Lights on the Mountain by Cheryl Anne Tuggle

Author:Cheryl Anne Tuggle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paraclete Press
Published: 2018-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

10

LATER THAT MORNING, when Jess had turned the cows out on hay, he drove over to the Hays place. The pump on the well had a faulty switch, and he wanted to see what needed to be done to fix it. Gracie’s parents, Ivan and Darya, were coming to visit. And if Jess knew anything, it was that it would not do to have Morozovs in the house and no water for tea.

More than a decade of marriage to Gracie, and he still couldn’t warm to his in-laws.

Nor, he knew, could they warm to him.

Gracie was their only child, born when Darya was forty-seven, and Jess had stolen her away. It was from her mother that Gracie had got her suppleness, her strong, lithe limbs. They walked about the earth as water would, if it had arms and legs. Only in the last few years had Darya finally started showing her age, growing heavier and slower now with every year that passed. She had Gracie’s amber eyes too, but Darya’s were cooler and flickered with impatience at Jess’s bashful fumbling. Once in a while he thought he caught the scantest, palest flash of her daughter’s kindness in them, but it came and went so quickly he could never be quite sure.

Gracie’s papa was a man of medium height, or slightly more (the top of Ivan’s head would reach Jess’s shoulder, anyway, if they were to stand side by side), with a thick, wide chest and strong old miner’s arms he seemed always to keep crossed. He was balding, and what hair remained stood in two funny, owlish tufts atop his head. Gracie and her mama were joined at the heart, but it had always been Ivan who hung the moon over Gracie’s earth at night. There were times when, with no small amount of jealousy, Jess suspected she also gave her father credit for the sun. On occasions like this evening’s dinner, with Ivan and Darya and Gracie all together at once, Jess was the fourth leg on a three-legged stool. An awkward leg he made too, cut of inferior American wood, far too long and poorly turned. He set the whole stool off its neat little feet.

He had reached the Hays place, a piece of wooly, untilled land Orville and Zodie had bought tamed and let go wild. Zodie was a dowser, a water-witcher. With a forked stick, she found water, and with a special rig and truck, Orville brought it up. The witching was something Jess’s family had never taken seriously, though it was a fact that the Hays had a high rate of success at striking water on the first try. Gracie was never skeptical when there was the scantest reason to believe, though, and would have Zodie and her wand at the farm in an instant, Jess knew, if the Hazel well should ever run dry.

“What’s the news, Jesse?” Orville said. “Don’t never see you this time of the day, ’less it’s in the feed truck.”

“Well trouble,” Jess said.

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