Stig Dagerman - Sleet - Selected Stories

“I’m real sorry about your loss,” Doughboy says, though he don’t look it. “That’s too bad about your old man…. If you got any time on your hands tonight come on over for a little spell. It ain’t every day we get you back this way, Knut, my boy.”

“No, not since my Mamma passed,” I say, trying to look kind of solemn.

It ain’t so damned easy with all the pictures racing through my head of the good times I’ve had with Doughboy over the years. All the brännvin I’ve knocked back with him would be enough in a pinch to keep me good and limber for half a year.

“Well, we’ll have to see,” I say. “We’ll just have to see.”

I don’t want to sound too eager with Ulrik right here at my elbow. Him, he lets go with a loud click of his tongue and cracks the buggy whip so hard the horse lurches and jerks us forward at one hell of a clip. But the satchel is sitting tight between my knees, so there’s no worries there. The Chevy meanwhile drops into gear, and Doughboy, he moves on.

“Nice car,” I say and I’m just a little curious to know how he come up with the money for it. Last time I saw him he borrowed a five-crown note off me to buy back his woman’s shoes from the pawnbroker. She hadn’t left the house for three days, that girl, or so he told me then. Who the hell knows? Talks a lot, Doughboy. Otherwise he’s OK.

“First he cleaned up on that football pool,” says Ulrik. “And then he hit the lottery. Figure it’s just a matter of time before he drinks himself to death.”

Sounds jealous to me. Good old Ulrik, the same jealous mule he’s always been. He sits there at my elbow flicking the buggy whip, and Blenda bobs and clops down toward The Tourist’s Haven in her usual lazy way. When we get alongside the pub, there’s some brewery trucks parked out front, unloading their deliveries.

“Got any beer at home?” I ask Ulrik. “If not, let’s pick up a case.”

But him, he just cracks the whip like a wild man when I say that and gives that horse some proper inspiration. In no time flat we’re moving out on the bridge at a good clip.

“Can’t you think of nothing else?” he hollers at me. “With your own dad dead! Beer and brännvin . Is that the only thing that fits in your head?”

I could have answered him, alright. Could have helped him recollect who it was that sent the old man money for dipping tobacco for eight long years, or how many of Mamma’s dresses come to her second hand from my woman. So I’d say my head’s got plenty of room for other stuff, and always has, thank you very much! If I wanted to go that way with it, I could bring all this up easy enough. Plus I was only trying to think of all them guests at the funeral dinner. That’s why I thought we should pick up some beer. I’ll never forget how it was after we buried Mamma. How there was nothing left to drink there at the end of the dinner but water. And who had to bear the shame of that? Ulrik and me, of course! I could bring all this up easy enough if I had a mind to.

But it ain’t my style to stir up bad memories like that, even if it didn’t feel right at the time, the way they settled up Mamma’s estate. The water’s running low in the creek bed now, stones lying there naked and dry everywhere you look. We’re up the little hill there in a flash. You can say what you want about Blenda, but that horse can move when she has to. And the old man’s the one spotted that in her and made an offer on her while the getting was good. Funny, I can tell Ulrik is chewing on something he can’t quite get his lips around. But he finally just spits it out like a fish bone.

“So how’s things with your woman there?” He says. “With Elinda?”

A simple question deserves a simple answer.

“She caught a cold,” I say. “And her skirt hem got caught in the back wheel of her bike whiles she was riding it, so she took a good spill and sprained her arm. Other than that, everything’s jim-dandy, I guess.”

That shuts him up. Good old Ultrick! I know just what he was getting at, of course. I’m not a fool, and I never have been. I figure they got some idea about things back here at home. Lydia’s taken care of that, if nobody else has. You can count on that. Or that fella of hers, the tub o’ lard who runs around in that van of his all the time, pushing his radio sets on everybody. Of course, nobody can talk about how that fella’s made all his money. We’re not supposed to mention it. I could mention it, though, if I had to. And I don’t mean whisper.

He’s good and quiet now, Ulrik. You never know what he’s thinking. He’s a shrewd one, alright. Always has been. Shrewd and stubborn. Carlsson’s Café has big patio umbrellas out in their yard now, and The Cottage on the Green’s got a mini-golf course. I could maybe play a round later this evening. If anybody’s got a problem with that I know just what to say. “Let’s not forget the old man was never one to mope around!” Just look at how he was when we buried Mamma. Or right after we buried her. When he waved me into his room that evening.

“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.