Sleet: Selected Stories

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.”