Sleet: Selected Stories

They drank their coffee with brandy, and spirits were high. Håkan’s mother cleared the table while he walked around the living room, passing out cigars and cigarettes. When he saw his mother step into the doorway a couple minutes later, Håkan caught the look in her eyes and made his way carefully over to the dresser. Meanwhile, his aunt was busy setting up the card table. The bank clerk, the store manager, and the organist dragged their chairs to the green card table and sat down. Håkan began to wind up the phonograph. The bank clerk dealt. Håkan’s mother nodded to him from the doorway. The four players picked up their cards, their faces glowing from liquor and laughter. Håkan’s grandfather was dealt a possible straight flush in spades, and he had the first bid. He was so beside himself with excitement that he dropped his cigar on the floor. Then he heard the radio come on, loud and irritating, from the corner of the room. It sounded like a lecture. He whirled around on Håkan.

“Will you turn that goddamn thing off!” he screamed. “…Two spades.”

Håkan turned it off. It no doubt put a big scratch in the record, but that made no difference. The pain ran through him, cold as an eel. A fine mist settled over his eyes and the red drunken faces in the room took on a dull metallic cast. Someone from Uppsala or Gävle laughed. And it was that laugh which drove him from the room, out through the hallway and into the darkness of the small back room. He came to a stop in the middle of the room with the record still in his hands. And it seemed to grow and grow, until at last it was as heavy as his own life. The door creaked open, and from the stream of light his mother stepped quietly towards him. He slipped into her arms with his pain, and her warm wet whispers caressed his cheek.

“Don’t cry, my boy,” she whispered. “Don’t you cry.”

But she herself was shaking and in tears.

Sleet

No, there will never be another afternoon like this. It simply couldn’t happen. Because it’s only once in the world that you’re nine years old, chopping the heads off carrots with your new Mora knife, having sleet in the middle of October, and with an aunt — or should I say your mother’s aunt — coming from America at seven-thirty. So here we are, sitting in the barn, cutting the tops off big muddy carrots. If you want to, it’s easy to pretend other things, like how it’s not really carrots that are losing their heads, but something totally different, like kids at school that you don’t like, or even vicious animals. Most of the time we don’t talk. We just cut, the green tops tumbling down between our feet, the headless carrots tossed out in long looping arcs to disappear in the bushel basket.

It smells good from all the freshly dug carrots. The tops are wet and when you get really dirty you can even wash yourself with them. Just like what Alvar does to Sigrid when she’s not watching out — how he jumps up from the upside-down pail, grabs her around the neck and rubs her face with the wet carrot tops till she screams and laughs. But this just makes Grampa lose his temper and start pointing his finger at Mama, who’s sitting next to me on the stool that Alvar uses when he shoes the horses.

“You keep an eye on little brother there …,” he says. “And make sure he don’t try no funny stuff with the girl.”

This makes Sigrid’s face flush red. But Mama, she doesn’t answer Grampa. Nobody answers him most of the time. Maybe because he’s so old. I’m just about the only one that ever does. And then all he does is holler at me. But Mama, she always sticks up for me.

Alvar’s sitting back down on the pail again.

“You just set there on the cutter and mind your own business,” he says to Grampa. “You mind yours and I’ll mind mine.”

Nobody dares to look right now, because sometimes Grampa gets so mad that his face turns beet-red. And that’s when he knocks over his chair and all the other chairs in the kitchen. That’s when he yanks his work shirt down from the hook, throws it to the floor, and starts stomping up and down on it. You only dare to look a little bit. But this time there isn’t much to see, except of course that Grampa’s sitting there on the chaff-cutter. “Why can’t you just sit on a pail like the rest of us,” Alvar said to him when we were getting ready to chop. But Grampa said if he couldn’t sit on the chaff-cutter, then we could go ahead and do it without him. So Mama and Alvar helped him up onto the machine. Sigrid was laughing so hard she had to run into one of the stalls and shut the door behind her. And Mama got mad, because she doesn’t like it when Sigrid laughs at Grampa, and she started scolding him about walking around and making a damn fool of himself in front of other people with his ridiculous carrying-on. But Grampa, he just shrugged and said if he couldn’t sit there on the chaff-cutter, then we could do it without him, and that’s all there was to it.