The Signal Flame

by Andrew Krivak

  Like he’s in a box somewhere, she would say, and the marines just haven’t gotten around to opening it yet. And Bo would take that letter down to the hardware store.

  If it were my dad, Ruth said, and shook her head. I don’t know what I’d do.

  Bo shifted his weight and pinched the brim of the hat in his hand. He looked down at the dog and back at Ruth and felt his gut twist when it occurred to him that this was how his brother saw his fiancée when they stepped out of their embrace and she got on the plane that took her back to Dardan from Hawaii. She had gone to be with him on leave, one month before his second tour in Vietnam was over.

  How far along are you? he asked.

  Seven months. Due in June.

  Well, if I can help at all, Bo said. With anything. You let me know.

  She closed her eyes and opened them. All the troops are pulling out, she said, as though he had asked another question altogether. Just last night I heard Cronkite say on the news that Nixon wants everyone home by September.

  They’ll find him, Ruth, he said. You know my brother. He’s going to be waiting on your doorstep the day you bring that baby home.

  She wiped her cheek with the sleeve of her shirt and said, You’re right.

  Bo put his hat on and called Krasna. You let me know, he said again, and turned and walked back in the direction of the loading bay doors.

  Wind rocked the truck on the road up to the farm, and Bo thought of the day Sam first mentioned Ruth Younger’s name. Bo was working at the mill and paying rent to his grandfather to live at home. Sam came down the hall to his room one evening after supper and said, Hey, Bo, you’ll never believe who talked to me at school today. Ruth Younger. What kind of hell do you think the old man would give me if I started saying more than hello back to her?

  Sam stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, after saying this all in a rush. Bo told him not to worry about the old man. It was Hannah he would have to answer to. Sam made a noise like a blown tire and walked back down the hall. Then it was spring, followed by a long hot summer.

  At the start of a new school year, he came into Bo’s room again, his lip swollen and his eye bruised.

  What happened to you? Bo asked.

  Football practice, Sam said. It’s nothing. I’ve got to talk to you about something else.

  Bo closed the book he was reading and Sam sat down on his brother’s bed. He was squeezing a rubber ball in his hand.

  It’s this Ruth Younger thing. I’ve got it bad, brother. I need to be with her. I just need you to be on my side. Will you do it?

  Bo said, Sam, it’s not about taking sides. If you told Pop you were in love with the daughter of the man who shot dead your father, he would sit you down like a tracker with spoor and say, You’ve got to know your own mind, son. Then it doesn’t matter what you do.

  Sam threw the rubber ball at Bo and hit him in the chest. I wasn’t even two. And Ruth was just a baby.

  Bo threw the ball back. Like I said. It’s Mom. She would want to know why, of all the girls in Dardan, you had to choose a Younger, and then you would have to live with her believing that you couldn’t show your father’s memory the respect of leaving that family alone.

  Sam shook his head. Family, he said. She lives down in the Flats on Holly Street with her dad in a place no bigger than a shed. I’ll bet there wasn’t any talk of the old man leaving that family alone when he was scooping up their land.

  Those were different times, Bo said.

  Yep. Real different. Pop still lets him hunt, you know. Paul Younger.

  Bo had not known, but he pretended that it was no matter. You’ve got to understand, he said. It’s not like she believes Younger went unpunished. It’s more like she doesn’t want to be reminded of who our father was when he came home.

  Who was he? Sam asked, though not like he wanted to know.

  Not the man in that photograph she keeps on the mantel, Bo said. That’s for sure. I remember him looking thin and weak. And he walked slow, like he was hollowed out of everything. There was a horse he spent most of his time with, an old gelding he called Pushkin. Mom said he used to take care of a lot of horses in town before they were married. Men brought them to him from all over the place. Something about the Lowari. The kind of gypsies he had come from. He and I just walked in the woods a lot. I was afraid to ask him too many questions. Thought he might start to cry or blow over if I did.

  Sam sat and listened and considered Bo’s memory of their father. That’s a fair bit of him you’ve got in there, brother, he said.

  There’s more, Bo said. Scenes in my head that stand out for the season or time of day. Things he did. Or didn’t do. He wouldn’t eat an egg. I remember that.

  Was he what they say he was? Sam asked.

  I don’t know. Pop says he fought same as any man. More, even, if he was broken like that. He did what he could to save his life and come home.

  Sam stared out into the hall. Sounds like someone I wish I’d known, he said.

  When he got back to the house, Bo pulled his truck all the way up the drive and went in by the back door. The woodstove in the kitchen was warm. He lifted the lid and put some kindling on the coals and a small log on top of that.

  Hannah, he said into the quiet.

  Krasna pushed past and padded in the direction of the living room. Bo followed the dog and found his mother asleep in a chair by the fireplace, that fire not having burned for long before going out. A worn hardback of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was splayed spine-up on the floor. Bo pulled a blanket around her shoulders and walked back into the kitchen. The stove was burning again, and he put two more logs in the firebox and went outside to the barn.

  There was enough daylight in the wood shop to work, but he flipped the light switch, stoked a fire in the potbelly, then moved to the center of the room and chucked up a cherry block in the lathe and tightened the tool rest a finger’s distance from the wood.

  He had the idea for a hutch when he saw the stack of letters his mother was collecting from the marines and the Department of the Navy. By February she had two small piles tied together and sitting on the table in the dining room, a table they set only for the velija feast at Christmas Eve and on Easter Sunday. He began to make a sketch of something with drawers in it, a shelf, and a top for writing. It was during a snowstorm in late February that he sat down in the kitchen and looked at the sketch and added four short legs to the hutch to see what it would look like set off from the floor, then measured a corner of the foyer and altered the dimensions he had drawn so it would fit there. He had some cherry set aside in the drying shed at the mill, and he told himself he would get to work on the hutch in April. Then his grandfather died.

  He put on glasses and took up the new gouge. His hands were shaking and he knew why. He breathed and imagined for a moment the short-styled leg’s finished shape, the shallow recess above the midpoint, then the single long-curved hourglass tapering into the foot. All he wanted to do now, though, was rough them out. He snapped on the machine, his left hand palm-down to guide the gouge, and eased the cutting edge into the spinning block. He worked in increments of a few inches across the wood out toward the tailstock, feeling the edges give way until they spun smooth and the entire piece was round. He did the same to the other three, then shut off the lathe, removed his glasses, and stepped back.

  He thought he heard a car outside and looked out the window and down the drive, but there was no one. It was like that when they came to tell Hannah about Sam. Bo was stoking the potbelly when he saw the blue Nova sedan, and he ran from the barn into the house just as his mother answered the door. Now all he felt were the wood shavings under his sleeves and the cold off the glass. He walked over to the stove and fed it another shovelful of coal, the sulfur smell mingling with the sweetness of the cherry in the air. Only in the summer, when he came in after work to touch up a piece, or prep it for a long stretch on the weekend, did he open the windows and let in the smell of the mowed
grass and ripening apples or the coming rain. His grandfather never had any heat in there. Bo wondered what Jozef would say when he put the stove in, but he seemed not to notice or care. Then, on that same afternoon in November when the marines came to the door, he told his grandson he was glad to have the heat and the stove. Wished he had thought of it forty years ago.

  Well, Pop, Bo said into the empty silence of the wood shop, if I can keep it warm in here for another forty, I’ll be doing all right.

  He walked back to the house in the spring twilight. Hannah had soup, a bowl of noodles, and a bottle of wine on the table, the last of a case of Tokaji that Jozef had bought in 1949, a ’45 Tokayer Essenz. Bo washed and sat and told her he could remember the two times in his life he had tasted the wine. The Christmas Eve when he came home from college in the winter of ’59, and dinner on the day he took ownership of the mill.

  I had it for the first time with your father, she said. When he came home from the war. I remember him raising his glass and looking through it, then bringing it to his nose. It’s the smell of my boyhood, minus a horse or two, he said, and I thought, My God, he’s home.

  That doesn’t add up to a case, Bo said. Where’d the rest go?

  Oh, you know, Hannah said, and seemed to brush the air with her hand, and laughed.

  Well, to fathers and sons, then, Bo said, and they touched glasses and drank, the wine tasting to him at once sweet and earthy, like molasses and black tea. He sipped again, as though he had missed something the first time, and asked, Are you sure it’s the last bottle?

  Hannah nodded. Enjoy it, she said. You won’t ever see that year in this house again. Don’t drink it all now, though. It’s for after dinner.

  They bowed their heads and said grace, then ladled their dinner into bowls and ate in the new silence that had descended over them at the table. When they had finished, Hannah asked, What are you building out there?

  Just roughing out some spindles, Bo said.

  Hannah dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a napkin. I got a letter from Captain Foote today. He’s been reassigned to San Diego. He told me that a Captain Kraynack was going to be my new contact for any information that might come up about Sam. I don’t know, Bo. It feels like the world is moving on.

  He had seen the mail. The folded sheet of white paper by the radio was not official-looking stationery, but it was typed, single-spaced, one paragraph with a sweep of a signature beneath the second fold.

  He said, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

  I don’t mean the war, Hannah said. I mean the ones who are supposed to be looking for him.

  They’ve been looking for six months now, Mom.

  He’s your brother.

  Yes. And that matters to me only?

  She shook her head. Your grandfather once said something I’ve remembered ever since. It was just after Sam enlisted. We were sitting at this same table and I wondered out loud why it had to come to that. Why couldn’t we have seen? And he said, Finding yourself is hard, Hannah. Finding yourself in a war is very hard. You have to let him walk the path he chose.

  Bo got up from the table and hooked a dish towel around the stove handle. He turned and leaned against the sink. Leave these for later, he said, and gave a nod to the dishes. Let’s drink our wine outside. It’s a beautiful night.

  They put on jackets and went through the house and out the front door. A gusty wind had risen since he had come in from the wood shop, and the branches of the pear swayed and ticked against the gutters along the porch roof. He sat down on the top step and she in the rocking chair her father had placed there. They looked in the direction of the town, where a faint glow of lights was visible from the creek valley. A crescent moon hung like a tiny scimitar in the west.

  It is a beautiful night, Hannah said, and she began to rock back and forth in the chair, the runners sounding like low thunder rising from the floorboards of the porch, and she pulled at the collar of her jacket in the wind.

  Bo sipped his wine and said, I saw Ruth Younger at the hardware store today. She asked about you.

  Hannah turned to look at him. What did you tell her?

  I told her the truth. That I didn’t know how you were.

  Hannah lowered her head into her folded arms, and when she lifted it again, she said, Must be pretty far along by now.

  June, Bo said. She misses Sam.

  We all do.

  I know, but you don’t have a baby on the way.

  He is my baby, Hannah said.

  The distant wail of a siren rose from the town, the sound traveling far in the cold. Bo watched his mother take a breath and, against a thin spread of lamplight that shone from inside the house, push that breath into the night air like a plume.

  You two boys were so different, she said, looking back out into the dark as she started rocking again. You were always complaining about food, or wanting time to read, if you weren’t in your grandfather’s wood shop working on something. Sam was on the move, like a restless cat. I’d be hanging up the wash, and he’d drop out of a tree like he’d been up there all night, and it’d scare the daylights out of me. Then he’d say something like I was just studying the bark. It’s got bugs in it that the woodpeckers eat. I remember the time once when you and your grandfather went fishing. It had to be late June. Sam was five, and he knew he was too young to be invited, but he wouldn’t listen to a word of explanation and went off to his room until you and Papa had gone. When he came down, I suggested we go out to the lake to fish ourselves, and he said, I don’t want to fish. Let them. We got our bathing suits anyway and drove out to Asa Pound’s dock, and we talked about school for him next year and what a big boy he was becoming. I parked the car under the pine, and we walked down to the water, and he sat in one of those Adirondack chairs that had been there since the beginning. Well, the chair must have had a nest of yellow jackets under it, because I saw him jump and scream and start twitching like no dance I’d ever seen, and it dawned on me what was happening. I dropped everything I had and ran to him, lifted him up with one hand, and pulled him in so close that I could feel those hornets stinging me. Then I jumped right off the dock into the lake, bees floating past like bubbles around our faces. And when I glanced at him there underwater, he was looking at me like he wasn’t sure if he should be confused or relieved, and I could feel him hugging me so tight that I kicked to the surface and swam back because I thought something might really be wrong with him. You know? Like he was allergic and I didn’t know it. But then he let go of me and pulled himself up onto the dock and got the bucket he had brought to play with, filled it with water, walked to the chair, and flipped it over, then doused the nest. Slow, too. Like he knew a good stream of water would do the most damage. And then he kicked that nest off and into the lake, flipped the chair back over, and said, We’re okay now, Mom. Just like that. We’re okay.

  Her rocking slowed to a stop. Listen to me. Talking about him in the past tense. Your grandfather never would.

  Bo said, The night he came up from Camp Lejeune after his first tour, we were drinking beers and he asked me if getting married to Ruth Younger would cause holy hell in the family.

  What did you say?

  I said, Vietcong shooting at you and you’re worried about who’s going to come to your wedding? I’ll come. Find someone else and it’ll be legal.

  Your grandfather, you know, thought that girl was the best thing that ever happened to him. After the marines.

  What do you think? Bo asked.

  She did not answer but started to rock, and for a while there was nothing but the sound of that rhythm and the wind.

  I’ll write to this new captain, she said. We’ll see what we get back.

  The moon had set, and she turned and looked down into the shadows of orchard and road on which every visitor to the farm arrived and left, bent forward and reached for her glass, then sat up and looked over at her son.

  When things settle down, Bernie Lloyd’s coming over to read
the will.

  No surprises in there, I’d imagine.

  No. She paused. I’ve seen it. It’s not that. I’m just wondering what it’s going to be like to hear my father’s voice again. Even coming out of the mouth of a lawyer and from beyond the grave.

  I hear that voice around every corner of this place, Bo said, and drank off the wine in his glass. It’s gotten so that I’ve started talking to him myself.

  She smiled and Bo thought she would stand and go, but she sat there for a moment and seemed to study his face in the paring of light from inside the house.

  You look so much like him, she said. Your father, I mean. So much like him still.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  HE WAS BORN IN 1941 and christened Bohumír Ondrej Konar because, his father said, He will be God’s peace to us. That was the year Bexhet Konar took the exam and raised his right hand to become an American citizen and enlisted in the United States Army. The year he wrote to his wife once a week from basic training in Alabama and saw her and his infant son one more time that spring, before he boarded the troop ship bound for Southampton, England. The letters slowed then, sometimes three a month, sometimes one every other month, letters in which he would refer to a passage from a letter that she had never received. But it did not seem to her that letter-writer wrote less. Rather, the interval of time between them had stretched. In September 1944 a postcard came from Paris on which he had written, My love and a kiss to you and Bohumír. There was no word from him at Christmas. She listened to the news. The tide was turning in Europe after the great landing. Then, in early 1945, she received the note that said her husband was missing in action in France and presumed dead.

  Bo was five when he asked his grandfather if he could come into the wood shop to watch him work. Six when Jozef started teaching him how to use the tools. Bo rode on the tractor, was put in charge of some hens in the chicken coop, and never flinched the day he watched his grandfather and Mr. Pound from the mill butcher a hog. And when he was not with Jozef in the shop, the orchard, or the barn, Bo was in his grandfather’s library, reading the spines of the books that lined the floor-to-ceiling shelves. Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen Crane (the only writer Jozef Vinich said he wished he could have met), Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, H. W. Longfellow, and H. G. Wells. There were collections his grandfather had acquired at auctions. Tomes of philosophy and theology. Local histories he had received as discards from the Osterhout Free Library in Wilkes-Barre. Encyclopedias and almanacs dating back to the turn of the century that he had found in boxes put out for junk at the edge of yards from Dardan to the New York state line. All of it belonging now to a man who had grown up in what Aunt Sue called the ol’ kawntree, a man who had read each one of those books and placed them like stones in a wall that he built against the life he would have been destined to live had he remained in that old country.