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

are, and feel glad when we complete the turn in my father’s drive without stalling the car, and begin to pick up speed, and pass the coulee, and head out to the highway.
    I think: So this is how it feels to be a grown-up person. I look at my hands as if they belong to someone else. I feel neat, and gathered up within myself, as if I took a broom to the far corners of my body and swept myself clean into a pile.

C LARENCE

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    ALL MY LIFE, Clarence had lived at the top of the Lakehead road in a tall, upright house that looked just like my mother’s. It wasn’t, however, until I was eighteen years old—the summer I got a job working for the Weekly Gleaner in town—that I ever laid eyes on him.
    Guy was the Gleaner ’s editor-in-chief. He said Clarence was the oldest man in the county—probably even the state. It was hard to tell exactly, and even more difficult to prove. Clarence himself hardly knew anymore just how long he’d been alive. He didn’t get around much, hadn’t for a while. Not, at least, for eighteen years. Even the Save-Easy boy (who had grown, over the intervening period, into a surly, dough-faced Save-Easy man) never saw Clarence anymore when he went up to the house once a week, delivering the groceries and the mail.
    But that was the summer of the fiftieth-anniversary spread, and Guy said he wanted Clarence right on the cover. I’d only just started, but he gave the job to me anyway. “Let the old fella tell you a thing or two,” he said, when he sent me up the road. I could tell he thought that he was doing me a favour.
    IT WAS CLARENCE’S WIFE, of course—twenty-five years younger—and not Clarence himself, who came to the door. She had taken her time, and when she did arrive, she opened the door only partway—hardly wide enough to pass. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Come from the paypah.”
    I nodded my head, and indicated my new camera, which I had purchased with my own money. She stared—first at it, and then at me—before, finally, opening the door a little wider. “Well,” she said. “Come in. He sure ain’t coming to greet you.”
    In the same way that people, over the years, come to resemble the things that surround them—their animals, their wives—Clarence had come to resemble his house. He was tall, even sitting upright in his living room chair. Straight as a chimney. And—like all the houses along the Lakehead road, where large families had long ago moved into town—mostly shut-up-looking, like only one or two rooms were lived in at all.
    And old. Terminally so. His eyes sunk so deep in his head, like inset windows, that his skin, where his eyes should have been, ruffled out around them like curtains for the Fourth of July. His long neck was so thin and straight that his head seemed to be set there as if only temporarily. When, finally, I worked up the courage to speak, I did so quietly—afraid of disrupting what seemed to be a delicate balance. Even with how eager I was to get Clarence’s name—and my own—onto the front page of the anniversary special, I didn’t mind particularly when I saw that there was no story to find atClarence’s house. Even when (cautiously) I managed to lift my voice, each of my carefully prepared questions was met only by a devastating silence. I was happy enough not to test the limits of that particular silence. Happy enough to take my leave as quickly and discreetly as possible, and—having gleaned nothing—simply head back to town. I had, in fact, just resolved to go when I discerned a low hum—a sort of sad, slow whistle, like a distant train—which (emanating, as it did, from Clarence’s general direction) I took to be a form of reply. Still—and though I strained, desperately, to do so—I could not make out a single word. Once more, I resolved to make my departure.
    But again I was