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 and no drafts encroached, the fire burned steady, and he hung his pots, skins, and my mother’s icon of Saint Michael the Archangel on the wall.
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 time.