Sleet: Selected Stories

The grieving band! My body suddenly turns cold and the grudge I bear the others just falls away like nothing. I stop thinking how everybody’s out to run me down. And I pretty much forget Elinda. I don’t cry anymore on account of my misunderstood heart of gold. Instead I lay here on the old man’s sofa bed and see myself for the fucking pig I am. To lose the grieving band like that — that’s like losing the grief. I took the wrong path somewhere and let that band slip from my arm. That’s my memorial to the old man — getting shitfaced drunk and losing the reminder of my loss. What a lousy pig I am. Always have been and always will be. And much as I try to close my eyes and block it out, the shame is there all the same. I can picture that black band laying in a pool of puke or dangling from the barbed wire outside the Pavilion. Or maybe somebody’s picked it up there by the outdoor dance floor and said, “Look! Someone went and lost their armband! That miserable slob Knut, of course. That goddamn boozehound that can’t keep sober once, not even the night before his old man’s funeral. Same damn thing when his mother got buried. What a piece of work that son of a bitch is, good old Knut Lindqvist — spelled with a ‘qv,’ like he told the deputy! He sure has come up in the world since he moved to the city to pick up other people’s garbage.”

And as I sink further down into a yellow gloom, so warm and vile, I can remember all at once how things went at Mamma’s funeral. How the first thing I did that day was get up and puke out the window, just as Ulrik was passing by with a couple of milk pails, and how he spat out his contempt at me.

“I ain’t gonna make you clean up your mess on the footpath out front, not this time, but you can be damn sure you’re gonna scrub all the puke off the front stoop!”

And I remember waking up again, a while later, with no trousers on my legs, ’cause of course they got caught on a metal latch and torn at the knee as I stumbled through the gate drunk. So Lydia, she was up early sewing them together again in the kitchen. And then I had to sneak down to the basement to have a stiff one in secret to steady myself. And the rest of them, they could see it in my step, ’cause there wasn’t anything else in my stomach. If it wasn’t for the old man I’d have had to make it over to the car on my own, but he took me by the arm. And then I got woozy from the drink and had motion sickness in the car, so it took us right up to the last minute before we all got to the church, they had to drive so damn slow. And then down in the dead room Nisse and Ulrik unfastened the coffin lid, and there lay Mamma with her pointy nose, so yellow and scrawny. And then Ulrik laid the handkerchief back over her again and I was weeping so bad I almost put out the flame on the candle I was holding. And then there was the sound of that lid creaking the way it did as they screwed it back on for the last time. And the caretaker, he walked ahead of the rest of us as we took up the coffin.

“You ain’t so sturdy,” Ulrik said to me, “so you get in back.”

And truth be told, I didn’t look like much in that suit, so I pulled up the rear. And boy, was it full in the church. Mostly old folks, sitting there staring. It was July and hot like the blazes, so the sweat was just pouring off me, and what a relief it was when I could put my end of the coffin down in front of the altar. And then afterwards I just held my handkerchief up in front of my face, and the gravel from the priest’s trowel sounded like a rattlesnake. And then up we went again to bear the coffin, and my shoulder was aching something awful, so bad I could scream. And I got the straps mixed up ’cause I was flustered. And Nisse, he wanted to say something smart to me, I could tell, but then I guess he remembered he was in church, so he bit his tongue. And I held up my end as best I could going out the church, but all the way back over to the dead house I felt sick right down to my toes. And Mamma, well, she was starting to smell a little. Just a little. Maybe I was the only one that noticed. And then as we was all lowering her into the grave I let go just a bit too soon, I was so wiped out. If the others wasn’t a good bit stronger than me to begin with, the whole thing would’ve just crashed down into the hole. I really wanted to speak a word there at the grave, but I couldn’t get a word out for all my bawling, so I just dropped in the wreath. And then we all headed back to the cars for the ride back to the funeral dinner. And at table Lydia leaned over to me and whispered that I brought too much brännvin, ’cause now all the old guys was getting drunk. I told her I thought Mamma would’ve liked to be here for this.

“She’d have been so goddamn happy to see everybody having such a good time!”