Sleet. Stig Dagerman
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.
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.”
So they probably didn’t mean for me to be on the carrot with them, but that doesn’t matter. I’m already on a whole bunch of other places. I’m on the barn wall, I’m up in the haylofts, I’m over on one of the stall doors, and I’m even right here in this part of stable. We’re all here, for that matter. Even Grampa and Gramma are here, on the stable wall, but their names are so old you can barely read them. Gustav and Augusta Berg 8-10-1897. In 1914 came Mama for the first time, and then in 1918 came Alvar. I’m here for the first time in 1933 and then came Sigrid in 1936. And right here in the stable it even says Palestine on one of the beams. It happened last year, just before Gramma died. A tramp slept in the stable one night, but he left before anybody woke up. While the rest of us were having our coffee, Gramma went out to get the eggs like she did every morning. And then suddenly she came running in, all out of breath, and said: “You won’t believe who slept under our barn roof last night! Jesus! That’s who! None other than the Lord God, Jesus Christ Himself!” But then another tramp stopped off that night and I was out in the stable with him, showing him where the horse blankets were, so he wouldn’t have to freeze to death. He wanted to shake my hand and thank me, but I was afraid he was full of lice, so I kept my distance. And then he got a look at Palestine on the wall and said: “Oh, Christ! Has that old scumbag Palestine been here? If that’s the case, you can bet them blankets is just crawling with lice.” So Jesus was just another bum after all, and full of lice at that. When I told Gramma the truth at supper that night, she just sat there and cried. She told me I was too little to understand. But Mama stood up for me and said I certainly was not, and just because some lousy tramp came along who felt like calling himself Palestine or Jerusalem or the Holy Land, then that didn’t necessarily mean he was Christ or the Apostle Paul, Mama said.
My carrots are just about done now, so I’m taking it easy. Mama’s are almost done, too, and the same with Alvar and Sigrid. Only Grampa’s got a whole heap left. Right now, Mama’s over by the chaff-cutter trying to get her hands on some of them. But this is only making Grampa really mad. He’s telling her to leave his carrots alone,