The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [0]
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PUEBLO, COLORADO JUNE 1899
DARDAN, PENNSYLVANIA THE LAST NIGHT OF MARCH 1972
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
For Irene
... That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.
—JOSEPH ROTH, The Radetzky March
It’s difficult with the weight of the rifle.
Leave it—under the oak.
—DAVID JONES, In Parenthesis
PUEBLO, COLORADO JUNE 1899
She rises before sunup without waking her husband or the child still asleep in the Moses basket at their bedside and walks through the dark of the small shack into the kitchen. At the stove she rocks the fire grate, takes kindling and three quartered aspen from the wood-box, wraps them in newspaper and dried bark and heaps them on the nearspent embers, slides the vent for draft, then waits as smoke and threads of flame rouse and lick the underside of a worn and atramental gloss. From a pitcher she fills the kettle and places it over the heat, sits down, and stares absentmindedly in the dawning at an icon of Saint Michael the Archangel resting on a shelf cut into a corner of the wall, until she catches herself drifting, shakes off sleep, stands, and takes up another log to feed the blaze.
Her husband emerges from the bedroom and walks somnolent into the cramped water closet. She waits, listening through the walls (no more than partitions of pine crates cobbled together) as he hawks and spits and rinses the basin, then stands for a long while to relieve himself. He steps into the kitchen toweling his face, leans against the window, and peers blankly out at slag heaps and a smelter, all they can claim for a view.
Dobré ráno, she says, not slipping out of the Slovak in which she dreams and thinks and speaks when she is tired.
Hell of a racket, he says, and dabs behind his neck and the backs of his ears. You couldn’t stay quiet for another half hour? Christ, a man can’t even rest on the Sabbath. And I don’t want to hear that damn language when it’s just us.
But she is silent and doesn’t move until the kettle begins to roil and she rises from the table, smooths her apron, and walks to a cupboard by the sink.
Coffee is ready soon, she says.
He hangs the towel on the back door of the closet and sits down in his own chair at the table, watches her slide a paper filter into a small steel funnel, place the funnel over what had once been used as a teapot, open a mason jar and dole out fresh grounds like a prospector handing flecks of gold over to the buyer’s scale of weights and measures. She turns back to the stove, wraps a rag around the kettle’s handle, and pours hot water through the apparatus. He bought the funnel in Leadville, where they lived before she became pregnant, and the coffee is black-market, beans siphoned off and sold or sometimes bartered by an old Hungarian man who had worked for years on the train from St. Louis bound for the hotels of Denver and San Francisco. She places the brew, black and steaming, in front of him, and he sips slowly and knows in spite of his mood that some manner of restiveness holds her.
I want to go out today and take the boy, she says, almost whispering but insistent. Just a short walk. Across the river.
His hands cup the drink before him as though it were a small world he might contemplate the fate of, and all of the enmity with which he rose dissipates with her request. The birth had been hard. The fetus was inverted but ill-positioned, and he nearly lost his wife from bleeding and his firstborn from suffocation. But he had heard of the doctor who had been trained in Philadelphia (an easterner come west for anonymity) and lured him with payment in gold into the Pueblo shantytown on Good Friday, the last night of March 1899, and the man, stinking of ether, assisted the child with forceps and sutured the woman where