The Sojourn - Andrew Krivak [9]
The sheep we tended were used to being outside yearround. I did what work I could as a child, busy work I no longer remember, but soon was put in charge of the feed bunks, which we needed until the first spring grasses shot through. My father crotched the ewes before they gave birth, and then played midwife to entire flocks once they started lambing in late April, often with the help of Rusyn peasants who knew just when to show up every year and who seemed fond of my tall, independent father. Come summer, we moved each day through valleys and meadows, where we slept outside if we had gone too far from the camp or if the weather stayed clear, and talked on those nights of neither the past nor the future, but simply of what we had found strange, onerous, or beautiful that day (his division of the things of nature), and where we might lead those flocks the next.
All this time, we spoke in English. The first day he hoisted me into that saddle and we led the herd away from Pastvina, the last he spoke of any Slavic language was to those same Rusyn peasants who greeted him as they took to the fields in Lent with “Slava isusu Khristu,” to which he responded “Slava na viki,” and then ceased to say a word comprehensible to me, until, by the end of the summer, I knew—and could respond to—the language that was to become our own there in the mountains, and which he insisted that I never speak when we went back to the village, where everyone spoke Slovak, or Rusyn, or Hungarian to outsiders.
My father had brought several books with him from America (including a Bible and a dictionary), books he kept on a shelf in the cabin and, after the midday meal or when the light hung on in summer, would read to me, sometimes having me take a chapter when he wanted to rest or smoke, so that in time English was the first language I could read well. Thoreau’s Walden, a slim volume of Walt Whitman’s poetry, a large, tattered version of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (which we read from so often, the pages fell out), and, my father’s greatest treasure, the personal memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant in two volumes bound in leather and kept together by a length of hide. And so, America became for me on those nights not a place but a voice, the voice of one man sitting alone at his table and telling another of what he had seen and had made—or would like yet to make, if there would be time—of the world.
IF I COULD HAVE CEASED WHAT PENDULUMS SWUNG, OR WHEELS turned, or water clocks emptied, then, in order to keep the Fates from marching in time, I would have, for though it is what a boy naturally wishes when he fears change will come upon what he loves and take it away, a man remembers it, too, and in his heart wishes the same when all around him he feels only loss, loss that has been his companion for some time, and promises to remain at his side.
It began one day in winter, after I turned nine years old, when the magistrate came to the village, knocked on our door, and ordered my father to send me to school in the spring term.
I didn’t understand what he meant when he told me that I couldn’t go with him into the mountains that year and instead must ride on the back of a cart into Eperjes, where I was shown to a room in a dormitory with two other boys, told to dress in the red-and-olive-green uniform that hung in the closet for me, and in the morning marched with the rest of the children into the cramped room of a schoolhouse off the main street and a few doors away from the Greek Catholic seminary. I felt betrayed and so unsettled that I would not sit at the desk assigned to me, even when threatened with corporal punishment, with which the headmaster obliged. And after a week of beatings so hard and of such duration that I wept, they beat me all the more, and stopped only after I could neither speak nor cry and came down with a fever so bad that I heard the headmaster say that he feared he had gone too far this