Lake Wobegon Days (20 page)

Brother Louie, a heavy-set young man with a full head of black hair and elegant mustache who had a weakness for two-toned summer shoes and red bow ties, grew old and fat and bald at the bank, where he stayed assistant cashier for thirty years until he retired in 1961, after forty-five years of employment there. It never occurred to me until he retired that once Louie had wanted to make something of himself in the banking business.

In the flush of pride that accompanied retirement—his picture appeared on the front page of the
Herald Star
along with an extensive article, “Town Lauds Louie For Years of Service,” and a photo of a Certificate of Distinguished Citizenship that Hjalmar, using his considerable influence, had wangled for Louie from Governor Elmer L. Andersen himself, signed by him
and
by Minnesota’s Secretary of State Joseph L. Donovan, and presented to Louie at a banquet at the Sons of Knute temple, attended by everyone, even Fr. Emil—Louie went so far as to show me his scrapbook and talk about his salad days, which was utterly unlike him: on Louie’s Grace & Truth shaving mirror was, “Not me, but Christ in me, be magnified,” and he lived by that precept. I never knew a man who tried so hard to avoid the personal pronoun.

In the scrapbook, along with photos of his parents (who glared at the photographer as if this moment was a terrible insult, even though they had paid for it) and of him and Gladys in the front seat of a Buick roadster (his only non-Ford car) and souvenirs of a honeymoon in the Black Hills, was a certificate from the St. Paul College of Commerce proclaiming in fancy script bedecked with patriotic bunting that Louie had successfully completed a course in finance and banking and earned the degree of Associate of Commerce. It was dated 1931.

He earned the degree studying at night, and when it came in the
mail, he said, “I told Gladys we were moving to the Cities. It was our chance.”

“We packed everything we owned in the back of the Buick and took off a week later. Sandy and Marylee stayed with their grandma. They cried to see us go, they thought Minneapolis was on the other side of the world, where there were missionaries. We had a flat this side of St. Cloud and another near Anoka and then one in Osseo. Gladys thought I could’ve checked those tires before we left, which I had, but I was too mad to talk about it, so we hauled in around midnight at the Cran Hotel on Hennepin Avenue, which looked to have reasonable rates in the tourist guide, and got a room. The lobby was dirty, and there were old men sitting around the lobby in their undershirts, and the desk clerk was rude. He said, ‘Whaddaya want?’ Gladys wouldn’t let me pick up the change. She said, ‘You don’t know where that money has been.’ The room was small and it smelled of disinfectant. I opened the closet and almost fell to my death—no floor, it was a shaft of some sort, it went down to the basement; I dropped my shirt in it. We got undressed for bed, and now we were wide awake. Gladys said, ‘Someone died in here, that’s why the Pine-Sol. I’m not about to get into a deathbed.’ She said she would prefer to sleep on a park bench. So we got dressed and snuck down the backstairs to avoid notice. We drove to the Hotel Nicollet. It was a swank place with walnut paneling and potted palms and a carpet like walking in mud. Well, we must’ve looked like orphans in the storm because the clerk asked if we had reservations and then he got snooty with us, he said, ‘Ordinarily we’re full weeks in advance. You really should have written on ahead a long time ago. But you’re lucky, I do have a room for $15.’ Gladys thought it was the weekly rate. She said, ‘No, we’re only staying the one night.’ But I knew. I looked him straight in the eye and I said, ‘You wouldn’t happen to have something better, would you?’ I didn’t want him to think we were green. No, he said, so I said we’d take it and I peeled off a twenty, my only one. Gladys was in shock, and so was I. We got to the room which was like a royal suite, and we couldn’t sleep for thinking about all that money. Fifteen dollars! Gladys said, ‘What made you say that?’ Well, it was pride talking, worldly pride. I was so ashamed. I thought of the girls, the things I could’ve done for them with that money. I sat up all night thinking. I decided that if
Minneapolis had that effect on me, that I’d rather spend what I didn’t have than admit to not having it, then I’d better go back where I belonged, and the next day we did. And then I told a lie: I said I’d looked for a job and didn’t find one good enough. It took me a long time to get Minneapolis off my conscience.”

The Brethren did not hold with ambition of worldly success, and their hopes for their children were modest ones: to earn an honest living, take pleasure in the Lord, and suffer trouble cheerfully. College was not necessary, nor was a well-paying job. Mr. Milburn of the St. Cloud Brethren earned a good dollar as a wholesale hardware salesman for Benson Brothers, but salesmanship forced a man to put his faith on the shelf—if a client cursed and told dirty jokes, he’d have to bite his tongue. Farming was the most godly livelihood, and show business was the least. When Bernie Carlson (“Mister Midwest”), host of the popular “Happy Day” and “Farm Hour” shows, got fired for a drunken remark to the Sweetheart of Song, it was noted as “what happens to people who get too big,” the logical consequence of success. Bernie was “big” in nobody’s eyes but ours. WFPT in Freeport was a Quonset hut in a cornfield by the tower. Nevertheless, he drove a white Olds and was on the radio, so he was pointed out to me as a sign of “what happens.” I was ten and I liked to read from the newspaper into a cardboard tube, cupping a hand behind my ear to hear if I had Bernie’s deep bass tones.

On Memorial Day, two great bands of marchers assemble in the morning, the Catholics at Our Lady and everyone else at the Lutheran church, and the Catholics are definitely the flashier outfit. Twelve Knights of Columbus led by Florian Krebsbach will lead them in their smart black suits and satiny capes with silver sabers at their sides and gorgeous white plumes on their black tricorn hats, followed by Father Emil in gold-embroidered surplice, and the five Sisters leading the classes from Our Lady School, including the flutaphone band in red capes, tooting “Immaculate Mother.” We pass Our Lady on the way to the Lutheran church, and the Catholics are a wonder to behold. Florian, a mechanic by trade, now gives off the
aura of an Admiral of the Fleet; gold and silver medals adorn his chest as he stands with the other Knights, smoking a last Lucky, and gives a nod to us poor Protestants slouching by. The Catholic boys’ drum and bugle corps wears purple sashes with white fringe, the boys’ honor guard carries a dozen flags including six American (five large, one immense), the Order of St. Benedict, the Marian Society, the St. Joseph’s Circle, and the long green banner of the Little Sisters of St. Margaret,
and
six white carbines for the rifle salute. They could add two senators and an elephant and it wouldn’t be any more magnificent than it is.

The municipal Lutheran procession is nothing but a bugler, two flags, the Sons of Knute, and a big crowd. “Christians don’t go in for show,” my father says, explaining the difference. We aren’t Lutheran, but there are only two parades to choose from; if we Brethren put on our own, it would look like a few people going out to lunch. “Christ commanded us to be humble,” he adds. Well, I guess we’ve got that commandment in our hip pockets. We’re humble to the point of being ridiculous. We look like POWs.

We march first, and the Catholics march after us. We walk up the hill to the cemetery behind Gary and LeRoy in the cruiser, the bubble light flashing, and the poor old Knutes wobble along and everyone else brings up the rear, and as we turn the corner onto Taft, we hear the clatter of drums and a burst of flutaphone toots and Florian hupping the Knights, and I turn to see the Catholics swing out onto Taft and head for our rear. Our numbers are approximately equal, but if they attacked, they would roust us in a minute. I’ve read
Foxx’s Book of Martyrs
, and it’s hard to forget: scenes of faithful Huguenot believers praying quietly and praising God and forgiving the hordes of Catholics who pile kindling at their feet. If the Knights were to tie me to a telephone pole and pile dry brush around me and call on me to renounce my faith while a Catholic Boy Scout prepares his flints, what would I do then? I guess I’d renounce, all right. Kiss a statue, hold a crucifix, do what they said. I could always cross my fingers at the time and prevent a real conversion. God would know I didn’t mean it.

Our Prairie Home Cemetery is divided into Catholic and Us; they have their gate and we have ours, and a low iron fence with spikes
separates the two. After service, while our elders stroll among the stones, we boys practice jumping the fence. Little kids stand by and watch this, lost in admiration. You make your first jump when you’re nine or ten and the fence comes up to your thighs, an awesome feat because if you missed, of course, you’d fall on the spikes and be impaled and die there. Nobody could save you. You’d flop around like a fish on a hook and be buried immediately. When you clear the fence, then you have to jump right back over or else. “You can’t come here,” David Krueger told me. He was Catholic. He had a heinie and a fat face and was “after” me at school. He got me. “This is holy. Get the hell out.” I broke away from him and vaulted back to our side. Then he jumped over and we chased him back. Then we stood and exchanged views.

“Catholics stink.”

“You stink so bad you think everybody does. You stink so bad, you make flowers stink.”

“The Pope is dumb, he can’t even speak English.”

“You’re so dumb you’re going to hell and you don’t even know it.”

“Am not.”

“Am too.”

That was afterward. First, our crowd gathered in silence on the slope above the obelisk erected in 1889 by the Grand Army of the Republic in grateful memory of those brave men who laid down their lives for their country and conducted a formal service out of which, had they been watching, those brave men surely would have gotten a big kick. The ladies’ sextet, decked out in white dresses, gathered to one side of the obelisk along with (then) Mayor Hjalmar Ingqvist and Pastor Tommerdahl, and the schoolchildren’s committee to the other, under the eye of Miss Lewis. For once, we needed no shushing; the presence of death hung heavy in the sweet summer air, as the killdeers called their name and the meadowlarks warbled and our relatives eased themselves down on the fresh grass, and the somber reality of the committee’s task weighed on us.

All eight of us, chosen on the basis of good behavior, had memorized three pieces—the Gettysburg Address, “In Flanders Fields,” and the Twenty-third Psalm—but we did not know which child would be called on to recite until the moment for that piece arrived and Miss
Lewis put her hand on the victim’s shoulder. It was an agonizing wait: your mind raced through the lines—

That was easy, but then what? Something about larks singing, which was stuck to “Four score and seven years ago” and “He maketh me to lie down,”—and when you tried to pull out the line about the larks, your hot little mind coughed up a wad of odds and ends, a whole bird’s nest of lines (“Pepsi-Cola hits the spot, twelve full ounces, that’s a lot”), and you tried to catch Miss Lewis’s eye with a silent message:
I can’t do it.
She looked straight ahead.

The Sons of Knute honor guard stood at the gate smoking and fiddling with their rifles, waiting for the crowd to shut up, then they marched double-file up the drive, all eight of them. On the gravel, their shoes ground out a sort of beat for a few steps and then the curve and the incline threw them off stride and they hauled up to the obelisk shuffling, almost dancing, trying to get back in step, until the Grand Oya yelled
Halt.
They turned to face us, and the sight of them did nothing for our confidence. They looked exhausted by the march. They wore the remnants of old Army clothes, whatever still fit them, and they made me think I’d rather die young in battle than grow up to be a Knute. All in all, they were not the men you’d pick to fire rifles around a crowd.

Pastor Tommerdahl took two steps forward, bowed his head, and prayed. It was a long one, taking in a good deal of American history, and gave me time to worry about the Gettysburg Address, the first hurdle of the program. The awful moment arrived. Karen was tapped for the Address, stepped forward, and said it perfectly. The ladies’ sextet then offered “Abide With Me.” They got to use a hymnal, one more unfair advantage of being older. I pulled for them to hit a clinker, I wished they’d hit one so bad that people would laugh out loud, and then they did—Mrs. Tollefson screeched like an old screen door—and I stifled a sudden laugh and it came out as a fart. Miss Lewis poked me, and I stepped forward, thinking it was time for “Flanders Fields,” and had to be yanked back.

John Potvin was tapped for the poem, my classmate who we called “Wiener.” He stepped forward, got the first two lines out, stopped, and swayed in the breeze. “That mark our place,” Miss Lewis hissed between her teeth. He said that. “And in the sky!” she hissed. He said that, and she gave him the line about larks, but his mind was shot and then he ducked and turned around and I saw the dark spot on the front of his pants. Leonard Tollefson finished the poem and had to be prompted, too. This made all of us except Karen feel sick to our stomachs. Normally, the Twenty-third Psalm was a cinch, but it had now escaped me and I knew it had escaped the others—I could smell the sweat and hear lips moving. “The Lord is my Shepherd.” That was all of it I had, that and the valley of death.