close, they were, in fact, that Jess sometimes pondered, as he was inclined to do all life’s hidden things, the strength of their bond. A pure gift, he would most often decide, after considering awhile. What else could it be, when they were as different as dawn from dusk and hardly looked like kin?

  He and Walter resembled one another so
little, in fact, that at the drunken send-off shindig Walter’s friends had thrown—a bonfire gathering of folks who (if you didn’t count Mike and Sully Latona) were all strangers to Jess—not one person had taken them for brothers. Likeable, easygoing Walter had the dark Cherokee eyes and the small, light frame of their mother’s folks. Jess was six feet and seven inches, taller than any man in the valley, even their father. And as if the curse of absurd height had not already marked him as the peculiar son, nature had also given Jess a wiry bramble of hair, black as a crow’s wing, and sunken eyes of the palest gray. “Hungry,” a canny old woman selling lemonade at the county fair had once said of his eyes, “like a young Lincoln,” after which he had started casting them mostly downward.

  He made his way around the barn to the milking shed behind, mud sucking at his boots. Storms in the south had brought to the valley warm winds and an early thaw. He thought of climbing up to the loft and knocking back in the hay as Walter used to do, he was that weary. But it would never work and he knew it. When Walter had slept in the loft, Jess had always been tending to the herd. Left to wait, the cows would complain in voices loud enough to bring an irritated Clyde. Also, it was Thursday. Pat Badger would be pulling down the lane soon, wanting milk for the weekend. Not the sort of man you asked to stand by and watch you dig sleep out of your eyes.

  Sage. That was how Jess’s mother, Millie, described Pat. A single word, spoken as though she held an egg on her tongue, was somehow always closer to the point than Jess could get working with full sentences. Pat did take a keener, wider, more generous view of the world than most anyone else Jess knew. In fact, on another morning when Jess wasn’t so cross, he might have sought counsel, asked the sage old farrier to see what he couldn’t, which was how a fellow was supposed to live with any pleasure now that Walter wasn’t going to come sliding into the milking shed of an evening, late as the dickens and cheerfully unrepentant. No working wisdom out of Pat today, though. Jess had no patience for it. The man had to be tapped like a great old tree, and the sap ran very slow.

  The horses had heard him coming down the hill. Big Jake thumped on the stall door with his hoof and Maggie called out, shrill and insistent, demanding Jess stop by the tack room and dip his hand into the potbellied jar on the shelf. He ignored the pair. They knew full well Millie’s ginger snaps were only given out in exchange for work. Some days they begged for them anyway. He ducked to miss the doorframe as he entered the milking shed and slipped quietly inside. The bawling of the cows only made him more eager for the peace the work of milking would bring. He set down the sanitizing buckets and began filling the troughs with fodder. When all was in readiness, he opened the lower door, letting in the noisy, complaining herd. The boss cow entered first. He greeted her as he always did, with a gentle slap on the rump. As she passed, he gazed over the bony crests of her hips to the valley stretched long and slender below the barn. Where the thin light caught the dew, the grass sparkled and glinted, as if the pasture had a sugar glaze.

  So often at this hour, when the sun still hid behind the wall of Kerry Mountain, when the valley lay wrapped in the pale gray shadows of earliest dawn, Jess felt the thrill of a watcher, stealing in to witness a hidden, mystic rite. It pleased him to think that however old and practiced the ritual was now, it hadn’t always been. A gawky young first night had once had to learn this graceful way of making an exit, of taking proper leave of the world, smoothly handing it off to the day.

  It was just as this rite was ending that the light appeared. Before his eyes it shaped itself into a slender golden column, a beam such as he’d only seen once in his life, and that was in a picture on the wall of a neighbor’s house. Long gone now, that family had been of some small religious sect looked at askance by valley folks, who were too taken up with eking a living from Prospect’s rocky hills to worry over the exact day and hour of the second coming of Christ. It was to be a pretty rosy event, though, evidently, for the picture Jess had seen showed a blue-eyed, gentle-looking Jesus, riding barefoot out of heaven on a shining beam of light. Only that beam, as he remembered it, had pointed toward earth. This light shot up from the mountain peak—a single, radiant, upwardly moving stream that, once it reached the sky (a sky now in bright, blinding glow), seemed to rend the fabric of it and continue on, as if seeking a destination beyond the visible world.

  “Glory,” Jess said, a word that echoed around the quiet valley as unexpected as the light.

  Glory. Not a word he used, customarily. It was the right one, though, for now that he had spoken it, the light appeared to shimmer, gleaming a darker, richer gold against the yellow brightness of the sky.

  It began to dance.

  And while it danced—the entire amber-lit length of it quivering in a holy, grace-filled shimmy—Jess watched, keeping as still as he could manage. His legs were trembling, his heart beat hard against his ribs, causing his breaths to grow short and quick, and his palms had begun to sweat. But he had a strong urge to stay put, to keep silent and wait. For what, he would never be able with any certainty to say. A pronouncement of some kind, perhaps. The song of an otherworldly choir. Whatever it was never materialized.

  The feeling of expecting it would be with him a long, long time.

  “Shekinah Light.”

  At the sound of his father’s voice, Jess turned and saw Clyde coming out of the shed, watched as he ducked his head for the overhang, crossed in two strides the path between them, and came to stand next to Jess. Shoulder to shoulder, they gazed at the scene. The dance was over. The light was fading now, but still visible as it hovered above the mountain.

  “I’ve never seen it, mind,” Clyde said, in the same flat voice he used to mention a possibility of rain, “only heard. God himself, the old folks used to say it was, paying some lucky devil a visit. It’s a sun pillar. Just ice crystals way up in the atmosphere, reflecting the light of the rising sun.”

  From the corner of his eye, Jess checked his father’s face, measuring his expression against the cut of his statement. He wished to find a hint of wonder in those level gray eyes, just the barest flicker of awe, but the man was gone. Clyde was inside the milking shed already, affectionately cussing the cows as he locked them in the stanchions. Soon the shed got quiet. His father had begun the washing. A scrupulous bathing of all the udders while the water in the sanitizing buckets was still hot and the cows were going contentedly at their fodder.

  The yolk-colored sun was well above the peak now and the beam was fading, almost gone. This was all right with Jess, for the spell was broken anyhow. He turned and went into the shed, bending his long legs and ducking his head as he entered, just as his father had done. The two had not received their height from Edward Hazel, Clyde’s great-grandfather, who had built the house and barn. Nor had it come from Raleigh, Edward’s son, who later built the long, low-slung milking shed—an odd decision for the time, and one that had surely caused people to wonder if he had lost all good Hazel sense. There were farms now in their part of Pennsylvania, the western part, that were specialized, but not then. In those days farms existed mostly to sustain themselves, and only when that end was certain did they profit on the excess.

  It was Raleigh’s shed that had fated all Hazels to be dairymen. Jess knew it was because Clyde never let his sons forget: “Do you see how important your actions are?”

  Jess had to smile, thinking of this, for he could almost hear his brother’s voice. Walter was asking him to recall the time Clyde had got on the subject during morning chores.

  Jess and Walter had just got the milking underway when Walter mentioned he was going to need the outhouse soon. He had no more finished saying it when their father walked in. Seeing the look on Clyde’s face, Jess had taken a firmer grip on the teats of his cow and sat straighter on his stool, for his father hated to see him slouch. And as always, he had worried for his brother, who never worried a straw for himself. He’d been so glad that Walter had not left his chores and gone up the hill, as he had said he might. Clyd
e stood like a tree in the door. Some worry, either past or future, had been gnawing at him that morning, for he began in the usual way—abruptly, as if Walter and Jess had been in on his thoughts, helping him stir the stew.

  “You boys just have no idea how your every move affects the family.”

  At that, Walter had snickered—softly, so only Jess could hear.

  “It’s time you two started using more care, got some direction before going and doing a thing. Especially you, Walter, as the oldest.” Clyde stepped inside, positioning himself so he could see both Jess and Walter, each seated at the side of his own cow.

  Jess could not see Walter’s expression, but had no doubt it was as innocent as a baby’s.

  “In fact, Walter,” Clyde said, “before you go to make another move, I want you to see me first. Let me consider it awhile.”

  Walter always had his wits about him. Even as a boy of thirteen. He had held back from replying, letting the tension build, the only sounds in the shed being those made by the cows—tails whipping up to swat flies, the quiet slap and swish of thick wet tongues washing down the feed trough—and just when Jess didn’t think he could take it another second, Walter had said, in a voice as straight as string, “Say I did want to make a move, Father. Wanted it bad. How much time would you need to consider? I mean, just how long is a while?”

  Jess was used to such jokes, being generally the butt of them. If he could have seen the insolent glint in his brother’s eyes, the telltale sign that Walter’s lithe brain was working at a jest, he might have been ready. But he couldn’t see the glint, couldn’t see Walter at all, and when the question came, delivered with perfect, comic soberness, Jess had to fake a coughing fit to cover his laughter. He was sober, now, remembering his father’s red face. You just never knew if Clyde would grin and ask to be let in on the joke, allowing Walter’s humor to settle light on them all, or turn and stride away, causing chores to proceed in silence so thick you could cut it with a knife. That morning it had been the latter.