Sleet: Selected Stories

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.”