CARL Tollefson was what people, only a short time ago, commonly used to refer to as a nice, clean old bachelor. In any event, that was the manner in which Little Paul’s mother, Tollefson’s niece, chose to characterize him to Big Paul while their guest unpacked in his room upstairs.
“I was so pleased to see he was a nice, clean old bachelor,” she said, buttering toast for her husband, who refused to go to bed on an empty stomach. “Most old men get awful seedy if they don’t marry. And I really had no idea what to expect. I hadn’t seen him since I was a little girl – I couldn’t have been more than ten. Eleven maybe.”
“Christ, Lydia,” said Big Paul, “don’t you think they keep them clean in that T.B. sanatorium? They don’t have no choice about bathing in a place like that. They make them. Sure he looks clean. Now.”
“Did you notice he wears elastic sleeve garters to keep his cuffs even? When was the last time you saw somebody wear sleeve garters, Paul?” She slid the plate deftly in front of him. “I think it’s real cute.”
“You make sure he has his own plate and cup,” said Big Paul, who was mortally afraid of illness. “And make sure it’s a different colour from the dish set. I don’t want his stuff getting mixed with ours. I’m not eating off no goddamn T.B. plate.”
“You know better than to talk such ignorance,” his wife answered him. “He’d die of embarrassment. Anyway, he isn’t contagious. Do you think he’d get a foot in the door if he was?”
She tilted her head and lifted an eyebrow ever so slightly in the direction of their son, as if to say: Do you really think I’d put him in jeopardy?
Little Paul stood with his thin shoulders jammed against the wall, and a harried look on his face as he scratched the red scale of eczema which covered his hands. His hair, which had been cropped short because of the skin disorder, appeared to have been gnawed down to his skull by a ravenous rodent, rather than cut, and made the scalp which showed through the fine hair seem contused and raw.
He was six years old and slow to read, or count, or do most things people seemed to expect of him. In school he gave the impression of a small, pale spider hung in the centre of a web of stillness, expecting at any moment to feel one of the fragile threads vibrate with a warning.
“Give him a chipped plate then,” said Big Paul around a mouthful of toast. “You can keep track of that easy enough. He’ll never notice.”
“You might buy three or four weanling pigs,” his wife replied, ignoring him, “and he could look after them. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind doing light chores for his room and board. We could feed them garden trash. It would keep him busy pottering around until he found a place.”
“Where’s he going to find a place?” asked Big Paul with that easy contemptuousness which had first attracted his wife to him. “Nobody is going to hire an old fart like him.”
“He’s not so old. Sixty-six isn’t so old. And it’s not as if farm work is all bull labour any more. He could get on with a dairy farm and run the milking machines, say. Or maybe work a cattle auction. He knows cattle, he said so himself.”
“Anybody can say anything. Saying something doesn’t make it so.”
“Tollefsons were never blowhards nor braggers.”
“One lung,” said Big Paul moodily, “he won’t last long. You saw him. The old bugger looks like death warmed over.”
“Paul,” his wife returned sharply, “not in front of the boy.”
“Why did he come here?” whined Little Paul, who felt something vaguely like jealousy, and decided he could exercise it now that his presence had been formally recognized.
“To die in my upstairs bed,” his father said unhappily, apparently speaking to himself, “that’s why. To die on a goddamn spanking-new box-spring mattress.”
“Don’t listen to your father,” said his mother. “He’s only joking.”
“What do you want?” Tollefson said, startled to see the silent, solemn boy standing in the doorway dressed in pyjamas. He tried hard to remember the child’s name. He couldn’t.
“That’s my dad’s bed,” Little Paul said pointing to where Tollefson sat. “He owns it.”
“Yes.” The old man took exception to what he read as a note of belligerence in the boy’s voice. “And this is my room. Nobody is welcome here who doesn’t knock.” Little Paul’s settled gaze made him uncomfortable. He supposed it was being shirtless and exposing the scar of his operation – an L of ridged, plum-coloured tissue, the vertical of which ran alongside his spine, the horizontal directly beneath and parallel to the last bone of his rib cage. Whenever Tollefson thought of his missing lung he felt empty, hollow, unbalanced. He felt that way now.
“Why can’t I come in here without knocking?” the boy demanded listlessly, his eyes shifting about the room, looking into things, prying. “This is my dad’s house.”
“Because I have certain rights, After all, I’m sixty-six and you’re only…” He didn’t know. “How old are you anyway?”
“Almost seven.”
“Almost seven,” Tollefson said. He extended one blunt-fingered hand scrolled with swollen blue veins, grasped a corner of the dresser and dragged himself upright. Then he unzipped a cracked leather case and removed two old-fashioned gentleman’s hairbrushes which he slipped on his hands.
“What are you doing?” said the boy, advancing cautiously into the room. He thrust his tattered head from side to side like some wary buzzard fledgling.
What an ugly child, Tollefson thought, and was immediately ashamed. He glanced at the hairbrushes on his hands and remembered he had originally intended to have them initialled. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity rang in his mind.
What exactly had his married sister, Elizabeth, said to him forty-five years ago on the occasion of his twenty-first birthday party?
“Carlie,” she had sung in the lilting voice he had been pleased to hear her daughter Lydia had inherited, “you’re a handsome young devil. You do know that, don’t you?”
No. He hadn’t. Never dreamed it. The notion had surprised and confounded him. He would have liked to ask someone else’s opinion on the matter, but that was hardly the thing a person did.
This startling information, however, did lead him to begin to take great pains with his appearance. He refused any longer to let his father cut his hair. Instead, he went to the barber in town for a “trim” and his first baptism with bay rum. His sideburns crept past his ear-lobes; his hair appeared to be trying to mount a plausible pompadour. He bought elastic-sided boots, took to looking at himself in store windows when he sauntered past, and lounged on street corners with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops. Carl Tollefson began to suspect more than one girl of being in love with him.
Nobody told him any different until, in a moment of fanciful speculation, insane even for him, he remarked to his brother-in-law Roland that he thought the butcher’s wife had her “eye on me.”
Elizabeth spoke to him a second time. “Carlie, you remember what I said to you about being a handsome devil? I’m sorry, but I only meant to give you a little confidence – you’re so shy around girls. The thing is, Carlie, there never was a Tollefson born who was anything but plain. I swear to God Roland married me out of charity. Still, I learned some time ago that nothing much helps; you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. So let me give you a little advice – the girls around here don’t much run to hair oil and elastic-sided boots. What they want is steady, and God knows you’re steady. Just remember, Carlie, we’re all in the same boat – there never was a Tollefson who turned a head with his profile.”
“You think I don’t know that,” he had replied with a tight, pinched laugh. “What kind of fool do you think I am?”
Studying his face in the mirror he was puzzled by the mystery of how he had been able to believe in his supposed good looks, even for a second. Evidence to the contrary stared out at him from the mirror as it had every one of those mornings forty-five years ago as he had so carefully shaved.
Of course, age hadn’t improved him. But, by and large, it was the same old face, only a little more used up. An indifferent kind of face: mild blue eyes which in a certain light appeared unfocused; a limp mouth which he often caught himself breathing through; a decent, ordinary, serviceable nose for a decent, ordinary face; and a set of small, neat ears which lay close to his skull and gave him the surprised look of a man caught in a fierce wind.
Perhaps it was from the moment he realized what he was in comparison with what he hoped to be that he turned in upon himself. And although he bore no resentment against his sister for planting the seed that flowered in his humiliation, he always sensed that the story of his life might have been very different if she had never said what she had. Not better, only different.
After all, he did not renounce all of what he had come to be; that would have been an admission that everything stemmed from self-delusion, and he was too proud to do that. The sideburns disappeared and the never-to-be-completed edifice of his pompadour crumbled from neglect, but the elastic-sided boots and the trips to the barber endured.
Nor did he dare court the local girls, imagining that they scorned the memory of his debonair days and thought him a poor thing, likely simple. Yet when the chrome-backed hairbrushes he had ordered from the catalogue finally arrived, he hadn’t returned them and requested a refund. He was not quite the same young man he had been before his twenty-first birthday.
“What are you doing?” said Little Paul again, with greater emphasis.
“I’m going to brush my hair,” Tollefson told him, cocking his head and looking at himself in the glass from a different angle.
“And then what?”
“I’ll get myself ready for breakfast. Like you should. I’ll wash my face and hands.”
“Why?”
“Cleanliness is next to godliness.”
“Why can’t I come to your room without knocking?” the boy asked again.
“Because I might be doing something I don’t want anybody to see.”
“Like what?”
“Praying. Having my private talks with God that nobody has any business butting into,” said Tollefson sternly. “For Jesus told us: ‘When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.’ ”
“Here? In this room? God would come here in this room?” the boy said excitedly, his fingers digging and twisting at the crotch of his pyjamas. “Come here and talk to you?”
“Yes, in a way He would.”
Little Paul thought for a moment, sucking his bottom lip. “I don’t believe you,” he said. “God wouldn’t fit in such a little room. Jesus might fit, but not God.”
“Same thing, son,” said Tollefson, slipping into his shirt.
Little Paul appeared to be sceptical of Tollefson’s contention, but he let the subject drop. “My dad’s buying you pigs,” he informed the old man.
“That a fact?”
“Can I help you look after them pigs?”
“You can if you promise not to come here in my room without knocking any more.”
“All right.” He climbed on to the bed and crossed and locked his legs.
“Why don’t you go to the bathroom, son?”
“Don’t need to.”
“Suit yourself. But no accidents on my bed, eh?”
Little Paul giggled at the idea. Somehow Tollefson heard this as a plaintive sound. The boy didn’t seem to have acquired the knack of laughter. Tollefson began to do up his shirt.
“Why did you come here?” the boy asked abruptly.
Tollefson paused at his collar-button. He always did up his collars. He was that kind of man. “I never thought about it,” he said. “I suppose because there was no place else to go.” He considered further. “No, God brought me here,” he decided at last.
“To die in this upstairs bed,” added Little Paul conversationally, patting the bedclothes with a hand crusted with eczemic lesions.
That terrible spring Big Paul often inquired of Tollefson, “Did you bring this goddamn miserable weather with you, or what?” He made a point of the goddamn, always careful to stress it after he learned from Lydia that her uncle had turned “churchy” some time during the past twenty years.
“I don’t remember hearing anything about his being religious from Mom,” she said. “He didn’t catch it from home; I know that for sure. Grandpa Tollefson’s acquaintance with church was of the marrying and burying variety.”
“Why do they have to creep?” said Big Paul. “He minces around like he was walking on eggs. They all walk the same and they all talk the same. They’re so jeezly nice. I never thought there’d come a day when I’d have to sidle past some creeping christer slipping and sliding around my house.”
“There’s nothing the matter with religion,” declared his wife. “You could do with a little yourself.”
“What really frosts my ass about guys like him,” said Big Paul, who found anything out of the ordinary offensive, “is they got no idea of what’s normal. Take him. He wouldn’t say shit if his mouth was full of it. Yesterday he fell down in that slop in the corral. Know what he says?”
“Can’t imagine.”
“ ‘Oh Lord, how long?’ he says. ‘How long what?’ I asks. ‘Oh Lord, how long will it rain?’ he says, and then laughs like he was in his right mind. That’s his idea of a joke!”
“If God happens to answer his question, let me in on the secret,” said Lydia. “I want to hang washing some time this week.”
But April was not a month to hang washing. April was a month of cruel rains. The eaves on the house choked on ice water; the poplars behind the cow sheds glistened in an agony of chilling sweats; and sparrows shrank to black clots of damp feathers which rode telephone wires that vibrated dolefully in the wind.
Big Paul’s farmyard swam in water. The early calves were dropped from the warm bath of the womb into numbing puddles – where four drowned before they found the strength to gain their feet. Others shook in the steady drizzles until they contracted hemorrhagic septicemia, shat blood, and died between their mother’s legs.
Under the pressure of circumstances, Tollefson tried to do more than he was capable of. The muck in the corrals sucked the strength out of his legs and left him trembling from head to foot, his single lung straining, the blood surging in his temples. When the old man stumbled in pursuit of new-born calves, his mouth gaped in a mute appeal for oxygen; his breath was barely visible in the cold as a thin, exhausted vapour. The wound on his back became a fiery letter, and one grey day in the mindlessness of utter fatigue, trying to wrestle a struggling calf to shelter in a pelting rain, he found himself muttering over and over, “L…, L…, L…,” in cadence with the thrumming of the blood in his ears and scar.
In mid-month, on April 18, the temperature dropped and the rain resolved itself into a stinging sleet which came driving out of a flat, impassive sky and froze to whatever it struck. Fence posts were sheathed in ice; barbed wire turned to glass, its spikes to frosty thorns. The cattle humped their backs to the bitter onslaught and received it dumbly, until their coats crackled when they stirred uneasily during lulls in the wind.
Big Paul and Tollefson began to search the bushes behind the cowsheds for calves when it became clear, after an hour, that the storm was not going to abate. They panted over deadfalls, forced their way through blinds of saskatoon and chokecherry bushes, slogged through the low spots where the puddles lay thick and sluggish, a porridge of ice crystals.
Within half an hour Tollefson’s flannel shirt stuck to his back, heavy and damp with a sickly sweat. Thirty minutes later he had the feeling that his legs were attempting to walk out from underneath him. They felt as light and airy as balsa wood; it was only by an exertion of great will that he made them carry him. At some point, however, the cold gnawed through the gristle of his resolve and concentration, his mind wandered, his legs did what they wished – and folded under him. Tollefson was surprised to find himself kneeling in mud and slush, the wet seeping through his pant-legs and draining slowly into his boots, while he listened to his heart ticking over, and felt the scar blaze on his back.
“I found him,” Big Paul would tell the beer parlour crowd later, “else he’d have froze stiff as a tinker’s dink. It was just behind my barley bin, about a quarter-mile from where he says his legs gave out. I guess the old bugger got pooped out and sat down for a minute, and then his legs cramped with the cold and he couldn’t get up. When I seen him he was just a lump of snow by the granary skids. He must have had horseshoes up his ass, because I could have easy missed him. I looked twice, mind you.
“But as I was saying, I saw this bump and first thing I says to myself is, ‘That’s another christly calf down and sure as Carter’s got liver pills he’s dead, son of a bitch.’ I nearly crapped my drawers when I got close up and saw it wasn’t no calf but the wife’s uncle. I hadn’t seen him for an hour, but I’d figured he’d got cold and went back to the house.
“He didn’t have a thing left in him. He was on his side with an arm over his face to keep the sleet off. He could have been sleeping. Didn’t hear me until I was practically standing on him.
“ ‘Hey!’ I hollered. ‘Hey!’ I figured he was tits up. I wasn’t too crazy about touching a dead man. But he wasn’t dead. ‘You found me,’ he says, real quiet. Then he takes his arm off his face. No teeth. He lost his teeth somewhere.
“ ‘You broke a leg, or what?’ I says. ‘Can you get up?’
“ ‘No, I can’t get up,’ he mumbles. ‘I’m beat.’ He didn’t talk so good without his teeth and he was so tired I could barely make out what he was saying. I yelled at him: ‘You broke a leg or had a heart attack or what?’
“ ‘I’m tired,’ he says. ‘My legs give up on me.’
“Now he’s old but he ain’t light, and I was thinking how the hell was I going to get him out of there? He seen I was wondering how I was going to pack his arse out of there. I couldn’t get a truck in there; she’d go down to the axles.
“ ‘Go hook the stoneboat to the Ford tractor,’ he says, ‘and pull me out of here.’ He had it all figured out. Of course, he had plenty of time, didn’t he?
“ ‘I got a pile of manure on it!’ I hollers. ‘I’ll have to throw it off first!’
“ ‘I can’t wait,’ he says. ‘I can’t feel my toes.’ Then he says, ‘You bring her in here and load me on. That Ford can pull a double load of b.s., can’t it?’ And he laughs. I tell you, I figure he was pretty far gone for him to say that. That’s pretty strong stuff for that old man. He’s a regular Bible-banger. I never heard him say so much as damn before that.
“So that’s how I dragged him out of there. Rolled him onto a pile of cow shit and pulled him up to the house. He just lay there with his arms flung out on either side, the sleet coming down in his face. He didn’t even try to cover up. I don’t think he cared for nothing at that point.”
Eric, who was seated across the table from Paul, said: “You say he crawled a half-mile? You ought to race him against Charlie’s kid,” he laughed, poking Charlie. “I was over to his place yesterday, and his rug rat can really rip. I’d put a dollar on him.”
“I paced it off next day,” Big Paul said, and his voice hinted at wonder. “That was what it was, just under a quarter-mile. And he gets the pension. I didn’t think he had it in him.”
“How’s he now?” asked Charlie.
“Seems he’s okay. We brought him home from the hospital a week ago. He spends most of the day laying in bed, then he reads to the kid when he comes home from school. Reads him mostly Bible stories. The old bird ain’t nothing if he ain’t odd. Lydia thinks it helps the kid. He don’t do much at school.”
“Sounds just like his old man,” said Eric, “a regular little shit-disturber.”
“No,” said Big Paul, honesty itself, “he just don’t learn.”
“He won’t grow up to be a shit-disturber with a preacher in the house,” said Charlie, draining his glass.
“You ought to seen the kid,” Big Paul said, suddenly struck by the recollection. “The things he comes up with. The things he thinks of. The other day I come in from feeding the stock and Little Paul’s traipsing around the kitchen with a towel tied on his head and a piece of butcher’s tape stuck on his chin for a beard.
“ ‘Who the hell are you?’ I says.
“ ‘Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt,’ he says. Do you believe that? Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt.
“ ‘Well, lead the bastards over the nearest cliff,’ I says.” Big Paul winked at his companions and rubbed his palms on his knees. “ ‘Over the nearest cliff,’ I says,” he repeated, laughing.
“A preacher in the house,” said Eric, shaking his head. “That’s trouble. You know what they say about preachers. Hornier than a two-peckered owl is what my old man used to say. Watch that old bugger; he might preach the pants off the wife.”
“Keep him away from the goats,” snorted Charlie. “He’ll turn the cheese.”
Big Paul hated it when they teased him. Every time they started in on him he began to feel confused and helpless. “Ah, not him,” he said nervously, “for chrissakes show some respect. He’s her uncle, for crying out loud.”
“Any port in a storm,” said Eric, poking Charlie.
“He don’t like women much,” said Big Paul, “he never got married.” He paused, and, suddenly inspired, saw a solution. “You know,” he said, “if anything, he’s a little fruity. He’s got fruity ways. Irons his own shirts. Cleans his fingernails every day before dinner. Queer, eh?”
“That reminds me,” said Charlie. “Did you ever hear the one about the priest and the altar boy?”
“What?” said Big Paul sharply.
Tollefson’s four volumes of Bible Tales for Children were twenty years old. He had bought them for his own edification weeks after his conversion at a Pentecostal meeting he had been taken to by a widow who had thoughts of marriage. She never landed that fish, but Jesus did.
Tollefson bought the books for two reasons. He admired the bright illustrations, particularly the angels who were sweetness itself; and he thought that in those children’s books the great mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection would be so simply and obviously stated that his perplexities on those matters would evaporate. He found they helped.
Now the first volume lay open on the scarlet counterpane that covered Tollefson’s bed and Little Paul was huddled beside him, his head drawn into his bony shoulders, his face intent.
“But why did God ask Abraham to do that?” the boy demanded, his voice much too loud for the narrow bedroom.
“Can’t you wait for nothing?” said Tollefson. “The book’ll say. It’ll all come out in the end.” The old man resumed reading, his words muffled and moist because his lost teeth had not been found.
“So Abraham took his only son Isaac, whom he loved more than life itself, two trusty servants, a donkey, and bundles of sticks to make a fire, and began his journey to the land of Moriah where God had told him he would point out the mountain on which he was to sacrifice his son Isaac to God.”
Tollefson paused and wiped at his slack lips with the back of his hand. Little Paul wound his fingers together and grimaced suddenly, like a small ape displaying his teeth.
“Why is God doing this?” he said nervously. “Little Isaac is scared, I bet.”
“He doesn’t know,” Tollefson reminded him.
“Why is God doing this?” the boy said. “Why?”
“Wait and see, it’s like a mystery. Wait until the end of the story. Listen now,” he said, beginning to read in a flat, uninspired monotone. “Can you imagine what pain was in Abraham’s heart when he watched Isaac skipping lightheartedly beside him? How he longed to disobey God?”
“He won’t do it,” Little Paul said under his breath. “Isaac’s daddy won’t do it. Not when he sees how scared he is.”
“And all through the trip,” Tollefson read, “Isaac kept repeating one question over and over again. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘we are carrying these big bundles of sticks to make a fire, but what will we offer to the Lord our God, since we have forgotten a lamb to sacrifice?’
“But Abraham ignored the question, because he could not tell his son that he was the sacrifice.”
Little Paul stared down at the stark print; for the first time in his life his mind wrestled with the hard words. He wanted to spell out the conclusion to this fearsome puzzle. He hated the story. He hated the book. He hated all books. They said he could read if he wanted to. That he could count. Your tests prove it, they said. You could read if you’d try. But he wouldn’t. Little Paul was not going down that long tunnel. Count maybe.
His head could count. One, two, three, four… on and on you could go. Numbers never stopped. But they would never find out he counted in his head. He just would never say the numbers out loud.
“After many weary days and thirsty miles Isaac and Abraham arrived at the mountain in Moriah, Abraham climbed it with oh so sad a heart, his son beside him. When they arrived at the top they gathered stones and built an altar.”
Little Paul had begun to rock himself on the bed, his arms clasping his knees tightly. He slowly waggled his prison-camp head with its shorn hair and scent of powerful medication from side to side. “No,” he said softly, his lips carefully forming before he sounded the word, “no-o-o, he won’t.”
Tollefson, his ears numbed by the singsong cadences of his own voice, did not hear Little Paul. He had a picture of his own forming behind his eyes. A great golden angel crouched behind a rock on a barren, sandy mountain top. Rescue. Unconsciously, his voice began to rise with his own excitement. “Suddenly, after the last stone was lifted, Abraham seized his son, bound him, placed him on the altar amongst the sticks, and lifted his sharp dagger high, high above his head!”
A sob, a darting hand, and the page was torn. The old man, stunned, caught Little Paul; but the boy’s body wriggled violently upward, his eyes staring, his mouth a pocket of blackness – a diver with bursting lungs breaking the surface. For a moment the boy’s body throbbed with inchoate fury as he strained silently in Tollefson’s grasp, speechless, and full of wonder at what had passed through his mind. Then he screamed: “It’s stupid! It’s stupid! You’re stupid!”
“Paul! Stop it!”
“He killed him!” shouted Little Paul. “The little boy is dead! There’s nothing left of him! He’s all gone! All of him!”
“No,” said Tollefson, and he said it with such assurance and sincerity that the boy went quiet in his hands. “No, he isn’t. The little boy’s alive. There’s an angel, and the angel tells Abraham not to kill Isaac, and there’s a ram in the thicket,” he went on quickly, “and they sacrifice that instead. The little boy… Isaac, he isn’t dead.”
“Yes?”
“Yes,” said Tollefson. Once more on familiar ground, he was recovering his stride and filling with annoyance. “What kind of performance was that?” he asked, handling the book. “You can’t get away with stunts like that. You know, people won’t stand for it. Look at the book.”
Little Paul was not interested in the book. “Why did God tell him to kill the little boy? Was he bad?”
“No, he wasn’t bad. God told Abraham to kill Isaac to see if Abraham loved God enough to obey. And Abraham did love God enough. He loved God so much that he was willing to sacrifice his only son, just as God was willing to sacrifice his only son, Jesus, because He so loved the world and wished to wash it clean of sin, as white as snow, by the saving mercy of His blood.”
Little Paul could see blood. Pails and pails of blood were needed to wash away the sins of the world. He had seen his father catch blood in a pail to make sausage. Blood pumping hot out of a slashed throat in bright jets. Later, when it cooled, it turned black and thick like pudding.
“And because Abraham loved God,” said Tollefson, “he would do anything God asked. No matter how hard.”
“Would you?”
“I’d try very hard. We must always try our hardest to please God. You must too, Paul, because He loves you.”
“Did he love Isaac?”
“Of course. He loves all his children.”
“I don’t like the story.”
“Oh, you didn’t at first,” said Tollefson, “because you didn’t wait for the end. But everything came out all right in the end, didn’t it? That’s the point.”
It didn’t seem the point to Little Paul. It seemed to him that God, being who he was, could have as easily ended the story the other way. That, to Little Paul, seemed the point.
“What do you mean,” said Big Paul, “he wet the bed?”
“He wet the bed, that’s what I mean. And keep your voice down.”
“Jesus, he’s seven years old.”
“It’s the nightmares,” Lydia said. “They all have them at his age. Myrna’s youngest had them for months and then, just like that, they stopped.”
Big Paul felt uneasy. “He never plays with other kids. He’s always with that sick old man. It’s as if he’s afraid to take his eyes off him. No wonder the goddamn kid has nightmares.”
“Maybe if you didn’t talk about Uncle dying in front of Paul, he wouldn’t have bad dreams.”
“Shit.”
“And he spends time with Uncle because of the pigs. He likes to help him.”
“That’s another thing. I told you to tell that kid those pigs weren’t supposed to become pets. That they were going to be butchered. Yesterday I go down to the pens and he shows me how they’ll roll over to have their bellies scratched. Jesus H. Murphy, doesn’t anybody listen to me around here any more?”
“He knows they’ve got to be butchered. I’ve told him and told him.”
“And something else,” Big Paul said, his voice rising with outrage, “the old boy is butchering those pigs. I’m not looking like a shit-head in my kid’s eyes killing those pigs. I didn’t teach them cute tricks!”
“My God, Paul, are you jealous?” Lydia asked, surprised and a little pleased at the notion.
“And last of all,” he yelled, “tell that old son of a bitch to leave the bedroom door open when he’s in there with Little Pauly! Better still, keep the kid out of there!”
“You pig,” she said.
“What are you telling Uncle?” Little Paul whispered, his head twisting at the keyhole in a futile attempt to see more of Tollefson’s bedroom.
“Don’t you listen, Uncle Carl,” he muttered fiercely. “Don’t you listen to him.”
Through the keyhole the boy could see only part of the room, and that part contained Tollefson’s bed, by which the old man knelt praying, his bare back turned to the door, and the scar, faded by time, a faint letter formed by a timid hand.
What was out of view, in that portion of the bedroom that contained the unseen wardrobe, toward which Tollefson’s head was beseechingly turned, Little Paul could only imagine.
The old man and the boy picked their way between the dusty rows of garden vegetables under a stunning August sun, collecting refuse for the pigs. Little Paul trudged along listlessly behind Tollefson, pulling a wagon heaped with old pea vines; tiny, sun-scalded potatoes; beet and carrot tops. Their two shadows, black as pitch, crept over the dry, crumbling soil; shattered on the plant tops shaking in the breeze; squatted, stooped, and stretched.
Tollefson was admitting to himself he was a sinful man, a deceitful man. For months, ever since the April storm in which he had collapsed, he had known he was incapable of any longer earning his way in the world. His working days were over. He really was an old man, and in his talks with God he had come to realize that he was close to death. Yet he had pretended it was only a matter of time before he regained his strength and left to find work. But this deception was no longer enough. His niece and her husband were becoming impatient with him. Perhaps they would soon invite him to leave.
Tollefson didn’t want to leave. He was an old man with nowhere to go. A man with no place of his own; no people of his own. All his life he had lived in other men’s houses; played with other men’s children; even, on occasion, slept with other men’s wives before he had come to know Jesus. He was lonely and frightened.
That was why he had hit on the idea of making Little Paul the beneficiary of his will. He had worked very hard all his life and saved more money than anybody would suspect. Thirty-nine thousand dollars. When he told Lydia what he was going to do, they wouldn’t dare ask him to leave for fear he would take the boy out of his will. What had Jesus said? “Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?”
Big Paul might hate his guts, but he wouldn’t deny his son a stake in thirty-nine thousand dollars. He was sure of that.
Tollefson looked down at Paul grubbing under a tomato plant for wormy fruit. Lydia had told him the child was suffering from bad dreams and nervous diarrhea.
The boy glanced up at him with his flat, guarded eyes. “Tomorrow will be too hot to kill pigs,” he said out of the blue. Although Little Paul hadn’t phrased his sentence as a question, Tollefson knew it was. For a week the boy had heard his father and Tollefson discuss whether they would soon have “killing weather” – cooler temperatures and a wind to prevent flies swarming on the pigs as they were scalded and gutted.
“Can’t wait any longer,” said Tollefson matter-of-factly, shading his eyes and studying the glowing blue glaze of the sky. “Your dad made a booking to have the meat cut and wrapped at the locker plant tomorrow afternoon. I’ll have to do the pigs in the morning.” The old man paused, adjusted his shirt sleeves, and then inquired, “Are you going to give me a hand?”
“It’s too hot to kill pigs,” the boy said sullenly.
“You got to learn some time,” Tollefson said, “if you want to be a farmer. I told you all along them pigs would be butchered, and your mother told you. You knew it. That’s a farmer’s job to grow things for people to eat. Now, you like bacon, don’t you? Where do you think bacon comes from?”
“God,” said Little Paul automatically. He thought he’d learned how to please Tollefson.
His answer took the old man momentarily aback. “Well yes… that’s right. But pigs is what I meant. It comes from pigs. It’s pork. But you’re right. Everything God made, he made for a reason. He made pigs for men to eat.”
“I’d puke,” said Little Paul vehemently. “I’d puke it all up.”
Tollefson took off his long-billed cap and peered into it as if he expected to find there an answer to his predicament. “Listen,” he said at last, taking the boy by the shoulders and looking directly into his face, “you got to learn to see things through. Believe me when I tell you it’s the most important thing in life. You can’t feed a pig and keep a pig and grow a pig and then leave the end, the dirty part, for another man to do. You had the fun of it all, and now you don’t want the rest. It isn’t right, Little Paul,” he said. “You got to learn that. Remember when I read you the story of Abraham and Isaac? You didn’t want to hear the end of the story because you thought it didn’t suit. Just the way now you think butchering those pigs doesn’t suit. But it does. There’s nothing finer in God’s eyes than a farmer, because the work he does, it does good for all people. A farmer feeds people and that’s good. Don’t you see?” he pleaded to the pale, intractable face.
“No.” The boy’s shoulders twisted under his hand. “No.”
“God wants them pigs butchered,” said Tollefson, trying to make sense of it for the boy. “They won’t feel nothing. I’m a top-notch pig shot. I shot hundreds.”
“You talk to him,” said the boy, speaking very quickly, his face a strained mask. “You two got secrets from me. I talk and talk but he doesn’t answer me what you got planned for me. I asked and asked and asked. But it’s a secret. Why don’t he tell me!”
“Who?” said Tollefson, reaching for the boy, alarmed by the fear which had lain in the shallows of the child’s eyes all those months, but which he recognized only then, for the first time.
“Is he hungry?” implored Little Paul. “Is he hungry? Please, is that how the story ends?”