Blood and Salt (26 page)

Later there’s a bricklaying lesson. By the end of the day Taras can see it’ll be a while before the foreman lets him do anything but practise. But there’s work he can do on the inside of the building and they’ll start him on that the next day.

After another whistle from the brickyard signals the end of work,
Taras walks up to a whitewashed house built in the Ukrainian style, sitting well apart from the Canadian houses of wood or brick, as if a piece of Shevchana has blown across the ocean and planted itself in the prairie. At the back, there’s a vegetable garden and a small stable.
The hill he noticed earlier, crowned by a thick aspen bluff, separates the yard from the brick plant.

Moses greets him at the door. Inside there’s a
peech
and an icon on the wall. Wooden benches around a wooden table. Embroidered scarves draped around the icon and a picture of Shevchenko.

His new friend pours glasses of chokecherry wine. Choke-cherry is a berry that grows on the prairies, he says. Taras smiles.
“Tse smachniy.”

As Moses cooks, he asks Taras many questions but reveals nothing more about himself.
Soon he dishes up supper, a simple meal but more than Taras has seen in several weeks. Scrambled eggs with slices of sausage. Potatoes fried with onions. It all tastes marvellous.
Smachniy.
He can’t help wolfing it down. All he’s had since breakfast is a chunk of bread he brought along. Moses gives him second helpings. Finally all the food is eaten, the wine replenished.

“Now,” Moses says. “Ask me anything you want.”

Taras knows Stover doesn’t like Moses and thinks it has something to do with the colour of his skin.
“Proshu,”
he says,
“I never saw a man like you before.”

“Black, you mean? Lots like me where I come from.”

“But why do you have Ukrainian things? How is it you speak my language?”

“I live my life as a Ukrainian. This house belonged to Pavlo Panko, my adopted father. From Halychyna. He left me the house when he died.”

“I see,
”
Taras says.
“Dobre.
How did you come to know him?” He should get back to his parents, but nothing can tear him away until he hears this man’s story.

“My family lived in Pennsylvania. In the United States. See their pictures?”

He points to two photographs in oval frames hanging on the wall above an old pump organ with music open on its stand. One shows a man and a woman – his parents – and the other his whole family, with a younger Moses kneeling in front of his mother and father. They look a little stiff in their best clothes, hair carefully brushed or, in the case of his mother and sisters, swept up on top of their heads, and proud.

“My father worked in the coal mines. That’s how he knew Pavlo. We’d all heard things were better in Canada, and Pavlo thought we should give it a try. At first, it was just something to talk about on a winter night.”

Like men in the tavern back home talking about Kanady.

“After a while there was less work in the mine and we all decided to come here. But no one told us how cold it would be. We barely had time to build shacks before the snow fell. All we had to eat was flour and salt pork. Near Christmas, my family got sick with a fever.

“I don’t know why I never got sick. Soon I was the only one walking around. First Jessie, my older sister, got it, then Rebecca, then Mama.
Then Albert, my little brother. Mama told Papa and I what to do, but after a while she could barely talk. Then Papa got it.”
The words catch in his throat. He takes a drink of his wine and goes on in a quiet, even tone.

“I was ten years old. I knew how to make pancakes from flour and water. How to fry up salt pork. After a while nobody but me was hungry. I tried to keep the shack warm, but the frost kept creeping up the walls and windows. Even so, they were all burning up with fever. I put damp cloths on their foreheads, I talked to them. One morning I didn’t think Mama and Papa could hear me any more.

“But Jessie was starting to get better.
She looked at me and said, ‘Go for help, Moses.’

“I think that was what I was waiting for. Someone else to take charge. So I put a bridle on Billie, our plough horse, and rode to Pavlo’s homestead. It started to blizzard. I made it to the house before it hit.”

Moses seems to be looking at something far away.
Taras wants to ask what a blizzard is like but doesn’t want to interrupt.

“I yelled at Panko, told him he had to come, but he said we wouldn’t get a hundred yards.
Wouldn’t even know what direction we were going. He told me afterwards that I kept hitting his chest and arms and screaming. Once I ran out into the storm to get the horse and head home, and he had to drag me back. The blizzard lasted three days.”

Taras is almost afraid to breathe.

“When the storm ended, we made it to the shack. All my family were dead.
Jessie, too. Frost on their hands and faces. Eyes frozen over like they were made of glass. There was a story about it in the paper.
They called me the Orphan Boy.”

Taras can see it as if the people were in the room with them. No one has told the Kalynas, either, how cold it will be here, and now he wonders. Surely it can’t be colder than in the old country? What if it is?

“I thought it was my fault.”

“How could it be?
You were a child.”

Moses shakes his head. “You don’t think that way. It was up to me, and I failed. Pavlo helped me bury them. We had to wait till spring. He took me in and raised me as his son.”

“Why did he build his house in town?”

“When he adopted me, he got a job at the brick plant. He’d decided that neither of us were meant to be farmers, and he wanted me to go to school. So he built us a little piece of
Ukraïna.
People in Spring Creek thought it was odd, but they didn’t want to fight with the man who looked after the Orphan Boy.”

“Did they call you the Orphan Boy in school?”

“Some did. Some called me the black hunkie. Some just called me Blackie. ‘Hey, Blackie! Whatcha doin’?’ I heard that a lot.” Moses gets up to make coffee.

“I only went for six years, enough to read and write and work with numbers.
Then I got a job at the plant. I always worked hard to be the best. At work I’m not the Orphan Boy. I’m the one who keeps things moving.
All the stuff Shawcross has no idea how to do.”

Taras smiles. It’s not hard to believe that Shawcross is a bit useless. “What happened to Pavlo?”

“He died a few years back. He had a disease in his lungs. Years of mining coal causes it. I looked after him and he taught me everything he could.” He pauses a moment, as if not sure Taras is ready to hear the rest.

“I didn’t only learn his language. He taught me to sing the church services.”

“You’re a
cantor?”
Taras tries not to sound too amazed.

“Sometimes – when they bring in a priest from the city. At first, the few Ukrainians scattered around here didn’t want me. Didn’t think a black man could be a cantor. But they got to know me. Now... Anyway, there’s nobody else.”

“But are you Ukrainian, then?”

Moses raises his eyebrows at Taras. “You tell me.”

Taras doesn’t know the answer. It’s time he got back to his parents. They could never guess that he’s got work and met a black man who is somehow Ukrainian. Now they’ll be able to buy supplies for winter. He has a friend who speaks his language and Moses says there are some other Ukrainians on farms not too far away.

Other bohunks. Moses has explained the word to him.

He asks Moses if he’s seen anyone who resembles Viktor. A short, stocky, arrogant man with a smart, lovely daughter, Halya, and her
baba,
a tall, hardy old woman with a sharp tongue. Moses hasn’t seen them.

“Most likely he’ll be on a farm working for someone, or maybe he’s got a place of his own.”

“He’ll have a place of his own, all right. Viktor could never work for anyone else.”

“If he’s here. I’m sure you’ll find him. Halya and her
baba,
too.”

Moses lends Taras his horse to ride to and from work. She’s a bony old white mare, but she’s good natured and she can get him there and back. Moses pretends Taras will be doing him a favour.
Molly can eat the Kalynas’ grass, save him money on feed. Taras knows the benefit is all on his side. The walk home would take over an hour. He promises to bring Moses some of his mother’s bread.

The internees like this story.
Most have seen a black person at one time or another but not up close. Not to talk to. Tymko explains that black people originally came from Africa. Some people know exactly where Africa is. Others have only a hazy idea. Bohdan asks whether, if he could touch such a person, the colour would come off on his hands.
Taras assures him it would not. He sees Bohdan thinking about what wood he might choose to carve the likeness of Moses.

Myro takes on what Taras has come to think of as his teacher look. “This is not the first time a black man and a Ukrainian have been friends,” he says. People look up, amazed. They’re going to get two stories in one night. Both apparently filled with marvels.

“You see, Taras Shevchenko wasn’t only a painter and a writer. He was also a fine singer and actor, and he loved the theatre. One night in St. Petersburg he went to hear a great American actor – a black man called Ira Aldridge – perform in
Othello.
He was so moved it made him weep and he went backstage afterwards to thank Aldridge. He hugged the actor, he kissed him.”

Taras wants to say, “What’s
Othello?”
but he doesn’t want to stop Myro in full spate. His friend’s face seems to glow as he warms to his
topic.

“They couldn’t understand each other’s languages, but they became friends, united by an unbreakable bond. And what was that bond? The knowledge that neither of their peoples were free.”
Taras sees that he’s not the only person who doesn’t understand this.

“You see, black people were brought from Africa to North America as slaves. Kidnapped, to tell the truth. They worked on plantations and as servants.
It was worse than serfdom.” His listeners look skeptical.
They’ve always believed serfdom was the worst thing.

“Now, only a small number of black people in America were free at this time, and Ira Aldridge was one of them. While he was in St. Petersburg, he and Taras went everywhere together, to the best houses, the liveliest parties; and everywhere they went arm in arm. It was the most amazing friendship. A proverbial friendship. A friendship for the ages.”

“You say they walked down the street arm in arm?”
Yuriy says.

“Certainly.
That was very common among gentlemen in that time. No one thought it weak or foolish. Men were not afraid to kiss each other as friends.”

“Well, that happens in the village when you meet an old friend or relative,” Ihor says. “But afterwards we don’t walk around arm in arm like little girls.”

“That may be,” Myro says, “but they did. And Shevchenko was so moved by his friend’s soulful acting that he made a portrait of him.”

“I wish I could see that,”
Yuriy says.

“Moses knows songs his people sang when they were slaves,” Taras says. “Did Shevchenko and this actor sing songs?”

“I’m sure they did. No one mentions what songs they sang. But I can guess.”

“What do you mean?”
Yuriy asks. “Do you know slave songs?”

Without hesitation, Myro sings in a strong baritone:

Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land

And tell old Pharaoh, to let my people go

“That’s all very well,”
Tymko interrupts, “but it sounds like a lot of unnecessary emotionalism.
They should’ve been talking about how to make revolution. How to free their people. Not prancing around St. Petersburg thinking what great artists they were.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“No? What was it like, then?”

“It was like this,” Myro says. “Art feeds the heart and the soul. Without heart and soul, what good would revolution be? Revolution for what? Theories are fine, but what kind of people do we want to be?” A few people nod. “Until we know that, we can’t make anything. Remember the words Taras recited? From the old man in the reading hall? ‘Examine everything you see. Then ask yourselves: Now who are we?
’
”

Momentarily at least, Tymko is silenced.

Early in February, 1916
, just when Taras begins to believe the world has contracted to the space of the bunkhouse, the weather turns. The temperature rises to above freezing by mid-afternoon. He and his friends have to return to work and it actually feels good to be outdoors. The next day, Saturday, it’s cold again and for all they know could stay that way for a month.

Tymko says everyone should have Saturday off as well as Sunday, anyway. He says some day everyone will take this for granted.