the surface. For a moment the boy’s body throbbed with inchoate fury as he strained silently in Tollefson’s grasp, speechless, and full of wonder at what had passed through his mind. Then he screamed: “It’s stupid! It’s stupid! You’re stupid!”
“Paul! Stop it!”
“He killed him!” shouted Little Paul. “The little boy is dead! There’s nothing left of him! He’s all gone! All of him!”
“No,” said Tollefson, and he said it with such assurance and sincerity that the boy went quiet in his hands. “No, he isn’t. The little boy’s alive. There’s an angel, and the angel tells Abraham not to kill Isaac, and there’s a ram in the thicket,” he went on quickly, “and they sacrifice that instead. The little boy… Isaac, he isn’t dead.”
“Yes?”
“Yes,” said Tollefson. Once more on familiar ground, he was recovering his stride and filling with annoyance. “What kind of performance was that?” he asked, handling the book. “You can’t get away with stunts like that. You know, people won’t stand for it. Look at the book.”
Little Paul was not interested in the book. “Why did God tell him to kill the little boy? Was he bad?”
“No, he wasn’t bad. God told Abraham to kill Isaac to see if Abraham loved God enough to obey. And Abraham did love God enough. He loved God so much that he was willing to sacrifice his only son, just as God was willing to sacrifice his only son, Jesus, because He so loved the world and wished to wash it clean of sin, as white as snow, by the saving mercy of His blood.”
Little Paul could see blood. Pails and pails of blood were needed to wash away the sins of the world. He had seen his father catch blood in a pail to make sausage. Blood pumping hot out of a slashed throat in bright jets. Later, when it cooled, it turned black and thick like pudding.
“And because Abraham loved God,” said Tollefson, “he would do anything God asked. No matter how hard.”
“Would you?”
“I’d try very hard. We must always try our hardest to please God. You must too, Paul, because He loves you.”
“Did he love Isaac?”
“Of course. He loves all his children.”
“I don’t like the story.”
“Oh, you didn’t at first,” said Tollefson, “because you didn’t wait for the end. But everything came out all right in the end, didn’t it? That’s the point.”
It didn’t seem the point to Little Paul. It seemed to him that God, being who he was, could have as easily ended the story the other way. That, to Little Paul, seemed the point.
“What do you mean,” said Big Paul, “he wet the bed?”
“He wet the bed, that’s what I mean. And keep your voice down.”
“Jesus, he’s seven years old.”
“It’s the nightmares,” Lydia said. “They all have them at his age. Myrna’s youngest had them for months and then, just like that, they stopped.”
Big Paul felt uneasy. “He never plays with other kids. He’s always with that sick old man. It’s as if he’s afraid to take his eyes off him. No wonder the goddamn kid has nightmares.”
“Maybe if you didn’t talk about Uncle dying in front of Paul, he wouldn’t have bad dreams.”
“Shit.”
“And he spends time with Uncle because of the pigs. He likes to help him.”
“That’s another thing. I told you to tell that kid those pigs weren’t supposed to become pets. That they were going to be butchered. Yesterday I go down to the pens and he shows me how they’ll roll over to have their bellies scratched. Jesus H. Murphy, doesn’t anybody listen to me around here any more?”
“He knows they’ve got to be butchered. I’ve told him and told him.”
“And something else,” Big Paul said, his voice rising with outrage, “the old boy is butchering those pigs. I’m not looking like a shit-head in my kid’s eyes killing those pigs. I didn’t teach them cute tricks!”
“My God, Paul, are you jealous?” Lydia asked, surprised and a little pleased at the notion.
“And last of all,” he yelled, “tell that old son of a bitch to leave the bedroom door open when he’s in there with Little Pauly! Better still, keep the kid out of there!”
“You
“What are you telling Uncle?” Little Paul whispered, his head twisting at the keyhole in a futile attempt to see more of Tollefson’s bedroom.
“Don’t you listen, Uncle Carl,” he muttered fiercely. “Don’t you listen to him.”
Through the keyhole the boy could see only part of the room, and that part contained Tollefson’s bed, by which the old man knelt praying, his bare back turned to the door, and the scar, faded by time, a faint letter formed by a timid hand.
What was out of view, in that portion of the bedroom that contained the unseen wardrobe, toward which Tollefson’s head was beseechingly turned, Little Paul could only imagine.
The old man and the boy picked their way between the dusty rows of garden vegetables under a stunning August sun, collecting refuse for the pigs. Little Paul trudged along listlessly behind Tollefson, pulling a wagon heaped with old pea vines; tiny, sun-scalded potatoes; beet and carrot tops. Their two shadows, black as pitch, crept over the dry, crumbling soil; shattered on the plant tops shaking in the breeze; squatted, stooped, and stretched.
Tollefson was admitting to himself he was a sinful man, a deceitful man. For months, ever since the April storm in which he had collapsed, he had known he was incapable of any longer earning his way in the world. His working days were over. He really was an old man, and in his talks with God he had come to realize that he was close to death. Yet he had pretended it was only a matter of time before he regained his strength and left to find work. But this deception was no longer enough. His niece and her husband were becoming impatient with him. Perhaps they would soon invite him to leave.
Tollefson didn’t want to leave. He was an old man with nowhere to go. A man with no place of his own; no people of his own. All his life he had lived in other men’s houses; played with other men’s children; even, on occasion, slept with other men’s wives before he had come to know Jesus. He was lonely and frightened.
That was why he had hit on the idea of making Little Paul the beneficiary of his will. He had worked very hard all his life and saved more money than anybody would suspect. Thirty-nine thousand dollars. When he told Lydia what he was going to do, they wouldn’t dare ask him to leave for fear he would take the boy out of his will. What had Jesus said? “
Big Paul might hate his guts, but he wouldn’t deny his son a stake in thirty-nine thousand dollars. He was sure of that.
Tollefson looked down at Paul grubbing under a tomato plant for wormy fruit. Lydia had told him the child was suffering from bad dreams and nervous diarrhea.
The boy glanced up at him with his flat, guarded eyes. “Tomorrow will be too hot to kill pigs,” he said out of the blue. Although Little Paul hadn’t phrased his sentence as a question, Tollefson knew it was. For a week the boy had heard his father and Tollefson discuss whether they would soon have “killing weather” – cooler temperatures and a wind to prevent flies swarming on the pigs as they were scalded and gutted.
“Can’t wait any longer,” said Tollefson matter-of-factly, shading his eyes and studying the glowing blue glaze of the sky. “Your dad made a booking to have the meat cut and wrapped at the locker plant tomorrow afternoon. I’ll have to do the pigs in the morning.” The old man paused, adjusted his shirt sleeves, and then inquired, “Are you going to give me a hand?”
“It’s too hot to kill pigs,” the boy said sullenly.
“You got to learn some time,” Tollefson said, “if you want to be a farmer. I told you all along them pigs would be butchered, and your mother told you. You knew it. That’s a farmer’s job to grow things for people to eat. Now, you like bacon, don’t you? Where do you think bacon comes from?”
“God,” said Little Paul automatically. He thought he’d learned how to please Tollefson.
His answer took the old man momentarily aback. “Well yes… that’s right. But pigs is what I meant. It comes from pigs. It’s pork. But you’re right. Everything God made, he made for a reason. He made pigs for men to
