Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

“Ah, the trick,” said Gloria. She took two walnuts from her overalls pocket and held them out, one in each palm, for him to see before bringing her hands together, fingers laced as if in prayer. Her muscles bulged and Aaron heard the crack of a nut bursting open. His mother cheered, and Gloria opened her hand — the intact walnut at its center, its shell slick with perspiration — and offered him the meat of the other.

“I don’t feel good,” he told his mother. He handed her the dishtowel.

Gloria and his mother took him into the sunroom, where he would sleep that night. His mother said she would be back in ten minutes to tuck him in, but he could hear the two of them talking in the dining room and knew they had forgotten about his bedtime. He looked for the cat. The thought of sleeping with its hollow sockets staring at him seemed unbearable. He was bent down, searching beneath the couch, when he heard Clarence roll in behind him. “I imagine you’re looking for Aaron,” said Clarence. “Sister has taken him to her quarters for the evening.” Aaron got up from the floor. “I’ve come to see whether you need anything, and I’ve brought you these.” He indicated the neatly folded pajamas on his lap. They were covered with Santas and reindeer. “Yet another of Sister’s poorly conceived though well-intentioned gifts.”

“Thank you,” Aaron said. He took the pajamas. “What happened to the teacher who was afraid of you?” he asked.

“Ah, Nordstrum has caught your interest,” said Clarence. “I am not surprised to learn that classroom injustice interests you. In fact, I would be happy to finish the story, particularly since justice prevails, but first you must take those wretched pajamas down the hallway to the bathroom and get yourself ready for bed. Agreed?”

“Yes,” said Aaron. He ran down the hallway, changed into the pajamas, folded his clothes, urinated, rinsed his mouth because he had no toothbrush, and returned.

“You look ridiculous,” Clarence said as Aaron stood before him in the Santa pajamas. “But there’s nothing to be done about it. Climb beneath the covers at least, so I don’t have to look at you.”

Aaron did, and Clarence began his story immediately. “This Nordstrum was bothered by my presence in his classroom to the extent that he wished to have me removed from it altogether. The principal — who was not a bad man, merely limited in his sensibilities — did not grant his request, could not, for ours was a tiny school. Nordstrum was in charge of not just my fourth-grade class but fifth and sixth as well, which meant that he had three years of my unsettling presence to look forward to.

“Instead, the principal summoned me to his office, and perhaps because he too found me freakish, he spoke with candor. Mr. Nordstrum’s fear had nothing to do with me personally, he said. It was caused solely by my appearance. He seemed unaware that his assessment contradicted itself. In closing, he noted that Nordstrum would adjust to my oddness, just as everyone else had managed to do. What he asked of me was patience. Though I’ve outgrown it admirably, patience was one of my virtues as a boy, for hadn’t I waited, day after day, year after year, to grow? Of course, a man like Nordstrum never gets over his fear because it’s nothing but a stand-in for prejudice. Nonetheless, justice was served.” He paused and patted his chest. “By me. From that day onward, I made a point to be always in front of Nordstrum. I sat in the front row so that when he glanced up, I was the first thing he saw. I arrived early for school and stayed late, and when we went outside for recess, I trotted behind him like a shadow so that when he turned, I—”

“You could walk?” Aaron interrupted.

“Of course I could walk,” Clarence said. “I walked to school, several miles each way, though in winter my sisters — Gloria, whom you know, and Frances, who is a year older than Gloria — took turns pulling me on a sled.”

“Were you afraid of snow?” Aaron asked.

“Quite the opposite. Sometimes my father would hoist me on top of a big bank of snow and I would run across it, liberated by the realization that no one was light enough to follow me.”

“But now you have to be in a wheelchair?” Aaron asked.

“I was an active child, and when it became clear that I had weak bones, my parents began to restrict my activities. They lacked money for medical bills and did not like to see me suffer. Moreover, my mother felt secretly responsible for my overall condition because of an incident that occurred in my infancy, involving my grandfather, her father, who had come to stay with us around the time I was born. I don’t remember him well — he died when I was still young — but I have been told that he liked to drink. Over the years, he lost everything, all the land he had farmed with decreasing success. He had come from Sweden as a child with his parents and six siblings, but only he and his parents survived the journey. Later, everyone marveled that it was this weak, easily crushed man who had had the stamina, or simply the luck, to remain alive as his siblings fell like flies.

“After he had sold off all his land in bits, he was shuffled around until he came here to be with his youngest daughter. By then he had become like a child again. My mother said that he would chase my sisters around the house making animal noises, quacking like a duck for hours until even my sisters, who were two and three at the time, begged my mother to make him stop. Of course, my mother allowed no alcohol in the house, so at night, while everyone slept, he would sit in his room at the window, seized by tremors and longing, before rising to pace the house. The years of drinking had affected his motor skills, so he clomped along noisily, bumping into things.

“One night, he passed by my sisters’ room, where I slept in a clothes basket. Later, he explained that he had heard me crying and, wanting to be useful, had gone in and lifted me from the basket, thinking he would rock me back to sleep. My parents awoke to the sound of my howling outside their window and jumped from their bed to look. They couldn’t see me there on the ground because it was dark, but they could hear me. My mother said that my father pried open the window and climbed right out to retrieve me. They found my grandfather asleep upstairs, still leaning on the sill. He remembered nothing more than sitting down to rock me.”

“What happened to him?” Aaron asked.

“He killed himself several years later,” Clarence said matter-of-factly. “As I began to grow — or rather, as I began not to grow — he became despondent. Though he had become childlike in most ways, it seemed that he still possessed an adult capacity for self-recrimination. Often he was up at three or four a.m., before my father rose to attend to chores even, and I would occasionally join him for breakfast. He always made oatmeal, and we rarely spoke, though he would giggle over something silly — a chair scraping across the floor that sounded like gas being passed. When we were finished, the bowls and spoons rinsed, he would remove the yardstick from the old butter churn and gesture for me to stand. I would, and he would press it to my back, hold his hand level across my head, and mark a spot on the stick with his finger. He would study that spot, muttering to himself, and then return the yardstick to the churn and go outside.”

* * *

“I have a bully,” Aaron announced to Clarence after breakfast the next morning. Gloria had served eggs, and their runniness added to the nauseated state in which he’d awakened, the result of having slept poorly. The night before, his mother had not returned to tuck him in, but even after Clarence shut off the sunroom light and the house became still, he’d been unable to sleep, his mind looping back through all the stories that Clarence had told him. It was pleasant, like watching reruns of his favorite television shows, except he realized that he had told Clarence nothing of himself in return, nothing to keep him alive in Clarence’s memory the way that the stories about the schoolmaster who hated Clarence and the grandfather who dropped him out the window would keep Clarence alive in his. He resolved to tell Clarence the story of his bully the next morning, and only then had he drifted off to sleep.