WLT

by Garrison Keillor

  “Daddy is dead, Grampa,” Jodie said. “He died on the train.” But Grampa couldn’t hear her, of course. Grampa said, “Vaer sa venlig at give mig et stort stykke ost,” so Franny brought him a big piece of cheese. “Tallerken,” Grampa said. Plate.

  Mother came down the stairs slowly and stepped into the kitchen as if she wasn’t sure where it was, and said that she was going to get somebody to drive her to Tyler to see to their poor father. “I don’t want them to leave him lie out there all night,” she said, “and that’s exactly what they’ll do if it’s left up to them.”

  She turned to reach for the telephone on the wall and knocked the sugar bowl off the shelf and it smashed on the floor.

  When Grampa saw it shatter and saw the broken pieces of crystal glittering in the sugar, he finally understood that everything had fallen apart once and for all. He cried without hiding his face. He cried hard, his handsome old face turned toward her.

  Benny, Benny.

  She said, “Grampa, you go to bed and get your sleep, we’re taking you to Fargo tomorrow. I got all I can do to take care of myself and the children.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Uncle Art

  Aunt Emma and Uncle Charles arrived a few hours later from Brainerd and Mother went to bed. That was on Friday. She made an attempt to get up on Sunday and again on Monday, for the children’s sake, but she was too weak to stand so she lay on her side and sobbed with abandon. He was a good man, the only one she ever loved, her life was over now, she had nothing left. “Might as well bury me next to him, Emma! Might as well!” Francis’s words that day were reprehensible, pallor, niggardly , lickspittle, and coax. He asked Uncle Charles if “niggardly” comes from “nigger” and Charles frowned. He was a slight, sad man with his brown wool suit and galluses, his moon face and his pale puffy hands, who had a delicate stomach and couldn’t eat certain foods, such as tomatoes or beans, and had to have his meals come precisely on time. “This is a great tragedy,” he told Francis, “it’s no time to talk about things like that.”

  Aunt Clare and Uncle Art arrived Friday evening from Minneapolis. Francis was in his room, cutting ribs and struts out of balsa wood for a model plane, which Daddy had shown him how. When Art walked in, Art did his vaudeville shuffle (“Hell-o tootsie, hell-o”), and said, “Hey, Franny, did you hear the one about Lena after Ole died, she said to her friend Tina, ‘Oh Tina, he didn’t leave me a penny of insurance, the old coot.’ So Tina says, ‘But Lena, where’d you get that diamond ring then?’ And Lena says, ‘Oh, he left $100 for his funeral and $400 for a big stone and this is the big stone.’ ” Ker-bang. Tingaling.

  Clare made a pot of spaghetti—you need to eat, she said, so they ate. “I need no coaxing,” said Francis. After supper they all sat in the living room, except Mother and Emma, and Art had a couple beers and they listened to Wingo Beals and the Shoe Shine Boys on the radio, except Charles, who read Popular Science.

  Emma and Charles returned to Brainerd in the morning. His stomach was acting up. Art and Clare stayed for a week. Clare sat with Mother in the dark bedroom and fixed meals and cleaned, and Art cracked jokes and had a ball. There was nobody like Art, he was like a big bald kid with a moustache. Nothing was serious, everything was a game to him. “Bet you I can throw this pea in your mouth,” he’d say at dinner and then do it, when Clare was in the kitchen. Art hated peas. He hated all vegetables except sweet corn and seldom got up before ten in the morning and tried to get out of chores. If Clare asked him to run to the store or fix the kitchen faucet, Art would say, “I’ve got to take care of that furnace first, something’s wrong with the air intake,” and give Francis a big wink and slip down the basement and lie around and read National Geographic. He had his own copy with nothing but naked women in it, neatly pasted together, which he enjoyed looking at every day. “Catch the hooters on that one,” he’d say, passing the book to Franny. “Boy, she’s got a pair of bazongas you could eat off of.” One night he got down his mandolin and sang a song about a girl who ran away with a sailor. Clare told him it was in poor taste to sing such a song so soon after—and she nodded at the children, but Art said it was one of Benny’s favorites. And then he sang another:I was brought up to

  Work hard every day.

  Eight hours of labor for eight hours of pay.

  But then I discovered

  This great mystery:

  When I ask for money, people give it to me.

  I sell them swampland

  And snake oil, too.

  I tell them stories,

  I’ve got one for you.

  I’m a thief and a gambler,

  And I just want to say:

  Everything’s going my way.

  Now I drink the best whiskey

  And always eat steak.

  I own a big mansion

  Sits down by the lake.

  Got rings on my fingers

  And gas in my tank,

  And about half a million

  Keeping cool in the bank.

  I’m a thief and a gambler,

  I get drunk every day.

  Everything’s going my way.

  Mother was unable to attend the funeral. She knew she should but she couldn’t. She lay in bed and wept for this terrible failure, her faithlessness to Benny, her unworthiness. He was burned to death and now his wife couldn’t even get out of bed to bury him, poor man. She was too weak to get up. “I might as well be dead myself,” she told Francis. The copper coffin sat in a parlor of the undertaker’s house. It looked too small to Francis, like a child’s coffin. The six of them sat and the minister read from the Bible and smiled reassuringly. There were twenty-six chairs, but the Withs had only lived eight years in Mindren and nobody knew them. Hamburgers sizzled in the kitchen. Francis thought of the train crash song. He touched the coffin, which was cool. Then they drove three blocks in a drizzle to Resurrection Cemetery and put him in the deep black hole. Art took Francis’s hand and they walked home. At the cemetery gate, Art stopped and lit up a stogie and said, “That’s one less here and one more there, they laid him in the ground. Rest in peace, and now there’s more beer for the rest of us.” It was cold and gray and the next day Francis had to go to school. He didn’t want to go but Clare said he had to do it for his father’s sake.

  So he did. After the Pledge of Allegiance, Miss Theisen said, “I am sure that we all extend our heartfelt sympathies to Francis With, whose father was killed in that terrible train wreck,” and she passed around a sympathy card and everyone signed it, including Francis, and then they gave it to him. Later, at recess, the children sang:The engine crashed and broke in two,

  Burst into flames and cooked the crew.

  The superintendent said, “Hee-hee!

  We’ll feed the public school for free,

  And we’ll just call it wieners.”

  Ya ya ya.

  Teacher, teacher, come and see.

  Hairs in the hot dogs, one-two-three.

  Big black hairs and a big tattoo

  Saying “Evalina I love you”

  And sixteen warts and a dirty goatee

  And bloodshot eyes looking up at me.

  He must’ve worked on the railroad.

  Ya ya ya.

  Golly gee this lunch is fine,

  I just found a note in mine.

  “A pound of liver, a loaf of bread,

  A barrel of beer,” is what it said.

  Guess he was a German.

  Ya ya ya.

  You will know he was a Hun

  If your nose begins to run

  And your throat is hot and sore

  And you puke your guts out on the floor.

  Must be Benny With.

  Ya ya ya.

  Poor Francis. Children pranced around and sang this ditty in his face while the big boys pinned his arms and squashed him down on the sharp cinders and the girls hollered, “That’s about yer faw-ther!”

  “He wasn’t a Hun, he was Danish!” Francis yelled. B.S., said David and
Darrell the dogfaced twins. They sang,Big black hairs and a big tattoo

  Saying “Hello Francis, how are you?”

  And ashes in the overalls

  From one little wiener and two black balls.

  Ya ya ya.

  He had no brothers to stick up for him, and Jodie was scared of her shadow. She preferred to remain in the school library during recess and read picture books about the lives of rich people in New York City. Jodie cried and the school cook Mrs. Grebe supplied her with extra tapioca pudding with raisins in it, but Francis couldn’t cry. He was too scared to cry. Daddy was dead and now Grampa was gone and what would happen to them? A man with a red face had come in a car for Grampa and Grampa trembled as the man put Grampa’s hat and coat on him. Then the man held Grampa’s arm tight and steered him out the door. This could happen to anybody. And now Mother stayed in bed having a nervous breakdown. Clare waited on her, bringing bowls of soup, which sat getting cold. She had no friends, Mother wailed. Her only friends were on the radio. She listened to the radio from morning to night. And Francis kept up with the Word Club, trying to improve himself. Arrant, confrere, agape, barbaric, eclipse.

  The only good part was Uncle Art, who passed him the copy of the Geographic and taught him the fine points about women. Art was a connoisseur of women and to pass muster with him they had to score high in the Bosom Division, which he divided into: nice titties, torpedoes, real knockers, a pair of headlights, major bazongas, and a shirtful of hooters. If Clare marched through on her way upstairs, Art would suddenly say, loudly, “So how’s school coming?” and if Jodie came in and flopped down, he’d have to flip cards for awhile or remove quarters from her nose, but then she had to help Clare with supper, and the men returned to their favorite topic.

  “Aw, you’re too young, kid, I shouldn’t be leading you down the garden path like this,” Art muttered. Franny assured him that he was not too young, that he knew a lot already and was interested in hearing more man-to-man information about women, and that he wouldn’t tell anybody where he heard it.

  “Well,” Art said, glancing around. “For fooling around with, the girls with the flat chests are your hot babes. The ones with the melons, they get a little old on the hoof, and you have to throw a flag over them feedsacks so they don’t bang you on the head, so you want a woman with nice little titties. And a talker. You always want a woman with good chops on her. She’ll give you a lot of yap but she’ll give you a lot of hubba-hubba too.”

  Franny wanted to know more—what is hubba-hubba, for example—but he didn’t want to betray ignorance.

  “Your daddy was a real ladies’ man, now there was a man who knew his way to the bedroom. Not that he two-timed your mom, I’m not saying that, I don’t know that, but back in his bachelor days, you never saw anybody could rustle up a nooner like Benny could. He had a cock like a ballpeen hammer. We used to go around north Minneapolis, we knew where all the hot babes were. He was a pistol, your old man. And now he’s gone, there’s more for you and me, kid. Just remember that. When you’re dead, you’ll be dead a long long time, so you might as well live when you’re alive. Your daddy did.”

  “I’m hoping to move to Minneapolis someday,” said Francis, matter-of-factly. “I’m planning to attend the University of Minnesota.”

  “You do that, Franny. What’ll you study?”

  “I want to study to go into radio.”

  Art laughed. “Nobody studies radio, kid. They don’t teach it in school because it’s too much fun. People go to school to be a teacher or a dentist. Radio is just a bunch of guys having a ball. It’s incredible. I tell ya, I don’t know anybody in radio who works more’n about fifteen minutes a day. It’s a gravy train! You want to get into radio, you come and see your uncle Art, I’ll put you right up at the head of the parade.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Poor Children

  When Art and Clare got in their big Chrysler to drive back home to Minneapolis, Clare was sniffling and dabbing at her eyes. Jodie and Franny stood by the car and she put her hands on their heads. “You poor children,” she said. “We are undaunted,” said Francis, thinking of his other words, global and delinquent and archaic and erode. Art took two quarters out of Jodie’s nose and found a matchbook behind Franny’s ear. Art said, “You oughta come with us to Minneapolis, kiddoes. You’d have a ball there. Go to shows and stay up late and have ice cream for breakfast.” He said to Franny, “I could get you a job at the radio station. You could work for me there.” Clare sighed. “Come on, big shot, time to hit the road.”

  After Art and Clare left, the house was silent except for the radio. Mother mooned around, daunted, day after day, her face pale and damp, global, in Daddy’s old brown bathrobe, her dark eyes hollow and her tangled hair hanging down on her shoulders. She eroded. She stayed upstairs and slipped around like a tattered shadow. She lay in bed day after day and held Benny’s big brass railroad watch, scorched black, the glass half-melted and the face crumpled. Every day when Francis came home from school she called out in a shaky voice, “Come here to Mother,” and burst into tears when she saw him. She seemed to sing when she cried, her mouth twisted agape, she shook, her eyes shut, and Francis put his arm around her. And then sometimes he was delinquent. He and Jodie sat at the table and tuned in their shows and ate their soup and Francis studied his vocabulary. They still set a place for Daddy at the end. Though he was archaic.

  “He is happier now, in heaven,” said Jodie.

  Francis said, “There’s no such place. It’s all a fabrication .” He wasn’t sure he thought this but it felt good to say it. And it was a word on yesterday’s list. But Jodie wouldn’t talk to him then, because he was evil.

  “Daddy is with Jesus in heaven,” she said, “and you are the evilest person in the world and you will go straight to everlasting hellfire.”

  “You don’t scare me.”

  “Good.” Jodie smiled. “I’m glad. Because I want you to go.”

  With Jodie not talking and Mother sick in bed, radio was the only friendly voice in the house, especially Francis’s good friends, the Bensons. He wondered about Little Becky: was she a real-life friend of Dad’s too, or just an actress? He guessed she was real and just as sweet as on the show. She sure added a lot to Friendly Neighbor. Her father had given her expensive clothes but never much love, and she was happy as a clam with Dad and Jo and Frank, and Dad had always wanted a grandkid, so it was a good deal for everybody. They got along without a cross word between them. Becky learned to ride a bike one day, she learned to dry dishes, she learned hymns, and one night Tuna gave birth to six kittens at the foot of Becky’s bed. They enrolled her at Elmville School, where Miss Judy, Frank’s mom, became her teacher, the wonderful widow-lady who had made the cake for Dad’s birthday every year since Mom Benson died from the coma, so Francis could imagine that Miss Judy would be dropping by more often and might bring her nephew Little Buddy, who yodelled.

  One day, Jodie wrote a long tearful letter to Aunt Emma and Uncle Charles in Brainerd and asked to come live with them, and they took her, the little traitor. Francis asked her why she was going away and she said, “Because you’re not Christian. I’m going to live with a Christian family.”

  Francis couldn’t believe she really would go away and leave her own mother and brother in their darkest hour, but the day came and Emma and Charles arrived and Jodie smiled and said goodbye and even kissed him—she had never kissed him before, but she gave him a dreadful dry little peck on the cheek. You lied, he thought. Emma told him to be good and take care of his mother. Charles looked ill, as always.

  Becky loved it at the Bensons’, and her dad and Ginger never did stop on their way back from Moonlight Bay to get her, of course: they needed to go to Morocco first, and then something came up at his ranch in Montana and then he was off to London on a business trip, and by then she was enrolled in school so he decided to let her be. “It’s a good place for you,” he said, and considering what a vile father he was, he was righ
t. He dropped in to see her a couple times a year for a minute or two and offered Dad money which Dad always refused.

  “Uncle Dad,” Becky asked once, “why doesn’t my daddy ever write to me?” “He’s a busy man, Beeper,” Dad answered. “Humph,” said Jo.

  Jodie almost never wrote to Francis but it was nice to think that she was listening to the radio at the same time he was, that they had something in common, and Francis sent in her name to the Jubilee and Leo read it on the Happy Birthday Club.

  “Happy birthday to Jodie Marie, the most splendrous sister a boy could ever have—well, isn’t that sweet, Jens?”

  “Ja, aye tink dat boy, he is a real sewper-dewper kid dere. By yiminy yes.”

  After Friendly Neighbor, Mother sent him to Kohler’s Drugstore for more cough syrup. He stayed out as long as possible, playing in the ditch, digging snow caves until it was dark, then he snuck in the house and dawdled around in the kitchen, as she called again and again, “Francis? Francis?” When he slouched in by her bed, she bawled and held him tight to her bosom and said that he was all she had left in the world now, everything else was meaningless. She reeked of camphor and eucalyptus. The radio was on all day, chattering away beside her bed. She followed all the shows: the Benson family of course and Up in a Balloon and Down in the Valley. The house sat soaking in grief. Emma came every week, bringing hot meals in covered dishes wrapped with towels, taking away dirty laundry. It was rich food, which made Mother gassy, and when she pulled back the blankets, a cloud of farts flew out. Emma taught Francis to wash clothes and to use plenty of blueing and wring them out and hang them outside. It was scary in the basement, pumping water into the tub. The kerosene lantern cast a flickering light and sometimes shadows moved and Francis jumped. Maybe Daddy was mad at him for making him go on the train and get burned up, and maybe Daddy told Emma to send Francis down in the basement, down to where Daddy could punish him.