Just One More Story

Episode 4: By First Light

By Lloyd W. Alexander

To all the Veterans…

No words can encompass how much you are appreciated.

Thank you to all the men and women who have given us one more day.

* * *

Ben had a theory about sunrise.

Nobody was ever awake for it by accident. The people who saw it were people who had chosen to. They had set alarms. They had made coffee in the dark. They had, in at least one case, driven a long way in the dark and started up a mountain at a quarter to four in the morning with a headlamp strapped to their forehead.

Which meant that anyone you met at sunrise had come for the same reason you had.

To be left alone with it.

It was a good theory.

It had never once been tested.

* * *

The North Ridge Trail started in the woods, which in November at four in the morning meant it started in nothing at all.

Ben’s headlamp threw a small white circle on the ground in front of him. Roots. Rocks. A wet leaf. Another root. Beyond the circle, the world simply stopped, the way it does when you are alone in the dark and trying very hard not to think about how alone you are.

He had bought the headlamp in August.

He hadn’t said why, not even to himself. He had just walked into a store, picked one up, paid for it, and put it in his pack, where it had stayed ever since, waiting.

It was a very good headlamp.

The trees thinned. The trail tipped up onto bare granite, and the cold found him all at once. A hard, steady wind came across the rock from somewhere out over the ocean and went straight through his jacket as though it had been invited.

He followed the cairns. Little stacks of stone, appearing one after another at the edge of his light. Every so often a painted blaze on the rock.

Somewhere below him and off to the right, a pair of headlights crawled up the summit road.

Ben watched them for a moment.

Then he kept climbing, and allowed himself the small, private satisfaction of a man doing something the hard way on purpose.

* * *

By the time he came up over the last of the ledges, he was breathing hard and sweating under three layers and his fingers had gone stiff in his gloves.

He stopped and turned off his headlamp.

The dark came back, but it wasn’t the same dark anymore. Out to the east, along the bottom of the sky, there was a line. Not light, exactly. Just a place where the black had started to go thin.

Under his boots, the granite was no color at all. Just a pale gray shape against the darker gray of everything else, like the mountain hadn’t quite decided what it was yet.

Below it, a long way down, he could make out the shapes of islands, darker against the dark water. A few lights along the shore. Somewhere a boat.

Ben stood and looked at it and felt the thing he always felt at this point, which was something like being let into a room before anyone else.

Then he walked toward the edge, to find his spot.

There was already someone in it.

* * *

At first it was only a shape.

A dark figure, standing near the edge of the granite on the east side, right where the rock fell away toward the water. Right where Ben had been going.

He stopped.

There was a parking lot at the summit. He had known that. There was one vehicle in it, a pickup truck, parked by itself with its windshield fogged. That was fine. People drove up. It was allowed.

But this one had gone to the edge.

Ben told himself he would find another spot. There was a whole mountaintop. He had found other spots before. He was very good at finding other spots.

He didn’t move.

The line at the bottom of the sky was turning from gray to something with color in it. A deep, bruised blue. Then the faintest edge of rose.

It didn’t stay in the sky. Ben noticed it on the rock first, the first color coming up through the stone at his feet, as if the granite had been pink all along and was only now admitting it. Then he noticed it in the air itself. The cold, thin air between him and the edge had gone faintly rosy.

And in that light, slowly, the shape began to become a man.

A big man. Broad in a heavy work coat, a knit cap pulled down over his ears. He was standing beside a flat rock, looking out at the water, perfectly still.

On the rock was a bag.

Ben frowned.

It wasn’t a pack. It wasn’t a camera bag or a thermos or anything a person would carry onto a mountain. It was a plain plastic shopping bag, the kind you get at a grocery store, sitting all by itself on the granite.

Nobody carried a grocery bag to the top of a mountain.

Nobody needed to. There was a parking lot.

Ben had walked two and a half miles up a ridge in the dark to see the sunrise, and he found that he had stopped looking at the sky entirely.

He was looking at the bag.

* * *

The man bent down and reached into it.

He took out a bottle. Then two small glasses, which he set on the flat rock, side by side, very carefully.

Shot glasses, Ben realized.

The man straightened up with the bottle and began to work on the cap.

It took a long time.

Ben watched him turn the bottle in his hands. Brace it against his chest. Turn it again. There was something odd about how he was holding it, something stiff on one side, and Ben couldn’t make out what until the light came up another shade and caught the man’s left hand.

It wasn’t a hand.

It was shaped like one, more or less. But it caught the light the wrong way. Too smooth. Too still. When it closed around the neck of the bottle, it closed all at once.

The cap came off.

The man let out a breath that Ben could see from where he stood, a little cloud in the cold, and then he bent over the rock and began to pour.

He held the bottle in his right hand and steadied the glass with the left, the false hand pressing gently against the rim to keep it from sliding. He filled one. Then the other. He went slowly. He didn’t spill a drop.

Then he set the bottle down and stood there with the two glasses at his feet, and waited.

Ben realized he was holding his breath.

The rose at the edge of the sky went to orange. The orange went to gold. The rock went with it, rose to copper to something warmer.

And then, out past the islands, at the very bottom of the world, a single point of light broke over the water, so bright it hurt.

The man picked up one of the glasses.

He held it for a moment, out toward the light, the way you might hold something out to someone across a table. Then he tipped it, slowly, and poured it out onto the granite. It made a dark, spreading shape on the pink stone.

He set the empty glass down and picked up the other.

This one he held out longer. He turned a little as he did, slowly, from one end of the horizon to the other, as though there were a great many people out there and he didn’t want to leave anyone out. Then he poured it out beside the first.

Two dark shapes on the pink stone, running together.

He set the second glass down beside the first one.

And then he came to attention.

Ben didn’t know what else to call it. The man’s whole body changed. His feet came together. His shoulders went back. His right hand came up sharp to the brim of his knit cap, and held there.

The sun kept rising.

The man didn’t move.

Out past the islands, the light came up and up, spilling gold across the water, catching the tops of the waves, climbing the face of the mountain.

It reached the man first. It struck him full in front, edging his cap and his shoulders and his raised hand in gold. Behind him, his shadow leapt out across the granite, long and thin, past Ben’s boots and on toward the parking lot and the one lonely truck.

Then it reached Ben.

For a few seconds, everything was gold. The granite, the air, the frost on the lichen, the man’s knit cap and the edges of his shoulders. Even the cold seemed to have color in it.

He held the salute until the sun was all the way clear of the sea.

Then he lowered his hand, and his shoulders came down, and he was just a big man in a work coat again, standing on a rock in the cold.

Ben had come all that way to watch the sunrise.

He realized he had missed it entirely.

He found that he didn’t mind.

* * *

The sensible thing to do was nothing.

Ben knew that. It had been perfectly clear to him from the moment the man came to attention. Whatever had just happened was private. It was none of his business. The polite thing, the decent thing, was to look the other way, find another spot, and let the man pack up his bag and go.

Ben had a great deal of practice looking the other way.

The man bent down and began, slowly, to put the glasses back in the bag.

Ben took a step toward him.

He stopped.

No, he thought. Absolutely not.

He took another step.

He had no idea what he was doing. He was aware of this in a calm, distant way, as though watching himself from a little farther down the mountain. He was a man who did not walk up to strangers. Strangers walked up to him. That was the arrangement. It had been working fine for years.

He was now standing about ten feet from the man.

The man looked up.

He was younger than Ben had thought. Forties, maybe. Late thirties. A broad, weathered face, a short beard with some gray in it, and eyes that were very red around the edges.

“Morning,” the man said.

Ben opened his mouth.

“What,” he said, “was that?”

He heard it come out and wished, immediately, that he could reach out and catch it and put it back.

The man looked at him for a long moment.

“You were staring,” he said.

“I wasn’t staring.”

“You were. I saw you. You came over the top of that ridge and you stopped dead and you stood there for twenty minutes with your mouth open.”

“I was observing,” Ben said.

“Staring.”

“Observing is different.”

“How?”

Ben thought about it.

“Observing is more respectful,” he said.

The man looked at him. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed. It was a short, rough laugh, but a real one.

“That,” he said, “is a terrible argument.”

“I know,” Ben said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. It’s none of my business.”

“No,” the man agreed. “It isn’t.”

He tied the handles of the grocery bag in a knot.

“Ask me anyway,” he said.

* * *

His name was Bill.

“Bill Price,” he said, and he said it deliberately, both names, the way a man signs a document. He held out his right hand. Ben shook it.

“Ben.”

“Ben what?”

Ben hesitated.

“Amato.”

“Ben Amato.” Bill nodded, as though filing it somewhere important. “Good. That’s good. Always get the last name.”

He sat down on the flat rock with a grunt, the bag beside him, and looked out at the water. After a moment, Ben sat down too, a respectful distance away. The granite was so cold he could feel it through two layers.

“You hiked up,” Bill said.

“I did.”

“In the dark.”

“I had a headlamp.”

“I drove.”

“I saw,” Ben said. “I passed you. Well. You passed me.”

“So which one of us got here first?”

Ben considered this.

“You did,” he said. “But I think mine counts more.”

“Why?”

“Because I hiked.”

“That’s not an argument, that’s a brag.” Bill shook his head. “Sun doesn’t care how you got here. Sun came up the same for both of us.”

“It came up the same,” Ben said. “I just think I earned it more.”

“You earned blisters.”

“Those too.”

Bill laughed again, quieter this time.

Then he didn’t say anything for a while.

Ben didn’t either. He watched the light move across the islands, turning them from black to green. A gull went by below them, riding the wind without moving its wings.

“Marines,” Bill said finally.

Ben looked over.

“I was a Marine,” Bill said. “Still am. You don’t really stop.” He held up his left hand and turned it, so the morning light ran over the smooth plastic and metal of it. “Afghanistan. Helmand Province. Twelve, thirteen years ago now.”

Ben said nothing.

Bill looked at the hand like it was something he’d found on the ground and wasn’t sure what to do with.

“You want to know the funny thing?” he said.

Ben wasn’t sure he did.

“It’s my left.” Bill flexed it. The fingers closed together, all at once, and opened again. “I’m right-handed. Always have been. Write with my right. Throw with my right. Eat with my right.” He shrugged. “If you’re going to lose one, that’s the one to lose. That’s what I tell myself.”

“Do you believe it?”

“Most days.” He let the hand drop back to his knee. “Some days I think the right one’s just showing off.”

Ben didn’t laugh. He wasn’t sure he was allowed to.

Bill glanced at him.

“You can laugh,” he said. “I worked on that one for a while.”

Ben laughed, a little.

“There you go,” Bill said.

* * *

He told it slowly.

He told it the way people tell things they have told before, in their heads, many times, and only a few times out loud. With pauses where the words used to stop.

It had been a hot day. That was the first thing he said. Hot, and dusty, and loud, a big compound with a market nearby and people everywhere and a lot of different units moving through at once, Marines and Army and others he never sorted out.

“And then it all went sideways,” Bill said. “That’s the only way I can say it. One second you’re standing there, and the next second it’s just…”

He made a motion with his good hand. Something coming apart.

“Shooting. Yelling. Everybody yelling. You can’t tell where anything’s coming from. You can’t tell who anybody is.”

He stopped.

Ben waited.

“There was a guy,” Bill said. “Not one of ours. Army, I think. I saw the patch, after. I didn’t know him. I’d never seen him before in my life.” He looked out at the water. “And in the middle of all of that, he looked right at me and yelled, ‘Billy!’”

He laughed, a short, broken sound.

“Nobody calls me Billy. Nobody but my mother. But somebody near me must have yelled it, and he heard it, and he grabbed onto it, because that’s what you do. And he yelled, ‘Billy, get down!’ and then he hit me. Full speed. Like a linebacker. Knocked me sideways behind a wall.”

Bill’s voice had gone very quiet.

“And then it went off.”

The wind came across the rock. Ben felt it on his face and realized his eyes were stinging, and he wasn’t sure it was the wind.

“I don’t remember much after that,” Bill said. “I remember the sky. I remember somebody holding my arm down. I remember thinking the hand felt hot.” He breathed out. “And I remember seeing him. After. Where he’d been standing.”

He didn’t say anything else about that.

He didn’t need to.

“His name was Russ,” Bill said.

He said it to the sun.

“That’s what somebody yelled. ‘Russ!’ Right before. That’s all I’ve got. One word. I don’t know if it was his first name or his last name or something his buddies called him. I don’t know where he was from. I don’t know if he had a wife. Kids. Whether his mother’s still alive to thank.”

Ben swallowed.

“Couldn’t you…” he started, and then stopped, because it seemed like a terrible thing to say.

“Look it up?” Bill said.

Ben nodded.

“Oh, I looked.” Bill almost smiled. “You’d better believe I looked. Months in the hospital, all I did was look. There are lists. There are names. Nobody on that day that fits. Not a Russ. Not a Russell. Not a Russo. Nobody.” He shook his head. “Maybe I got the day wrong. Maybe somebody else yelled it. Maybe it was a nickname for some guy named Kevin. I don’t know.”

He shrugged, the big shoulders rising and falling.

“I argued with myself about it for two years. You know what I figured out?”

“What?”

“I could argue either side,” Bill said. “I could make a really good case that I should keep looking. And I could make a really good case that I never would find him. And I could win both of them.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his good hand, quickly, like it was nothing. “Turns out that’s not as useful as it sounds.”

* * *

The sun was well up now. The gold had burned off, and the rock around them had settled into its own color, a warm, deep pink, the granite this mountain was made of. The air had gone clear again, and colder for it. The dark patch where Bill had poured out the whiskey was already starting to fade at the edges.

“So I come up here,” Bill said.

Ben looked at him.

“Every year. Veterans Day. First place the sun hits, this time of year. Did you know that? First sunrise in the whole country. Right here.” He tapped the granite with his knuckles. “I figure, if I can’t find his family to say thank you, the least I can do is say it before anybody else in America gets a chance to say anything at all.”

He looked down at the grocery bag.

“One for Russ,” he said. “And one for all the rest of them. Everybody who served. The ones who didn’t come home, and the ones who did and are still carrying it around.”

He was quiet a moment.

“But Russ first,” he said. “Always Russ first. And then I say it.”

“Thank you,” Ben said quietly.

Bill nodded.

“Every year,” he said. “I’ve only been doing it eleven years. Eleven times.” He looked out at the water. “But I’m going to do it every year for the rest of my life. And I hope that’s a long time. I really do. I hope I’m a hundred years old and they have to carry me up here in a chair.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“And it still won’t be enough,” he said. “Not even close. You can’t pay a thing like that back. You can only…” He stopped. “I don’t know. Keep making the payments.”

Ben didn’t say anything.

He thought, for some reason, about the headlamp in his pack.

* * *

After a while, Bill stood up, slowly, with a hand on his knee. He picked up the grocery bag.

“Well,” he said. “That’s me.”

Ben got up too. His legs had gone stiff on the cold rock.

Bill looked at him.

“Can I ask you something, Ben Amato?”

“I suppose that’s fair.”

“Why are you up here?”

Ben blinked.

“Six-thirty in the morning,” Bill said. “Middle of November. You hiked up a mountain, alone, in the dark, on Veterans Day. Nobody does that by accident. So.”

He waited.

Ben looked at the water.

There was an answer. There was an answer right there, plain and simple, and in any other company on any other morning it would have been the most ordinary thing in the world to say.

But not here.

Not after that.

“I like sunrises,” Ben said.

Bill looked at him for a long moment.

“Nobody likes sunrises that much,” he said.

“I do.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s a true answer.”

“It’s a true answer that isn’t the answer,” Bill said. “I’ve been giving those for eleven years. I know one when I hear one.”

Ben didn’t say anything.

Bill studied him a moment longer. Then, unexpectedly, he nodded, as if Ben had said something after all.

“All right,” he said. “Keep it. Everybody’s entitled to one.”

He held out his right hand again. Ben shook it.

“Bill Price,” Bill said.

“I know.”

“I’m just making sure.”

He turned and walked back across the granite toward the parking lot, the grocery bag swinging from his good hand.

Ben stood on the rock in the sunlight and watched him go.

Then he looked down.

The dark patch on the stone where the whiskey had been was almost gone now. Just a faint shadow on the pink granite, getting smaller as the sun warmed it.

Ben watched it until he couldn’t see it anymore.

* * *

Afterthoughts

Ben

He went down slowly.

The trail looked completely different in daylight. The granite was pink, not gray. The cairns were small and ordinary. There were views everywhere he looked: the islands, the water, the town down along the shore just beginning to wake up. He had walked right past all of it in the dark and never known it was there.

Halfway down, he stopped on a ledge and sat for a while.

Why are you up here?

It was his birthday.

That was all. That was the whole answer. Every year, on this day, he got up in the dark and went somewhere to watch the sun come up by himself. Sometimes a mountaintop. Sometimes a rock at the edge of the ocean. He had done it for longer than he could easily say. He had never told anyone. It wasn’t a secret, exactly. It just wasn’t the kind of thing that seemed worth mentioning.

And he certainly hadn’t been about to mention it this morning.

Not on a rock beside two shot glasses. Not to a man who had spent eleven years counting the birthdays somebody else had paid for.

Ben thought about that.

Every year, Bill climbed into his truck in the dark and drove up a mountain to say thank you for the years he had.

Every year, Ben went out in the dark to a mountaintop or the edge of the sea and watched the sun rise on his, and then went home.

He had never once thought of it as something to be grateful for. It was just a thing he did. A day to get through quietly.

He sat on the ledge with the wind in his face and the whole bright bay spread out below him.

Then, feeling slightly ridiculous, and checking first to make sure no one was coming up the trail, he said it out loud.

“Thank you.”

He wasn’t sure who to.

He thought that was probably all right.

Bill

The summit road went down in long, slow switchbacks, and he took them carefully, the way he always did.

He always drove down slower than he drove up.

The truck heater roared. The grocery bag sat on the passenger seat, the two glasses wrapped in a dish towel so they wouldn’t rattle. Through the windshield, the whole island was lit up gold, every tree and every rooftop, like the world had been switched back on.

He felt it in his chest. The way he always did, coming down.

Not lighter. Heavier, if anything.

Eleven times. Eleven years of driving up here in the dark and standing on that rock and saying thank you to a man who would never hear it. And next year he would do it again. And the year after that.

It didn’t get easier.

He had stopped expecting it to.

He thought about the guy on the rock. Ben Amato. Observing. Bill snorted. There was a man who had come up that mountain with a reason and then stood there and told him he liked sunrises, with a perfectly straight face.

Fair enough.

Everybody was entitled to one.

At the bottom of the summit road, where it met the park road, his phone buzzed in the cup holder.

He pulled over and looked at it.

DENISE — PANTRY.

He answered.

“Are you still coming?” Denise said, without saying hello. “We’ve got a line out the door already, and three of them don’t have coats.”

Bill glanced in the rearview mirror. The back seat of the truck was piled to the windows with black garbage bags. Winter coats. Men’s large, mostly. A few extra-large. He’d spent two weeks collecting them from every church and closet between here and Old Town.

“I’m coming,” he said. “Tell them to hang on. I’ll be there by ten.”

“You always say ten.”

“And I always get there.”

“Ten-thirty,” Denise said. “You always get there at ten-thirty.”

Bill smiled.

“I could argue that,” he said.

“Don’t,” Denise said, and hung up.

Bill set the phone back in the cup holder and sat there for a moment, his good hand on the wheel and the other one resting on his knee.

Then he put the truck in gear and pulled out onto the road toward Bangor.

Somewhere around Ellsworth, he caught himself saying it again, quietly, the way he always did, about once every few miles for the rest of the day.

Thank you, Russ.

He kept driving.

He had people waiting.

The End