The Taste of Hunger

By Barbara Joan Scott

A family saga about Ukrainian immigrants in the early 20th century, the power of desire, Baba Yaga fairytales, and a moment that changes everything.

In Saskatchewan in the late 1920s, a fifteen-year-old Ukrainian immigrant named Olena is forced into marriage with Taras, a man twice her age, who wants her even though she has refused him. Stuck in a hardscrabble life and with a husband she despises, starved for a life of her own choosing, at every turn Olena rebels against her husband and her fate. As Olena and Taras drag everyone around them into the maelstrom that is their marriage, they set off a chain of turbulent events whose aftershocks reverberate through generations.

In her novel The Taste of Hunger, Barbara Joan Scott masterfully explores the pull of family, the fallout of thwarted desire, and the power of redemption and forgiveness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Freehand Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781990601194

Barbara Joan Scott

Barbara Joan Scott's first book, The Quick, won the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and the Howard O'Hagan Award for Best Collection of Short Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Henry Kreisel Award for Best First Book. In 2015 she received the Lois Hole Award for Editorial Excellence. Her debut novel, The Taste of Hunger, will be published by Freehand Books in 2022. She lives in Calgary.

Book preview

Cover: The Taste of Hunger: A novel, written by Barbara Joan Scott. Thin leafless branches of trees placed all around the edges of the book with the title displayed in the center. The title and the branches are coloured in a gradient of beige and red, while the background is in black.

THE

TASTE

OF

HUNGER

THE

TASTE

OF

HUNGER

BARBARA JOAN SCOTT

Logo: Freehand Books.

©

BARBARA JOAN SCOTT

2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical — including photocopying, recording, taping, or through the use of information storage and retrieval systems — without prior written permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright), One Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5.

Freehand Books acknowledges the financial support for its publishing program provided by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Alberta Media Fund, and by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

Logo: Canada Council for the Arts; Logo: Conseil des Arts du Canada; Logo: Government of Alberta; Logo: Government of Canada.

Freehand Books

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Book orders: UTP Distribution

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: The taste of hunger : a novel / Barbara Joan Scott.

Names: Scott, Barbara, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220231834 | Canadiana (ebook)

20220231842 |

ISBN

9781990601187 (softcover) |

ISBN

9781990601194 (

EPUB

) |

ISBN

9781990601200 (

PDF

)

Classification:

LCC PS

8587.C619 T37 2022 |

DDC C

813/.6 —

DC

23

Edited by Deborah Willis

Copyedited by Suzanne Skagen

Book design by Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design

Author photo by Jazhart Studios

Printed on

FSC

® recycled paper and bound in Canada by Friesens

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

For Keith

because I prayed

this word:

I want

Sappho, If Not, Winter (trans. Anne Carson)

PROLOGUE

you lie in the ditch at the edge of what was once the largest slough in the district, ribs grassy and waiting, empty sockets taking in the sky. Mice nest in your pelvis, once the site of such disturbance; ants and spiders war along femur and tibia. The ditch holds all your secrets, left behind with rotting flesh and sinew in soil several layers down. Whatever fires lit your belly, flamed from your eyes, ignited your dreams, have long been banked. You have lain hidden here through years, damp soil clogging nostrils and mouth and weighing on chest, above you the whispering of faraway winds, beneath you the frost heaves and spring floods that lifted you even as they wore you away. Raised you finally to the surface, exposed you to the sky. Eased you out of the earth the way living flesh eases out a splinter. Your jaw hangs open, tongueless and silent, waiting for the winds to teach you to sing.

WANT

I know

You won’t

believe me,

but

it sings,

salt sings, the skin

of the salt mines

sings

with a mouth smothered

by the earth.

Pablo Neruda, Ode to Salt (trans. Margaret Sayers Peden)

‹ 1926›

he first saw her standing in a hen house, lit up by a shaft of sunlight that sundered the murky dimness of the rough shack. She seemed suspended in light, along with motes of dust and down and chicken shit lifting from the dirt floor with the slightest movement of foot or air. He had to stoop to speak to her, the low roof putting a crick in his neck and the stench of the place pushing his breath into his throat. The defiant set of her chin under his gaze pressed on his lungs like a heavy and familiar hand.

His first job in this country, a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant from Ukraine fleeing the aftermath of the Great War, had taken him deep into the Ontario mines where he’d pitted animal strength and pickaxe against a rock face deep under the soil of the gentler surface. One day he pried loose a rock that fell on his hand and smashed against his index finger. Blood darkened the nail, a dull throbbing spread from his finger to encompass his whole body, becoming the focal point of all his concentration, his effort to stay at his task. At the end of his shift, in too much pain to eat, he buried his hand in a bowl of ice and staggered to bed, and still the pain wrenched his arm to the shoulder. Two precious dollars later and he was in the doctor’s hut. The doctor took one look at the taut and shiny-black skin and reached for a drill, steadied it against the blackened nail. Don’t move, he said, and it took every muscle to obey him. The drill ground down, churning up bits of fingernail like wood shavings, tearing his nerves from finger to skull, he could hear himself grunting from somewhere far away, and just when he couldn’t stand it, he had to pull away or smash that bastard doctor’s face in, the drill bit through the nail and blood spurted two feet in the air. The relief was immediate, the blood bright and red; he felt strong just looking at it.

When the girl lifted her chin like that, resisting the weight of his gaze, Taras felt again that pressure, the relentless turning of the drill.

By the time he was twenty-eight he had had it with the mines. The lousy pay, the eighteen-hour work days, never seeing sunlight even in summer, what meagre life he had played out in darkness or twilight only. So he left the mines and worked his way across the country as a railway labourer, paying a dollar for the privilege of wielding a pickaxe under the open sky. Every step he had taken in this country seemed accompanied by a wedge of rusty metal piercing dull earth, one or the other shrieking in protest. Before long he’d had it with the railway too. One night in Estevan, drinking long and deeply in the hotel bar, he fell into conversation with a man sodden with booze. Wasyl, a fellow Ukrainian.

I’m getting out. Wasyl’s nose drooped over the pint of beer into which he’d poured two shots of rye. Godforsaken country. I bought my ticket to Toronto and then it’s back home to Ukraine. Fuck this place, fuck my land. I thought I’d bring my wife over, make a go of it, be a landowner. Ha! He took a long pull at his drink, wiped the foam and spittle from his mouth. Call that land?

Did you sell it?

Who’d be fool enough to buy it? It isn’t broken yet, or at least, not more than a few acres. I sold off my plough to my neighbour, but even he didn’t want more land to break than he could manage. Let the fucking mosquitoes and black fly have it, I say.

How much you want for it? Taras had been saving what he could, probably not enough, but it didn’t hurt to ask.

Take it. A magnanimous wave almost brushed Taras’s nose. It’s yours.

No, no, Taras said, checking to be sure he was considerably more sober than this man. We’d have to do it right. Write up a bill of sale. Hope was sparking in him and he banked it down so this man would not sniff it out.

Here, bartender! Wasyl yelled. Bring us a pen and paper. When it arrived he scrawled something onto two sheets of paper, signed both pages with a flourish then shoved them toward Taras. You fill in your name.

The script was barely legible but Taras made out on each one: Received from _______ the sum of One Dollar for Quarter Section

NE

55-15-4-

W

2.

You sure?

Much good may it do you. And that nag and decrepit wagon out front, take them too. Free gift. He let out a bitter crack of laughter. Like the land. Curses on the government of this godforsaken country who told us we could make a living out here. Begged us to come. Fuckers. What better to dangle in front of peasants than land, eh? You have two years to cultivate, mind, or they take it back. He drank another beer with another two shots while he sketched out a map to show Taras where to find the section, his head nodding ever lower, his words slurring, the pen slipping from his grasp. Taras snatched up the map and the papers, filled in his name and signed, then stuffed one of the pages, along with a crumpled dollar bill, into the man’s vest pocket, and slipped out before Wasyl could come to.

The horse and wagon were out front as Wasyl had said. Taras was trembling at the stroke of luck but also with a quiver of fear. What did he know of breaking land, or farming for that matter? He’d been raised on a farm, but his father had died when he was a child, and his mother had been unable to cope. Their tiny strip of land had barely made enough to pay the rent to the landlord, let alone the tithe to the church. But what the hell. He was young and strong. He hadn’t known anything about mining or the railroad and he had managed. He stole a pickaxe from the

CPR

locker, threw it into the back of the wagon, and headed north.

The property was at least a week’s journey away. Not wanting to spend his meagre savings until he got near enough to buy supplies, he slept in the fields or the wagon, caught fish in the streams and cooked them over an open fire, accompanied by hard tack biscuits soaked in creek water. Worked along the way at farms, sometimes for money, sometimes just for food to get him a few miles farther down the road. He was still several days from his destination when he stopped to ask for water at a weathered shanty.

There was no one by the well, but he heard a commotion coming from a chicken coop, a hut only slightly smaller than the house. He ducked his head down low to get through the doorway. Cautious. Could always be a coyote, and they got nasty when cornered. But it was a girl, fifteen maybe. If she was nervous at the sight of a strange man blocking the doorway she gave no sign. She was holding a tiny chick upside down, where it fluttered furiously. When she saw him she righted it and put it back near its mother, the hen that had been making all the noise.

She said nothing, so he had to speak first, in halting, accented English.

Hallo? I have come to ask for vater.

I can give you that. She spoke in Ukrainian, the sound of it as much a joy to him as her brief smile at his accent. But I have to finish with these first. Grasping another chick firmly by the legs, she upended it. It dangled at the end of her hand as though dead.

What are you doing?

She didn’t glance up from her task. Seeing if they will be cocks or pullets. She placed the chick in a small slatted box in which several other yellow balls cheeped forlornly, then took up another. This one fluttered its stubby wings and tried to right itself, its small and frantic movements looking ludicrous at the end of that tanned and muscular arm, until she tucked it safely back with the hen.

How do you tell? As she reached for the next fluffy ball, her worn dress pulled across her breasts, the faint light from the doorway caught the curve of her arm, the glint of her dark hair. Her feet were bare and flecked with chicken droppings and their tiniest movement raised dust motes that danced around her.

She upended another chick, held it out for his inspection. It hung limp in her grasp. Which do you think? Cock or pullet?

I don’t know — pullet?

She put the chick in the crate and dusted off her hands on her thighs. Cock. It’s the female that fights back.

Why do you need to know?

Too many cocks in a yard cause trouble. She spoke with mild contempt. He didn’t remember his mother sorting chicks on the farm in Ukraine. He hadn’t paid attention to women’s work. Dimly, however, he remembered the priest coming for the tithe and rejecting contemptuously the box of chicks his mother had proffered instead of money. Maybe the priest also knew the secret of sex detection and saw the trick Taras’s mother was trying to pull. Or maybe he’d been just another greedy bastard.

The girl pushed past him into the daylight and fresh air. Just one minute more and I’ll give you well water. There’s some up at the house. Plunging the dipper deep into the rain barrel, she rinsed her feet sparingly, returned the leftover water to the barrel, then led him up a worn track, their footsteps kicking up small eddies of dust.

My name is Taras, he said, to her back. She walked with short, brisk strides, her whole body involved in the concentrated movement, her shoulders pulling against the faded cotton dress that was too small for her, showing more of her calves than was proper, and outlining more of her rear too.

Like the poet, he said, wanting to impress her somehow, make her turn toward him. My mother named me for Ukraine’s greatest poet. Taras Shevchenko. He didn’t know if this was true. Probably not. His mother, like most peasants, especially women, had been illiterate. He had read Shevchenko’s poems as a young man fired with nationalistic fervour, thrilling to the poet’s calls for Ukraine to claim her rightful place in history.

Await no good,

Expected freedom don’t await —

It is asleep: Tsar Nicholas

Lulled it to sleep. But if you’d wake

This sickly freedom, all the folk

Must in their hands sledge-hammers take

And axes sharp — and then all go

That sleeping freedom to awake.

---

But that had been before Taras embraced communism and learned that the nation state was dead. As, of course, was land ownership. He smiled wryly, thinking of his homestead, and thankful, over all, that the girl didn’t press him further on questions of poetry.

The house was larger than it had seemed from the chicken coop, but its sagging porch and loose and weathered boards, one in particular dangling from a final stubborn nail, confirmed his first impression that, whatever its actual size or number of rooms, this was a shack.

An old man in threadbare coveralls stepped onto the porch, followed closely by a crone dressed in black.

Who’s this? the man barked.

He’s here for water, the girl barked back.

The crone spat in the dust, almost at Taras’s feet, perhaps by accident. When he glanced up at her, startled, he realized she was probably no more than fifty, but her face was so deeply lined and stained with sun and labour she looked more like seventy. The man was as lined and leathered as the woman. Not an ounce of spare flesh to soften the wrinkles, his face ground into a permanent scowl. Taras resisted the urge to reach for his own face, to probe beneath the scrape of stubble for lines drawn by his own years of labour. Would he look as worn down as they in — what? — twenty years? Surely not. And this girl with her taut and glowing skin — it didn’t bear thinking about.

Well, the old man said, I suppose we could give you a cup of tea. The woman spun on her heel and ducked into the house, banging pots in what Taras assumed was a protest.

Olena, you finished with those chickens?

Yes, Papa.

Go help your aunt. So, not her mother. Olena. A supple name, like the pull of her dress across those breasts, those thighs, as she moved to obey her father. Taras felt a stirring in his jeans and looked away, strode up the steps behind her to shake her father’s hand.

My name is Taras Zalesky.

The old man motioned Taras towards a chair. Metro. Metro Kulyk. And that, he jerked a thumb toward the doorway, is Varvara, my sister.

Varvara propped a rigid back against the door frame, staring at Taras, malevolently it seemed to him. But perhaps weather and age had simply sculpted her face into a constant glare. Her nose hooked down, her chin hooked up, even, by God, a wart in the middle of her leathery forehead, for all the world like the Baba Yaga from his childhood stories.

Olena emerged carrying a tray of tea things. Taras had to hide a smile. And here was the little Vasilisa, awaiting rescue.

Sit, his host said, and Taras sat in a rickety willow chair that teetered under his weight. Where you headed?

Homestead, Taras answered with some pride. Another fifty miles or so, north. Near Quesnel Lake. He smiled up at Olena as she handed him a steaming tin cup but she did not meet his gaze.

Bush country, Metro grunted. Lots of clearing left to do. Best land went before the war.

I’m not afraid of hard work. Taras opened his hands to show his calloused palms. I’ve been in the mines, on the railroad. I can use an axe and spade as well as anyone.

Metro smiled. Can you, by God. Olena, he called over his shoulder, bring the vodka. He tossed his tea over the edge of the porch. And fetch the man’s horse and wagon up to the barn.

Several hours later the jug Olena had brought was empty, and Taras and Metro were roaring with laughter.

So then, Taras brought his hand down on the arm of the chair, which rocked wildly beneath him, I ran him off the place. Black skirts flapping and his cross swinging. Like an old crow! He glanced sideways to see what Olena thought of this tale, but her face was expressionless.

Damn priests. Metro spat over the porch railing. Take your last egg.

Damn right. Taras almost launched into an impassioned speech about how communism would wipe those greedy crows from the face of the earth, but reined himself in. He was drunk and talking to a stranger. Better to be cautious. His mouth was dry and empty. He tried to moisten it with his tongue. He had been glad of the liquor but what he needed now was food, and it looked like the last thing on the old man’s mind.

Brave men, in talk anyway, Varvara’s harsh voice broke across his thoughts. Olena. Go kill one of those hens since it appears we have company for dinner.

Stay! Stay! Metro was delighted, expansive, waving his hand as though inviting Taras into a mansion. Maybe you’ll stay a few days, eh? Help with the chores? I have only one girl now, his words weighted with sorrow. All my other girls, three of them, gone. Married. Left. They all leave. His nose dripped with emotion, his eyes reddened. Only Olena is still here. He peered slyly at Taras. And who knows, she may be leaving soon too.

Taras felt the pull of his homestead, the land he hadn’t seen. But even stronger he felt the pull in his pants, strengthened by the white lightning. A few days, a chance to strain those breasts and hips against him, feel the squash of flesh and the thrust of bone, crush those lips like honeyed blossoms. He heard the long squawk of the dying chicken and smiled.

Which way is your outhouse? And went, staggering only slightly, in the direction Varvara pointed.

They ate the chicken in a kitchen dimly lit by an oil lamp. As far as he could see it was the only room not affected by the general decrepitude of the place. The floor swept clean and not one board creaking, the wood stove polished a gleaming black, the fire flickering, and a kettle simmering over the hot water reservoir. The whole kitchen redolent of garlic, which he hadn’t smelled in a long, long time, the Angliki preferring their food bland on the nose and tongue. It smelled of home, and Taras tore into his meal. Varvara snorted with what he hoped was satisfaction at his appreciation of good food. The flesh was a bit stringy, but sweet with fat. He sucked the bones and his fingers to prolong the pleasure of good meat. The old potatoes and carrots, taken from barrels of sand where they had wintered, were a bit withered but still tasted fine when boiled then tossed with butter. All of it washed down with more of the fiery liquid that seemed in inexhaustible supply.

Delicious. Taras stretched back in his chair and glanced once more at Olena. She too had given all her attention to her food, barely speaking a word all evening. He had told his best tales, of deserting from the Polish army and escaping into Germany, heart in mouth as he scrambled underneath barbed wire, waiting for the shouts of discovery, the shots that could end his life. Of Germany in shambles after the war and his coming to Canada in another of what was beginning to feel like a long line of escapes. She had barely looked up from her plate. Taras was puzzled. He had not lived to be thirty without realizing he was attractive to women. Not handsome, but he had something, an energy that drew women to him. They liked to touch him, trace the raised veins on his wiry arms, the bumps of spine down his back, and usually they liked to listen to him. But this one? She was polite, but mere politeness was not what Taras was used to. He found himself in the ludicrous position of having seduced the father, who, pouring steady streams of vodka into his glass, appeared ready to adore him in his daughter’s stead.

He stayed the next four days, ploughing, picking rocks, and dragging stumps from the fields, doing his best to shore up outbuildings that sagged under the weight of Metro’s neglect. Wasting time that would have been precious to his own homestead, attempting to woo the daughter through the father by reciting what scraps of Shevchenko’s poetry he could remember, or recounting adventures of Ukraine’s mythic revolutionary, Taras Bulba, all while Metro sucked up liquor and let the words whistle past him like the prairie wind.

Metro seemed to regard the situation as a huge joke. Like Jacob and Rachel, eh? he chuckled. Lucky for you the others are all married, but I could still play a trick, eh? Put Varvara in your bed. Then off he’d go in shouts of laughter.

Taras couldn’t puzzle out what drew him so strongly to Olena. She was no beauty, hadn’t the height for it for one thing. Short, almost stocky. And he so tall, almost a foot more than she. But those muscles, their power, their precision. He could watch her carry the milk pails across the whole yard just to see the strain of her arms, the scissor step of her legs. Her lips thin with determination not to spill one drop. Every day she went for a walk, when Taras and Metro were sitting on the porch with their vodka, their boots unlaced, the leather tongues lolling away from their sweaty socks. Out across the flat fields into the sunset, then circling the house, a speck on the horizon, as though she were tethered. He ached for her to invite him on one of her rambles, even hinted, but could only assume she didn’t get the hint. For a while he hoped that she walked for his benefit, giving him the opportunity to appreciate her hips, her shoulders pulled back and chest inhaling, but she ranged too far afield for this to be her motive. Yet his desire followed her, stretched thin across the fields, glinting in the evening light. Surely with the right tug at the right time it would draw her to him. He watched the circle of her arms as she swept the porch, flung grain to the chickens, the sudden swirl when one day she chased the barn cats away from the milk pans, a tornado of dust and feline hissing and girlish laughter. Watched and was helpless. He tried every seductive wile that had never failed him before, brushing her hand when she offered him bread at the noon meal, breathing on her neck ever so slightly when they passed in a room or on the porch. She appeared not to notice. It was driving him wild. He had never thought to marry before, but why not? He was about to settle on land of his own, he would need someone to work alongside him, and certainly he would rather have a Ukrainian girl than any other. Ukrainian girls knew how to work, take the place of an ox at the plough if need be. English girls were all right for a bit of fun, but not for marriage, with their need for fine houses and clothes and furnishings, their wrinkled noses when they came across the smell of honest sweat.

He found himself bending toward Olena whenever she returned from her walk, to inhale the mix of earth and sweat and open air. Once he watched a trickle of perspiration travel slowly from her neck to where her breasts rubbed together and was half crazed with desire to bury his tongue there, to lick the pure salt taste of her.

He decided to speak to her. Her father liked him. He had land, good prospects. When he caught himself thinking like this he almost