Lake Wobegon Days (14 page)

“Pretty good,” the man yelled back.

“Is there room for two?”

“Are you a fisherman?”

“Yes.”

“Then there is room.” And he poled the raft to shore, helped the formerly dying man onto the craft, and the two of them spent several hours pulling a good string of sunfish and crappies out of the still water among the weeds and water lilies. The man was Magnus Olesen, and he and Muus did not exchange three words all afternoon. In fact, it wasn’t until dark that Magnus got around to asking if Muus was ill, and by that time, he was not.

He was the first Norwegian bachelor farmer in Lake Wobegon. He farmed three acres north of the lake, only enough to keep him stocked
with beans and tobacco, and his real occupation was fishing, which he did every day except Sundays. Every fish he caught, he smoked in a stone smokehouse as big as the shack he lived in, which was beside the smokehouse. People wondered about him, of course. He didn’t join the Norske Folke society or the Lutheran church, though he attended church faithfully, taking his place in the “doubters’ pew” at the rear, and he never spoke up when the emigrants gathered for the weekly reading of their mutual copy of the Minneapolis
Tidende
and, strangest of all, he got no mail. He was not known at the post office. He was barely known at all.

He was generous with his smoked fish, though, and always carried a few in his shirt for distribution, and to those who got some, he was not so strange. They figured that a man who could make the finest smoked fish they ever tasted was entitled to some leeway in his private life. The minister got a fish every Sunday, and the Norske Folke got a big bundle for Christmas, and any Norwegian who took sick found a large smoked fish at the front door the next day, placed on the lintel to keep it away from cats and dogs. The fish was good for any kind of intestinal problem and was credited with having saved the lives of several who were wasting away until the sweet smell made them strong enough to sit up and eat it, including Anna Torgerson, fading fast from dysentery, who recovered and married him, July 6, 1873, after which he fished only every other day.

Magnus and Katherine had three daughters before she died giving birth in 1871, so the Norwegian Bible was passed to the eldest girl, Hildur, and then to her daughter. Hildur married Oskar Tollefson after his first wife died, and they had seven children, including Amelia (b. 1885) who married Peter Ingqvist, begetting nine, including Esther (b. 1906), who married Gustaf Bunsen, by whom she had four children, including Clarence, (b. 1925), who now has the Bible, his sister Eva having given it to him as a wedding present when he and Arlene were married, after Eva learned she could not have children. After fathering the Katherine Oleson branch, Magnus married again in 1872, had three more children by Mari Tollerud, a hired girl at the Watsons’ who dumped dishwater on him when he first proposed, and, after her death fourteen years later of consumption, married a third time, Ada
Tommerdahl, the widow of a minister who drowned, with four sons, with whom he lived until his death in 1911 at the age of seventy-five, the patriarch of a great house of descendants, now mostly scattered and gone off to places almost as strange as America was to him. A fine portrait of the old man taken when he was sixty-eight and strong as a horse, his white beard like a buttress and his eyes still clear and sharp despite this print having been photographed from a photograph of a photograph—this portrait hangs in a vast white living room in La Jolla, in a mobile home outside of Abilene, in a stone house in the province of Michoacan, Mexico, in a dreadful driftwood frame above a purple plush couch in a Chicago condo, and God only knows where else aside from Lake Wobegon, of course, where you see it almost everywhere you look. Anyone who looks hard at him gets a good hard look back telling you to buck up, be strong, believe in God, and be about your business.

By 1904, when the picture was taken by his grandson John Tollefson, who had a studio in the Central Building, Magnus Oleson had seen more history than a person could put in a book, not that he was a man to think about writing one. His letters home to Norway began to peter out when the Tollefson party rode into town and ceased abruptly when Katherine Shroeder arrived: just
stopped.
He had written them because he was lonely and had no one to talk to, and the day she came, the literary chapter of his life snapped shut and he began another that we can only guess at. We know that in 1871, while still in mourning for his first wife, he set a record for planting corn, using the old hand planter and covering the seeds with his foot: sixteen acres in one day—it’s in
The New Albion Sun
(formerly the
Star
). We know that in 1876 he sold 257 bushels of wheat at $1.75 and eight years later the price was down to 35¢. A bushel made about forty pounds of flour, and at less than a penny a pound, he felt somebody was cheating him so he took up potato farming and kept a small dairy herd; the 1883 class consisted of Lily, Jenny, Bessie, Molly, Daisy, Helen, and Flora. His horses were named Norma and Fanny, two gray mares that cost him $400, and their children were Gypsy and Blaze whom his children rode to high school in town the first year there was one, 1885. He served on the school board for ten years and donated firewood. In 1894 he donated $10 to the Women’s
Suffrage & Temperance Union (W.S.T.U.), of which his daughter Anna was a founder, and the following year donated a pig toward the purchase of an organ ($259 from Brunelle & Sons, Chicago) for the Norwegian Lutheran Church, of which his grandson John Olaf Quist was choirmaster. He liked music. He enjoyed having his feet tickled. He was a heavy reader. He subscribed to four newspapers, one English (the St. Paul paper through which he had found his wife, not the
Sun
, which was too Republican for his taste) and three Norwegian, the
Posten
, the
Budstikken
(later the
Tidende
), and
Nordisk Folkebladet
, in which he faithfully followed the funny strip
“Ok og Tina”
which popularized the words
“Uffda!”
and
“Ishda!”
His contempt for bankers was exceeded only by his disgust for lawyers. “Honesty in a lawyer,” he said, “is like a hen’s hind legs.” He kept all his teeth except two, which were extracted for 50¢ apiece by a man named Ronning who practiced dentistry with a pair of pliers. During the farm depression of the 1890s, he sold his two hundred sixty acres to Elmer Tollerud, the husband of his granddaughter Viola, and moved to a house in town. He never visited Minneapolis, never rode in an automobile, but in 1906 at the annual county fair put on by the Agriculture Society, of which he was a charter member, he rode solo in a hydrogen balloon to the end of its tether, about three hundred feet, and looked down at the crowd, many of them related to him, and at a town he had observed for more than fifty years, and stayed aloft for his full five minutes. When he died, he was buried next to Katherine after a service that, according to his wishes, included a good sermon in Norwegian and the singing of
“Hvor Finner vel Hjertet sin Saligste Ro?”
(“Where Does the Heart Find Its Most Blessed Peace?”).

“No innocent man buys a gun and no happy man writes his memoirs,” said Raymond Duff Payne, and yet there’s so much we’d love to know about the early years of our town which is buried in silence. A few dim recollections from ancient relatives who were asked for information only after they got feeble, by an earnest grandchild, about matters that no longer much interested them. The letters are for the most part lost; they were all mailed. The photographs are for the most part formal. No picture exists of a Saturday night dance, for example, of the thousands put on in houses before the Alhambra Ballroom (&
Roller Skating Rink) was built in 1887, and yet it was (along with church) one of the bedrocks of Norwegian life.

The first Social Circle was formed in 1871 by Oskar, six families who took turns hosting the weekly dance when they all could “turn loose” after a week of digging. People walked miles to a dance, even in the winter. It began at seven
P.M.
and went for four hours, with a big lunch and coffee served after, but often they went until four in the morning. Little houses
packed
with people, the furniture piled, hauled upstairs or out in the yard. Some played whist, but everyone danced. Oskar and brother Paul played violins and their mother the piano (if there was a piano, otherwise Mr. Jaeger played his harmonica). Paul was so good, his father let him off the hard work so his hands wouldn’t get stiff. They sat on top of the piano, the house was so crowded. Little boys dashed in and plunked some bad notes and ran away. They played
polskas
and schottisches,
springleiks, masurkas
, and of course the
vals.
To a woman who had risen at five
A.M.
for six days in a row to make a fire, haul water, feed poultry, milk, pump water for the livestock, and
then
do laundry and cook and clean house and perhaps also help out in the field, the Saturday dance was a bright spot that she worked toward.

“We worked hard but we had fun then,” old Mrs. Berge murmured to a grandson whose name she couldn’t remember. She couldn’t even remember the work so well. “Anything that needed doing, we did it ourselves.” She did however remember the dances. She came from Norway to work for Carl Ingqvist and family for $3 a week, seven days a week with Saturday night and Sunday morning off. “They were good to me.” They took her to the Circle. Sixty years later she remembered the dancers and the music clearly. “The room was full of people laughing, hopping up and down.”

In 1878, something about a hill made August Krebsbach think of Bavaria, the contours and the two spruce in the dusk, and he said, “Halt!” and climbed down off the wagon and tasted the dirt. It was April, his children were tired of riding, and his wife, Clara, was pregnant. The register of deeds shows 180 acres purchased April 18 for $2700, $2000
secured by the New Albion National Bank, and the elevator records show that in his first season he tried potatoes, the next year corn. In 1880, there was a misunderstanding over credit, and Mr. Peabody at the elevator “initiated proceedings” that sent the sheriff and county clerk to roust the Krebsbachs out of bed at gunpoint and seize two beds and an oak dresser. Shots were fired, a brindle cow was killed, and the family was threatened with prison, all of which appears in the records simply as a credit of $21.

From this shameful incident began the Krebsbachs’ enmity toward town, which lasted long after the sheriff shot himself and Mr. Peabody departed with several thousand dollars that didn’t belong to him. August paid off the bank, then never set foot in New Albion or Lake Wobegon again. The names of August and Clara vanished from the church roll, their three boys and two girls left school, their trade went to the merchants of St. Hubert. Only the tax assessor noted their existence. Even the fire that burned their house to the ground went unnoticed in the newspaper. That is thought to have happened in 1891, in January. How the family survived, nobody knew. Perhaps they lived with their animals until spring, or else they may have moved temporarily to St. Hubert. St. Hubert dried up and blew away fifty years ago, so there is no record there, and whatever the Krebsbachs’ neighbors knew about them, they didn’t consider it worth telling their children, and the story is gone. August and Clara may be buried in the St. Hubert cemetery, a sad story itself. The promoter who sold the lots also sold gravestones of an inferior grade of granite, which disintegrated. The ruins were picked up and put in one big pile which you can see today next to County 49, across the road from some old stone foundations.

The boy who got the farm was Manfred, Fred to the few who knew him, who married a St. Hubert girl and led an unexceptional life except for his great isolation, although after she died in childbirth, he was known to visit town on occasion and even hoist a beer at Barney’s, howbeit in silence. Old-timers remember him as “the red-faced man” who never spoke other than what was necessary to buy things. One day, Rev. Olaf Hauge drove out to Krebsbachs’ and spent an evening, and they became Lutherans, he and his sister, Mrs. Winkler, whose husband had run off, and her two boys. Whatever this taught Fred
about forgiveness and regeneration did not change his habit of silence—for one thing, he was a German Lutheran and the church was Norwegian and worshiped in Norwegian until 1934, when a monthly English service was added; and for another, the former county clerk was a deacon. Fred endured baptism and never entered church again until he was carried in for his funeral (1929). He did send the boys, though, and with Leon and Roman, the grudge finally ended. They never discussed it with anyone else, it ended without comment after forty-nine years when Fred died.

Roman was the older, a heavy man; he lived in a pair of blue bib-overalls that he stretched fore and aft, belly and shanks, a very admirable figure of a man, with hands big as legs of lamb, a ruddy face, a distinguished band of white across his forehead where the hat left off, and a white dome above the fringe of curly brown hair. He was an admirable horseman in his day, then an admirable mechanic; he was admired for sheer strength, having once lifted a steer and put it on a wagon; he was admired for never being at a loss for words and never wasting any either. He even spat tobacco admirably—pooching his cheeks and putting the thin brown line exactly where he wanted it, not a big blow, just a real nice spit, very graceful and discreet.