Lake Wobegon Days (41 page)

So we little kids stayed away from behind the school where the pump was, and when we went out for recess, we kept our mouths shut. We did this, knowing also that a person who breathes through his mouth can freeze his lungs. You should always breathe through your nose: the nose warms up the air. You swallow air so cold through your mouth, suddenly there is a little chunk of ice in your chest where your lungs were. There are no last words when a person dies that way. You stand frozen in your tracks, a little blood leaks out your mouth, and you topple over in the snow.

One January morning, Rollie Hochstetter went in to town for a new belt for his woodsaw and got back home to find a couple dozen chickens, ducks, and geese strewn on the snow between the henhouse and the tool shed, their throats ripped open and blood spattered around where they’d been dragged and shaken, and all the other livestock in an uproar, even the Holsteins who looked like they’d been to the horror show. A pack of wild dogs did it. Rollie found dog tracks, and his neighbors said they had seen big dogs roaming in the woods, former pets who went bad, who hit Rollie’s because he had no dog to guard the place since Rex died.

It was a caution to all, especially to us children who walk to Sunnyvale School just west of Rollie’s, some of us with a half-mile hike each way. A lot crosses your mind when you’re eight years old and the light is dim and the road goes through dark woods and there are wild dogs around, even if older children are with you.

In fact, it’s worse with older children. They’re the ones who say, as you trudge down the hill toward the ravine, “It’s breakfast time for those dogs, you know. They’re probably real hungry now. You know, they can smell food miles away. And they can tear your flesh off in about two minutes.”

“They are more afraid of us than we are of them,” you say, but you know it’s not possible for a creature to be more afraid than this. “Not when they’re hungry, they aren’t,” they say. “When they’re hungry, they can run as fast as forty-three miles per hour, and they go straight for the throat, like this—” and someone screams in your ear and grabs your neck.
Cut it out! Leave me alone!

You look down the road to the dark ravine, watching for slight branch movement, as if spotting the dogs would make a difference. You are dressed in a heavy snowsuit and boots like two club feet. You couldn’t outrun a snow snake. Then they say, “If they do come, I think we should give them one of the little kids and maybe they’ll let the rest of us go.” And then one of them yells, “Here they come!” and they push you down in the ditch and everyone gallops down the road and through the ravine, girls screaming, lunchboxes banging.

Oh, yes, I remember that very well. I remember who did it, and I’m sure they remember too. I don’t get letters from those older children saying, “Sure enjoy your show. Remember me? We went to school together.” They know I remember.

Winter is absolute silence, the cold swallows up sound except for your feet crunching and your heart pounding. And sharp cracks in the distance, which could be ice or trees or could be the earth itself. A planet with hot molten rock at the middle, that is frozen solid at the top—something has to give. The earth cracks wide open and people disappear in it. Limbs fall off trees and pin you to the ground. You walk into deep holes full of snow. You step into a bear trap covered with snow. Snap! it breaks your leg. You step into a deep hole, and there’s
a bear in it, a bear who has eaten nothing but dirt for weeks. He chews your arms off first and then eats your head.

Of course, if the Communists came, there wouldn’t be anything you could do. They would line us up in the playground and give us a choice: either say you don’t believe in God or else put your tongue on the pump handle. What would you do then? You could say, “I don’t believe in God,” and cross your fingers, but then how would God feel? Maybe He would turn you into a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife. Or an icicle.

After sixth grade, I left Sunnyvale and rode the bus in to Lake Wobegon High in town, where Mr. Detman was principal, a man who looked as if wild dogs were after him and a giant icicle hung over his head. Worry ate at Mr. Detman. He yelled at us when we ran downstairs, believing we would fall and break our necks and die on the landing. He imagined pupils choking on food and wouldn’t allow meat in the lunchroom unless it was ground up. He had his own winter fear—that a blizzard would sweep in and school buses be marooned on the roads and children perish, so, in October, he announced that each pupil who lived in the country would be assigned a Storm Home in town. If a blizzard struck during school, we’d go to our Storm Home.

Mine was the Kloeckls’, an old couple who lived in a little green cottage by the lake. She kept a rock garden on the lake side, with terraces of alyssum, pansies, petunias, moss roses, rising to a statue of the Blessed Virgin seated, and around her feet a bed of marigolds. It was a magical garden, perfectly arranged; the ivy on the trellis seemed to move up in formation, platoons of asters and irises along the drive, and three cast-iron deer grazed in front: it looked like the home of the kindly old couple that the children lost in the forest suddenly come upon in a clearing and know they are lucky to be in a story with a happy ending. That was how I felt about the Kloeckls, after I got their name on a slip of paper and walked by their house and inspected it, though my family might have wondered about my assignment to a Catholic home, had they known. We were suspicious of Catholics, enough to wonder if perhaps the Pope had ordered them to take in little Protestant children during blizzards and make them say the
Rosary for their suppers. But I imagined the Kloeckls had personally chosen me as their storm child because they liked me. “Him!” they had told Mr. Detman. “In the event of a blizzard, we want that boy! The skinny one with the thick glasses!”

No blizzard came during school hours that year, all the snowstorms were convenient evening or weekend ones, and I never got to stay with the Kloeckls, but they were often in my thoughts and they grew large in my imagination. My Storm Home. Blizzards aren’t the only storms and not the worst by any means. I could imagine worse things. If the worst should come, I could go to the Kloeckls and knock on their door. “Hello,” I’d say. “I’m your storm child.”

“Oh, I know,” she’d say. “I was wondering when you’d come. Oh, it’s good to see you. How would you like a hot chocolate and an oatmeal cookie?”

We’d sit at the table. “Looks like this storm is going to last awhile.”

“Yes.”

“Terrible storm. They say it’s going to get worse before it stops. I just pray for anyone who’s out in this.”

“Yes.”

“But we’re so glad to have you. I can’t tell you. Carl! Come down and see who’s here!”

“Is it the storm child??”

“Yes! Himself, in the flesh!”

The Lake Wobegon
Herald-Star
(formerly the
Star
, then the
Sun
, then bought by Harold Starr in 1944) is published every Tuesday and mailed second-class to some fifteen hundred subscribers, most of whom don’t live there anymore (and wouldn’t if you paid them) but who shell out $30 a year to read about it. They’re Harold’s bread and butter: retirees in Tampa and Tucson and San Diego, who keep track of old chums through the obituaries; and people who ran away from home to escape winter and much more, for whom the paper (a gift subscription from Mother) is fresh evidence of a life worth leaving; and then the ones lured away by the pleasures of school and good money, who can afford to be nostalgic.

This ghostly crowd is fascinating to Harold, even their personal checks are fascinating, he wishes he could afford to hang onto them. Violet checks, emerald checks, russet, puce, buff, robin’s-egg blue, charcoal gray, fuchsia, lapis lazuli, saffron, apricot, peach, burgundy, tangerine; some are dappled, flecked, stippled, even scented (lilac, orange, pine), printed on a landscape, pictures of ocean or mountains
(one printed on a pine forest so dark he could barely make out the amount); some come with a saying, “Work is love made visible (Gibran)” or “Have a nice day” or “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want,” and one arrived with “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer—Thoreau” printed across the bottom in cursive type against a ferny background, it came from a former Leonard halfback now living on Bonnie Brae Drivein Fresno. The
streets!
Harold has readers on Melody Lane, Flamingo Way, Terpsichore Terrace,
^*
West Danube Pass, Ventura Vista, Arcadia Crescent, Alabaster Boulevard—look at the checks, it’s as if everyone who left town resolved never to live on a numbered street or an avenue named for a President or a common plant, nor on a Street or Avenue
period
, but on Lanes, Circles, Courts, Alleys, Places, Drives, Roads, Paths, Rows, Trails, with names like Edelweiss, Scherzo, Galaxy, Mylar, Sequoia, Majorca, Cicada, Catalpa, Vitalis, Larva, Ozone, Jasper, Eucalyptus, Fluorine, Acrilan, Andromeda—an atlas of the ideal and fantastic, from Apex, Bliss, and Camelot through Kenilworth, Londonderry, Malibu,
Narcissus, to Walden, Xanadu, Yukon, and Zanzibar, plus all the forestry variations, Meadowglade, Mealdowdale, Meadowglen, -wood, -grove, -ridge.
Look at this!
A check from Earl’s boy, Arlen, the little turd who tried to set the woods on fire, now doing well on Ibis Parkway and writing cream-colored checks bearing a photo of himself and wife and kiddos. Arlen has gained a hundred pounds and has a caterpillar on his upper lip.

“If they got checks like this, can you imagine what they got in their homes? I’ll bet they got everything you can think of. I’ll bet they got organs.” Harold has his eye on an organ for himself and Millie, a $1395 Spano spinet with two keyboards and attachments including Auto-chord, which, when you play a note of the melody, gives you a whole rich chord, so an average person can learn to play pretty well in about two hours. The Spano combines the best features of theater and church-style organs. Harold thinks it would help him relax in the evening and not hit the hard stuff so hard. Some nights he goes home and drinks Jim Beam whiskey until he is nineteen years old. An organ would give him something to do. He also has his eye on a better toupee than his current rug, which has a nylon shine and tends to slip forward.

Publishing a paper in a small town, where readers know precisely what they want, is a big headache for Harold. He ran a hardware store
in Aitkin before entering journalism, which he did for love of the mighty Mergenthaler Linotype—

An old printer taught him a few things, such as where to hit it when the monster eats the hot slugs and spits lead in your face, but nobody had to teach Harold the pure pleasure of sitting down to the keyboard and tapping letters, the brass matrices clicking into their carriage, then whirring off to take the molten lead as you peck along, two lines ahead of the slugged lines dropping into the galley tray—and what a puny thing is the smudged scrap of yellow copy paper in the brace above the keys, compared to the immense engine clattering and sighing—those satisfying sounds:
tiptiptiptip, bracabracabraca-cock … chung! pickapink-hhhhhnnnn, shhhhhhhht, fffft—chung … shhhhhht, plank!

The headache is the yellow paper. Harold never did well in English, or civics, or writing home from the Navy. “I never claimed to be the world’s greatest writer,” he has admitted. Even armed with his copy of
The Editor’s Source: One Hundred Basic Stories
, he squints at blank paper, bites his lip, kneads the back of his neck.

What the readers want is a good writeup. A Leonards game should be five hundred words long and mention every boy who played, e.g., “Donnie Olson made a couple good tackles.” A sale at Skoglund’s, Ralph’s new meat counter—those deserve a photo and also a hundred words or so. A girl who makes the Dean’s List at college, a boy who finishes basic training—people like to have a nice little article they can send to relatives. A wedding deserves a major literary effort. It has got
to have sweep and grandeur to it and a hundred details, all correct. You don’t want to put white tulle on someone who was wearing peach taffeta.

Spelling counts about eighty percent when it comes to names. If an Ingqvist sees Ingquist or Engqvist or Ignqvist, it gets under her skin, and pretty soon she is mentioning to her friends how it seems to her the paper is getting
worse
, and how Mr. Starr looks—well,
plastered
half the time, poor Millie, it’s such a
pity;
and, all in all, you’d be better off if you had said it was Etaoin Shrdlu who won Garden of the Month and the $10 gift certificate from Buehler’s.