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he had about me.
    It was August before I could scratch more than two details to my father’s five, and in that time I came to understand what he meant. Which way was the wind blowing? Where was the sun? What was my target? How big or how far away? Was it moving or stationary? Distracted or attentive? At work or rest? Could it see, hear, or smell me? Could I have slipped away from where I hid as easily as if I’d stayed, unknown, unnoticed, and unafraid?
    I learned how to move when he moved, remain when he remained, anticipate a turn because I saw the lip of rock before he and the flock did, or knew exactly which gill they would follow because its course was the path of least resistance. My father was loath to waste a shot, so practice was always some form of a hunting party, which meant that we ate well in the mountains, and that fall I killed my first deer. I did everything right—found my position upwind of him, watched him emerge from the cover of wood into a wild and fragrant crab-apple grove, and made sure my shot was clear. Prone behind a fallen tree that served as a good barrel rest and gave me a slight height advantage, I snuggled my cheek into the weld of the stock, reckoned that he was little less than a hundred yards away, filled the fore sight blade with the front of his
body, took a deep breath, let out half, held, aimed just behind the shoulder of the foreleg where the heart is, and pulled the trigger.
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    LATE IN THE AUTUMN OF THAT YEAR, A WOMAN CAME TO THE door of our house in Pastvina. She was dressed in a coat two sizes too big and wrapped in a shawl on top of that, and she was weeping, looking as though all that she’d ever had was lost but for these few articles of ill-fitting clothing. She knew my father’s name, and he embraced her in return. A boy stood behind her, his stature and expression the exact opposite of this woman who led him. He was tall, gangly almost, the coat he wore too small and thin for the first snow and wind, although his face gave away nothing of whether he felt cold or comfort. I stared at him and he stared back, his eyes a deep beryl blue, his hair (when he removed his hat) as fine and blond as mine. It was as though I was looking at my older brother, who himself seemed nonplussed to have found me. After a long conversation with my father (her words indiscernible at times through the sobs), the woman left. The boy slept on the floor in the kitchen that night and the next, until my father built a bunk bed above me in my corner of the house and that’s where he stayed for the rest of the winter.
    His name was Marian Pes. His mother was a distant cousin, a woman for whom, when they were children, my father had a fondness because of her own restless desire to leave the village and see something of the world, and the two stole away from chores in the afternoon to climb the hills that framed Pastvina and lay down in the newmown hay, where they planned their getaway together. Eperjes was the farthest she got, where she worked as a
dishwasher in the kitchen of an old hotel. (My father married my mother and left for America not long after.) When she became pregnant by a man who promised to marry her and then disappeared, the bishop (who had seen her attend the divine liturgy every Sunday) gave her a housekeeping job in the priests’ quarters at the seminary, and when her time came, she named the baby boy Marian out of gratitude and devotion, wondering, perhaps, if he might one day sweep down those same tiled hallways wearing the black cassock and an attitude of meditation.
    In time, though, the local priests and their parishioners talked. The seminarians were disedified, they said, and so she left and drifted through what jobs she found to keep her son in food and clothing, until she wound up back at the hotel, this time serving coffee to the men who read their newspapers in the lobby each morning.
    She caught the eye of an older gentleman from Budapest,