Pig: A Thriller (12 page)

Once, Magda had had the good fortune to bump into one of the men who’d known her father in the
gulag
and asked about his health. It was then she found out he had died. Life expectancy in the
gulag
was generally less than seven years, the average length of sentence given out by the Soviet courts. If you outlived the term, you were considered to have cheated the State by shirking your duties or taking up more than your fair share of  resources. Seven years under
gulag
conditions were more than enough to be a death sentence. Magda’s father had passed away years ago, long enough that the elephants should have stopped coming. But they hadn’t. On his deathbed, the men in the barracks had promised him to keep the custom going. Every time one of them got out or had a message get through to a relative, an elephant was sent to a little girl, a teen, a grown woman, all so that she wouldn’t worry about her Dad. He was that much respected. That much loved.

That was why Magda wouldn’t give up her elephants.

Chapter one: Genesis. God was so lonely, he created stories. He was still lonely, so he created humans to tell them.

“What's your story?” Magda demanded, looking around at the washed-out colour of Snow’s walls. Where others might have seen blah, she saw walls the colour of sturgeon grilled over a wood stove.

“What’s hurt you so badly you think you need to be alone? Here, I’ll start. My father was a quarter Ukrainian.”

“Yeah? Mine was half drunk.”

Snowden Nastiuk didn’t have a history, just a geographic location. It was his way of giving himself a past, since he sure as hell couldn’t imagine having a future. He had grown up thirty kilometres from Buffalo Jump and forty miles from good-looking, alone with his father on a ranch in the Rocky Mountain foothills, dominated by his opinionated Dad’s predilections, preconceptions and prejudices. Snow’s father had been born in 1937 and began drinking shortly thereafter.  He died in 1987, when it is believed he stopped. In between, he sired Snow, drove a wife to suicide and ranched.

“Your father has passed?” Magda asked. “Mine, too. I am sorry.”

“Passed? Hell, no! He was a full-on fucking failure. He sure as hell failed in raising me. I’m not sorry.”

“God you’re selfish,” Magda declaimed. “You can’t be like everyone else. No, your suffering and failure have to be something special, unique. Someday, you’ll have to face that your failures are no more special than anyone else’s.”

“We’ll see,” Snow said. “What would you know? He was my father.”

“It's better to have pain from someone who loves you than from a stranger,” said Magda, with all the logic of a true Slav. The possibility of no pain at all never seemed to cross her mind. You see, if there was one thing Magda had learned in the
gulag
, it was that  the world doesn’t run on logic. It runs on the seven deadly sins. The  sum of life was getting food into your belly. Everything else was pure luxury.

It wasn’t that Snow had had a bad relationship with his father. It was that they had had no relationship at all. As far as his dad was concerned, words were like window curtains, decorative screens to keep the neighbours out. On the ranch, they never had much use for any of them: curtains or neighbours or words. Snowden Nastiuk, he had been christened. Snowden was his mother’s maiden name, the son receiving the name to honour the mother, the only time his father had ever shown such an inclination. Nastiuk was his father’s family name. Nastiuk was a Ukrainian name, so Snow and Magda had something in common after all.

Snow’s father was nasty, rude and abrupt, with little time for anything that didn’t have four hooves or a twist-off top, which left his son on his own. After Snow’s mother decided to celebrate the arrival of Spring by walking down to Lee’s Creek and drowning her sorrows in the mountain run-off, Nasty Senior dealt with her death the same way he handled all of life: he ignored it. He made sure his son was fed and clothed, but that was about it. The rest of Snow’s upbringing, he washed his hands of.

Snow had only vague childhood memories of his mother before she died looking for the exit sign at the bottom of Lee’s Creek. How she’d return from the barn smelling of manure and horse sweat, a basket of eggs and a bucket of frothy milk hanging from each arm. Snow would sit around the snug cabin watching her bake bread, put down preserves, roll out dough for the perogies. No matter how busy she was, she always took time to share stories with him. Like the ones of Grandpa growing up in the Dust Bowl. Grandpa claimed during the Dirty Thirties, his folks would throw a gopher in the air and if it dug a burrow before it hit the ground, they would know it was too dusty to send the kids to school that day. Or of the baseball player rounding second base who ended up lost for three days and was finally found four miles out of town.

The ranch was home -- no, the universe -- to him. Snow learned more there than he ever could have at any school. He learned practical economics. He learned how to get along with adults. He learned how to be alone. About Life and Death. About sex and how babies got made. Most important was what he learned from watching his father. Work was what men did. Not whining or screwing around or feeling sorry for themselves. Work. A man was someone who worked hard, shut his mouth and bent over and took all that God could give him. And if it hurt, so what? That was what God invented booze for.

Other than the occasional rancher or Hutterite who dropped by, there was no one to tell Snow what was going on outside. Only afterward, after he started working overseas and his jobs had become his
National
Geographic
, teaching him what the larger, outside world was all about, did Snow come to realize just how strange a life it was. How hockey ever reached out and found him there he had no idea. Because, if the mountains had been formed by glaciers scouring the land, hockey  --  he knew -- had  been invented by God. That – hockey – was what had kept him sane. That and some other thing. Some other one.