The Keillor Reader

by Garrison Keillor

  What made this old man so mean? Some said it happened in 1924, when he played for the town team that went to Fort Snelling for the state championship, and, in the ninth inning, in the deepening dusk on Campbell’s Bluff, Lake Wobegon down by one run, bases loaded and himself the tying run on third, the Minneapolis pitcher suddenly collapsed and writhed around on the mound with his eyes bulging and face purple and vomiting and foaming and clawing and screeching, and everyone ran to help him, including E.J., and he jumped up and tagged them all out. A triple play, unassisted. What a rotten trick, but there they stood, a bunch of rubes, and all the slickers howling and whooping their heads off, so he became mean, is one theory.

  And he was mean. He could hit foul balls with deadly accuracy at an opponent or a fan who’d been riding him, or a member of the fan’s immediate family, and once he fouled twenty-eight consecutive pitches off the home-plate umpire, for which he was thrown out of the Old Sod Shanty League.

  “Go! Hence!” cried the ump.

  “For foul balls?”

  The umpire and the sinner were face-to-face. “Forever!” cried the ump. “Never again, so long as ball is thrown, shall thy face be seen in this park.”

  “Foul balls ain’t against any rule that I know of!”

  The umpire said, “Thou hast displeased me.” And he pointed outerward and E.J. slouched away.

  So he coached his boys. He never said a kind word to them, and they worked like dogs in hopes of hearing one, and thus they became great, mowing down the opposition for a hundred miles around. In 1946 they reached their peak. That was the year they disposed easily of fifteen crack teams in the Father Powers Charity Tournament, some by massacre, and at the closing ceremony, surrounded by sad little crippled children sitting dazed in the hot sun and holding pitiful flags they had made themselves, when E.J. was supposed to hand back the winner’s check for $100 to Father Powers to help with the work among the poor, E.J. said, “Fat chance!” and shoved away the kindly priest’s outstretched hand. That was also the year Babe Ruth came to town with the Sorbasol All-Star barnstorming team.

  The Babe had retired in 1935 and was dying of cancer, but even a dying man has bills to pay, and so he took to the road for Sorbasol, and Lake Wobegon was the twenty-fourth stop on the trip, a day game on November 12. The All-Star train of two sleepers and a private car for the Babe backed up the sixteen-mile spur into Lake Wobegon, arriving at 10:00 a.m. with a blast of whistle and a burst of steam, but hundreds already were on hand to watch it arrive.

  The Babe was a legend then, much like God is today. He didn’t give interviews, in other words. He rode around on his train and appeared only when necessary. It was said that he drank Canadian rye whiskey, ate hot dogs, won thousands at poker, and kept beautiful women in his private car, Excelsior, but that was only talk.

  The sleepers were ordinary deluxe Pullmans; the Excelsior was royal green with gold-and-silver trim and crimson velvet curtains tied shut—not that anyone tried to look in; these were proud country people, not a bunch of gawkers. Men stood by the train, their backs to it, talking purposefully about various things, looking out across the lake, and when other men straggled across the field in twos and threes, stared at the train, and asked, “Is he really in there?” the firstcomers said, “Who? Oh! You mean the Babe? Oh, yes, I reckon he’s here all right—this is his train, you know. I doubt that his train would go running around without the Babe in it, now, would it?” and resumed their job of standing by the train, gazing out across the lake. A proud moment for them.

  At noon the Babe came out in white linen knickers. He looked lost. A tiny black man held his left arm. Babe tried to smile at the people and the look on his face made them glance away. He stumbled on a loose plank on the platform and men reached to steady him and noticed he was hot to the touch. He signed an autograph. It was illegible. A young woman was carried to him who’d been mysteriously ill for months, and he laid his big hand on her forehead and she said she felt something. (Next day she was a little better. Not recovered but improved.)

  However, the Babe looked shaky, like a man who ate a bushel of peaches whole and now was worried about the pits. He’s drunk, some said, and a man did dump a basket of empty beer bottles off the train, and boys dove in to get one for a souvenir—but others who came close to his breath said no, he wasn’t drunk, only dying. So it was that an immense crowd turned out at the Wally (Old Hard Hands) Bunsen Memorial Ballpark: twenty cents per seat, two bits to stand along the foul line, and a dollar to be behind a rope by the dugout, where the Babe would shake hands with each person in that section.

  He and the All-Stars changed into their red Sorbasol uniforms in the dugout, there being no place else, and people looked away as they did it (nowadays people would look, but then they didn’t), and the Babe and his teammates tossed the ball around, then sat down, and out came the Schroeders. They ran around and warmed up and you could see by their nonchalance how nervous they were. E.J. batted grounders to them and hit one grounder zinging into the visitors’ dugout, missing the Babe by six inches. He was too sick to move. The All-Stars ran out and griped to the ump but the Babe sat like he didn’t know where he was. The ump was scared. The Babe hobbled out to home plate for the ceremonial handshakes and photographs, and E.J. put his arm around him as the crowd stood cheering, and grinned and whispered, “We’re going to kill ya, ya big mutt. First pitch goes in your ear. This is your last game. Bye, Babe.” And the game got under way.

  It was a good game, it’s been said, though nobody remembers much about it specifically, such as the score, for example. The All-Stars were nobodies, only the Babe mattered to the crowd, and the big question was Would he play? He looked too shaky to take the field, so some said, “Suspend the rules! Why not let him just go up and bat! He can bat for the pitcher! Why not? It wouldn’t hurt anything!” And nowadays they might do it, but back then you didn’t pick up the bat unless you picked up your glove and played a position, and others said that maybe it wouldn’t hurt anything but once you start changing the rules of the game for convenience, then what happens to our principles? Or do we change those, too?

  So the game went along, a good game except that the Babe sat sprawled in the dugout, the little black man dipping cloths in a bucket of ice and laying them on the great man’s head—a cool fall day but he was hot—and between innings he climbed out and waved to the fans and they stood and cheered and wondered would he come to bat.

  E.J. said to Bernie, “He’ll bat all right, and when he comes, remember the first pitch: hard and high and inside.”

  “He looks too weak to get the bat off his shoulder, Dad. He looks like a breeze would blow him over. I can’t throw at Babe Ruth.”

  “He’s not sick, he’s pretending so he don’t have to play like the rest of us. Look at him: big fat rich New York son of a bitch, I bet he’s getting five hundred dollars just to sit there and have a pickaninny put ice on him. Boy, I’d put some ice on him you-know-where, boy, he’d get up quick then, he’d be ready to play then. He comes up, I want you to give him something to think about so he knows we’re not all a bunch of dumb hicks out here happy just to have him show up. I want him to know that some of us mean it. You do what I say. I’m serious.”

  It was a good game and people enjoyed it, the day cool and bright, delicious, smelling of apples and leather and woodsmoke and horses, blazed with majestic colors as if in a country where kings and queens ride through the cornfields into the triumphant reds and oranges of the woods, and men in November playing the last game of summer, waiting for the Babe, everyone waiting for the Babe as runs scored, hours passed, the sky turned red and hazy. It was about time to quit and go home, and then he marched out, bat in hand, and three thousand people threw back their heads and yelled as loud as they could. They yelled for one solid minute and then it was still.

  The Babe stood looking toward the woods until everything was silent, then stepped to the plate and wav
ed the bat, and Bernie looked at him. It was so quiet you could hear coughing in the crowd. Way to the rear a man said, “Merle, you get your hands off her and shut up now,” and hundreds turned and shushed him. Then Bernie wound up. He bent way down and reached way back and kicked up high and the world turned and the ball flew and the umpire said, “BALL ONE!” and the catcher turned and said, “Be quiet, this doesn’t concern you,” and the umpire blushed. He knew immediately that he was in the wrong. Babe Ruth was not going to walk, he would sooner strike out and would do it himself, with no help from an umpire. So the umpire turned and walked away.

  The Babe turned and spat and picked up a little dirt and rubbed his hands with it (people thought, Look, that’s our dirt and he’s putting it on his hands, as if the Babe might bring his own) and then stood in and waved the bat and Bernie bent way down and reached way back and kicked high and the world turned and the ball flew and the Babe swung and missed; he said huhhhnnnn and staggered. And the next pitch. He swung and cried in pain and the big slow curve slapped into the catcher’s mitt.

  It was so still, they heard the Babe clear his throat, like a board sliding across dirt. They heard Bernie breathing hard through his nose.

  The people were quiet, wanting to see, hear, and smell everything and remember it forever: the wet fall dirt, the pale white bat, the pink cotton candy and the gentlemen’s hats, the smell of wool and the glimmer of a star in the twilight, the touch of your dad’s big hand and your little hand in it. Even E.J. was quiet, chewing, watching his son. The sun had set beyond right field, darkness was settling, you had to look close to see—Bernie took three steps toward home and pointed at the high outside corner of the plate, calling his pitch, and the Babe threw back his head and laughed four laughs. (People were glad to hear he was feeling better, but it was scary to hear a man laugh at home plate; everyone knew it was bad luck.) He touched the corner with his bat. Bernie climbed back on the mound, he paused, he bent down low and reached way back and kicked real high and the world turned and the ball flew and the Babe swung and it cracked and the ball became a tiny white star in the sky. It hung there as the Babe went around the bases in his famous Babe Ruth stride, the big graceful man trotting on slim little feet, his head down until the roar of the crowd rose like an ocean wave on the prairie and he looked up as he turned at third; he smiled, lifted his cap, strode soundlessly across home plate looking like the greatest ballplayer in the history of the world. The star was still in the sky, straight out due northwest of the centerfield fence, where he hit it. The ball was never found, though they searched for it for years.

  “Did you see that?” your dad says, taking your hand.

  You say, “Yes, I did.”

  Even E.J. saw it and stood with the rest and he was changed after that, as were the others. A true hero has some power to make us a gift of a larger life. The Schroeders broke up, the boys went their own ways, and once they were out of earshot, E.J. sat in the Sidetrack Tap and bragged them up, the winners he produced and how they had shown Babe Ruth a pretty good game. He was tolerated but Babe Ruth was revered. He did something on that one day in our town that made us feel we were on the map of the universe, connected somehow to the stars, part of the mind of God. The full effect of his mighty blow diminished over time, of course, and now our teams languish, our coaches despair. Defeat comes to seem the natural course of things. Lake Wobegon dresses for a game, they put on their jockstraps, pull on the socks, get into the colors, they start to lose heart and turn pale—fear shrivels them.

  Boys, this game may be your only chance to be good, he might tell them. You might screw up everything else in your life and poison the ones who love you, create misery, create such pain and devastation it will be repeated by generations of descendants. Boys, there’s plenty of room for tragedy in life, so if you go bad, don’t have it be said that you never did anything right. Win this game.

  6.

  1951

  I have never moved to a warmer climate—never gave it a thought—because, after the brutal winter of 1951, every winter since has seemed mild and pleasant to me, especially with the advent of thermal underwear and heated steering wheels, which didn’t exist back then. Nowadays you can plug your car into an electrical outlet to keep the radiator warm so the car starts instantly in the morning. Ice choppers are better, snow boots, emergency medical care: progress on every hand. People complain about winter and I tell them, “It could be worse,” which I happen to know something about, having been around in 1951.

  I was nine years old, the invisible middle child in a family of eight. We had been a family of ten but little Ralph had been carried away by coyotes and my twin sister, Gertie, had been perforated by a giant icicle. She was going to school and slammed the door in a fit of pique, and the icicle, which had been suspended from the eave and was the size of a Sidewinder missile and pointed at the end, split the child nearly in two.

  This was before we moved to town. We lived way out on the county road, in a rickety frame house at the old Crandall farm, eight of us in three bedrooms, plus Aunt Cooter and Uncle Dud, who weren’t related to us. Mother took them in because they had nowhere to go and we were Christians. They lived in the living room, wrapped in horse blankets, gumming their food and conversing with historical figures such as Ulysses S. Grant or Mrs. William McKinley. When they weren’t complaining about their troubles, they were muttering dark prophesies: “It’s a-coming! The big one! Who can withstand the power of the Lord God Almighty if He shall set His Hand against them!” Demented elderly people do not make good houseguests but peach brandy made them manageable: Dad poured half a cup for each of them at eight every night and they were out cold by nine. All in all I’d say that with them living with us, I always looked forward to school, so that was good.

  • • •

  Unlike today, there was no accurate weather forecasting back then. America’s radar was focused on defending us against Soviet attack, not on locating high-pressure fronts. All we had from day to day was a general sense of foreboding. Blinding blizzards came sweeping suddenly down from Alberta and Saskatchewan without warning. Thirty below zero was considered moderate; fifty below was cold, eighty below darned cold. At a hundred below, school was canceled and everybody stayed home. Years later it came out that the chief meteorologist at the U.S. Weather Bureau was on the take from the Chamber of Commerce and that temperatures and snowfall were “adjusted” so as not to harm “public morale,” but we knew how cold it was. When you dumped boiling water out the back door, it hit the ground as ice crystals. The snow was ten feet deep—the downstairs of our house was dark from January on and we had to exit through a tunnel. You could walk on the hard-crusted drifts. Our furnace burned coal, and when we ran out, it burned tree stumps, old tires, furniture—we burned the entire twenty-four-volume C. H. McIntosh Commentary on the Ephesians one night, which was Grandpa’s wedding gift to my parents but he was dead and they were still married so it wasn’t a problem.

  • • •

  One night, engrossed in a Hardy Boys mystery, I lay by the heat register while my sisters and Mother listened to Jack Benny on the radio, jawing with Rochester and Mary, trying to save a nickel on a necktie. Mother asked me to go out and bring in the clothes hanging on the clothesline. I put on my coat and buckled up my overshoes.

  “Put a scarf over your face,” she said, “and remember to breathe through your nose, not your mouth.” We knew that mouth breathing would lead to frosted lungs, which would lead to pneumonia and then death.

  I walked out into the bitter cold and found the laundry frozen stiff as lumber on the clothesline, the world silent and frozen all around. Blue light flickered from the Wicks’ Muntz TV across the road. We did not have a TV—there were Hollywood movies on TV and Hollywood was a polluter of the minds of young people—so I sometimes snuck over and stood around watching I Love Lucy. The Wicks were always piled in around their old TV with the rabbit ears antenna like a den ful
l of dogs curled up, each dog in his spot. Once when their picture got snowy, I stood and held the antenna and the picture got clearer. They paid me a quarter to do this.

  As I took the frozen laundry off the line, I thought about putting my tongue on one of the clothes poles, where it would freeze to the iron instantly and soon the volunteer fire department would come rolling up, sirens screaming, red lights flashing, to rescue me, the very nice boy with glasses, and Mother, weeping with her arms around me, at last would realize what a prize she had. But it was only a thought.

  • • •

  That night I lay in my cot in the attic and could see my breath. I always slept in my clothes, never wet the bed, never even considered it. I lay quietly, warming up my little trough, and soon after I fell asleep, Mother was thumping on the door. Five a.m., time to rise and shine. I went to the kitchen and took a bowl of Hot Ralston, which tasted like sweeping compound, and a cup of Folger’s coffee, and put on parka and gloves to go help Dad start the car, which was frozen solid in the driveway. We had burned the garage for fuel the winter before.

  It was a 1946 Ford coupe, a good-looking car, and my job was to get behind the wheel while Dad pushed. The windshield was heavily frosted, so I put my bare hand against it to clear a little peephole. Dad yelled, “Ready?” and I said I was. “Pump the gas,” he yelled, and he gave a big heave and the tires came loose from where they’d been frozen to the ground and the car started to roll down the slight incline of the driveway. I clung to the wheel and strained to see out through the peephole as the car picked up speed, jolting and bucking over the bumps, the shock absorbers frozen solid. At just the exact right moment, I was to pop the clutch and throw the car into second gear; if I had pumped the gas pedal just the right number of times, the momentum of the car would turn over the engine and it would start firing, and if I hadn’t done everything right, the car would jerk to a stop and Dad would have to call up Mr. Wick to come over with jumper cables and start us. Dad did not care to be beholden to a Catholic, so there was a lot at stake. The car was rolling fast now, and when my foot came off the gas pedal and Dad said, “Now! Now!” I popped her into second and the engine roared and I stepped on the brake while pushing in the clutch to slip the car into neutral, and stopped at the end of the driveway, engine idling at high speed as Dad came running up. “Shove over,” he said. I slid over, and he put the car in reverse and backed her up the long driveway to where the garage had been, and we were all set to go. I don’t remember that he said “Good job” or “Well done, son”; I suppose he may have, but I doubt it. Dad didn’t believe in praise; he felt that it contributed to a prideful attitude.