Man Descending (8 page)

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 could barely make out what he was saying. I yelled at him: ‘You broke a leg or had a heart attack or what?’

“ ‘I’m tired,’ he says. ‘My legs give up on me.’

“Now he’s old but he ain’t light, and I was thinking how the hell was I going to get him out of there? He seen I was wondering how I was going to pack his arse out of there. I couldn’t get a truck in there; she’d go down to the axles.

“ ‘Go hook the stoneboat to the Ford tractor,’ he says, ‘and pull me out of here.’ He had it all figured out. Of course, he had plenty of time, didn’t he?

“ ‘I got a pile of manure on it!’ I hollers. ‘I’ll have to throw it off first!’

“ ‘I can’t wait,’ he says. ‘I can’t feel my toes.’ Then he says, ‘You bring her in here and load me on. That Ford can pull a double load of b.s., can’t it?’ And he laughs. I tell you, I figure he was pretty far gone for him to say that. That’s pretty strong stuff for that old man. He’s a regular Bible-banger. I never heard him say so much as damn before that.

“So that’s how I dragged him out of there. Rolled him onto a pile of cow shit and pulled him up to the house. He just lay there with his arms flung out on either side, the sleet coming down in his face. He didn’t even try to cover up. I don’t think he cared for nothing at that point.”

Eric, who was seated across the table from Paul, said: “You say he crawled a half-mile? You ought to race him against Charlie’s kid,” he laughed, poking Charlie. “I was over to his place yesterday, and his rug rat can really rip. I’d put a dollar on him.”

“I paced it off next day,” Big Paul said, and his voice hinted at wonder. “That was what it was, just under a quarter-mile. And he gets the pension. I didn’t think he had it in him.”

“How’s he now?” asked Charlie.

“Seems he’s okay. We brought him home from the hospital a week ago. He spends most of the day laying in bed, then he reads to the kid when he comes home from school. Reads him mostly Bible stories. The old bird ain’t nothing if he ain’t odd. Lydia thinks it helps the kid. He don’t do much at school.”

“Sounds just like his old man,” said Eric, “a regular little shit-disturber.”

“No,” said Big Paul, honesty itself, “he just don’t learn.”

“He won’t grow up to be a shit-disturber with a preacher in the house,” said Charlie, draining his glass.

“You ought to seen the kid,” Big Paul said, suddenly struck by the recollection. “The things he comes up with. The things he thinks of. The other day I come in from feeding the stock and Little Paul’s traipsing around the kitchen with a towel tied on his head and a piece of butcher’s tape stuck on his chin for a beard.

“ ‘Who the hell are you?’ I says.

“ ‘Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt,’ he says. Do you believe that? Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt.

“ ‘Well, lead the bastards over the nearest cliff,’ I says.” Big Paul winked at his companions and rubbed his palms on his knees. “ ‘Over the nearest cliff,’ I says,” he repeated, laughing.

“A preacher in the house,” said Eric, shaking his head. “That’s trouble. You know what they say about preachers. Hornier than a two-peckered owl is what my old man used to say. Watch that old bugger; he might preach the pants off the wife.”

“Keep him away from the goats,” snorted Charlie. “He’ll turn the cheese.”

Big Paul hated it when they teased him. Every time they started in on him he began to feel confused and helpless. “Ah, not him,” he said nervously, “for chrissakes show some respect. He’s her uncle, for crying out loud.”

“Any port in a storm,” said Eric, poking Charlie.

“He don’t like women much,” said Big Paul, “he never got married.” He paused, and, suddenly inspired, saw a solution. “You know,” he said, “if anything, he’s a little fruity. He’s got fruity ways. Irons his own shirts. Cleans his fingernails every day before dinner. Queer, eh?”

“That reminds me,” said Charlie. “Did you ever hear the one about the priest and the altar boy?”

“What?” said Big Paul sharply.

Tollefson’s four volumes of
Bible Tales for Children
were twenty years old. He had bought them for his own edification weeks after his conversion at a Pentecostal meeting he had been taken to by a widow who had thoughts of marriage. She never landed that fish, but Jesus did.

Tollefson bought the books for two reasons. He admired the bright illustrations, particularly the angels who were sweetness itself; and he thought that in those children’s books the great mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection would be so simply and obviously stated that his perplexities on those matters would evaporate. He found they helped.

Now the first volume lay open on the scarlet counterpane that covered Tollefson’s bed and Little Paul was huddled beside him, his head drawn into his bony shoulders, his face intent.

“But why did God ask Abraham to do that?” the boy demanded, his voice much too loud for the narrow bedroom.

“Can’t you wait for nothing?” said Tollefson. “The book’ll say. It’ll all come out in the end.” The old man resumed reading, his words muffled and moist because his lost teeth had not been found.

“
So Abraham took his only son Isaac, whom he loved more than life itself, two trusty servants, a donkey, and bundles of sticks to make a fire, and began his journey to the land of Moriah where God had told him he would point out the mountain on which he was to sacrifice his son Isaac to God.”

Tollefson paused and wiped at his slack lips with the back of his hand. Little Paul wound his fingers together and grimaced suddenly, like a small ape displaying his teeth.

“Why is God doing this?” he said nervously. “Little Isaac is scared, I bet.”

“He doesn’t know,” Tollefson reminded him.

“Why is God doing this?” the boy said. “Why?”

“Wait and see, it’s like a mystery. Wait until the end of the story. Listen now,” he said, beginning to read in a flat, uninspired monotone.
“Can you imagine what pain was in Abraham’s heart when he watched Isaac skipping lightheartedly beside him? How he longed to disobey God?”

“He won’t do it,” Little Paul said under his breath. “Isaac’s daddy won’t do it. Not when he sees how scared he is.”

“And all through the trip,”
Tollefson read, “
Isaac kept repeating one question over and over again. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘we are carrying these big bundles of sticks to make a fire, but what will we offer to the Lord our God, since we have forgotten a lamb to sacrifice?’

“But Abraham ignored the question, because he could not tell his son that he was the sacrifice.”

Little Paul stared down at the stark print; for the first time in his life his mind wrestled with the hard words. He wanted to spell out the conclusion to this fearsome puzzle. He hated the story. He hated the book. He hated all books. They said he could read if he wanted to. That he could count.
Your tests prove it
, they said.
You could read if you’d try
. But he wouldn’t. Little Paul was not going down that long tunnel. Count maybe.

His head could count. One, two, three, four … on and on you could go. Numbers never stopped. But they would never find out he counted in his head. He just would never say the numbers out loud.

“After many weary days and thirsty miles Isaac and Abraham arrived at the mountain in Moriah, Abraham climbed it with oh so sad a heart, his son beside him. When they arrived at the top they gathered stones and built an altar.”

Little Paul had begun to rock himself on the bed, his arms clasping his knees tightly. He slowly waggled his prison-camp head with its shorn hair and scent of powerful medication from side to side. “No,” he said softly, his lips carefully forming before he sounded the word, “no-o-o, he won’t.”

Tollefson, his ears numbed by the singsong cadences of his own voice, did not hear Little Paul. He had a picture of his own forming behind his eyes. A great golden angel crouched behind a rock on a barren, sandy mountain top. Rescue. Unconsciously, his voice began to rise with his own excitement.
“Suddenly, after the last stone was lifted, Abraham seized his son, bound him, placed him on the altar amongst the sticks, and lifted his sharp dagger high, high above his head!”

A sob, a darting hand, and the page was torn. The old man, stunned, caught Little Paul; but the boy’s body wriggled violently upward, his eyes staring, his mouth a pocket of blackness – a diver with bursting lungs breaking 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.”