Lake Wobegon Days (30 page)

Twelve
P.M.
; as the last moan of the noon siren fades away, twenty-seven boys are led from the church basement and marched under close guard to Main Street where, in front of the Central Building, the town of Lake Wobegon stands in ranks, facing, on three sides, a patch of asphalt where the boys, disheveled, their eyes downcast, their faces crimson with shame, are ordered to form a row. Under the blazing sun, the crowd listens as Scoutmaster Einar Tingvold reads the Bill of Dishonor, all thirty items. A bugler plays Retreat. In the silence that follows, the crowd can hear clearly every rip as the Scoutmaster tears insignia from each Scout in turn—troop number, merit badges, insignia of rank—and places the bits of cloth on a small bonfire. At a shouted command (“’Bout face!”), the crowd turns its back to the miscreants, then disperses quietly into the bright afternoon, as the boys, tears streaming down their dirty faces, stand and watch the flames devour the last little scraps of their Scouting careers. They will carry this mark for the rest of their lives. Doors will slam in their faces, old friends will turn away, even loved ones will whisper behind their backs: “He dishonored the uniform. He did not deserve to be a Scout.”

I heard quite a few snuffles around me when Einar talked about stripping our badges. I did not snuffle myself because I had nothing he could strip. Two years a Scout and I hadn’t even made Tenderfoot. Second Class seemed very far away and First Class or Eagle only a dream. I joined Scouts because it was fun to hang around with my friends and go on camping trips: not for the Scout part but for the stuff we thought up including stuff that made Einar mad. What he was talking about, the dishonor and all, made no sense to me. What honor?

Listening to Einar was one time I felt superior to grownups, hearing them thunder and yell and knowing they had no power over me. Dave Ingqvist was shattered by the thought of being stripped; he had a shirtful of badges, he stood out from the crowd like Audie Murphy in a battalion of postal clerks, he was a Scout’s Scout. He was State President of Scouts for Christ; and the same year he went to Boy’s State and was elected Governor of Minnesota, which didn’t surprise me. I was only surprised to find out he was Governor-for-a-Day. I thought he was elected for good. He was brave, reverent, and clean, though perhaps lacking in the trustworthiness department.
I
didn’t trust him, anyway, not after he told Einar about the tent zipper.

Now he is Pastor Ingqvist, a good man, and I’ve forgiven him, though not entirely. He was the only boy who had the complete uniform—Scout pants, shoes, cap, belt, even Scout shorts for summer wear—the rest of us only had shirts and neckerchiefs. I thought he should give his uniform to the poor, me, and let me have his Schwinn too.

Mrs. Meiers had a Reading Club on the bulletin board, a sheet of brown wrapping paper with a border of book jackets, our names written in her plump firm hand and after each name a gold star for each book read, but she has given it up because some names have so many stars. Her good readers are voracious and read their weight in books every week, while the slow readers lag behind. Daryl Tollerud has read two books, Mary Mueller has read sixty-seven, and her stars are jammed in tight behind her name. In the encyclopedia, I’m up to Customs of Many Lands and she is up to Volcanoes. She is the queen of Reading Club and she knows it. Girls want to sit next to her at lunch. Donna Bunsen is second with forty-six. Her close friends believe that Mary writes her book reports from book jackets.
Look at this: “Little House on the Prairie
is a book about the Ingalls family living in South Dakota…. “
She didn’t read that book, the big cheater.
Marilyn Peterson put a slip of paper in a book in Mary’s desk. It said, “You big cheater,” she put it in at the end of the book. Mary didn’t say anything about it. “See?” Marilyn said. “She didn’t read that book.”

It took me a long time to learn to read. I was wrong about so many words.
Cat, can’t. Tough, through, thought. Shinola.
It was like reading a cloud of mosquitoes. Donna in the seat behind whispered right answers to me, and I learned to be a good guesser, but I didn’t read well until Mrs. Meiers took me in hand.

One winter day she took me aside after recess and said she’d like me to stay after school and read to her. “You have such a nice voice,” she said, “and I don’t get to hear you read in school as much as I’d like.”

No one had told me before that I had a nice voice. She told me many times over the next few months what a
wonderful
voice I had, as I sat in a chair by her desk reading to her as she marked worksheets. “The little duck was so happy. He ran to the barn and shouted, ‘Come! Look! The ice is gone from the pond!’ Finally it was spring.”

“Oh, you read that so well. Read it again,” she said. When Bill the
janitor came in to mop, she said, “Listen to this. Doesn’t this boy have a good voice?” he sat down and I read to them both. “The little duck climbed to the top of the big rock and looked down at the clear blue water. ‘Now I am going to fly,’ he said to himself. He waggled his wings and counted to three. ‘One, two, three.’ And he jumped and—” I read in my clear blue voice. “I think you’re right,” Bill said. “I think he has a very good voice. I wouldn’t mind sitting here all day and listening to him.”

One word I liked was
popular.
It sounded good, it felt good to say, it made lights come on in my mouth. I drew a rebus: a bottle of Nu-Grape + U + a Lazy Ike.
Pop-u-lure.
It didn’t occur in our reading book, where little children did the right thing although their friends scoffed at them and where despised animals wandered alone and redeemed themselves through pure goodness and eventually triumphed to become Top Dog, The Duck of Ducks, The Grand Turtlissimo, The Greatest Pig Of Them All, which, though thrilling, didn’t appeal to me so much as plain
popular.
“The popular boy came out the door and everybody smiled and laughed. They were so glad to see him. They all crowded around him to see what he wanted to do.”

Morning and afternoon, school recessed and we took to the playground; everyone burst out the door except me. Mrs. Meiers said, “Don’t run! Walk!” I always walked. I was in no hurry, I knew what was out there. The girls played in front. Little girls played tag and stoop-ball, hopscotch, skipped rope; big girls sat under the pine tree and whispered. Some girls went to the swings. Boys went out back and played baseball, except for some odd boys who lay around in the shade and fooled with jackknives and talked dirty. I could go in the shade or stand by the backstop and wait to be chosen. Daryl and David always chose up sides and always chose the same people first, the popular ones. “Let somebody else be captain!” Jim said once. “How come you always get to choose?” They just smiled. They were captains, that was all there was to it. After the popular ones got picked, we stood in a bunch looking down at the dirt, waiting to see if our rating had changed. They took their sweet time choosing us, we had plenty of time to study our shoes. Mine were Keds, black, though white ones were more popular. Mother said black wouldn’t show dirt. She didn’t know how the wrong shoes could mark a person and raise
questions in other people’s minds. “Why do you wear black tennis Shoes?” Daryl asked me once. He had me there. I didn’t know. I guessed I was just that sort of person, whether I wanted to be or not. Maybe not showing dirt was not the real reason, the real reason was something else too terrible to know, which she would tell me someday. “I have something to tell you, son.” She would say it. “No! No!” “Yes, I’m afraid it’s true.” “So that’s why—” “Yes. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you before. I thought I should wait.” “But can’t I—” “No, I’m afraid not. We just have to make the best of it.”

Nine boys to a side, four already chosen, ten positions left, and the captains look us over. They chose the popular ones fast (“Brian!” “Bill!” “Duke!” “John!” “Bob!” “Paul!” “Jim!” “Lance!”), and now the choice is hard because we’re all so much the same:
not so hot
—and then they are down to their last grudging choices, a slow kid for catcher and someone to stick out in right field where nobody hits it, except maybe two guys, and when they come to bat the captain sends the poor right-fielder to left, a long ignominious walk. They choose the last ones two at a time, “You and you,” because it makes no difference, and the remaining kids, the scrubs, the excess, they deal for as handicaps (“If I take him, then you gotta take
him
”). Sometimes I go as high as sixth, usually lower. Just once I’d like Daryl to pick me first. “Him! I want him! The skinny kid with the glasses and the black shoes! You! Come on!” But I’ve never been chosen with any enthusiasm.

I think that if Wally (“Old Hard Hands”) Bunsen were here, things would be different for me; he and I would be close friends. He was a true champion, a man among men, known for his kindness as well as athletic prowess. He saved a boy from drowning once, and another time he brought a crippled kid to the ball game to see him hit a double off Carl Hubbell. That was in the season he spent with the Chicago Cubs.

Born, Lake Wobegon, August 1, 1910. Died, Lake Wobegon, June 11, 1936. I know those dates by heart. The year 1933 he was with the Cubs, and batted .348 from April to July, and then came home. He died while batting for the Lake Wobegon Volunteers (who later became the Whippets), vs. Albany, bottom of the seventh inning, with men on first
and third (later known as “The Dead Man’s Spread”). He batted left, threw right, was 6’2” and weighed 181 pounds. His golden hair was parted down the middle, and he wore a gold ring on his right hand. The little finger of his right hand was cut off in a corn picker, 1931. The little white house next door to Dieners’ was his house; he slept on the back porch, even in winter, and his dog’s name was Buddy. His parents’ names were Clara and Oscar. He was smart as a whip and if he hadn’t played ball he would have been an inventor. He made a gasoline-powered sled, an automatic apple-corer, and an electric water fountain for his mom’s rock garden.

Two pictures of him hang in the Sidetrack Tap: one in his Cubs uniform, his bat cocked, and the other with Jack Dempsey, who is kissing him on the cheek, a great tribute when you think about it. What sort of man would the Heavyweight Champion of the World kiss? A man’s man, of course. I wasn’t allowed in the Sidetrack as a boy, but I went in—just to have a look at the pictures, and they were permanently imprinted in my mind, and from his wonderful grin I began to imagine him as a personal friend.

Wally Krebsbach: “He had wings on his feet and a whip for an arm. he ran, he threw, he came to bat, and it was all play to him. He just laughed out there, it was so natural to him. A beautiful ballplayer. God gave him the talent and he had no trouble with it. The outfield was his home and any ball hit near him just naturally belonged in his hand. He came to bat and had no trouble in his mind, he was meant to hit.”

His trouble with the Cubs lay in his glove. Growing up in Lake Wobegon, being poor, he learned to play without one, and by the time he could afford to have it, he was such an excellent bare-handed fielder he didn’t bother with a glove. Thus the nickname “Old Hard Hands.” His palms were like leather. In 1931, a Cubs scout went to look at a prospect in Duluth, and the hotel clerk said, “Dobbins? Hell, you ought to see a guy in this little town near St. Cloud, he could put Dobbins in his back pocket.” So the scout came to town, in his gabardine suit with a bottle of rye in his valise and took one look at Wally shag flies and waved $500 in his face as if he was trying to wake him up. “One thing, kid, you gotta get a glove,” he said. Wally was about to leave for spring training the next January, but his father got sick,
so he stayed until he recovered, which wasn’t until May, and the year after that he went to Florida and put on the uniform.

“Dear Folks,” he wrote. “Arrived this morning and went straight to the park for practice. The grass is brown and the ground is hard as cement, but guess it will do. Tried on so many gloves and none felt just right so just picked the smallest one and hoped for the best. Ran for an hour and felt better, then lunch. Food here is all fried. Felt queasy after, but swung the bat okay and then came back to the hotel, which is small but clean. The others went to a movie. Miss you all.”

He begged the Cubs to let him play barehand, but they said it was against the rules. “You will get accustomed to it,” they said. He was so good in every department, they figured it would be easy for him to learn this one little thing. A man who stood at the plate so relaxed and easy, then cocked his hip, lifted his left foot, and the next you saw was him trotting slowly toward first—a man who if he did have to leg it cruised on the basepaths so deceptively fast, the centerfielder trotted in and picked up Wally’s single and went to lob it to the cut-off man and saw Wally ambling into second—a man whose eye in the field was so keen, he was momentarily distracted by a pigeon gliding into the grandstand or a shooting star—a man who people would have paid just to watch him throw a ball home, so hard it hummed, so true the catcher never moved his feet—surely, a man so talented could learn to wear a glove on his left hand and catch with it.

“He could’ve but his heart wasn’t in it,” says Wally Krebsbach. “It didn’t feel right to him. It threw him off balance. It took the fun out of the game. He actually got headaches from it. And then he dropped a couple, and that made him ashamed and then he came home. They offered him more money but he just laughed. It wasn’t worth it to him.”

“If they’d let him play the way he wanted to, bare-handed, he would’ve been the greatest they ever saw, but they wouldn’t, so he came home.”

“He wasn’t the same. He looked forty. His hands shook. Then he had a run of bad luck. His dad passed away. That was hard on him. And then his girl told him she didn’t love him anymore—that took all the spirit out of him. Nobody could cheer him up after that. He told me—he said, ‘Buddy, she says to me, she says, “My daddy says you’re
nothing but a ballplayer and you’ll never hold down a regular job, but that doesn’t matter to me. I could love you anyway.” She says, “It’s your hands being so hard. I just can’t get used to it.” Can you believe that, Buddy?’ he says. He couldn’t believe it. He said, ‘A man is
supposed
to have hard hands, ain’t he? Who has soft hands? Nobody but fruitcakes and bank clerks.’ He was broken up over her for weeks.”