Free Man Descending by Guy Vanderhaeghe Page A

you think he’d get a foot in the door if he was?”
    She tilted her head and lifted an eyebrow ever so slightly in the direction of their son, as if to say: Do you really think I’d put him in jeopardy?
    Little Paul stood with his thin shoulders jammed against the wall, and a harried look on his face as he scratched the red scale of eczema which covered his hands. His hair, which had been cropped short because of the skin disorder, appeared to have been gnawed down to his skull by a ravenous rodent, rather than cut, and made the scalp which showed through the fine hair seem contused and raw.
    He was six years old and slow to read, or count, or do most things people seemed to expect of him. In school he gave the impression of a small, pale spider hung in the centre of a web of stillness, expecting at any moment to feel one of the fragile threads vibrate with a warning.
    “Give him a chipped plate then,” said Big Paul around a mouthful of toast. “You can keep track of that easy enough. He’ll never notice.”
    “You might buy three or four weanling pigs,” his wife replied, ignoring him, “and he could look after them. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind doing light chores for his room and board. We could feed them garden trash. It would keep him busy pottering around until he found a place.”
    “Where’s he going to find a place?” asked Big Paul with that easy contemptuousness which had first attracted his wife to him. “Nobody is going to hire an old fart like him.”
    “He’s not so old. Sixty-six isn’t so old. And it’s not as if farm work is all bull labour any more. He could get on with a dairy farm and run the milking machines, say. Or maybe work a cattle auction. He knows cattle, he said so himself.”
    “Anybody can say anything. Saying something doesn’t make it so.”
    “Tollefsons were never blowhards nor braggers.”
    “One lung,” said Big Paul moodily, “he won’t last long. You saw him. The old bugger looks like death warmed over.”
    “Paul,” his wife returned sharply, “not in front of the boy.”
    “Why did he come here?” whined Little Paul, who felt something vaguely like jealousy, and decided he could exercise it now that his presence had been formally recognized.
    “To die in my upstairs bed,” his father said unhappily, apparently speaking to himself, “that’s why. To die on a goddamn spanking-new box-spring mattress.”
    “Don’t listen to your father,” said his mother. “He’s only joking.”
    “What do you want?” Tollefson said, startled to see the silent, solemn boy standing in the doorway dressed in pyjamas. He tried hard to remember the child’s name. He couldn’t.
    “That’s my dad’s bed,” Little Paul said pointing to where Tollefson sat. “He owns it.”
    “Yes.” The old man took exception to what he read as a note of belligerence in the boy’s voice. “And this is my room. Nobody is welcome here who doesn’t knock.” Little Paul’s settled gaze made him uncomfortable. He supposed it was being shirtless and exposing the scar of his operation – an L of ridged, plum-coloured tissue, the vertical of which ran alongside his spine, the horizontal directly beneath and parallel to the last bone of his rib cage. Whenever Tollefson thought of his missing lung he felt empty, hollow, unbalanced. He felt that way now.
    “Why can’t I come in here without knocking?” the boy demanded listlessly, his eyes shifting about the room, looking into things, prying. “This is my dad’s house.”
    “Because I have certain rights, After all, I’m sixty-six and you’re only …” He didn’t know. “How old are you anyway?”
    “Almost seven.”
    “Almost seven,” Tollefson said. He extended one blunt-fingered hand scrolled with swollen blue veins, grasped a corner of the dresser and dragged himself upright. Then he unzipped a cracked leather case and removed two old-fashioned gentleman’s hairbrushes which he slipped on his hands.
    “What are