The Sojourn Read online

  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.

  That night, in an infirmary I don’t remember being taken to, I dreamed of my mother. She was the same wavering and lucent image that came to me first on the boat from America, and who stood before me, arms outstretched, every spring on the first night I spent in my father’s mountain cabin. Now, in my bed of fever sweat and wet sheets, she stood at my side and wiped my cheeks and forehead (for I felt the cool comfort of a cloth), and then she kissed me and I slept. And in the morning, after a breakfast of boiled eggs and mint tea, I returned to my dormitory, and to the classroom the next day, where I was told to take my seat, and did so without incident.

  The lessons were rote, the teachers shrewish, the schoolboys I sat among filthy and unruly. I felt like a trapped animal living inside of a cage in the city (and indeed the school itself was a sort of jail, damp and cold and surrounded by iron fence work), my body weakening, my senses becoming dull, and the intense fear and need for self-preservation I once felt seemed long ago (though I had been there only a month) to have turned into a resignation that this was somehow all I could expect of life.

  As the days lengthened, though, and the weather turned fair, we went outside at noon if there was no rain, into a dirt courtyard, where the other boys kicked a ball or scrapped with their fists, and I stood off to the side, leaning against a stone wall and listening to the long midday ringing of the Turkish bell (which our village church also rang and which could be heard far into the mountains on clear and windless days) until I was noticed, or until someone decided that I had been watched long enough, and I was taunted for being blond and unblemished and solitary, and so dragged into a fight.

  But I was as angry about being in this company as I was quiet and bantam, and responded so quickly to the threats from my insolent schoolmates that the aggressor—a bigboned kid whose skin was gray and smelled of stale sweat—was forced to defend himself when I singled him out as the one to go after and began, without the hint of emotion, to throw hard and punishing blows to his head and body. I had never seen anyone fight and I had never been taught to defend myself. But I knew hurt and never wondered that day what it was I had to do if I didn’t want to be hurt again. I set my feet, took a breath, and swung my fists so as to go through anyone foolish enough to face me.

  In the end, my coat was torn and my nose bloodied, but I otherwise held my ground, and when that boy dropped to the dirt, I stood over him with my foot on his chest until he begged me to stop, and I pushed down harder out of anger that I had been sent to this place, when all I wanted was to be with my father in his cabin, and the boy ceased bawling and began to thrash and gasp for air, and all of the others looking on went silent, until someone said out loud “Sta•ilo!” I stepped back, kicked him hard once more in the teeth and walked away.

  After that, they sought out weakness elsewhere. I learned my sums, and I learned to read and write Hungarian, which is all we were expected to learn in school. And when the year was over, my father took me back into the mountains, the magistrate never returned to Pastvina for me, and my life, I thought, would resume as before, but for the pendulums, wheels, and water clocks.

  BEFORE I HAD HEARD ABOUT COLORADO AND LEADVILLE, THE Sawatch Range, and a man named Orten, my father’s skills as a hunter were qualities I took for granted in the mountains, like hearing to a musician or sight to a painter, and what he taught me of marksmanship became, in the end, my only grasp on life, until I, too, laid down my weapon and went home.

  The first spring day I went with my father into the mountains, I remember being fixated on the sight of the Krag as he unwrapped it from its leather cover and hung it up on pegs on the wall by his bed. The finished wood stock, shiny bolt, and bluish black metal of the barrel stood out amid the rest of the worn and beautyless tools and equipment and clothing that were part of the daily life of the shepherd. I always wondered how he managed to ship it from America, get it past the corrupt and greedy customs agents, and keep it from the curiosity of my stepbrothers before lashing it to the horse’s saddle. And every spring when we arrived at the camp and he took the rifle down from the horse’s side, he’d always say, “We treat this as though its life is more important than our own, because one day it just might be.”

  When I was ten (the year after I had left school), he taught me how to remove the bolt, clean the barrel, load and unload it, all without firing a shot. And then, a month after we had brought the sheep into the mountains, set them grazing, and waited for the lambs to start coming, he said, “It’s time you learned to shoot.”

  I went mechanically, yet with a practiced ease, through my test of assembling the Krag, and we hiked up a promontory, where we wouldn’t spook the flock, and I felt as though I had already gone through a rite of passage and that on the other side there waited for me my first portion of the kind of strength my father possessed, as though it were a gift he had carved and prepared for me, and I felt a consoling peace in that, and pride.

  But I did poorly on that test, clinging loosely to the stock with my face down, in spite of my father’s instruction to “pull it in close and snug,” and he yelled “Stop!” before I could lose an eye or dislocate my shoulder, took the rifle
away from me, and said, “It’s to be feared, but not fired in fear,” and I wanted to assure him that I wasn’t afraid, but instead I remained silent, and so we returned to our books and shepherding for the rest of the summer.

  In the fall, I got a second chance, sighted down a buck in a high-mountain meadow, and, in my excitement, snatched at the trigger. The recoil on the Krag was so powerful that the shot went high and wide and the buck turned to look at us, sniffed in the wind, and bounded off into the trees.

  “I think you scared him,” my father said, and what I had initially felt as pride emerged then as my first bitter taste of weakness and failure, and I wondered if he thought less of me, thought that I was undeserving of his gift, or believed that I could not do the work he had for so long trained me to do, and quietly I waited for him to suggest that I stay home in the village, or even to send me back to school, when it was time to lead the sheep again to their summer pastures.

  But the following spring we set off as we had done the year before, and halfway up the mountain he told me that I wasn’t to go any farther with him. I trembled and expected the worst. He sat his old horse there on the trail like Grant astride his beloved Cincinnati, removed the Krag from its skin, unloaded it, and handed it to me where I stood on the ground.

  “You go ahead, but don’t let on to where you are. I don’t want to see or even hear you. I’ll meet you at the cabin for supper.”

  I stood frozen and staring up at the man.

  “Go on,” he said. “I’m going to be a while with these beasts, but Sawatch and I will get by.”

  “What am I going to do with this?” I asked, and held out the Krag, cradled in my arms like a baby I was unaccustomed to holding.

  “Nothing, I hope. And if you knock that sight out of line, you can be sure you’ll never carry it again. Now get.”

  I reached the cabin in a few easy hours, placed the rifle on its pegs, swept the winter dust and droppings, and waited.

  There was silence all about, none of the sheeps’ constant bleating, and no hint yet of their mephitis, which saturated the air and our surroundings once the summer months settled in, but to which one simply grew accustomed, and I enjoyed the strange sameness and yet difference about the place.

  After a few more hours alone and with no sign of my father, though, I became nervous and decided to go back and see how far he had yet to come. And when I reached a small cliff and could just see the trail where it emerged from the forest, I noticed him standing there eating an apple and watching me, the horse grazing, the dog running a few strays up out of the trees.

  “I thought I wasn’t going to see you until we got to the camp?” he called out.

  “I ...” I stammered. “I thought you might need some help.”

  He pitched the core into the brush and said, “Sure could. Come on.” He whistled for the dog, and when I scrambled down the side of the cliff, he handed me the bridle strap of the horse. “Take the flock. Sawatch and I’ll get the rest of the strays.”

  That night, after dinner, he asked me if I had understood what he was trying to do, giving me the rifle to carry on the trail. I said no, I hadn’t, and he nodded his head as if to say, I thought not.

  “I wanted to see if you were predictable.”

  I told him (the tone of disappointment in my voice unmistakable) that I would stand in front of a train for him.

  “That’s not what I said, Jozef. I’d never question your loyalty. I said you’re predictable. I wanted to see if I was right about what you’d do, and I was. I knew that if I sent you on ahead, you’d move fast, and reach the cabin, and that you’d turn right around and come back to me. I was betting the distance of the forest trail and one apple. And there you were, just as I expected. Now, if you want to learn how to shoot, and how to be a good hunter, you’ve got to learn to predict, but, more importantly, in yourself, how to be unpredictable.”

  That summer, he sent me out to hide and watch him herd. I had to make notes of how he worked, where he stood, details of the terrain around him, without him finding me. It was a game we were to play, and we played it month after month. If he saw me—a glint from a buckle, a stone I’d kicked loose—he’d drive the sheep in my direction, which meant I had to get up and move, and the more I moved, the less I could observe of him. At dusk, when we met back at the camp or built a fire and slept out, we compared notes. I could fire the Krag only when I had more information about him than he had about me.

  It was August before I could scratch more than two details to my father’s five, and in that time I came to understand what he meant. Which way was the wind blowing? Where was the sun? What was my target? How big or how far away? Was it moving or stationary? Distracted or attentive? At work or rest? Could it see, hear, or smell me? Could I have slipped away from where I hid as easily as if I’d stayed, unknown, unnoticed, and unafraid?

  I learned how to move when he moved, remain when he remained, anticipate a turn because I saw the lip of rock before he and the flock did, or knew exactly which gill they would follow because its course was the path of least resistance. My father was loath to waste a shot, so practice was always some form of a hunting party, which meant that we ate well in the mountains, and that fall I killed my first deer. I did everything right—found my position upwind of him, watched him emerge from the cover of wood into a wild and fragrant crab-apple grove, and made sure my shot was clear. Prone behind a fallen tree that served as a good barrel rest and gave me a slight height advantage, I snuggled my cheek into the weld of the stock, reckoned that he was little less than a hundred yards away, filled the fore sight blade with the front of his body, took a deep breath, let out half, held, aimed just behind the shoulder of the foreleg where the heart is, and pulled the trigger.

  LATE IN THE AUTUMN OF THAT YEAR, A WOMAN CAME TO THE door of our house in Pastvina. She was dressed in a coat two sizes too big and wrapped in a shawl on top of that, and she was weeping, looking as though all that she’d ever had was lost but for these few articles of ill-fitting clothing. She knew my father’s name, and he embraced her in return. A boy stood behind her, his stature and expression the exact opposite of this woman who led him. He was tall, gangly almost, the coat he wore too small and thin for the first snow and wind, although his face gave away nothing of whether he felt cold or comfort. I stared at him and he stared back, his eyes a deep beryl blue, his hair (when he removed his hat) as fine and blond as mine. It was as though I was looking at my older brother, who himself seemed nonplussed to have found me. After a long conversation with my father (her words indiscernible at times through the sobs), the woman left. The boy slept on the floor in the kitchen that night and the next, until my father built a bunk bed above me in my corner of the house and that’s where he stayed for the rest of the winter.

  His name was Marian Pes. His mother was a distant cousin, a woman for whom, when they were children, my father had a fondness because of her own restless desire to leave the village and see something of the world, and the two stole away from chores in the afternoon to climb the hills that framed Pastvina and lay down in the newmown hay, where they planned their getaway together. Eperjes was the farthest she got, where she worked as a dishwasher in the kitchen of an old hotel. (My father married my mother and left for America not long after.) When she became pregnant by a man who promised to marry her and then disappeared, the bishop (who had seen her attend the divine liturgy every Sunday) gave her a housekeeping job in the priests’ quarters at the seminary, and when her time came, she named the baby boy Marian out of gratitude and devotion, wondering, perhaps, if he might one day sweep down those same tiled hallways wearing the black cassock and an attitude of meditation.

  In time, though, the local priests and their parishioners talked. The seminarians were disedified, they said, and so she left and drifted through what jobs she found to keep her son in food and clothing, until she wound up back at the hotel, this time serving coffee to the men who read their newspapers in the lobby each morning.
/>   She caught the eye of an older gentleman from Budapest, who wished to have a mistress when he traveled to the •ari• region on business, and so she lived under his care (and happy, it was said, the man even treating the boy like a son) in a small but elegant flat in the center of town for many years, until he died at his home, surrounded by family, and she was forgotten. She didn’t know where she would go or what she would do, she told my father the night she showed up at our door after months of slipping further and further into destitution. She only knew that the fates had turned against her, too, as if she’d been cursed somehow, and she wanted her Marian to escape the same, if he could, to live somewhere besides the streets and learn something more than how to steal food from hotel kitchens.

  When she asked my father if he would do this final kindness for her, if he would take her son, though she feared she couldn’t bear it, my father said, “I will treat him as though he were my own.” And after a lull, as she turned to go, he asked, “What will you do, Zuska?”

  Lowering her eyes, she said, “God’s will,” and they must have wondered then, those two, how the children who had lain on a hillside and dreamed of life in far-off places conjured for escape like fortune-tellers could have known how much of that dream would come true.

  In the first few months of his living with us, Marian remained aloof from all but my father. He spoke in a mannered Hungarian, which I suppose he had picked up from his mother’s lover and the other men who gathered at the hotel when they weren’t concerned with matters of business, as though it were the extension of some salon they frequented in Budapest. But to look at him, there was no mistaking him for the child of the streets that he had become.