Blood and Salt (49 page)

“You haven’t eaten for two days. I’ll bring you something easy to digest.” She swishes out of the room. The guard looks sad to see her go.

Looking at the nurse is easy to digest. She looks so healthy. So good. So smart.
Taras can’t believe his luck.

Now that he’s more awake, though, pain rakes his chest, pulses with each heartbeat. He tries to take slow, shallow breaths. The throbbing subsides a little. His head goes fuzzy.

He awakens again when Miss MacQuarrie, which she tells him is her name, comes back with a bowl of oatmeal, brown sugar and warm milk. She cranks up the head of his bed and it feels as if barbed wire is being dragged through his chest. Once he gets his breath back she feeds him lovely warm porridge.

“You’re lucky, you know.
The knife missed your heart and lungs and a major artery. Of course, you’d have been luckier not to get stabbed in the first place.”
She spoons up more porridge and holds it out like a robin offering its baby a worm.
The whole bowl seems to disappear in seconds.

When he tries to puzzle out her name, wanting to thank her, she says he can just call her Flora.
Kvitka,
he says. Flower.

Kvitka offers him a muffin with butter and marmalade.
Taras shakes his head. She gives it to the guard.

“You know,” she tells him, “this boy’s going nowhere for quite a few days.
You could give yourself the occasional break.”

The guard nods with a foolish grin. After she leaves, he does step out for a while.

Next day
Tymko is allowed to visit, accompanied by Bullard
.
The relief on Tymko’s face seems to say he believes
Taras will live and that it’s not what he was expecting.

“I wrote to your parents. I said you’ll be all right soon. Nice to see I wasn’t lying.”

Taras feels a smile tugging at his face. He’d forgotten smiling, lying here all day.
Like the rest of his body
,
the face has been taking advantage of the time off.

“They sent that guy to the crazy house,” Bullard is saying. “He wouldn’t stop yelling. And crying. Who was he, anyway? Did you know him?”

“I knew him...once. He was always...a bit crazy.”
Taras turns to Tymko. “Like Yuriy says, there’s one crazy bastard in every village.”

“He’s only been here in camp for a few weeks,” Bullard says. “He was helping out in the kitchen. They say that’s all he was good for. They say he never talked to the other men. Stole the knife that night.
Why do you think –”

“I don’t know.” Taras doesn’t want to say too much with Bullard there. “Maybe he didn’t like being locked up.”

“Must’ve been it,” Bullard says. “Well, who would?”
Was that Bullshit talking?

Bullard nods at the other guard and suggests a quick break. He’s actually figured out on his own that Taras isn’t going anywhere. Even if
Tymko could carry him, the pain would probably kill him.

“I broke his wrist,”
Tymko says. “That should slow him down a bit.”

“Poor
Viktor.”

“Poo
r
Viktor? He tried to kill you!”

“I know,”
Taras says. “Poor
Viktor.”

“So who is he?”

“Halya’s father.”

Tymko slaps his forehead. “Should have guessed.”

“He’s always hated me. I don’t know how he got here.”

“Maybe the cops decided he was a spy.”

Taras starts to laugh at the idea o
f
Viktor spying, but stops before he can hurt himself more.

“He’d be really bad at it.
Trust me, nobody would ever tell him anything.”

“Maybe it was like with Yuriy – somebody complained about him.”

“Maybe.” Taras doesn’t want to think about Viktor. “How is everybody? How’s the professor?”

“Professor’s good. He’s teaching the men arithmetic. All the ones who couldn’t go to school. Or didn’t go long enough.”

“Damn, I would have liked to do that.” Myro will probably tell them who invented arithmetic and all sorts of interesting things.

“We had to think of something, now that we don’t have you to tell us stories.”

“I need to know more about arithmetic.”
Taras’s eyes close and in a moment he doesn’t remember what arithmetic is, but it doesn’t matter.

“All in good time,”
Tymko says
.
Taras is already asleep.

One morning
Flora cranks up the head of
Taras’s bed and he manages not to yelp. She no longer has to help him with the oatmeal. What’s he going to do when it’s time to go back to the camp and there’s no oatmeal, and no Kvitka? She’s also brought two muffins and hands one to the guard, who on this day happens to be Bullard, without comment, and he wanders off to eat it. She performs her usual chores – writing things on a chart, filling his water glass – then pulls the room’s plain wooden chair near the bed and sits. Taras can see she wants to say something, but can’t imagine saying anything back. Since he was stabbed everything happens far too quickly. Before he can take in one thing, another thing happens.

“I’ve seen you before, you know.” Undaunted by his blank stare, Flora continues. “One day they were marching you men through town. On your way to clear snow from the streets. I saw all the people watching. Clucking and disapproving.”

She waits for him to decode the words, and continues.

“I wanted to speak up, but I was afraid. I wanted to say that it’s not right, the way you’re treated. The government just wants someone to blame.”

Taras can only gape. He’s seen women around the town staring at the internees as they pass, their lips pressed firmly together. For some unknown reason Flora is not like this.

“I knew Ukrainians in Blairmore,”
Flora says. “They were wonderful people, I’ll never forget them. They were really strong for the union.”

“The union?”
Taras says. “You’re for unions?”

“Oh my, yes. My father is president of the union. Alexander MacQuarrie. He helped to organize the men. ‘Without it,’ he says, ‘it’s every man for himself.
’
”

“I almost joined a union,” Taras says. “Before they arrested me.”

“Well, maybe some day you will. It’s grand, you know.
You’re never quite so alone as you were before.”

Taras can’t grab hold of all her words but he understands that she likes him and she likes unions. She beams at him like a human sun. Something of her radiant health and sturdy good will steals into him.

“Thank you, Flora.
Dyakuyiu.
”

“You’ll thank me by resting and getting better.” She cranks down his bed and tucks his covers up under his chin. And then she’s headed for the door, squeezing past Bullard, who has come back in. He winks at Taras.

“Wish she’d look at me like that.”

“Be happy you got the muffin.”

Bullard laughs. Taras feels his lips stretch in a small smile. He can’t believe they spoke to each other almost like friends.

CHAPTER 36

When I die, who will
care?

Tymko leads
Taras into a corridor o
f
ice that gleams deep blue and flashes splinters of sun in their eyes. In the middle of town, by the Brewster Company residence hall, the internees have built an ice palace for the winter carnival. It looks like a military stockade, or maybe the wall around a castle, with corner turrets and the entrance in a central tower. Inside the wall the prisoners have built a maze from great blocks of river ice.

Taras wonders what an ice castle has to do with the war effort. No, that’s the wrong question. The real question is, if you have serfs, what can you get them to do for you? He wasn’t a serf in the old country, but now he is. But who actually owns him?

The single corridor branches into two.
Taras has no idea which way to go, but Tymko leads him to the right and around a sudden doubling back in the path. Chill comes off the ice in waves. His breath makes thin clouds that vanish an instant later. He stares into the heart of an enormous block, trying to find meaning in the things that have happened to him. He feels Tymko watching, like a mother alert for signs her child is tiring.

“Leave me alone here a moment.”

Tymko almost protests, but changes his mind and walks off. Taras goes slowly forward until he comes to a dead end, which forces him to backtrack to another branching place. He decides that since before he went right, now he should go left.
This soon leads to another dead end. He turns back a second time and sees a passage at right angles to the one he’s in. He follows it to a square space in the middle of the maze.

The maze reminds him of his recent life. Wandering down closed passages, taking right or left turns without knowing where they lead. He runs mittened hands over the ice and feels a stab of panic.
What if he’s lost?

He knows he only feels fear because he’s been ill. They wouldn’t make a maze people could get lost in for long. He slows the taking in and letting go of his breath.

Who would enjoy this? People for whom life’s major questions have already been answered? Being safe, do they like to play at being lost? Taras considers his life in camp as a maze. Is the way out a doorway to something better? Or will it lead to a place where he’ll still be lost?

The cold saturates his bones. He needs Tymko to get him out of here.
The thought is no sooner formed than his friend’s hand touches his arm.
At the entrance they find Sergeant Lake, who has arranged this strange treat. Supported by Lake and Tymko, Taras thinks he has enough strength to make it to the bunkhouse.

On Banff Avenue, Indian people called Stoneys have set up
tipis
along the main street.
Tymko says the citizens of Banff enjoy having
the Stoney people –
Nakodah,
he calls them – on display in the middle of town. For a little while. It makes their own lives more interesting in some way. More colourful. Taras wonders if the
Nakodah
enjoy it.

Lake stops to speak to a family: a man and woman in their early thirties, with their daughter, about fourteen.
They wear coats made from white woollen blankets, with wide stripes – bright green, red, yellow and black – along the cuffs and the bottom hem. Their deerskin mittens are decorated with colourful beadwork that reminds Taras of Ukrainian embroidery.
Their hair hangs in long braids.
They look so neat, so tidy, in their dress and in their way of doing things.
Their
tipi
, which the woman and daughter have just finished putting up, has painted animal figures on the outside.

The man has an open, pleasant look.
A curious look. His wife smiles a friendly smile, and their daughter has an expression that says she understands her own worth. He thinks of Halya, when they both attended the village school and Halya was best at every subject.

Arthur Lake introduces the family as Sampson and Leah Beaver and their daughter, Frances Louise.
Tymko can’t seem to take his eyes off the girl.
She must remind him of Oksana. Somehow Lake understands that Tymko wishes he had a gift to give her. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out one of Bohdan’s carvings, a chickadee perched on a bit of tree branch. He hands it to Tymko, who gives it to the girl.
She examines it and smiles.
Thanks him. Her parents watch, letting the girl handle things. When it’s time for everyone to move on, the woman takes something from the pocket of her blanket coat and gives it to Tymko. It’s a beaded flower, a wild rose, worked on a piece of deerhide.

“You sew that on your coat,” she says.

“Thank you,” Tymko says, “I will.”
Taras knows he’ll do that only when he leaves the camp. In the meantime he’ll keep it hidden.
Too many things can be taken away in this place.

As he watches the pleasant and friendly Beaver family, Taras feels a sudden certainty that he and Halya will never be together. She has been taken away to a school and married to an Englishman. He will never find her, and even if he did, what would be the use? He takes off the one thing he’s managed to keep from his old life, the sun pendant he made in the smithy in Shevchana. He hands it to the girl who reminds him of Halya. She looks worried, not sure if she should take it. He smiles and makes a gesture to say she should put it around her neck.

Leah Beaver looks at Taras. When he nods at her she tells Frances Louise in
Nakodah
that she may put on the pendant.
The girl flips back the hood of her coat and places it around her neck. “Thank you,” she says in a serious voice.

He nods. He hopes she’ll have a happy life.

Taras feels much lighter without the pendant, and calm.