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
“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
“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