The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [1]
For the next three months, she was housebound, sleeping, taking what food she could, and suckling the child. She stood to do little more than shuffle across the sloping floor of the house, make toast, drink water, or go to the toilet. And these only when the child slept and she couldn’t, for he seemed to bear his waking hours with a grief that was more than a newborn’s discomfort with cold, hunger, and separation. When the boy cried, it sounded to her as though he was pleading with the body that bore him to remain.
The man nods. You two missed most of spring.
If spring is what they call it here, she thinks. The late snows and quick thaws, the mud that seems to grow and move as if it were some lower form of life itself, and the unbroken view of the industry that feeds them. The only beauty visible is as distant as the Spanish range to the southwest, which she found when they first arrived could be seen from the raised elevation of the railroad trestle over the Arkansas, but which she hasn’t been able to walk across for almost a year.
It is morning now and she looks beyond her husband to the sky filling the top of the window behind him. A clear and cloudless blue matte, like it has never been since the coldest morning of midwinter, when she held the taut swell of her belly and wondered in her waking what kind of child it was that was being prepared for her.
The sleep was good, she says. I feel well. And she feels, too, the tension between them, born of where they are and where they wish to be, easing.
We have the meal with my sister and her family after the liturgy, he says. Go when the others are washing up. They’ll understand.
You’ll come with me?
No, he says, his eyes avoiding her to search his coffee again. I have to go up to Leadville tomorrow morning for a few days and I need to look over some maps. Clean my rifle. Mr. Orten wants to talk about the camp. Maybe do a little hunting.
What about work?
They’ll have to do without me. It’s slow, he says, and lingering between them is the memory of his nearly having lost this job for a similar absence just after she gave birth, the smelter boss having decided not to fire the new father. But he looks up at her and says in a tone that means he will say this much and no more, I think it’s time we turned the land that camp’s on for a profit, while there’s profit to be turning. We could move away from here, Lizzie. California. Montana. We could move away.
She stands and moves to the other side of the table, holds her husband’s shoulders from behind as though a boy himself too grown to cradle, kisses him on the top of his head, and in the other room the child wakes and begins to cry. She waits as the shallow bleats become sobs, then wails.
Go to him, the man says. And so she goes to him.
When he drank and someone was there to listen, he’d say that the Slavs of Pueblo had only exchanged life in one poor village for another, even if the journey to America, and then out west, promised to reveal a paradise. They had come for that purpose, and in the end it assuaged what hardship they found with the two things they knew well this side of the kingdom of heaven: work and family, lone virtues that reminded them of what was good about the old country. They clung to both so fiercely that a shirked responsibility was akin to what scripture called the sin against the Holy Spirit, and this fear bound them, because faith reigned like the quiet yet exacting old Rusyn priest, who had long ago come out to Colorado from Pennsylvania after his wife and five children died in a fire. Invisible to all but the old women throughout the week, he presided over the divine liturgy every Sunday and then remained with his small, obedient flock to share the midday meal at some parishioner’s house, always sitting at the head of the table like a bearded and widowed grandfather to the disparate, self-exiled clan, and no one knew for sure that he wasn’t.
Ondrej Vinich could just as well have lived out his