Lake Wobegon Days (38 page)

Sister Brunnhilde had directed the pageant forever, and, massive woman that she was, seemed permanently in place, like a living pulpit, but Sister Arvonne bided her time, listened to Sister complain about how unappreciated and unacknowledged this annual burden was, sympathized with her, drew her out, and when she had drawn Sister so far out that she couldn’t go back, Sister Arvonne sweetly sliced off the limb and took over.

She set out to cut down on smirking by creating more speaking roles. She brought in Zacharias and Elizabeth and tried to write some lines for Joseph:

The last one appealed to her in a way, but all of them struck her as
forced
somehow and she gave up on him. She had never been clear about Joseph. The shepherds, too, were a problem. They had only one line, and as she well knew from her own acting experience, one line is harder than a hundred. You practice “Let us go to Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord has made known unto us” a hundred times, and yet there’s no telling what will come out when it’s your turn to shine. Intense rehearsal of one line may drive it deeper into the brain, to where you can’t remember it that night and can’t forget it for the rest of your life. She gave the shepherds a good speech from the Book of Isaiah.

“They’ll never remember it,” said Sister Brunnhilde who came to rehearsal one day to help out. “It’s too complicated. They’re all mumbling. Nobody will hear a word they’re saying.”

“It’ll be beautiful. Besides, everybody knows the story anyway,” said Sister Arvonne, and she was right, of course.

A cloud of incense drifted down the center aisle behind Zacharias as he marched forward, praising God, his short arms upraised, swinging the censer like a bell, and the cloud enveloped him where he knelt at the steps to the altar, when the angel Gabriel jumped out and shouted, “Fear not!” Gabriel, exceedingly well dressed, announced that Z. would have a son, named John, who would be great in the sight of the Lord. “I am an old man!” cried Zacharias. And Gabriel struck him dumb, for his unbelief. His wife, Elizabeth, also old, helped him away, and you could tell that she believed they’d have a baby, she was counting the days. When the Blessed Virgin came in to grind corn, you could see that she was very shy, and you hoped the angel would speak softly. He waited in the shadows, adjusting his magnificent wings, grooming himself, and then walked up behind her. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou among women.” She fell down. He told her, “And behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus.” He told her about Elizabeth, which seemed to make her feel better. She said, still lying on the floor, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; let it be according to thy word.”

Elizabeth helped her up, and they hugged each other. Mary said the
Magnificat. John was born and Zacharias recovered his tongue and gave a speech about the tender mercy of God who had visited his people, to give light to them who sit in darkness in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. And then the lights went out for a spooky minute or two, during which you knew something had gone wrong and everything was about to come to a big crashing halt, but the lights came on and there was the manger and Mary and Joseph. Shepherds were lounging a little way away, where the angel made his third appearance, illumined by powerful beams, and cried, “Fear not!” and they all fell down. A heavenly choir joined him in song. Wise men appeared, coming up the aisle, uncertain whether they were doing the right thing. “Where is he that is born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east and are come to worship him.” They met the gang of shepherds going west and all went in together and knelt down at the manger. Gifts were given, prayers said, and some of the shepherds remembered most of the long prophetic passage from Isaiah. “Behold the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world,” one said.

And then silence. The children huddled together on their knees, heads bowed, such a peaceful sight and yet you wondered if it was the end or what came next—nobody moved, Mary and Joseph knelt like statues, nobody said a word. They remained in perfect adoration until the organ began to play and then, remembering that it was time to go, they got up and left, and the pageant was over.
^*

The tree enters a few days before Christmas, a fresh one bought from Mr. Fjerde or Mr. Munch, two adjoining bachelor farmers who share a small forest of evergreens where you can cut one for yourself. Mr. Fjerde is a silent man, and when you bang on his door, your tree in hand, he won’t even tell you the price; he waits to hear your offer and then nods or looks studious until you come up a dollar. But Mr. Munch will talk your ear off, and to hear him tell it, he never meant to raise Christmas trees, they simply snuck into his property one day, and if he ever has the time he’ll clean them out with a backhoe.

“They grow like goddam weeds, you know,” he says, “and they eat the hell out of your soil—that’s good soil there, a guy oughta be doing something with it, it’s a shame to let it go like I have. Goddam, I think next spring I maybe oughta get in there with some herbicide, get them cleaned out. Or I could burn them.
Ja
, I think maybe I’ll burn them.”

Mother can’t bear to hear swearing, so she sits in the car with the windows rolled up and a choir singing on the radio. “You stay here,” she tells me, but I go with Dad up to Mr. Munch’s back door for the thrill of it. Bachelor farmers disobey almost every rule my parents ever laid down; the yard is full of junk under the snow, including a broken-down sofa, a washing machine, an old icebox leaning against a tree with its doors hanging open and more junk inside it. A hill of old tin cans sits about a can’s throw from the back door. Mr. Munch is unshaven, a cloud of white hair on his head; his clothes are dirty, brown juice runs down his chin, his breath smells of liquor. “He’s not fit to live with decent people,” Mother told me when I asked why he lived alone. And yet he seems to have gotten away with it; he is as old as my grandpa. God hasn’t struck him with lightning, the way you might think.

He ducks into his little house to get two dollars’ change from his cigar box, and I see that he does not clean his room either. Old breakfast scraps on the plate on the table—what a luxury to get up and walk away from a meal! He carefully counts out the two dollars into Dad’s hand, and says, “You be careful with that tree now. Those things are like explosives, you know. I sold these people a tree, I think it was last
year, and two days later they was all dead. It blew up one night and burned them all so you couldn’t tell one from the other. I tell you I wouldn’t have one if you paid me. Even fresh—they can go off like a bomb, you know.
Boom!
Just like that.”

“Merry Christmas,” Dad said.

“God help you,” said Mr. Munch.

News of incendiary Christmas trees was no news to Mother. She knew all about fire hazards. Oily rags never spent a night in our house. A paintbrush in a can of thinner was allowed half an hour to get clean, and then the thinner went down the drain with fifty gallons of water behind it. Extension cords that looked frayed or suspicious were bound up in Scotch cellophane tape. A jar of flour sat on the counter by the stove, ready in case of fire; once, the gas flame under the spaghetti sauce flared up and Mother went for her flour, but we ate the sauce anyway—“It’s only flour,” she said, “same as in the noodles”—though it stuck to the roofs of our mouths like Elmer’s glue. Any unusual sound from the furnace, a wheeze or sigh, and she could see (1) fuel oil leaking on the floor and making an immense dark pool creeping closer and closer to the pilot, or (2) carbon monoxide drifting up the ducts and flowing invisibly into our lives. Our fireplace was used only under supervision, and even after she had doused the coals with water, she often couldn’t sleep and tiptoed down and laid on another quart or two.

As a result, I grew up with a passion for fire and sometimes lit a few farmer matches in my room for the sheer pleasure of it, and one year, two days before Christmas, when the Mortensons’ house burned down (they didn’t
know
that the tree caused it, but it could’ve) when I was staying at Uncle Frank’s farm, I felt terrible for having missed it. I also felt bad for wanting to have seen it, because they lost everything in the fire including all their presents, an awful tragedy, but nonetheless one I was sorry to miss.

Dad’s fear was that Christmas would throw him into the poorhouse. Mother felt that each of us should get one big present every year in addition to the socks, Rook game, paddleball set, model, ocarina, shirt, miscellaneous gifts: one
big
one, like a printing press or a trike or Lincoln logs. Dad thought the ocarina should be enough for anybody.
He for one had never been given a toy as a child but
made
his own toys, as everyone did then, out of blocks of wood and string and whatnot, and was content with them, so the thought that a boy
needed
a large tin garage with gas pumps out front and crank-operated elevator to take the cars up to the parking deck was ridiculous to him and showed lack of imagination. “I don’t want to know,” he said when Mother walked in with a shopping bag full, but then he had a look, and one look made him miserable. “Twelve dollars?
Twelve dollars?
” He believed that spending was a tendency that easily got out of hand, that only his regular disapproval kept Mother from buying out the store. It all began with Roosevelt who plunged the country into debt and now thrift was out the window and it was “Live for today and forget about tomorrow” with people spending money they didn’t have for junk they could do without and Christmas was a symptom of it. He went into the Mercantile to buy a pair of work socks and saw a German music box that made him wonder what the world was coming to. Eight dollars for a piece of junk that played “Silent Night,” which was maybe worth seventy-five cents, but there was Florian Krebsbach buying the thing who owed money to a list of people as long as your arm. That was Christmas for you.

The twin perils of the poorhouse and the exploding tree made for a vivid Christmas. Where the poorhouse was, I didn’t know, but I imagined it as a gray stone house with cold dank walls where people were sent as punishment for having too much fun. People who spent twelve dollars here and twelve dollars there, thinking there was more where that came from, suddenly had to face facts and go to the house and stay in it and be poor. I might go with Dad or I might be farmed out to relatives, if the relatives wanted me, which probably they wouldn’t, so I’d live in a little cell at the poorhouse and think about all the times I had begged for Dad to buy me things. I would eat rutabagas and raw potatoes and have no toys at all, like Little Benny in
The Mysterious Gentleman; or, The Christmas Gruel; A True Story of an Orphan in the East London Slums
, except that Little Benny was patient and never complained or asked anything for himself and was adopted by a kind benefactor and brought into a life of fabulous wealth and luxury in a Belgravia mansion, whereas I, a demanding and rebellious and ungrateful child, was heading in the opposite
direction, toward the dim filthy room and the miserable pile of rags for a bed and the racking coughs of our poor parents, dying of consumption from hard labor to earn money to buy the junk I demanded.

On the other hand, the danger of Christmas-tree fire some night killing us all in our beds seemed to point toward a live-for-today philosophy, not that we necessarily should go whole-hog and buy everything in the Monkey Ward catalog, but certainly we could run up a
few
bills, knowing that any morning could find us lying in smoldering ruins, our blackened little bodies like burnt bacon that firemen would remove in small plastic bags. Simple justice demands that a person who dies suddenly, tragically, at a tender age, should have had some fun immediately prior to the catastrophe. If your mother yells at you and you go off on your bike feeling miserable and are crushed by a dump truck—that would be a much worse tragedy than if it had been your birthday and you had gotten nice presents, including the bike, and were killed in a good mood.

Then one Christmas I opened a long red package and found a chemistry set, exactly what I wanted, and sat and stared at it, afraid to look inside. For Mother to buy me one, given her feelings, was more than adventurous, it was sheer recklessness on her part, like a gift of Pall Malls and a bottle of whiskey. The year before, I tried to aim her toward the Wards deluxe woodburning kit, pointing out that I could earn money by making handsome Scripture plaques, but she said it was too dangerous. “You’ll burn down the house with it,” she said. So, a year later, to get a chemistry set, complete with Bunsen burner, fuel, a little jar marked “Sulphur,” and who knew what else, I didn’t dare show how happy I was. “Thank you,” I said, humbly, and put it aside and tried to look interested in what other people were getting, afraid that if I got too excited about chemistry, she’d want to have a closer look at it.