The Signal Flame Read online

  Bo stood five yards from him now and could see it was a doe Younger had brought down.

  You always hunt out of season? Bo asked.

  Season, Younger said, and spat. I’m doing these woods a favor. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. Your brother showed me this spot. Deer love those cattails over there. To bed. I can come over the escarpment upwind of them and have my pick. Any day. Any season.

  Close up, the man looked gaunt and filthy, his gray-flecked hair greasy and strewn with bits of dried leaves, the skin in his neck lined with dirt. He had likely spent the night in those woods. Maybe two. And something about the way he described his method of hunting these lowlands beneath the curve of the creek reminded Bo of Sam recounting how he, too, had lain and waited for the buck he bagged and brought home all by himself each year.

  My brother? Bo asked.

  Used to hunt with him here all the time. That boy had a gift.

  Bo regarded the man before him, a man like his grandfather in many ways, save the one way that counted most. He could lay claim to no ground for his own—ground, that is, on which he could hunt with impunity, and for this he seemed a man lost. Bo remembered what Sam had said about him, and he remembered the arguments Sam and Jozef got into over whose land this rightfully was, land Sam believed should belong not to the Youngers or the Viniches but to anyone who would walk through it, take what he needed, and leave the rest in peace. You’re living forty-nine states too far to the east there, son, Jozef said to him. You and Mr. Younger might believe it to be a wilderness, but you’d be the only two in this town. God didn’t give it to me, the bank did, and that’ll do for now. Bo wished he could conjure his grandfather’s ledger and sit down with this man among the cattails where the deer he sought to kill loved to rest, and say, Look here, Mr. Younger. Each man has had a part in this. But something peaceful could be born out still.

  He said, Hunting’s over, Mr. Younger. And my brother’s not here. You want permission, you ask. Now, do what you need to do with that thing and stay off my mother’s land.

  Your mother’s now, is it?

  Younger stood and sheathed the knife he had taken from his belt and turned to face Bo. I guess when she’s gone, it’ll be yours. Or maybe some of it’s yours already. And tell me, Bo Konar, when the Good Lord takes you, whose land will it be then?

  Bo said, I don’t imagine it’ll matter to you anyway, will it?

  Younger smiled. Now you’re catching on. They told me you were the smart one.

  What about the game commissioner? Bo asked. You’re pretty close to land where the state has some say about who hunts and when.

  Younger scoffed. Game commissioner couldn’t find his ass with both hands. Do you know what the fine is for poaching out of season?

  It’s not much.

  Do you know what this doe will bring besides food?

  No, but I bet you do.

  Younger nodded. I hunt deer when there’s room in my freezer. I’ve been doing it since I was a boy and my daddy owned this land, and I intend to keep doing it until I don’t need to eat anymore.

  Younger paused and looked like he was about to turn back to the task before him, but he pushed his boot again into the ground where he had thrown the match, and said, About your father. Your grandfather knew I meant him no harm. Your brother, too. You know how many times I’ve relived the moment I pulled that trigger? How many times I see him in that second before I pull it? He said this to the ground. Then he lifted his eyes and said to Bo, Your mom—

  My mother won’t forgive you, Bo said so fast he wished he had not.

  Younger scratched his head and looked at his fingers as though he had caught something in them. Yeah, well, that’d make two of us, he said.

  They stood looking at each other, and Bo could see Ruth in him. Something around the mouth, though, was different, something that could not be inherited, and Bo felt all of a sudden like a man coming home after a long time away and finding another family in his kitchen and wondering if he has walked into the wrong house.

  What do you want? Bo asked.

  Younger pointed to the doe, and Bo stared at it as if measuring not the dead animal but what his response ought to be. The same, or different from those others who had come before him?

  All right, he said, but this is between you and me. No one else. You hunt alone, and you keep your mouth shut about it.

  Younger drew the back of his hand across his forehead. Just until your brother comes home, he said. Then we go together, him and me.

  Bo took a deep breath and let it out, and Paul Younger turned back to his kill. Bo watched the man as he rolled up both of his sleeves and slid his arm through the shoulder strap of his rifle and pushed it behind him. He took his belt knife back out, knelt down, and began to work the blade along the underside of the doe, fast but steady, stopping only to wipe hair off of the choil. He leaned closer to the ground as he sliced past the belly and slowed around the bladder. When he had cut the animal open to the anus, he stood and looked at Bo one more time, then walked over to the creek side, bent down, and washed the blood from his knife and hands.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  LATE THAT SPRING THE RAINS returned as though it were April, and it seemed there would be no end to them, except for single days or hours when the clouds parted and the sun came out and the ground dried enough for anyone to believe that something besides mushrooms and more ferns might grow. On a day like that (long enough after the day she had written last, so the postmark was as much a surprise as a reminder), a Friday, Hannah received a letter from the new casualty assistance officer. She handed it to Bo when he came home from work. He opened a beer, went outside, and sat down on the front porch steps. It was the longest letter they had received regarding Sam. It read:

  Dear Mrs. Konar,

  This is in reply to your letter of April 17, 1972. Regrettably, there is no new information concerning your son Corporal Samuel B. Konar. The search is continuing. As you know, the officers’ board that was convened to investigate his status had, after sixty days, found no evidence to recommend a change to deceased. That remains the case these more than seven months later.

  The letter went on to say the welfare of the American servicemen captured or missing in Vietnam was a matter of the utmost urgency, and the president desired all to know that his administration would not set the matter aside until every American was repatriated and the fullest possible accounting of the missing was given.

  Then there was another paragraph, and Bo was surprised by the change in tone. He read closely, as if he might be the recipient of some code meant to tell him more about his brother than protocol would allow. On a personal note, there is one further detail I can add, which may at least give you the chance to talk to someone who knew your son in Vietnam. Captain Burne Grayson has retired and is living in the town of Abas, West Virginia. He was on the ground the day Corporal Konar went missing, and his testimony has been instrumental in keeping your son carried in that status.

  The letter was signed, Sincerely, J. A. KRAYNACK, Captain, U.S. Marine Corps Head, Casualty Section, Personal Affairs Branch, and at the bottom of the letter was a handwritten postscript: #1 Morning Ridge. It would not be out of line to go visit. Good luck. Jack.

  After Bo came home from college in the winter of ’59, the farthest he had ever traveled from Dardan was a trip to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to look at a saw he did not buy. It was a Mattison and had been poorly maintained and then stored for years in a barn near the river, so its parts were either seized or decayed beyond repair. Jozef had told him to go. You never know what you might find, he said, and four hours later Bo found out he had wasted his time.

  So he sat there on the porch, the air smelling sweetly of peonies and wet grass, and he wondered if he should go to this place in West Virginia and listen to a man he had never met tell him about the last days of his brother’s life. And he decided he would not.

  The screen door slammed, and Hannah came out and sat down
in the rocking chair.

  It’s the most we’ve ever gotten, she said.

  And we’ve still got nothing.

  That’s just what it feels like. We don’t know for sure. Maybe we should go see this Captain Grayson. Maybe he could tell us something, if he’s so inclined.

  Why wouldn’t he come see us, if he was so inclined? And why wouldn’t he already have told it to the marines in charge of this stuff?

  She didn’t answer. Bo put the letter down on the porch and banged some mud off of his boots into the beds below.

  Maybe I can get a number and call him first, he said. We could drive down together.

  Hannah rocked. What about Ruth? she asked.

  I’ll take the letter to her, Bo said. He was working a stick into the lug sole of his Chippewas, and he pretended to be distracted. When he finished, he banged that boot, too, and said, She’s the one who ought to make the visit, you know.

  She won’t drive down there pregnant like that to visit some man she’s never met.

  I didn’t mean down there. I mean up here. Invite her into this house, Hannah. It’s not like when that baby comes you can just ignore her, Sam or no Sam.

  Bo, Hannah said, I lay up most nights thinking about the same thing. And the closer I get to becoming a grandmother, the more sleep I lose over it.

  Well?

  Yes, she said. I wish that it were.

  She got out of the rocker and walked down the steps of the porch and picked up the garden trowel and hand rake she had left on the grass and put them in the wheelbarrow.

  You know, she said, turning to look up at Bo on the porch, if Sam had ever felt the loss, ever felt what it was like to have your father around and then to know he was never coming back, he’d have stayed away from her, no matter how beautiful she is. Not out of anger. Out of sadness. That’s all I want, Bo. I just want them to stay away. Is that too much to ask?

  In the morning, after Bo had gone to the mill, Hannah drove over to St. Michael the Archangel church and parked behind Father Rovnávaha’s Scout in the rectory lot. She got out and knocked on the front door, and the housekeeper said that the priest was in the church hearing confessions, so Hannah walked along the sidewalk and went in by the back door and sat down.

  The church was built in the 1920s by Father Bozak of Swoyersville, a revered World War I chaplain who was wounded badly with a company of men at the second battle of the Marne. He vowed, the story went, that if he lived he would build a church of stone just like the ruined one in France where he lay waiting for someone to find him, while all around the men of his company cried out in their final hours for a medic, their mothers, and God.

  Stone turned out to be more practical than symbolic in that part of Pennsylvania when the priest came home and announced his plans to build a church west of the city for the people of faith who lived along the Salamander. Catholics kept mostly to their neighborhoods in Wilkes-Barre. Jozef once said that in 1921 he remembered seeing, against the night sky on the hill where the church now stood (the whole valley clear-cut and stripped of trees for the mines), three crosses almost two stories high, burning to remind Dardan what could happen if they let the immigrant papist have his way. But that only steeled Bozak, who was said to have threatened the burning of his church with the fires of hell, unleashed by a man who knew what those fires looked and felt like. And so St. Michael’s was built. The stone quarried in Pennsylvania. The timber cut in the Endless Mountains. The hands that raised it from the town itself, men of all faiths and no faith, hired and paid, their names etched on a plaque in the nave.

  Inside, it was quiet and still and Hannah felt like she was nine again, when she came there with her mother on Saturday afternoons to confess to Father Blok in the dark of the confessional about hiding some hardtack under her pillow, or not wanting to help her mother or father around the house. Once she blurted out that she hated the farm and wished she could live like other boys and girls who did not have to milk cows and gather eggs or weed patches of tomatoes and cucumbers. In those days, the old priest looked to her through the screen like he might be asleep. But she could hear him breathing, waiting for her to finish, and he said, Your sins are not grave, Hannah. She was shocked to hear a priest tell her she had done nothing wrong. He went on, Imagine, there is a part of the world where right now a girl like you is praying that she might not lose her mother, because her father was lost when the soldiers came into town. And after that, she wants for one thing only. Food. What did you have for breakfast this morning? She told him, Fresh eggs. He said, Ahh, fresh eggs, as though they had appeared on a plate before him in that tiny booth. Did you thank God for them? Hannah said no. Then for your penance, thank God for the food before you when your mother places it on the table. And then take a moment to thank God for her, too. Will you?

  The air smelled of the same candle smoke and slight perfume of frankincense and gardenia that she remembered, and it still sounded even in its silence like every voice uttered was a whisper and that whisper would echo forever if she just sat and listened long enough.

  When there were no more lines outside the confessional, Hannah slipped inside and heard the screen slide. Father Rovnávaha greeted her with a blessing.

  Good morning, Father, she said. I wanted to ask if you’d like to come for lunch tomorrow. I need your advice and your counsel and, well, I need it sooner rather than later. I thought this might be as good a place as any to find you.

  Hannah, Rovnávaha said. He sounded exhausted, though it was only morning. For lunch with you, I would tell the pope himself to wait. What time?

  Come at noon if you can. We’ll have chicken soup.

  Noon it is.

  There was a short silence between them, then Rovnávaha said, Is there anything else you need to talk about?

  No, Father, she said. We’ll save that for another conversation.

  She sat reading in the living room with the front door open so she could listen for the priest, the telltale downshifting every vehicle did to make the hill. He was right on time at twelve, and she went out on the porch and watched his small truck come up and over the rise through the trees and pull into the drive.

  In the church, and when he made sick calls at the hospitals in Kingston and Wilkes-Barre, Rovnávaha wore his full black clerical suit with a high white collar. But in town, when he ran errands or traveled to the homes of parishioners, he dressed in khaki trousers and a tab-collar clerical shirt that he rolled up at the sleeves, with a faded jean jacket over it if there was a chill in the air. He got out and stared up at the sky that had clouded over again, walked up the front steps of the house, and gave Hannah a bottle of wine.

  Will it ever stop trying to rain? he said, and she smiled and told him she had given up on the spring and was pinning all of her hopes on summer.

  They had the chicken soup with fresh bread and they told stories of Jozef and laughed at most of them and did not speak of anything or anyone else.

  When they were finished, Hannah cleared the bowls and plates and made coffee. Rovnávaha sat, swirled the last of the wine in his glass, and waited for her to tell him why she had asked him to lunch. She put out cups, saucers, a sugar bowl, and a creamer and sat down, one hand resting on the table, the other in her lap.

  She said to the priest, You know, Father, when Becks went missing during the war, there were days I used to leave Bo with Papa and walk up to the bend, where he and I hiked when we were young. I could speak to him there. I knew he was alive. So I wasn’t surprised when Father Blok called me one day to tell me he had heard from a Hungarian priest who was a friend of his that a man named Konar was being held by the military police and was suspected of desertion. All I could help thinking was, He is alive. I trusted while the others doubted.

  When I went to Brooklyn to visit him in prison, he told me what he had done, the weeks on end of fighting in French villages, the rain of mortars in the forests, the man next to him with no arms or legs, the dead. He had no desire to be anywhere. Less des
ire to fight. So when he got the chance, he fled and found a kumpania of Rom who took him in like one of their own, which he was in a way. Until the war was over.

  But when he came home finally, he was a changed man. I would wake up in the morning, his side of the bed cold, and I would go outside and find him walking out of the woods as though he had spent the entire night there. Where were you? I’d ask, and he would say, I couldn’t sleep, so I went up to the bend to listen to the stream. And I knew I had lost him. Lost the part of him that had years earlier, when he was a boy yet, run from Europe to come live with us on this farm, because his own grandfather said to him, Go find the man they called Vinich.

  She stopped, put her head down, and dabbed at her eyes with a napkin.

  Go on, Rovnávaha said.

  So even though two years had gone by, two years in which we had Sam, and Papa was talking about Becks taking over the mill, and he seemed to be coming back to us, I wasn’t surprised when they told me he’d been shot by Paul Younger on the ridge that spring. It was like I had been expecting it all along. Like he had willed it somehow. I know it was an accident, and I can’t imagine what Paul Younger must carry around with him still. Like some kind of millstone. But I carry one, too. And I can’t forgive him, Father. I don’t want to forgive him. To me he’s just another man with a rifle who took my Becks. And now Bo wants me to invite him and his daughter into my home. Feed them. Welcome them as family because of what Sam and Ruth have done. But it’s not what I want to do. I don’t want to call them family. If I had my way, I would make them leave this town altogether. Only that would bring me peace.

  Rovnávaha leaned back into his chair. He had heard the story of Bexhet Konar from Father Blok when he first came to St. Michael’s as a young priest, one week after they buried the man. Information during the war was often passed through the Vatican, and there was talk of an American soldier with Romani blood who had been found by the Resistance, separated from his unit and wandering the Ardenne Forest. They killed many, many Germans, Tomáš, Blok told him in a tone more of wonder than of disapproval, as though Becks Konar might have been a part of that resistance. But he was, in the end, just a lost and tired soldier who waited too long to return to the war.