But it ain’t my style to stir up bad memories like that, even if it didn’t feel right at the time, the way they settled up Mamma’s estate. The water’s running low in the creek bed now, stones lying there naked and dry everywhere you look. We’re up the little hill there in a flash. You can say what you want about Blenda, but that horse can move when she has to. And the old man’s the one spotted that in her and made an offer on her while the getting was good. Funny, I can tell Ulrik is chewing on something he can’t quite get his lips around. But he finally just spits it out like a fish bone.
“So how’s things with your woman there?” He says. “With Elinda?”
A simple question deserves a simple answer.
“She caught a cold,” I say. “And her skirt hem got caught in the back wheel of her bike whiles she was riding it, so she took a good spill and sprained her arm. Other than that, everything’s jim-dandy, I guess.”
That shuts him up. Good old Ultrick! I know just what he was getting at, of course. I’m not a fool, and I never have been. I figure they got some idea about things back here at home. Lydia’s taken care of that, if nobody else has. You can count on that. Or that fella of hers, the tub o’ lard who runs around in that van of his all the time, pushing his radio sets on everybody. Of course, nobody can talk about how that fella’s made all his money. We’re not supposed to mention it. I could mention it, though, if I had to. And I don’t mean whisper.
He’s good and quiet now, Ulrik. You never know what he’s thinking. He’s a shrewd one, alright. Always has been. Shrewd and stubborn. Carlsson’s Café has big patio umbrellas out in their yard now, and The Cottage on the Green’s got a mini-golf course. I could maybe play a round later this evening. If anybody’s got a problem with that I know just what to say. “Let’s not forget the old man was never one to mope around!” Just look at how he was when we buried Mamma. Or right after we buried her. When he waved me into his room that evening.
“Come on in here, my boy,” he says to me. “Don’t let anybody see you.”
Then he takes two glasses out of his dresser and a bottle of cognac he’s got squirreled away in there. And we sit down next to each other on the couch and drink up the little bit that’s left in the bottle.
“Son, I like you,” he says. “You ain’t hard to get on with nor full of yourself.”
He always was fair, the old man, and he had an eye for character. He wasn’t above lifting a glass with you, either, not even then when he was seventy-two. What will I have to come home to, now that the old man’s dead and gone?
Maybe I should try to cheer Ulrik up. Not like he’s had a whole hell of a lot to sing about himself, all alone on the farm, without the good sense to get himself a woman. The woman that kept house for him, she just picked up and left. Think they said the old man had a hard time keeping his hands off her after Mamma passed, but people, they say all kinds of things. Don’t see why they’d need a woman to tend house anyway after Mamma was gone. She’s the one that needed tending, confined to bed all the time. But the old man, he was up on his feet to the very end, and whipping together a little daily grub was never any problem for him, not even at his age. It’s a good thing the farmhand stayed on, though, ’cause Ulrik couldn’t get along without him, don’t care how strong they brag he is.
Down in the village “cinter,” as they say it here at home, there ain’t a soul in sight. OK, maybe one. A tall fella standing there at the edge of the road with a paper bag in his hands, waiting for us to go by. A drifter, I’m sure, ’cause as soon as we’re clear he crosses real quick and goes right through the gate at Petterson’s, the grocer’s place. Couldn’t have picked a wronger damn door than that one to visit. Petterson wouldn’t give a bum a plug nickel, a miser just like everybody else around here. The old man was a breed apart when it come to that. If a drifter stopped off at his door you can be sure he’d get some food and rest. The old man was probably just happy to have someone to talk to. He was a happy soul like that. Not like Ulrik, who you couldn’t choke a word out of. When me and the old man was sitting there in his room after Mamma’s funeral, he says to me: “To get a drink in this house a man’s got to go and sneak off.” It ain’t like Ulrik would say anything to him about it, but he sure as hell would glower. Practically till his eyes burned. But to get a word out of him you’d have to make him good and furious.
That was the last time I ever spoke with the old man. So I ain’t gonna forget that in a hurry. And I’ll say this much, them others ought to know — all of them! — that the old man wasn’t one to look down his nose at the next fella. And all this noise they make about what a capable fellow Ulrik is — that’s all I hear every time I come home to visit, all I’ve heard ever since I moved to the city! How he’s as good as three men and works himself that hard on the farm, whiles I just kick up my feet and have a good time in town! And how he never swears, unless he’s besides himself with anger! How he don’t smoke and hasn’t touched a drop since he was a conscript in the army! Of course, there was that one time on the old man’s seventieth birthday when me and him mixed some brännvin into the lemonade and then poured a big glass of it for Ulrik. And him, he was so thirsty he just guzzled down the whole thing, thinking it was plain old lemonade, of course. What a hell of a mess that was — Ulrik out there throwing up all over the front yard and then coming back in and railing at us like a creature possessed. But anyways, he got a few drops in him that time. That’s for sure.
Now we meet the new schoolmaster on the road, and he’s so stuck-up he can barely bring himself to lift his hat. Ulrik tells me old Jacob is dead. He was the schoolmaster in my day.
“Gave up the ghost right there in his yard, sitting in a chair,” he says. “The old ones is going. No question about that. First it was Mamma, then Jonsson, who ran the mill …”
He drowned in the mill creek last fall, I heard. Everybody heard it. It was on the radio: “In Kvarnlunda eighty-two-year-old Elov Jonsson, former mill proprietor, was pronounced dead on Tuesday evening, the apparent victim of a drowning.” That very same week an old woman got run over on the highway, though I can’t say I knew her.
“Then come old Jacob,” Ulrik says, “and Stenlund, who got himself cancer and died in the poorhouse. And now it’s the old man.”
A fella on a bicycle comes up behind us, ringing his bell, and so Ulrik steers us over to the edge of the road and slows down a good bit. He slides his hat back off his forehead and looks around, first straining round to look behind and then glancing to each side. Like we got to be all alone to talk about the old man. Suddenly he’s turning into a regular chatterbox, and that don’t happen much with him, so you note it when it does. When the bull over at Wiklunds busted out of his pen and run a horn into our little brother’s ribs you should have heard him going on and on all night long about damages and what the law had to say about this and that. The rest of us was all pretty much struck dumb, it was such a revelation that he could string together so many words at the same time. Same thing when we was readying Mamma for burial. Once he got going, it seemed to us he wasn’t ever gonna stop.
“He was supposed to go to the nurse that day,” Ulrik says. “You know how the old man didn’t hear too good a lot of the time. So once he was up and around, he says to me: ‘Ulrik, I’m gonna take that bike and head on down to the nurse in the village ’fore I lose the little bit a hearing I got left. I ain’t heard a single world you said the whole week long!’ And sure enough, he pulls that bike out and sets right off with it. Me, I’m heading into the smithy anyway that morning to pick up the plow. And while I’m standing there bridling Blenda the old man goes tramping off dragging that old bike alongside him. And so I call out to him through the stable door, I say, ‘Hold on there, Dad! I’m heading off to the blacksmith’s, and the nurse ain’t much farther.’ He hadn’t climbed on that thing in a year, you see. And it was all he could do to get his leg up over that bar on account of his rheumatism. ‘Hell with that!’ the old man says to me. ‘Don’t tell
me I’m so far gone I can’t ride that little ways over to the nurse’s all by myself.’ So I let him do it, but I didn’t like it. Later when I get to the smithy, the blacksmith is standing out there in his yard and as I’m pulling in through the gate he yells over to me: ‘What you thinking, letting your old man ride all that way by himself?’ So I say, ‘All that way? Since when is the nurse’s place a long way off?’ ‘The nurse?’ he fires right back at me. ‘Why, I was over in the market town a while ago. And when I was riding back here with the brewer, we come upon your old man pedaling down the road to Mon! And let me tell you! The way he was wobbling on that bike it won’t take much for there to be a mishap of some kind.’ So that’s when it hit me, what he was really up to. The tin knocker, he lives out there at Mon, and we all know he ain’t the kind to shy away from free-flowing booze, nor to lose sleep wondering where it come from. And I’m pretty sure there was a bulge under dad’s coat when he left home — the more I thought back on it, the more I remembered it that way.
“So I take the plow home. When I get there I go straight away into the old man’s room to have a look in his dresser. But it’s locked and I can’t find the key. The old man, he started getting mistrustful in his old age. And I ain’t the kind to go sniffing around in other people’s dressers anyways, so I just stay out in the shed the rest of the day, mending stuff, pitchforks and potato picks — potato harvest being just a week away. I keep the shed doors wide open while I’m in there, leaning out every now and then to run my eyes up and down the road. But midday comes, and then three o’clock coffee comes, and there ain’t no sign of the old man. That boy, our hand, he putters round the woodpile most of the day, trying to keep the smirk off his face, so he knows the shape of things alright.
“Finally I take my bike,” Ulrik says, “and ride up toward the village. No sign of him anywheres. I stop in at the nurse’s place, just to be on the safe side. And when she opens the door she grabs my hand so sudden and hard, I can’t help getting goose bumps. ‘Yes, your father is here,’ she says to me. And my first thought is I’m glad he didn’t make the whole thing up anyway. But then when I step inside, I see the old man is laying there on a bed, his head wrapped in bandages, snoring up a storm. Not a sightly picture. Nurse tells me how she was standing there looking out the window when she saw the old man come along on the bike, wobbling from one side of the road to next. ‘He’s swerving so bad, I can’t help thinking this probably won’t end well. And just then Doughboy Holmgren comes along in his car, and your dad comes crashing down, bike and all, right in front of him! And Doughboy has just enough time to stop before he runs him over. He was awful lucky there! Doughboy, he helped me carry your father in here. It was a miracle he ever got on that bike to begin with, drunk as he was.’”
So says Ulrik. I don’t know why he thinks he’s got to mention all that stuff about the old man being dead drunk and all, not when the whole thing’s still so close. I’m sure all this just stokes the hot white fire of righteousness for Lydia and her fella. I’ll never forget how they acted at Mamma’s funeral, pissing and moaning just ’cause I was decent enough to bring along my whole legal ration of liquor for the occasion. It seems Ulrik ain’t done yet, ’cause now he brings Blenda to a creeping pace. We must be a sight to behold, hobbling along down the side of the road like we’re on our last leg.
“So I say to the nurse, how’s the old man doing?” Ulrik says. “And she just shakes her head and says he’s gonna need rest. A few days probably. If I can just fix getting him home, she promises to come by in the morning and check up on him. The air was getting awful thick with the smell of brännvin in there, and that’s not so nice right in the middle of potato season and all. Me, I go to get on my bike again to ride home and right there’s the old man’s bike lying in the dirt at the foot of the nurse’s stoop, the handlebars bent up a good bit but otherwise looking okay for the most part. Back home I wait till it’s a little darker before I set out. Don’t much feel like being ogled in the village by everybody and his brother on account of the old man. But then finally I hitch Blenda to the buckboard and head back to the nurse’s. Dad’s still out cold when me and the nurse carry him out. When I get him home, we carry him in to the cot in his room, me and that smirking hand of ours. I don’t much feel like taking the old man’s clothes off, so I put a blanket on him and then head out to milk the cows and tend to the horses.
“When folks come round that evening for their milk you can just tell from all the sly smiles that they know all about it. ‘The old man never was one to turn his back on a drink.’ I hear this more than once. ‘But at his age!’ someone else says to me. For the sons there’s no escaping the sins of the father. Later that night something didn’t sound right in his room, so I went in and struck a match over him. And all of a sudden I was scared. I turned the electric light on, but the old man was already dead. I send our hand to go and to fetch the nurse. But she only stays in there with him for a few minutes, and then she comes out to the kitchen and says to us that she never would have thought it possible, him going so quick like that.”
It so happens we pass by the nurse’s place right then. And wouldn’t you know it, there she stands just inside the window, giving us a good long stare just like everybody else around here as we go by. The same window she was standing at when the old man hit the ground and went to sleep for the last time. And that was right here on the road, the spot we’re passing over this very moment in the shadow of Jacob’s hedge. How many times as a kid did I run down this road? How many times did I step right on this spot or push my kicksled over it in winter? And for how long has it been in the cards that my own dad would crash his bike here and knock himself senseless? Ulrik cracks the whip now and sets Blenda into a hell of a trot. And all the way till the road curves there at the boarding house, I stay halfway twisted round, looking back at that little bit of road between the hedge and the Nurse’s white house. It’s like I’m looking at the old man’s grave. And it ain’t till then that I really understand he is dead.
But the churchyard is right here across from the boarding house, and the door to the dead room is open. You couldn’t see that from the road when we buried Mamma. But it was July then, so all the maples was in the way. Just as we come up even with the churchyard wall, Ulrik slows way down and takes his hat off, setting it in his lap till we’ve gone by the church. He’s a funny one, Ulrik, with his old-fashioned ideas. Like it does the old man a damn bit of good now to take off your hat when you go by his dead room. Somebody closes the door right then, shutting the old man in, but it don’t feel the same as it did just a minute ago when I was looking back at that little patch of road. And it’s funny, ’cause I don’t feel the same when my thoughts turn to him now. The old man, he was always so full of life, so I can’t help thinking of all the good times me and him had together. For some reason I think of that morning, the day we buried Mamma, when I took my own razor and shaved the old man myself. He was so happy he almost cried. “Wish Ulrik would do this,” he said. “But he don’t give a goddamn if I almost cut my throat shaving! These hands of mine get so shaky.”
And now Ulrik’s sitting there beside me staring at the hat on my head, but if he wants the damn thing off my scalp he can yank it off with his own hands. Out of the corner of my eye I can still see a bit of the boardinghouse we just passed. Used to have one hell of a lady friend working there. Name of Irma. Now that was a gal to hold on to. Used to meet me in the woods out back in the evening and bring me a full dinner from the boardinghouse, all wrapped up in a nice big napkin. A man had everything he could ever want then. But then Mrs. Lund, she got wind of it and put an end to that real quick. And Irma, she run off with this lieutenant that come and stayed at the boardinghouse for four days. “Sure beats a freeloader with a bottomless stomach!” she says to me right to my face, the witch. The grief I’ve had to endure! But I’ve been known to give back just as good as I take. I’ll say that much!
Back on with your hat, Ulrik. There you go, Ultrick.
And sure enough, he doffs it again the moment we pass the last grave and then gives Blenda such a whack with the whip that she bolts right down the hill. The blacksmith stands half-hanging over his gate, three sheets to the wind from the look of it. So we’re not far now. First across the little creek that I thought you could fish when I was a cub, then past the parsonage and into the open fields. “Maybe we should’ve dropped off the wreath at the church,” I say to Ulrik. Not like he’d bother to give me an answer. He’s in a surly mood now. You can tell by the way his moustache is drooping. There’s a car in the yard, that I can see right away, and then Lydia’s bloated lout comes out on the steps. He’s wearing a white shirt and is puffing away on a cigar. The place looks pretty tiny to me — it gets smaller every time I come home. Even at Mamma’s burial, it didn’t seem like there was much of it left, and now it’s shrunk down to almost nothing.
I can tell Ulrik’s looking at me off to my side. He’s probably thinking: “Take a good hard look, ’cause it’s the last time you get to come here to my home on a free ride.” Lydia’s fat boy comes over and opens the gate for us as we drive in, and of course I can’t get out of saying hello, so I hand him the bag and climb down, then reach my arm out to give him a hearty clap on the back, but then he stiffens up and starts away with the bag like he just got stung by a wasp or something. He thinks I’m stewed, of course. And that shirt of his is too spanking white to get pawed by an honest working man’s hand. Ulrik drives ahead to the trough to let Blenda drink. I’m not about to go chasing after the radio dealer. He can just slow down and wait for me, which he does, but only so he can show off his car.
“Yes, sir — this beauty is brand new!” he says, as if I’d asked him. “And a six seater too! Pontyac. Just the thing for business trips.”
Alright, so business is good, for Christ’s sake. Good for you. At the little gate he manages to remember his manners, though, offering his condolences to me as he opens the gate. Right then Lydia comes running out on the porch. Lord God, has she gotten fat! But at least she ain’t wearing her Women’s Auxiliary Corps uniform, nor that god-awful folk-dress getup. She hugs me so hard my spine feels like it’s about to cave in. Then she lays her head on my shoulder, crying and hiccupping, while that idiot of hers just stands there gawking at us like he’s at the circus.
Sleet: Selected Stories Page 16
