Lights on the Mountain Read online

  He fetched a milking stool and set it absently under a cow. Lord, how he missed that way Walter had of dealing with Clyde. Though he could not change his mood—not even Millie could do that—Walter could always find a way to alkalize it, a thing Jess had no talent for. He leaned in, resting his head against the cow’s warm side, closing his eyes. He saw again the beautiful, shimmying light and heard his father’s voice, mocking an innocent faith. He felt cheated. As a youngster he had often wished to have a swarthy complexion and a governor put on his shooting frame, so he might be mistaken for one of his friend Mike’s many siblings. The Latona family was large and loud and unabashedly religious. They were good Sicilian Catholics who baptized their fat, dark babies and confirmed their daughters and took their sons to the priest for a blessing before sending them off to war. Clyde was a pacifist, of course, a remnant of his Quaker past. He didn’t hold to war. But Walter had gone to be a soldier regardless. And Jess couldn’t help thinking things might be different if he’d done it with a blessing. Anyway, how could anyone be sure God wasn’t here, milling about the valley?

  No doubt his father was right. Clyde always was. The beam of light probably was an extraordinary reflection of the everyday sun, but did that mean it couldn’t also be more? It might also be a kind of ladder, the means for God to get down to this patch of soil Hazels had been working since old Penn first claimed these woods and set things back to the way they used to be.

  Jess realized, of course, that the farm didn’t compare to stopping over at the Latona house, where a divine visitor might at least be recognized, everyone talking at once and Rita yelling from the kitchen that He should wipe His feet on the mat. But the Hazels were decent folks. They worked hard. Surely that counted for something. Things wouldn’t need to be exactly normal either (Jess had no wish to be greedy), just as much like the old life as could be managed, under the circumstances. Walter was gone. And in the last several weeks, Mother’s letters to him had brought no reply, only a new uncertainty. It lay over the valley now, thick as a winter fog. The Hazel family, fortress of steadiness and reliability, had proved as vulnerable as any other. That couldn’t be put right. Jess yawned and reached for the near teats of his cow. But some sort of cosmic resetting of the farm’s clock to a regular cycle of work and rest might be a start toward pretending it could be.

  2

  Kerry Mountain

  Prospect, Pennsylvania

  May 1, 1952

  5:56 AM

  ELI ZOOK RAN HIS HANDS THROUGH HIS HAIR, rose from the chair he had been occupying off and on since dusk the day before, and walked stiffly across the room to the window. Sunlight had begun to filter through the curtain, and he wanted to slide it back along the rod and let it in. The night was done at last, if the trouble it had ushered in was not. It seemed an especially bright, bold ray that sliced through the dingy pane, instantly bathing the room in light. But then, mornings came sudden to this peak, he had learned. No gradual lightening of the eastern sky. No soft, downy light hatching out from the wing of the horizon. There was only this sun, full-grown and robust. He sighed, an ache for home swelling his chest. How he yearned to be there again, if only once, to see the quiet approach of dawn, to watch the slow retreat of the shadows from the fields. An Amish sun knew how to arrive in good Plain order.

  He lowered the lamp’s wick, snuffing the flame, and gazed down at the girl in the bed. She lay still with eyes closed, drawing quiet breaths. It was the muscles flexing at the hinge of her jaw that told him she was tensed. She was ready.

  Her last cry still rang in his ears, but Eli was listening now for another sound. It was not unfamiliar, the noise downstairs. Knuckles against wood. An insistent muffled pounding. But it had been a long while since he’d heard it. Maria cried out again and struggled to sit up. Her dark eyes were open now and fastened on his face. Eli turned and came back to stand by the bed. He bent to her, arranging the pillows and rolled-up quilts so they supported her back. All of this he did with a measure of caution. At the peak of a pain she was like a wounded dog and flinched at his touch. In its wake, though, she would turn to him as she might to a husband or lover, glazed eyes seeking his. Then she would stretch out her hand and clutch at his sleeve, muttering to him, tears gathered like drops of dew on the tips of her eyelashes. Whether her words cursed or blessed, Eli did not know. She suffered in her language, not his. When she was quiet again, he wiped her brow with the cloth he had been using to moisten her parched tongue and cool her cheeks, listening the while to the knocking downstairs as it grew louder, more insistent. And when it did not cease, he pressed the cloth into her hand and backed by inches from the room, severing her gaze with the bedroom door.

  The kitchen was dark still, the one window in it opened west, and he had left the lamp upstairs. He opened the door and peered out. The wide shadow on the other side of the screen spoke, a deep male voice.

  “Everything all right in there?”

  “Yah.”

  “You sure, mister? I’m not saying you’d lie, but I’m pretty familiar with the sound of a female in distress.”

  “Yah? You a doctor?”

  “Not a doctor. A farrier. On my way down to the Hazel place for milk. My Peggy wants it fresh and Jesse, that’s Clyde’s youngest, will milk right into the pail for me. Doesn’t come any fresher than that, I tell her, ’less you’re a suckling calf. Anyhow, I got a queer urge to come up this way, saw you had a horse tethered out by your shed. Either there’s a panicked mare upstairs, or your woman is getting close. You got help, or no?”

  “Nah.”

  “You want any?”

  Eli hesitated, just as the girl cried out again. The man was not waiting for an answer now. He jerked the screen door open and plowed through it, brushing Eli aside with ease. Once he was inside the kitchen, he stopped and stood still with head cocked, as if listening for the long scream that floated down directly from above. Even as it pierced the air, he was turning on his heel in that direction. The floorboards groaned as he lumbered into the hallway, tossing his hat and coat aside as he went, and vanished.

  Eli went to the table and sank into a chair. For three days, he had struggled and worked to rein in his thoughts, threatening every minute to bolt. How he had managed to keep vigil with Maria all last night, he did not know. He only knew he was drained of all such power now, so frail feeling and limp in his limbs, as if the days and nights had been spent in a hot high fever that at last was broken.

  The farrier had found the room. The big raw voice turned gentle as a midwife’s as he first consoled her, then questioned. Her answers, when she found the breath, told Eli that she had decided already to put her trust in the man. He wondered if her mutterings had been prayers and she believed the man to be heaven sent.

  Eli listened as the farrier’s voice became a low, encouraging rumble. They were a team now in earnest. Listening, his head grew heavy. Maria had, after all, no more need of him. The little help he could give her, clumsy words and clumsier ministrations, was useless now that the big farrier had come. And there was no use in fretting, worrying whether the man was the sort who would talk. It was too late for that. And somehow Eli had a strange certainty he wasn’t. Each of these thoughts eased his mind a little, and yet a little more, until he stopped fighting his weariness altogether. Making a cradle of his arms, he lowered his head into it, the sound of her laboring soothing him, like the fury of a storm way off in the distance.

  He woke to the weight of a hand lying firm on his shoulder. He looked up to see that sunlight slanted through the kitchen window. A man stood over him, as big and broad as an upright ox, judgment glinting in his clear blue eyes.

  “Don’t exactly seem like you’ve been wearing the floor out down here.” The man took his hand from Eli’s shoulder and crossed one arm over the other, muscles straining against the fabric of his gray cotton shirt. Blood stained his turned-up sleeves. His expression was hard. “I’ve got four boys. And each time I slept nary a wink. Not until a babe was
stowed safe in his mother’s arms.”

  Eli rubbed a hand over his eyes, his brain fogged with weariness. The man seemed real enough. But why was he here? Why did he stand in Eli’s kitchen talking of boys, and of his wife giving birth? Then he remembered that Maria was in labor. And that her labor had collided with one of his spells. It was over now, the spell—it had run a short course all on its own (Maria too focused on her own pain to quiet him with a song). The fair that had set up twirling and hawking inside his head had closed down, departed at last. But he didn’t hope for rest. There was none of that to be had. For his sort of weary, sleep must always suffice. Even as the man stood over him and the stained sleeves and the terrible quiet upstairs pricked needle-sharp at the edges of his mind, his lethargy returned, sudden and powerful. His head was a burden, his neck too flimsy to support the weight of it. He had only one thought, one desire, and that was to lay it back down in the comforting circle of his arms. If only the man wasn’t still there, still talking.

  “It was a fight,” the farrier was saying. “One the bitty thing meant to win. She came feet first, eyes open, looking straight into mine. Little hoot-owl eyes. Wiselike. If you know what I mean.” He peered at Eli, his blue eyes narrowed, then shrugged. “Gave me a queer, queer feeling, that’s all I know,” he said. “That same feeling got me up here this morning. Could be punchy, I guess, but it doesn’t seem now like stopping at your place was my idea at all. I’m going.” He rolled down his sleeves, unmindful of the stains, and put on his coat. He glanced around the kitchen, looking for his cap, still lying on the floor by the stairs where he had tossed it. He picked it up and set it on his head, settling it low on his brow. “You want me to go by Doc Bloom’s and have him come look in on them?”

  Eli roused. “No doctor,” he said.

  The man looked hard at him again, blue eyes sharp. Then he shrugged, spreading his hands.

  “Your business, mister. I’m aware you’uns got your own ways of doing.” His gaze went then to Eli’s suspenders, flicked over the homespun shirt and buttoned fly, and Eli knew that this farrier was a man who did not judge, unless it was correctly. “That pride won’t serve you near so well out here among us English, though. I’ll warn you that. The girl is weak. Weaker than she ought to be. She hadn’t the strength to bring a child into this world on her own. If the little ’un hadn’t a been so all-fired ready and I hadn’t happened by the way I did, I believe you’d be passing a grim morning. But she sings the same tune as you. No doctor.” He opened the door and stepped onto the porch. “I don’t hold to pressing folks against their will,” he said, through the screen. “So, I’m not pressing, just advising. You ought to get Doc Bloom.”

  “The first thing you said was the right one,” Eli said, getting up from the table. He locked the screen door, snapping the brass hook into its eye. “It is my business.”

  “Don’t worry, mister. I’ve said my piece,” the farrier said. “A more generous piece, folks will tell you, than I’m used to parceling out.” He turned to go. At the step he halted and turned back. “That’s a pretty trotter you’ve got tied up out there,” he said. “Ten-year-old, I’m guessing, though she could as easily be twelve. How long since she foundered?”

  “Last week.”

  “Well you did right, tethering. Keep her off that rich grass. At least until I can get back up here. No feed either. Sweet or otherwise. Hay and plenty of clean fresh water, that’s all. You won’t mind, I guess, me stopping off in the next day or two and seeing to her feet?”

  “Yah. I don’t mind.”

  “Good. So long, then.”

  Once again, the man stopped at the step, turned around, and came back to the door.

  “Come pretty near to forgetting my manners. Congratulations, Mr….”

  “Zook. Eli Zook.”

  “Pat Badger.” The man grinned, his expression turning friendly. “I’d ask you to unlock that screen and shake hands, but I fear it would seem like backing up, seeing as we’ve been pretty well acquainted already by circumstance. Don’t know what it signifies, Mr. Zook, a child choosing this day to get born. But it does seem fitting, someway, for that fey-eyed one upstairs. As I said before, congratulations. She’s a fine posy for your basket.”

  3

  JESS WAS ALONE IN THE BARN, working over Maggie’s tack, when Pat Badger finally eased in, looking tired but pleased. The farrier’s wide chest was caved in a way Jess knew well—that good, spent-shouldered slump of a man who has just finished some hard but satisfying work. He had seen Clyde look that way, generally when a calf he’d given up for dead slipped alive into the world and began to try out its legs.

  “We’ve stripped all the cows, Pat,” Jess said. “And Father’s gone out to the Amish already with the milk.”

  “And what am I to do then?”

  Jess grinned.

  “I reckon you could go by the supermarket on your way home and get some store-bought. Pour it into Peggy’s pail and see if she’s the wiser.”

  “Oh, she’d be the wiser,” Pat said, dryly. “And if she wasn’t, her cats would be. She’s got six now, you know, all Siamese. Petty, tattling creatures.”

  He turned and went into the cooler, where he knew he would find Peggy’s milk. When he had filled his pail, he came back and leaned against the tack room door, watching Jess. Pat never lingered. Jess decided the farrier must have something on his mind and stayed quiet, kneading soap into the collar seams with his thumb, a little self-consciously now. He often watched Pat at this work, but he could not recall that it had ever been the other way around. The rag, which had been slipping smoothly over the collar before, began under Pat’s keen gaze to drag and catch until at last Jess lost his rhythm altogether. He set the collar aside.

  “What’s the day brought you so far, Pat?”

  “Miracles, mostly,” Pat said, with a slow, broad grin. “And some burden,” he added, turning sober. “One doesn’t come without the other, you know.”

  “I don’t know,” Jess said. “Burdens, I’ve got some experience with. Miracles, not so much. Although, now that you mention it, I thought I had one on the line this morning. Turned out to be a trick of the sun.”

  “It was a wonder of a dawn, wasn’t it?” Pat said. The grin returned, wider than before. “‘He is beautiful and radiant with great splendor. Of You, Most High, he bears the likeness.’”

  “I’ve heard that,” Jess said. “Or I should say, I’ve read it. On a plaque at Latona’s Deli. It’s a prayer, isn’t it? By some saint or other. But you’re not Catholic.”

  “It’s a hymn. And no, I’m not Catholic. But neither was the man who first sang it out. Not the way I see it. Attach the word to a fellow like Francis of Assisi, and it becomes a tag in his ear. Before, he was free as God. Now, because of the tag, he’s owned by men who sift his every word and deed through their soft white hands. Wheat, they say. Or chaff. But for them, it’s the sifting that’s important.”

  While he talked, Jess listened, curious. There was an odd spark in Pat’s eye today. And he had never known the man to bring forth so many words at once without pause.

  “Peggy’s Presbyterian, isn’t she?”

  “Methodist, but that’s splitting hairs. Hand me those reins, Jesse. I hate to be idle.”

  When he had passed the reins and a soaped rag over to Pat, Jess picked up the collar and went back to kneading the leather into the suppleness that lent it strength. They sat for a while then in comfortable silence, Jess stealing occasional envious glances at Pat’s huge hands, working soap over the reins with absentminded ease, like a hoary old fiddler rosining his bow.

  “Do Methodists have saints?” he said, after a few minutes.

  Pat chuckled. “Lord, no. Peg’d have your scalp for suggesting it. They’ve just got good Bible-believing folks in her church.” He shook his head. “But there’s plenty of sifting goes on.”

  “Are you one of those?”

  “What? A Bible believer?”

  “Yes.”
r />   “Well, now,” Pat said, with a sideways glance at Jess, his hands still going at the reins, “I generally view that as a trick question. Most folks who ask it have got reasons other than curiosity, which tends to incline me not to answer. But you aren’t asking what they are. I know that. And I don’t mind admitting to you,” he glanced around the barn, as if his wife might somehow be listening, “that there are Scriptures I hold very dear. Especially the Psalms. All on earth that strikes me as good or wearies my soul nigh to death once also moved an ancient scribe, and he set it down in words. That, to me, is a marvelous thing. And I don’t take it lightly.” Pat paused, looking up from his work. “What about you, Jesse? Are you a Bible man?”

  “I guess not. Mother’s kin were foot-washers back in Kentucky. She keeps the old Jenkins Bible on a shelf in the front room. Walter and I used to take it down and look at it sometimes when we were kids. He knew where to find the parts Mother would never have let us read if it was any other book. Kings, one and two. Song of Solomon. The two of us had some pretty good times with those. But I’ve never much read it on my own.”

  Jess happened to look toward the barn door just then and gave a guilty start. There was his father, coming through it. He had made awfully good time, getting to the cheese factory at New Wilmington and back already. Jess’s cheeks burned. He didn’t like to think his father might have heard him asking what Clyde would consider silly, womanish questions of the family farrier. Pat’s expression had turned sober. He handed the halter to Jess and stood up. “I need a word, Clyde. If you’ve got time,” he said.

  Pat had not stayed just to be companionable, Jess realized, and left the men to their business. He gathered up the harness pieces and took them into the tack room. When he had finished stowing the tack away and came out, the two had left the barn. He looked out and saw them walking away together toward Pat’s truck. They made a curious pair of figures. Alike, and yet not. Set across their heads a flat stick would surely measure horizontal, but through the shoulders Pat made two of Clyde.