Andrew Krivak
The Sojourn
For Irene
… That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.
It’s difficult with the weight of the rifle.
Leave it — under the oak.
PUEBLO, COLORADO JUNE 1899
She rises before sunup without waking her husband or the child still asleep in the Moses basket at their bedside and walks through the dark of the small shack into the kitchen. At the stove she rocks the fire grate, takes kindling and three quartered aspen from the wood-box, wraps them in newspaper and dried bark and heaps them on the nearspent embers, slides the vent for draft, then waits as smoke and threads of flame rouse and lick the underside of a worn and atramental gloss. From a pitcher she fills the kettle and places it over the heat, sits down, and stares absentmindedly in the dawning at an icon of Saint Michael the Archangel resting on a shelf cut into a corner of the wall, until she catches herself drifting, shakes off sleep, stands, and takes up another log to feed the blaze.
Her husband emerges from the bedroom and walks somnolent into the cramped water closet. She waits, listening through the walls (no more than partitions of pine crates cobbled together) as he hawks and spits and rinses the basin, then stands for a long while to relieve himself. He steps into the kitchen toweling his face, leans against the window, and peers blankly out at slag heaps and a smelter, all they can claim for a view.
Dobré ráno, she says, not slipping out of the Slovak in which she dreams and thinks and speaks when she is tired.
Hell of a racket, he says, and dabs behind his neck and the backs of his ears. You couldn’t stay quiet for another half hour? Christ, a man can’t even rest on the Sabbath. And I don’t want to hear that damn language when it’s just us.
But she is silent and doesn’t move until the kettle begins to roil and she rises from the table, smooths her apron, and walks to a cupboard by the sink.
Coffee is ready soon, she says.
He hangs the towel on the back door of the closet and sits down in his own chair at the table, watches her slide a paper filter into a small steel funnel, place the funnel over what had once been used as a teapot, open a mason jar and dole out fresh grounds like a prospector handing flecks of gold over to the buyer’s scale of weights and measures. She turns back to the stove, wraps a rag around the kettle’s handle, and pours hot water through the apparatus. He bought the funnel in Leadville, where they lived before she became pregnant, and the coffee is black-market, beans siphoned off and sold or sometimes bartered by an old Hungarian man who had worked for years on the train from St. Louis bound for the hotels of Denver and San Francisco. She places the brew, black and steaming, in front of him, and he sips slowly and knows in spite of his mood that some manner of restiveness holds her.
I want to go out today and take the boy, she says, almost whispering but insistent. Just a short walk. Across the river.
His hands cup the drink before him as though it were a small world he might contemplate the fate of, and all of the enmity with which he rose dissipates with her request. The birth had been hard. The fetus was inverted but ill-positioned, and he nearly lost his wife from bleeding and his firstborn from suffocation. But he had heard of the doctor who had been trained in Philadelphia (an easterner come west for anonymity) and lured him with payment in gold into the Pueblo shantytown on Good Friday, the last night of March 1899, and the man, stinking of ether, assisted the child with forceps and sutured the woman where she had torn. Eight days later, the priest came to the house, and the boy was christened Jozef.
For the next three months, she was housebound, sleeping, taking what food she could, and suckling the child. She stood to do little more than shuffle across the sloping floor of the house, make toast, drink water, or go to the toilet. And these only when the child slept and she couldn’t, for he seemed to bear his waking hours with a grief that was more than a newborn’s discomfort with cold, hunger, and separation. When the boy cried, it sounded to her as though he was pleading with the body that bore him to remain.
The man nods. You two missed most of spring.
If spring is what they call it here, she thinks. The late snows and quick thaws, the mud that seems to grow and move as if it were some lower form of life itself, and the unbroken view of the industry that feeds them. The only beauty visible is as distant as the Spanish range to the southwest, which she found when they first arrived could be seen from the raised elevation of the railroad trestle over the Arkansas, but which she hasn’t been able to walk across for almost a year.
It is morning now and she looks beyond her husband to the sky filling the top of the window behind him. A clear and cloudless blue matte, like it has never been since the coldest morning of midwinter, when she held the taut swell of her belly and wondered in her waking what kind of child it was that was being prepared for her.
The sleep was good, she says. I feel well. And she feels, too, the tension between them, born of where they are and where they wish to be, easing.
We have the meal with my sister and her family after the liturgy, he says. Go when the others are washing up. They’ll understand.
You’ll come with me?
No, he says, his eyes avoiding her to search his coffee again. I have to go up to Leadville tomorrow morning for a few days and I need to look over some maps. Clean my rifle. Mr. Orten wants to talk about the camp. Maybe do a little hunting.
What about work?
They’ll have to do without me. It’s slow, he says, and lingering between them is the memory of his nearly having lost this job for a similar absence just after she gave birth, the smelter boss having decided not to fire the new father. But he looks up at her and says in a tone that means he will say this much and no more, I think it’s time we turned the land that camp’s on for a profit, while there’s profit to be turning. We could move away from here, Lizzie. California. Montana. We could move away.
She stands and moves to the other side of the table, holds her husband’s shoulders from behind as though a boy himself too grown to cradle, kisses him on the top of his head, and in the other room the child wakes and begins to cry. She waits as the shallow bleats become sobs, then wails.
Go to him, the man says. And so she goes to him.
When he drank and someone was there to listen, he’d say that the Slavs of Pueblo had only exchanged life in one poor village for another, even if the journey to America, and then out west, promised to reveal a paradise. They had come for that purpose, and in the end it assuaged what hardship they found with the two things they knew well this side of the kingdom of heaven: work and family, lone virtues that reminded them of what was good about the old country. They clung to both so fiercely that a shirked responsibility was akin to what scripture called the sin against the Holy Spirit, and this fear bound them, because faith reigned like the quiet yet exacting old Rusyn priest, who had long ago come out to Colorado from Pennsylvania after his wife and five children died in a fire. Invisible to all but the old women throughout the week, he presided over the divine liturgy every Sunday and then remained with his small, obedient flock to share the midday meal at some parishioner’s house, always sitting at the head of the table like a bearded and widowed grandfather to the disparate, self-exiled clan, and no one knew for sure that he wasn’t.