The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [8]
But when he returned early in the following year because of unseasonable snows, he saw how Borka fed her sons all they could manage (and then some), set her own good portion off to the side, and left barely enough for me to eat, twice a day at most. He knew then that he had chosen poorly in that marriage, and wondered for the first time (the fear that would grip him and lead to his decline) if losing me, finally, might be the unintended consequence of the grief and desire for seclusion that blinded him.
And I remember still that fateful moment in the direction my boyhood would turn from then on, the day my father cornered my stepmother in the kitchen and demanded an explanation for why she fed me so much less than her own sons.
She scoffed at him. “There isn’t enough for even three to eat squarely. But whose fault is that, eh?”
My father—a man whose descendants must have been a direct line of the old Kievan Rus, for his face looked carved from rock maple, his hair the texture of bear’s fur, and he stood a full foot taller than any stunted villager who walked next to or past him—rose up in front of his wife and thundered, “My work feeds us all, and my son will eat first, or I will leave you and your boys alone to starve.”
She shrank from him but, even wounded, barked back, “What do you know? You’re never here half the year. I will say who eats and who doesn’t. Go back to your sheep and your bed in the mountains. Father Bogdan will hear about this.”
“I’ve already given Father Bogdan too much money for this match,” my father’s voice boomed, and she ran from him in fear. “If my son dies,” he said, “they’ll welcome you and that thieving priest both in Hell.”
“He’ll hear of this!” she screamed, and locked herself in a tiny room off the kitchen. “He’ll hear of this!” But her voice and her intentions sounded weak and muffled through the door.
“He won’t have to,” my father called back as he swept me up and carried me out of the house. “I’m off to tell him myself.”
From that day on, for the rest of the winter, my father and I ate together the same food at the same table, and if my stepmother so much as lingered or addressed either one of us with even passing comment, he would say in a hard, flat tone, “Chod’ pre•,” and she would slink away like a dog.
In spring, he must have decided that I no longer needed the care of my stepmother. For on the first Saturday of Lent, after he had packed the mule and saddled his horse, he asked me if I wanted to go with him for a ride. When I nodded yes in amazement, he said, “You had better get your coat and boots, then, because we’re going to ride for some time.”
Strapped into the saddle of the piebald horse he had bought from a Gypsy (“The best purchase I’d ever made,” he said the day we put that horse to rest in a meadow grave), I traveled with him and the sheep and Sawatch the dog out of the village and up into the mountains of the Carpathian range, where we lived for the spring and summer in a cabin he built himself, and returned for the production of bryndza, to sheer the sheep, and for winter, when he tended to the animals that were his and repaired tack for another season, a cycle that would come to define all that I knew and loved of life.
When Easter came early, it could be bitter cold in the mountains for the first month, but the cabin was built of stacked logs around a central hearth (he had seen this done in America), and the walls were sealed with a mortar he made from clay and straw. The roof was pitched and overhung the walls outside, so that the weather took little toll on them, and the inside was finished with the same milled planks he had used on the roof