by Larry Watson
Sonja House never shared with anyone what John said, nor did she confess that in her son’s last living moment she had been afraid to lift him in her arms, thereby depriving him of what all human beings must wish for: to die in their mother’s embrace.
Although John had a large bump on the back of his head, Dr. Van Voort would not—could not—say with absolute certainty that this injury was responsible for the boy’s death. He had a hematoma, that was sure, and yes, a bump or blow could cause have caused the brain to bleed and swell, but perhaps John House simply had a weak blood vessel that would have burst that day no matter what the circumstances.
The doctor would go no further in his explanation to the boy’s parents. His voice trailed off into silence, and he put up his hands. He did not wish to seem unfeeling, but he had been practicing medicine for many years—during Henry House’s childhood Dr. Van Voort had been the only year-round physician in the county north of Sturgeon Bay, and he had practically lived with the Houses when young Henry fell ill with pneumonia—and in his view it was best for parents to accept as quickly as possible the finality of their child’s demise. If Henry and Sonja believed that they could have done something to prevent their son’s death, they would flagellate themselves and each other until they were stripped down to nothing but bone, guilt, and grief. And what could they have done? Well, of course there were any number of things. They could have put the horse out in the pasture when the children were around. They might have kept the boy out of the barn. They could have sold the horse once they decided to have a family. The doctor didn’t know exactly what caused the boy’s death—only an autopsy could settle the matter, and he sure as hell wouldn’t put the parents through that—but he was fairly certain the horse was involved. Dr. Van Voort hadn’t found any mark on the child that a shod hoof might have made, but even a glancing kick or bump from a thousand-pound creature could be fatal to a four-year-old boy. But what would be gained by assigning blame to that gentle beast? The child might have teased him, startled him, come up on the wrong side of him. Why not let the horse be as guiltless as the parents? Dr. Van Voort couldn’t say to Henry and Sonja that their boy’s brain was destined to rupture on June 29, 1953, no matter what the circumstances, but that could have been the truth. And finally the doctor wished that that was the conclusion on which they would settle. They might go on then to believe that it was a cruel, godless world in which a child’s death was inevitable, but in the long run there would be less torment in that faith. Losing a child was pain enough to undo any parent; adding guilt and recrimination frequently doomed the marriage as well.
Sonja knew the form in the doorway was Henry’s, but since she saw him only in silhouette, she could not figure out how he was posed. Where were his arms? Had he bundled himself in a blanket, the chill of grief finally overcoming the season’s heat? Was he embracing himself? Were his hands clasped behind his back, so he might approach as a supplicant?
She turned her head away, though less to avoid her husband and more to escape her own thoughts. Dr. Van Voort had given her pills intended to make her sleep. “If I could,” he said, “I’d have you sleep for a year. Then, when you woke, the pain wouldn’t be gone—God knows that’s not possible—but the hurt wouldn’t be quite so sharp. Just remember that— every hour, every minute you can get past will make it a little better. I know that doesn’t seem possible either, not now, but it’s so.” Yet she didn’t sleep, not exactly. She lay on her bed, and while her head, arms, and legs felt so heavy she hadn’t sufficient strength to lift them, her thoughts churned like the wildest sea, and she would have given anything to stop her own thinking.
The winter before, Henry, Sonja, June, and John had driven down to Green Bay on a Sunday afternoon to visit Henry’s mother in her apartment. They returned in a snowstorm, which Henry steered them through without incident until the truck began to climb the driveway toward home. Then a tire slipped into the ditch, and they were stuck. The wheels spun and whined but wouldn’t catch. Henry only laughed, and they walked through the drifts to the house, John riding high on Henry’s shoulders. And under the influence of Dr. Van Voort’s pills, that was what happened with Sonja’s thoughts. They slipped the track and spun uselessly.
“Are you awake?” asked Henry.
She turned her face once again in his direction, hoping he would see her open eyes and spare her the effort of using her voice to answer him.
He took a step into the room and let his hands fall to his sides. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Yes.”
He wrapped himself once again in his own arms. “If you want to sleep . . .”
“No, no. What is it?”
He walked over to the bed and sat down beside her. She didn’t see the motion his hand made, but she sensed that he had reached out to her, then drew back.
“I know you probably don’t want to think about such things,” he said, “but we have to. So here goes.” His intake of breath was doubled, as if a sob was concealed inside it. “Do you want me to dig the grave myself? I know that might sound strange to you, but the Houses have done it before. Not regularly, I mean. But my dad did it. Twice. He and his brother did it for their father. And then when my uncle died, Dad dug his grave too. So if you want . . .”
What if John had not died? Would Sonja never have known that she was married to a man willing to pick up a shovel for such a purpose?
“You don’t have to decide just yet,” Henry said. “Give it some thought, and I’ll check back. Maybe after you’ve had a rest . . .”
But she couldn’t decide, not when her mind kept getting stuck, this time spinning on two words. Dig . . . grave. Grave . . . dig. Grave was the Norwegian word for dig.
Sonja could trace her confusion over the word to the day she left her home and climbed into a boat to begin her journey to America.
“Grave! Grave!” The man in the prow shouted at the men who immediately obeyed, pulling back even harder on the oars in an attempt to carry the boat and its passengers beyond the waves that wanted to push them all back to the shore.
Dig? thought Sonja. Surrounded by nothing but water and he commands them to dig? Then she noticed how the oar’s blade plunged again and again into the froth, and she knew: Digging was exactly right. Her older brother had taught her some English, and she could see the connection—the effort to displace water was not so different from the gravedigger’s as he worked to move dirt.
And what did young Sonja Skordahl believe would go into that watery grave? She was insufficiently versed in irony to think it possible her life could end exactly when so many people told her it was about to start anew. But then neither had she ever thought it possible that the day would come when her mother and father would place their twelve-year-old daughter in a small, unsteady boat that would row her to the ship on which she would sail to a country Sonja had never seen to live with an aunt and uncle she had never met. “To a better life, Sonja,” they told her again and again. “We are sending you to a better life.” But how could that life be better when it hurt like death to leave the present one?
Ah, so that must have been it! The oarsman gouged a grave in the ocean to bury the past. In went the village and the little house! Under the waves with the friends and all the familiar faces of childhood! Down, down went Father and Mother and brothers, as surely as if they were going into coffins, never to be seen again!
She never saw her parents again. Two years after she left Norway her father was dead. He slipped from the roof when he was making repairs on the chimney, and though he was not killed instantly, he never woke from the coma he lay in for eleven days. One week before Sonja’s sixteenth birthday she learned that her mother was dead of a cancer that bloomed in her brain with such rapidity there was scarcely any time between diagnosis and demise. Both her brothers, Anders and Viktor, she met again, but so many years after their first parting that when they entered the room without introduction she wondered who these strange men were.
And now,
into her life again—dig, grave . . . grave dig. Could he mean it—Henry was willing to dig the hole into which their baby boy would go? Only a man could think such a thing! If she stood in that empty space in the earth, she would never climb out. It would be too easy to pull the dirt in on top of herself, to pull and scrape until the stony, sandy soil began to tumble over her of its own accord, the way ocean waves rush to fill in their own hollows and troughs.
She knew what her decision was, what it had to be. It came to her as she thought again of Henry’s silhouette in the doorway. On unsteady legs she rose to go and find her husband, to tell him he should not have to use his muscles to dig their son’s grave.
Sonja was not interested in assigning blame, at least not beyond the sizable portion she heaped upon her own plate for not keeping John out of the barn altogether, but she could not quell her curiosity. Something had happened when John was in the barn, and she meant to know what.
She had reason to believe that the horse was involved, not only because of the straw in John’s hair—possibly indicating that he had been in Buck’s stall—but also because the boy died with his hands clenched into fists and twined tight between the fingers of one hand were filaments that Sonja thought could have been horsehair. That was all it took. A bit of chaff. A strand of hair. She imagined her little boy sneaking up behind Buck in order to run his fingers through the tangle of the horse’s tail. The horse, startled or annoyed or both, kicked out, and his hoof either hit John and caused that bump on the back of head or caused him to fall back and strike his head.
Sonja did not present this theory to her husband, not right away, but on the night of the funeral, she asked Henry to accompany her to the barn. Their home was still brimming with family and friends who had come over with cakes and casseroles and their own bewildered hearts to try to help Henry, Sonja, and June through their grief.
Henry did not at first understand his wife’s request; furthermore, he seemed uncomfortable being alone with her. “The barn? With all these people here? You want to go out to the barn?”
“Perhaps we can know what happened out there.”
Henry moaned and let his weight fall back against the wall. “Honey. No, no. Don’t. Let it go. You heard what the doctor said. Sometimes you can’t know.”
Perhaps if Henry had put a hand on Sonja—a touch on the wrist might have been enough—he could have kept her in the house.
“I’m going out there,” she said. “You stay if you like.”
Henry walked with her to a point midway between the house and the barn, but there he stopped. Did he know that this was where John collapsed? No, Sonja was sure she had told him no more than that John fell in the yard.
“I can’t,” Henry said. “Not tonight.”
“But you’ve already been in there. Feeding Buck. The chores.”
“That was different. I wasn’t . . . Look, we have people here. We can do this another time.”
“Go back, then. They are your family anyway.” Sonja knew she angered him with this remark, but when he turned and wordlessly walked back toward the house, she felt no inclination to go after him.
Although Henry and his friend Reuben Rosicky had brought electricity out to the barn two years earlier, Sonja did not turn on any lights. John had no doubt come there to touch, and only by denying herself the use of her eyes could Sonja take in through her hands, her fingertips, as much as her son did every day of his brief life.
She walked slowly forward, her hands held out in front of her. A barn cat, or one of its prey, made a scurrying sound in the straw. The pigeons that Sonja would have thought fell asleep hours before burbled high in the rafters. The heat had swirled all the barn’s smells into the single overpowering odor of rot, and breathing it in brought unbidden to Sonja’s mind the image of her son in his child-size coffin, her son at the mercy of decay’s inexorable powers. She rushed forward to frighten away such thoughts, and when she stopped she was standing next to Buck’s stall. She felt his warmth and heard his deep-lunged breathing. He snorted softly.
Perhaps if you stood in the barn next to Sonja House that night, perhaps if you stood so close to her that her lips were almost touching your ear, perhaps if you were that close and you also understood the Norwegian tongue, then you might have heard her whisper, “Horse, did you kill my baby boy?”
Sonja did not want to go back in the house, not right away. The lights there were too bright, and after three days of tears her eyes felt like open wounds. The barn was too dark—its blackness seemed to have substance—but standing out in the yard was a comfort. The warm night asked nothing of her, neither sorrow nor soothing, and the crickets’ scraping made no attempt to question or console.
She began to count silently to herself, though she had no idea what number she would have to reach before reentering the house. Twentyfive, twenty-six . . . Just as this afternoon, seated in the hard pew, she had counted—one hundred, two hundred. . . . How high she had to go before the hymns and prayers and the young minister’s words words words would stop she couldn’t know. Three hundred twenty-five, twenty-six. He spoke about the impossibility of knowing God’s unknowable reasons and of the futility of even approaching God by way of reason: “God’s ways are mysterious and many.” How many, Sonja echoed, and counted higher. By then, she had stopped believing in God and instead believed in what she desired—silence, since it was silence that surrounded her son now and forever five hundred forty-one . . .
From the house came the sound of laughter, bass notes sung by Henry’s uncle Alvin, a man who could not remain somber any longer than a child. Sonja liked to hear him laugh, but she did not want to come too close for fear his joviality might be contagious.
She counted the squares and rectangles, the house’s windows and doors, three, four, five blank portals of light . . . and while she watched, one of the spaces filled. In an upstairs window a figure appeared, a child-size body in the exact place where John used to stand and watch for his father’s truck winding up the hill toward home.
That was June silhouetted in the upstairs window, and while Sonja stared up at her daughter another figure joined June. Henry had searched the house and found his daughter alone looking out at the night. He put his arm around her, and their separate bodies became one shadow.
They didn’t know Sonja was out there—they were simply standing together, each taking comfort in the nearness of the other—but to Sonja it seemed as if they had linked their bodies for strength, and thus joined they could block the way to anyone threatening their home.
Who might such an intruder be? Only Sonja stood outside.
12
Henry’s father taught him how to thin the fruit by hand, leaving at least twelve inches between each apple. This would mean fewer but larger apples—equal at harvest. Pluck the fruit like this, Henry’s father said, with thumb and two fingers, like this, like this. . . .
When his life fell in on itself after John’s death, Henry found, among his many difficulties, that he could not keep grief and love and work separate. The three fingers with which he pulled incipient apples from the boughs—like this—were the same fingers with which he teased Sonja’s nipples, and when he thought of the act of thinning fruit it came to him that when God took John He was thinning the House crop and when Henry thought of putting his hands on his wife—like this, like this—he held back because that would lead to Henry planting his seed deep enough in her to yield and that could result in heartbreak. Nonetheless, while Henry could force himself to pluck fruit from his trees, he could not make love to his wife, and to hide from her his lack of desire he tried to avoid touching her altogether.
However, six weeks to the day after John was placed in the earth and dirt packed around and over his small coffin, as Henry and Sonja lay in bed together, Sonja pulled her nightgown up to her neck and pressed her body against his.
While Henry pretended to sleep, Sonja ran her hand down his outstretched arm as if she were trying him on like a garment. In so doi
ng, she increased the pressure of her breasts against his back.
He tried to mimic a sleeper’s regular breathing, but she must have known he was awake because she said softly, “There is nothing between us.”
Henry did not reply. How could he? Her words could have two sets of meanings, each the opposite of the other. She may have wanted to entice him into sex by pointing out that since nothing intervened between her flesh and his, why shouldn’t they complete the process—logical between man and wife—and become one? Or she may have been making a declaration, advising Henry that since they shared neither desire nor love there was no reason for him to turn her way. If she spoke the language like a native, perhaps then she would have inflected her sentence in a way to make her meaning clear.
Before long, she moved her body until it no longer touched Henry’s. A moment later, she raised and lowered herself quickly on the mattress; she was, he knew, pulling her nightgown back down.
Two days later, Henry and Sonja were alone in the house. For the first time since her brother’s death, June had accepted an invitation to play with a friend.
Henry smoked and drank coffee while Sonja rinsed the plates, behavior that struck Henry as odd. She usually cleared everything before starting on the dishes, but there were the leftover boiled potatoes still on the table. Shouldn’t Sonja cover them, put them in the icebox, and tomorrow grate them and make potato pancakes for lunch?
She raised her voice to be heard over the running water, and then it was too late for Henry to escape—he had no choice but to finish his coffee and listen.
“My father had a friend—Thorvald Norstog—who wanted to make contracts over every little thing. If you borrowed a cup of sugar, Thorvald wanted to write a contract saying how and when it would be repaid. If he said he would help you repair your boat, Thorvald would write down the agreement saying exactly what work he would do.”
Henry lit another cigarette and waited for her to arrive at her point.