The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [4]
We have to run, she says, and grabs Tobias by the arm. Toby, come quickly, she says again, and Tobias looks up from the water below, his face bemused, and she shouts at him now, Toby, run!
Tobias tries to run, but in as little as two steps, his foot is caught. He whimpers and pulls on it and begins to bawl as he tugs and tugs at the hobnailed boot that won’t come free. I can make it across, she thinks to herself. I can make it, but that boy—he seems three miles, not three feet, from her—that boy has thumbs on his feet, she hears her sister-in-law say, and she turns back to wrench him loose, the sound of the train and its iron face growing, rising, she thinks, and she wonders if the entire cast of locomotive and cars might soar up and over them, but the boy squirms as he screams and screams, his foot twisting tighter into its trap, and no matter how hard she yells at him to hold still and be quiet, she knows there is no time to hold and, Oh dear God, she says to herself, why can’t there be quiet?
The baby moves at her breast then, and she looks down into the wrap and there are his eyes, staring up at her with their otherworldly hue, he unfazed by the danger growing and bearing down on them, until she knows that even if she abandoned her nephew and ran for the edge, she would be caught before she could cross to any kind of safety. She catches a glimpse on the bank below of the lads, skinny and shivering, who have climbed out of the water to watch the Missouri Pacific thunder above, and so she removes the child from around her in one graced motion, cinches up the bundle, presses her lips to his face, and whispers, L’úbim t’a, then lets him roll from her arms out over the trestle and into the water as the braking train screeches and strikes.
DARDAN, PENNSYLVANIA THE LAST NIGHT OF MARCH 1972
AND SO I WAS SAVED BY THE SIMPLE ACT OF A BOY WHO dived into that river, icy as hell and too strong for even a grown man to swim, stroked hard to reach a babe sinking under the weight of the wraps that bound him, and floated to the safety of the opposite shore almost a half mile downstream. The Pueblo Star-Journal called him a hero, the rescue a deed that rivaled the world’s greatest, and headlined their front page TRAIN CARRIES DEATH TO PLEASURE PARTY. Two days later, the paper long blown away, discarded, or used to wrap parcels and cuts of beef, the town had forgotten all but the reminder that death was indiscriminate.
But not my father, who knew that fortune, too, was equally thoughtless. Before the train set off again, the conductors took up a collection from the passengers, who chipped in fifty dollars cash, though more out of guilt than pity. And the next day, while the news was being hawked from the streets, the railroad company was writing Ondrej Vinich a check for five hundred dollars, in addition to paying the hospital and funeral expenses, afraid, no doubt, that I would die of pneumonia or some such thing, and there would be another round of headlines on which the story would drift farther east and west.
What the papers didn’t tell was that Anna went into labor when she heard the news about her son, and the baby, a girl, was stillborn, and the woman’s grief at the loss of her children nearly killed her as well, until the same doctor who had delivered me took me to my aunt (who lay empty and worn in her bed), placed me in her arms, and she nursed me with her daughter’s milk and cared for me as we both recovered, and then brought me into her home as though I were her son, except that she and her husband never spoke again to my father and always left the house when he came around to visit me on Sundays, while everyone else was in church and he could be alone.
The following spring, my father took me east to Pennsylvania, where he had relatives and friends in the mining town of Wilkes-Barre, and we lived with a young couple who had come from his home village of Pastvina,