The Sojourn (2 page)

Anna kneels down and says to her son, Toby, stay here with Mama and we'll have a treat of poppyseed and milk. You and me.

But Tobias begins to cry, and Lizzie, who understands why a woman should be so protective of her son, says, Let him come.

So her sister-in-law consents and Tobias dances a clumsy reel while his mother steadies him for his hat, points him in the direction of the door out of which his aunt has just walked, and stares after him as he bounds down the wooden steps.

Don't be long, she says to Lizzie, who is waiting in the street. I worry about him, you know. That boy has thumbs on his feet. And Lizzie promises that she'll keep him within arm's reach.

The streets and alleys of this shantytown neighborhood she knows well and has walked them for church, visits, meals, but as she moves past the farthest house she has been to in over a year, sees the smelter dumps huffing even while idle on a Sunday, and presses on in the direction of the river beyond a block of warehouses, she feels awake to the landscape so close and new to her, even in its filth and disarray. It could be close to Hell itself (as some have said) and she would still feel as though she'd been released into a garden. She looks down into the wrap that's carrying her son, and he's awake now, lips pursed and silent, his eyes azure beads gazing upward, a body content with her constant rhythmic movement.

L'úbim t'a, she says, and hugs him closer.

They come to the tracks before the bridge and Tobias hopscotches along the ties, but she knows—or thinks—there is only one train due on a Sunday afternoon and that won't be for a while, so she leaves him to his game, which he plays without any grace, says that his mother was right, and laughs when he teeters off a rail and tumbles onto the ground.

Som v poriadku, he says, smiling and dusting himself off. Then they come to the trestle at the river's edge.

For the first few minutes, they are both hypnotized by
the water. He is thrilled at the height, the roar of the strong course below, the distance he has been allowed to venture from home. She is drawn to the rise of the bridge from the river, too, and lets herself hang between the two emotions of daring and fear, then feels against her face the cool, moving air rising from the surface of the muddied water that has come this far south and east out of the mountains. Tobias points to a group of boys swimming in a back pool on the banks below, where the water's slowed and deep, and she clasps her forehead and mock gasps in a mime of disbelief that they should brave the cold. He pretends to shiver and can't control himself for laughing, until she moves out farther onto the bridge and motions for him to follow, and they make their way in the stop and start of looking down and moving along, as though explorers more enraptured than careful, until they find themselves in the middle of the trestle and Lizzie signals to her nephew that it's time they went back.

 

 

Before the eastbound passenger train number two approaches the river trestle near the smelter dumps in Pueblo, it has to negotiate a bend, so that when the engineer is in full sight of the bridge, the fireman is still in the blind of the curve as he stokes the engine for the run. To anyone standing on the bridge, the train is almost invisible until it has come around that turn and opened up to its full thirty miles an hour.

Lizzie sees the train as the engine makes the bridge, wonders how it could be. How could it be early? How could it be so quiet? Nearly silent, as though a moving picture.

But she sees then the whistle steam and hears its high note break through the sound of rushing water. And beyond
the gray coal smoke the train spews, the sharp stretch of track that disappears back into the bending river, and (her eyes lifting) the farther horizon that the Sangre de Cristos frame majestically, she notices that the sun hasn't far to go before it begins setting. She wonders again to herself, How can it be time? She is more bewildered than frantic, and yet she knows, too, that she has moved slowly all day, as she has done every day since winter and so has learned to misjudge time.

There is as much distance before her on the tracks as behind. Maybe thirty yards. Not impossible ground to cover on foot, but here there is no place to retreat from the train's path, and the track on which she stands is all rail and ties.

We have to run, she says, and grabs Tobias by the arm. Toby, come quickly, she says again, and Tobias looks up from the water below, his face bemused, and she shouts at him now, Toby, run!

Tobias tries to run, but in as little as two steps, his foot is caught. He whimpers and pulls on it and begins to bawl as he tugs and tugs at the hobnailed boot that won't come free. I can make it across, she thinks to herself. I can make it, but that boy—he seems three miles, not three feet, from her—that boy has thumbs on his feet, she hears her sister-in-law say, and she turns back to wrench him loose, the sound of the train and its iron face growing, rising, she thinks, and she wonders if the entire cast of locomotive and cars might soar up and over them, but the boy squirms as he screams and screams, his foot twisting tighter into its trap, and no matter how hard she yells at him to hold still and be quiet, she knows there is no time to hold and, Oh dear God, she says to herself, why can't there be quiet?

The baby moves at her breast then, and she looks down into the wrap and there are his eyes, staring up at her with their otherworldly hue, he unfazed by the danger growing and bearing down on them, until she knows that even if she abandoned her nephew and ran for the edge, she would be caught before she could cross to any kind of safety. She catches a glimpse on the bank below of the lads, skinny and shivering, who have climbed out of the water to watch the Missouri Pacific thunder above, and so she removes the child from around her in one graced motion, cinches up the bundle, presses her lips to his face, and whispers, L'úbim t'a, then lets him roll from her arms out over the trestle and into the water as the braking train screeches and strikes.

DARDAN, PENNSYLVANIA THE LAST NIGHT OF MARCH 1972

AND SO I WAS SAVED BY THE SIMPLE ACT OF A BOY WHO dived into that river, icy as hell and too strong for even a grown man to swim, stroked hard to reach a babe sinking under the weight of the wraps that bound him, and floated to the safety of the opposite shore almost a half mile downstream. The Pueblo Star-Journal called him a hero, the rescue a deed that rivaled the world's greatest, and headlined their front page TRAIN CARRIES DEATH TO PLEASURE PARTY. Two days later, the paper long blown away, discarded, or used to wrap parcels and cuts of beef, the town had forgotten all but the reminder that death was indiscriminate.

But not my father, who knew that fortune, too, was equally thoughtless. Before the train set off again, the conductors took up a collection from the passengers, who chipped in fifty dollars cash, though more out of guilt than pity. And the next day, while the news was being hawked from the streets, the railroad company was writing Ondrej Vinich a check for five hundred dollars, in addition to paying the hospital and funeral expenses, afraid, no doubt, that I would die of pneumonia or some such
thing, and there would be another round of headlines on which the story would drift farther east and west.

What the papers didn't tell was that Anna went into labor when she heard the news about her son, and the baby, a girl, was stillborn, and the woman's grief at the loss of her children nearly killed her as well, until the same doctor who had delivered me took me to my aunt (who lay empty and worn in her bed), placed me in her arms, and she nursed me with her daughter's milk and cared for me as we both recovered, and then brought me into her home as though I were her son, except that she and her husband never spoke again to my father and always left the house when he came around to visit me on Sundays, while everyone else was in church and he could be alone.

The following spring, my father took me east to Pennsylvania, where he had relatives and friends in the mining town of Wilkes-Barre, and we lived with a young couple who had come from his home village of Pastvina, looking (as he and my mother had years ago) for the opportunity due anyone who was willing to work and pray and accept the blessings that would be, as a result, bestowed upon them.

But all he could find was work in the mines, and he came back to the row house on Charles Street every night exhausted and coughing, so that I'd wake up, and the woman of the house, young as she was, chided him for disturbing the baby and asked him why he didn't take a shower at the breaker like all the other men, and he said that he just wanted to come home. He washed in the sink and ate soup with bread and a bottle of beer while I got rocked back to sleep.

One Sunday, these same friends took the train out of the city to the town of Dardan. “And I was so struck by this place,” my father said, “its small center on a tributary
of the Susquehanna that they called Salamander Creek, and the farms, large and not so large, that radiated out toward mountains that were in no way comparable to the Rockies, but commanding in their own right.” At the local feed mill, he began to ask about hunting, and a man named Zlodej, who was kin to the couple we lived with, asked my father where in the old country he was from and my father told him.

“But,” he said, “I'd been living with my family out in Colorado.”

“Colorado,” Zlodej said. “Now that's country out there.”

He said he knew a Czech man named Orten in Leadville who could shoot a tick off a dog's ass, and my father said, “George. George Orten.” Zlodej asked him if he was Ondrej Vinich and my father said he was.

“Heard about your wife,” Zlodej said, and told my father that he should come back in the fall and he would take him deer hunting on his land.

The last thing my father did before he left Colorado was purchase an M1896 Krag Jørgensen rifle, just like the one George Orten had in Leadville. He wrapped it and crated it and it came with us to Wilkes-Barre, and, after me, it was, I think, the only thing my father really cared about, and he waited and waited for the day when he would get to hunt with it, and fire it, and dress what he killed with it, as he had done in the days when he hunted with Orten, and which made him feel, he said, “as though I was the maker of my own fate.”

All that summer and into the fall, my father worked in the mines and clung to his renewed hope that he might yet make a home in America. He picked and blasted and shoveled and dreamed of buying a small house in Dardan,
where land was still cheap and he figured he could find a job at a lumberyard until something better came along. Or maybe that would do just fine. And one Saturday morning in November, looking like a trapper he once knew in Leadville (but for the fact that he had shaved earlier in the week), he rose and, rifle case in hand, got on the trolley that ran past Charles Street and down along River, boarded the light-gauge train that carried most everything from Wilkes-Barre into the farming towns west of the river, and jumped off at the feed mill at Dardan corner, where he met up with Mr. Zlodej and another man he had never seen before, a man of means who was visiting Zlodej and looking into buying the feed mill and the 550 acres of land Zlodej owned and wanted to sell.

“I could tell right away that he had likely never fired anything bigger than a twenty-two,” my father said, “and yet he spoke of having shot a lion in East Africa and hunted bear in the Colorado Rockies, and I said, ‘Bear?' and he said, ‘Grizzly. Yep, grizzly.' And I told him that Colorado wasn't the best place to hunt for grizzly, and regardless, grizzly wasn't the kind of animal I'd want to go after for sport. ‘Well,' he said, ‘then you ain't a sport,'” and my father decided right there that this was a man one did well to stay away from.

The rain that had fallen the night before in the city was snow in Dardan, a wet six inches of ground cover, and the mountainside they approached that day was a steep and wintry landscape of pine interspersed with hardwoods and outcroppings of rock and small caves, which Zlodej said were once home to the Susquehannocks when they roamed those hills before the Europeans arrived.

The snow gave fresh evidence of deer moving that morning, and Zlodej suggested that he retreat along the
base of the mountain around to the other side, where there was a stream and large swaths of wintergreen patches, and he would drive any deer that might be grazing there over the mountain to my father and their hunting companion.

“I would have happily gone on that trek if I had known the terrain,” my father said, “but I was stuck with the man hunting with us, and I began to feel so uneasy about his presence that I almost told Zlodej that I thought it was time I made it back to Wilkes-Barre, even though it was barely morning.”

When Zlodej disappeared, his gait so quick that the woods were silent in an instant, my father suggested that he and the man find a hide from which they could observe the widest arc of the summit.

The man said, “Ah, we won't be seein' no deer anytime soon. Now lemme lookit yer rifle.”

My father said that if he wanted to see a rifle like this, he knew a gunsmith who could show him one, and sat quietly with it resting on his knee. But on that mountainside in Dardan, the man got irate and said, “Who d'ya think yer talkin' to, son?” and without warning lunged and grabbed the rifle from my father's hands and shoved him hard against a rock.

“You see,” he said, holding the Krag up and inspecting it, “I ain't used to hearin' the word
no.
That's why I aim to own most of this town, and Zlodej's mountain with it.”

“What could I do?” my father said. “He wasn't going to shoot me, at least I didn't think so, because he didn't seem to know the first thing about handling a rifle like that. He just said, ‘She's a beaut,' propped the Winchester he came with against a tree, and began to trudge up the hill toward a rock cave, carrying the Krag like it belonged to him.”