The Age of Perpetual Light Read online

  Little Rachael looks like she is thinking not so much about the spilling as about the length of time the piss has been in the bag. She crinkles up her nose.

  I reach across the table and hold the bag before her face. “What do you smell?” She refuses to breathe. I hold it in front of her little brother’s nose. Then her older brother’s. Then, reaching all the way across the table, under her mother’s nose. I can feel her breath on my knuckles.

  “Nothing!” I say, and, over her plate, turn the bag upside down. I shake it. Not a drop comes out.

  “What kind of bags?” she says.

  As if such a bag is too valuable to be away from my body for long, I pull it back. “Canvas,” I tell her. “Soaked in turpentine and wax.”

  Ura chews the end of a bone. “From Russia?”

  “Where can you get them?” his wife says.

  “This,” Ura says, “is how they make them in Russia?”

  “Do you have more?” she asks.

  “I think …” I answer, “I believe … I might … No, I am almost certain I must have, even right now, one or two still in my sack.”

  But once we are in the sitting room standing beside my rucksack, it is not the bags she wants. It is colder in there, the fire unlit—the Amish, in all my years of knowing them, are never ones to waste wood—and when I bend down to open the straps of my rucksack, she bends down behind me. I feel, in the pocket of my coat, her hand. On the straps, my own hands go still. From the kitchen: the sound of the kindes cleaning up the plates, of Ura talking to them, just on the other side of the wall. But she is right there. So close. Her soft, round face with its sun-hardened skin, dark beneath the white of her bonnet, her mouth a hard line. Is the line shaking? Through the lining of my coat pocket, I feel the back of her fingers against my thigh. I feel them find the bag, close around it. Yes, her mouth is shaking, just a little. I see it when her lips open, hear it on the murmur of disappointment she makes.

  “What is it?” I whisper.

  “Dry,” she says. “But not still warm.”

  “The piss?” A small laugh comes from my throat and I try to tamp it out before it gets past her ears. “After fifteen years?”

  She smiles. “Why do you lie, Yankel?”

  It is the first time she has ever called me by my given name. I slip my hand into the pocket. Her wrists are so big there is hardly room for mine. I can feel my blood beating against the bones at the back of her hand, her knuckles beneath my fingers, and, as I curl mine around hers, the warmth passing through our skin.

  I whisper, “What is it that you want?”

  Such is the world through which I walk: Heavy stone homes more knolls than houses, their chimneys going through them like veins of rock. Even the barns are made of stone. Their slate roofs dare the wind to try to blow them anywhere. So gray, so solid, and in winter the round, red hexes painted on their walls look like rusty washers bolting them to the sky. Even the dirt roads are hard as pounded metal, beaten by the hooves of plow horses, by the boots of a million soldiers who marched them not even forty years ago. How fertile the fields are with bones! Yet, when the sun breaks through, when it sweeps them in patches, they look alive, rolling gentle as clouds between the ridgelines. The ridgelines are black straps holding them down. In their shadows: the hunkered milking barns, silos like turrets. Defending what? Against whom? The windows of the houses give no answer. Mostly they are dark, still as if sleeping, uninterested in the passing of days, decades, the century. It is 1901. March. I have been walking these roads for almost four years.

  There I am, cresting a hill! First comes my voice, babbling to itself like a whole family at supper. Next, the smoke from my pipe, drifting into the air as if just on the other side of the hill there is, instead of me, the chimney of a small house. But wait. It is moving! Yes, there is its roof! No, that is my rucksack! So large it rises first atop the hill, above my head, as if the road itself is growing a hump. And then? Bit by bit? Comes me: the pale orange fuzz at the top of my fox-hair hat, the hairy earflaps swinging, my glasses foggy, my mustache dark with sweat. The rucksack’s straps cut into my shoulders, the rope with which I tie it to my waist bunching my long coat like a bathrobe. If it is sunny, my flasch is out. It swings—tock, tock—against my chest, soaking in the light, so it will be ready for the kindes of the next farm. And there I go: the nails in the soles of my boots clacking against the pebbles on the road, the ash I knock from my pipe leaving behind me a trail, almost invisible, then gone, until as I make my way down towards the last farm for the day, there is left only the sound of my singing:

  A bisl libe un a bisele glik,

  Di zun zol shaynen!

  Nor oyf eyn oygnblik

  Ven ikh zol kenen in mayn Hartz

  arayn brengen zonnenshayn

  oyf eyn minit!

  A little love and a little luck,

  The sun shall shine!

  Just a little bit

  When I’ll know in my heart

  to bring the sunshine around

  in a minute!

  Down there they will serve to me my supper. The Klopfenstiens, or Virklers, or Oesches, or Yordys. They will make for me a bed in the barn. Waglers, Beilers, Lapps, Knepps. My hundred families, two hundred, maybe more. Three or four I make it to in a day. Three or four times I return to each within in a year. They like me. I speak their language, or close enough. I like them. They remind me—their plain clothes, their big families, their devotion to God, their faces ready for suffering, yes, even the beards—of home.

  Never have I cheated them. Never have I sold a faulty good. Never have I duped or swindled. Never do I come to their doors without a smile. Usually also with a tune. Of their ways I do not make my judgments known. I do not speak against their God. I speak no Hebrew in their homes. Nor do I place in their hands the weight of my heart. Never do I eat a meal without bringing a gift, or sleep in a bed without leaving a nickel on the sheets, or spend a night in the barn only to wake in the morning and steal my breakfast from a milch cow’s teat. Never do I tempt their sons, flirt with their daughters. Never have I slept with their wives.

  How many times have I told that story of the kelt and the piss? How many leak-proof bags have I sold? How many children have I made laugh with my nose poking through the crack between my hands like the tip of a poz? How many times have I wiggled my nose for them, my ears wiggling along with it? How many times, then, in the moment before I split my hands apart, have I remembered: we could all twitch our noses and our ears, but it was only my breuder who could do one without the other. I remember the way he would move his face part by part—one ear, one eyebrow, one nostril—and how the rest of us would laugh. Tatte’s laugh like low humming from the back of his throat. Mamme’s rolling, hiccupping, a bell tossed down the side of a hill. My breuder’s squeezed snorts as he tried to keep quiet beneath the twitching of his face. My own, unrecognizable. Then, my hands stay sealed in front of me. My nose: still. My ears: still.

  “Mister Yushrov?” the farmer, after some time, will say.

  His wife: “Is something wrong?”

  Their kindes: silent, watching.

  This is what they do not understand. This is why they do not like my wonze. Not only Ura Hartzler. All of them. They tell me that it makes me look like a soldier.

  “A soldier?” I say.

  “In the army of Germany,” they tell me, “every soldier wears beneath his nose a schnurbaertli.” They say, “We are a peaceful people here.”

  I tell them this I know, but I remind them that here is not Germany, anymore. “We are in America,” I say. “A new country. A country far away from our pasts. Here,” I tell them, “the soldiers wear beards.”

  They nod, they shrug. “Still,” they say, “it makes you look like a German soldier.”

  This is why there is no Amish peddler to take my trade from me. This is why in the first spring of the first year of the new century, I go all the way to the capital of the county, I brave the busy streets, I push
through the doors of the Reading Hardware and Dry Goods Company and spread out on the counter all the money I have saved. This is why I tell the clerk, “I want to buy a cart.”

  By May I am back at the Hartzlers’ farm again. Normally, it would be June, even July, but I have changed my route. I don’t want to carry with me too long the thing that Esther Hartzler desired. I have wrapped it in crumpled pages of the Reading paper, and slid it inside one of a pair of mittens I hope to sell. They are lined with the thick, soft fleece of a sheep, but, still, taking extra care, I have rolled them into a blanket and tied it shut and wedged it, snug, into the corner of my cart.

  How before my cart did I make it up these hills? How did I carry enough to keep from starving? It has been barely more than a month since I gave up my rucksack and, yet, I cannot conceive of how I once did it. My shoulders have forgotten the weight of the straps. My belly cannot remember the belt. I tell my buttocks, Forget the weight pressed down on you! Back, I say, forget the sweat of the pack! I brush my hands of it. Is it possible that for three years I trudged all these miles beneath that rucksack? That I thought us inseparable as a tortoise and its shell? That once I loved it as if it was, all wrapped in one, my companion and work and home? Such is the cuckolding delivered at the hands of progress.

  My new cart has three wheels. On either side, attached to the axle, there are two large ones rimmed with iron and spoked with wood, set close enough to the back that if I wished I could reach out with a hand and feel, brushing against my palm, their rough-pocked hoops. With each step I take they grunt alongside my grunting. Sometimes I speak to them. Just a little farther, I say. I tell them, We can rest at the top. The third wheel speaks back. It is a little thing, hiding under the front of the cart like a kitten beneath a couch. Thin iron hoop, thin iron spokes, it squeaks. I have, attached to it, a rod: it runs beneath the cart and up through the back to the handlebars from which I can turn it. This way or that. Coming down a hill, running with the pull of the weight, I like to play with the little wheel, making it swoop back and forth across the road, back and forth, until the cart almost topples and, laughing, we have to rein ourselves in.

  After all, the cart is not truly a new one. The money I had was only enough to pick through the hardware store’s back lot. So? Neither am I such a new one, anymore. Besides, I like the layers of old paint, the black scraped down to the red scraped down to the yellow scraped down to the wood. It is as if I can see on its sides the passage of time, the world rolling forwards. How long ago was the first coat painted? Who brushed it on? What did he carry? Who did he carry it to?

  By the time that I begin the long, rattling trundle down the hill towards the Hartzler farm, it is approaching the hour for supper. The smoke wisping out of the kitchen chimney does to my stomach the same as the clanging of a bell. But my stomach’s rumble is buried beneath the cart. And I know that the Hartzlers are not yet inside at the table. Below, the rich light of the end of the day spreads thick as butter over pastures still giddy with spring. Such green! Such plushness! It makes me want to reach down—Yankel the Giant! Yankel the Golem!—and plunge my fingers in.

  Down there, in the milking parlor, there is, I know, the whole family. Though the only one I can see is the girl. She is outside, in the small corral, moving among the cows that have already been milked, dumping grain into the troughs, the bucket flashing in the light, the feed a little explosion of gold, the cows shoving to smother it. On the other side of the barn, the ones still waiting to be relieved of their milk crowd the shut door, knocking, wanting in.

  Inside the parlor I can still hear their dull thudding, but it is walled off and distant as my own heartbeat, buried beneath the sounds in the room: hoof clomps, shit spatter, the muzzles of four cows battering the wood bins to shlingn every last grain of feed, the slap of a wet cloth, the high, thin, shushing of the milk streaming into the pails: shush, shush, shush.

  I stand in the entryway reserved for humans, listening, watching. The only light is what streams in through the small, square windows that line the walls. It looks more red than it did even just outside. Maybe it is only my eyes adjusting to the dimness of the barn, or maybe it is only how this time of day the light changes with each breath, fast as butter browning in a pan, but it seems to me more than that: strange, wondrous, even frightening, as if the light is not what is changing but the change is in the world on which it falls, as if the two have come untethered, out of alignment, the barn not the barn, the cows not the cows, the man not the man, the woman not the woman, the boys not the boys. In and out of the beams of red light, pieces of them—hands, arms, faces—flicker like moths. I can feel them swirling and I stare hard at them, at the rest of their shapes in the shadows, to make them people again, four people: tatte, mamme, sohn, sohn.

  Slowly, I become aware that the mamme is talking to me. They’ll be done soon she says. Into the light she raises an arm—Esther Hartzler’s forearm, her thick wrist, her fingers spattered white with milk—and gestures for me to wait outside. Instead, I unbutton the cuffs of my sleeves. I crouch down. At the basin, I soap my hands, I wash my forearms. And, fingers dripping, I enter the parlor to join them.

  Over supper there is the good freundschaft of having worked together. Do they feel it, this family that every evening eats like this after milking? How can I know? I only know that the green onion shoots taste like the wild ones I would pick beside the wagon ruts in the dirt road I used to walk to school; that the slices of warm mutton are slathered in a sauce that smells like my mother’s hands after she had stood on the stool in the sun of the window hanging to dry the sheaves of mint; that little Yonnie is not too shy to, in the middle of my chewing, reach over and, with his napkin, wipe at my mustache: green jelly on the cloth, the boy’s green teeth grinning. Is it true that Ura talks more, and more easily, that he tells a little slower the story of a shunned man, an excommunicated woman, with a little more detail of a sickness among the hens and trouble with two bull calves, unfolding tales without rush, without worry, the way he would to a friend?

  Even Esther Hartzler doesn’t make any tension. All supper, she asks not one question. Is she tired from the work? No. Her eyes are alive as ever. Even—is it possible?—more. Is her face flushed simply from the heat of the stove, of the steam coming off her plate? Are her cheeks more full, the creases around her eyes less deep, her lips a younger woman’s? All supper I try not to look at her, and fail. There is something new in her that makes me grip my fork and knife to keep the tines and tip from rattling against my plate.

  I want to ask her, but even after supper, when Ura tells her that he and the children will clear the table while she goes out to my cart to see my wares, she says only that it is too dark. In the morning, she says. Even when I try with a look to tell her that I have brought for her her wish. Even when, following her into the kitchen, I whisper that I have already brought it in, that it is wrapped up in my bedroll right here beneath my arm, she does not even glance behind her to see.

  For an hour before bedtime we all sit in the kitchen, on the dining room chairs drawn into a circle, the whole family and me shelling peas—plink, plink—into a bucket in the middle, my eyes taking the whole of her in. Are her breasts even heavier? Is her belly more round? My heart rises like dough in the moist heat of my chest. But when we’re done and Ura announces his departure for the outhouse and there is just her and me in the kitchen with overhead the footsteps of the children drumming to their beds, before I can ask her anything, she tells me, “Bring it to your room tonight.”

  Later—so late it is maybe already morning—she comes to me. She brings no lamp, no candle. There is just the creaking of her walking the upstairs hall—I can feel each footstep on the bridge of bone in the center of my chest—and the door opens, a blackness in the wall peeled away to show the pale light of the moon coming through the hallway window and in it her black shape. She is listening. I listen, too. From the bed against the other wall comes no rustle of sheets, no creak of slats beneath
the mattress, only the same steady breathing that I have listened to for hours: Samuel, her older boy. Yonnie is next door in his sister’s room, the two smallest of the family sharing a bed, her younger son’s narrow cot left for me.

  Slowly, the moonlit doorway disappears, her dark shape disappearing with it into the darkness of the wall. For a moment, after the click of the door, we both wait, holding our breath. Then she is there. As soon as I feel her weight settle onto the mattress beside me, I know, somehow, that she is with child. And I want—suddenly, overwhelmingly—to touch her like I never have before, slide my palm over her belly, up the center of her chest along the same bone so thudded at in mine, rest my hand there between her breasts. But instead I reach down. Beneath the bed, my hand finds the bag, the cinch, begins to open it.

  “No,” she whispers.

  She has bent close and the feeling of her breath on the skin of my ear mutes for a moment the sound.

  “Don’t you want to see it?” I whisper back.

  “We can’t,” she says.

  “Yes,” I tell her, “I have it here.”

  I can barely feel through the mattress the faint ripple in her body from her shaking her head. “The light,” she whispers.

  “The light?”

  “It will wake him.”

  I hush a laugh and keep it to a smile that I can feel spread over my whole face. And so that she can know it, I reach out and take her hand and press her palm to my mouth. I have been growing my mustache and her little finger pushes the hairs against my nose. It tickles. I can feel my breath wet her skin and I say into her moist palm, “There is no light.”

  “Nein?” she whispers, and I wish she would take my palm and put it to her mouth.

  “It doesn’t work like that,” I say. “It can’t make light on its own.” I let go of her hand. In the dark, I think I can just make out that she lifts it, that, perhaps—I stare at the darkness where I know her face must be—she presses her hand to her cheek.