Sleet: Selected Stories

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.”