Lake Wobegon Days (31 page)

“And then he got the idea from the way people talked that he’d been a failure, that if he was any good he’d be in Chicago. And that just killed him. He knew it wasn’t true, it was that they thought it that killed him. He knew how good he was, he didn’t have to prove it by going someplace else. A man is just
good
, he can be good anywhere. This was his own family who looked down on him, though, so it tore him apart. Clarence’s dad, that’s Wally’s brother, he gave him a hard time about quitting the team and embarrassing the family, as if he had any right to talk about it. Well, Wally didn’t have a job, he was living off what he’d earned from the Cubs, and he was lying around in that sleeping porch, thinking too much, just living from Sunday to Sunday for the Volunteers games. One Saturday night he comes down here and asks for a drink. My old man was bartending, he says no. So Wally left. Where he found it I don’t know but he found enough to last him all night because when he came to the game next day he was suited up and that was about all. He looked like death on toast.”

“He never should have played. Dutch and me, we argued with Henneman to send him home, but there was naturally a big crowd to see him play so play he did. I never saw a man sweat so much. His eyes bugged out. He flopped on the bench and almost passed out. Then he dropped one in the top of the seventh. It wasn’t important, we were up by six runs, there were two outs, we said, ‘Shake it off,’ but it bothered him so that when he come up to bat, he was set to kill one. And instead it killed him.”

“It was the bottom of the seventh, Roy on first and me on third, no outs, a count of two-and-two, and he stepped out of the box and looked down toward me, but he wasn’t looking
at
me because his eyes wouldn’t focus. He was clearing his throat and I thought he was choking so I called time and ran in, but he wasn’t choking, he was crying. He says, ‘I’m no good.’ I said, ‘You’re the best. You’re the best there ever was.’ And then I went back to the bag.”

Wally stops. He can’t finish the story. He shuts his eyes and tears squeeze out from his eyelids and fall down his poor old face. Up and down the bar, old guys look away and touch their eyes. The alarm clock ticks by the cash register, and you can hear the electric clock hum in the Cold Spring beer sign. The big fan above the door hums. Everything else stops at the Sidetrack when he comes to that point in the story everybody has heard him tell so often.

The rest is: Wally Bunsen swung at the next pitch, an inside fast ball across the letters, and fouled it off into his own head and fell across home plate and died. They said he never knew what hit him. Some of his family said that was what comforted them in this terrible tragedy, that he hadn’t had to suffer, but of course he had suffered a great deal more than they knew.

When I thought of him, I imagined him as my best friend and him and me taking off to go fishing together. I even practiced what we would say. He’d say, “Nothing beats fishing.” And I’d say, “
You’re
not just talking.”

In August, Coach Magendanz gets in his Chevy wagon and drives around recruiting Leonards for football season. The late Leonard Halvorson, for whom the high school teams are named, recruited in September with an emotional speech to the student body about school pride and about rival schools who at that moment were planning our disgrace, but Coach likes to go one-on-one and establish a personal rapport with his prospects. “You coming out for football?” he says to a big boy he’s found mowing hay in a ditch. The boy is not sure. “You queer?” Coach asks. “If you are, I don’t want you.” The boy thinks he may after all. Coach has fifteen or twenty certains on his list and needs to round up as many undecideds. He looks for size, speed being rare among Norwegians and Germans, and for malleability or what he calls
attitude.
In football, it’s kill or be killed, and he needs some killers. “There is an animal in you and I intend to bring it out,” he tells the team the first day of practice. The new boys glance at each other—it isn’t what they learned in Luther League. He picks out two big boys to stand up and face each other. “Okay, Stuart,” he says, “rip his shirt off.” Stuart advances. “You going to let him rip your shirt off, Stupid?” Coach yells. Stupid isn’t. They go at it in the hot sun, fooling around
at first but then the animal in them comes out. They grunt and pant, rolling in the dirt, getting wristholds, leg holds, ripping each other’s shirts off, until Coach calls them off. “That’s football,” he says. “Any pansies in the bunch can get up and leave right now.”

Some of us who are more sophisticated drift by the practice field on our bikes. It isn’t Goodhue Field but Sandburr Field at the county fairgrounds; Goodhue is grassy and Coach likes to start on dirt. Forty boys do pushups in unison, then stand up for the burpies. We wave to them, on our way to go swimming. He looks at us and we don’t hear what he says to them; he says, “I gueth they can’t take their eyth off you guyth.” We hear about it later, and far from being sophisticated, we are filled with terror. All those afternoons we went skinny-dipping, the curiosity about what each other looked like—is something terrible going on? Are we that way? Perhaps we are, otherwise why are we so uncertain about girls? We don’t talk about this. But each of us knows that he is not quite right. Once, at the river, Jim made his pecker talk, moving its tiny lips as he said, “Hi, my name’s Pete. I live in my pants.” Now it doesn’t seem funny at all.
If it’s not wrong, why were we worried somebody would come along and see?

My Uncle Earl centered the line of the great Leonards team of 1932 that beat Minneapolis Roosevelt in the days when football was football, before shoulder pads or hot showers. A Saturday afternoon in November in Memorial Stadium at the University, the teams fought to an 0-0 tie as the sun set. Uncle Earl’s shirt hung in shreds, one eye was swollen shut, his left hand was broken from being stepped on, and blood ran down his legs into his shoes that squished when he walked. But the huge crowd wouldn’t go home without somebody winning, so the game went on in the dusk. The Leonards had only fifteen on the squad, and some were hurt worse than him, so he stayed in. The two lines crouched and heaved forward, and the weary Leonards fell back, until the ball was on their two-yard-line, first and goal for the Teddies. The referee had a flashlight. He shone the light on the ball as the teams lined up. The crowd roared, all rooting for Roosevelt. Then the light failed, and Uncle Earl, crouched ahead of the ball, hollered “Hup!” and grabbed it. The lines crashed together. Leonards yelled “Fumble! Fumble!” A Leonard fell and the Teddies tore his uniform off trying to get the ball. But Uncle Earl had it under his arm,
and he had walked toward the sideline with it and was strolling up the field. He walked ninety-eight yards for the winning touchdown and when they got the flashlight fixed, there he was under the goalposts. He played against me and my cousins when we were little. He picked up the ball and walked the length of the yard with six of us hanging on him.

When I was fourteen, he came up to bat one hot July afternoon in the Father-Son Softball game and looked at me playing third base and pointed his bat at me. I crouched; my mouth was dry and my heart pounded. He waited for a low pitch and drove it straight down the baseline—a blazing swing, a white blur, a burst of chalk dust—I dove to my right just as the ball nicked a pebble—it bounced up and struck me in the throat, stopping my breath, and caromed straight up in the air about fifteen or sixty-five feet. Blinded by tears, I hit the ground face first, getting a mouthful of gravel, but recovered in time to catch the ball and, kneeling, got off a sharp throw in the vicinity of first which caught him by a stride. I was unable to speak for twenty minutes. That play was some proof that I was all right. Everyone saw it and said it was great; even guys who didn’t like me had to say that, because it was.

A hard frost hits in September, sometimes as early as Labor Day, and kills the tomatoes that we, being frugal, protected with straw and paper tents, which we, being sick of tomatoes, left some holes in. The milkweed pods turn brown and we crack them open to let the little seeds float out across the garden on their wings of silvery hair. The milk of the milkweed is said to be poisonous. Toward the end of September, the field corn is ready to be picked, about the same time as the sun (represented by an orange in Miss Lewis’s hand) is directly over the equator of a pea, thus making day and night of equal length, the northern hemisphere of the pea (us) tilting away from the orange and toward the darkness. The orange is smaller than the one Senator K. Thorvaldson gives me for Christmas, the glorious Florida orange. “Here, Chonny,” he says, “you put this in your stocking.” He has forgotten my name—he gives oranges to so many kids—but he likes me and wants to be on a first-name basis. On a cold December morning, the orange gives off the sweet essence of Florida, a spectacular smell, almost as good as Vick’s Vaporub. But Christmas is a long way
off, beyond the planets of Halloween, Armistice Day, and Thanksgiving.

One Saturday in October, Mayor Clint Bunsen puts up his storm windows, and the next Saturday everyone does, including Byron Tollefson and his boy Johnny, home from college, who asks, “Why do we have to do it today just because everyone else is?” He also wonders why they don’t get aluminum combinations with the storm enclosed that you just slide up or down instead of taking down screens and lugging these ancient storms up from the cellar and washing them and hoisting them up: it about breaks your back, and the second-story ones you got to hump up a ladder which won’t reach unless it’s at an 89° angle so you climb straight up the cliff bucking a hundred pounds of glass and if a gust catches it or if the legs slip or if you take a deep breath or lean back one degree or if you have a serious thought in the back of your mind, you’re a goner.

Byron has the radio on to the Gophers, who are getting pounded by Ohio State in heavy static, so it’s hard to follow exactly, it’s a sort of general overall disaster. Sounds like a short-wave transmission from the Russian front, but they’re in Columbus, and the long, long wave of crowd noise means another Buckeye TD, which makes it 51-7. “Our Gophers are definitely being outplayed today,” the announcer remarks. It has put Byron in a tough mood. “Don’t tell me about it. Just
do
it,” he says and he points up to the front bedroom window, number fourteen (XIV scratched in the sill and in the side of the storm), and braces his foot on the bottom rung. Byron can’t lift the big ones on account of his back, which he sprung the day they moved into this house, carrying the refrigerator; and he doesn’t climb because his sinuses are affected by heights.

It was chilly the next night, and the night after that. Father Emil’s hay fever began to subside to two hankies per day. There had been no mention of the Feast Day of St. Francis in the bulletin, so Sister Arvonne asked him straight out if he wasn’t going to have the blessing of the animals. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “It’s so hard on the grass. They tear up the sod and then it freezes and you got hoofprints in the spring.”

“If it’s your allergies you’re thinking about, we could get Father Todd,” she said.

“Oh, it’s not the allergy, it’s the commotion. You know—” and he paused profoundly—“we have to think twice about providing ammunition to the unbeliever. What troubles me about the blessing of the animals is the circus aspect. People see this, they think, Well, there go the Catholics. I think, Sister, we could bless animals without having them on the premises, same as the criminals or the lepers—you wouldn’t ship in a bunch of lepers so we could pray over them, would you?” Meanwhile, he thought: Father
Todd?
Bring in Father
Todd?
The T-shirt priest? The last time he got talked into Father Todd was for an Easter sunrise vigil for Catholic youth, which the man presided over in a
T-shirt.
With a picture of Our Lord on water skis that said “He’s Up!” What would the man do on St. Francis’s Feast Day? Probably wear antlers and talk about Our Brother the Buffalo.
^*

“Well,” she said, “I know people who have their heart set on it, so if we’re going to disappoint them, let’s not do it at the last minute. And what’s wrong with a show? Entertainment
began
in the Church, after all. People need it.”