Blood and Salt (38 page)

Prisoner. Enemy alien. Internee.
That’s what he’s been for almost a year; back then another train brought him this way.

He lets the swaying motion open up memory: wind knifing rain into his face, lightning searing his eyes, mud running like a river.
The storm a reckless giant stalking the valley. A spirit, his own, howling like wind.

That night three men escaped. So, he’d thought, it can be done. Over the year he kept track of the ways people got away. He found no real pattern, just that you had to get into the trees. After that, rain, smoke or fog could help a man hide there.

In his favourite escape story, three men helping carry the prisoners’ lunches took off in the opposite direction from the work gangs, along with the lunches. He imagines having all he wanted to eat for a day or two. Even it was only the
pokydky
the government feeds them.

He wonders what happened to the ones who got away. He imagines lives for them, pleasant, comfortable lives. Warm, clean beds. Delicious, wholesome food and, yes, an occasional drink. Church on Sunday.

The train pulls into the siding, and the immensity of Castle Mountain asserts itself once more. It’s some kind of change, but he’s also back where it all began.

Their first job is to unload a freight car full of tents and equipment and clean up the site. But they don’t even reach camp before a new guard, Private Edwards, takes Taras, Yuriy, and a couple of other men, Tony Rapustka and Panko Marchuk, on a mission to carry baggage to the Parks foreman’s camp west of the internment camp.
The foreman himself comes along to direct them.

What kind of trouble can four prisoners, an armed guard and a foreman get into, especially when the four prisoners are carrying heavy burdens?

Foreman Wilson also needs trees cut and trimmed to make poles for
tipis.
No one explains why he needs
tipis,
but then no one ever explains anything to internees. Wilson leads them into shade-dappled woods and they fell the trees he points out – tall, slender trees with very straight trunks. The guard is calm and quiet, just the way Taras imagined it, and he works at his own pace and lets time pass.

As he trims branches from one more lodgepole pine, he hears a small, strangled sound and looks up. A tree plummets toward earth – or rather toward Tony Rapustka. Straight for his head and shoulders
.
A moment earlier Rapustka might easily have been daydreaming or imagining there would somehow be a good dinner back in camp, but now he suddenly realizes the enormous importance of his head and shoulders – if only to himself. He leaps out of the way of the tumbling, plunging trunk; and having leapt and found it pleasant, he leaps again; and yet again. Finding himself now in the shelter of the forest, he begins to run, and it must be that he finds that good also. He moves deeper into the trees.

“Halt!” screams Private Edwards as Rapustka crashes through the trees. He raises his rifle and fires. Rapustka stumbles.
He must have hit the man.

“You got him! I’m sure of it,” the foreman yells.

Edwards tears into the trees. No sign of Rapustka anywhere. He makes a half-hearted search, but he has to keep an eye on the other prisoners. Edwards has the only weapon, and even if
Wilson did have a gun, a Parks foreman has no authorization to go around shooting people. So they’ll all have to go back so Edwards can talk to his captain.
The captain will send soldiers to cover the places a man might be most likely to come out of the trees.

Taras and
Yuriy flash each other happy grins. Rapustka is their hero for the day
.
They can still see him leaping: once, twice, three times. He’s flown like a bird. And he’s got a nice head start. A squirrel high up in a tree makes a chattering noise as if warning them all to leave, and the internees start to laugh. Until then they wouldn’t have dared. Wilson laughs too, but Edwards merely tightens his grip on his rifle.

Next morning the guards look really unhappy. The prisoners think there must have been another escape, but they haven’t heard anything and nobody seems to be missing. Unhappy guards are a common enough thing, but this is a different
,
hard-to-define unhappiness. For once it doesn’t seem to be connected to the prisoners.

A week later, back in Banff, Taras and his friends return to the bunkhouse after supper. Tymko has found a discarded copy of the local newspaper, the
Crag and Canyon,
and it has a story about the camp. Reading it, they finally learn what happened the night of Rapustka’s flight. One of the guards, Henri Martin, was posted at the bridge across the Bow River at Johnson Creek to keep an eye out for him. At the same time, a local game warden, W. H. Fyfe, armed himself with a revolver and also set out to look for Rapustka.

“Well, that’s sensible,” Tymko says. “He was probably afraid Rapustka would strangle some game with his bare hands. And eat it. Absolutely against the law.” He thinks for a moment. “Okay. Here’s how I think it went.”
The others give him the floor.

“So. Henri Martin sees a shadow moving through the trees along the water. Could be a bear or an elk, but he’s almost sure it’s a man.”
Tymko mimes a man skulking through the trees, arms raised like antlers.

“
‘Who’s there?’ Martin yells. ‘Halt, or I’ll fire!’

“But the shadow man keeps walking.
Who but a fleeing prisoner would do that? So Martin creeps toward him, bayonet fixed. The unknown man draws his gun, yells, ‘Stop!’

“Martin sees the gun raised toward him and a second later a shot echoes across the valley. The shadow man writhes on the ground, holding his wrist. Martin fires a second shot that grazes the man’s shoulder. Martin hurries over.
He has Rapustka.

“‘You asshole!’ screams the wounded man. ‘I’m the goddamn game warden! Why’d you shoot?’ The soldier doesn’t say a word.

“‘You got my wrist! I’ll probably be crippled for life!’ The guard tries to offer his hand and the game warden kicks it away. ‘I hope they send you to goddamn jail for this!
’
”

Taras and his friends applaud. But there’s more to the story in the paper. Myro reads it aloud. “This is the first time one of the guards has shot a man since the internees were stationed at Banff, and it is the irony of fate that a white man should be chosen as the target.”

The first part is strangely comforting. The guards have never before managed to hit anybody with their rifles. Not for lack of trying, of course.

But the men are puzzled by the “white man” part. “What are we, then?”
Yuriy asks.

Tymko explains. “To the townspeople, well, most of them, whiteness is what sets them apart from what they consider lesser peoples. Whiteness means intelligence, resourcefulness, hard work, superior organization. We internees are believed to lack these qualities, and so they believe we aren’t white.”

“What?” Ihor says. “That’s crazy.”

“Being white also means speaking good English,”
Tymko goes on, “and this is taken as further proof that eastern Europeans belong to some other race – because otherwise they’d have been
born
speaking English.”

There’s laughter when Tymko jeers at such ignorance, but it still hurts.

“But really,”
Yuriy says, “what is a white man, then? We don’t look any different from them.”

“No,”
Tymko says, “we don’t. Well, they have better clothes.”

On June 30,
all the internees, 312 men, make the move to Castle Mountain. They spend the day putting up tents and settling in. Except there is no settling; everything changes from moment to moment.
Within days, twenty-six more prisoners are paroled. On July 4, Wasyl Pujniak and John Kushniruk escape. Two days later, four men are sent away because of illness and four more are sent to the Canmore coal mines. On July 7, nine more leave to work for individual farmers.
That leaves 267.

Taras feels angrier each time he sees a group of men moved out of camp.
Why these men and not others? How can the government explain why some men who were dangerous before are not dangerous any more? Were these men never as dangerous as the ones who remain? Is he himself more dangerous than he thinks?

Next day, fifty prisoners are paroled to the Canadian Pacific Railway.
Tymko feels bad about it: he worked for the CPR years ago, but they didn’t ask for him. “My politics,” he says. But he admits it could be because the men they took worked for the company more recently. Either way, it takes the heart out of them to see so many leaving while they must stay.
The 312 men have become 217.

Tymko offers his usual analysis. Once, workers were needed for Canadian industries, so Ukrainians were welcomed. Then there was a depression and fewer workers were needed. Ukrainians became unwelcome. Now many young men are in Europe fighting and Canada needs workers again. Especially for the industries that keep the war going.

This still makes sense, but it doesn’t seem to help – and just when Taras had started to believe the most important thing a man could have was a good analysis.

Since the release of so many internees, Taras and his friends have heard no reports of
sudden spates of murder, sabotage or spitting in the streets. No outbreaks of subversion. Of course, they don’t get the newspaper every day.
Tymko says that must explain it. In reality, there must be a constant parade of death and carnage.

Taras sits in the tent
one night smoking a hand-rolled cigarette Tymko gave him. Smoking still makes him dizzy, but it’s one of the few things you can choose to do in this place. He imagines his father, who never smokes:
“So, you want to be dizzy, is that it?” Apparently he does.
Yuriy, Tymko, Ihor smoke every evening. Even Myro sometimes puffs away, a distant look on his face, thinking important professor thoughts.

“I see you’ve decided to give up on your story,” Tymko says. The others turn from staring at canvas walls to staring at Taras.

“I never said I was giving up.”

“No. Not in words.” Tymko lights a cigarette, watches Taras through the smoke.

“I didn’t like how it was going.”
Taras blows a wobbly smoke ring. “Too miserable.”

“Even more reason to tell it, then. Don’t you think, Myro? It’ll make him feel better.”

“It might. What do you say, Taras? You’ve taken us this far. Why not tell us how you came to be here? I know I’ve been wondering.”

“Me too,”
Yuriy says.

“And me,” Ihor adds.

“Oh, all right.
Just to keep you quiet.”

He begins the part he couldn’t tell back in the bunkhouse when he could imagine Zmiya in the corner listening. But Zmiya’s not with them now, he’s in a tent near the back of the camp.

“Well,” Taras says, “in spring, 1915, all us workers who were building the school the summer before were still at the brick plant making bricks for the war. Shawcross was even taking on a few more men, including some from Regina. Many of them were what Shawcross called ‘foreigners.’
They’d been in unions before and they wanted to be again. So by June people were talking about it a lot.” He stops for a breath.

“So Moses and Frank Elder went to Moose Jaw one Sunday. They met some union people to learn more about how to organize.
And then they talked to every man in the plant about what they’d learned. Everyone but Stover.”

“Because Stover was the boss’s man?”
Tymko asks.

“Yeah, and because it was the last thing he’d want. He already had what he wanted. He could bully people because we knew Shawcross wouldn’t stop it.
And he had enough money to go the saloon when he wanted. So they never asked him, but I think he knew something was up.

“I admit I was never interested and I just forgot about it. But Frank and Moses made plans for a meeting. By early August, they were ready. One day I was loading bricks into the kiln for firing, and Moses came in. ‘Meeting tonight,’ he said. ‘To talk about a union.’

“I didn’t want to go. I said, ‘I don’t even know what that is.
’
”

“
‘Never mind,’ Moses said. ‘Just come.
’
”

We all sat
on wooden chairs in a meeting room Frank Elder arranged in the Anglican church. Frank was standing in front of a table at the front, leading the meeting. Moses sat behind it.

“So the guy from Moose Jaw is willing to come down and help us organize,” Frank said. “And I think we’re going to be in a strong bargaining position.”

Angus McLean, red-haired and strong as a blacksmith, stood up. “Why’s that?” he asked. Angus’s job was hauling clay from pits in the hills near the plant. I think it was the only job he’d ever had.

“It’s like Shawcross told us,” Frank said. “The government needs brick for warships. So the money’s there. Shawcross is gonna do just fine out of the war.”

“Profit
and
patriotism,” Moses added. “He’s got them both.”