Lights on the Mountain Read online

  Jess turned the horses out to graze and went to work mucking stalls. It was a daily chore with all the rain. A pair of draft horses confined to stall made a mess directly proportionate to their size. As he passed the open barn door, he caught sight of Maggie.

  “What’s your rush?” he called out to her, laughing.

  Out to pasture for the first time in days, she stepped as unhurriedly as ever, picking her way down the hill toward the tenderest new grass.

  Clyde was a Percheron man, partial to the breed for their willing, cautious nature and careful feet. Pat raised Clydesdales. His horses were not known for their ability to work, which was likely to be considerable, but for their beauty and form. Pat shipped them far and wide to rich folks who coveted them for show. As far as Jess knew, his father was the only non-Amish farmer left in Butler County who still used horsepower in his fields. Machines guzzled gas and belched exhaust and broke down in the field when the sun was still high overhead. That was not progress, Clyde insisted, but a foolish waste of hard-earned cash. Once established, grass grew free for the cutting. And a draft horse came designed for hard work.

  After the war, a county extension agent, fresh from the university and full of zeal, had come out to Hazel Valley, Jess remembered, to get Clyde in step with the times. The future of dairy farming lay in mechanized milking, the agent said. It was the only answer for a population so rapidly on the rise. Why, the entire industry was about bust wide open. Clyde had better think about getting on board. Jess’s father had looked at the agent as if he spoke in a foreign tongue.

  “Industry? What industry? I’m in the business of keeping my own family fed. And my neighbor’s, if there’s a need. He does the same, and his neighbor does likewise. I’ll be straight with you, son. It’s a mighty satisfactory arrangement. So, unless you’ve got something more than higher yields and lowered contentment to offer, we can take our leave of one another now. That sound you hear is my cows, begging me to lay my unprogressive hands on them and ease them of their milk.”

  The agent had gone away thwarted, a look of utter confusion on his face as he got into his truck and departed from Hazel Valley. When they were alone again, Clyde had turned to Jess, laying a hand on his neck, and said, “We’ve not seen the last of that fellow, Jesse boy, and if I know anything, there will be more just like him. Pay heed now, because this place will be yours someday.”

  And Jess had smiled and said, “Mine and Walter’s.”

  He was twelve then, young enough that he still believed, still dreamed. Of his own house nestled into the rise of the hill above the northwest forty. Of working the fields with his horses while Walter tended their dairy herd. Of their wives, sitting together on the porch at twilight, snapping beans and gossiping. And of their children, hunting the nests of field mice and rabbits among the rows of drying hay, pleading, as their fathers used to do, for the nests to be spared when the time for baling came.

  “We’ll see about Walter,” Clyde had said, hardness creeping into his voice. “Your brother doesn’t have our zeal for this life, you know. There’s red blood in his veins. We’ve got dirt in ours, you and me.”

  Jess’s skinny chest had swelled with pride, then contracted again at the thought that Father might have it right about Walter.

  “Machines make factories, Jesse,” his father had said then, getting back to his subject, “not farms. A good farm knows its size. And the best farm has eyes no bigger than its stomach. If you can remember that, you’ll do well.”

  Of course, all that the agent had prophesied had speedily come to pass. These days, everyone got their milk from the big mechanized dairies, and Clyde was left selling his to the Amish for cheese.

  The stalls were emptied now, scraped down to the clay floor. Jess laid down a thickness of clean straw and wheeled the muck cart out to the manure pile. West of the barn, Pat’s old blue Ford truck went ambling down the lane. Clyde was walking up the hill to the house, a grim look on his face. He wondered what Pat had needed to see his father about. And if it had anything to do with what had kept him from coming around at milking time. Perhaps it had something to do with what burdens he’d said the morning had brought. He thought then of Pat’s miracles and grinned. He had snuck up to the house that morning and looked in the encyclopedia. The light was just what Clyde had said it was, tiny particles of ice, reflecting the rays of the rising sun.

  And it had danced.

  4

  SPRING WAS LONGER THAT YEAR THAN MOST, or so it seemed to Jess. Wetter too. Perhaps in part because of his mother’s sadness. The summer that followed was more the usual kind, each day a single blazing fire set to burn through the working hours and die out at dusk. Of a morning, Jess wore his coat in the barn. The nights were that cool.

  In late July, more than a year since he’d gone away, they finally got word of Walter. Missing. Presumed dead.

  There was no strife on the first floor after the telegram came to keep Jess awake at night. But it was a dread silence that took its place, and he almost wished for its return. His mother had ceased to speak his brother’s name, or very nearly—a change that troubled Jess no end. When he did chance to hear Millie talking of her eldest, it was plain that Walter had become the child of her remembering heart, not the son of her future.

  Then, in the wake of a slow, dry autumn without beauty or marked change, it was suddenly winter, and Jess had no more need to fret over what was, or was not, being said downstairs between his folks. He dropped all pretense of hope for Walter’s return from Korea too. It was of no use. His mother was gone.

  “It was only natural and right, the way it happened,” Jess said to Margit Busco, the neighbor who tried hard to keep him fed during the first shocked, muted days of his orphaning.

  Margit was one-half of a pair of widowed sisters-in-law the Hazels had always only ever referred to as the Hungarians. Clyde and Millie had not been friendly with the two women, who kept goats on the back porch and chickens under the front and hawked their garden harvest from a stand on the highway, but Jess had always liked them, if mostly in secret. And he had never been gladder to see anyone than on those nights he came up from the barn to find Margit in his kitchen reheating beef stroganoff, or cabbage rolls or cauliflower soup or whatever else she had fed her two small grandsons for dinner. He was glad not just for the food, but for Margit’s stocky stolid presence, which hushed, if only for an hour or two, the echo of the empty house. If Margit had no hopeful word to say, she was likely to say nothing at all. It was perhaps this trait that Jess liked most in the old woman, for hers was a companionable silence, altogether different from that of his ghosts.

  When she was sure Jess had eaten all he wanted, though it was never as much as she thought he should, Margit would take a glass down from the cabinet, rinse the coffee from Jess’s cup, and pour them each a drink. And with his tongue loosened by whiskey, Jess would find himself talking about his folks.

  “They were a team,” he’d say, leaning in close, so as not to shout while speaking of the dead.

  His dead.

  Margit was hard of hearing in one ear and only grasped a little English with the other, and Jess would have developed a strong need by then, his cup being almost empty, to make sure she not only heard but also understood. He wished her to know just how fitting it was for Clyde and Millie to be in the truck together when it slipped the road at Old Line Bridge.

  Nobody saw it happen, but Jess had with his tireless imagination viewed the scene of the accident in his mind a thousand times since: watched in slow motion his mother’s small, slender fingers uncurl from her lap as she reached for the door handle, saw his father’s black eyebrows form a thick, wondering knot as he felt the loss of control in the steering wheel, understood too late that the truck’s tires were leaving the road. Had there been any last declarations of devotion or asking forgiveness of one another as they waited for the frigid waters of the Beaver River in January to close tight their steel tomb? Jess had his doubts. He knew for sure ther
e were no prayers echoing around the truck cab, no desperate pleas for divine assistance. If the folks could have hired the Creator to lend them a hand, paid him a good, fair wage to pluck them from the icy flow, well, that would have been all right, and they might have agreed to it. Anything else was charity. And that was not the Hazel way.

  “A team, I tell you,” Jess would say again, anxiously seeking Margit’s faded blue eyes with his own. “As solid a working pair as Maggie and Big Jake.”

  And Margit would listen, quietly drinking. Then, without a word, she would drain the whiskey from her glass, and going to the sink she would rinse it, drying it carefully with a towel before putting it back in the cupboard. All this while Jess waited, agonized, for her to nod and agree. In the end, she would, though she could not seem to manage it looking him in the eye.

  “Sure, they was, Jesse,” she would finally say, reaching politely for his cup. “Sure they was.”

  5

  FOR FIVE YEARS JESS LIVED as if he had been marooned alone in his own valley. A castaway. The farm his lonesome island. He ran the dairy wholly on his own steam, and worked his fields in solitude, except for those few days in summer when he would hire help for the haying. A man if he could get one. Two boys if he couldn’t. In later years, when his long, straight legs had begun to bow a little and his joints often ached, he would look back and marvel at the callous way he had treated his young body.

  “Not a drop of mercy,” he would exclaim then. “Too young, I guess, to realize there would only be the one.”

  And he would shake his head. Gently. Sympathetically. As if he were recalling someone else’s life.

  At the time, though, he had no such compassion. He worked his limbs as if they were forged of iron, stopping only when to not do so became absurd. He never would have used a horse as hard.

  He moved through the days as if through mud. Morning and evening, the cows still made their way up the hill to the barn, complaining to Jess of bags stretched to discomfort. Only now he greeted the herd (his herd) in silence. He milked as dutifully as ever but took little of the old pleasure in hearing the tinny first thwack of milk against the bucket, the knowledge that he gave a cow ease. When the snow had gone, and the sun leaned nearer the earth and all was freshened and new, he stood along his tilled and planted fields and saw the sight every farmer covets: small green fingers unfolding to the light. Evidence of viable seed. Proof he hasn’t sown in vain. The sight hardly moved him. Nowhere near, anyway, to his old glee.

  Then one morning the fog lifted from the upper pasture and he found one of his heifers tending the still, limp body of her first calf. When he squatted beside the calf, he saw a reason to hope: a web of amniotic material covered its mouth and nose. A swift swipe of his palm over its face and the membrane had been whisked away, but the calf did not breathe, so he reached up and snapped a twig from the sycamore the cow had calved under, and bent to the calf with it, tickling its pale blue nostrils. Anytime a stillborn calf suddenly shook itself and lived was a sure thrill for Jess, always filled him with a marvelous, springing-up awareness of kinship with all that lived and breathed on earth. This calf—it was a little heifer—did all that. She sneezed and coughed and even, with encouragement from the cow, struggled to her feet. But though Jess stood by waiting for it, the old feeling never came.

  Its absence unnerved him.

  Whether an animal lived or died, it was all the same evidence of nature’s resilience. Both Clyde and Pat had always insisted that, in rare agreement. But to Jess, watching the calf suckle with an encouraging vigor only an hour after her birth, it seemed only to reveal a fickle nature. This life was a struggle. That, he knew well. It was a mighty one too, some days. But any hardship that had come had always seemed balanced by a certain joy: that of courting the earth and having her yield. It was real wealth, joy. The heart of the whole thing, to his mind. He’d always felt richer than his friends who lived in town, who knew no more of husbandry than to weed the backyard garden or water a strip of lawn, had secretly pleasured in knowing that his was a life of privilege.

  The calf was sated, her belly full of colostrum. She collapsed in the grass to sleep. Next to her, the cow began placidly to graze. Jess turned away, satisfied that the heifer was going to mother naturally, no further help from him. He was glad, but gladness did not lift the uneasiness that had descended. He felt strange. Suddenly off kilter. As if he’d struck out across ground that looked level but wasn’t. Even when the folks were alive, and Walter was not fighting a war or presumed dead, and they had all been as knit as a glove, Jess had been given to bouts of light melancholy, the consequence of living too much in his own head, of too many conversations had only with himself. But he had no experience with discontent. To be so suddenly ill at ease with this life he loved was to be abruptly vacated. Emptied of even the plainest pleasure. If on this morning in his pasture nature had chanced to be kind, Jess felt no urge to gloat.

  Sleep was elusive. Now more than ever. It came only with exhaustion.

  Jess was troubled by dreams—vague waking fears that rearranged themselves into worrisome, realistic scenes as he slept. To avoid them, he took to staying up very late, his eyes bulging from weariness and nerves.

  The electric light his mother had so coveted, pleased as a child on Christmas morn when the first pole appeared in the valley, was distasteful to him now. It glared. Exposed. Revealed his lone state. For the darkest hours he would light an oil lamp, staying in the small, kind circle of its glow until milking time, reading as if his life depended on it The Journals of Lewis and Clark.

  The Journals were a onetime Christmas present to Walter from an aunt who lived way off in California. She did not know her sister’s boys. Not well enough, anyhow, to know that of the two of them only Jess read for pleasure. And since Walter was never one to hoard what he had no use for, he’d turned around and given the books to Jess, handing them off with an appalling lack of ceremony. No more than the previous year when Jess had been tossed a paperback copy of Tarzan of the Apes. Jess often wished on a fevered sleepless night that he could thank Walter for his gift, however offhand it had been. For when Clark wrote in spare, terse language of the descent of a mosquito horde, or Lewis described, using far more words than Clark would have needed, how the days of relentless rain had affected morale, it gave Jess’s mind rest. The only form it would accept to take.

  It was on one of those nights as he read, making his way across the plains to Mandan country, that he came across a paragraph that stirred his mind up instead of bedding it down. By the time he finished reading it, the passage had kindled a fire he did not know whether to try and snuff out or tend and feed:

  Along the northern sky was a large space occupied by a light of a pale but brilliant white colour: which rising from the horizon, extended itself to nearly twenty degrees above it. After glittering for some time its colours would be overcast, and almost obscured, but again it would burst out with renewed beauty; the uniform colour was pale light, but its shapes were various and fantastic: at times the sky was lined with light coloured streaks rising perpendicularly from the horizon, and gradually expanding into a body of light which we could trace the floating columns sometimes advancing sometimes retreating and shaping into infinite forms, the space in which they moved. It all faded away before the morning.

  At the end of the passage, Jess sat stunned, staring blankly at the page. He read it again. And again.

  He read the passage again, three times through, before closing the book and setting it aside. He sat still and quiet for a while, gathering himself. And when he felt strong enough, he rose from his chair, walked across the room, sinking to his knees as he reached the window, and leaned heavily against the sill. Only a few steps, but when he looked back across the space, it seemed a great accomplishment. A pilgrimage, of sorts, finished on his knees. Outside the moon shone full and bright, beckoning his gaze. He raised his hands to part the curtains and saw that his fingers were trembling. As he looked out, gazing
across the valley to Kerry Mountain, he could see as if it were yesterday and not five years ago the pillar of light. “Glory,” he recalled saying. And now, in a hoarse whisper, he spoke the word again.

  “Glory.”

  He was certain now of its rightness. Captains Clark and Lewis had no doubt spoken it too, caught in the presence of the lights.

  He was too keyed up now to read. Peering through the curtain sheer, he saw that the moon still beckoned. He went out and stood for a moment on the porch, running his hands through his hair, grasping for the meaning in it all. Wondering if it had any. Worried that it might not. Scared as hell that it surely did. After a little while, he made his way down the hill to the barn and climbed the stairs to the hayloft, throwing open the hay doors to the night. Still weak in the knees, he sank to the hard plank floor, sitting on his heels to gaze out, gripping his thighs with white-knuckled hands. And as he watched the thin, silent clouds rush across the purple sky, Clyde’s voice rose to his ear.

  “God himself, the old folks thought it was.”

  There had been no proof that morning of any such visitation. Not once the light pillar had vanished. But Jess had been privy to something miraculous. Of that, he had no doubt. Yet it harrowed too, the light, had been haunting him ever since, as if that had been its whole purpose for flashing down. Now he couldn’t help wondering just how much glory, and not the grief that followed, had sapped his joy. He was acutely aware, suddenly, of a rattling emptiness beneath his ribs. A hollowness. And he knew the kernel that had once filled the space must have been withering a long time.