eat.”
“I’d puke,” said Little Paul vehemently. “I’d puke it all up.”
Tollefson took off his long-billed cap and peered into it as if he expected to find there an answer to his predicament. “Listen,” he said at last, taking the boy by the shoulders and looking directly into his face, “you got to learn to see things through. Believe me when I tell you it’s the most important thing in life. You can’t feed a pig and keep a pig and grow a pig and then leave the end, the dirty part, for another man to do. You had the fun of it all, and now you don’t want the rest. It isn’t right, Little Paul,” he said. “You got to learn that. Remember when I read you the story of Abraham and Isaac? You didn’t want to hear the end of the story because you thought it didn’t suit. Just the way now you think butchering those pigs doesn’t suit. But it does. There’s nothing finer in God’s eyes than a farmer, because the work he does, it does good for all people. A farmer feeds people and that’s good. Don’t you see?” he pleaded to the pale, intractable face.
“No.” The boy’s shoulders twisted under his hand. “No.”
“God wants them pigs butchered,” said Tollefson, trying to make sense of it for the boy. “They won’t feel nothing. I’m a top-notch pig shot. I shot hundreds.”
“You talk to him,” said the boy, speaking very quickly, his face a strained mask. “You two got secrets from me. I talk and talk but he doesn’t answer me what you got planned for me. I asked and asked and asked. But it’s a secret. Why don’t he tell me!”
“Who?” said Tollefson, reaching for the boy, alarmed by the fear which had lain in the shallows of the child’s eyes all those months, but which he recognized only then, for the first time.
“Is he hungry?” implored Little Paul. “Is he hungry? Please, is that how the story ends?”
What I Learned From Caesar
THE OLDEST story is the story of flight, the search for greener pastures. But the pastures we flee, no matter how brown and blighted – these travel with us; they can’t be escaped.
My father was an immigrant. You would think this no penalty in a nation of immigrants, but even his carefully nurtured, precisely colloquial English didn’t spare him much pain. Nor did his marriage to a woman of British stock (as we called it then, before the vicious-sounding acronym Wasp came into use). That marriage should have paid him a dividend of respectability, but it only served to make her suspect in marrying him.
My father was a lonely man, a stranger who made matters worse by pretending he wasn’t. It’s true that he was familiar enough with his adopted terrain, more familiar than most because he was a salesman. Yet he was never really
Occasionally I return to the small Saskatchewan town near the Manitoba border where I grew up. To the unpractised eye of an easterner the countryside around that town might appear undifferentiated and monotonous, part and parcel of that great swath of prairie that vacationers drive through, pitying its inhabitants and deploring its restrooms, intent only on leaving it all behind as quickly as possible. But it is just here that the prairie verges on parkland, breaking into rolling swells of land, and here, too, that it becomes a little greener and easier on the eye. There is still more sky than any country is entitled to, and it teases the traveller into believing he can never escape it or find shelter under it. But if your attention wanders from that hypnotic expanse of blue and the high clouds drifting in it, the land becomes more comfortable as prospects shorten, and the mind rests easier on attenuated distances. There is cropland: fields of rye, oats, barley, and wheat; flat, glassy sloughs shining like mirrors in the sun; a solitary clump of trembling poplar; a bluff that gently climbs to nudge the sky.
When I was a boy it was a good deal bleaker. The topsoil had blown off the fields and into the ditches to form black dunes; the crops were withered and burnt; there were no sloughs because they had all dried up. The whole place had a thirsty look. That was during the thirties when we were dealt a doubly cruel hand of drought and economic depression. It was not a time or place that was kindly to my father. He had come out of the urban sprawl of industrial Belgium some twenty-odd years before, and it was only then, I think, that he was beginning to come to terms with a land that must have seemed forbidding after his own tiny country, so well tamed and marked by man. And then this land played him the trick of becoming something more than forbidding; it became fierce, and fierce in every way.
It was in the summer of 1931, the summer that I thought was merely marking time before I would pass into high school, that he lost his territory. For as long as I could remember I had been a salesman’s son, and then it ended. The company he worked for began to feel the pinch of the depression and moved to merge its territories. He was let go. So one morning he unexpectedly pulled up at the front door and began to haul his sample cases out of the Ford.
“It’s finished,” he said to my mother as he flung the cases on to the lawn. “I got the boot. I offered to stay on – strictly commission. He wouldn’t hear of it. Said he couldn’t see fit to starve two men where there was only a living for one. I’d have starved that other sonofabitch out. He’d have had to hump his back and suck the hind tit when I was through with him.” He paused, took off his fedora and nervously ran his index finger around the sweat-band. Clearing his throat, he said, “His parting words were ‘Good luck, Dutchie!’ I should have spit in his eye. Jesus H. Christ himself wouldn’t dare call me Dutchie. The bastard.”
Offence compounded offence. He thought he was indistinguishable, that the accent wasn’t there. Maybe his first successes as a salesman owed something to his naivete. Maybe in good times, when there was more than enough to go around, people applauded his performance by buying from him. He was a counterfeit North American who paid them the most obvious of compliments, imitation. Yet hard times make people less generous. Jobs were scarce, business was poor. In a climate like that, perceptions change, and perhaps he ceased to be merely amusing and became, instead, a dangerous parody. Maybe that district manager, faced with a choice, could only think of George Vander Elst as Dutchie. Then again, it might have been that my father just wasn’t a good enough salesman. Who can judge at this distance?
But for the first time my father felt as if he had been exposed. He had never allowed himself to remember that he was a foreigner, or if he had, he persuaded himself he had been wanted. After all, he was a northern European, a Belgian. They had been on the preferred list.
He had left all that behind him. I don’t even know the name of the town or the city where he was born or grew up. He always avoided my questions about his early life as if they dealt with a distasteful and criminal past that was best forgotten. Never, not even once, did I hear him speak Flemish. There were never any of the lapses you might expect. No pet names in his native language for my mother or myself; no words of endearment which would have had the comfort of childhood use. Not even when driven to one of his frequent rages did he curse in the mother tongue. If he ever prayed, I’m sure it was in English. If a man forgets the cradle language in the transports of prayer, love, and rage – well, it’s forgotten.
The language he did speak was, in a sense, letter-perfect, fluent, glib. It was the language of wheeler-dealers, and of the heady twenties, of salesmen, high-rollers, and persuaders. He spoke of people as live-wires, go-getters, self-made men. Hyphenated words to describe the hyphenated life of the seller, a life of fits and starts, comings and goings. My father often proudly spoke of himself as a self-made man, but this description was not the most accurate. He was a remade man. The only two pictures of him which I have in my possession are proof of this.
The first is a sepia-toned photograph taken, as nearly as I can guess, just prior to his departure from Belgium. In this picture he is wearing an ill-fitting suit, round-toed, clumsy boots, and a cloth cap. The second was taken by a street photographer in Winnipeg. My father is walking down the street, a snap-brim fedora slanting rakishly over one eye. His suit is what must have been considered stylish then – a three-piece pin-stripe – and he is carrying an overcoat casually over one arm. He is exactly what he admired most, a “snappy dresser,” or, since he always had trouble with his p’s, a “snabby dresser.” The clothes, though they mark a great change, aren’t really that important. Something else tells the story.
In the first photograph my father stands rigidly with his arms folded across his chest, unsmiling. Yet I can see that he is a young man who is hesitant and afraid; not of the camera, but of what this picture-taking means. There
