The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [6]
The snow gave fresh evidence of deer moving that morning, and Zlodej suggested that he retreat along the base of the mountain around to the other side, where there was a stream and large swaths of wintergreen patches, and he would drive any deer that might be grazing there over the mountain to my father and their hunting companion.
“I would have happily gone on that trek if I had known the terrain,” my father said, “but I was stuck with the man hunting with us, and I began to feel so uneasy about his presence that I almost told Zlodej that I thought it was time I made it back to Wilkes-Barre, even though it was barely morning.”
When Zlodej disappeared, his gait so quick that the woods were silent in an instant, my father suggested that he and the man find a hide from which they could observe the widest arc of the summit.
The man said, “Ah, we won’t be seein’ no deer anytime soon. Now lemme lookit yer rifle.”
My father said that if he wanted to see a rifle like this, he knew a gunsmith who could show him one, and sat quietly with it resting on his knee. But on that mountainside in Dardan, the man got irate and said, “Who d’ya think yer talkin’ to, son?” and without warning lunged and grabbed the rifle from my father’s hands and shoved him hard against a rock.
“You see,” he said, holding the Krag up and inspecting it, “I ain’t used to hearin’ the word no. That’s why I aim to own most of this town, and Zlodej’s mountain with it.”
“What could I do?” my father said. “He wasn’t going to shoot me, at least I didn’t think so, because he didn’t seem to know the first thing about handling a rifle like that. He just said, ‘She’s a beaut,’ propped the Winchester he came with against a tree, and began to trudge up the hill toward a rock cave, carrying the Krag like it belonged to him.”
And when my father asked him where he was going, the man said that he was going to climb over the caves to the top of the hill. “Got to have the vantage of height if yer goin to kill anything,” he said.
So my father watched him as he climbed, the grade getting steeper and steeper, the snow-dusted tree line turning into a surface of packed dirt and wet scree, the man holding the Krag by its bolt like a shopping bag in his right hand and grabbing on to roots and saplings with the left as he struggled to ascend, until his foot slipped from the poor hold he had chosen on the next step and he pitched forward and began to slide and spin sideways down the hill, letting go of the rifle, which picked up its own speed and outstripped him as it dropped straight and slammed into a rock not twenty yards from my father and went off, shooting the man through the heart. He was dead before he came to rest.
“No one loved him, but he had a lot of friends,” my father said, “or maybe people who clung to him for his money. Anyway, it didn’t look good, no matter how much Mr. Zlodej came to my defense. I don’t think anyone thought I was foolish enough to have killed him, but he was American-born and Philadelphia-raised, a Morgan they said, and I was a Slav, good for work and nothing more, an immigrant whose luck was bad since having come over, and getting worse by the day. I had to make some decisions fast, and I needed someone to take care of you.”
So he wrote letters to what family remained in Pastvina, a small Rusyn village in a far northeast corner of the Hungarian Empire, and through negotiations with the local priest he arranged to remarry. The woman, whose husband had been killed felling timber, needed someone to support her own two sons in return for care of a child. So, after what he said was a long, long winter and late spring, around about the time I turned two, we packed a trunk and boarded a ship in New York harbor and made our way back to the country from where he’d come.
As a young boy, all that I could claim of my mother was a face I had seen in a daguerreotype my father had brought with him from America and kept next to him wherever he slept. And because I always shared his bed, that framed