Lake Wobegon Days (42 page)

The most controversial item this week is:

FLYING SNAKES

True or untrue? And—

Also, a tip from the extension home economist on using salt to remove wine stains from white tablecloths (should drinking be encouraged by showing drinkers how to cover their tracks?), but nothing controversial close to home, such as the big stink at the school board meeting where some taxpayers demanded that they stop teaching French. One of them held up a French I text opened to a Renoir nude and said, “We don’t know what these kids are reading here. We got
no idea. It could be anything.” The story in the
Herald-Star
only said, “Textbooks were also discussed.”

“I have to live here, too, you know,” is Harold’s first principle in journalism.

So the
Herald-Star
didn’t say one word about the council meeting where they discussed Bud’s use of one stick of dynamite to dig Mrs. Tingvold’s grave last February and a motion by Einar to censure him. “
Rest in peace!
That’s what it says on my mother’s stone!
Rest in peace!
What a joke!” he yelled at Bud. Bud was so mad he tipped his chair over. “You try digging a grave and see how you like it!” he yelled back. People talked about it for weeks. But not a word in the paper.

It wasn’t news that Ruthie and Bob got married, marriage was more or less inevitable under the circumstances; the
news
was the miracle of architecture Mrs. Mueller worked on Ruthie’s dress, making it look flat in front, and then, six months later, the baby boy—not
out
of wedlock, but not quite far enough
into
wedlock either. Abortion was never considered, they being cradle Catholics and Father Emil being himself.
As he says, “If you didn’t want to go to Chicago, why did you get on the train?” The poor kids. Poor Ruthie. Bob got shnockered at the wedding dance, and she drove them to a $50 motel room in St. Cloud and sat on the bed and watched a Charlie Chan movie on TV. “The bridal suite featured violet satin bedsheets and a quilted spread with ironed-on bride & groom appliqués, a heart-shaped mirror over the dresser, a bottle of pink champagne in a plastic ice bucket, a bouquet of funereal red roses, and her husband sick in the john,” the
Herald-Star
did not report. “The bride felt queasy herself. Reception was poor, and the picture kept flipping. She adjusted the brightness knob to sheer black and turned up the sound. The man in the next room, with whose flesh hers was now one, dressed in white cotton boxer shorts with blue fleur-de-lis and a yellow ‘Keep On Truckin’ T-shirt, sounded as if he was almost done. Wave after wave of multicolored wedding food had come out of him, propelled by vodka sours, and now
he was unloading the last of the wedding cake and the cheese dip and the liverwurst snacks. The bride, whose personal feeling about vomiting is that she would much prefer to lie very quietly for three days, tried to occupy her mind with the pleasant memory of being class orator in a blue ankle-length sateen graduation gown with bell sleeves and blue pumps and a mortarboard cap with a yellow tassel and reading five hundred words on the subject ‘Every Conclusion Is a New Beginning,’ but she wasn’t sure she felt so hopeful about the conclusion taking place in the next room. And she needed to pee.”

News of Mr. Rognes’s mother’s death was passed on by the paper in four paragraphs, which mentioned “her many contributions to church and community work” and the “long illness” but which failed to convey the great surprise of death to the decedent. Sick as she was, delirious, in and out of her mind, nevertheless she heard Pastor Ingqvist when he asked, “Greta, are you prepared to die?” She opened her eyes wide. “I’m going to San Diego next week!” she snapped. She repeated this several times in the last two days. When Nils took her hand and said, weeping, “Mother, I love you,” she said, “Stop blubbering. I’m going to San Diego, and that’s final.” Death took her unawares. For thirty years, she bossed every church supper with such a sharp tongue that younger women suddenly forgot how to butter
bread and boil water. Her own demise was unthinkable; she simply didn’t think the world could do without her.

The courtly formality of the
Herald-Star
, its severe discretion, are courtesies that most newspapers once extended to aristocracy, as Clarence Bunsen pointed out to me one day when I complained about it, being fresh out of college. “The dukes and marquises took life at a pretty fast clip, but newspapers back then knew enough to mind their own business,” he said. “They didn’t go to press every time a count spilled soup on himself.” (I was eating a bowl of chicken noodle soup right then and was in the process of spilling.) “I don’t say it’s right, but then I don’t know if what you’re doing is right either.” (I was starting a novel about Lake Wobegon right then and was in the process of gathering information.) “What are you going to do? Tell the world that your grandfather was a cattle thief?”

“Which grandfather?” I said. Then I said, “My grandfathers weren’t thieves, either one! What are you talking about?”

“See? You writers are all alike. Ready to believe the worst.”

Almost anyone in town who has normal hearing and eats a slow lunch at the Chatterbox is a better source of straight poop than the
Herald-Star.
If you order pie and take your time, Dede will take a swipe around the salt and pepper with a damp cloth and say, “I heard that Miss Bomer might not be coming back to teach English,” and you say, “Oh really? What’s that all about?”

“Well, I shouldn’t be telling you, I suppose,” she says, “but you’d hear about it eventually anyway, so—” and she tells about Miss Bomer’s romance up north with a younger man, a violinist whom she had met at a roadside spa, and sparks flew and turned into spontaneous combustion, and Miss Bomer is now about to throw away her career and follow the rounder east where he performs in cafes with a jazz combo. She was seen with him in The Starlite Club near Lake Winnibigosh, drinking a sloe gin fizz and looking into his eyes with a moony expression.

I never heard about the violinist. Back when I was in school and we invented romances for Miss Bomer, it was either the new pharmacist Wendell or Carl Krebsbach’s cousin Ernie Barfnecht, No-Neck Ernie, who drove a potato truck. Of course, it was wrong to tell lies and besmirch her reputation, but it’s also wrong to ignore people and take them for granted: everyone would like to be thought
capable
of sin and maybe even mildly interested. (I once tried to spread a rumor that I had an offer of $15,000 to leave radio and fly out to the coast but when the story came back to me, it was $1200 to go to Seattle.)

Sin, however, was not a staple of my earliest fiction. My first reader was my mother and her taste ran toward goodness, or something as close to goodness as I could get. She saved every scrap of my work in a bureau drawer, every worksheet from school, and I was so impressed when I found this stash one day—my work collected in a box! maps colored by me! my letters (“AaBbCcDd” etc.) and my correct answers (“The cat
ran
into the house. The cat
jumped
onto the table. The cat
ate
the food”)—I got to work producing more. If she thought I could fill in the blanks in Mrs. Meiers’s sentences pretty well, wait till she saw some real writing!

I began my career in a lower bunkbed, using soft colored pencils and a Big Red Indian Chief tablet, which I kept on the slats of the top
bunk. I stored the stories in the springs. The colored pencils were for different moods, such as brown for sadness, red for happiness, and blue for when they were outdoors. Mostly I wrote in red. Animals were the stars of the show and children. Children hung out with animals who often spoke to them.

“Hi, Eddie.”

“Puff?”

“Can I get you anything?” Children wished for things and animals brought them. It was better than Christmas, you got what you wanted, and nobody argued since there was plenty for everyone. If you wanted to, you could fly—birds would help you—or you could be invisible. You could walk into the radio and be in shows. Hang out with the masked man between shows, when he and Tonto were relaxing on the plains. You could become a magnificent person whose body is covered with fine white feathers that give off a radiant light, once you learn to spell
radiant.

When I say “my mother,” I mean the woman who raised me—my real mother was in the carnival, she was the fat lady and the tightrope walker, and I was born during an outdoor show—she thought it was some pancakes she ate, and there she was fifty-seven feet in the air over the Mississippi River, she dropped the balancing pole and she caught me by the ankle as I fell—I still have a mark there—and somehow she made it to the other side and handed me down to the man who ran the cotton-candy stand and said, “Here. Take care of this for me, willya?” And went back up and walked the tightrope to the west bank
of the Mississippi. Then the rope broke, so she went on to Fargo with the strong man, figuring I’d catch up later, but the cotton-candy man misunderstood—I was an ugly child so he figured that was why she went on, and late that night, driving through a small town, he stopped the pickup and laid me on a doorstep with a note that said, “Sorry about this but it’s not mine either,” and gave me the pencil to play with.

I still have that pencil. It’s my only souvenir of where I came from. I write with it, though not so much now as I used to because it’s so short.

Mrs. Magendanz, wife of the Leonards coach, was snapping beans on the back step one afternoon when her neighbor, old Mrs. Dahl, leaned across the lilacs and said, “I sure would appreciate it if you wouldn’t spend quite so much time at the window staring at us,” and stalked away before Mrs. Magendanz could think up a reply. She had to call
up Mrs. Dahl. She said, “How would you know I was looking if you weren’t looking at us?” Mrs. Dahl said, “The fact that I may sometimes look in your direction doesn’t mean I take the slightest interest.” “Likewise, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Magendanz.

So she began to pay closer attention to the Dahls, wondering what they had to hide, and soon noticed that the old man visited the garage morning and evening for about two minutes each. A secret drinker, evidently. Poor Mrs. Dahl. No wonder she was afraid. She thought Mrs. Magendanz had seen the old coot staggering around the house and screaming abuse at her. But Mrs. Magendanz watched closely for a few days and saw no signs of it. Did he go out to the garage to smoke? To chew? To look at dirty pictures? One day it dawned on her that he must have an outhouse in the garage. The Dahls had moved off the
farm into town only two years before. He had found that his bowels wouldn’t budge on a flush toilet, so he dug a pit in the garage and was using it twice a day.

She steeled herself to do her duty, and the next morning when he disappeared into the garage, she walked over and pounded on the door, prepared to give him a talk on sanitation, but when he lifted the door, she saw nothing but an old garage with a lawnmower and garden tools and a workbench with cans of lacquer and jars full of nails and screws. One thing caught her eye, a calendar above the bench with a picture of a beautiful girl in a bathing suit holding a wrench. The girl had long brown hair, and she smiled out from July 1943 as if it would never end.

“That’s my old calendar,” he said, “I’ve had that since 1943. Used to keep it in the barn, that’s how it got banged up a little. The Mrs. wouldn’t have it in the house, you know. I always liked it because that looks a lot like her when we was married. Of course, she didn’t go around like that, but that picture, I’d swear it was her. I look at it and I think, That’s Evy. Sounds crazy, I know, but you know, we didn’t take pictures then. No camera. Never thought about getting one. So this is all I got.”

All I have is the end of a black phone. It sits on the kitchen counter and before I dial the number, I wash all the dishes in the sink, as a sort of token, so this kitchen will look more like theirs, and I turn off the light. Eight digits, a six-second delay, and a clunk, then the hard burr of the country telephone. My call follows a trunk route north to St. Cloud, then north and west, takes a sharp turn alongside a narrow oiled road, and there it enters a system that my late grandfather built, which is where the call clunks. You can tell the weather up there by the sound of it: more metallic in cold weather, like a tire hitting a bump in hot weather, and of course static during a thunderstorm.

My grandfather was the leading light of the Lake Wobegon Rural Telephone Cooperative, its first president, the man who signed up investors and walked the fencerows and dug holes for the posts. The first ones stood about eight feet tall, the wire hung on a bent nail. They had telephones in town long before, of course—the Ingqvist twins, who lived for innovation, had the first, a line to their mother’s, in 1894—but it took my grandfather to convince the good countrypeople that the phone was more than a toy. He was a tall, handsome, godly man and so admired that when the preacher at his funeral chose the text “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God,” his neighbors
considered it an insult. One cold day, his chimney caught on fire and his house burned to the ground, and as he stood raking the coals in the cellar, he thought about telephones. He was not a man to take suffering as God’s judgment if a remedy was close at hand. In 1921, he rebuilt the house (without a fireplace), organized the phone company, and drew up a contract between the township and the Lake Wobegon volunteer fire brigade. In the same year, he bought a Model T, his first car, and gave an acre of pasture for a township cemetery.

The rural co-op merged with the town company in 1933, and a pupil in Grandpa’s Sunday School class who worshiped the ground he walked on has been running it from her pantry since 1942, Elizabeth, who was my Sunday School teacher for many years. When she was a child, Grandpa took her along when he walked the phone line in the spring, checking for loose or leaning posts and also watching for hummingbirds and picking purple lilac blossoms and a toad or two. “He never went anywhere without a child in tow,” she says. “He had
seven of his own, but if those weren’t available, he’d shop around until he found another. He might be driving to town for a bag of nails he wanted right away for roofing, but he still needed that child to ride with him—he’d come pull you out of school if he had to.”