Lake Wobegon Days (28 page)
Authors: Garrison Keillor
Muriel went home and got her bawling-out from Hazel and, as Hazel remarked, “I say it and it goes right off you like water off a duck”—it was true, it didn’t make her feel bad at all.
When Fred did not return from his trip for the chisel, Hazel looked around to see if he had left her a note explaining that he’d be gone overnight. She had said good-bye to him when he went out the door and he hadn’t mentioned a long trip then, but he was taciturn and full of secrets. His taste for Ever Clear pure grain alcohol was a secret to her for years, as were the mail-order books he kept in his workbench. One day she went to look for a C-clamp and saw a grimy picture of a bosomy dame in black net stockings and a harness like a telephone lineman’s. She learned about the Ever Clear one morning when the toaster burst into flames and she grabbed his cup and threw the coffee on the fire. The coffee exploded. Then she had an idea why he always poured his own and what was in the bottle marked
DON’T THROW OUT
under the sink.
On his workbench she found a note he had written to himself the morning he left, a list of jobs to do around the house. It began:
(1) Replace back steps.
(2) Take squash out of basement & build new shelfs.
(3) New tailboard for truck.
(4) Shower head.
And it continued on to:
(31) Tear out tile around tub & retile. (1st fix pipe)
(32) New water heater?
(33) New siding on garage wall. Maybe NE side too.
(34) Check roof.
Evidently he had decided to sit down and get his life in order, and then when he looked at what needed to be done, he panicked and ran. Thirty-four items on the list, and he was thirty-four years old. When she noticed that, she knew that it was more than coincidence. It was a sign that he had reached his limit as Fred and would never come back. He had left his wallet behind, too. Evidently, he was going to be somebody else for a while.
*
P
orch society is described by Gaylord Gibbon in his
Etiquette Along the Mississippi
(p. 28), a book not found in our house but it applied to us anyway:
The backyard is for privacy. Only people walking in the alley will bother you, and they’re the sort who would anyway. The porch is sociable, but certain rules apply:
• Even if you’re screened from public view, it’s polite to call out hello to passers-by you know. It’s up to them to stop or not. It’s up to you to invite them in or not. The porch is a room of your house, not part of the yard. Only peddlers or certain ministers would barge right in.
• If you say, “Why don’t you come up and sit for a bit?,” it is customary for them to decline politely. If the invite was legit, it should then be repeated.
•
An invite to the porch is not an invite to the house.
Its terms are limited to a brief visit on the porch, no refreshments necessarily provided unless the occupants have such at hand.
• When the host stands up and stretches or says, “Well—,” the visitor should need no further signal that the visit has ended. Only an oaf would remain longer. If the host says, “You don’t have to run, do you?,” this is not a question but a pleasantry.
Humankind knows no finer amenity than the screened porch. It is the temple of family life, and the sacred preserve of the luxurious custom known as “visiting.” Compare it to the barbarity of the “business lunch,” the hideous conversational burden of the cocktail party, and the prison that is the formal dinner, the porch visit shines with civility.
*
A/C,
dishwashers, automatic transmissions, frozen dinners, and liberal theologians.
Some people move away, they get A/C first thing and crank it up to Cold. They drape themselves over it. Then they find a church where God is the gentle mist rising from the meadow and the smile on a child’s face. They don’t want to get sweaty anymore if they can help it. Some people dive right into decadence and make up for lost time, such as Wendell Tollerud who became a big noise in life insurance, has two cars (automatic with A/C), a one-acre ranch house (A/C, all the conveniences), membership in the Presbyterian church, and bought a lake home to get away in, which, he found to his horror, had no indoor plumbing. It was in virgin wilderness up north where septic tanks are forbidden. He paid the price of the cabin for a stainless-steel Swedish catalytic toilet (indoor) that converts shit to a fine white ash like powdered sugar. Wendell had had eighteen years of outdoor biffies and they held no further attraction. He wanted one you could sit in and not be reminded of all the people who’ve been there before you.
*
W
hen Bertha Ingqvist, David’s mother, said one April, “I don’t believe I’ll put in a garden this year,” they knew she didn’t have long. When you no longer care about fresh tomatoes and sweet corn, then death is near, and so she died the first week of June and now she is enriching the soil up there on the hill.
*
O
ne slow week years later, the
Herald-Star
carried a photo of the Lugers looking at their garden under the headline GARDENS DOING WELL, RESIDENTS SAY—SWEET CORN, TOMATOES, ON TARGET, ACCORDING TO REPORTS. I thought my targeted tomato would have made a great photo, and also the cheeseburger I bought at the Chatterbox when I was four with a dollar I stole off the kitchen counter. My father arrived just as Dorothy put the beautiful cheeseburger in front of me; he said, “You come with me,” and I said, “I’ll be there in a minute.” He dragged me away without a bite. No burger since has looked so good to me. I still miss it. Wake up nights hungry and see it.
In
Gene Autry and the Mystery of Big Mesa
, a gang of desperados rode into town when Gene was away, and one named Big Pete rode his horse into Mrs. Adams’s Dry Goods Store, grabbed one end of a bolt of calico and rode away with it up the street, trailing a long flag of bright blue cloth that got longer and longer. A bad man, and yet I couldn’t get that picture out of my head, and though I knew it was wrong to tie all those sheets together the day after washday and run out the front door and tow them around the house, whooping at my horse Bob, forty feet of white sheets is quite a sight. Throwing the tomato was a great moment. It was a fabulous cheeseburger.
“Don’t you know it’s wrong to steal?” he said. Of course, I knew. In the Bible, people who innovated tended to get smote, and that at a time when God smote hard: when He smited you stayed smitten, smiting was no slap on the wrist. Mrs. Tollerud illustrated this in Sunday School with a flannelgraph: a cloth-covered board on which she placed cloth figures and moved them around. The liberals got kicked out of Paradise, they got flooded upon, and Pharaoh, though decent in some ways, when he didn’t obey God, God made a mess of Egypt, dumping locusts, frogs, blood, lice, hail, and flies on them and then turning day to night. She took down the figure of Pharaoh the ruler and put up the figure of Pharaoh with his hands over his face. It made us think twice about striking out in new directions. But knowing right from wrong is the easy part. Knowing is not the problem.
*
I
n his desk, they say, was thousands in gold dust brought back from Colorado, the family fortune—all lost in the blaze, thus changing our history these past hundred years. All of us think of it often. The new house became a chicken coop later, and I wonder if the gold didn’t sit in the dirt and generations of chickens crawl under the boards and eat it. In that case, the golden yolks of our boiled eggs were truly golden and so are we now. I loved eggs. I may be worth hundreds of dollars.
*
T
he Red Cross gave Ralph a pin for giving the most blood during the drive that ended Memorial Day. The pin arrived from Minneapolis the first of August, and Ralph and Margaret Krebsbach went to the
Herald-Star
for the presentation, where Harold has the Speed-Graphic mounted for portraiture—most official presentations take place there, in front of Harold’s display of fine printing:
NO TRESPASSING, HUNTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, KEEP OUT, BEWARE OF DOG, PRIVATE
. Margaret accidentally stuck Ralph when she pinned it to his shirt, and he didn’t bleed a drop. “It was only a scratch,” he said, but he didn’t feel well at all.
School started the day after Labor Day, Tuesday, the Tuesday when my grandfather went, and in 1918 my father, and in 1948 me. It was the same day, in the same brick schoolhouse, the former New Albion Academy, now named Nelson School. The same misty painting of George Washington looked down on us all from above the blackboard, next to his closest friend, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was kind and patient and we looked to him for sympathy. Washington looked as if he had a headache. His mouth was set in a prim, pained expression of disapproval. Maybe people made fun of him for his long, frizzy hair, which resembled our teacher’s, Mrs. Meiers’, and that had soured his disposition. She said he had bad teeth—a good lesson for us to remember: to brush after every meal, up and down, thirty times. The great men held the room in their gaze, even the back corner by the windows. I bent over my desk, trying to make fat vowels sit on the line like fruit, the tails of consonants hang below, and colored the maps of English and French empires, and memorized arithmetic tables and state capitals and major exports of many
lands, and when I was stumped, looked up to see George Washington’s sour look and Lincoln’s of pity and friendship, an old married couple on the wall. School, their old home, smelled of powerful floor wax and disinfectant, the smell of patriotism.
Mine was a vintage desk with iron scrollwork on the sides, an empty inkwell on top, a shelf below, lumps of petrified gum on the underside of it and some ancient inscriptions, one from ’94 (“Lew P.”) that made me think how old I’d be in ’94 (fifty-two) and wonder who would have my place. I thought of leaving that child a message. A slip of paper stuck in a crack: “Hello. September 9, 1952. I’m in the 5th grade. It’s sunny today. We had wieners for lunch and we played pom-pom-pullaway at recess. We are studying England. I hope you are well and enjoy school. If you find this, let me know. I’m 52 years old.”
But Bill the janitor would find it and throw it away, so I only scratched my name and the date next to Sylvester Krueger’s (’31), a distinguished person whose name also appeared on a brass plaque by the library, “In Memoriam. Greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friends.”
It was an honor to have Sylvester’s desk, a boy who probably sat and whiled away the hours with similar thoughts about Washington and Lincoln, cars, peckers, foreign lands, lunch. School was eternity, a quiet pool of imagination where we sat together and dreamed, interrupted by teaching, and thought of the boy Lindbergh (from Little Falls, a little east of us), the boy Lincoln, Wilbur and Orville, Lou Gehrig, all heroes, and most of all, I imagined Sylvester who left the room and died in France where his body was buried. Strange to think of him there, French guys mowing the grass over him and speaking French; easy to think of him here, working fractions under George Washington’s gaze.
His mother came to school one day. Maybe it was Arbor Day, I remember we planted a tree in the memory of those who died for freedom, and I wasn’t one of the children chosen to shovel the dirt in. Bill the janitor dug the hole, and the filling honors went to the six children who were tops in school citizenship, which didn’t include me. They were lunchroom and hall monitors, flag-raisers, school patrol, and I was a skinny kid with wire-rim glasses who had to do
what they said. Mrs. Krueger was a plump lady in a blue dress who put on her specs to read a few remarks off a card. I studied her carefully on account of my special relationship with her son, Sylvester. She was nervous. She licked her lips and read fast. It was hot. Some kids were fooling around and had to be shushed. “I know Sylvester would be very proud of you and glad that you remember him,” she said. The little sliver of tree was so frail; it didn’t last the spring. Bill had dug the hole in left field and the tree got stomped in a kittenball game at the All-School Picnic. Mrs. Krueger looked like a person who was lost. Mrs. Meiers walked her to the corner, where she would take McKinley Street home. I tagged along behind, studying. Mrs. Krueger seemed to have very sore feet. At the corner, she thanked Mrs. Meiers for the very nice ceremony. She said, “A person never forgets it when they lose a son, you know. To me, it’s like it was yesterday.”
*
The same day we planted the tree, our all-school picture was taken by a man with a sliver of a mustache who crouched behind his tripod and put a cloth over his head. Jim told me we could be in the picture twice—at both ends of the group—by running around back while he shot it, but I left the right end too soon and got to the left end too late, and so appeared as two slight blurs. I looked at the print and thought of Sylvester and me.
School gave us marks every nine weeks, three marks for each subject: work, effort, and conduct. Effort was the important one, according to my mother, because that mark showed if you had gumption
and stick-to-itiveness, and effort was my poorest showing. I was high in conduct except when dared to do wrong by other boys, and then I was glad to show what I could do. Pee on the school during recess? You don’t think I would? Open the library door, yell “Boogers!” and run? Well, I showed them. I was not the one who put a big gob on the classroom doorknob during lunch though, the one that Darla Ingqvist discovered by putting her hand on it. Of all the people you’d want to see touch a giant gob, Darla was No. 1. She yanked her hand back just as Brian said, “Snot on you!” but she already knew. She couldn’t wipe it off on her dress because she wore such nice dresses so she burst into tears and tore off to the girls’ lavatory. Mrs. Meiers blamed me because I laughed. Brian, who did it, said, “That was a mean thing to do, shame on you” and I sat down on the hall floor and laughed myself silly. It was so
right
for Darla to be the one who got a gob in her hand. She was a jumpy, chatty little girl who liked to bring money to school and show it to everyone. Once a five-dollar bill—we never had a five-dollar bill, so all the kids crowded around to see it. That was what she wanted. She made us stand in line. It was dumb. All those dumb girls took turns holding it and saying what they would do if they had one, and then Darla said she had $400 in her savings account. “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” Brian said, but we all knew she probably did have $400. Later Brian said, “I wish I had her five dollars and she had a feather in her butt, and we’d both be tickled,” which made me feel a little better, but putting the gob on the knob, knowing that Darla was monitor and had the privilege of opening the door,
that
was a stroke of genius. I almost didn’t mind Mrs. Meiers making me sit in the cloakroom for an hour. I put white paste on slips of paper and put them in the pockets of Darla’s coat, hoping she’d think it was more of the same.