The Sojourn Read online

  He never spoke of his mother. He rarely spoke at all. I remember my father handing him a thin yellow envelope every other week or so, which Marian would push into his coat pocket and then disappear. When he returned, he looked more aloof and sullen than before. And then the fights would begin.

  My stepbrothers, Tibor and Miro, made fun constantly of Marian’s poorly fitting and nearly threadbare clothing, and taunted him, though always from a distance and not long before they ran away. They called him zl• pes, a bad dog in Slovak, and Marian usually ignored them, until one day, when Tibor, the elder of the brothers, was alone and distracted, Marian (who had just emerged from a hiding place after reading one of his letters) took a stitching palm, reversed it on his hand so that the leather fit the outside of his knuckles, walked up to him, and punched him hard in the center of the chest. Tibor wobbled for a moment and then dropped to the ground. Marian removed the palm and threw it onto a nearby table, then took Tibor’s good blanket-lined hunting coat off of him (it had been his dead father’s) like one might undress a drunkard who had fallen asleep, and put it on. I stood by, wanting to see how this would all play out.

  Marian buttoned the front of the coat, turned up the collar, and said to me, “Co myslí•, Jozef? Krásny, hej?”

  I told him that I’d never seen a finer coat, to which he nodded and said, “I’ll need it for the mountains,” although he had never been, and only heard my father speak obliquely of the flocks, the cabin, and the kind of work we did.

  Tibor complained to his mother, who insisted that “that animal” give her son back his coat, but my father ignored her, and Tibor was afraid to fight and in time gave up his coat as a thing lost. After that, only my father ever called Marian by his Christian name. To everyone else, he was Zlee.

  Which fit him better than even the coat, because something seemed to change in Zlee after he had tilted the balance of power there in the house, and he ventured out to see if it might work elsewhere, and began to look for fights, taking them on like an angry dog. He looked the part, too, with a loping stride like some Russian wolfhound, a gaze of regal and indifferent contentment on his face until he pounced, usually to avenge someone weaker who had no means of defending himself, but often enough simply to fight anyone who wore his strength like meanness on a sleeve, and then there was no way of escaping Zlee’s lupine determination to stand and strike, until someone dropped and stayed down.

  By the time Lent began, the villagers were grumbling and talking of running Zlee out of town (although he did have a strong advocate in a father whose simpleton daughter had wandered outside of the house one day and along the main road to the village store, where a couple of boys thought they might have some fun with her, until Zlee showed up, having been sent on an errand to buy flour). So, Zlee went with us into the mountains the following spring, as he had, in a way, foretold, and set right to the work of shepherding like a hired hand who’d been missed during a brief sabbatical but who had returned well rested and in form, and in time my father and I wondered how it was we had ever gotten along without him. And I don’t know if the letters stopped coming, or if my father had stopped giving them to him, but Zlee never received another word from his mother, and he seemed to accept this turn away from one and toward another kind of life as one might accept a change of season.

  IT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE TO CONSIDER NOW, BUT AS I THINK BACK on that time, I was, like all the rest, afraid of Zlee that first winter he arrived. I wasn’t sure who or what was behind the mask of the dog, and yet I can’t say that I had any reason to believe that he’d turn on me. In the village, I shadowed him, mostly out of curiosity, but otherwise left him to himself, which he seemed to prefer. I was as intrigued as I was cautious of the way in which, seemingly without any effort or intent, wherever he walked or traveled or emerged, he became the center to which all things weakened or antagonistic were either drawn or from which they fled, and I wondered how long a man—a boy, rather— could live this way until that center no longer held and the world he sought either to protect or punish broke apart before him and he was left to wander and search for a new world wherein nothing of the old one that had shaped him remained.

  When my father took him into the mountains with us, though, I watched what I thought was that change come over Zlee. He accepted his role of novice to the husbandry we plied as a trade with an equanimity and gratitude, working side by side with me, asking for help and direction when he was given a task he hadn’t done before, and my father acting as though it were unfolding all as he had planned. Perhaps it was. I could have led those flocks by myself, so well trained and used to that life had I become, but it had taken me some time to come into my own. And yet, by midsummer Zlee had picked up even the skills of shepherding that bordered on the instinctual (when to separate a ewe who had aborted; when milk would and wouldn’t bring a lamb to thrive), as though having remembered them after a long time of toiling away at another kind of work, one that didn’t suit him and clouded his sense of purpose, until someone told him to stop, brought him back to where he had begun, and placed in his hand an instrument he had never seen before but which he knew immediately he had been missing, and knew how to use.

  The only time I ever saw Zlee caught off guard or seem in any way uncertain was when we had turned the first corner on the switchback that climbed for a good long mile on the path we had cut through the forest and up to the first of the springs where we and the animals watered, and my father told Zlee in English to tighten up the load that a new mule we had brought with us that season was carrying. He made no exceptions to his unwritten rule about the language we spoke once we left the village.

  Zlee said, “Co?”

  And my father said again, “I want those girth straps tightened before we lose the whole damn load,” and Zlee went silent.

  I was out ahead but heard the exchange and so came back and cinched up the straps and repositioned the leather pad that kept them from digging into the mule’s belly, and Zlee looked defeated somehow as he watched and translated my deliberate moves. But my father grinned and said in the only Slovak we would hear for the next seven months not to worry, that we never talked much in the mountains anyway, and Zlee took that to mean there was no harm done. By August, he was sitting down with us to read from Grant’s memoirs, and listening tentatively as my father spoke in the voice of Ishmael about Ahab and the whale.

  And while it seemed that he could do anything with a staff, a rope, or a knife in hand, of all the skills Zlee was asked to master that summer, he took to the rifle as though it were a language almost, for which he needed no grammar or tutoring or even alphabet, only ear and breath, which my father seemed to sense from the start, and which I never resented. I found hunting to be a skill I enjoyed honing, but it was more work than it was artistry for me, and had I not had the desire to focus on the details of the shot as much as I already had the desire to study and blend into all of nature surrounding, I might have been content with hunting only enough not to go hungry. Yet in Zlee, there was at his core something imperturbable, something his reputation as a tough who beat fools in order to be rid of them no doubt kept from the view of others (so that they might miscalculate the steady young man behind the bending frame), something that he unveiled there in the Carpathians, and which I witnessed as a transformation in him. The waiting and silence that came with shepherding and shooting both seemed to appeal to a natural discipline in Zlee that made him—and I say this from the distance of these many years—not part of man’s world, but God’s, so that as we worked and spoke and rested in silence, day after day and month after month, he became more like some contemplative seraph than a mere shepherd, a being at once willing and capable of defending what is good and beautiful and so moves easily and without disturbance from blithe to fearsome when the time comes to act.

  WHY, THEN, AS I WATCHED WITH A KIND OF REVERENCE my brother’s becoming, could I not see the arc of my father’s fall?

  He would not have described it as such, my fa
ther, but to me there was no other way to account for the slow loosening of the discipline he had himself impressed upon me, the views clung to (old and yet constantly put forth), which remained caught in their weak and circular rationale, and the growing resignation that his life—the life, that is, he took up after he returned from America—was meaningful only for the length of time he was given to atone for an incident deep in the past and as yet untold.

  All of this played out on the level of the quotidian, imperceptible and harmless day after uneventful day, or so it seemed, until the pattern emerged.

  Rather than being jostled awake in the morning (usually by Sawatch, sent to lick my face), I began rising before dawn to cook or begin the process of breaking camp, often finding Zlee already hard at it, while my father slept on and morning came and I had to strip him awake. In the daytime, as we moved from meadow to meadow, he left grazing decisions to me, which I took at first as a sign of confidence and still expected him to second-guess if there was something dangerous about the area that I couldn’t see, but then realized (when it was Zlee and Sawatch who brought a cadre of lambs back from a steep ridge obscured by scrub pine) that he might not have cared if I led an entire flock of sheep over a cliff, and so I began to scout our moves more cautiously.

  And at night, when our supper was over and there was little light to do anything but talk into the shadows—or rather, listen to my father’s profile behind the candle while he gave the same tired ideas for problems universal and local—I thought nothing of the sweet plum smell of slivovica and the clear bottle that accompanied him on those evenings, until I started kicking empty ones at his bedside when it was time for all of us to be awake and moving.

  The summer that I turned fifteen, my father returned from a trip to Kassa with extra rounds for the Krag, a .410 Hungarian-made shotgun, and a pair of Zeiss field glasses. We never wondered where he got the money to buy these things. They were tools, useful and necessary to us, like a sharp scythe necessary for harvest.

  The .30-caliber rifle shells and nine-hundred-yard range of the Krag were too powerful for the rabbit and dove we ate plenty of in the mountains, but with the shotguns, Zlee and I not only kept up a steady supply of meat but also practiced our stalking skills, seeing how close we could get to unwary hares before we kicked up grass or tossed a stone to get them running, and then, after a head start, shot them with our Magyar blunderbuss.

  Bullets for an American-made Krag were hard to come by in Europe, but my father didn’t seem to have any trouble getting them through a connection he had in Kassa. We had little reason to fire the Krag often—practice and conditioning mostly—so he made only one trip a year to the city (the cultural center of what would become eastern Czechoslovakia) and its marketplace, where more than farmers plied their wares. That summer, though, my father restocked because we had gotten word that a mountain lion was giving trouble to some of the shepherds east of us and we knew it was only a matter of time before the big cat showed up in the hills surrounding Pastvina.

  Those were the days when the last of the lions and pumas still roamed the Tatras and Carpathians, and in late August we started to find fresh kills on the periphery of the herd, usually a lamb or two, but often enough one of the ewes. If that predator had only taken the weak and moved on, nature doing the culling we ourselves would have done, we’d have let her have her share. But she seemed to hunt with a bloodlust, and we couldn’t afford to lose the horse or mule, or, worse, find one of us face-toface with her as we came up a switchback.

  My father began going down to Eperjes every other week then. In the town square, where the farmers set up stalls and sold their produce, there was talk of “levica,” the lioness, sometimes with awe, sometimes with contempt, as though she were goddess and succubus in one body, and my father would return and give us these reports, and at night, under the spell of his brandy, he began telling us more and more about America and the mountains of Colorado, where there were lions, too, but they were remote animals and remained in the higher altitudes, away from men. And then he said (the pronouncement strange, for his voice spoke to neither Zlee nor me), “but they will find you when the time comes.”

  He began carrying the rifle with him—on horseback, on foot, in his bed. I asked him why he thought he’d run into the cat in broad daylight or asleep in the cabin, and he asked me when it was I had gotten so smart, and I let him be. But I could tell that he was beyond cautious or even superstitious of the cat’s presence. He was somehow thrown off, as though he hadn’t expected such an adversary to encroach on his mountain pastoral. Or worse, that her presence meant she had come to the end of a long game of stalking and the hunt was about to be finished.

  One morning before first light we heard the hard bleating of a ewe in distress and my father was outside and moving fast through the flock before Zlee and I even knew what was happening. I heard a shot as I came out of the door of the cabin, and another as I broke into a run. When I reached my father, he was holding the barrel high and staring off into the light rising in the east.

  There was barely enough dawn to see, but if my father had pulled a trigger—and twice—I believed there was reason, and so I asked breathlessly, “Did you get her?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Let’s follow the blood. Which direction did she run in?”

  “I don’t know,” he said again, scaring me a little.

  “You don’t know?” I asked, more out of disbelief than anything.

  “For Christ’s sake, Jozef. I said I don’t know.”

  We were silent for some time, and I listened to the mauled ewe suck air (she had fought in what way she could, big and strong as she was) and kick at the hard ground with her hooves, until she stopped kicking and breathing altogether and lay in her bed of grass and gore.

  Two days later, we buried Sawatch in a shade of pines to the back of the cabin and went inside without a word. My father began packing food (what looked like enough for three days) into a rucksack, threw four rounds into a side pocket, took the Krag down from the wall and handed it to Zlee, then gave me the rucksack and a leather case with the field glasses inside.

  “I was up all night figuring this, even while that thing was killing my dog,” he said. “She’s hunting from the top of Krí• ik Ridge. Has to be. I want you boys to come back with most of those rounds and enough food for a guest. I don’t even want to see that cat.”

  Zlee and I took a lame ram we were going to have to put down anyway, hiked the whole day up to the ridge—the highest point just above the tree line there in that part of the mountains, Krí•ik was named for the crosslike shape it resembled, with a long horizontal cave that rested on the top of a towering shaft of granite—left the ram on the trail and found a thick stand of birch about 250 yards away and upwind, where we sat hidden, waiting.

  The ram brayed, tried to run, grazed on some lowgrowing thistle, and then slept. We spent the night listening and resting in shifts. I glassed the ridge at sunrise but didn’t see a thing. We watched all morning and into the afternoon, then left our cover and walked the ram back down into a meadow, clearing the air before we tried again the next night. Nothing. Three days we spent observing that ridge, until I woke up the next morning and saw Zlee standing to take in the view of the valley behind us and a slice of the distant range visible from our blind.

  “Your father’s wrong,” he said. “That lion’s not here. And if she was, she’s not coming back here, at least not to hunt anything tied down.”

  We had run out of food, so, disappointed as I was that we wouldn’t get the cat, I was glad we’d be heading back to our camp, and I said to Zlee, “Do you mean in the mountains, or not here on this ridge?”

  “I mean not where we are,” he said. “If this lion’s hunting, why do we believe that we can leave some old animal in her path and expect her to show up for us? We’re not tracking a creature of habit. She’s stayed alive in these mountains for a long time by doing more than stalking sheep.”


  I told him I understood, and that we should take the ram back to the camp, reprovision ourselves, and try again in another place.

  “Jozef, don’t you see?” His eyes flashed, lightless as it was, and I don’t think he had slept at all. That lion had picked through the best of the flock, he said, not the weak and the lame, but the strong, and she was going to keep on hunting for one better prize after another. “And all we’ve done is wait for her, and fired into the air at her shadow. But if we could find her, without her seeing us, while she stalks, we just might be able to kill her. There’s no other way.”

  We tethered the ram to a stake at the mouth of a thrum-cap overhang. Then, our packs empty, we set off for the valley where my father said that he was taking the sheep for some protection until we returned, a day’s hike from there.

  It was dusk when we arrived. I still remember looking down on him from the brow of a hill we had just come over. He was scanning the perimeter of those same hills rising out of the valley in which he and his sheep had lain down for the night, but he didn’t see us, just turned his back and set to the chores of the evening, slowly and with a break every now and then when he’d sit and stare at the ground, not, it seemed, because he was tired but, rather, as though he had forgotten what it was he needed to do next. I felt the wind coming up out of the mountains from the northeast.

  We had approached on purpose in a long sweep from the west. I carried the Krag, while Zlee scouted ahead and found a group of large boulders midway up the hill, and we nestled in behind them. They covered our backs and gave us a good view of the surrounding terrain. I had watched my father from a distance before and he had always somehow seen me without my knowing. Now, with no idea that Zlee and I were there, he seemed fragile and alone as he finished setting up his small tent, built a fire, and warmed his soup. I felt alone, too. I wanted to go to him, listen to him talk as he stirred what would be our supper, or hear him read, and be a boy again there in the mountains.