4
“I want to celebrate Saint Nicholas,” he says.
“Saint Nicholas?” There haven’t been any Saint Nicholas celebrations in this house since Mother died. “What for?”
“It’s nice.”
“And how do you imagine it?”
“You know,” he says, “the usual.”
“The usual? If you want to celebrate Saint Nicholas, you have to buy presents.”
“Yep.”
“Yep? How are you going to buy presents?”
“You’ll have to buy them.”
“For myself as well?”
“Yep.”
“Then I’ll know what I’m getting.” I don’t want to have long conversations like this with him. I want to look in briefly and get away fast. The ticking of the grandfather clock fills the room. A window-shaped block of light shines on the glass of the case and reflects on the sheep painting, making it a lot less gloomy. It’s a strange painting. Sometimes it looks like winter, sometimes summer or autumn.
When I’m about to close the door, he shouts, “I’m thirsty.”
“I get thirsty too sometimes.” I close the door firmly behind me and walk downstairs.
Only the sofa has made it back to the living room. On the bottom shelf of the built-in linen cupboard in my bedroom I found a big piece of material. Mother might have been planning to make a dress from it, although it seems a bit large for that. It’s perfect for covering the sofa. The floor is primer gray. When the bedroom door is open, the color is continuous over the freshly painted sill. I’ve done the skirting boards, window frames and doors with primer as well. The sideboard is somewhere else, with the low bookcase on top of it. I’ve thrown all the flowering plants on the muck heap. That didn’t leave much. When I go to buy paint, I’ll have to look for venetian blinds or roller blinds as well; the heavy dark-green curtains in the bedroom and living room leave me gasping for breath, and I have a vague suspicion it’s not just because of the years since they were last beaten. I took the remaining contents of the linen cupboard upstairs and brought my own clothes downstairs.
There are cats here. Shy cats that shoot off. Sometimes it’s two or three, a few months later it will be nine or ten. Some are lame or missing their tails, others (most, actually) are incredibly mangy. It’s impossible to keep tabs on them: it’s no surprise if there’re ten, but two is just as likely. Father used to solve the cat problem by shoving a litter in a gunny sack, adding a stone, and tossing the sack in the ditch. Long ago he would also stuff an old rag in the sack after first drenching it with some liquid from the poison cabinet. I don’t know what it was, that liquid. Chloroform? But how did he get his hands on a bottle of chloroform? Were you able to go out and buy things like that thirty years ago? The silver-gray cabinet with the skull and crossbones on the door is in the barn and hasn’t contained poison for a long time: poison is out of fashion. I keep paint in it.
Last spring I saw him shuffling around the barn with saucers of milk. I didn’t say anything, but sighed deeply, so deeply he must have heard. Within a few days he had the kittens drinking from a single saucer of milk. He grabbed them and stuffed them in a bag. Not a gunny sack, we don’t get them any more. It was a paper feed bag. He tied the bag on to the rear bumper of the Opel Kadett with a piece of rope about three feet long.
Seven years ago when his license needed renewing they made him do a test. There were all kinds of things wrong with him and he failed. Since then he hasn’t been allowed to drive. He still climbed into the car. There was a green haze on the trees that line the yard and narcissuses flowering around the trunks. I stood in the barn doorway and watched him start the car, which immediately shot off, throwing him back against the seat, then jerking him forward so that he hit his head on the steering wheel. Then he reversed without looking over his shoulder or in the rear-view mirror. He did that for a while: driving forward, changing into reverse (the gearbox howled) and backing up, turning the steering wheel just a little. Up and down and back and forth until a cloud of exhaust fumes hung between the trees. He climbed out of the car, untied the paper bag very calmly and tried to throw it on the muck heap. He had to pick it up again no less than three times, his arms were no longer strong enough for a hearty swing. “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” he said, coming into the barn. He wiped his forehead and rubbed his hands together in his one-chore-out-of-the-way gesture; it made a rasping sound.
It took me a while to get moving. Slowly I walked over to the muck heap. The bag wasn’t right at the top, it had slid down a little, and not just from gravity, but partly from the movement inside. I could hear very quiet squeaking and almost inaudible scratching. Father had made a mess of things and I could fix them for him. Damned if I would. I turned and walked away from the muck heap until I had gone far enough to be well out of earshot and then stayed there until there were no more sounds and no more movement.
He wants to celebrate Saint Nicholas, because “it’s nice.”