He said, “Well, if you change your mind, you know where to find me.”
Of course people gossiped about their separation but Mother rose above it. She was a duchess. She was circumspect and unburdened herself to nobody but her childhood friend Gladys and sometimes her daughter and she did her weeping in private. In public she offered a resolute smile and plenty of small talk. She avoided scrutiny by attaching herself firmly to Lake Wobegon Lutheran church. She took over the Altar Guild after the sainted Mrs. Dalbo succumbed to arthritis, arranged the flowers every Sunday, arranged lunches for funerals and senior suppers, stood ready to step in and manage anything that needed managing. She was responsible for bringing in Ernie and Irma Lundeen and their Performing Gospel Birds, a troupe of parakeets and doves and canaries, a macaw, an owl, and a crow, who enacted scenes from Scripture in their bird-sized costumes and picked out hymns on xylophones and wound up the show with the Blessing of the Birds—the congregation, heads bowed, heard the beating of wings as the Gospel Birds dropped mustard seeds on each person, seeds grown in the Holy Land. Some people thought the show was trashy and beneath them, but after the Birds left, people talked about it for weeks. A remarkable evening. She took on the wedding of a lapsed Catholic about to ship out to Vietnam and in a hurry to marry his girlfriend, an unbeliever, and Evelyn got them hitched and served champagne on the church lawn and tossed rice at them and paid for the motel. She chaperoned Luther Leaguers on convention trips, camped with her Girl Scouts, taught Sunday school, sponsored a Vietnamese family of four, baked for bake sales, edited the Ladies Circle cookbook, sewed for the Christmas pageant, and did the Reformation Sunday scholarship fundraising dinner fifteen years in a row. And then she buried Jack.
*
Jack died of a heart attack on a bitter January afternoon in front of the Sidetrack Tap. He was a little drunk and arguing with Mr. Hoppe about the authenticity of the Kensington Runestone. Hoppe insisted the stone was inscribed by Viking explorers in the fourteenth century and left in a meadow in western Minnesota, and Jack said the stone was a well-known fake, carved by a farmer with time on his hands. Anybody with an IQ of a potted plant would know that. They’d had this argument for thirty-seven years and the venom had not dissipated, but only distilled. The argument was the vehicle for Jack’s anger about old age, bad luck, communism, marriage, Lutherans, the fluoridation of water. It put him in a fury, plus which he’d been thrown out of the bar that morning for yelling at someone he thought was Norbert and who was not. Wally gave him the heave-ho and a few minutes later Barbara saw him fumbling with his keys, trying to open the trunk of a car that wasn’t his, and she offered to buy him lunch. Jack was gaunt, unshaven, his hair matted, his face loose, skin sagging, his teeth punky, his glasses missing a lens. He’d been in the leg trap a long time. They traipsed into the Chatterbox Café and sat at the counter and she ordered chicken soup and a grilled cheese sandwich for each of them. “I’ll drive you home,” she said.
“I got no home,” he said. “Got no family. Used to but not anymore. Family is pretty overrated in my book. I am on my way to a place that I don’t even know that I’ll recognize it when I get there. Maybe the stars. Or the woods. Maybe just North Dakota. I am the Hard Luck Kid. Old and beat down and used up. That’s me. Ever show you my scar?” He started to lift his shirt and she made him stop. “But I never held out the tin cup, kid. Say what you will, I never held out the tin cup. But hey, who cares? Nobody. Nobody gives a rip if you live or die. You die and they shove you down in the ground and go about their business and it’s like you never existed. That’s the long and the short of it. Between a man and a dog, there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference and you can quote me on that. People think they’re so high and mighty. Ha. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. That’s in the Bible, you can look it up. Everybody in this town looks down on Jack Peterson, well, let ‘em. My own wife looked down on me for forty years so I’m well used to it. Her and her books and her good manners and her la-di-da lady friends. I fought for this country. I wore the uniform. I was in California but I saw men go off to the Pacific and come back in bags. It could’ve been me. It wasn’t but it could’ve been. So don’t look down on me. Goddamn Norbert stole my auger and now he’s trying to avoid me. What kind of a deal is that? Goddamn V. A. won’t fix my teeth. Went to church to ask for twenty bucks to tide me over and they’re like, ‘Oh Jack, we’d love to but we gotta check with Pastor Ingqvist and he’s out on a call, could you come back at four o’clock?’ The hell. I’m not stupid. They got the money right there in an envelope in the drawer. I’ve seen it. They don’t gotta get permission.
“I was born in this town, grew up here, all my buddies were from here. Married your mother, 1942, went off to war. Treat you like a hero and then you come back, forget it. You work hard, raise your kids, do your best, and you get old and they throw you away like they never knew you. I could write a book about this town that’d burn the eyes right out of your skull. I know these people. There’s not a one of them better than me, not one. The Lutherans are the worst and the Catholics run ‘em a close second. Myself, I am a card-carrying atheist. Proud of it. Could I borrow fifty bucks until next week? I get my check next week. I gotta go to the V.A. and have them look at my head.”
So she forked over the money, paid for lunch, patted his shoulder, and as he headed off to his death, he stopped in the doorway and faced the diners in the booths along the wall, and yelled, “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, assholes!”
He walked back to the Sidetrack Tap and there was Mr. Hoppe who smelled of Lilac Vegetal cologne spritzed on liberally. “You smell like you’re hoping to get lucky, Hoppe,” said Jack, “but let me tell you: as long as it’s light out, no woman is going to come within ten feet of you. And after dark, one of them might shoot you if she had a gun.” Mr. Hoppe had had a major drinking bout the day before, which he had lost, so he was feeling unsteady, but he drew himself up to full height and said, “Jack, I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.” When he wasn’t dead drunk, Mr. Hoppe could be rather aristocratic. “You,” he said, “are a piece of trash.” They stood there insulting each other for a few minutes and then got onto the topic of Viking history. Hoppe said it was a crime that the Viking explorers were never given credit while that stumblebum Columbus had a holiday of his own. Jack said, “Well, America is named for Eric the Red. Isn’t that enough for you?” Hoppe said it wasn’t. And he brought up the runestone. They were standing at the curb in front of the bar, and Jack was hanging onto the town’s lone parking meter (erected in 1956 as an experiment, soldered shut in 1972), and he yelled at Hoppe, “It’s no wonder you never made anything of yourself. You got shit for brains.” And he turned, clutched at his chest, and fell to the ground, dead, his old grizzled mug flat on the ice and snow. “To hell with you,” said Hoppe and then thought better of it. He shook Jack’s shoulders. “Get up, you old booger,” he said. And then he smelled death. It was Bruno, the old mutt, making his rounds of garbage cans. The dog sniffed at Jack’s feet, then his crotch, and his face, and then licked Jack’s lips. That was too much for Hoppe. He fled into the bar and had Wally call the constables Gary and LeRoy. And then the sheriff came, and the coroner, and a motley crowd of townsfolk, many of whom had seen Jack only minutes before and were struck by the irony: there he had been and now he was no more. It was a wonderful commotion, one that the deceased would have enjoyed. They took photographs of him lying there, and then packed him up and took him away. Somebody went to tell Evelyn but she was in St. Louis. At last, the only mourner left was the dog who sniffed around at Jack’s death site and scratched at the ice, and then lay down on it and took a nap. A week after that, Wally put the Sidetrack up for sale. He told Evelyn, “I never planned to spend my life in a tavern putting mothballs in the urinal and pouring shots of bourbon and listening to a bunch of drunks talk about the good times. I got into this as a favor to my brother-in-law. I was going to run it for him until he got better, but he died. And
here I am.”
*
They were married all those years and all Evelyn would say about him was that he was who he was and never pretended to be anything else and in the end he lived how he wanted to live and it’s pointless to try to change people. He liked being alone. He liked working on cars. He was employed by Rudeen’s Chevy-Buick in Little Falls until the drinking got to him. He preferred a job in a town where he didn’t live, which cut down on conversation. He’d slipped into marriage, and it didn’t suit him, fell in love with an imaginary friend, took up the bachelor life, drank freely, went fishing, got to talk to his loving daughter at the end. And he died in an instant. It all worked out.
5. THEY TAKE HER AWAY
The man from Waite Park Cremation Service arrived, shortly after noon. Barbara had finished 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. She pushed Uncle Al around like he was a lawn mower. Don’t put that toothpaste there. It goes here in the green cup. Don’t hang your shirt there, that’s for towels. Why are you driving so fast? Do you want to kill us? Just because the sign says 45 miles an hour doesn’t mean you have to drive 45 miles an hour! She kept a critical eye on his outfits, his grooming and hygiene, and knew everybody he spoke to on the phone and where he was every minute of the day and why—lucky for her he hadn’t gone berserk and stabbed her, the old biddy. Barbara fell asleep on the sofa and awoke at three and in the meantime three persons had called Mother and left messages on her answering machine, which seemed unspeakably sad. Aunt Flo saying: “Just called to see how you’re doing. You seemed so quiet the other day. Call me if you want a ride to quilting.” And a man offering to clean the chimney and warning of the dangers of carbon monoxide. And the man who had called last night. “Hey, Precious. You sleeping in today? Give a call. I’m around. I see there’s a fish fry in Avon. I could drive up in the RV and meet you there.” And a chuckle. “Call me on the cell.” His voice was low and seductive with a little tinge of the South. Could he be black?
She picked up the phone and called Oliver at Liberty Gas & Lube and he answered right away but he was with a customer so, okay, she said she’d call him right back. “Are you okay?” he said. Sure, she was okay. “You don’t sound okay.” “I’m okay,” she said. She didn’t mention that she had found her mother dead in bed. She didn’t want to get into that and make him feel obligated when he was busy with customers. “Talk to you later,” she said. The moment she hung up, she got teary-eyed again. What in hell are you doing? she thought. You’ve lived in this town all your life. Call up somebody and tell them to come over here. You’re in grief. They’ll come and be with you. If you can’t call your pastor, call the cops, call Father Wilmer at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, call Sister Arvonne for crying out loud—Sister Arvonne, now there was a good idea. A pistol of a woman in her black skirt and black jacket, her starched blouse, her sensible shoes. Sister Arvonne would drop everything and come in a minute, make some phone calls, draw up a list, turn this into a project. One, two, three, four—don’t cry—that’s for later—first things first.
She was blinded by tears and her left leg was asleep but she went careening into the kitchen to find the phone book and look up Sister’s number at the Catholic school. The phone book wasn’t in the junk drawer and it wasn’t next to the phone. She looked in the drawer under the junk drawer and found clippings clipped together and some old color snapshots of family picnics and a letter—a copy of a letter Mother had written to her from Alaska. Except she couldn’t remember getting it.
My dear Barbara,
Life is unjust. Here I am, goofing off and having a wild time, and sister Flo, hardworking, loyal, dedicated Florence, has no reward at all except more people asking her to do this and that, loading her up with obligations, and Al trailing along in her wake, helpless as ever. The world is merciless. Time marches on and it tromps over good hard workers and here I am skating along, the playgirl of the North.
But someday this foolish trip to Alaska will be a great asset. I flew up to Juneau in rain and low clouds and the plane glided in between mountains and the man sitting next to me was a bush pilot and out of the blue I asked if he would fly me north. Shameless. But he said, Sure. You shouldn’t hesitate to ask for a ride: everybody likes a little company now and then. So the next morning I got in the back of his plane, surrounded by sacks of mail, piles of groceries, the seat belt a cargo strap, and we flew north, and he took a little detour and flew over Mount McKinley, so close to the mountain I could see strings of climbers struggling upward in the snow fields. We landed on a dirt strip next to a gold-mining camp and a man drove up to the strip and unloaded half the groceries and some mail, and invited us in for a beer. He and his wife were the only inhabitants, mining for gold by aiming high-powered hoses at the banks of a stream, and running the dirt through a sluice and collecting the gold dust, and they were starved for company, absolutely starved. Asked me where I came from and I told them about Lake Wobegon and the Norwegian bachelor farmers and how they burn their socks in the spring. And then we flew on to an Inuit village and a grass landing strip on the edge of a cliff. We came in heading for the cliff and landed uphill and used every inch of landing strip and all the Inuit kids were out, laughing and yelling and tearing around, and mail was unloaded and then Dan turned the plane around and gave the engine full throttle, and the plane hurtled toward the edge of the cliff bouncing like mad, and the engines screaming and off the cliff we went and dropped a little and then the wings caught hold and off we went. Dan was singing something that he told me later was an Inuit good-luck song. That takeoff I will always remember. The violence of it and then the silence of being airborne and banking to the right and down below the children waving, and then off to Kotzebue and the Bering Strait ahead, and beyond it Siberia and a whole mysterious world I don’t expect I’ll ever see.
When I am old and bunged up and living in the Good Shepherd Home surrounded by half-dead people watching TV and I rummage around in my memory bank to figure out who I used to be, that takeoff will be right there, I believe. Money in the bank. I can feel the plane shudder and buck and leap forward and me leaning forward, hanging onto the cargo strap, and then the sinking sensation and then the air picked us up and bore us forward.
Life is unjust and this is what makes it so beautiful. Every day is a gift. Be brave and take hold of it.
Love, your mother
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. “We’ve found it better not to advertise who we are,” he explained. “Some folks are still sort of weirded out by the idea of cremation, so our customers prefer anonymity.”
But how could you hide the fact of cremation? she thought—people come and there’s a little jar on a pedestal.
She explained about the rhinestone dress and he smiled. “You don’t want that,” he said. “A lot of charred rocks mixed up with your mother.” And then she suddenly could visualize Mother being consigned to the flames—rising up, mouth open in a silent scream, arms reaching out, in agony, a true Christian martyr in the flames.
“Where is your mother?” She pointed to the bedroom door. He went in there. Suddenly she wasn’t sure if this was the right thing. O God. What to do? She picked up the phone but who to call? Aunt Flo was three blocks away but that would be a horr
or show. She’d get mad and tell you what a harebrained thing this is and how typical of you, Barbara. Pastor Ingqvist—you were supposed to call your pastor, weren’t you? Yes, you were. But what was he going to add to the situation? Read a prayer off an index card. Talk about the corruptible becoming the incorruptible. And she didn’t know his feelings about cremation. Probably negative. He’d come in and murmur his stuff and the upshot would be that Mother would lie waxen and cold in a $3000 coffin and Barbara would feel the whips of remorse for the rest of her life. And she knew what Pastor Ingqvist’d say about Andy Williams singing “Moon River.” Not much doubt there.
Walt emerged from the bedroom holding up a diamond necklace. “You’ll want this,” he said. Barbara had never seen it before. He went to bring in the gurney and Barbara poured herself a little vodka and OJ.
She could imagine Oliver on his stool in the cashier’s cage at Liberty, behind the candy bars, turning his great bulk to take the credit card from a customer, swiping it, shoving the slip under the glass to be signed, offering the ballpoint. He had been shot twice on duty. “Only flesh wounds,” he said, chuckling. He weighed, she guessed, almost four hundred pounds and he was the sweetest man you ever met. When people stared at them at Perkins when they had breakfast after a night together, she wished she had a pamphlet she could hand out: “This man whom you stare at, who, to you, is a freak and an abuser of food, is also the kindest and cheeriest man in Minnesota. And, yes, a wonderful lover. Attend to your own shortcomings, and give this man the respect he deserves. Thank you.” Oh, what a lovely amorous man. He loved to nuzzle and whisper and stroke her leg. He was a great fat man and in no hurry to get to the acrobatics. He could kiss and murmur and nestle for an hour or two before he got urgent and excited and started undressing her, which other men got to in forty-five seconds. No foreplay for them, just get you naked and in they go and a minute later it’s over. The fat man was languid and tender. And then, bless his heart, when she was naked and the fat man looked at her, he imagined he saw a slender lovely girl before he turned the lights out and began to slip out of his clothes.
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