The Signal Flame Read online

  When Bo was seven, his grandfather pulled up to the house in the truck with another man sitting in the front seat next to him. It was a wet spring then, too, one of torrential rains, and the two men waited in the pickup, as though they were talking, before they got out and walked slowly (in spite of the rain) up to the front porch, where Bo and his mother stood waiting. Hannah and the man embraced and remained in that embrace for a long time before he said, Where is my son? Hannah stepped back. The man knelt down, held out his arms (so thin they looked to Bo as if they were lost in the sleeves of the green coat the man wore), and said, I’ve missed you, my Bohumír.

  For the next two years Bo came to know something of his father. Bo walked with him in the woods, walks on which there were long stretches of silence that Bo wanted to fill with questions but dared not. Walks on which they had to stop and rest often, on a lush patch of crow’s-foot, or the bald dome of Summit Rocks, where they could see most of the two-thousand-acre stretch of the Vinich land. It was there on the rocks one day that Bo asked his father the question that gnawed at him the most, Did you kill any Germans in the war? Becks looked at his son and back out at the land and said, Yes, son. And then I ran away from the war and hid so that I wouldn’t have to kill any more. Then he stood and walked off the path and into the woods and pulled up a tree of sassafras, snapped the root in two, and inhaled the wood and cinnamon smell mixed with dried leaf and dirt. So that I could come home to this, my Bohumír, he said, louder for the distance he stood from his son. All of this.

  On the farm, Bo listened to him sing strange and mournful songs as he carved horses and birds out of blocks of wood. And Bo remembered the day his mother went into labor. The doctor came to the house and Bo and his father waited in the kitchen together, trying not to listen to the sounds. When they were told that another Konar boy had been born and that Hannah was doing well, the man knelt down and hugged Bo like he had on the day he arrived home in Jozef’s pickup, and said, A good man is good to his brother, Bohumír. Promise me you’ll be good to him when I’m gone.

  And on a night in March in 1950, Bo went to sleep with his father’s kiss on his lips and woke in a house that would never hear his steps again.

  He understood what they told him. That his father was walking in the woods in the morning, in the high meadow above the creek bend, when a man named Paul Younger, whom Jozef Vinich let hunt on his land, shot Becks Konar. It was an accident, they said. Younger was hunting deer out of season, but Jozef Vinich had given him permission. The herds were thick and needed culling, and Paul Younger needed the food. The man was no more guilty of directing the path of a ricocheted bullet than he was of wanting to feed his wife and baby daughter. Most asked why Becks Konar was in the woods at all that morning. Bo knew the answer. Because he missed them. Paul Younger waited for Hannah at the cemetery, took off his hat, and told her he was sorry for her loss. After that, Bo drifted back to the side of his grandfather, back to him for advice, instruction, and comfort, back to the man he had never stopped calling Pop.

  Everything Jozef Vinich taught his grandsons in the years after their father died came across in a language of discipline and correction. The ax swing when they split wood. (Center! Helve straight.) How to sharpen the Morseth on an Arkansas bench stone. (Don’t turn that blade over until you can feel the burr.) And, at the age Jozef alone believed each of his grandsons was ready, where to hunt and how to shoot. A discipline one learns more by observation than by talk, he told each one in turn. He never reminded Bo of the morning they went into the woods to shoot the deer-killer dog. He waited for the fall and took Bo out again, for squirrel and rabbit. Each time the lesson was the same. They sat on the steps of the back porch before they left and Jozef intoned softly into the morning air, You’re my shadow. And if you can’t be my shadow and only my shadow, then you can stay home. Then he would turn and make his way through the orchard for the woods, Bo right behind.

  Jozef Vinich was lean and fair-haired and stood five feet five in his boots. To Bo and Sam he seemed Herculean, a man incapable of weakness. Unassisted, he could lift whole barrels of apples or bundles of wood in a leather sling as though they were no more than cotton wool or straw, in spite of the missing fingers on his right hand. (From another war, their mother said, so that Bo wondered when he was young how many wars there could possibly be.) They knew Jozef had once walked from the mill in West Dardan to the house and arrived at dinner and sat down as though he had come in from the barn. And they were certain there was no part of the perimeter of the Vinich land he could not reach on foot and with his rifle within hours of setting out, recounting to them later details of his patrol. The eight-foot black snake. An albino doe. The feces from a bobcat he had never seen but knew came over from the state lands to hunt for grouse. He spoke in a voice so low-pitched and sonorous that it seemed to resonate from his entire frame.

  This was who had shaped Bo’s world for eighteen years, except for the long days he had to suffer through the boredom of high school, a young man of some privilege in a town where land meant wealth. A young man who was at times shown affection in that town, at times ignored, though he sought out neither. It was something else he was looking for, something of which he caught a glimpse in the books he had pulled down from his grandfather’s shelves. Something of a world that existed beyond Dardan and the banks of the Salamander, a world through which he would travel as a rite of passage, those books (and others he might find) his maps along the way.

  In the early spring of 1959, he went to his grandfather and said he had been thinking about it for a long time and he would like to go to college.

  College? Jozef said. He stroked his chin with his pistol-shaped hand. I hadn’t expected that. In time, you know, you’ll take over the mill and half of that land out there will be yours.

  I know.

  Then what is it? Jozef asked.

  This town, Bo said.

  Jozef laughed and looked in the direction of that town as though he could see it from where they were in the barn, inspecting the fuel lines on the Farmall. How could he have known the worlds that rested between the covers of every book he had acquired and read would someday make his grandson curious enough to want to see what those worlds might have to offer.

  There’s a lot more out there than this town has to offer. That’s for sure, Jozef said. Let me think about it. In the meantime, find a place that’s not going to let the privilege of having some big letter sewn onto a sweatshirt go to your head.

  Bo went to an old school on the Chesapeake Bay in Annapolis, Maryland, that read the books of the ancients because they believed the ancients still had something to say. He could not believe his luck in those first autumn months at having found such a place among the brick walkways and buildings whose foundations were older than the nation entire. Inside the Great Hall, rooms of wooden tables and stone fireplaces reminded him of reading at home so much that he would arrive early to class in the morning and sit alone and speak to his grandfather as though he were sitting in the next chair. Euclid reminds me of you, old man, he’d say. Difficult and right.

  There were several women in his entering class of sixty undergraduates that year, but only two were in his first-year seminar where they read the Greeks, and one left after a week. The other was named Ann Dvorak. She was tall with wide, sloe-colored eyes that she kept hidden behind black-framed glasses. She tied her long brown hair in a kind of knot on her head, up off her shoulders and away from her face, and kept it twisted around what looked to Bo like a stick stripped of its bark, sanded smooth, and varnished.

  For the first month she seemed not shy but aloof. Toward the end of that month, she took off her glasses in class and stared across the table at him, and he could not help thinking that she looked as though she had just walked out of the workshop of a Renaissance sculptor. She caught him staring, winked, and put her glasses back on.

  Most of the other men at the college were older than eighteen. Several were veterans of Korea. Of those, more than
a few thought Miss Dvorak (as she was called) was more arrogant than intelligent, and they wondered how she had gotten there and when she would leave. But Bo was drawn to her, wondering if there was at work in her the same desire to see beyond a horizon without fear of leaving something else behind, something known and comforting and seemingly incapable of change.

  He had not cut his hair at all the year before he went off to school. His mother said to him one day, You have your father’s hair, and so he let it grow because he liked the idea that he could evoke the man. When he got to the school and Hannah sent him some money for a barber and lunch, he used it to buy a Loeb copy of Aeschylus and a book for his grandfather on sundials. He kept what had become long and loose black curls pushed back behind his ears, or in a ponytail if he was playing basketball, and for this reason people began to believe he was from someplace other than a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania, although no one knew where.

  They were reading Thucydides in the fall, and Miss Dvorak asked a question on the virtue of self-mastery and the perception, in the speech of the Corinthians from Book One, of the Spartans as warriors too cautious and slow.

  Is it rather, she asked, a deeper understanding with the intimacy of men and war, as King Archidamus suggests, in the heart of the individual as well as a nation? Then she quoted, When a great confederacy, in order to satisfy private grudges, undertakes a war of which no man can foresee the issue, it is not easy to terminate it with honour.

  No one spoke for a few moments, until someone offered dismissively from across the table, You know, Miss Dvorak, that real Spartans wouldn’t have treated women very well.

  It’s comforting to know that I’m not in the presence of real Spartans, she said. Except there, on Mr. Konar. That’s a Spartan’s hair. That’s what an Athenian would see when he closed in to do battle with the Lacedaemonian. A man free to stand or die. An honorable man. That’s what I mean by self-mastery.

  Bo knew by her glance that she was asking him to take her side. He looked down at the table, down at the old and blackened stain and shellac holding up against the penknives of undergraduates wanting to etch their initials onto its surface, then up at the crystal wall sconces that gave off a light more steady than the books themselves. Then he turned back to the faces of the fourteen men, one woman, and two tutors (who held their beat-up Jowett translations in front of them like explorers not two leagues off from their discovery) and said, It’s fear of the Athenians and their increasing power that leads the Spartans to war, Thucydides says in the end. Not the speeches of their allies. But that doesn’t mean they can’t act honorably, even in fear. If we are speaking of self-mastery, that seems to be the difference. How we act. What we do. I think the cautious Spartans knew that best. The difference between the honorable man and the belligerent fool.

  Later that evening he saw her with some other students in the campus bar. She walked over to him and pushed her eyeglasses up on her head. Let me buy you a beer for coming to my rescue, she said.

  Did I? he asked.

  I thought so.

  He pointed to her glasses. Don’t you need those to see?

  They’re just for show, she said, and tucked them into a pocket on her sweater. But don’t tell anyone.

  I will stand or die, he said.

  They talked in that bar until last call, and then they walked the cobblestones back to campus and continued on past the dormitories to the edge of the playing fields, where a small creek flowed out to the river that flowed out to the bay. There they sat on the bank and talked about their families. She was from Parma, Ohio, a town from which she, too, longed to leave and yet wondered if she ever could. She’d gone to an all-girls Catholic school, graduated at the top of her class, and, after working behind the counter of a bakery for six months, begged her father to send her to college. Her mother would not hear of it, but her father told her if she could scrape up half, he would give her the rest. And so she worked at the bakery until she had what she needed.

  She had listened to her parents speak Slovak all her life, but she had never learned it with any fluency because, they said, You don’t need to. As the sky brightened, the sun rose, and Bo listened to her slur her speech as she practiced saying his name the way his father used to say it, as if rolling an ice cube around on her tongue. And he felt as though he were in the presence of some goddess who had come to deliver a message of courage to those whose fates had yet to be measured.

  On Friday afternoons they went to dance lessons in the Great Hall, and on Saturdays they attended the school’s waltz parties and swing balls. He would dress in one of the two suits his grandfather bought him at a clothier in Wilkes-Barre, and she would wear a gown that her grandmother had owned from the twenties. All of the young women there were townies, or girls from Baltimore visiting one boy or another. She danced with him alone, the two of them gliding across the floor with a grace she had brought out of him, taught him how to feel, then said, Now you lead. And she moved before his every step as if she were his mirror, their eyes locked, their bodies close, the hint of tea rose rising to him from her shoulders, a reminder that he drifted in the wake of this dancer for a short time. But I have her, he thought. We leave this wake together.

  They stayed on campus over the Thanksgiving break, ate turkey sandwiches at the only open shop on Main Street, and took a six-pack of National Premium back to her dorm room, which had a fireplace. They sat near the hearth and drank beer, and Bo read out loud to her from a letter he had gotten from his grandfather the day before. Jozef wrote with news of the farm and the mill, greetings of people who had asked about him, and finished with a recounting of his younger brother’s first hunt. Sam had been given a break-action .20-gauge for his ninth birthday, and he and Jozef went turkey hunting the first week of November. The little guy snuck up to the biggest bastard in the rafter, Jozef wrote, twenty-five yards maybe, waved me back, and took the bird down with the only shot that H&R would give. Then he said, I sure wish Bo was here to see it.

  Ann laughed and said, I sure wish I could meet them.

  You will, Bo said.

  They turned up the record player and listened to Come Fly With Me and Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, then turned it down for Everybody Digs Bill Evans and fell asleep next to each other while the needle softly hissed and bumped against the end of the album on the turntable, like the heart beating in his chest.

  When winter recess came, they took the same bus together to Harrisburg, where she would change for the westbound Greyhound to Pittsburgh and go on to Cleveland, and Bo would head north to Wilkes-Barre. He let that bus go without him, and they drank coffee and ate apple Danish from a vending machine and talked about the spring and traveling west to work in the state parks for the summer. He held her a long time when they announced her bus was boarding. They kissed and she said he tasted like sugar and apple jam.

  I’ll miss you, he said, though he wanted to say I love you, because it was true.

  I know, she said.

  As his bus pulled into the Wilkes-Barre station, he saw his grandfather and kid brother sitting in the front seat of the pickup. He gave them each a hug on the depot platform and they walked together to the parking lot. He threw his duffel onto a crust of snow in the open truck bed and Sam said, We’ve got a new dog, Bo! Her name is Krasna because Mom says that means beautiful in Slovak. Bo opened the passenger door and there was a black Lab puppy asleep on the seat. Sam scooped her up in his arms and slid in between Bo and his grandfather for the drive back to the farm.

  Ann wrote to him as soon as she got home, the letter arriving with the mail on December 24. It was not a long letter. She told him that Parma felt like a world flat and without depth, and she could not wait to get back on the bus in the New Year. She wrote in the same cursive hand with which he had watched her fill entire notebooks with commentaries on translations and directions for mathematical proofs, and it smelled faintly of her tea rose. He waited until the twenty-sixth to write back, telling her of Christmas with hi
s mother, grandfather, and younger brother, the living room where the tree from their own woods stood, and the longing that he had for her. Then he walked down to the post office in Dardan to mail the letter, the thought coming to him as he crossed over Salamander Creek that he was prepared in that moment to walk across Pennsylvania and into Ohio just to be with her.

  He did not know until the New Year, when every student received a letter from the dean saying that Miss Ann Dvorak had been struck by a car and killed on Christmas Eve as she walked home from church, that he would not be going back to college. The day after he received the letter he walked down the hill again into Dardan in the snow, and he went to the barber and told the man to give him a regular. The following week (the year was 1960), he went to work at the roughing mill and never looked beyond the tree-studded horizon of Dardan, Pennsylvania, again.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  THE HOUSE SETTLED INTO A new rhythm after Jozef Vinich died. Hannah collected the daily evidence of her father’s presence (flannel shirt on a hook, boots in a closet, a copy of Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley on the nightstand in the room where he slept) and put them with the other things of his that she had taken from his dresser drawers and boxed and stored in the attic. She swept and dusted and aired out his room on the first day the temperature rose above fifty degrees. But there was not much more to do in his absence. One morning she walked into that room as if to wake him, wondering why he had not risen, until she pushed open the door and realized (once again, for it happened often) he was gone. She sat on the bed she had made the day before, looked out through the glass on the doors that opened onto the balcony above the front porch, and breathed in the air of the room. She used to love the smell of her father’s room. It was like cedar and dried leaves in October, with just a hint (she swore) of root beer. She ran her hand along the quilt that covered the bed and felt the desire to lie down on it and sleep, so tired had she become of maintaining the weeks-long pace and process of mourning. But the sun was already filtering in and the day promised to be a beautiful one. She stood and patted flat the depression she had made on the bed and went downstairs. Bo would have fed the cow, but the chickens needed to be let out, their waterer filled and the feed trough checked. Then she would get started on the flower beds. And then, well, she would know the next thing when she saw it.