The Sojourn Page 2

  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.”

  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.