Christopher Merkner

The Cook at Swedish Castle

The cook was no cook. He had only role-played one at his grandmother’s house in Chicago as a boy. Yet, flying back for his grandmother’s funeral, he found himself entirely preoccupied with playing the cook again. The prospect made his feet throb. Maybe, in the end, there was nothing larger than the cook. Even sitting in the pew, silent and solemn before the service, Able could not shake the trembling.
And then his mother’s sister roped her arms around his neck and asked him if he would say a few words. “You are always our best speaker.” The cook nodded. The liquor on her breath was rum. “So warm-hearted.” She paused, suppressing a hiccup. “You’re just the most warm-hearted person…”

*

Leaning against the baptismal font at the front of the church in a tuxedo was the cook’s cousin, Erik Pederson. He spoke with a dark, plump woman and periodically batted her on her heavy, bare shoulder. When he had done this several times, the woman reached back and whacked him in the chest with the flat of her hand. The sound of the impact was loud. The two of them chortled and tried to conceal their mirth with their hands. It appeared to the cook that his cousin had coerced a woman to marry him; the woman’s ring was a salient and gaudy flash in the spare hull of the sanctuary.
The cook lowered his eyes. He would not be caught gazing at the cousin and the wife. However, he was really shocked to see his cousin married, really shocked.

*

The cook’s cousin was an educated man, a scholar of obscure philosophies, an adjunct at some desperate Midwestern state university. The man had always been a real bastard. He was about as physically grotesque a person as the cook had ever known. Right below the rim of his belt, for example, the cook’s cousin expanded enormously. It had been this way since they were kids. The chest, the shoulders, the back, the stomach: all seemed to have dropped into an expansive bubble of body flesh orbiting the waistline; something, it seemed, had always been herniated. The man’s arms were clubby with bloated, hair-thronged fingers that curled into half-fists. He suffered from a cleft palate, his lip lifting to his nose and exposing his teeth in a placid grin. Also, an unseemly hunch of the spine.

*

When I look out at her family, all of you just sagging there in your pews, dwelling upon her life, and now, as it must be, her death, I imagine she would like to have a few things uttered on her behalf. For starters, she might ask that you please stop calling her Mothball.

*

The Edens was stopped dead in all eight lanes, both directions. The Pedersons and Leifs were one long snake in the right-hand lane, their headlights turned on in the blazing sunlight, a pathetic gesture. Through the bright windshield of his rental car, the cook gazed at the dogs cluttering the rear window of his cousin’s Lincoln ahead. It was all torsos and heads back there, banging around, slathering.

*

The Leifs and the Pedersons were drunk, all of them, even the children of the children. Blitzed, they sprawled around the grandmother’s living room furniture laughing about the woman’s final days in her hospital bed and the visits they’d paid her, the things she’d said in the madness that preceded her death. Then, one of the Pedersons suggested that nothing would make the grandmother so proud as to look down upon them and see another Swedish Castle. The cook immediately produced a wooden spoon and a paring stiletto like a card trick from his pant pockets.

*

There had been no resistance, only brief confusion, when the cook’s cousin insisted he take the part of the queen. The cook certainly had nothing to say about it. None of the boys had ever played the role of queen before, but if he protested, he would have had to speak directly to the man and so far he’d avoided doing so.

*

She did not pick up. The cook studied his cell phone for several moments, checking and re-checking he’d dialed the correct number. He had. He dialed again and again received only his own recorded voice. The cook pondered the things she might be doing with their eleven children at this hour. He did not leave a message.

*

Of course, there, down the hallway and around the corner, in one of the bedrooms of the grandmother’s house, is the cook’s cousin showing the cook a way to peel the skin off a hot dog, a way to suck on certain pieces of candy, a way to play a musical instrument with the lips and cheeks of the mouth. The cook is nine, ten, and eleven there; the cook’s cousin fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen.

*

The queen strode from one side of the living room to the other in a tiara and cape. The monologue was pretty good, obviously prepared: “What must a mother do to her daughters, what must a daughter do to her mothers, her many mothers, to induce harmony like a child in the home?” The queen allowed her question a silent moment, then answered it with a firm fist on the top of the piano: “Harmony must be sired! You cannot wait for harmony. You cannot seduce harmony. You must beget such things.” Oh, god, he was good, the new Pederson queen; the cook could admit that his cousin was a very good queen, indeed.

*

Still not home, or you’re not picking up. I am worried. Also I’m obviously sorry I didn’t get that flight. Also I am drunk. This was harder than I’d thought. Listen. Look, tell Inger to go to that orientation tomorrow without me; he’ll be fine. Have the Ingvilds drive him if he gives you crap. They owe us, anyway. Look, I’m sorry. Everyone here is sad, just worse than I can remember.

*

The cook’s cousin had left the house to smoke a cigarette and to let his dogs out of the Lincoln to run them. He had three dogs total, it now appeared; the cook watched them from inside the house, through the kitchen window. The grandmother’s front yard was not large, and it shared a small fenceless lawn with the neighbors on either side. The queen, still in his tiara, threw a blue racquetball for the dogs to charge after. The dogs were large, muscular. They ran after the ball with force, fought and wrangled over the thing like it was raw meat, and then they returned it to the queen’s feet with a sort of palsy. They did this numerous times. They were ridiculously oversized for the size of their owner, and when the queen picked the ball up and held it above his head, the animals propped their legs on his shoulders and lapped the man’s face with their tongues. The cook considered whether the cousin’s head might fit inside the mouth of one of the dogs.

*

When the dogs were brought indoors, Per Hans Leif protested, “What if the dogs shit, how will the house be sold?”
“The dogs have already shat,” the queen said with coldness. “They will rest quietly in one of the back bedrooms.”
“Then at least put them in Mothball’s room, which already smells of shit.”
All were too drunk to keep interest in this issue. The queen took the dogs away. The children sat around the coffee table and drew panties on the naked women in the grandfather’s nudity magazines, unearthed from the basement.

*

“What I don’t understand,” the queen’s wife protested to the room, “is why I have to be a ghost. I am no ghost. I am like one of these ladies, you know, who is bigger than the picture. I am no ghost. I have never been some flimsy thing to shake sticks at. Look at me. Look at this!”

*

The cook had a hand at his back. It was the queen’s hand, and it slipped around his waist. Before the cook could shift away, he was pulled close to his cousin, so close he could feel a hot, damp armpit wetting his pantleg, the thick ungainly waistline of the queen pressing against his thigh. “Some group,” the queen said. “Some fucking group we got here.”
The cook nodded.
“So,” the queen said, “I’m going to need you to repeat your eulogy from earlier.”
“Why?”
“Because I liked it. It was warmhearted.”
The cook said nothing.
“I need warmhearted, Able. You see what I’m doing here as queen. You see that I need some warmheartedness to round out the treachery.”
“Maybe you should just scale back on the treachery.”
“That’s a thought,” the queen said. “But do you know what I’m thinking?”
“I don’t care about you.”
“I’m thinking about how much sweeter you used to be when you were younger.”

*

The cook expected the dogs to be there when he stepped into his grandmother’s bedroom. He put his knee through the bedroom door first. And, as he expected, he felt a bony face against his knee. He shoved the dog backwards, into the room, closing the door behind.
He went to the bed, sat down. The dogs thrust their faces into his lap. They were happy dogs. He petted them for a short time. The cook listened to his family guffaw and chortle as they sprawled about the grandmother’s living room. He could hear the queen through the door requesting a jester to juggle something, wine glasses it would seem, and when the shattering of glass shortly followed, the house quaked with lusty amusement.
With his stiletto knife, the cook cut a deep smooth line on the dark soft belly of the dog’s pretty throat. The dying was silent, mostly clean, and without evident suffering. Eyes rolled. The mandible dropped. What stung the cook was the sight of the other two dogs backing away. They studied the dying dog but cowered into the corner and whined softly, or at such a removed and lofty pitch they might have been in another room of the house, perhaps another house altogether.

*

In the third act, the queen had some doubts. These were doubts he claimed he could never utter to his most trusted lords and confidantes, doubts about his decision to disembowel his own parents. “It is trying,” the queen contended, “to have to willingly disembowel one’s parents.”
He weighed his heart as such, feigned torment over his dilemmas, and when the servant entered the stage, the queen wheeled and ordered the death of his parents immediately—he could delay the dirty thing no longer, he barked, lest it burden his conscience further and all of Swedish Castle see his doubts.
The Pedersons nodded, and the Leifs examined the dead grandmother’s carpeting. No one was following. The servant, the youngest cousin of the cook’s, departed without a word to her script, and the queen leaned like a fop on the piano.

*

I’m at a loss here. I’m at my wit’s end. I’m trying to understand where you are, but I don’t even have a guess at this point. Where do you take eleven children in the middle of the night? Anyway, it’s almost three o’clock your time. I have done something I shouldn’t have. Call.

*

Surprising everyone, the king, the cook’s older sister, opened the fourth act with a sudden announcement that would, she claimed, “spare the queen his mortal doubts.” The king revealed a secret she’d just heard: that the princess was illegitimately with child. “Therefore,” the king announced, “the princess would be the more fitting substitute for a disemboweling, if in fact the queen felt he could no longer go through with the disemboweling of his own parents.” The princess was being played by the servant’s newborn, Lilly, seven weeks old.

*

The sobbing was excessive. Upon seeing the butchery in the grandmother’s bedroom, the queen stepped outside of himself and wept. He had thrown jewelry and both bedside lamps across the room. One of the dogs had been kicked and injured and had fled beneath the bed; the other was thrown into an adjacent bathroom, locked in there by one of the Pederson men who had pulled the thing’s collar from his son’s fist.
It surprised the cook to see this dog’s muzzle stained dark with blood; it had evidently stuck its nose into the dead dog.
It was the consensus of the room, then, that one of the dogs—maybe both of them—had slain the other. The queen sobbed, He knew it, he knew it, he knew it! He knew this would happen one day!

*

All was silent. The queen’s brother, the blacksmith of Swedish Castle, had his socked foot on the dog’s smooth, gray pelvis and was moving it thoughtfully, as though trying to rouse it.

*

The queen’s air was passing heavily through his teeth, and the longer he gazed at the blood-soaked carpeting and the disjointed head of the animal, its teeth exposed along the jowl, its eye open, the heavier still his breathing became. The cook had to look away. The queen said he would need just several more moments before he would be able to speak. And when he did speak, finally, he began swearing. The curses did not come clearly through his affected mouth. “Guck,” he said.

*

When the queen returned to the living room, he was wearing his tiara and the cape had been restored around his neck, flowing over his shoulders, dragging along the carpet behind his feet. He signaled with a finger to drop the lights.

*

In one final glorious act, the servant came forward and placed her infant, the princess, down across an ottoman. The queen commanded her to confess the baby’s sin, and when she did in the voice of the infant (“I have an illegitimate bun inside me.”), the queen carefully placed his cape down on the coffee table, pulled a curtain rod out of his belt loop, and struck the woman—his teenage cousin—with a snap of the rod across the neck. All flinched, then looked to the ottoman, fully expecting the infant to be struck next.

*

I just hope you’re not waiting at the airport. Anyway, this is almost done here.

*

The queen’s father comforted his son with a hand at the back of his neck. “Well,” the father said gently. “On the farm you can either shoot them or you can teach them.”

*

To teach them, the queen shoved the dog toward the blood pooled in the carpet. He dragged its head toward the severed throat. But smelling the death, the dog resisted and threw its weight backwards; the collar slid up nearly over its ears and would have slipped off entirely if the queen hadn’t adjusted and taken the thing by the scruff, thrusting its nose directly into the flaps of skin at the dead dog’s throat.
Able watched.
“Bad girl—Bad, ba-aad girl—”
The Pedersons then rolled the big dead dog into a black garbage bag, spun it, and tied the top.

*

It occurs to me that this death is both a crappy surprise for everyone, and yet long overdue. When they are among us, those we love are so much among us we pretend we don’t need to do anything. And when they are no longer among us, those we love are so much completely gone we pretend we have to do something, everything to try to bring them back. It occurs to me we probably have this completely backwards. Thank you.

*

And of course there, down the hall and around the corner, this is the room Able is taken to on private matters with his cousin. There, this is where they skin hotdogs and stick candies in their mouths and, as it turns out in time, thrust each other’s penises into the palm of the other’s hand until everything is disgusting, cold, and empty.

*

Able looked at the ceiling as the queen spoke about the final act of Swedish Castle. “Don’t roll your fucking eyes at me,” the queen said. “It’s simple. The funeral is the only thing left. A few words by the queen, me, to capitalize on that eulogy—thank you, by the way, real warmhearted—and the cook will be found out to be the father of the illegitimate child of the servant and we’ll kill both of them by throwing them alive into an open grave filled with serpents.”
The cook rubbed his eyes.
“You’re a loose end,” the queen explained. “The princess isn’t a very good bad guy, being only seven weeks old, etcetera. And neither are you, for that matter, because you just basically stand there with your stupid wooden spoon and do nothing except smirk all night. But the two of you together, and then sealing your grave over, and some heartfelt digressions about love and fidelity by me—that’ll be closure.”

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