Sleet: Selected Stories

by Stig Dagerman

  So that’s where he is now, sitting on the chaff-cutter, after all that fuss. Alvar went and dumped a whole bunch of carrots into the shoot and put a pail underneath so all Grampa has to do is drop the headless carrots into it. But Grampa, he almost never hits the pail. He almost always drops them right beside it. Just like when he eats. Mama’s forever laying into him about that.

  “You could at least stop spilling it all over yourself!” she says. “Maybe we should buy you a bib.”

  At times like this it’s hard to keep from laughing, but if you laugh you’ve got to leave the table. So it’s not easy. The worst is when we eat oatmeal, because the oatmeal gets stuck in his beard and then it’s pretty much hopeless trying to get it out, says Mama. It sets just like cement.

  But sometimes Grampa grins at the supper table and tells Mama how she ought to be thankful she’s even got a father.

  “It’s not every child that’s got one,” he says, grinning at me. “Is it?”

  And then Mama jumps up so quick that her chair hits the floor with a bang, and she runs into the bedroom and bolts the door. At times like this it’s impossible to do anything with her.

  It’s nice to sit out here in the stable. The pile of carrot tops is growing and growing. Rain fingers the roof’s shingles, and Sigrid says how it sounds so homelike.

  “Yeah, if we only had a home,” says Mama. “Then it sure would be real homelike.”

  The cat is jumping around up in the hayloft. All of a sudden he comes ripping down. He crawls into the chaff underneath the cutter and just lays there. I thrashed a kitten to death once. But I don’t think it hurt, because it happened so fast. Back in the stalls, the horses are gnawing away on the manger.

  “Alvar, go and quiet them horses,” Grampa says. “They’re good and hungry now, I can tell.”

  “Those old nags have been standing there idle the whole week long,” says Alvar. “What have they got to be hungry about? Besides, they’re yours. If you want ’em fed, then do it yourself.”

  Sigrid looks at Grampa with her jaw hanging wide open to see if he’s going to turn purple and start yelling again. And Mama, she looks too. But there’s no call for it this time. Grampa just sits there in the cutter, chopping away. But Alvar, he hasn’t been chopping for a long time. So I stop, too, to take a look at what he’s doing. Sigrid, she’s not chopping. She’s just sitting there gawking at Alvar.

  But Mama, she keeps on chopping away, her knife flashing back and forth through the carrots like a streak of lightning in her lap. She must be good and mad, because that’s when she works the best and doesn’t say a word to the rest of us. She’s almost always mad, and with all of us at the same time. She says if it wasn’t for us, she wouldn’t be wearing her fingers to the bone out in the boondocks. If it wasn’t for us, she’d be working a good job in the city somewhere, in some fine store maybe. Mama’s almost always mad at me in the daytime. But at night, when she thinks I’m asleep, she sits there on the edge of my bed and twirls my hair around in her fingers. God, I’m afraid one of these days I’m going to get curls.

  Alvar’s got a big carrot in his hand, one that he already scrubbed clean and scraped the dirt off of. He’s been carving something into it with the tip of his knife and now he’s showing it to Sigrid with a big grin. I want to go over and take a look, too, but Mama pulls me back by the seat of my pants and tells me to keep my nose out of their business. But then Alvar tells me anyway, ‘cause Alvar’s nice to me. Not like Sigrid, who just pinches and curses me all the time. Mama finally lets me go and see the carrot. What he did, he went and carved his and Sigrid’s names in it, and the date too. It says:

  ALVAR BERG SIGRID JANSSON 10-18-1937

  I ask him to write my name on it too, so he does.

  ARNE BERG

  And then he throws it in the basket. But I don’t think Sigrid likes it that I got to be on the carrot with them, because now she’s glaring at me. But Alvar, he just tickles her under the chin with a carrot top.

  “Just think,” he says. “The fall’s gonna come and go, and come winter we’ll need to go down in the cellar to get some carrots for the animals. Then one day we’ll find that one and we can go out in the snow and eat it up.”

  So they probably didn’t mean for me to be on the carrot with them, but that doesn’t matter. I’m already on a whole bunch of other places. I’m on the barn wall, I’m up in the haylofts, I’m over on one of the stall doors, and I’m even right here in this part of stable. We’re all here, for that matter. Even Grampa and Gramma are here, on the stable wall, but their names are so old you can barely read them. Gustav and Augusta Berg 8-10-1897. In 1914 came Mama for the first time, and then in 1918 came Alvar. I’m here for the first time in 1933 and then came Sigrid in 1936. And right here in the stable it even says Palestine on one of the beams. It happened last year, just before Gramma died. A tramp slept in the stable one night, but he left before anybody woke up. While the rest of us were having our coffee, Gramma went out to get the eggs like she did every morning. And then suddenly she came running in, all out of breath, and said: “You won’t believe who slept under our barn roof last night! Jesus! That’s who! None other than the Lord God, Jesus Christ Himself!” But then another tramp stopped off that night and I was out in the stable with him, showing him where the horse blankets were, so he wouldn’t have to freeze to death. He wanted to shake my hand and thank me, but I was afraid he was full of lice, so I kept my distance. And then he got a look at Palestine on the wall and said: “Oh, Christ! Has that old scumbag Palestine been here? If that’s the case, you can bet them blankets is just crawling with lice.” So Jesus was just another bum after all, and full of lice at that. When I told Gramma the truth at supper that night, she just sat there and cried. She told me I was too little to understand. But Mama stood up for me and said I certainly was not, and just because some lousy tramp came along who felt like calling himself Palestine or Jerusalem or the Holy Land, then that didn’t necessarily mean he was Christ or the Apostle Paul, Mama said.

  My carrots are just about done now, so I’m taking it easy. Mama’s are almost done, too, and the same with Alvar and Sigrid. Only Grampa’s got a whole heap left. Right now, Mama’s over by the chaff-cutter trying to get her hands on some of them. But this is only making Grampa really mad. He’s telling her to leave his carrots alone, he’s gonna chop them himself, damn it, and that’s all there is to it!

  “So, you’re just going to go on chopping carrots when your sister gets here!” says Mama. “Is that it?”

  She makes a grab at a bunch of them, and Grampa stabs at her with his knife. She’s got one of Alvar’s shirts on and the sleeve gets ripped. So now she’s just standing there, looking at Grampa like he’s not all there in the head.

  “You just watch your step, Daddy!” she says. “Or else you’ll go and do something real crazy, something you’ll regret the rest of your life.”

  This makes Grampa pretty sheepish for a while. And now all of a sudden it’s real quiet in here. There’s only the rain dancing on the roof, and the knives cutting away at carrot tops. Finally, I can’t keep quiet any longer.

  I say, “Alvar, tell what it’s like on the Atlantic.”

  And suddenly Alvar looks all deep in thought.

  “On the Atlantic,” he says. “On the Atlantic, the waves are as big as houses.”

  And I’m thinking to myself, “What kind of houses? Little red ones like ours? Or big yellow ones like the school teacher’s?” Because when I think about waves being as big as houses, then I guess they must look like houses, too. The whole Atlantic is just one big county with waves of two-story houses and little red shacks. And over the waves, here comes Mama’s aunt, just riding along. But actually, she’s not riding anymore. We got a letter from her the first day she came ashore, and for the next four days Grampa was out on the bridge about ten times an hour to check and see if she wasn’t out there, coming down the road. But no, we didn’t see or hear from any Aunt Maja.

  But
then one day another letter came that said we should expect her inside a week. Her brother-in-law was going to drive her up here in his car. Mama read the letter out loud after supper, since Grampa went into the bedroom to lay down for a bit. When she finished reading she got so angry that she ripped it up into little pieces, screaming “Of course, since we’re the poorest in the family, we’ve got to wait to be the last!” And her, she’d be damned if she was going to lift a single finger to make this house nice for when that old bitch got here.

  So nothing’s been done to make it nice for Aunt Maja. Which is kind of funny when you think about it, seeing we practically haven’t talked about anything else since we first got her letter last spring, the one that said she’d be coming in the fall.

  Me, I figured we’d have a real party, the kind of party that would make all the people in the village just stand around with their mouths hanging wide open. But now I guess it’s nothing but a big flop. It makes you feel like cutting your thumb off and throwing it in with the carrots so that Sigrid and Alvar will find it in the spring and say “Do you remember when Arne cut his thumb off? It was the same day Aunt Maja came from America.”

  “In three hours that sister of yours is coming,” Mama is saying to Grampa right now, and boy, does she sound hot. “Three hours, and you just sit there on the chaff-cutter acting like it’s neither here nor there. You’d think since you haven’t seen each other in twenty years you’d at least go and have a shave.”

  “If I can’t set on the chaff-cutter, then the hell with it!” he says. “Both here and there! If you got a sister that’s so high and mighty that she can’t come and see her only brother ’cept but in a car, and that can’t bear to see him if he’s setting on a chaff-cutter, then the fucking hell with it! That’s what I say. Both here and there!”

  Now Sigrid’s laughing so hard that she has to get up and go into one of the stalls again. And Grampa’s so upset that he drops his knife, and now Mama’s taking all his carrots and chopping them in a flash. I stick my knife in its sheath and head out to the yard. I look out on the road to see if the car’s coming, but it’s still way too early. Next I go over to the gate and carve my name in the wood. I’ll never forget this day when we were chopping carrots, when it was raining and the rain turned to sleet, and when the aunt from America was coming here to stay.

  I go and sit on the daybed in the kitchen, looking at the Atlantic in the atlas. But there’s not much to see. I don’t see even one single wave. So I can’t be sure whether Alvar was lying or not. Anyway, now I hear a big ruckus outside and when I look out the window I can see Alvar and Mama coming through the yard with Grampa between them. He’s struggling against them, but it’s not doing him a bit of good. They get him through the gate and then up on the porch. In the doorway he braces himself against the frame and then kicks the door. But they manage to get him into the kitchen, anyway, before they finally let him go.

  “Now we’re going to wash you,” says Mama. “And I mean right now!”

  Alvar goes and stands by the door so that Grampa can’t bolt out, and Mama runs water into a washbowl from the big tank. Then Alvar goes over and pulls the work-shirt off Grampa. Beneath it, he’s only got on an old t-shirt which comes right off, too, because he’s so sweaty from the fight. Underneath that, he’s all yellow and skinny-looking. He struggles against them some more, but they get him over to the sink, anyway.

  “Arne, come here!” Mama yells. And it’s such an angry voice that I know I don’t have much choice.

  “Soap his back!” she says.

  And I don’t have much choice but to do that, either, even though it’s not very nice, because Grampa really doesn’t smell too good. I soap his back so that you can’t even see it through the lather. Then Mama scrubs it off with a rag. Alvar’s just holding him, and Sigrid’s sitting over on the daybed, grinning. Next Mama takes the soap and scrubs his neck and face and ears, and he just keeps on huffing and snorting, but he still can’t break loose. Finally, Alvar dips his head down into the washbowl so that Grampa gets water in his throat and starts coughing like he’s about to choke to death.

  “Alright Daddy, now all you need is a shave,” says Alvar, as he rubs Grampa dry with a towel. Mama comes over with a clean shirt and slips it over his head. Then Alvar leads him over to the table and sits him down on a stool. He grabs the shaving mirror off the dresser, takes out the straight edge from the drawer, strops it, takes a mug of hot water from the tank, and sets it on the table. He puts an old newspaper on the table, too, just in front of Grampa, and ties a towel around his neck to keep that new shirt from getting soiled.

  “And I want you to be on your best behavior,” says Mama as she chases a moth through the kitchen. “No spitting on the floor while she’s here.”

  Alvar soaps Grampa’s face, then takes the razor and starts scraping.

  “Hold still,” he barks. “Or you can do it yourself!”

  Grampa just sits there, looking at himself in the shaving mirror. And at last I guess he must figure he looks pretty horrible, because then he starts to sob a little.

  “I ain’t seen her for twenty years,” he says. And his face gets so scrunched up from all the sobbing that Alvar cuts his cheek.

  “Didn’t I tell you to sit still!” he barks again.

  “Not for twenty years,” Grampa goes on. “I was fifty-three then, and she was thirty-three. Me and the woman went down to the station with her. We gave her lilacs and a dozen eggs. The three of us cried so much the train pretty near left without her.”

  I can’t bear to sit here anymore, watching Grampa like this, so I run outside and start walking along the edge of the creek, throwing stones at the frogs and scaring off a trespasser that’s fishing from a boat he’s got hidden in our reeds. It’s dark so I can’t see his face, and he makes real sure to turn it away from me while he’s rowing out of there.

  After a while I feel like carving, so I take my knife and run up through the yard to the stable. But when I pull open the door, I see Sigrid lying on her back in the middle of the carrot-top heap. And right there on top of her — sitting right there on top of her! — is Alvar, biting her hand. He jumps up and curses at me. I slam the door and run.

  I don’t run inside the house. What I’m feeling is too strange to go inside — so strange that I need to be alone with it for a while. So I run around to that room at the back of the barn where we usually shoot the pigs. I sit down on a milk pail and put my head in my hands. I’m trying to get that picture of Alvar and Sigrid out of my head, but I can’t seem to do it. And at last, I figure the only way I can get rid of it is if I do something really different, something so dangerous and exciting that it’s bound to make everything else seem like nothing. So I sneak into the hen house and scare away a hen that’s sitting on her eggs. Then I feel around under the hay with my hands. I once got a cigarette from one of the neighbor kids and that’s where I hid it, along with a pack of matches. But I’m nervous, so when I go to light it, I accidently drop the burning match and it starts a little fire in the straw on the hen house floor. Real quick I pour a bowl of milk over it, and it dies out. But it still smells like smoke in here.

  I go and sit down again on the milk pail in the slaughtering room. It’s totally dark in here, and the little bits of light coming through the cracks in the barn wall make the threshing machine, with all its wheels and belts, look like some kind of giant ghost animal that just creeped into its dark cave. The rain’s knocking lightly against the splintered roof and the cows are chewing in their stalls — actually, that kind of sounds like rain, too. All of a sudden Sigrid comes walking in with a lantern and a couple of milk pails. When she catches sight of me, she puts them down on the floor and comes right up to me. And with the light coming up from underneath, her face gets all these terrible shadows all over it, and it’s pretty scary. I scream out, but she grabs hold of my arm and pinches, long and hard.

  “You tell Tora or the old man …,” she says, “and I’ll pinch you in the thr
oat so bad you’ll never say another word again.”

  Then she lets go of me, picks up the pails and the lantern and heads into the stall. When they see her, the cows stand up, grunting softly, chains rattling like a gang of prisoners.

  When I go inside Grampa is sitting on the daybed, looking totally different. Mama must’ve made him get into his best suit of clothes. He hasn’t wore it since last year at Gramma’s funeral. He looks way too white in all those black funeral clothes, like all the blood has run clear out of him. There’s a red scratch on his cheek that sticks out like a thin mouth, but the rest of him is pure white. He looks tired, too. Doesn’t seem to know what’s going on around him. I wonder if he even knows his only sister that he hasn’t seen in twenty years is coming in about a half an hour.

  Mama’s standing there combing her hair in front of the dresser with the mirror on it. She went and put on her best dress. And the wristwatch that’s broken, the one she got from my daddy, she even put that on. I go and turn on the radio. It’s in the middle of the weather: Eastern Svealand and the coast of Southern Norrland, a bit chilly for this time of year — and in the northern parts of the district, sleet.