The rain that had fallen the night before in the city was snow in Dardan, a wet six inches of ground cover, and the mountainside they approached that day was a steep and wintry landscape of pine interspersed with hardwoods and outcroppings of rock and small caves, which Zlodej said were once home to the Susquehannocks when they roamed those hills before the Europeans arrived.
The snow gave fresh evidence of deer moving that morning, and Zlodej suggested that he retreat along the base of the mountain around to the other side, where there was a stream and large swaths of wintergreen patches, and he would drive any deer that might be grazing there over the mountain to my father and their hunting companion.
“I would have happily gone on that trek if I had known the terrain,” my father said, “but I was stuck with the man hunting with us, and I began to feel so uneasy about his presence that I almost told Zlodej that I thought it was time I made it back to Wilkes-Barre, even though it was barely morning.”
When Zlodej disappeared, his gait so quick that the woods were silent in an instant, my father suggested that he and the man find a hide from which they could observe the widest arc of the summit.
The man said, “Ah, we won’t be seein’ no deer anytime soon. Now lemme lookit yer rifle.”
My father said that if he wanted to see a rifle like this, he knew a gunsmith who could show him one, and sat quietly with it resting on his knee. But on that mountainside in Dardan, the man got irate and said, “Who d’ya think yer talkin’ to, son?” and without warning lunged and grabbed the rifle from my father’s hands and shoved him hard against a rock.
“You see,” he said, holding the Krag up and inspecting it, “I ain’t used to hearin’ the word no. That’s why I aim to own most of this town, and Zlodej’s mountain with it.”
“What could I do?” my father said. “He wasn’t going to shoot me, at least I didn’t think so, because he didn’t seem to know the first thing about handling a rifle like that. He just said, ‘She’s a beaut,’ propped the Winchester he came with against a tree, and began to trudge up the hill toward a rock cave, carrying the Krag like it belonged to him.”
And when my father asked him where he was going, the man said that he was going to climb over the caves to the top of the hill. “Got to have the vantage of height if yer goin to kill anything,” he said.
So my father watched him as he climbed, the grade getting steeper and steeper, the snow-dusted tree line turning into a surface of packed dirt and wet scree, the man holding the Krag by its bolt like a shopping bag in his right hand and grabbing on to roots and saplings with the left as he struggled to ascend, until his foot slipped from the poor hold he had chosen on the next step and he pitched forward and began to slide and spin sideways down the hill, letting go of the rifle, which picked up its own speed and outstripped him as it dropped straight and slammed into a rock not twenty yards from my father and went off, shooting the man through the heart. He was dead before he came to rest.
“No one loved him, but he had a lot of friends,” my father said, “or maybe people who clung to him for his money. Anyway, it didn’t look good, no matter how much Mr. Zlodej came to my defense. I don’t think anyone thought I was foolish enough to have killed him, but he was American-born and Philadelphia-raised, a Morgan they said, and I was a Slav, good for work and nothing more, an immigrant whose luck was bad since having come over, and getting worse by the day. I had to make some decisions fast, and I needed someone to take care of you.”
So he wrote letters to what family remained in Pastvina, a small Rusyn village in a far northeast corner of the Hungarian Empire, and through negotiations with the local priest he arranged to remarry. The woman, whose husband had been killed felling timber, needed someone to support her own two sons in return for care of a child. So, after what he said was a long, long winter and late spring, around about the time I turned two, we packed a trunk and boarded a ship in New York harbor and made our way back to the country from where he’d come.
As a young boy, all that I could claim of my mother was a face I had seen in a daguerreotype my father had brought with him from America and kept next to him wherever he slept. And because I always shared his bed, that framed and static vision of the woman, who appeared somehow meek and stern in the same stilted pose, entered my memory from early on, and it was on the crossing back to Europe that I had — I hesitate to call it a dream, I was so young, but the memory of her in my presence then is strong to this day — the first dream of her that I can remember. She didn’t speak and she didn’t move; she just stood before me, radiant and iconic, her arms outstretched without beckoning, as though having held something she had just let go. Only her face was changed. Instead of the motionless and serious demeanor the photograph held, her features wavered and I felt anticipation that she would speak and move, and that if I woke, I would find her among us, as she had been once before, living and breathing and whispering to me.
But even as my father sought, for his own reasons, to give some life to that lifeless past on an early summer evening in June 1916, while dusk settled, too, upon the whole of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it came too late for me to understand or even forgive him, spent and weakened and alone that he was in the light of the candle flame around which we sat in our village hut while he talked and drank plum brandy and told me of what he had done and wanted to do in those last few months of life in America, before he took me to the old country. Over the years of my youth and young manhood there, he had decreased while I struggled to increase, bent that I was on the promise of a journey to the edge of the culture and land in which I had been raised and believed was my own (although I was, in truth, a stranger), with the imagined valor of heroic battles, and the thought that death would be a thing I doled out to others who dared resist. For, by the time I had heard the story of my birth, and my father’s leaving the land of my birth, war was imminent, and I was hungry to call myself Infanterist, Frontkämpfer, Soldat. Anything. Anything but the son of the shepherd, because shepherd was all that my father — once he returned to Pastvina — wanted to be, and I wanted to become what he was not.
IF, WHEN WE, A LOST-LOOKING FATHER AND HIS RETICENT SON, first arrived in Pastvina in 1901, the people of our village had heard or whispered among themselves tales of prospecting and silver and the dangers — gunfights and murders — of the Wild West, stories they should expect a man who had seen that world to weave with suspense and nostalgia in their presence, they were soon forgotten, for there seemed nothing about Ondrej Vinich’s attitude or demeanor (against the fiery young man intent on leaving Pastvina to make his fortune) to suggest that he’d ever lived one of those storied lives, but in fact seemed content and almost grateful to have to take up what was the loneliest existence a man could live in that part of the old country. Which is strange, when I think about those villagers and how they seemed to cling to one another and yet blame one another for the harsh lot from which not one of them could escape.
“Someone who makes it to America,” my stepmother used to rail, harridan that she was, “and you come back! With barely enough to keep a house and pasture other people’s sheep, while I’m left here to do all the work and raise my sons?”
I hear her now, old Borka, for that voice embodied my own fears as a boy, fear of loneliness, abandonment, and starvation, fear I struggled at any cost to overcome.
Every family in Pastvina had a child who died before the age of two from disease or malnutrition, because there were other, stronger children who might survive. Houses had straw roofs and a single fire for warmth, so that inside it was either bitter cold or so choked with smoke that you’d rather freeze outside than suffocate in. There was meat when someone slaughtered livestock, snared a rabbit, or (as my father could) shot a deer. Vegetables in the summer, but only potatoes, coarse bread, and root plants in winter. Children who’d lost a father stayed close to their mothers, whose sole existence seemed to be the upkeep of whatever hut they were given to live in, if they weren’t lucky enough to remarry. These were the kids who hacked like tuberculars, eyes sunken and knees bowed, and who were usually dead before they turned five, a path I might well have been on, for (my father said to me years later on a morning when I saved his life) when he came down from the mountains after his first summer, he feared that I was one of those in this world who simply would not thrive.