“Kupiak!” says Ihor. “I know people with that name. In the village next to mine.”
“That’s right,” Taras says. “Kupiak is a Hutsul.”
“I don’t know a Marko. But he must be related.”
“Yes, he must be. So as I was saying, Marko Kupiak has a talent even more wonderful than singing. The baby starts to cry. He walks up to the mother and offers to hold him. The mother is worn out with all the crying. She hands the baby over and Kupiak holds him with great care. He asks the baby’s name: Oleksandr. He sings a song about a baby called Oleksandr, and the baby still cries. And then... He whistles the songs of birds. Real bird songs and ones he’s made up himself.” Taras feels them warming to the story, senses the slight pause he needs to leave to increase their interest.
“Soon all the children gather close and the adults, too. Some of the birds sing soft and low, some scrap and chirp like old men arguing. Others sound like a baba scolding you for something. All the time he cradles the baby in his strong arms. The baby stops crying. Smiles and laughs at the new sounds.”
Taras’s listeners also smile. The simple story reminds them who they are. Kupiak isn’t a rich man, but he has gifts. Taras builds the picture. Kupiak’s been visiting his brother Panas in Winnipeg. He’s travelling to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and then going home to a sheep ranch in the hills south of town, owned by a man named McLean. McLean is letting Kupiak buy the place bit by bit out of his share of lambs. In ten or fifteen years he’ll own it. Everyone sighs. This is how it should go. Work hard, life will be good.
Before they reach the Saskatchewan border, Kupiak hears the stories of everyone in the car. He listens to what the Kalynas tell him and understands that some things have been left untold. He might even guess, considering their son’s age, that Taras has run from the army. He tells them the place they’re headed, Spring Creek, isn’t far from Moose Jaw.
“You’ll visit my house,” he says. “Enjoy some mountain hospitality.” For Kupiak, like Ihor, is from the Carpathians. They’ve never met a Hutsul before, but they’re charmed. When he whistles, their spirits lift. Maybe the baby won’t die. Maybe a farm is really waiting.
Kupiak pulls a small package out of his pocket and offers each of them a dried fruit, shaped, or so Taras thinks, like a testicle. When he bites into it he finds masses of seeds – nearly as small as poppyseeds – with unexpected sweetness. After the fig, he offers them dates, so sweet their teeth ache; but their stomachs feel fuller than before.
The baby starts to cry again. Plaintively, desperately. Kupiak talks to the conductor. Both of them head to the next car. Ten minutes later they return with a woman holding a very young baby. Kupiak speaks in a low voice to the woman who hasn’t enough milk. After a moment, the two women share a smile and the babies are temporarily exchanged. The men in that part of the train move off a little, and the woman from the other car, Marusia is her name, nurses Oleksandr.
They reach Spring Creek the next morning. It’s small, a town of maybe a thousand people, with different kinds of stores clustered on a few streets near the train station. They step down onto a packed dirt main street, clutching the wooden chest and the homespun bag. A couple of women walk past them, holding children by the hand. A man drives by in a wagon loaded with lumber. Another in a suit and hat disappears into a door marked “Royal Bank.”
No one seems to notice them. They might as well be invisible.
Kupiak has taught them some English words and phrases. They ask several people, “Please, where land office?” but no one seems to recognize this as English. A man carrying a sack of flour works it out, finally, and points the way. Afterwards, watching him disappear down the street, they wish they’d also asked, “Where I buy sack of flour?”
The land agent talks too quickly. “Youmust buildahouse. Break thirtyacres. After threeyears landisyours. Gimme tendollars.” Kupiak has told them what the man would say, but the only part they actually catch is “tendollars.” They have tendollars ready. They exchanged their Austrian money when the ship docked.
“Ask him about trees,” Daria says.
“Land. Trees,” Mykola says, as firmly as he can muster.
The agent shakes his head. “Oh no. Not around here. Trees... all...gone.” This is clear even to a person who doesn’t know the words. He glances at the paper in his hand and tells them that there’s a house on the land. They won’t have to build a house.
“House,” they understand. Good, they hadn’t expected a house.
Mykola pays ten dollars and the agent gives him a paper with coordinates for their land. The Kalynas have just bought 160 acres of land.
The agent is good at sign language. He points to a livery stable, mimes hiring a horse and wagon. Shows them where to buy flour, potatoes, a barrel of drinking water. Gives them an encouraging smile as they go out the door. Taras turns back and sees him shaking his head.
An old man at the livery stable, Geordie McIntosh, looks at the coordinates, nods, and loads them and their belongings into a wagon. He drives them down a rough, narrow road into what he calls the south country – dry, grassy hills where hardly a bush can be seen, never mind trees. They know at a glance that no one has ever farmed this land. Wonder if it can be farmed. When it rained last. When Geordie talks, it sounds even stranger than the land agent’s speech – though pleasant to their ears, with its rolled r’s.
A half-hour passes. The view hardly changes. Taras takes in the rhythm of the land, ridge upon ridge melting to a smoky blue at the horizon. Sky so wide and high it makes him dizzy. Geordie points at a small pond with cattail and willow growing around it. “That’s what we call a slough.” One word sticks: sloo.
Mykola wants to ask why they’ve passed no houses.
Ten minutes later they climb a slightly steeper hill and then roll slowly down the other side, rocked almost to sleep by the swaying wagon. At the bottom of the hill, without any warning, the Scotsman stops and begins to unload. Startled, Mykola and Taras jump down to help. They see a weathered grey shack perched on a more or less flat farmyard. It has two windows, one on the south side and one on the east facing the road. Surely this isn’t the house? Behind it to the west, a small sloo glitters in the sun. Beyond that, hills roll away for what looks like forever.
It seems that it is the house. Not far away is a very small structure which must be the toilet.
In a couple of minutes, they have laid on the bare grass sacks of flour and cornmeal and a small bag of brown sugar Mykola bought when he realized how hard things might be. The water barrel, the linen bag from the old country, the small chest. A brand-new spade.
Mykola wants to ask a hundred questions but has no words. Geordie accepts his payment and turns back to town. “Good luck to ye,” he says, taking his battered tweed cap off to them. He begins his long, slow ride, fades from sight so gradually it’s hard to tell he’s moving. Later it’s even harder to believe he was ever there.
Daria cries softly. This is their farm. No village, no neighbours, no garden, no trees. No house. She follows Mykola and Taras to the shack.
The main room, maybe twelve feet square, is filled with a stranger’s belongings. A cast-iron stove, a tin coffee pot and a coal scuttle. An old wooden dresser with an oil lamp on top. A galvanized tin pail. A washtub. The small wooden table has a single chair. A tall cupboard has a work counter at waist height, and above that, shelves of common supplies: yeast, baking powder, vanilla extract. Cadbury’s cocoa powder.
On the west side, with a small window overlooking the hills, is a second, smaller room, holding a narrow bed with a faded quilt and a chest beside the bed, curtained off by a blanket hung over a rope. Worn clothing hangs from the rope – overalls, shirts, socks. Scuffed boots nestle under the bed beside a chamber pot.
There are other useful things. Chipped dishes and a pottery bowl for mixing bread sit on a shelf. In a corner, a spade, saw, hoe and pickaxe lean against the wall. They can almost see the man who lived here, obviously a bachelor. Al
l his things must now be theirs.
Who leaves their clothes behind? Their boots? Quilt? Kettle and dishes? No one wants to say it: the bachelor died here.
Mykola and Taras see Daria’s thoughts in her face: I can’t stay in here.
There is no money to buy the materials to build a house.
That afternoon they consider building a burdei. This way of building homes out of and partly in the earth was explained to them by Kupiak. Apparently many others have done it on first arriving in Kanady. Or Canada, as people say here.
To build a burdei they will have to dig a hole, probably about half the size of their main room back in the village, two or three feet deep. Then they’ll cut squares of sod, which they’ll lay around the edges of the hole, like bricks, to make walls. Then they’ll gather willow wands from the slough, weave them together to frame a roof, then lay more sods on top of it. Then if they can find some good quality clay on their land, they’ll mix it with grass to form a thick plaster to insulate the burdei.
They could do all this, but it sounds like a lot of work just to live in a hole in the ground. A lot of time which they need for breaking land and planting a garden. Mykola takes the one chair from the shack outside, and sits down and thinks.
Daria meanwhile gathers dried twigs and grass and fetches some of the settler’s coal. Makes a fire between the shack and the slough and lets it die to a low, steady flame. She sets up stones around it and balances an iron pan over the fire. Puts salo in the pan and hears it sizzle; thinks how strange it was to bring a clay pot of pig fat all this way. She mixes flour and water and makes a rough pancake. When she has enough of these, she fries them and sprinkles them with brown sugar. Adds a couple of dates from Kupiak for each person. The dates are a promise that while they’ve lost a lot, they might also gain something here. Kupiak is proof that it’s possible to feel at home.
Eating the plain but delicious supper, Mykola understands what to do.
As the light fades, Taras looks up and sees on top of the hill above their yard a horse dark as charcoal. It turns and gallops down the other side out of sight. He climbs the hill, but it’s long gone. In the distance, in the folds of other hills, he sees bluffs of stunted poplar.
He’s safe from the Austrian army, or hopes he is. The pahn, Radoski, is thousands of miles away. They’ll never see his smirking face again. Surely that’s worth something?
Halya is near, somewhere not far from Spring Creek. He can find her.
He see his parents looking all around them and thinks that if Shevchana might be regained without having to retrace their steps, they’d do it in a moment. But no. All that’s gone – the old place and its ways. Shevchana before the rumours of war no longer exists.
His parents are small figures in a world of grass.
Stars appear in the darkening sky. A cool breeze touches his face. Below, his parents set out blankets for them to sleep on – on the bare prairie. A shooting star streaks across the night and is swallowed by a hill. A single voice, clear as a flute, seems to answer its brief fire.
No one said there would be wolves.
Taras wakens to see his father headed for the bachelor shack. Mykola comes out a few minutes later with the pail, the washtub, the hoe and the spade they bought in town. He walks over to the north side of their yard and takes a few steps up the slope of the big hill they drove down when they arrived here. He picks up the spade and digs. Taras thinks he must be dreaming, and a moment later he is. Dreaming of Halya, her steady blue-grey eyes. This must be what he likes about her, that steadiness. Some men like pale blonde hair, some like shining black hair. He likes brassy gold hair and that look she gets that says she’s not going to back down.
When he turns over an hour later, he sees Mykola dumping something from the pail into the washtub. Sees him walk down to the slough and pick up lengths of dried grass he’s cut with the hoe, and toss them into the tub. Normally he’d get up and help, but today he doesn’t move.
Batko is doing something secret and magical. Something with grass and...what? Clay! That’s something you could dig out of the side of a hill. And he’s doing it early in the morning, so Mama won’t know. If he wanted help, he’d have asked by now.
When Taras and his mother wake up, Mykola is nowhere to be seen. In a moment he comes out of the shack and helps get the fire going. Daria doesn’t ask what he was doing. This is some kind of husband and wife secret, Taras thinks. If anyone asks what Mykola’s doing, there’ll be a big argument, but no one’s going to ask. Daria makes pancakes again and spreads brown sugar on top. Mykola’s seem to disappear in seconds.
After their meal, Taras walks out past the slough and finds a rabbit in a snare he set the night before. Setting snares is something else Kupiak taught them. He skins and guts it and takes it to his mother, who rinses out the cavity, cuts it up and puts it in a pot of water over the fire. Later, he’ll go to the poplar bluffs he saw from the hilltop and bring back fallen branches for cooking fires. But there won’t be enough for winter. They’ll need more coal.
The next task is breaking land. The bachelor did have a garden plot near the slough, about fifty feet square, now covered with weeds. Taras and Daria get busy hoeing and digging the soil for planting. Mykola keeps doing what he’s doing and they don’t look at him.
By noon, Daria nods to Taras: time for lunch. As she makes more small pancakes, they hear a wagon and see a black-haired man driving a pair of workhorses, and Kupiak shouts out their names. Drives up to their fire and jumps down, laughing. Hugs and kisses them all, full of energy and smiles. Just seeing him, they start to feel better.
Kupiak soon realizes there’s something going on, but that things are more or less all right. And nobody’s talking about it. Fine. He can do that too.
He unloads good things from the wagon. Loaves of new bread. A jug of milk. A small foil package of tea. A cream can filled with good well water. That’s welcome, because the slough water isn’t fit to drink and the water from town will be gone before long. They’ll have to dig a well.
Everyone gathers around the fire for pancakes and milky tea. The Kalynas may not have any close neighbours, but Kupiak is a village all by himself. He admires the cleanup of the garden plot, walks over the hill with Taras to set new snares and entertains them by playing Hutsul music on a small wooden flute. Before they know it, the sun drops low in the sky and everyone is hungry again.
At the same moment, Daria and Mykola realize it’s Sunday. They all sit down to eat on a blanket spread on the grass. Mykola gives thanks to God for friendship and good bread.
Daria serves the stew, offers Kupiak dark bread with a small bowl of salt. He dips the bread in the salt and eats.
Light fades from the clear sky. The strip of air near the horizon turns pale orange and coolness comes up from the earth. Bread and salt is a piece of the old land, eaten under strange stars. Yet here is Kupiak, quite at home. Maybe this will happen to them too, one day. When it’s time for sleep, Kupiak gets a bedroll from the wagon and curls up beside them on the grass. Smells of sage and earth mingle.
When the wolves begin their nightly howl, Kupiak explains that they’re really coyotes, smaller than wolves and no danger to them. Only then does Taras hear the cries as the new world singing.
The next day Kupiak helps Mykola with his mysterious task. Right after breakfast, they walk away into the hills and come back an hour or so later cradling stacks of something in their arms, something that gets mixed into the clay and grass in the washtub, along with pails of water from the slough. In the meantime, Taras and Daria weed and dig.
Late in the afternoon, Mykola takes Daria’s hand and leads her to the shack. On the grass, she sees the bachelor’s clothes and bedding rolled into a ball, beside the bedstead and mattress and a few other personal things.
Mykola opens the door. Coaxes her inside.
The walls are now plastered in the Ukrainian style. The icon hangs in a corner, the Shevchenko portrait across from it. The tabletop and
the small counter are clean, empty spaces. Daria’s embroidered scarves are draped around the pictures and the window frames. From the inside at least, it looks something like a Ukrainian house. A very small one.
Daria doesn’t speak at first. She looks at the walls for a long time, thinking of the fact that winter is coming and they must have shelter.
“Dobre,” she says at last. “I will be able to use this place, but I still need to sleep outside for a while.”
Mykola nods. “I’ll change the way it looks outside too. Kupiak and I will lay sods along the walls from the ground to the roof, and I’ll plaster them too. And we’ll put sods on the roof. We’ll be warm in the winter.”
“I’ll be able to cook on this stove,” Daria says. “It’s not as nice as a peech. But it’s a good stove.”
The men’s bodies relax.
“What was it you gathered on the prairie?” Taras asks.
“Buffalo chips,” Kupiak says. “In the old country, we used cow dung to hold the plaster together. Here we have buffalo chips.”
CHAPTER 15
The Orphan Boy
Taras comes slowly awake in the early morning light and realizes the ground has sucked the heat out of him. Yesterday was warm, but the night was cold enough that he can see his breath. His back aches like hell. At home he never had reason to sleep on bare ground. It’s interesting in an unpleasant way.
He crawls out from under his blanket, tries to stretch the aches out of his body. Sees one black eye watching him. Kupiak gets up and they walk off a way, blankets knotted around their shoulders, to take a leak. Afterwards they go up the hill to the place where Taras saw a horse. He wonders if he’s always going see things like that. Horses made of half-remembered dreams, they must be. Or do horses run wild in this land?
They gaze out over the lines of hills. The sight overpowers Taras with something like loneliness, yet better. He’s come to such a different place and seen things he could never have seen in the village. The sun over the hills must be the same one as back home, but it looks different. Everything here seems stripped to its basic nature. He knows they’ve lost many things, but in spite of this loss, something inside him is struggling to be said. I’m not sorry.
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