by Tom Hansen
We had moved again, out of the rambler and into another apartment on the border of Edmonds and Lynnwood, across the street from College Place Junior High School. A huge sprawling expanse of single story buildings linked by covered concrete walkways, it was my sixth school. A running track, baseball and football fields lay behind the school. Behind that was a huge fenced off dark section of woods the locals had dubbed ‘The Gov’, because it was rumored to be government property. You weren’t supposed to go in there, even though there were a few holes in the fence. I’d heard that UFO’s had been seen over The Gov.
I stood behind the recliner, watching my dad. He would be leaving for Alaska again soon. His bandaged arm lifted the beer bottle to his mouth, over and over. It was just better to leave him alone when he was like this, not because he would get mean or violent, but it would just have been too much to drag him out of the place he was in and into my world. It was better to wait for him to come to me, even if it didn’t happen very often. Even if it was years between the times it happened. It was better to wait.
I quietly zipped up my jacket, grabbed my skateboard and walked out of the apartment, down the steps and into the parking lot. There was an island in the middle of it, some kind of decorative thing, a couple of trees set up on a mound of earth surrounded by a circle of boulders. My dad had dented up the side of the Buick on it coming home from the bar. I continued on out the parking lot, the rows of townhouses on either side. As I neared the street I stopped at Cody’s apartment. He was a year ahead of me at school, and lived with his mom and little brother. Their dad had run off and his mom usually at work or out with some guy or another. She was a nurse but was also a part time hooker, at least that was the rumor. Cody was epileptic. I’d first seen him riding his bike around the parking lot where sometimes he would suddenly freeze up and start shaking. Then he would stop pedaling and coast in a slow arc until he fell over or crashed into a wall.
Cody and I would go across the street to the school at night, ride our skateboards on the concrete pathways, jump our bikes down flights of stairs. I introduced him to Bob, the night janitor, who had a wooden cart filled with cleaning tools and trashcans that he wheeled from classroom to classroom. Cody and I tagged along when he made his rounds. Sometimes we helped him, emptying garbage cans, pushing the dry mop around. Once in a while we would take his cart and run off with it, hide it while he was cleaning a room.
Cody was supposed to be taking medicine for his epilepsy but it made him feel weird and sleepy so often he didn’t, even though that meant he would have more seizures. They only ever lasted a few minutes, and I knew to just leave him alone until it was over. In public, people would freak out. He’d fall to the ground, start twitching and shaking, foaming at the mouth. He really hated that, but most of all he hated when it was over, coming out of it and seeing a crowd of strange and scared faces staring down at him.
Cody and I crossed the street to the school. The sun had just gone down, the streetlights were coming on. Jason, my other friend at the time, hadn’t been to school all week. That wasn’t so unusual. He had a defective heart that didn’t pump enough oxygen to his body, which made his fingers and lips swollen and purple. He was thin and frail, walked slowly and always looked on the verge of collapsing. He often took a few days off. When he did come to school, we would sit together at lunch. I would usually finish eating first, and listen to the cliques of people at the tables around us. They never seemed to be having conversations as much as a sort of competitive talking. One kid would spew about how he knew everything about something and then another kid would interrupt to say something louder. It was like a word-puking contest, the point of which was lost on me. It was just one of the many paradoxes about life that were becoming apparent to me. The people who talked the most usually had the least to say. The boys who seemed like tough guys were actually the biggest sissies. The physically frailest, like Jason, were actually the strongest. I would see it in his eyes. He knew he was going to die yet he had a calm resignation, a total lack of fear.
It had gotten dark. Cody and I were standing on the grass strip between the street and the front of the school. I was feeling very strange. Earlier that day I had called Jason’s house, to see how he was doing. He was dead. No one at school had even noticed. It must be true, I thought, that thing they say, only the good die young.
Behind the school the darkness of The Gov loomed, a black mass in the distance. In the half-light we stood there, imagining the cars driving by were gangsters with Tommy guns. Invisible bullets would hit our bodies making us twitch and shake like puppets on invisible strings. Then we would fall to the ground sprawled out, not moving, our arms and legs bent into strange positions. First one of us would get shot and then the other, each of us trying to outdo the other, trying to imagine ours as the most spectacular death.
[MAY 29, 1999]
There’s someone here with me, I can sense it, off to the right. I could barely move, but I grasped the rail of the bed with my forefinger and pulled myself over.
My God. What the hell is she doing here? Someone must have called her. Does she really need to see this?
She noticed that I was awake and her eyes lit up. “Tom! How are you?”
What can I possibly say to that? Oh, I’m fine mom, can’t you tell? I’ll be on my feet in no time. In two weeks I’ll be a doctor or a lawyer like you always dreamed.
“I’m ok.”
“The doctors weren’t sure you were going to make it. I’ve been waiting out in the hall with Maxine the whole night.”
I let go of the bed rail and fell back, stared at the ceiling. Poor woman. She’s been waiting most of her life. First waiting for my dad to come home from the bar, then waiting for him to come home from Alaska, then waiting for him to come home from the bar again, and since then waiting for her son to stop shooting drugs. When that never happened she waited for a phone call from the morgue. Some of that grey hair, the hump on her back and the lines on her face were because of it.
She has the best qualities a person could have—patience, empathy, perseverance, devotion, forgiveness, faith. And then there’s me, the ultimate train wreck. She hadn’t known what she’d been getting into with me, that’s for sure. She should have adopted more than just one kid, then she could have written me off. Then she could have said, “Oh that Tom. He’s always been trouble. But look at Jimmy! He’s doing so well!”
She’s still wearing those goofy flower print dresses and cheap thrift store shoes. Any minute now she’ll probably start complaining that they hurt. She never changes. You could give her a million dollar pair of the most stylish and comfortable shoes on Earth and she would reject them outright without even trying them on. Stubborn, that one. She’d even refused to believe that my drug use was my fault. It was always ‘those friends you hang around with’ or ‘that girl.’ I’d tried to clue her into the fact that it was on me but she hadn’t wanted to hear it.
Shit.
“How did you....?”
“Katrina called me. She said you were here. The doctors told me you were in bad shape.”
“Uhhhh....”
“They were able to save your leg,” she said, trying to be upbeat, positive.
“Yeah.”
I was having a hard time staying awake.
“You get some rest now. I’ll come back tomorrow after work.”
“Okay.”
If she was anyone else on Earth I would call her a fool. But she had very straightforward, very old-fashioned ideas about love, about family, always had. It wasn’t up to her to stop my dad boozing, or me using. Her job was to support us and pray that we would eventually stop. The rest was in God’s hands, and ours. Concepts like intervention, enabling and tough love were lost on her. In her world, you didn’t go broadcasting your family’s problems all over the place. You waited and prayed for them to stop. For her there was only one kind of love. You loved your family, your husband and your kids, no ifs, ands, or buts. You
didn’t get to pick and choose or decide when or how much you loved your family. It was unconditional. Period. No half love, no tough love, not dependent on this or that factor or behavior. Just love. It had one meaning.
[SANDEFJORD, NORWAY. SUMMER 1974]
I stood next to the barn, leaning on an axe, a pile of chopped wood at my feet. It was dark, the only light coming from the kitchen window of the house. I could hear the wind blowing through the fields of grain, but when I looked there was nothing but blackness. I pulled off my John Deere cap, wiped my brow with my sleeve and sat down on a log. It’d only been a week, but already my life back home seemed so far away, fading from my memory like a bad dream. It was odd, and I didn’t know what to make of it. Wasn’t a person supposed to feel more at home at home?
Sverre, my dad’s brother, came out of the house. He was a couple of years older than my dad and I’d heard rumors of his hell raising and boozing when he was younger. He had a mischievous look on his face most of the time. He ambled over to me.
“Don’t you want to come in?” he asked.
I’d lost track of time. After dinner I’d come out and started in on the wood.
“It’s half of eleven,” he said. “We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow, you should get some rest.”
Reluctantly I stuck the axe into a stump, and we began walking back to the house.
“You don’t have to come out here every night and do this, you know,” he said.
“I know,” I replied, “but I like it.”
The next morning we got into his tractor, a brand new John Deere. He told me to stand on a little platform behind the seat and hang on. He started the engine, shut the door and pulled around the side of the barn, where he attached a long sturdy trailer with tall wooden sides. Then we headed out a grassy track and past the potato patch, following two tire ruts that cut through the fields. All around us, grain swayed back and forth in the wind. Occasionally a gust would come down from the sky. It made a rushing sound and looked like a sheet of rain hitting the ground. It was peaceful, surrounded by nothing but the sky and the grain. The noise of the diesel engine made it impossible to talk. Suddenly, in the middle of the field, far from anything, Sverre stopped the tractor, put it in neutral. Letting the engine idle, he climbed down and pulled a packet of Tiedemann’s Rød from his shirt pocket and began to roll a cigarette. After lighting up and taking a couple drags, he bent down and pulled a half-filled bottle out from behind a rock on the side of the track. He unscrewed the cap and took a swig, put the cap back on and returned the bottle to its place. The cigarette dangling from his mouth, he put his finger to his lips and said Shhhh, smiling a sly smile. He climbed back up and we continued out the track until it intersected with another track where his neighbor was waiting with a huge combine.
They exchanged a few words and then Sverre got back into the tractor. Over the next weeks this is what we did, all day every day. Sverre drove alongside the combine as it moved back and forth across the fields, collecting the grain in the trailer as it shot out of the tube. When the trailer was full, we drove back to the barn, dumped it on the second floor, then later I would spend hours shoveling it into a hole in the floor where it drained into waiting trailers parked below. I remember a strange feeling, a sense of being in tune with the world. A feeling that this was what people were supposed to be doing in this life, surrounded by family, part of a community, just doing what they had to do, rather than being faced with a thousand meaningless choices.
One night, after dinner Sverre came out while I was chopping wood. “Come on, I need your help with something,” he said, then walked toward the barn.
I didn’t know what he wanted but somehow I didn’t care. It surprised me somewhat, because often back home I felt quite lazy, and I knew that it was bad to be lazy but it made sense in a way because back home there was no purpose to anything. I followed him out to the barn into a small room with a low ceiling. A huge sow lay on her side in the dirt and hay panting, so fat with babies she couldn’t stand. While we waited he reached under a dusty shelf on the wall, pulled out a vodka bottle from behind a crate and took a swig. The label was worn off this bottle as well. He put his finger to his lips, said Shhh, and grinned. He told me it would be happening soon, rolled a cigarette and leaned against the wall, smoking.
One by one piglets shot out of the sow and landed on the straw, squirming, covered in slime. It went on and on, one every few minutes. I was witnessing the birth of a mammal, the first moments of a living thing. An animal. Up to this point I had only seen things like this on television. As they shot out of their mother, I dried their writhing little bodies off with a towel. Sverre took them from me, pried their mouths open and pulled or cut their teeth out with a tool that looked like pliers. They screamed like hell. I was shocked, but he said that it was normal, that it had to be done otherwise they would tear their mother to shreds.
As soon as he finished he set them down on the straw covered floor. They didn’t look so terribly different from human babies, all pink and new, kicking and screaming. The moment they hit the ground they gravitated to their mother like magnets. Some of them hadn’t even opened their eyes yet and still they knew where to go, as if they were homing in on some beacon. As I watched I realized that this was something I had not experienced. Of course I couldn’t remember, but I could imagine. I had been born, and then discovered that there was nowhere to go.
But, I had survived. Even though I couldn’t remember, I had obviously been given enough, because I was here. I hadn’t been thrown out into the woods to be raised by possums or wolves or some such. I had most likely been taken to an orphanage or something similar, where a few times a day someone had probably come by, given me a bottle and changed my shitty diaper. Wiped my mouth. Maybe said a few kind words. But I probably would have sensed that something was missing. According to my mom I had been there for three months. Had it affected me? One part of me thought that it shouldn’t affect me at all. After all, I had ended up in a decent family, all things considered. That was then and this was now, right? Yet I couldn’t stop wondering. Was there a difference between surviving and living? Was there a difference between merely existing and thriving, and if there was, what was it? I’d made it this far, but did it mean that I had really lived? Or was my life, or whatever it was, something else?
The next morning before heading out to the fields, I went to check on the piglets. There were about a dozen of them, swarming over their mother. Driven by their instincts, their little hooves flailing, they tried to climb over one another to get at her outnumbered nipples. I walked out to work. I’d completely forgotten the confusion from the day before, the swirling thoughts. Every time I set foot in Norway something changed. At first I thought it was simply having my dad around, my extended family, and although that was surely a part of it, I eventually realized it was something else as well, something to do with the place. The people were the same as back home, or any other country I’d been to, had the same problems, the same dreams. People still haggled over prices at the market, families fought about nothing, yelled at people in traffic. Parents got drunk and argued. The kids were just as savage and the adults just as crazy as anywhere else I’d been. And yet it was undeniable, I felt stronger, lighter. It wasn’t just the farm. I’d been here enough times and seen enough of this country, and there was something very different about it. I couldn’t tell who was rich and who was poor, everyone seemed to be some variation of the middle. The entire country seemed to have a different atmosphere, as if suddenly I had the use of both lungs after a lifetime of having just one.
The harvest was almost over. Time had flown by, the days had blurred into weeks and then months, just like every other time I’d been here. I had forgotten who I really was. I had spent most of my days working alone but hadn’t felt alone, not once. I hadn’t wanted to be anyone else, or anywhere else, or felt that unexplained emptiness, that weird desire to want what other people had despite knowing what they had was mea
ningless. The strange undercurrent of fear that made me feel inadequate and insecure, that there was something lacking from my life had simply vanished. I really didn’t want to leave, but I had no choice, I was only thirteen. I convinced myself that I was just growing up, and this time when I went home it would be different.
My parents were in the house saying their goodbyes. I finished loading the suitcases into the car and walked around the side of the barn. A blanket of gray clouds covered the sky. I couldn’t tell if they were moving or not. I looked out at the fields, imagining what it would be like to never have to leave. Life could just happen the way it was supposed to, organically, and I wouldn’t have that strange pressure that came with feeling I had to make something happen. The fields were swaying in the wind, and as it blew through the grain there was a quiet whispering sound.
[MAY 30, 1999]
“Mr. Hansen?”
I opened my eyes and propped myself up. Some man was there.
“Uh huh.”
“I’m one of your doctors,” he said, pulling a stool over close to the bed and sitting down. “How are you feeling today?”
“My leg hurts.”
I could barely make out what he looked like, but he had a pleasant voice. I could tell he had short dark hair.
“Hmm, yeah. That’s to be expected. Are you in pain?” he asked.
