The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [72]
“This is all your father left you,” she said. “Don’t worry. There’s no money in it. I checked.” She cackled like a bird and walked back into her bedroom and closed the door, to die, for all I knew, or even cared.
There were papers inside the folder, one from the United States of America’s Department of State, certifying the birth of Jozef Ondrej Vinich in Pueblo, Colorado, on the thirty-first of March, 1899. The signatures of my father, Ondrej Pavel Vinich, and my mother, Magdalena Rose Sabo Vinich, were scrawled beneath the typed “PARENTS,” the ink as black as it must have been when they were alive and believed these marks would mean somehow a better life for all of us. Along with this was a letter from my father to me, written in English and dated the thirtieth of November, 1918. It was a thick ten pages of scrawl, and I wondered what it was he’d had to say, or if maybe he’d just been some kind of fool after all and these pages would only serve to remind me.
My Dearest Jozef, the letter began, with winter has come the end of my shepherding, and with the end of shepherding will come, soon, the end of what I have tried to make of this life. He was writing, he went on, from his bed, unable to get up and do any work anymore. He had sold what was left of his flock and let someone else do the business of taking care of other people’s animals. My stepmother took from him all the money he had left and spent it before it was worthless with the advent of the new Czechoslovak koruna. He had hoped to live past the end of the war, to see Marian and me come home as heroes, but he feared he would die before that happened, and now that the war was over, he believed death had taken us all. Still, I hope, he wrote. Hope that you are lost but alive somewhere. Or, having been wounded, perhaps, are resting in order to regain your strength before you come back to me. He spoke of what news he heard of the war from those few men who had come back to Pastvina, but knew, too, that they could tell him and the others no more than what they had seen, and often suffered, so that everyone merely hoped and prayed and resigned themselves to the reality of Austria-Hungary’s defeat.
Then he explained the papers. Although he had told me about my mother and their life in America, there was much left unsaid, much left yet to do, and he wanted most of all, before he died, to give me a better life, if life was still a gift God granted me. Enclosed was everything I needed to leave Pastvina and go to the United States. I was a citizen there and wouldn’t need any visas or permits. All I had to do was present myself at the new American embassy in Prague, show them these documents, and I would be issued a passport.
How, though, you must be wondering, he went on to write, fully eight pages into the letter by now, and I was. This, he explained, was the reason for the old folder, the American papers, the news and sentimental wanderings, and the impression that he was a broken man with little to give. All had to be done so as to convince Borka that nothing my father had left me was of any value. Although he had enjoyed writing of reminiscences, as it began to make him feel as though he were speaking to me in person, the letter was long so that my stepmother wouldn’t be tempted to send it off to a translator in Eperjes if she suspected my father was passing along any information about money or valuables. For, buried at the end of that letter, was this:
In the late fall of 1917, after Zlee and I had been gone for almost two years and my father knew that he was too old to go back to shepherding on his own, he walked up to the camp one last time in the winter to leave for me there the small fortune he had brought with him from America in 1901 and had kept hidden from my stepmother for seventeen years. Not silver, which is what he mined for the Canterbury Mining Company in Leadville when he and my mother first arrived out west, but gold,