CHAPTER FIVE

SAVAS

Savas Parkos was an enigma, a man who’d come to the California hills north of Quincy in 1870 when he was not yet forty, buying good land with cabin and well ten miles south of the three building town called Crosley. How he arrived, or from where, forever remained a mystery. He brought furniture with him, and a dozen boxes of books which he kept on shelves surrounding the one room, neat interior of the cabin. There was a mahogany table, and three matching chairs near a wood-stove used for cooking and heating, and a mattress for a bed. The few clothes he had were hung on nails around the walls, and were always clean.

His toilet was a privy ten yards from the cabin, nestled among fir trees, and beside it a metal pan on a stand facing a book-sized mirror hanging from a tree. Lamps were scattered inside and outside the cabin, the outside lights remaining on each night without exception, often the inside lights as well, for it seemed that Savas Parkos slept little, and lightly. Even when deer came quietly to lick the salt slabs he left out for them, he would be there watching through a mica-covered window.

There were no visitors to his cabin until the boy came. He spent his days drinking, and reading in several languages: French, German, Greek, Dutch and English. His origin was Greek. The few who knew him remotely said he was from Rhodes, a businessman searching for a simple life and finding it near Crosley. He bought a horse, and each Saturday rode it to Quincy for groceries and whiskey. There, he would check into the hotel, then dine at Delnico’s Basque Restaurant and spend an evening approaching quiet oblivion at the bar. Late Sunday morning he would arise refreshed for the trip home. This he did with complete regularity for nine years, until the boy came.

Savas was also a mystery in Crosley, where he did his banking, and refused all social invitations from the town residents until the offers finally stopped. The local interest in him, he well understood, related to his initial deposit of over half a million cash dollars in a bank struggling to stay afloat after the end of the mining boom. There was more money than that, some three hundred pounds of gold dust and nuggets he had wrapped in burlap and lightly covered with earth beneath the floor of his cabin. He seemed a wealthy eccentric who lived simply and spent modestly, a man who wanted little to do with people. After a while the townspeople ignored him, and Savas Parkos lived a quiet life alone, until the boy came.

It was a Thursday evening, and he was washing dishes, daydreaming about something in his past. A sound, like something striking the cabin wall, and he turned with a plate in one hand to see a face pressed against his mica window. When the plate shattered on the floor, the face disappeared. Savas rushed to the door in time to see a figure crash into the brush by the privy.

“Hey! You want see me, you come back and we talk!” he yelled.

No answer. Nothing moved.

“Nothing here to steal, but I have coffee and bread. You want to eat?”

Nothing. He waited several minutes, then went inside, shut the door and watched at the window until his eyes were too tired to focus, and so he went to bed with all the lamps burning.

The next day he watched from the window, and saw nothing.

Three days after that he put some food on a plate and left it on the washing stand by the privy. The food soured, and dried.

He baked bread, leaving the cabin door slightly ajar, putting one loaf to cool on the washing stand, and forcing himself to stay away from the window all day. When he went outside late in the evening, the loaf was gone.

The next day he baked bread again, leaving the door wide open and singing every Greek song he could remember. When the bread had cooled, he took a loaf outside along with butter and a small wheel of cheese, and sat by a packing crate which served as table, putting the food on top of it. He broke bread, spread chunks of it thick with butter and cheese, and ate noisily.

Near dusk, the boy suddenly appeared.

Savas was first aware of a watchful presence, and then there was movement to his left. He turned his head slowly, eyes moving back and forth. The boy, not much more than a child, was crouched in bushes near the privy, eyes dark and wide like those of a doe, mouth closed tightly in a grim line. Savas picked up the other half of the bread loaf, beckoned to the boy with it, then broke off another piece, stuffed it into his mouth and chewed noisily with obvious pleasure. The boy swallowed hard, but remained where he was. Savas smiled at him, ate some cheese and beckoned again. This went on for half an hour before Savas leaned back in his chair, pointed to the food and said, “Why don’t you join me, before I get sick from eating all of this?”

The boy seemed to understand. He stood up, short, but big-boned, heavy features and thick, black hair. No injun for sure, a kid who could pass for Greek. How old? Fourteen? Husky kid. His eyes never left Savas as he walked slowly forward, clothes hanging from him in tatters, feet bare. When he came close, Savas could see the clothing was animal skins and cloth remnants carelessly sewn together. The end of the gold boom has been tough on some folks, he thought.

“You from around here?”

No sound. The boy picked up a slab of cheese, tasted it, and popped the whole thing into his mouth. Pleasure showed in his eyes, but he didn’t smile.

“Maybe you don’t understand my English. Greek still easier for me, but I get better at it. Don’t have much practice, though. You live in these hills?” He gestured at the surrounding mountains, and the boy’s eyes followed his hand silently.

“I’m Savas,” he said, thumping his chest with two fingers, and pointed. “You?”

The boy nodded, recognition in his eyes. He picked up another slab of cheese, then pointed to himself and said something unintelligible.

“Well, have some bread, whatever your name be.” Savas pushed food across the makeshift table as the boy sat down beside him. Later, Savas couldn’t quite remember what he talked about that early evening, but was certain a bitter, desperate loneliness had crept up on him, and the boy was the first visitor he’d had, eating and listening quietly while the host babbled on and on in both English and Greek. But at sunset, the boy suddenly arose, nodded at him, and curled his lips into a vague hint of a smile before turning and walking into the deep shadows of the trees and brush without looking back.

“Come back,” called Savas, “anytime you want to. I’m always here!”

The beginning was that simple, the beginning of an association that would last nine years and alter the course of a culture older than history. Savas had no way of knowing that, of course. To him the boy was a relief from the loneliness and boredom of his chosen life, and after that first day the visits became regular, usually in late afternoon and rarely on weekends, for his trips to Quincy continued as usual until the day he died.

At first they simply broke bread together, Savas talking in Greek, the boy listening, eyes alert. It was soon obvious the boy didn’t understand English or Greek, and would not respond to questions about himself. Savas became his teacher, pointing to things, naming them, using simple phrases for each of his actions. The boy made no attempt to repeat anything at first, but there was intelligence in those dark eyes, and occasionally a faint smile, like when Savas dropped an egg splat on the floor and cursed. Mostly, the boy was somber, as if life had been hard and he would not entrust a show of emotion to anyone outside himself. He learned with extraordinary speed, at first helping with the making of bread, then doing it without aid, measuring flour, milk and salt with precision. Then, one memorable day, he walked over to the newly arrived gramophone now playing a forlorn song, pointed to it, and said in perfect Greek pronunciation, “Where music come?”

Savas laughed. “New York, I think. Doubt if I’ll ever see it again.”

“Music come from far?” asked the boy.

“Yes, very far. This is a big world, with many, many people. I guess around here is the only place you know.”

The boy looked at him sadly. “We—few.”

“We?”

The boy didn’t answer, and turned away. Savas didn’t press, figuring eventually the boy would tell him who his people were, and where he came from.

He was still waiting for an answer the day he died.

At first they made bread, ate it and listened to the gramophone. Conversations lengthened, in both English and Greek, and when Savas finally coaxed the boy onto his horse for a ride, that also became a part of their routine. They bounced along rough trails, never going on the town road, the boy sitting rigidly erect, a faint smile the only sign of youthful excitement. So controlled, a near dignified bearing for someone far from being a man, thought Savas, a contrast to his own volatile nature now safely hidden in the hills where it couldn’t hurt anyone. When he was around the boy, the violent part of him seemed to shrivel, leaving him peaceful and content with a life that hadn’t turned out the way he’d planned. It didn’t seem important the gold was beneath a cabin floor, still waiting to be spent in some distant, exotic place free of rattlesnakes and biting flies, or on a woman who could relieve the ache he still felt when the moon was out and he was lying on his hard mattress alone, sweating. Nothing was important except the boy, and what he might become. As the days, and then the years, went by, the boy was like a son, replacing the one he had left far behind, perhaps dead now, the son he could not go back to ever, because others would be waiting for him and then he, Savas Parkos, would be a dead man.

The boy’s name remained impossible for him to pronounce. It was something like egg, only drawn out with a complex, guttural thing at the end, and the best way to get a smile from the boy was to try and pronounce it. After one abortive attempt that came close to producing an actual laugh from the boy, Savas had had enough. “I’m going to give you a name I can say,” he said. “It will just be between us, if you don’t mind.”

“Is good,” said the boy, in English.

“Something simple, and Greek, because you look Greek. We will pretend you are, and this is your christening. Stand still, now.” He put a hand softly on the boy’s black hair, and closed his eyes, thinking. The name of a cousin came to mind, a cousin who had been a drinking companion when they were young, and not yet scarred by money or politics, a man who had loved to sing and dance and drink and screw, before the world had destroyed him. Savas pressed firmly on the boy’s head.

“I will call you Peter,” he said.