The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [73]
My stepmother shook off her false grief and came out to stoke up the stove just as I was finishing the letter.
“He was a silly old fool in the end, your father,” she hissed. “Kept moaning about how he had nothing to leave you if you made it home from the war. If, I told him. And then he produced that musty old folder and said to make sure you got this so you’d at least remember him. Hah!”
I told her that I needed nothing to remember him by, and she said, “Nothing. That’s what you got in the end,” and looked at me to see if she might be mistaken.
But I acted as cold as if I was about to put a bullet through her head at four hundred yards and said, “I’ll be expecting my meal at noon,” so that she’d think I had nowhere else to go.
I waited at the house for a few days, visited my father’s grave, which seemed cold and unreal to me, but I otherwise remained a recluse in the barn, where I slept. I could tell that snow was on the way, so I lingered until the front came in, packed up some food and found the shotgun in the barn, which, surprisingly, my stepmother hadn’t managed to sell. Shells my father kept in a false floor were still dry, without any apparent rust around the primers, and so I armed myself, thinking the old gun just might come in handy. He had hidden the field glasses and a good hunting knife in there, too. The knife was still sharp. But there was no trace or mention anywhere of the Krag, not in the letter, not in Borka’s enmity, not in the barn.
I left the next day before sunrise in the middle of a freakish and substantial spring storm, which covered my tracks almost as quickly as I made them. The climb out of Pastvina seemed easier, in spite of the deep snow. No month-long packs of provisions, no mule, no horse, but no one else, either, to accompany me. I missed my father and Zlee, and the kind of world I knew before I marched off to war, and the old terrain seemed worn to me, the hills less challenging, the vistas not vast so much as merely broad from where I stood, as though what once to the boy appeared daunting mountains had become in the sight of the man merely stones.
At the camp, I waited for the storm to taper off, but it seemed unwilling to let up, and when it blew over, two feet of fresh powder blanketed the hills. I cleared the cabin of a few rodents and one big snake cold and still under a crate that had once held potatoes. I got the stove going, made some tea, lit the old oil lamp, laid out my supper of bacon and beetroot, and sat listening to the night, wishing I could summon into my presence the ghosts of everyone who had gone before me—friend or foe, civilian or soldier, family or Gypsy—embrace them, and send them home. But I rested now as they had left me. Alone.
I had enough food for three days, and so I waited that long before I hiked up to the ridge and climbed inside of the cave, which still smelled faintly of the fires we used to make there, the wall closest to the opening blackened permanently with soot. And, there in the back, out of the light, so that it would have been easy to miss, I found the stone veined with quartz. I pried it loose and lifted the sack from its resting place.
Five ounces of gold is a heavy five ounces. It felt odd in my pocket, as though it