Page 48 - A Little Life: A Novel

“As a rancher,” the reporter began, when Willem’s father had stopped
her.
“Not a rancher,” he’d said, his accent making these words, as all words,

sound brusquer than they should, “a ranch hand.” He was correct, of course;
a rancher meant something specific—a landowner—and by that definition,
he wasn’t a rancher. But there were plenty of other people in the county
who then also had no right to call themselves ranchers and yet did so
anyway. Willem had never heard his father say that they shouldn’t—his
father didn’t care what anyone else did or didn’t do—but such inflation was
not for him, or for his wife, Willem’s mother.

Perhaps because of this, he felt he always knew who and what he was,
which is why, as he moved farther and then further away from the ranch and
his childhood, he felt very little pressure to change or reinvent himself. He
was a guest at his college, a guest in graduate school, and now he was a
guest in New York, a guest in the lives of the beautiful and the rich. He
would never try to pretend he was born to such things, because he knew he

wasn’t; he was a ranch hand’s son from western Wyoming, and his leaving
didn’t mean that everything he had once been was erased, written over by
time and experiences and the proximity to money.
He was his parents’ fourth child, and the only one still alive. First there
had been a girl, Britte, who had died of leukemia when she was two, long
before Willem had been born. This had been in Sweden, when his father,
who was Icelandic, had been working at a fish farm, where he had met his

mother, who was Danish. Then there had been a move to America, and a
boy, Hemming, who had been born with cerebral palsy. Three years later,
there had been another boy, Aksel, who had died in his sleep as an infant for
no apparent reason.
Hemming was eight when Willem was born. He couldn’t walk or speak,
but Willem had loved him and had never thought of him as anything but his

older brother. Hemming could smile, however, and as he did, he’d bring his
hand up toward his face, his fingers shaping themselves into a duck’s bill
claw, his lips pulling back from his azalea-pink gums. Willem learned to
crawl, and then walk and run—Hemming remaining in his chair year after
year—and when he was old and strong enough, he would push Hemming’s
heavy chair with its fat, stubborn tires (this was a chair meant to be
sedentary, not to be nosed through grasses or down dirt roads) around the

ranch where they lived with their parents in a small wooden house. Up the