Free Tailor of Inverness, The by Matthew Zajac

towards the Germans. I wouldn’t say they were richer but they were more efficient to make use of what they had. Better than the Poles or the Ukrainians or the…so. And a, well, I don’t know…
    We have the family of Hutsuls, they come from the Carpathian mountains, they always come in the summer to help with the harvest. Those mountain people, all they have was just some goats and sheep. They not have any arable land to have crops, you see? They come the second week of July and they stayed till harvest finished, till August. After harvest was in, wheat was threshed on the machines and a father 
apportioned their due, so many sacks of wheat, barley and oats. And that was loaded onto the carts and taken to the railway station and they were taking that all home! Naturally they mill the wheat to flour to last them for the winter. Oh I enjoyed the harvest because it was very hot, and we enjoyed romping in the straw and hay!
    And after the Hutsuls went away, potato harvest came in. There was again, number of people come to help. They been paid for it, daily. Potatoes were dug, we didn’t have machines. Men been digging them and right behind, women and children been picking them up into the heaps. They sort of a crofters, subsistence farmers. They always got paid for it however they want, sometimes with wheat, sometimes with money. Maybe they had too small a croft they didn’t have enough potatoes so they made agreement with father he give them a ton of potato for the winter.
    Was not many farms the size of ours. That was ours and a my Uncle Anton and Uncle Michal. It was bigger farm one time and was divided in three, between the three brothers. Just before the second world war, it was decreed to stop that subdividing. Because you see, what would happen? Was three of us. Now our farm would have been divided again on three! You would end up with very little. You wouldn’t be able to make a living. So now one would inherit the farm and the rest have to get the job somewhere else, in towns or whatever. So I went to do tailoring. And Kazik didn’t want the farm. I think Adam would have been left with it. I had ideas about making lots of money!
    Kazik had a civil service job. He was sort of a tax inspector. I don’t know what I was going to do but I had my eye on Warsaw, because my cousins were there you see. To go there and make some sort of a fortune there. But it never came anything to it because war broke out.
    Was no police in our village.
We never have any
trouble,
any vandalism or anything. If anything sprung like that the people dealt themselves with it and that’s that! There was feuds between neighbours. About most irrelevant tings. Like maybe the neighbour’s sheep went over the fence and tramp the onion bed or eat their flowers. And they yell at each other …keep your animal at your place, look at the damage its made I’ll sue you for it! There was one family, two brothers, and they always been fighting. They lived just next door to each other. They have a wee crofts. The Kuszpisz brothers. And they fight nearly every week. Nobody took much notice, though there was a number of times father was called and my uncle to settle what they been fighting over.
    One brother accused the other that he stole his chickens. And one accuse the other that he stole his bullock. He say, ‘If I stole the bullock, he would be somewhere here! You think I put him in my pocket?!’
    ‘Ah you stole him you b so-and-so, you went to the market and sold him to the slaughterhouse!’
    And father and uncle try to pacify them by saying to one you must have stolen it.
    ‘Oh, I didn’t steal it.’
    ‘Well, you give him so much.’
    ‘I’m not giving him anyting, because I didn’t steal it.’
    ‘Well, who did?’
    And so on. And they were father’s age! Old men, yes!
    There was one woman who lived on her own, they call her a witch. She was no more witch than anybody else! But we were afraid of her. We teased her and she usually