The Signal Flame

by Andrew Krivak

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  HE HAD HEARD SOME OF the men around his grandfather’s time call it a planing mill, but it was known in Dardan as the Endless Roughing Mill, a place where lumber came in on logging trucks from the Allegheny Mountains and was air-dried, then cut to shape and kiln-dried and sent out to the local lumberyards or sold to contractors, freight yards, and the mines. When Jozef Vinich arrived in America in 1919, he worked on whatever construction crews would hire him during those years of boom in northeastern Pennsylvania. And when he went to Helen Posol’s father in 1920 and asked the man for his daughter’s hand in marriage, Posol laughed and said, You need to settle down. Jozef asked what he meant, and Posol said that a man needs a business. Jozef never told the father of the woman he loved that he was worth a hundred dollars in the eyes of the Miners Bank. But he understood. In the early spring of ’21 he hopped the train out of Wilkes-Barre to Dardan and walked the remaining four miles west to the edge of town, where the Cording Mill (as it was known) was hiring a tallier.

  In those days, the mill consisted of a warehouse, tally shed, straight-line ripsaw, two roughing planes, and a kiln. Jonathan Cording was a reclusive man, one of the last of the lumber barons in town. He had lost his only son in the battle of Belleau Wood and carried his grief like an empty watch chain that he pulled from his pocket hourly and seemed surprised to find the watch no longer there. He hired Jozef as the second of two handlers on the tally crew. But Cording’s inexhaustible well of sorrow, and the crash of ’29, nearly drove the business into the ground. On Christmas Eve of that year he leaned over the barrel of a twelve-gauge shotgun pressed between his knees and pulled the trigger.

  Cording’s daughter, Emma, saved the place by asking the workers to put what money they could back into the mill and become shareholders in the company. Four of them—laborers, mostly, who stacked boards, swept floors, and shoveled sawdust and wood shavings—left and migrated to the coal mines in Wilkes-Barre and Nanticoke. Four others put in as little as twenty dollars of their savings and hoped that Miss Cording knew what she was doing. Jozef, the yard foreman, the mill manager, and the supervisor put in two hundred dollars each, which she matched with the ten thousand dollars she had gotten from her father’s insurance settlement, and Cording Mill became the Endless Roughing Mill.

  There were days at a stretch when the saws were silent and the owner-operators still came in because they could not tell their families they had no more savings and they would soon have nowhere to work. But in 1930 there was a run on gold found in the Swatara Gap, and the Endless Roughing Mill sold nine thousand board feet of pine a week to a local contractor for the shanty towns going up. By the time the rush was over in 1931 (there was some gold but not enough for an industry to grow) and the National Guard bought the land for a state park, the lumber was sold and the money banked, and Endless Roughing made profits into ’36 supplying WPA projects. By 1940, Jozef Vinich and Erskine Pound, the supervisor, were the sole owner-operators of the mill, everyone else having sold their shares to these men when it looked like the profits were about as good as they were ever going to get. Then they began gearing up for another war in Europe.

  Twenty years later, when Bo came home from college and took the job working in the tally shed with Andy Jones, he told himself it would be temporary. But he was still at the yard in ’62 and had no plans to leave. He loved the acrid smell of the green woods and the syrup scent of pine as loads of these logs came down the grading chain and dropped to the floor, their presence recorded in the echoes that rose to the rafters of the corrugated ceiling before anyone ever made a scratch in the book. He apprenticed in the milling sheds (where he spent another two years breathing the incenselike heaviness of the air that carried on it the rips and whines of the planes and saws) and learned the business side of lumber in the back office with his grandfather. By the time Bo became the owner of Endless Roughing in 1970, he had worked every job in the mill and still shoveled shavings into the kiln furnace in the months when they were shorthanded because no high school kid wanted the job.

  Bo pulled into the yard at noon and walked to his office with Krasna at his heels. Jeff Lamoreaux, the mill supervisor, was sitting behind Bo’s desk and fanning a pile of work orders. Jeff had worked in sawmills in Georgia since he was fourteen. When he was twenty, he moved with his family north to Wilkes-Barre and then to the mountains west of the city, where he showed up one day at Endless Roughing with a letter and a short résumé. Jozef hired him not long after Bo started working.

  Jeff dropped the stack of orders on the desk and stood. Where’ve you been, boss?

  The lawyer read the old man’s will today, Bo said. Looks like I’ve got my own house. That place atop the field on the other side of Rock Mountain.

  That was your grandfather’s? Jeff asked, shaking his head. Damn. The things I don’t know.

  Bo took off his jacket and hung it on the back of the door. What’s come in?

  Jeff pointed to the desk. Heatin’ up all over the place. And not just local. Wilkes-Barre. Hazelton. That means they’re buying lumber.

  It’s just a seasonal bump, Bo said. We’ll bust our asses for a few months and then have to sit on them all summer.

  This one might last. We should be ready for it.

  Bo nodded. You got the help you need?

  I could use someone with a little skill around a saw. I’m tired of teaching them and losing them.

  All right, Bo said, and sat down. I’ll pay three-fifty an hour to anyone who knows what he’s doing.

  How about two more to sweep and shovel?

  Buck-seventy-five. That’s more than they’ll make at the Dairy Queen. Maybe someone will take to it and stick around for a change.

  Will do, Jeff said. He pulled a cigarette from where it was resting on the top of his ear and put it in his mouth.

  I thought you quit? Bo asked.

  Tryin’. One after lunch. One after supper. I just don’t think this one’s going to last until supper. He reached down to scratch Krasna’s ear and turned to Bo. You here for the rest of the day? Because I got to head over to the kiln to keep an eye on those boys from Mansfield. Good Christ, there’s a tree stump down in Georgia that knows more about the inside of that thing than they do.

  Bo laughed. I’m here. You go take care of that. You found them, remember?

  Don’t remind me, Jeff said, and walked out the door chewing on the filter of his Marlboro.

  Bo picked up the work orders. A stack of eight. Maybe this time it would last. Maybe they could buy a moulder, a multihead, and set up a finish shed and get into the business of more custom profiles. Bo signed them all and called the dog and went outside to walk the grounds.

  He ran into the foreman, Dave Cummings, coming out of the break room. Dave told Bo he had seen Asa Pound in town and that Bo ought to check in on the guy. He’s torn up about your grandfather.

  Bo had seen Asa at the wake and the funeral and he had seemed fine, kept it in, but Bo knew he was not fine. The Pounds were their best friends in Dardan. Jozef and Asa had run the mill by themselves once old Erskine let his son have his share of the place. The two men were undivided and of one mind when it came to matters of business, aloof and silent when it came to matters of the town. Asa and Maryann’s son, Will, was right between Sam and Bo in age, the three of them placed five years apart, as inseparable as their guardians. Then one morning in the summer of ’65, Sam and Bo came in from fishing and Jozef and Hannah were at the kitchen table, Hannah crying and Jozef looking like he had seen a ghost. Sit down, boys, he said, and told them that Will had been driving back from a ball game in Philadelphia that night when a trucker who had fallen asleep at the wheel crushed Will in his car between the truck and the mountainside. Will had asked Bo and Sam to come with him, but Sam had schoolwork to do, and Bo hated the idea of being anywhere near Philadelphia. So Will had driven down alone.

  I’ll swing by the house tonight or tomorrow, Bo said to Dave. I was just thinking abo
ut him and the times my brother and I used to have with his son out at the lake.

  Don’t let it keep, Dave said, and Bo thanked him.

  He walked past the planing shed, heard the saws going and the ductwork humming, and he kept on walking. He skirted the kiln and the pond that was surrounded by rhododendrons and blueberry bushes that Jozef had planted a long time ago, and he ducked into the tally shed.

  The air felt ten degrees cooler in there and smelled of dirt and tree bark and a hint of grease as Bo walked past the grading chain. Old Andy Jones was not around, but that was all right. Bo was in no mood to talk. He went over to the makeshift tally desk of eight cinder blocks and an old door and looked into the book Andy kept meticulously and could see they had received two loads of ten thousand board feet the Friday before. Bo told himself to remind Andy to check the schedule for any double loads. Krasna seemed curious about a mouse that had found a corner of the shed in which to hide, until Bo called her away, and they walked out and over to the parking lot and got back into the truck.

  He drove into town and took a left at the lights and headed up Old Lake Road, then veered off onto Rock Mountain Road. Signs for the state game lands were posted ahead of him, and he took a right turn onto a dirt road that looked as though it disappeared into the forest but looped in an S through the trees for half a mile and came out into a clearing. And there it stood at the edge of a field, the house, exposed and weathered like an unintended cenotaph no one returned to or even remembered anymore. He parked and left Krasna on the passenger seat and walked up the front yard of grass and weeds left uncut and brown and pushed flat along the ground from the winter’s snow and spring rain. He stopped at what was once a brick pathway that led to the front porch, but was barely visible now where it had cracked and moved and been covered by the overgrowth along its edge. He heard the warble of birds and looked up and saw doves sitting in the recess of a decorative tympanum above the front door.

  He knew now that Walter Younger had built the house—a three-story clapboard—sometime before Jozef Vinich built his on the other side of the mountain. It had a large porch that ran the entire length of the front, tall windows on the first and second floors that made the facade seem delicate and light, and two small gablet dormers built into the roof of the third floor on the east and west sides. Two chimneys rose through that roof. And in the direction of the field, there was a timber-frame barn that had weathered to a silver so bright the afternoon sun glinted off it like a shard of glass broken and left in the dirt.

  Bo surveyed the front from the bottom step of the porch and reckoned the house had been painted last in the mid-sixties, but the siding had held it well, and only on the south- and southwest-facing sides was there any peeling. As he got closer, he saw a rotten fascia board on the north side where one of the wooden gutters had pulled away. He could see, too, that the window frames were shedding some paint, the glazing raised here and there, but not much, and it occurred to him that Walter Younger had known what he was doing when he built this house. Jozef Vinich had known it, too.

  Bo kicked through the grass and got up close to the foundation, took out his folding knife with an awl on it, and poked at the mortar between the bricks. It was sound. He went around to the back and stood at the full basement door that led down steps cut into the hill on the eastern slope and tried to imagine where his grandfather might have hidden a key, since neither Hannah nor the lawyer had handed him one. It would be close but not too close. Part of the house, a place where he could pick it up upon arriving and hide it when he left. Bo walked back to the front and noticed one side of the latticework under the porch swung on a hinge and was closed with a latch. He opened it and saw a space the width of a deck of playing cards between two bricks in the foundation just below the sill plate. He put his thumb and index finger inside the gap and pulled out a key.

  The basement was cool and smelled of the earth floor and coal dust from the bin that had been emptied and swept clean. Bo opened the ashpan on the furnace and that, too, was empty. The water had been shut off at the main where it came in from the well, and the water heater was gone. He probed the frames of all six windows with the tip of his knife and then retraced his steps in a U-shape, looking up at the floor joists for any cracks or sags. He pulled a wooden crate away from a corner and hoped he would find some mouse droppings or a snakeskin or some crack in the foundation below grade and a line of damp, but there was nothing.

  The basement stairs came up into the kitchen, where there was a soapstone sink, an old wringer washer in a corner, and a Glenwood cookstove. He went over to the sink to have a look at the plumbing and noticed there was a gap between the back of it and the wall. He pulled on the sink to see how well it was anchored and heard something metal fall and clink on the floor. He bent down and picked up a small silver teaspoon, so plain and spare in its design that it looked deliberate. On the back of the handle was the silver mark BK. Bo put it in his pocket.

  He walked out into the main living room and went back and forth across the bare wood floors, feeling for any lifts or loose boards. He stopped at the fireplace and knelt down on the stone hearth, opened the damper, and peered up that chimney. Nothing except sky, but he would have to put a cap on it. The room was bright, and it had warmed considerably in the sun all day, so he opened the windows to see what the cross-breeze was like and to check the sash weights. Then he went upstairs.

  On the second floor he found some water damage in the bathroom. He took his knife and stabbed the watermark, and plaster crumbled into a claw-foot tub.

  Now we’ve got some work to do, he said out loud, and walked through the rest of the bedrooms, checking the walls and ceilings. But the house had weathered its abandonment well. He went up to the third floor to see if there was any evidence of squirrels or more leaks, then climbed down and went out through the front door. He walked over to his truck and hopped up inside the bed so he could see the full surface of the roof, then jumped down. It would be good for at least another five years.

  He let Krasna out of the truck and they walked over to the barn, a post-and-beam design built into the rise of the hill. There was a green cockerel weathervane at the top of a cupola, and it turned gently with the breeze. Two twelve-foot doors on sliders opened at the level of the driveway, and Bo tried these and went inside. He figured there was a little over a hundred square feet of space but nothing on the floor other than a rack of garden tools and two moldy bales of hay. He kicked one bale, and a garter snake nosed out and slid away toward the open door and disappeared into the grass outside. A set of stairs along the wall rose to an upper section of the barn, and he walked up, testing each step for loose boards. At the top was an area large enough for a tractor, and there were two doors that hung on hinges and opened out. He threw the bolt at their center and pushed on them and looked across his twenty acres of field. He knew that a man who rented the place in ’64 had grown potatoes. It had been a cornfield for a short time before that. Who brought in the hay bales or left them, he did not know. Spring shoots of orchard grass and clover were coming up. The old man would have planted those, he thought. The soil looked healthy. He would need the summer just to do repairs on the house, but he could try growing some winter wheat in September. And he knew a man who had a tractor with a plow and a harrow who might be interested in a lease. Krasna came up and around from the side of the barn and lay down in the shade beside the door. Bo looked over at the far edge of the field, a landscape familiar, though from a different angle, the angle he and his grandfather once approached this land from the farm, and stared at the house, and he wondered why it sat alone and unoccupied on that hill as though waiting, though for what his grandfather never said.

  The rifle crack made him jump, and Krasna stood up. It was a large-caliber round, and it came from the creek.

  Stay, Bo said to the dog.

  He walked at a pace across the field, the lay of the land moving him toward the edge of the woods. The breeze had picked up, and he felt the air c
ool as he approached the trees. There’s no wall, he thought, and kicked at the grass as if to make one appear. But the ground had been plowed right to the closest maples, and he knew whatever fieldstone had been collected went not into building a border but into the foundation of Walter Younger’s house, like his grandfather’s. Bo walked another two hundred yards downslope and came to the black and white sign for the game lands, the iron rod driven into the ground, woods on one side of it, weeds and grass on the other. Then he crossed over.

  He could smell the moss and wet rocks. The leaves on the trees had begun to emerge only the week before, their cover like a thin and silvery wash against the sky. Bo scanned the stretch of creek where hepatica and trout lily were beginning to bloom in white and yellow patches, and ferns unfolded in the shade and wet cover of the bend. He looked farther downstream, where the brush thickened, and he saw a man squatting over something on the ground. Bo moved closer and the man stood up and said in a flat voice, You’d get yourself shot in-season stomping around here like that, Konar.

  It was Paul Younger, Ruth Younger’s father. He had on army-surplus fatigues and pants, and he wore a thick black headband without a hat. Not a mark of hunter’s orange anywhere on him. He took a cigarette out of a pack in his vest pocket, lit it, dropped the match, and pushed it into the soft ground with his boot. He took a long drag and Bo could see the scar that curved down his cheek like an age line, too graceful and clean to have been received in any way other than slow. It was said around Dardan that there was not a stretch of woods in Pennsylvania where Paul Younger had ever gotten lost. Or would. Bo had seen him in town only from a distance. He had to be in his sixties, although Bo was not sure, wondering if he just had one of those images of the man in his mind that defined perception regardless of age, an image shaped by the memory of the day he had come up to Hannah at her husband’s funeral with a black hat in hand (the face not scarred then) and tried to speak to her. But she put her arm around Bo, turned her back, and walked away.