Stig Dagerman - Sleet - Selected Stories

This’ll just stoke their righteous fires, you can be sure of that. They think I’m drunk when really I’ve just got clay in my legs. They plop me down in the trailer cart on top of the newspapers and start pulling me home with the bike. That’s when I set them straight. They hear all about the clay and a few odd things besides. “I was stuck in the asshole of Lappland for eight long months,” I tell them. “So you can be sure I seen a thing or two alright! I hired a driver and car from Norra Station, and that shit-licking excuse for a man goes out through the window faster’n lightning. And just behind him my woman’s sandals come flying, clonking him right in the head. Could’ve thrown her right out on her ass too, but I know how to control myself. Eight long months in that Lappland sewer—”

“Yeah, yeah,” says the fella on the bike that’s pulling me. Like that’s all he’s been hearing from me! Think they can look down their noses at me just ’cause I’m a little undisposed for the moment. Can I help it if I get carsick? There’s pills you can take for that. Next time I’ll do that so there ain’t no misunderstandings. One of these jack-asses is running behind me pushing me in the back like some kind of goddamn deputy. Probably can’t hear a word I say. So I turn half around as best I can and tell him: “Eight long months I was stuck in that Lappland shithole—”

“Shut up!” he says, the dumb bastard. Like he was the one stuck in that shithole for eight months.

It ain’t worth trying to have a proper conversation with these goddamn hayseeds. Till they come to the city and live a while in your shoes, they got no way of understanding what a man can go through.

The road is bumpy, with the trailer cart swaying this way and that behind the bike, so I can’t help dozing off. When I wake up again I’m half slung over a fence post. Christ only knows whose fence this is, though I start to get my bearings after a bit, enough to see that I’m back at home. I fumble along the fence until I get to the gate, where suddenly there’s no more poles running across, and then my legs start turning clay on me again. But I stay up on them all the same. Well, I do trip over the first step when I get to the stoop, ’cause it’s so damn dark and all. They could’ve hung a lamp out here for me when they knew I’d be coming home in the dark. But thinking about me, that ain’t something they’re much used to doing. So I crawl up the steps on my hands and knees and take hold of the door handle. Hope nobody heard me fall down on the stoop, or I’ll never hear the end of it till the day I die, how I went out and got so blind drunk the night before we put the old man in the earth that I couldn’t even stand. But I should be OK. Ain’t no way they’d be up at this hour.

Or so I think. But when I open the kitchen door, Christ Jesus! There they all sit, lined up round the table and staring at me like I’m some kind of ghost. Our youngest brother Tage is here now and he’s sitting there with all the rest, sipping a coffee in his uniform. There’s nothing but poison for me here.

“So you’ve been to the grave now, have you?” Ulrik says. “You didn’t happen to fall in, did you?”

And all that does is clear the path for Lydia. She raises the roof with a rant that don’t end. I take a couple steps into the kitchen, but the car sickness still has its claws in me, so maybe I can be excused if I don’t go right over and sit down in the chair I had my sights on. Instead I head right past all the chairs to the draining board by the kitchen sink. That’s where the neighbor girl stands, toweling off some dishes. And lord, is she a sweet little thing! Rough around the edges maybe, like most farm girls, but just right to put your arms around. And all of a sudden she starts yelling at me too. So Christ only knows how much shit they’ve been slinging on my name in front of her while I been off at the graveyard.

“You get your hands off that girl!” says the radio dealer, sticking out his chest like he’s the big man around here.

And Lydia’s ranting so goddamn much there ain’t nothing I can do.

“Look at the state he’s in,” she screams. “Covered in puke and filth from head to toe! A big rip in the rump of his breeches! No hat on his head! So drunk he can barely stand up!”

And Christ almighty! How am I supposed to know there’s a chair right behind me? So of course I get tripped up when I turn away from the sink. Couldn’t that happen to anybody? And I ain’t about to put up with having insults flung right in my face like that! They can all sit up high on their horses, alright, but can they trouble themselves to buy a single flower to put on Mamma’s grave? Do they care enough about the old man to trouble talking with the fella that carried him into the nurse’s place after the accident, just to find out what really happened? No, that’s too much to expect of them!

I go right up to the table and bang my fist down so hard Tage’s coffee cup clatters to the floor. And then I give them a real good helping of truth. “For eight months I sent the old man money for dipping tobacco,” I say, “and you tell me right now if there’s anybody here that’s done more for him than that! And Mamma always got Elinda’s second-hand clothes, wore ’em till the day she died! And it ain’t no goddamn secret there’s a few folks here have a hard time swallowing me working in the sanitation trade. It’s easy enough for folks to shit a place up, but to have to clean it up, that’s another thing, ain’t it?”

But they’re so damned cold, the whole nasty lot of them, they just start pissing and moaning about my suit, as if the best suit of clothes I own ain’t fit for a small country funeral. “Shut your mouths,” I tell ’em. “Not everybody can make a living overcharging folks for old radio consoles and then drop money on brand new white shirts every other day. A man might not get fat working in the sanitation trade, but I’ll be goddamned if I’m gonna be ashamed of the way I make my living!”

What a miserable thing, standing here and trying to talk to a roomful of family and the unmentionable trash they’ve brought into it, ’cause not an ear in the room is paying me the least bit of heed. It’s enough to drive you crazy. You’re alone, Knut-boy, and you’ve always been alone. Is it any wonder you start to sob?

“He can have my suit,” Tage says. “I’ve got my uniform. I can wear that to the funeral.”

And then that son of a bitch radio dealer says he thinks Tage’s clothes should do the trick, long as he don’t mind they might end up with puke all over them.

“Getting motion sick can happen to anybody,” I tell that no-good lout. “If they ain’t used to riding in a car like that. Not everybody’s got the luxury of coasting around every day like some kind of showboat in their Volvo ’39, or whatever the hell it is.”

“Pontyak,” the radio dealer says. “Tage’s suit will fit good enough. For being thirty-three years old he still has the build of a tenderfoot.”

“You don’t gotta be a fat-ass,” I say to him, “to bust a fella in the chops so hard he’ll be sorry he ever opened his goddamn mouth. If it comes to that.”

“Well, then, maybe you should start with Elinda’s boyfriends,” he blurts out. “Before they eat you out of house and home.”

Here you stand at this table, alone and grieving, and as you do your woman is climbing into bed with another man. And your own family, wouldn’t you think that they would listen for even half a second to what you have to say? Don’t kid yourself. You’re on your own. And you’ve always been on your own. So now you cry. How can you not cry when your sister Lydia just keeps at you with no end in sight?