Sleet: Selected Stories

“Come on in here, my boy,” he says to me. “Don’t let anybody see you.”

Then he takes two glasses out of his dresser and a bottle of cognac he’s got squirreled away in there. And we sit down next to each other on the couch and drink up the little bit that’s left in the bottle.

“Son, I like you,” he says. “You ain’t hard to get on with nor full of yourself.”

He always was fair, the old man, and he had an eye for character. He wasn’t above lifting a glass with you, either, not even then when he was seventy-two. What will I have to come home to, now that the old man’s dead and gone?

Maybe I should try to cheer Ulrik up. Not like he’s had a whole hell of a lot to sing about himself, all alone on the farm, without the good sense to get himself a woman. The woman that kept house for him, she just picked up and left. Think they said the old man had a hard time keeping his hands off her after Mamma passed, but people, they say all kinds of things. Don’t see why they’d need a woman to tend house anyway after Mamma was gone. She’s the one that needed tending, confined to bed all the time. But the old man, he was up on his feet to the very end, and whipping together a little daily grub was never any problem for him, not even at his age. It’s a good thing the farmhand stayed on, though, ’cause Ulrik couldn’t get along without him, don’t care how strong they brag he is.

Down in the village “cinter,” as they say it here at home, there ain’t a soul in sight. OK, maybe one. A tall fella standing there at the edge of the road with a paper bag in his hands, waiting for us to go by. A drifter, I’m sure, ’cause as soon as we’re clear he crosses real quick and goes right through the gate at Petterson’s, the grocer’s place. Couldn’t have picked a wronger damn door than that one to visit. Petterson wouldn’t give a bum a plug nickel, a miser just like everybody else around here. The old man was a breed apart when it come to that. If a drifter stopped off at his door you can be sure he’d get some food and rest. The old man was probably just happy to have someone to talk to. He was a happy soul like that. Not like Ulrik, who you couldn’t choke a word out of. When me and the old man was sitting there in his room after Mamma’s funeral, he says to me: “To get a drink in this house a man’s got to go and sneak off.” It ain’t like Ulrik would say anything to him about it, but he sure as hell would glower. Practically till his eyes burned. But to get a word out of him you’d have to make him good and furious.

That was the last time I ever spoke with the old man. So I ain’t gonna forget that in a hurry. And I’ll say this much, them others ought to know — all of them! — that the old man wasn’t one to look down his nose at the next fella. And all this noise they make about what a capable fellow Ulrik is — that’s all I hear every time I come home to visit, all I’ve heard ever since I moved to the city! How he’s as good as three men and works himself that hard on the farm, whiles I just kick up my feet and have a good time in town! And how he never swears, unless he’s besides himself with anger! How he don’t smoke and hasn’t touched a drop since he was a conscript in the army! Of course, there was that one time on the old man’s seventieth birthday when me and him mixed some brännvin into the lemonade and then poured a big glass of it for Ulrik. And him, he was so thirsty he just guzzled down the whole thing, thinking it was plain old lemonade, of course. What a hell of a mess that was — Ulrik out there throwing up all over the front yard and then coming back in and railing at us like a creature possessed. But anyways, he got a few drops in him that time. That’s for sure.

Now we meet the new schoolmaster on the road, and he’s so stuck-up he can barely bring himself to lift his hat. Ulrik tells me old Jacob is dead. He was the schoolmaster in my day.

“Gave up the ghost right there in his yard, sitting in a chair,” he says. “The old ones is going. No question about that. First it was Mamma, then Jonsson, who ran the mill …”

He drowned in the mill creek last fall, I heard. Everybody heard it. It was on the radio: “In Kvarnlunda eighty-two-year-old Elov Jonsson, former mill proprietor, was pronounced dead on Tuesday evening, the apparent victim of a drowning.” That very same week an old woman got run over on the highway, though I can’t say I knew her.

“Then come old Jacob,” Ulrik says, “and Stenlund, who got himself cancer and died in the poorhouse. And now it’s the old man.”