Man Descending

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