Evelyn craned to see where the voice came from. “Is it true we’re snowed in?”
“Boy howdy.”
“And the phone?”
“Not available at this time.”
“Oh,” said Evelyn. “And what are you building in the yard, a cabin?”
“That’s a bonfire for Grandpa.”
In the doorway appeared an older man with high cheekbones and small, close-set eyes, a coarse and energetic character who identified himself as Torvald Aadfield. Donald raised his dark eyebrows, darker than the wide fan of beard, and oddly peaked just over the bridge of his nose, giving the impression that he had never seen his father before or else had seen him but was struggling to remember anything specific about him. Mr. Aadland caught this and nodded privately, suggesting that Donald was grimly incorrigible.
“We’re snowed in,” he said.
“See?” said Donald.
“How’s the moose?” Torvald asked. “Very good for you. Prepared it myself. With a seven mag.”
“Walking food doesn’t have a long life around Dad,” Donald said.
“I remember the lean times,” his father said. “Montana’s a boom-and-bust economy. “
Evelyn swung her head from one speaker to another without making a contribution. Her feigned affability did little to conceal her discomfort.
“During one of those busts,” said Donald, “I went to San Francisco for a Mott the Hoople concert. Spent six hungry months in the Haight, then almost two years in a cross-dressers’ review, very big with the tourists in a tourist’s town. I dreamed of saving enough to buy my own ranch. I thought I could hoof my way into the cattle business!”
“You’re in the cattle business,” said Torvald.
“Yes,” sighed Donald, “but one that can never grow. I have happy memories of those days, the gorgeous outfits so full of meaning, staying up all night with my disturbed friends, racing to the sea in the foggy morning, lumbering along in our frocks and smelling like a gym, past the Penguin’s Prayer sculpture, breaking out on Ocean Beach at dawn to storm the surfers in their wetsuits. Do I miss those days? What do you think!” He looked at his father but continued speaking to Evelyn. “He buys cheap bulls, won’t fertilize, irrigates with a shovel and doesn’t sprinkle…. ” Donald was agitated. The plastic cylinders festooning his head knocked against one another.
Evelyn couldn’t make out whether this was some old routine between the two men or something specifically for her.
Donald now was storming around so that the noise of his sandals on the floor and against the furniture was a dismaying backdrop to his remarks. “He won’t take a cheap Farm Home Loan or sign up with the Great Plains Program.”
Torvald was shrinking with truculence and embarrassment.
“He won’t use gated pipe because he likes to see me out there dragging mud-covered canvas, soaking wet in a cold wind. He won’t buy a calf table when—”
“Donald’s a great roper,” his mother added. “We wouldn’t want to miss that—”
“He’s got Mom flanking calves like she was in a rodeo. And tonight, to save a few bucks, he’s gonna cremate my grandpa.”
The older people winced to have this stated so boldly.
It was a good while before Torvald spoke. “Snowed in, has to be done,” he said complacently. “Lady, I don’t know what your plan was out there in my pasture, but if them cows had come to their feed like always, I’d of never found you atall.”
“I’m very grateful. Really, there is a telephone, isn’t there?”
“Line’s down,” he barked, the last word on that subject.
“Home cremation’s illegal as hell,” Donald noted, “but like the man said, we’re snowed in and even minor calamity can help boom-and-busters economize. Lucky you weren’t on your feet when Dad found you. He might’ve had you popped for trespassing.”
“I am a strong proponent of private property rights,” Torvald said, and left the room at the sight of his wife passing the doorway, pointedly ignoring the activity in the dining room but shouting as she went, “Torvald, fill the bird feeder!”
“Donald,” he said, “we’ve got work to do.” He seemed mildly elated by this information and, rising from his chair, clapped his calloused hands together. The men left the table apparently without a thought of what Evelyn might do with herself, though it was obvious her job was to wait for the storm to pass. From a nearby room, old psychedelic music suddenly boomed. Mr. Aadfield passed the kitchen doorway, shaking his head contemptuously. Evelyn heard him go out, and shortly thereafter Donald appeared in insulated coveralls, a housebound Bohemian artifact transformed now into a rather conventional farmer. He had a war-surplus campaign coat over his arm and was gesturing for Evelyn to follow him quickly. As she crossed the kitchen behind him, he draped the coat over her shoulders and opened a narrow door into a cold storage room, reaching familiarly around the inside wall to turn on the light switch.
“You’re safe with me,” Donald said, leading her into a room piled high with crates and rough shelves that stored canned foods. “My wan and ambiguous sexuality wouldn’t offend a gnat. And I love having a houseguest.” He went straight to the far corner, where he began removing burlap feed sacks from something leaning there, something that proved to be a corpse, rigid from cold storage. Having revealed it, Donald stepped back and bent slightly forward, hands clasped together in fascination. “Grandpa,” he said, with purring delight.
“I’ve never seen a dead person before.” Fleetingly, she wondered about her father, but he’d been boxed. “Is that a costume?”
“That’s his uniform from the Norwegian Navy.”
The corpse was balanced in the corner of the concrete walls, a small old man dressed in a pristine navy blue suit complete with epaulets. “Rescued from a Norwegian lightship that got torpedoed by a German sub. Thirty years later he was a county commissioner in Montana and the uniform still fits.” Rubbing his capacious stomach ruefully, Donald said, “If Grandpa’s genes were what they’re cracked up to be, I’d be still in the chorus line. Instead I spend my days on the wrong end of a number-three irrigating shovel or hitting the zerk fittings on Dad’s front-end loader with a half-frozen grease gun!” His sob, Evelyn knew, was not genuine. Her eyes were fastened on this peculiar effigy. It was certainly not a person. Nor was it remotely horrifying, though it did produce a strong sense of the ridiculous, perhaps due to a uniform right out of Gilbert and Sullivan.
Evelyn asked cautiously, “What’s he doing here?”
“Oh, boy,” sighed Donald. “‘What’s he doing here?’ Well, Evelyn, we’re going to do a home burial with Gramps, oppressed by Granddad and promised themselves they wouldn’t spend two cents burying him. They told him so to his face. They said, ‘Granddad, you’ve been very cheap and mean. You never fed your cows in the winter. When you die, we’re not going to spend two cents burying you. We’re not buying you a headstone, and we’re not notifying your hometown newspaper in Trondhjem.’ My mother and father might be hard, but they’re not unkind. When Grandpa said he preferred cremation, my father said, ‘You buy the matches,’ and it was kind of a family joke — you know, a Norwegian family joke that’s not at all funny. Anyway, Grandpa bought a box of kitchen matches, and my folks still have them after about ten years. Tonight the old fellow goes up in smoke, which, given certain laws, is why we had to wait until we were snowed in to do it. We can’t get out and, except for you, they can’t get in, even if they see smoke.
“My mother really tried to reach out to him, but it was all lost on Grandpa. Everyone on the place was half starved while he paid into a pension plan through the Odd Fellows. And he had a high-dollar pinky ring, which was totally inappropriate to begin with, and which he swallowed once he knew the end was at hand. Said we’d only use it to buy train tickets out. These were all more or less jokes, but serious enough that he actually did swallow the ring. My folks and I are just unwilling to go in and get it, even though it’s pretty obvious we could use the money. Now—” he rapped his knuckles on the corpse’s stomach “—you’d have to use a chisel or tire tool or some damn thing.”