The Signal Flame Read online

  Bernie Lloyd drove up to the house on a Monday morning in May at nine o’clock. Hannah met him at the door and showed him into her father’s study, then told Bo they were ready. When all three were in the room, she opened the safe and took out the folder on which was written WILL in black ink and handed it to the lawyer, who put his briefcase on the desk and produced a similar folder, which he put down next to the original.

  Jozef Vinich had designed and built his home around two main chimneys, one for the fireplaces that sat opposite each other in the dining room and the kitchen, the other for the large fireplace in the living room. On the other side of that wall was the study, where he kept a smaller collection of books and an old six-drawer captain’s desk by the window facing west. Two days after he had gotten the letter from Dean Smith informing him of Ann Dvorak’s death, Bo had come into this room to tell his grandfather he was not going back to the college. He knocked on the door of the study, heard the command Come!, and went in. Jozef was closing a thick leather-bound ledger on his desk. He stood, placed it on the bookshelf behind him, next to the book on sundials Bo had just given him for Christmas, and sat back down at the desk that had nothing on it but an ink blotter and an old steel dagger once cleaned of rust yet blackened and aged and resting where a paperweight might have been if there had been any papers. He motioned for Bo to take the chair opposite him and opened the conversation by asking what he was looking forward to reading in the spring semester.

  I won’t be there this spring, Bo said. I came in here to tell you that.

  It’s the girl, Jozef said, as though it was a matter of fact.

  Bo nodded.

  Jozef reached down to open a side drawer on the desk and pulled out a letter that he unfolded on top of the blotter and began to read out loud: October eighth, nineteen fifty-nine. This place, Pop. I have found people who are so oddly like me, and yet not, and for this reason I want to be around them, as though I once was for a long time and have returned.

  Bo remembered the words and where he wrote them, the corner desk and wooden chair where he sat, the anticipation of being with Ann after he dropped the letter in the mailbox. His grandfather rose and walked to the fireplace and put a log on the fire. Bo told him he could not imagine being at the college without seeing her there. He thought of their night alone in the dorm room, remembered the sound of the record when the music stopped, as it thumped and turned and thumped and turned, and he told his grandfather he had felt as though the stones of the buildings themselves were alive at that school.

  And now they’re just stones, he said.

  Jozef stood at the mantel and stared down into the fire. That’s the nature of loss, he said, and lifted his head and looked at his grandson. You are both lessened and left behind. There’s nothing to be done but the work that’s been given, so the part of you that’s lessened doesn’t become lost as well.

  Then that’s what I’ll do, Bo said. I’ll work. Here.

  Jozef walked back to his desk and sat down. Your work is there. The work you asked to do. You don’t want to know what it is you might have become? he said, as though curious.

  Bo told himself he would not give in. He stared straight ahead and said, I’ve thought about it, Pop, and there’s nowhere else I would have gone afterward but back here, to work on this land. Would it be worth the discipline to study the books and the languages and the mathematics regardless?

  Jozef put his arms on the desk and held out his hands. He remained there for a moment, looking at the boy who had become, in such a short time, a young man. Remained there as if he wanted to memorize Bo and call him to mind one day, when he would need to be reminded never to put an obstacle in the young man’s way.

  It’s discipline just the same, Bo, he said. That’s what shapes us, no matter what the trade or how we ply it.

  You’re disappointed, Bo said.

  No. I just thought you had found a place of your own. That’s all I’ve ever wanted for you. Jozef picked up the letter, folded it, and placed it back in the drawer. There’s work at the mill for now, he said. Until you find something else. You can help Andy in the tally shed. He’s about the best teacher you’ll find anywhere.

  The chair where Bo had sat that day was gone, and the desktop where Mr. Lloyd laid out the papers of his trade was empty of all but the old blotter. Where the dagger had gone, Bo did not know.

  It was a short last will and testament. Hannah was given the house and all of the land until she saw fit to pass her inheritance on to her sons (not fit to pass her inheritance on, as though there might, in the fullness of time, be someone else who would be the beneficiary of her love and good fortune, but on to her sons). The savings account in Jozef Vinich’s name held at United Penn Bank was to be withdrawn, used to pay any and all creditors and taxes owed, the remainder divided three ways, distributed, and the account closed.

  Bo had already purchased his grandfather’s share of the Endless Roughing Mill two years prior, so there was no part of the business to be passed on. But there was one final paragraph in the will. Mr. Lloyd looked across the desk at Bo, then put his head down and read.

  To my grandson Bohumír Ondrej Konar, eldest son of Bexhet and Hannah Konar: Separate from the two thousand acres of land that my daughter, Hannah Elizabeth Vinich Konar, is now in possession of, effective immediately and in perpetuity, I leave twenty acres of land and the house that stands at the top of that land, from the border with Rock Mountain Road to where the state game lands and the trees of the Vinich/Konar land begin (there being two iron rods in the ground at the highest and lowest points of that property).

  Mr. Lloyd closed the folder. Well, Hannah, he said, they match sure enough. I can file this one with the probate court for you if you’d like. Save a trip.

  She thanked him and offered him coffee, which he declined, saying he had a full day ahead of him and had to get back to the office. She walked him to the door.

  Bo was in the study, sitting and staring at the cold fireplace in front of him, when his mother came back in.

  Did you know he was going to give all that to me? he asked.

  Your grandfather and I went over everything.

  What about Sam?

  Sam’s not here. No one else could manage that land as well as you. He saw that when you took over the mill.

  Suppose I do. Make it a place to live. What about you? You’re going to run this farm by yourself?

  I’ll get by. It’s not like he left you a house in California. Besides, this place is no longer the farm it was. You said so yourself.

  Bo drummed his fingers on the blotter and glanced down at the drawer from which his grandfather once produced the letter Bo had written to him from college. He opened it and found it empty of all but some dust motes and the faint smell of dried ink.

  Hannah said, Are you going to sit around here and wonder why things are the way they are? Because I’ve got to get to the bank and the store and mail some letters.

  No, he said. You go. I need to head over to the mill and check on some orders coming in.

  Good, she said. Lock up on your way out. I’ll take Krasna with me. Almost as an afterthought, she went over to the bookshelf and picked up the ledger he had seen but never opened, the leather cover a deep rosewood with a light brown rectangle in the center, on which were embossed the letters JV.

  This is part of it, she said. The first part. So you’ll see how it came into his hands. What you’re being asked to keep. She put the ledger on the desk and walked to the door.

  Hannah? he said.

  She turned.

  Was it welcome? he asked.

  Was what welcome?

  The sound of his voice.

  Yes, Bo, she said. Yes, it was.

  He sat in the chair behind the desk, the silence of the house falling around him, and he wondered how it was a man who had worked and acquired and tended his whole life could leave behind all he had acquired with less than a page of words. He did not write, To my grandson Bo, I leave th
e wood shop and all of its contents. Or, To my grandson Sam, I leave my gun and rifle collection, on and on like that, some precise and well-considered checklist of matching talents. Jozef just handed it all down to the next, as though it could be held in both hands, whole and without fear of it in any way splintering or breaking off. In life he lived every day with the separation of the wood shop and the barn and the tractor and animals (what was left of them), the gun collection and the loaders and the cabinet and the walls of the house and the land on which it stood, farm or forest. But not in death. You are both lessened and left behind.

  Bo pulled the ledger toward him and opened it to the first page, the entry marked:

  9 April 1921—$100 in Miners Bank and this book to record what I will build.

  The next entry came right after, cramped and without white space on the page, although several weeks had passed.

  31 April—Hired at Cording mill Leaving Brookside for flat above store in Dardan Will ask Štefan Posol once more in one month for his daughter’s hand.

  Two months and still no space more than the black ink that separated each written line like a guide.

  4 June 1921—Married Helen Posol today She sleeps while I write this by candle flame Cording has given me a week off paid and left a ham and a bottle of wine by the stairs

  Beginning with that entry, a gap of one to two lines appeared between the last word and the subsequent date. They were not long, the entries he recorded, not even when his daughter, Hannah, was born on the twenty-second of February in 1922. Each was, as he had promised from the outset, a record of acquisition, the growing spaces consisting of the months and the years (such as 1923, the only entry written in that year, on August 27, when Jozef was made a shop foreman at the mill and given a five-cent raise in pay) that would remind anyone reading that the man lived most of his life in ordinary time.

  Bo saw it then, in an entry dated 8 October 1924, mention of Walter Younger, who appeared as a man to whom Jozef Vinich looked up. In an uncharacteristically long passage, Cording, Erskine Pound, and Jozef had skirted the Younger land with a surveyor from the state from whom they wanted to acquire timber, and the house at the hill came into view. What has that man done? He has built what I would build, too, Jozef wrote at the end of the paragraph that began with numbers of acreage and a rough tally of pine and hardwoods. And then it was the Christmas of 1924.

  With Helen and Hannah at Posol’s for velija feast Talk in Brookside of WY and troubles four years into prohibition Flat’s cold and the girl’s sick I will not spend another winter here

  So it began, what the man seemed destined to acquire, what Bo’s mother told him he was being asked now to keep.

  1 June 1925—purchased 100 acres on Rock Mt from WY $50 Says you can’t farm it

  Two months later.

  1 August—WY offered another 200 acres for same price/acre as previous Can’t afford but he’s hungry Countered with half and he walked

  Two weeks.

  15 August—200 acres attached to previous 100 $85 Now have what I want to start building Foundation and framed by winter (Though I had promised myself and my wife) we’ll wait until spring to move into the house

  The next several entries recorded board feet of two-by-tens, two-by-fours, bags of mortar, and pounds of nails, along with costs and delivery schedules. Names of men Bo had heard about or known as a boy, men whom his grandfather knew and trusted his entire life, and men who would show up and then disappear like minor actors in a play, weak adversaries, or opportunistic friends. Bo turned several pages that consisted solely of figures, amounts in the tens and hundreds, added, subtracted, divided, and added again, until the number with which Jozef Vinich ended the columns on the page equaled the number with which he began: 2,000 acres. Written and circled in the top right corner as though a reminder of some goal. Then the longest entry Bo had seen:

  24 December 1925—(With Helen and Hannah for velija feast) Mild winter House framed and tight WY showed up this week to see progress Miss Emma Cording showed EP and me work orders and profits ’26 looks good Her father is a lonely man WY has gone to her and offered to sell his land but she knows what it’s worth That it’s not just a house I’m wanting to build Days still when I wish my brother could walk this land with me like we walked in Pastvina before the war, my father and the horse out ahead of us, the man the same age that I am now

  The clock struck noon and Bo looked up from the book, watched the door swing open, and waited for his grandfather to walk into the room. Krasna pushed it with her nose and came up to him for a sniff and a pat on the head.

  Bo exhaled and shook his head. I thought you went with Hannah, he said. All right. Sit down if you want. I’m just reading.

  The dog walked over to the fireplace and lay down in front of it as though folding herself up on top of her paws. Bo turned back to the ledger.

  The initial recordings of land purchased gave way to a spare accounting (into the summer of 1926) of the building of the house where Bo and his brother had grown up, and then the gradual acquisition of farm machinery long rusted and animals Bo had never seen, until October of that year, where he found a note in all capital letters, as though a signpost.

  KEEP YOUR ACCOUNTS ON YOUR THUMBNAIL This my father always said to me and I did not believe it possible or even desirable I am now more than what he wanted to be Have more than he ever held Which will mean more to let go of

  The years thinned out on the page through ’27 and ’28, with the writer’s attention drawn only to his wife and daughter and house, the sparseness of details so striking (recorded without day or date but rather just the passing remark of season, Winter ’27 Hannah’s fifth birthday First of May—Planted blossoming pears) that Bo wondered what else must have occupied his grandfather’s mind. Something for which he was waiting. Something he welcomed. Something he feared. He turned the page and found two entries. One on the verso.

  29 October—Cording brought the mill to a halt

  The other on the recto.

  Miss Emma drove to the farm this morning to say that her father had taken his life God rest his soul

  The whole of 1929 summed up in these handful of words, the year itself not even written down, both pages otherwise unmarked but for a note at the bottom of the recto.

  New Year’s Miss Emma has renamed us Endless Roughing Mill

  Us, Bo thought, and when he turned the page he saw what he had wanted to see, though sooner in the ledger than he had expected.

  22 February 1930—Last 1,020 acres of water forest and field up to game lands from WY for a good price (because it’ll save him) and proviso he and family not be evicted from house or 20 acres of field (where he has a right to farm) until his death Offered to let him keep the 20 but he said no and I feared for him for a moment because he seemed desperate

  Bo wondered what the price was and supposed he could have looked it up at the town hall (those twenty acres hanging on to the final thousand like bracket fungus on a log that was his now), but he knew he never would. He turned to one more entry that spoke of the land. It was dated March 1 of that year:

  Miss Emma Cording sounded pleased that WY has sold all he owns scolding me even for letting him stay on as a tenant and I said nothing in reply She is a harder woman than I know

  Bo turned the page and found a sea of ink-lined white space, then saw writing on the next page, as though it were a new book altogether, for his grandfather had begun to punctuate and compose a clearer line.

  April 1933. Easter. The boy they once called Bexhet has found me. He has been given the Branch for a name and (though it will be difficult for him) intends to stay. Hannah is mesmerized in his presence. I will have to tell her now from where he has come.

  Bo closed the ledger and put it back on the shelf.

  Come on, girl, he said to Krasna, and she lifted her head from the floor. Let’s get in the truck. We’ve got work to do.

  Outside in the driveway he opened the tailgate of the pickup and lifted her
rump and pushed her paws first into the bed. You won’t be doing this much longer, he said.

  He got in the driver’s side and glanced over at the passenger seat and noticed, for the first time since his grandfather had ridden with him last at Christmas, a pair of the man’s old leather work gloves still pushed into the fold of the bench seat. Bo leaned over and pulled them out and laid them next to him. He thought again of the days when he and his grandfather drove to work together and spoke in the front seat of the pickup about matters of business, or the days when they never said a word to each other (out of exhaustion or contentment, it never seemed to matter) and Dardan flicked by in scenes framed by the window of the truck. Then as now, it was a place of peace where he had found himself, found his labor and his rest. Bo turned the engine over and backed down the drive.