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They came through trees to the edge of the open field, where a silver horizon met silver grass bent down with frost and spread out flat before them. A farmhouse and barn stood at the distant edge of that field, and Bo wanted to ask who lived there, but he did not. His grandfather sat down on a large rock and levered a single round into the Marlin. Bo sat down next to him and moved his hands and feet to keep warm. They waited a long time, until the sun was bright and round above the horizon in the east, when his grandfather put a finger to his lips and pointed in the direction of where a doe had emerged from the trees. He slipped off his mittens, got down on one knee, and brought the rifle to his shoulder. Bo followed the sight line of the barrel and saw that it was aimed not at the doe but at the low-slung figure of a dog like no dog he had ever seen, sleek and hunched and twitching at the far end of the field. He looked at his grandfather, as frozen as the grass, then back at the dog just as it leaped. The rifle cracked and the animal arced back in one round motion, and Bo felt his bowels loosen, the warm spreading around him where he sat. He stood up fast, dropped the twenty-two, and ran.
He did not stop until he had gotten to the farm and collapsed by the dog coop. Duna wandered over on her rope and began to lick the back of his neck, and Bo heard someone coming out of the woods. How could he move so fast, he thought, and never thought that again. Bo turned and tried to get up but lay there on his back staring into the sky and sun. He blinked and the sun was eclipsed by a hat. He waited for his grandfather to kick him and tell him he would never touch one of his rifles again, but Jozef reached out his hand and said, C'mon. Let's get you cleaned up. Bo took it, stood, and walked with him through the orchard back to the house.
In the cold living room, remembering that day, Bo leaned forward in the chair and dug his palms into his eyes and rose. Krasna's ears pricked and she got to her feet, and they walked into the foyer and down the hall into the kitchen, where Bo could hear the muffled roar of flames beneath the iron top of the Pittston and feel the heat as he approached its verge. He took off the wool suit coat he had worn since supper and draped it over a coat rack by the door and sat down at a pale and simple table he had made with his grandfather out of beech felled on their land. He ran his hand across the surface of it as if to feel what he could of those days when he first brought the table into the kitchen and his grandfather touched the surface of it in the same way, and said, Well, son, I do believe you have found your work.
Hannah shut off the faucet and dried her hands on an apron tied around her waist and walked over to the table. Her right forefinger was wrapped with tissue paper and tape and sticking up like a tiny flag post, and she stood not as though she was about to sit but as though she had just risen and stopped for a moment to listen to the unsyncopated ticks of the stove against the regular seconds of the wall clock. She lifted her head and pushed her hair out of her eyes with her left hand and took off the apron.
Are you hungry? she asked.
A little, he said.
She went over to the counter and returned with a plate of kielbasa and nut roll and placed it in front of him with a knife and fork, then reached into the refrigerator for a bottle of beer, pried off the cap with a church key, and put the bottle next to the plate.
Go on, she said, and sat down across from him.
She was nineteen when she became a mother for the first time in February '41, three days before her husband left for basic training. (He would see his son Bohumír as a baby one more time, in April of that year, before he went overseas.) She looked no different at fifty. Round face set off by high cheekbones. Hair long and flax. Eyes a deep and pupil-less gray. The kind of eyes that make people either stare or look away.
Excerpted from The Signal Flame by Andrew Krivák. Copyright © 2017 by Andrew Krivák. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc
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