Blood and Salt

by Barbara Sapergia

  This is what she loves. Stories. She doesn’t mind if some are made up. In fact, she likes the things he makes up as much as the things that happened. They’re made of the same materials.

  And then spring comes and a warm wind blows from the west. The air grows moist from dissolving snow and smells of earth. Taras rides Smoke up into the hills and looks out over the grass. Time to plant their first crop.

  PART 7

  CHAPTER 47

  Going back

  August, 1960

  The ten-foot fence is gone, might almost never have been, but anyone who knows can tell where the posts were rooted and see ghosts of the peaked white tents against the mountain. Yuriy once said he would come back and climb Castle but in the end only came once to look. Gazing up at the mass of rock, Taras doesn’t think he could climb it either, even though he once went halfway up with the Alpine Club. It still seems to deny him entry, despite the months he spent under its cliffs. Like Ihor, he can’t find its spirit.

  The air smells good. He doesn’t remember noticing that.

  The road they were building has been finished to a higher standard than any of them could have imagined, and paved. Even so, it’s not the main highway between Banff and Lake Louise any more – that’s the much newer Trans-Canada. Their old road seems more interesting, more intimate. It has more trees, more bends, more things hidden. The Trans-Canada seems bleak to him, too much at the mercy of sun and wind.

  Against all odds, they made something beautiful.

  Taras stares at the camp site until he begins to believe he’s put his fear to rest. Or does he still feel a wordless unease? Will it always be there? All right, then that’s how it’s going to be. He smells something pungent, musky, sees a dark shape move in the trees. In all his time here he never saw a bear. This surely must be one. He hopes it’s not interested in him. After a minute or so, the shape moves away into the forest.

  By the path back to his car, a hank of barbed wire lies coiled like a snake. He picks it up, throws it in the trunk. He’ll figure out what to do with it later, but he can’t just leave it.

  Back in town he sees someone he thinks he knows coming out of the drugstore: Kvitka. Flora. Only she looks so much older, the red-gold hair faded and laced with grey, and it upsets him; she should be as he remembers. He knows this is unreasonable. Another woman comes out of the store and catches up to her. This one’s like Kvitka as she looked in 1917. So this is her daughter; no, granddaughter.

  He wants to call out to her, but what is the point of disturbing her, of bringing back that faraway time? At this moment she’s on her way somewhere. How could he have the gall to interrupt that, to force himself on her notice? And what would she think of him now? How old he looks, that’s what she’d think.

  She disappears into another store; and he realizes that Kvitka would never have thought any of these things. She would have been happy to see him. Now it seems too late. Or he decides it’s too late. Why is he thinking this way? he wonders.

  He walks up to the drugstore. Sees his reflection in the window. A still-dark-haired man in sturdy trousers and a black leather jacket with a beadwork appliqué in the form of a rose. Leah Beaver’s rose. He wonders where the Beavers might be now. On an impulse he asks a man in the drugstore where the office of the Crag and Canyon is. It feels strange to go in there, although they treat him politely. Apparently he’s now a white man, or maybe whiteness isn’t as important as it was. They can’t tell him anything about the Beaver family.

  He takes a room at the Mount Royal Hotel on Banff Avenue. Remembers shovelling snow from the walk outside it long ago. As the sun slides behind the mountains, he feels his body slowing. Soon after supper he goes to his bed and falls into deep sleep. In the morning he can’t tell where he is. For the first time he feels old. Maybe it’s from seeing Kvitka and knowing for certain that, like him, she is no longer young. A large breakfast restores his strength, but he wonders how he’ll find enough of it to drive himself back through all those mountains. Back to Saskatchewan.

  Getting here was the easy part.

  The bunkhouses are gone but the Cave and Basin pool is still there. He feels a longing to bathe in those waters one more time. At the Hudson’s Bay Company store he buys black bathing trunks. Back at the pool a young man takes his money and points him toward the change rooms. Already he smells sulphur.

  He steps down into the water and lets heat claim his body. A young family splashes each other in a far corner, but otherwise the pool is empty. Except for Yuriy and Ihor floating close by. Except for Tymko when Arthur Lake brought them here after the river. Taras cups his hands and splashes hot water on his face.

  Myro was right. Nothing is forgotten.

  But he’s gone on with his life. He and Halya have built Viktor’s farm into a prosperous, orderly place where they’ve raised four children. Halya still writes articles for Ukrainian journals and for the local weekly newspaper, tapping away at Nestor’s old typewriter. She’s the head of the committee that built the new library in Spring Creek. She reads novels, more than Taras could ever keep up with; she’s even read one by a Ukrainian Canadian woman. When Miss Greeley died, she left Halya her books, and Halya has read all of them as well.

  Novels are her horses. She’s working on one of her own. She says she’s almost done. He did ask if she wanted to come on this trip, but she said, “You have to finish your story.”

  The three boys live with their families on nearby farms, but it’s their daughter Oksana (who married Yuriy’s son Taras) who inherited the genius for working with horses. Oksana’s daughter Nadia and her husband work with horses too, and they all live at Daria and Mykola’s ranch now that the old folks have moved to town. Nadia has a three-year-old, Tymko, the first great-grandchild. Watching the child carry that name around sometimes makes Taras cry, but it was what Nadia wanted because she’d heard so much about Tymko while she was growing up.

  In the corral Taras built at the ranch is a smokey grey colt with a blanket of white spots on its rump. Oksana is going to start training him to the halter soon. The first Smoke died twenty years ago, but there are a dozen horses on the place with the look of him. Taras has buyers coming to him all the time wanting them.

  Taras sees Yuriy and Ihor at least once a year. Bohdan Koroluk lives in Moose Jaw and has just retired from the railroad. He still makes carvings and has no trouble selling them to friends. He made a beautiful statue of Taras on Smoke as the horse reared high in the air. It sits on a shelf in the farmhouse near Viktor’s portrait of Shevchenko.

  Taras carves too – horses and birds mostly – and he makes hand-tooled saddles. People buy them.

  He keeps a few horses to ride. Picks out one to train each year.

  Maryna and Larysa did visit. When they met Moses, he and Larysa couldn’t stop looking at each other. Now they’re married and have a family of their own. Maryna once said new things could happen if people left the old country for Canada, and that seems to be true. Moses and Larysa’s children and grandchildren have married people from all over the south country, down to Willow Bunch and Mankota and Wood Mountain.

  Moses is no longer alone. No longer the only black Ukrainian.

  Taras sinks further into the water, lets it hold him upright, until only his head and neck remain out of the water. It seems the heat goes through his bones, to the marrow. Sampson Beaver said these were healing waters. Taras hopes it’s true for him.

  He turns his face so the people at the other end don’t see his tears fall into the water. He wants the tears to carry away the pain, but that’s not possible. It may be, though, that something eases in his chest and belly. Something hard that’s hurt ever since he was sent to the camp. He’s been able to forget about it for weeks or months at a time, but it’s always come back. He thinks of Viktor, once he knew they’d all forgiven him; the release in his face, his body. Maybe he’s finding something like that here.

  That night he sleeps once more like the dead. Or like people paral
yzed by polio, unable to move in their iron lung machines. That happened to a friend’s son in Spring Creek.

  The next morning when he wakes, he knows where he is. If he heads out early, he can be home before dark. After eggs and toast he climbs into the maroon 1953 Meteor and sets off down Banff Avenue to the Trans-Canada and turns east for Calgary.

  He reaches the farmyard, ringed with grassy hills, as light leaves the sky. He sees the row of kalyna bushes growing along the road. Soon they’ll begin to make berries. As he gets out of the car he hears excited barking and Sobachka, the old sheepdog – for some reason they’ve always called her by a name that means puppy – leaps up against his chest. She presses her head into his leg and herds him toward the house.

  Inside, Halya is waiting. “Tell me about your journey,” she says. Telling her takes the whole evening. When he’s done, she goes out to the car and brings in the scrap of barbed wire. Hangs it on a nail near the Shevchenko portrait.

  A few days later she comes into the living room after supper, carrying a tall stack of typed sheets of paper. She sets them on the table, centred on the embroidered tablecloth. She looks at him in a way that says he should get up from the rocking chair and come to the table. He comes and sits in a chair by the stack of papers. She stays standing.

  Something makes him think of the time in Edmonton when they found each other in the street.

  Halya’s hands shake a little as she picks up the first page and hands it to him. He begins to read, and in a moment he’s back on a train looking into the night, his ghost face staring back at him.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Sask-atchewan Arts Board, whose support provided time for me to work on this book. Thanks also to the Banff Centre and its self-directed residency program, which allowed me to spend time in Banff working on the manuscript and visiting sites which appear in it.

  I want to acknowledge as well the help of the Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund with the publication of my book.

  Thanks also to the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies for the opportunity to work in their archives, and for permission to use the photograph that appears on the cover of my book and four others in the interior. These photographs may have been taken by a soldier, Sergeant Buck, and I have created a fictional character, Arthur Lake, who takes them in my story. These internment photographs also came to my attention through In My Charge; The Internment Camp Photographs of Sergeant William Buck, edited, with a preface, by Lubomyr Y. Luciuk and Borys Sydoruk.

  The Whyte Museum contained two other sources that helped me: the archives of the Crag and Canyon newspaper and the splendid mountain photographs of Byron Harmon.

  I also want to acknowledge the marvellous photographs of Thomas and Lena Gushul in the Glenbow Museum’s archives.

  I’ve read many books as part of my research, too many to mention here. I want to acknowledge the importance for my work of In the Shadow of the Rockies; Diary of the Castle Mountain Internment Camp, 1915 – 17. It makes available the camp logs from Castle Mountain and Banff, extensively annotated by the editors, Bohdan S. Kordan and Peter Melnycky, who also provide an introduction to the material. Bill Waiser’s Park Prisoners; The Untold Story of Western Canada’s National Parks, 1915 – 1946, was also very helpful.

  Blood and Salt, is of course, a work of fiction, although I’ve tried to ground it in the research I did, while also performing the novelist’s job of imagining and re-imagining.

  I read many historical works, either in whole or in part. Jaroslav Petryshyn’s Peasants in the Promised Land; Canada and the Ukrainians was a valuable resource. The paintings and brief stories about them in artist Peter Shostak’s For Our Children were inspiring. And the stories in Land of Pain, Land of Promise, First Person Accounts by Ukrainian Pioneers, 1891 – 1914, translated by Harry Piniuta, provided fascinating glimpses into their times.

  Pavlo Zaitsev’s Taras Shevchenko; A Life, translated by George S. N. Luckyj, helped me immensely. I read translations of Shevchenko’s poetry by Watson Kirkconnell and C. H. Andrusyshen from their book, The Poetical Works of Taras Shevchenko. One of my characters speaks four lines from “My Friendly Epistle,” and another character gives a prose version of “I Was Some Thirteen Years of Age.”

  Lisa MacFarlane’s essay, “Mary Schaffer’s ‘Comprehending Equal Eyes,’” published in Trading Gazes; Euro-American Women Photographers and Native North Americans, 1880 – 1940, helped me develop my own thoughts about Schaffer’s famous photograph of Sampson and Leah Beaver and their daughter.

  I encountered the story of the bun who ran away in Barbara J. Suwyn’s The Magic Egg and Other Tales from Ukraine and in Christina Oparenko’s Ukrainian Folk-tales, and have drawn on their retellings.

  Thanks to George Hupka, who helped my husband and I learn as much as possible during a visit to Ukraine. And to Solomea Pavlychko and Oksana Zabuzhko, wonderful Ukrainian writers who inspired us with their spirit, learning and literary excellence. And to the kind and hospitable Achtemichuk family of Shevchana and Chernivtsi. I have borrowed the name Shevchana for the village in my story, but only the name is the same, the rest is fictional.

  Thanks to Mr. Kupiak of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, a man I used to see when riding the bus as a child. He would entertain the passengers, especially children, with the most amazing whistled bird calls. Marko Kupiak in this book is of course a different man, although I tried to give him the whistling and the kindness of the original Mr. Kupiak.

  Thanks to my cousin Vernon Sapergia, whose brilliant horsemanship inspired my character Taras Kalyna’s skills with horses.

  Thanks to friends who read all or part of the manuscript, including Ostap Skrypnyk, David Carpenter, Richard Rempel, Bobbi Coulter and Larry Warwaruk. And a huge thank you to Jack Hodgins for his extensive comments, and to Geoffrey Ursell, my editor, critic and support throughout this process.

  PHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS

  Front cover and page 74—Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies (V295-lc-35)

  Page 133—Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies (V295-lc-58)

  Page 202—Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies (V295-lc-39)

  Page 259—Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies (V295-lc-66)

  Page 297—Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies (V295-lc-117)

  Author Photo—Zach Hauser

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BARBARA SAPERGIA is a fiction writer and dramatist living in Saskatoon. She has four previous books of fiction, including three novels and a book of short stories. She’s had nine professional play productions, including Matty and Rose, about the struggles of black railway porters in the 1940s. It was produced by Persephone Theatre the same year she was Playwright in Residence. She’s the co-creator of and wrote numerous scripts for the children’s television series Prairie Berry Pie and wrote for the Mythquest tv series as well. She has two published plays and a book of poems, Dirt Hills Mirage. She has written ten radio dramas, including an hour-long drama broadcast in Canada and Australia. Poems and stories appear in many periodicals and anthologies. Two of her plays have won the John V. Hicks Long Manuscript Award (Nell and Double Take).