Free This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories by Johanna Skibsrud Page A

says. “Or not that you’d remember. It’s been years,” she says, “since anyone who isn’t crazy’s sung a song like that.”
    She turns to my brother and then she turns to me. “I’m sorry for you,” she says. My brother and I are sitting up, very tall and still, in our straight-backed chairs.
    Our plates—recently—have been pushed away as far as we can push them.
    â€œI’m sorry to tell you that your father is crazy.”
    My brother nods slowly.
    â€œYou’re not even German,” she informs my father, the spoon in the air. “You’re Croatian,” she says. “And now you live in the sticks of Red Deer, Alberta—face facts.”
    My father continues: “You were sleeping, and so you wouldn’t have known. It was—exactly—the middle of the night. Everyone in the whole wide world, but me and our father, was sleeping. Only I and my father were awake in the world.”
    Aunt Emira hits my father again with the spoon so that his head bobs to the table and into his arms. He says: “He turned. He looked into my eyes. He put one hand to his heart. He said—” But his voice is too muffled by his sleeve.
    â€œIt’s possible,” my aunt says, “that the dog was simply making too much noise.”
    â€œHe howled and would not stop,” my father agrees. Aunt Emira sighs. “I suppose it could have happened that the dog was also shot, but,” she says, and shakes the spoon, “they did not take one stick of furniture from that house.”
    WHEN WE ARRIVED, months late, for the Christmas dinner, there was a note on the table. I’m at the lot , it said. Make yourselves comfortable. I’ll be back before long.
    But my father was not at the lot when we got there. He was stretched, instead, in his favourite living room chair. The television was on, but the sound was turned off.
    â€œWhen did you leave us the note?” I asked him. “When were you up at the lot?”
    My father turned the TV off. He smiled at my brother and me as we stood in the doorway.
    Aunt Emira said: “A week ago. He hasn’t been out of the house for a week.”
    â€œBut,” I said, and paused. “We didn’t know ourselves we were coming, until the day before last,” I said. “Who did you write the note to?”
    My aunt waved the question away, but my father answered.
    â€œI wrote just in case.”
    Emira nodded, and shrugged. Then shook her head at us, back and forth.
    The artificial Christmas tree still stood in the corner,and my father got up then, from his chair, and plugged it in so that the coloured lights blinked on and flashed; on and off, on and off, in an irritating spiral.
    BEFORE WE LEFT my father, we flew to Bavaria and rented a car at the airport and drove to the house of my uncle there. What my father recalls is the flight. How we were offered a seat in first class, and how for the first half of the trip my father sat up there, in front, and at the exact halfway point in the flight he got up abruptly and gave up the seat to my mother.
    â€œThey served me champagne,” he said. “Called me sir.”
    Then he came to sit back in the regular section with my brother and me. He leaned over our two narrow seats to look out of the window, and pressed his knuckles up to the glass.
    â€œWhen I was a boy, I thought I’d feel flying all over my body,” he said. “Like when you dream it, I mean.”
    We drove around in the rented car and helped my uncle in the kitchen garden. I thought, If I’d been raised with a kitchen garden, things would have been different.
    My grandfather was a happy man; he did not seem bad.
    My mother disapproved of the way my grandmother wouldn’t sit down with us at mealtimes to eat, and so she kept her company in the kitchen, and wrote recipes down in a yellow notebook, with blue cornflowers on the front, in a row.