The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [14]
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