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By Root 263 0

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 father, but to me there was no other way to account for the slow loosening of the discipline he had himself impressed upon me,