The Signal Flame Read online

  Bo sat in the kitchen while the priest and his mother and his great-aunt prayed in the living room, and he tried not to listen to the antiphonal drone of decades from the rosary as they drifted on the morning down the hall. He freshened his coffee and pulled a copy of Time magazine out from underneath a stack of mail that had come at the beginning of the week. On the cover was a photograph of an American serviceman (the magazine logo looking like it was caught inside the man’s helmet band) and words to the lower right in yellow that read VIET NAM: THE BIG TEST. When Sam left on his first tour, Bo watched the news and read the magazine weekly, expecting to catch a glimpse of his brother through some photographer’s eye. He told Sam this when he saw him thirteen months later, and Sam laughed and said, Not a chance, brother. Not a chance. And the night they drank their grandfather’s good whiskey because Sam was going back for a second tour, he said to Bo, Don’t look for me this time, all right? It’s bad luck.

  It was Rovnávaha’s voice alone that rose up and out of the living room, the man sounding as though he could command the dead themselves to walk, and Bo remembered the day six months ago when the priest came to the house with the marine casualty assistance officer who told them that Corporal Samuel B. Konar had been reported missing in action in the province of Quang Tri. Bo watched his mother steel herself in the captain’s presence, then break down when he left, wondering out loud how that news could feel worse than the news she had always feared the marine on her doorstep would bring. Rovnávaha stayed and prayed with her then, too, and when he began to read a passage from First Samuel (You asked the Lord for him), Jozef and Bo went out to the wood shop and closed the door and Jozef said, He’s a good priest, Rovnávaha. You know that. Bo nodded and the two men sat there in their own silence among the tools and saws and scraps of wood.

  The phone rang in the house and the praying ceased and Bo heard Hannah walk into the foyer to answer it.

  It can’t be late, she said after a pause. The funeral starts at ten. Her voice rose. Just get that car up to this house.

  Bo heard the priest.

  Stan. Rovnávaha here. What’s the problem?

  They were all moving now, and Bo knew that it was time.

  Then send that one, Rovnávaha said. We’re not going far.

  They came back into the kitchen, Hannah shaking her head and saying, I’ve always hated that place. Used to be a movie theater. They ought to make it one again.

  She went over to the counter and tried to pour her own coffee and spilled it. She cursed and apologized and reached for a towel. I should go sit with Aunt Sue, she said to the window.

  No, Mom, Bo said. Listen. We’ll put him in the back of the truck if we have to.

  She slammed her coffee cup down on the counter and it sloshed out onto her hand and dress sleeve. Show some respect, Bo, she said, her back still turned to him, and Bo watched her hunch her shoulders and bury her face in her hands. He stood and went to her, hugged her from behind, and told her that he was sorry and that everything was going to be fine.

  She lifted her head and wiped her eyes and sleeve with the towel, then nodded and tried to steady her breathing. Bo walked her back to the table, and she sat down and Rovnávaha came and knelt in front of her, took her hand and spoke softly to her, not like a child but like a daughter, grown but still in need of a father’s love.

  Bo is only trying to help, he said. It will be like this, Hannah, the memories of him. Whole swaths of them—things he told you, places you’ve been, people who’ll remind you of him—will seem to rise out of nothing until there they are. Let them come. They’re painful now, but you’ll be grateful. In time.

  She stared at the floor so they would not see her eyes, and when she looked up again there was a fifties-model Cadillac hearse idling in the driveway, and Aunt Sue was standing in the kitchen. The old woman had on a black veil and wore a black dress with a brown cardigan over it. An airless scent of mothballs seemed to wrap around her like a gown, and she spoke to her niece in Slovak, as though these women were the only two in the room.

  Hana, she said. Je čas. Musíme íst’.

  The mourners who gathered at the church of St. Michael the Archangel filled the front half of the nave. The pallbearers were men from the roughing mill, and they carried the casket down the aisle to the front as the spare congregation sang The king of love my shepherd is.

  Bo, Hannah, and Aunt Sue sat in the front pew. Hannah read the First Reading and the Psalm, and Bo was surprised to hear his mother summon a voice so solitary and unwavering. It’s just the two of us now, he thought, and then remembered Sam.

  When she sat back down, Father Rovnávaha rose from his presider’s chair and went to the pulpit, read from John’s Gospel on the raising of Lazarus, and closed the book. His head was bowed as if his face might betray his struggle to be a priest when he wanted only to mourn the loss of his friend, and he pulled on the sleeve of his alb. Then he looked out at those waiting to hear him speak and began to tell a story of the time when he and Jozef had gone fishing on the Upper Salamander on a beautiful day in late October, the trees having lost most of their leaves but the warmth of the air and the hatch of blue duns reminding him of days in June on that same stretch of creek. At midday the water was in full sun and he reeled in his line, broke down his rod, and sat on a log to watch Jozef fish.

  He said, Father Blok told me when I was new here at St. Michael’s that the saddest day of his priesthood was when he buried Jozef’s wife, Helen, for Jozef said what Martha said: If the Lord had been here, she would not have died. And so Jozef Vinich took his own sorrow to the place from where I watched him that day, watched him work his way across and downstream into the shade of a stand of willows, where trout were rising to a Royal Wulff pattern he had used and caught fish on ever since I had known him. And I realized, resting on that log in my shirt and waders, that the man of sorrow was still a man of faith, for he believed that what God had created had a beauty that would withstand all loss. Then, as if to prove me right, a fish rose and took the fly with a smack so loud that I sat up to see.

  It was a big fish, the priest told them, and Jozef played it with a touch surprising for the man’s toughness, until slowly, letting the fish run when it put on a burst of speed against the line and reeling in that line as it tired in the wider section of the creek, he eased his catch to the shore. Rovnávaha watched him as he sat the butt end of his rod into his vest, bent down to remove the hook from the fish’s mouth, then held it up with two hands under its side like he might hold a newborn to the moon. It was a brown trout, almost two feet long, big for that stretch of water, for any stretch of water in Pennsylvania, and Jozef yelled from thirty yards downstream, Oakes! Krásny, hej?

  The priest smiled, leaned over, and reached behind the log for the walking stick he had used to come down the escarpment so that he could ford the rapids in front of him and see for himself the beautiful fish that had come out of the waters at that place they called the bend.

  Whether it was the warm fall, the exposed position of whatever den the snake returned to and emerged from year after year, or some fluke of estivation and age that kept it outside and roaming the woods, the timber rattler had found the hide from which to hunt beneath the fallen oak, and it remained there motionless and unperturbed. But the hand had come too close, and there was nowhere else for the snake to go, nothing else for it to do but strike.

  The priest could not even be sure that the quick and deep cracked-parchment sound that had frozen him was a snake’s rattle, but he felt the thud and the sting, and he yanked his hand up and out from behind the log and saw the sulfurous body and black chevron marks stretched and fat and clinging to the muscle behind his thumb, and he dropped.

  Jozef released the fish and threw his rod on the bank all in one motion, ran along the stream, and waded across where the water was the shallowest.

  Rovnávaha said to the congregation, I was sitting up and holding my hand as the bite began to swell. Jozef poured creek water over t
he wound with his hat, and I wondered, knowing that on my own I would not be able to get out of the woods fast enough, if this was the man before whom I would die.

  Then the priest’s voice rose there in the church, above the pipes that had begun to clang like dull bells against the walls as the heat within them stirred.

  But if Jozef Vinich weighed options, he said, it was in a place where, if you knew him, knew where he was from, not one of us would likely have gone, let alone survived. He spoke to me gently in that voice of his, as though he knew I needed comfort, told me not to worry or to move, pulled my waders off as though I was getting ready for sleep, then knelt down in front of me and said, Tomáš, I’m going to carry you out of here, up the escarpment, and to my truck. Say nothing and do nothing. I said, Are you sure you can carry me? He held a finger to his lips and said, Shhh. Already his voice sounded hollow. My head was swimming and my hand throbbed. He leaned in, grabbed me by the waist, and threw me over his shoulder in one move.

  Rovnávaha paused at the pulpit, then stood to his full height and shouted, Look at me! It was as though I was no more than a child to him, and he bore me straight up and along the rock path, and we rose out of those woods to the old logging road where he had parked that morning, and only then do I remember the sound of his voice talking to someone about the mountains, as though there was a third person in that truck with us.

  They all watched then as the priest hid his right hand in the sleeve of his vestment and walked down to the altar steps, where he stood in front of the casket.

  This is not a time for eulogies, he said, his voice tired-sounding. Although perhaps you will tell some among yourselves in days to come, for Jozef Vinich—the vine, you know, that means in Slovak—is a man we would do well to remember. No, I’ve told you this story because we live in Bethany, because we are a family, too, in which, as Saint Augustine says, one is sick and the other two are sad, and when the Lord says to His disciples, Let us go there, I know that this man, for whom I have wept often in the past two days, will live as sure as you, he said, and pointed to Hannah. And you, he said, and pointed to Bo. And each of you who has come here. For now, though, it is time we let him sleep.

  Then Father Tomáš Rovnávaha reached out his hand and touched the head of the casket and whispered so that it was barely audible from where Bo sat in the front pew.

  Goodbye, my friend. I’ll miss you.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  DARDAN, PENNSYLVANIA, SITS IN THE yawning cut of three mountains that long ago pushed away rather than collide as they rose, so that they came to resemble, in the topographic lines drawn later by the mapmakers, an unattached letter K. Hardwood forests surround it, and a ridgeline of the Appalachian range cuts off all but a few feeder streams from the broadening valley of the Susquehanna as that river, flat and silted and slow, broadens and sidewinds down into the Chesapeake Bay. The town’s position behind this divide is no shortcoming of her founders—the hunters, trappers, and woodsmen who saw that the plainlike valley floor was positioned well for a town—not a blindness or ignorance of how or where one ought to settle in mountains rife with stone and rattlesnakes. The arm and leg of the K approach but never touch the back of the letter, which rests wide enough apart and at such an angle that the sun rises and sets from late spring to early autumn on the exposed dip of its back, and the cold waters of Salamander Creek (before they drop into Troy Pass) leave their own rich silt of humate and the remnants of dead tree stoneground and rained upon like the blessed and dendritic valley of a promised land.

  It was this land to which Jozef Vinich came to live in 1919. And it was this land in which he was buried fifty-three years later next to his wife. On a hillside at Our Lady of Sorrows cemetery in town. Father Rovnávaha commended the man’s soul to God and committed the body to the ground. Those who were left at the grave drove back into Dardan Center to a place called Ruby’s, where they had a repast around a table set for twelve.

  The men from the roughing mill ate and did not linger, saying they had to get in at least a half day’s work. Hannah and Bo were the last to leave. They stood outside in the parking lot of the restaurant in the wind and cold, under a sky of unsettled blue. Bo hugged his mother and gave her a kiss on the cheek and told her he had to go over to Dardan Hardware to pick up a pane of glass and a new gouge. She asked if it could wait, and he said no, there would be work to do when he got back to the mill, with no break for a while. I’m here, he said. I might as well.

  He watched her drive away and he opened the door of his pickup, called Krasna, and walked across the street into the hardware store.

  He went in by the loading bays and asked Jim Lavendusky, the store manager, if he could cut Bo a ten-by-ten pane of glass. The man said sure and measured the glass, dipped a cutter into a small cup of kerosene, and scored the pane along a straightedge. While he worked, he told Bo he was sorry to hear about his grandfather, that it was a loss for the whole town. Then he broke out the score, smoothed the edge with a sharpening stone, and wrapped the pane in brown paper. He wrote $1 on it with a carpenter’s pencil and handed it to Bo. Bo thanked him and walked over to wood and lumber and told Phil Knapp he needed a new roughing gouge for some legs he was turning for a hutch he wanted to start working on now that it was spring.

  You wouldn’t know it, Phil said, and shook his head. No, sir, I can’t help you with that.

  He had an inventory sheet in front of him, and he stood by a rack of bins for lag bolts, carriage bolts, and large fasteners. He kept his head moving back and forth from the sheet to the bins, and he spoke to Bo without looking up.

  I just got a new set of Sorby’s in, he said, and pointed in their general direction. You’ll see them over there with the others.

  Bo walked past the walls of saws and shelves of mitres and planes, past an old green and yellow sign for Stanley Rule & Level Co., and kept moving in the direction of the woodworking tools, down the aisle of worn linoleum that Phil swept clean every day. He stopped in front of the display of the new Robert Sorbys, then walked to the end of the aisle, picked up a Buck Brothers carbon steel gouge, and untied the cloth bag to check that it was the size he wanted.

  Phil yelled, Gettin’ old up here, Bo! You got what you need?

  Bo took his time walking back.

  Sorry, buddy, Phil said to him when Bo appeared next to the rack. I’m late for lunch. Phil threw the last of a handful of lag bolts into the bin, looked at the cloth bag in Bo’s hand, and sucked his teeth. You don’t need to sharpen them Sorby’s, you know. High-speed steel.

  He shook a cigarette from a soft pack of Luckys and wrestled a butane lighter from the front pocket of his jeans. He scratched the flint wheel and lit his cigarette with a flame so high Bo thought the man’s hog-bristled mustache was going to catch fire.

  I like the feel of these, Bo said.

  Phil took a long drag and blew a thin trail of smoke from his nose, put on a ball cap, and nodded. It’s your wood, not mine, he said.

  Bo knew that Ruth Younger worked the register at Dardan Hardware on weekdays and had since Sam left for the war, but he was still surprised when he walked to the front of the store with Krasna and saw her there, ringing up a woman for a birthday card and a clutch of stick candy. She wore a red apron that covered the curve of her belly, and under that she had on a red-checked flannel shirt open to the third button. Her black hair was pulled away from her face and tied back in a ponytail so that all you could see were her eyes, deep wells of green above the white-rose cast of her cheeks, and Bo noticed that she still wore the tiny diamond engagement ring his brother had given to her in Honolulu. She saw the dog, then looked at Bo and turned back to the woman. She slid the card and candy into a thin white paper bag, counted out the change, and said, I’ll tell my father you were asking about him, Mrs. Sands.

  Bo stepped up, put the glass and the gouge on the counter, and handed Ruth a twenty. She took the bill and gave him change and said, I’m sorry to hear about your grandfather. I
really am.

  Her ring hand touched her ear, and Bo could see a small mole above her collarbone and smell the perfume she wore.

  Thanks, he said, and stuffed the change into his pocket. Died in his sleep. Doctor said he wasn’t sick, just ready.

  She reached into a box of Milk-Bones beneath the register and tossed one to Krasna. The dog sat down on the floor and gnawed the treat with her teeth.

  I’d have come to the funeral, she said, but Mr. L. had no one else to work this morning.

  That’s all right.

  How’s your mom? she asked.

  He tucked the glass under his arm as if it were a book. Hard to tell, he said.

  It was Hannah who had told Bo, when they had gotten the news about Sam in November, that he had better find Ruth Younger and tell her before someone in Dardan spilled it to her out of meanness. Bo asked his mother what she cared about the girl, and Hannah brought her fist down hard on the dinner table. I care, goddammit! she said. Jozef was there. Hannah stood to go, and he held her arm and said to Bo, Your mother’s right. Whatever happened in the past and will happen now, it’s still her grandchild.

  And so Bo wrote what he had to say in a short note, telling Ruth only what they already knew. The next day he got in the truck and went to the hardware store, where she stood at the same register, handed her the note, and said, This is for later, when you’re sitting down.

  If he saw her around town, it was from a distance. Once across the long counter at Ruby’s. Another time at a traffic light in the beat-up old Country Squire wagon she drove. Neither acknowledged the other. Not even a nod. Distance seemed to be their unspoken agreement, except when Hannah received a letter from the Navy Department in reply to her biweekly queries about her son. Their response was always the same, informing her that Sam was still carried in a missing status.