• • •
The birds did some tricks: some did acrobatics and walked a tightrope blindfolded, and the parrots talked—Scripture verses—and the canaries picked out a couple of hymns on a xylophone, which was nice. Ernie told the story of Noah; meanwhile Irma got the birds dressed as elephants and lions and llamas and horses and other animals walking two by two into the ark, and then from the back of the sanctuary—and who knows how it got back there—a dove swooped over their heads and circled the room three times. It descended on the ark, and the ark opened and all the birds rose from it in a cloud. It was good. They did the Nativity, and the parable of the Prodigal Son, and the Last Supper, and you were sort of afraid they’d do the Crucifixion, but they skipped that, and did the Rapture instead, which was like Noah’s Ark but with different lighting. Then the birds took up the collection. They flew around and took the dollar bills out of your fingers on the fly and brought them forward—pretty exciting—and someone held up a fifty-cent piece, and a parakeet took that and lost altitude suddenly but somehow made it back to port.
It was about a forty-five-minute program, and everything in it was absolutely memorable. Ernie and Irma talked about when they were children, which was sad—they were poor and they were lonely, and birds were so lovely and graceful and free. Ernie said he sat and watched birds for hours, and then one day a bird landed on his shoulder and he felt it was the Holy Spirit blessing him in some mysterious way he could not understand but could only accept. For God’s eye is on the sparrow; God knows if a sparrow falls, so we know that God is watching over us. And then four parakeets picked out that hymn on tiny silver bells: “I sing because I’m happy. I sing because I’m free. For his eye is on the sparrow. And I know he watches me.” It was lovely. Two-part harmony.
• • •
And then Ernie said, “And now, to close our program, I’d like you to feel that same thrill I felt when the bird landed on my shoulder. I’d like every head bowed and every eye closed as all of us contemplate God’s great love in our lives, and when the bird comes to you and lands on your shoulder, if you feel that special blessing in your heart, I’d ask you to stand at your seat. You don’t need to come forward. Just stand where you are. And now, the Blessing of the Birds.”
The Lutherans of Lake Wobegon are a very cautious bunch and it lent a certain excitement to meditation to close your eyes knowing that a bird was about to land on you and wondering which one. Minutes passed in silence as people got down to the business of meditation and thoughts of divine providence came to mind—ways in which their lives had been supported and upheld by powerful love outside themselves; powerful evil resisted despite the desire to follow it; acts of love and kindness they had felt called to despite embarrassment; and more than that, a presence of grace in the world that is almost beyond our comprehension. Then they heard a rush of wings as if angels were in the room, and one by one felt a light weight on their shoulders as if someone tapped them, and one by one stood, eyes closed, and felt not only touched by this but filled somehow. They were stunned, especially the ones who had come to be amused and make fun of the performance. Something had happened; they weren’t sure what, but something. Everyone agreed that it had been a mysterious experience.
• • •
For everyone except Ernie and Irma. They’d worked this show for twenty-seven years and seen the Blessing of the Birds too many times to be moved by it. Their take was almost $300 including CD and postcard sales, and that was good for a Wednesday night. Irma wants to retire. The preaching bothers her and all the Jesus stuff; she’s Unitarian. Unfortunately, people of her persuasion don’t go for a performing bird troupe. So they’re forced to work among evangelicals. And there they are in the front seat of their van as they drive out of town, heading for Aitkin, and the last we see of them is Ernie grasping the wheel, big and impassive, staring straight ahead, and Irma leaning toward him, telling him something. Something long and involved. And a dove on her shoulder.
6.
PONTOON BOAT
I went out on the lecture circuit when I was going through an expensive divorce and loved it immediately—a bare stage, a microphone on a stand, a stool, a glass of water—and stayed on the circuit even after the bills were paid. It was beautiful. You go out for a week or two, one-nighters, performance at night, up at dawn to catch a plane to a hub city and another plane to the next town, a fresh motel room, a nap, a light lunch, and then off to the stage. I had once told a story on the radio about a boatload of Lutheran pastors that tipped over on Lake Wobegon and I worked this up—added an old aunt and a hot-air balloon and a boy on a parasail towed by a powerboat—and it became a nearly perfect ninety-minute performance piece that I trotted around about a hundred times. I had the whole thing by heart and it worked like a precision instrument, the laughs came right on time and they built toward big boffo laughs at the end and I could see men and women wheezing and leaning up against each other, weakened by merriment. The problem with a piece as good as that is: nothing you do afterward seems good enough. You go out on the road with your new piece, which is about aging, and your old fans come up afterward and say, “We saw you a couple years ago the time you told the story about the pontoon boat. My gosh, we laughed all the way home.” I worked up the piece into a full-blown novel, which got a good, thoughtful review in The New York Times. It is an honor to be read carefully, an honor one does not always deserve, and of course you can understand if the reviewer cannot resist the temptation to torpedo you—it’s the witty put-downs that are quoted and remembered, the tributes are mostly forgotten—but the reviewer of Pontoon said that Lake Wobegon stories were neither nostalgic nor gentle but contained sadness and dread, and to be taken seriously by another writer made me happy for days afterward.
My aunt Evelyn was an insomniac, so when they say she died in her sleep, you have to wonder about that. At any rate, she died in her little stucco house in Lake Wobegon, in her own bed, under a blue knit coverlet, reading a book about Utah, where she was planning to travel soon. She was eighty-two. She had gone out that evening with her buddies Gladys and Margaret to the Moonlite Bay supper club, where she enjoyed the deep-fried walleye and a slab of banana cream pie, along with a mai tai and a Pinot Grigio. Three old Lutheran ladies, sitting at a table by the window and laughing themselves silly over the chicken salad Margaret’s nephew brought to the Fourth of July picnic, which had been sitting in the rear window of his car for a few hours, and the waves of propulsive vomiting it caused. Men mostly. Big men so sick they couldn’t hide; they had to stand and empty their stomachs right there in plain view of their children. The ladies chortled over that and then they took up Gladys’s husband, Leon, who had discovered Viagra and now, after a ten-year layoff, was up for sex. Viagra gave him a hard-on like a ball-peen hammer. “Or in his case, like a Phillips screwdriver,” said Gladys and they all cackled. Scheduling was an issue. He preferred mornings.
“The other day I had bread in the oven and I told him I had to go check it—I was baking for the Bible school bake sale—he said, ‘Don’t go! Don’t go! I’m coming!’ Then he kept at it for another five minutes—I said, ‘Jesus, if you can’t come just say so.’ He got all mad then, said it was hard being married to someone who didn’t care for sex and who kept poking holes in his confidence.”
“Who’s poking holes?” cried Margaret and they all three gasped and wheezed—O God—O God I am going to die—don’t make me laugh like that, I swear I’m going to wet my pants. The busboy heard all this and was quite surprised. A good boy from a nice home. And then Evelyn said, “Tell him if he needs to hump something, you’ll thaw out a chicken.” And Margaret laughed so hard a whole noseful of something shot out. The busboy retreated to the scullery. The ladies wiped their eyes. Oh I swear I am never having dinner with you two again, you are a bad influence. A bad influence.
And they drove back to town in Margaret’s car and Evelyn got out at her house on McKinley Street and leaned
on the car and said, “See you Wednesday.” There was a full moon and she stood and admired it and headed for the house. She stopped and pointed to her moon shadow on the walk and danced a couple steps as if to elude it and that was the last anyone saw of her. She was wearing a denim wraparound skirt and a white blouse embroidered with roses and a silky red vest and sandals, and she danced in the moonlight and went indoors to lie down and die.
Uncle Jack had died nineteen years before, leaving behind a basement and garage full of his accumulations, which had taken her months to disperse, and she didn’t want to burden Barbara with the same grim chore. Barbara lived three blocks away, up the street from Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, alone since Lloyd drifted away to the Cities and Kyle went to college. “When I die,” Evelyn told her, “I want you to be able to sweep out the place, take the sheets off the bed and the clothes out of the closet, clean out the medicine chest, and hang out a For Sale sign. Two hours and you’ll be rid of me. I’m a pilgrim. I travel light.”
• • •
Barbara found Evelyn’s body, lying in bed, faceup, green eyes staring vacantly at the ceiling, long tan arms at her sides, red lacquered nails, blue blanket up to her waist. Barbara is what you might call tightly wound, not the person you’d choose for the job of finding dead people. She shrieked, clutched at her mother’s hand, shrank back from the bed, knocked a lamp off the bedside table, yelped, and ran out of the room and into the kitchen, where she tried to collect herself. She breathed deeply, once, twice, again, again, and told herself to be calm. Nobody had murdered Mother. Then she looked around for a drink.
In recent years Barbara had developed a crème de cacao problem. She liked to pour it on her breakfast cereal; it put her in a gentler place. She climbed up on the step stool to look in Mother’s cupboards for liquor, and found a bottle of Kahlúa, unopened. She got out a jelly glass, filled it up to the third fish and drank it down, and went back in the bedroom. She opened the top drawer of the night stand and riffled through the clippings and postcards and aspirin packets and a poem on an index card—one of Mother’s poems. . . .
Life is not land we own.
O no, it is only lent.
In the end we are left alone
When the last light is spent.
So live that you may say,
Lord, I have no regret.
Thank you for these sunny days
And for the last sunset.
Not a great poem, if you ask me, thought Barbara. Sorry, Mother.
Under it was an envelope labeled ARRANGEMENTS. She opened it. The letter was typed on thin blue paper with PAR AVION printed below and a French flag.
Dear Barbara,
In the event of my death I want you to make arrangements as follows: I wish my body to be laid out in the green beaded rhinestone dress that was a gift from my dear friend Raoul the week we spent in Branson, Missouri.—
Barbara stared at the name. Raoul. Who he? Mother had never mentioned a Raoul. There were none in town. A boyfriend. Mother had a boyfriend. Good God.
—I would like someone to be sure to let Andy Williams know that “the lady in the green beaded dress” died and that his kiss on the cheek was one of the true high points of my life. I wish to be cremated. I do not wish to be embalmed and stuck in the ground to rot. I wish my ashes to be placed in the green bowling ball that Raoul also gave me, which somebody can hollow out (I’m told), and then seal it up, and I would like the ball to be dropped into Lake Wobegon off Rocky Point where Jack and I used to fish for crappies back years ago when we were getting along. I do not wish any eulogy or public prayers said for me, none at all, thank you, and the only music I want is Andy Williams singing “Moon River,” which was “our song,” mine and Raoul’s, and I’m sorry to have kept all this a secret from you. I am so sorry that you never met him. He is an old dear friend who I reunited with about twelve years ago. We loved each other and we had some high old times. I realize that these are unusual wishes but you are a strong girl and I know you will respect them. I love you, dear. I always did and I do now, more than ever. Please forgive me.
Love,
Mother
Barbara pulled the sheet up over Mother’s face as she had seen people do in movies. She dialed Kyle’s number at his apartment in Minneapolis. He picked up on the third ring. He sounded distracted. Kyle was a sophomore at the University, studying engineering, and he studied all the time.
“It’s Mother, honey. I’m awfully sorry but I have bad news. Grandma died.”
“Omigod.” He let out a breath. “When did she die?”
“She died in her sleep. Last night. It must have been sudden. She was reading a book and she just died. I know it’s a shock. Me too. I just walked in and there she was. She must’ve had a heart attack.”
Barbara said that Grandma was not afraid of death, she looked it straight in the eye, and don’t you think she had such a good life because she knew life was short and that pushed her to do more than most people her age would dream of.
“When’s the funeral?” Kyle asked.
“Well, that’s what I called you about.” And she read him Mother’s letter. Word for word.
“That is so awesome,” he said. “Wow. A bowling ball!! You mean, like a real bowling ball?”
“I found it in her closet. It’s green. Like green marble. Expensive. It looks Italian.”
“And no eulogy, no prayers. Boy. She had a whole other life, didn’t she.”
“I am just a little worried about this Raoul. What if he shows up?”
“Of course he’ll show up. We’ll invite him. He was her boyfriend. He loved her.” Kyle sounded a little giddy. “God, Grandma! I always thought she had something else going on!”
“You think we should? Really? I don’t know what to do,” said Barbara.
“We’re going to do it just exactly the way she wanted it,” he said. “I’m going to do it myself.” He was all excited now, bouncing around and yipping about his parasail—the one he had built from a kit—he was going to fly that bowling ball out over Lake Wobegon and drop it in from a great height.
Kyle’s friend Duane Dober had an 18-foot speedboat with a 75-horsepower outboard. Duane wore pop-bottle glasses and lived in dread that a ray of sun might catch a lens and burn a hole into his brain and leave him a helpless cripple who makes ashtrays from beer cans, so he wore long-billed caps and stayed out of the sun as much as possible but he loved to race around in his boat with the prow up in the air and smoke dope and listen to the Steel Heads. When Kyle called and said, “I need you to tow my parasail so I can deposit my grandma’s ashes in the lake,” Duane said, “Hey. Count me in.”
• • •
The man from Waite Park Cremation Service arrived, shortly after noon. Barbara had polished off the Kahlúa. The phone rang and it was someone asking if she was satisfied with her current long-distance provider. “We’re thrilled,” she said. “Couldn’t be happier.” She didn’t call Aunt Flo to tell her Mother was dead. In fact she locked the doors and pulled the shades for fear Flo’d barge in and take over. She was a great one for grabbing hold of something you were doing and saying, “Here, let me do that,” and wresting it out of your hands—“That’s not how you do that”—a rake, a screwdriver, a mixer: the woman would not let you so much as whip cream with a Mixmaster even though you were sixty years old and had raised a child, nonetheless you were not to be trusted.
The man from the crematorium arrived in a plain old black delivery van, no name on the side. He was young, but of course everybody was nowadays. His name was Walt. He held a folded plastic bag under one arm.
“Where is your mother?” She pointed to the bedroom door. He had a fold-up gurney, a skinny thing the size of an ironing board. The phone rang just as he emerged from the bedroom with Evelyn zipped up in a plastic bag and wheeled her out the back door. The shock of seeing this—the house sudden
ly empty—she picked up the phone and it was Flo saying, “What is going on? What is that truck doing in the alley? Speak up!” and Barbara sobbed, “My mommy’s dead.”
Flo pulled up in front two minutes later, her hair in curlers, as the truck pulled away in back. She’d been at the Bon Marche Beauty Salon, having it blued. She was hopping mad. She took one look at Barbara and said, “You’re a souse, that’s what you are! You need to get a grip on yourself. Where is Evelyn?” She went into the bedroom and found Walt’s business card and came charging out and glared at Barbara and shook her fist. “Sending your mother to be burned up like she was garbage. Why didn’t you just chop her up with an axe and throw her in the incinerator? You ought to be shot.” And Flo called up the crematorium and left a long message on the machine, to get the hell back with her sister Evelyn’s body unless he wanted to be in court that evening. “Driving around preying on the grief-stricken who happen to be intoxicated, too—”
Barbara pulled out her mother’s letter and handed it to Flo. Flo read it and looked up, aghast.
“You should have burned this. If you had an ounce of common sense, you would’ve put a match to it and buried it in the garden. This is just outrageous. I ought to wring your neck.” And then Flo put her old wrinkled face in her hands and sobbed. “What has this family come to? We’ll never be able to hold our heads up in this town again. A bowling ball! People will think we are fools, no better than the Magendanzes. I wish I had dropped dead rather than know this. Why couldn’t God have taken me first?”
The Keillor Reader Page 7