The Sojourn (3 page)

And when my father asked him where he was going, the man said that he was going to climb over the caves to the top of the hill. “Got to have the vantage of height if yer goin to kill anything,” he said.

So my father watched him as he climbed, the grade getting steeper and steeper, the snow-dusted tree line turning into a surface of packed dirt and wet scree, the man holding the Krag by its bolt like a shopping bag in his right hand and grabbing on to roots and saplings with the left as he struggled to ascend, until his foot slipped from the poor hold he had chosen on the next step and he pitched forward and began to slide and spin sideways down the hill, letting go of the rifle, which picked up its own speed and outstripped him as it dropped straight and slammed into a rock not twenty yards from my father and went off, shooting the man through the heart. He was dead before he came to rest.

“No one loved him, but he had a lot of friends,” my father said, “or maybe people who clung to him for his money. Anyway, it didn't look good, no matter how much Mr. Zlodej came to my defense. I don't think anyone thought I was foolish enough to have killed him, but he was American-born and Philadelphia-raised, a Morgan they said, and I was a Slav, good for work and nothing more, an immigrant whose luck was bad since having come over, and getting worse by the day. I had to make some decisions fast, and I needed someone to take care of you.”

So he wrote letters to what family remained in Pastvina, a small Rusyn village in a far northeast corner of the Hungarian Empire, and through negotiations with the local priest he arranged to remarry. The woman, whose husband had been killed felling timber, needed someone to
support her own two sons in return for care of a child. So, after what he said was a long, long winter and late spring, around about the time I turned two, we packed a trunk and boarded a ship in New York harbor and made our way back to the country from where he'd come.

As a young boy, all that I could claim of my mother was a face I had seen in a daguerreotype my father had brought with him from America and kept next to him wherever he slept. And because I always shared his bed, that framed and static vision of the woman, who appeared somehow meek and stern in the same stilted pose, entered my memory from early on, and it was on the crossing back to Europe that I had—I hesitate to call it a dream, I was so young, but the memory of her in my presence then is strong to this day—the first dream of her that I can remember. She didn't speak and she didn't move; she just stood before me, radiant and iconic, her arms outstretched without beckoning, as though having held something she had just let go. Only her face was changed. Instead of the motionless and serious demeanor the photograph held, her features wavered and I felt anticipation that she would speak and move, and that if I woke, I would find her among us, as she had been once before, living and breathing and whispering to me.

But even as my father sought, for his own reasons, to give some life to that lifeless past on an early summer evening in June 1916, while dusk settled, too, upon the whole of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it came too late for me to understand or even forgive him, spent and weakened and alone that he was in the light of the candle flame around which we sat in our village hut while he talked and drank plum brandy and told me of what he had done and wanted to do in those last few months of
life in America, before he took me to the old country. Over the years of my youth and young manhood there, he had decreased while I struggled to increase, bent that I was on the promise of a journey to the edge of the culture and land in which I had been raised and believed was my own (although I was, in truth, a stranger), with the imagined valor of heroic battles, and the thought that death would be a thing I doled out to others who dared resist. For, by the time I had heard the story of my birth, and my father's leaving the land of my birth, war was imminent, and I was hungry to call myself Infanterist, Frontkämpfer
,
Soldat. Anything. Anything but the son of the shepherd, because shepherd was all that my father—once he returned to Pastvina—wanted to be, and I wanted to become what he was not.

 

 

IF, WHEN WE, A LOST-LOOKING FATHER AND HIS RETICENT SON, first arrived in Pastvina in 1901, the people of our village had heard or whispered among themselves tales of prospecting and silver and the dangers—gunfights and murders—of the Wild West, stories they should expect a man who had seen that world to weave with suspense and nostalgia in their presence, they were soon forgotten, for there seemed nothing about Ondrej Vinich's attitude or demeanor (against the fiery young man intent on leaving Pastvina to make his fortune) to suggest that he'd ever lived one of those storied lives, but in fact seemed content and almost grateful to have to take up what was the loneliest existence a man could live in that part of the old country. Which is strange, when I think about those villagers and how they seemed to cling to one another and yet blame one another for the harsh lot from which not one of them could escape.

“Someone who makes it to America,” my stepmother used to rail, harridan that she was, “and you come back! With barely enough to keep a house and pasture other people's sheep, while I'm left here to do all the work and raise my sons?”

I hear her now, old Borka, for that voice embodied my own fears as a boy, fear of loneliness, abandonment, and starvation, fear I struggled at any cost to overcome.

Every family in Pastvina had a child who died before the age of two from disease or malnutrition, because there were other, stronger children who might survive. Houses had straw roofs and a single fire for warmth, so that inside it was either bitter cold or so choked with smoke that you'd rather freeze outside than suffocate in. There was meat when someone slaughtered livestock, snared a rabbit, or (as my father could) shot a deer. Vegetables in the summer, but only potatoes, coarse bread, and root plants in winter. Children who'd lost a father stayed close to their mothers, whose sole existence seemed to be the upkeep of whatever hut they were given to live in, if they weren't lucky enough to remarry. These were the kids who hacked like tuberculars, eyes sunken and knees bowed, and who were usually dead before they turned five, a path I might well have been on, for (my father said to me years later on a morning when I saved his life) when he came down from the mountains after his first summer, he feared that I was one of those in this world who simply would not thrive.

But when he returned early in the following year because of unseasonable snows, he saw how Borka fed her sons all they could manage (and then some), set her own good portion off to the side, and left barely enough for me to eat, twice a day at most. He knew then that he had
chosen poorly in that marriage, and wondered for the first time (the fear that would grip him and lead to his decline) if losing me, finally, might be the unintended consequence of the grief and desire for seclusion that blinded him.

And I remember still that fateful moment in the direction my boyhood would turn from then on, the day my father cornered my stepmother in the kitchen and demanded an explanation for why she fed me so much less than her own sons.

She scoffed at him. “There isn't enough for even three to eat squarely. But whose fault is that, eh?”

My father—a man whose descendants must have been a direct line of the old Kievan Rus, for his face looked carved from rock maple, his hair the texture of bear's fur, and he stood a full foot taller than any stunted villager who walked next to or past him—rose up in front of his wife and thundered, “My work feeds us all, and my son will eat first, or I will leave you and your boys alone to starve.”

She shrank from him but, even wounded, barked back, “What do you know? You're never here half the year. I will say who eats and who doesn't. Go back to your sheep and your bed in the mountains. Father Bogdan will hear about this.”

“I've already given Father Bogdan too much money for this match,” my father's voice boomed, and she ran from him in fear. “If my son dies,” he said, “they'll welcome you and that thieving priest both in Hell.”

“He'll hear of this!” she screamed, and locked herself in a tiny room off the kitchen. “He'll hear of this!” But her voice and her intentions sounded weak and muffled through the door.

“He won't have to,” my father called back as he
swept me up and carried me out of the house. “I'm off to tell him myself.”

From that day on, for the rest of the winter, my father and I ate together the same food at the same table, and if my stepmother so much as lingered or addressed either one of us with even passing comment, he would say in a hard, flat tone, “Chod' pre•,” and she would slink away like a dog.

In spring, he must have decided that I no longer needed the care of my stepmother. For on the first Saturday of Lent, after he had packed the mule and saddled his horse, he asked me if I wanted to go with him for a ride. When I nodded yes in amazement, he said, “You had better get your coat and boots, then, because we're going to ride for some time.”

Strapped into the saddle of the piebald horse he had bought from a Gypsy (“The best purchase I'd ever made,” he said the day we put that horse to rest in a meadow grave), I traveled with him and the sheep and Sawatch the dog out of the village and up into the mountains of the Carpathian range, where we lived for the spring and summer in a cabin he built himself, and returned for the production of bryndza, to sheer the sheep, and for winter, when he tended to the animals that were his and repaired tack for another season, a cycle that would come to define all that I knew and loved of life.

When Easter came early, it could be bitter cold in the mountains for the first month, but the cabin was built of stacked logs around a central hearth (he had seen this done in America), and the walls were sealed with a mortar he made from clay and straw. The roof was pitched and overhung the walls outside, so that the weather took little toll on them, and the inside was finished with the same milled
planks he had used on the roof and no drafts encroached, the fire burned steady, and he hung his pots, skins, and my mother's icon of Saint Michael the Archangel on the wall.

The sheep we tended were used to being outside yearround. I did what work I could as a child, busy work I no longer remember, but soon was put in charge of the feed bunks, which we needed until the first spring grasses shot through. My father crotched the ewes before they gave birth, and then played midwife to entire flocks once they started lambing in late April, often with the help of Rusyn peasants who knew just when to show up every year and who seemed fond of my tall, independent father. Come summer, we moved each day through valleys and meadows, where we slept outside if we had gone too far from the camp or if the weather stayed clear, and talked on those nights of neither the past nor the future, but simply of what we had found strange, onerous, or beautiful that day (his division of the things of nature), and where we might lead those flocks the next.

All this time, we spoke in English. The first day he hoisted me into that saddle and we led the herd away from Pastvina, the last he spoke of any Slavic language was to those same Rusyn peasants who greeted him as they took to the fields in Lent with “Slava isusu Khristu,” to which he responded “Slava na viki,” and then ceased to say a word comprehensible to me, until, by the end of the summer, I knew—and could respond to—the language that was to become our own there in the mountains, and which he insisted that I never speak when we went back to the village, where everyone spoke Slovak, or Rusyn, or Hungarian to outsiders.

My father had brought several books with him from America (including a Bible and a dictionary), books he
kept on a shelf in the cabin and, after the midday meal or when the light hung on in summer, would read to me, sometimes having me take a chapter when he wanted to rest or smoke, so that in time English was the first language I could read well. Thoreau's Walden, a slim volume of Walt Whitman's poetry, a large, tattered version of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (which we read from so often, the pages fell out), and, my father's greatest treasure, the personal memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant in two volumes bound in leather and kept together by a length of hide. And so, America became for me on those nights not a place but a voice, the voice of one man sitting alone at his table and telling another of what he had seen and had made—or would like yet to make, if there would be time—of the world.

 

 

IF I COULD HAVE CEASED WHAT PENDULUMS SWUNG, OR WHEELS turned, or water clocks emptied, then, in order to keep the Fates from marching in time, I would have, for though it is what a boy naturally wishes when he fears change will come upon what he loves and take it away, a man remembers it, too, and in his heart wishes the same when all around him he feels only loss, loss that has been his companion for some time, and promises to remain at his side.

It began one day in winter, after I turned nine years old, when the magistrate came to the village, knocked on our door, and ordered my father to send me to school in the spring term.

I didn't understand what he meant when he told me that I couldn't go with him into the mountains that year and instead must ride on the back of a cart into Eperjes,
where I was shown to a room in a dormitory with two other boys, told to dress in the red-and-olive-green uniform that hung in the closet for me, and in the morning marched with the rest of the children into the cramped room of a schoolhouse off the main street and a few doors away from the Greek Catholic seminary. I felt betrayed and so unsettled that I would not sit at the desk assigned to me, even when threatened with corporal punishment, with which the headmaster obliged. And after a week of beatings so hard and of such duration that I wept, they beat me all the more, and stopped only after I could neither speak nor cry and came down with a fever so bad that I heard the headmaster say that he feared he had gone too far this time.