The farm was small, about 160 acres, in rolling sandy hills a few miles north of Lake Wobegon. Daddy grew up on the farm with his five brothers and sisters, and by the time I was old enough to figure out who was who, all of them had moved to town except Aunt Eva, who never married and stayed on the home place with Grandma. The land was rented to a neighboring farmer, Mr. Walberg, a man with immense black eyebrows. Grandma and Eva busied themselves cleaning and cooking and washing and tending the garden and raising chickens, as they had always done. Nothing had changed there in a hundred years except Grandma owned an old Studebaker, and they had a telephone and electric lights, though Grandma liked to keep kerosene lamps around, the sour smell reminding her of her girlhood.
When I was 3 years old, Daddy went away to Fort Lee, New Jersey, to serve in the United States Army as a paymaster’s clerk and Mother and I and the older brother and sister went to live on the farm, and thus began the paradise part of my life, my earliest memories. Mother and the Olders shared a bedroom, and Eva and I shared a bedroom. It was small, under the eaves, with a sloping ceiling, and I imagined we lived on a ship. The wallpaper pattern was little bouquets of blue flowers tied with pale-pink ribbons. The bed had a valley running down the middle, and we slept under a quilt and flannel sheets in winter, a blue chenille spread and percale sheets in summer, and Eva told me stories in her soft twang and sang me to sleep with sweet sad songs about the days of yore, “The Old Oaken Bucket,” and “Mother’s Not Dead, She’s Only Sleeping in the Baggage Car Ahead,” and the babes in the woods who lay down and died and the robins spread strawberry leaves over them, and the death of Old Rex, who found Little Jimmy in the storm and lay beside the sleeping form and thereby kept the child warm. When rescue came at break of day to the hollow where they lay the faithful dog had passed away. Somewhere around that time, I began to think of Eva as a mother. She wasn’t Mother, but she was the warm body who lay next to me and whose smell I loved. I took an old dress of hers and curled up with it for my afternoon nap. She was my Eva. My Queen of Heaven.
She was a fireplug of a woman, with thick legs and small hands and a flat face, who all her days went around in one of two or three identical cotton print dresses, or the ancient navy-blue thing she wore to town for the Breaking of Bread on Sunday morning. She had no children and so she belonged to me and was available for my adoration. She was perfectly nice to the Olders but she preferred me. She didn’t have to say so; it was quite clear.
She liked the same exact things I liked. Meat loaf. Fried-egg sandwiches. Devil’s-food cake. Fresh tomatoes from the garden eaten warm right off the vine. Sneaking up on people and listening to them. Farts. Talking late at night. We loved the same radio shows. Burns & Allen and Fibber McGee & Mollie and Lum & Abner and Footlight Favorites with the Radio Toe-Tappers and The Post Toasties Cavalcade with Spike Hopper and His Jazz Equestrians originating from the famous Tom-Tom Room at the Hotel Oglallah on New York’s fashionable West 49th Street. The Jiggs Wahpeton Show starring “the gal in the know,” gossip columnist Jiggs Wahpeton, sponsored by Hercules Cleaning Crystals. Hold on to your hats, ladies, back in a moment with another juicy morsel after this word from Hercules! Monday night, it was Jack Cassidy and His Air Cadet Squadron, sponsored by Happy Baked Beans. An evil gelatin came squooshing in the windows of the Johnson house and started eating their furniture and then it ate the dog, Rusty, while the family clung to a chandelier. The gelatin was climbing the walls toward them, gurgling and sucking, and they were about to lose their grip on the light fixture, and just then we heard the drone of airplane engines and knew that Jack and the boys were on their way, and the Air Cadet Chorus came back to sing:Happy Baked Beans are nutritious,
Help you live the natural way.
They are nature’s fruit, have a healthy toot
With baked beans every day.
Eva woke us up in the morning by calling out, “Daylight in the swamps.” She just liked the sound of it. She had a whole raft of phrases. She said, “If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.” She said, “What we lack in our heads, we must make up for with our feet.” If you couldn’t find the pitcher of cream sitting right smack in front of you, she said, “If it were a snake, it woulda bit you.” Or “None so blind as those that refuse to see.” If you burped at the table, she said, “Bring it up again and we’ll take a vote on it.” She enjoyed jokes of all kinds, knock-knocks or Little Willie riddles, moron jokes. We tossed a softball back and forth and she complimented me on my arm. She also told me how well I read to her out loud from the Psalms and McGuffey’sReader, where we never wearied of Longfellow, the village smithy under the spreading chestnut tree, the smith a swarthy man was he, and listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, and the forests primeval of Evangeline, and the song of Hiawatha and the lovely Nokomis and the waters of Gitche-Gumee.
“I love to hear you read out loud,” she said. “You have the loveliest voice.”
I basked in her praise, coveted her praise, set my hat by it. Mother was the one who checked my ears for earwax and cautioned me against nose-picking and reminded me to make the bed and do my chores and worried about spoiling me. Eva didn’t worry about spoiling. She told me that I was the brightest little boy she knew and that I would grow up to be a great man like Franklin D. Roosevelt or Jack Benny.
It was a big day when Daddy finally came home from New York. Mother and the Olders and I drove to the Great Northern depot in Minneapolis and met his train as it came steaming in under the long shed, the dark-green cars, a trainman riding on the steps, and a car passed and through a window I glimpsed a couple smooching, and then Daddy hopped off, rumpled and tired and (I thought) not so happy to see us. He groused about us wasting all that gasoline to come meet him when he could just as easily have taken the bus.
Mother had warned us not to make too much noise, so we rode home in silence, listening to Daddy complain about the Army and its inefficient practices.
The farmyard was full of cars, all the relatives drove out to see him in his uniform and his campaign hat, ribbons on his chest. Grandma cried. We posed for pictures. There was fried chicken and corn on the cob at a long table on the lawn. We stood around the piano, Aunt Eva playing, and sang hymns. And not so long after that, Daddy went away again.
Mother says it was almost a year later. I remember it as three or four days. My earliest memory is of Daddy not being there, and then he was, and then he wasn’t.
Mother explained to the three of us that Daddy could earn a great deal of money if he went to work for the Air Force in Greenland, in a place called Tooley, but spelled Thule. He would earn better money than he could ever hope to earn in Lake Wobegon, so—because he loved us all so much—he would go away for a while and then come home and we’d be able to buy a nice house in town.
I didn’t care about a house in town, I was perfectly happy where I was.
We kept a map of Greenland in the living room, over the couch where we knelt and prayed every morning after breakfast, and a red pin marked where Daddy was, and while everyone else prayed to God for Daddy’s safe return, I silently prayed that he would not come back and that I would live on the farm forever with Eva and Grandma and Mother.
He was gone for three years, coming home for a week in the summer and a week at Christmas, and those were good years for yours truly.
People said, “You must miss your daddy a lot,” and I nodded yes and made a brave face, but it was all a big lie, I loved things as they were.
Mother was a town girl, slender and pretty, she had worked as a secretary for Brown & Bigelow, taking shorthand and typing, and liked to dress well and do up her hair, and the farm was a long exile for her. She never ventured into the woods or the hayfield. She took a job at the bank and bought a Model A Ford and kissed me goodbye every morning and went off for the day. She boarded the Olders with Aunt Flo and Uncle Al in town, so they could attend school there and not the one-room country school. Several times Mother left me with my
beloved Eva and took the train to New York and met Daddy there. I did not mind this at all.
“You’re a brave boy not to cry when your mother goes away,” said Grandma, but the truth was, I didn’t mind.
I loved the little white house with the big kitchen and tiny parlor, the old black spinet, Grandma’s bedroom downstairs, the creaky L-shaped wood stairs and the two bedrooms above, the woodstove and the red water-pump on the kitchen counter by the sink, the pantry with floor-to-ceiling shelves of jars of canned corn and beets and pickles. The paradise of red-oak woods and pasture where Mr. Walberg’s mournful Holsteins lay in the shade and chewed and thought cow thoughts and ignored the corncobs I tossed to them. Empty sheds to play in, the machine shed smelling of motor oil and full of coffee cans of bolts and nuts and screws and a long-deceased Ford tractor that was my Spitfire, my B-27. The big spooky old barn where you could climb up the side of the mow and leap down onto the loose hay, or stand on the highest promontory of bales and orate into the sweet grassy air.
My cousins came around to visit and eat Grandma’s ginger-bread cake, and we’d all play Starlight, Moonlight, and Eva tore around and flushed us out of our hiding places in the shadows and galloped after us through the tall weeds toward the yard-light pole that was the goal. She and I were It together and put our foreheads against the pole, counting loudly to fifty, and then she trotted off into the dark to flush the others out and I stood waiting to catch them, and the last one caught was always my cousin Kate, who was fast as the wind and sneaky. She had short dark hair and a mischievous look about her. She knew songs like “The horses stood around with their feet upon the ground, / O who will wind my wristwatch when I’m gone? / We feed the baby garlic so we can find him in the dark, / and a boy’s best friend is his mother.” She knew “Two little children lying in bed, / one of them sick and the other near dead. / Send for the doctor, the doctor said, / ‘Feed those children on shortnin’ bread.’ ” She would pee outside in the bushes, without a blush. She climbed trees. She told secrets. When it got past bedtime and Uncle Sugar and Aunt Ruth stood in the light calling “Katie! Katie!” she took her sweet time coming in. She was my favorite cousin as long ago as I can remember.
Eva could hypnotize chickens by cradling them in her arm and stroking their foreheads, ten or twelve strokes between the little yellow eyes and down the beak, and the chicken, dazed, stood motionless for several minutes before awakening from the trance and falling over in a feathery heap. She never killed a chicken without first putting it into a hypnotic state. She took us swimming in the river and there performed her trick of standing on her head, her two big white legs sticking straight up out of the water. She was the only grown-up to behave this way; the others sat in the kitchen and drank coffee and spoke of serious matters, such as the soul. She could recite the 23rd Psalm at top speed backwards or rattle off the eighty-seven counties of Minnesota, “Aitkin, Anoka, Becker, Beltrami, Benton, Big Stone, Blue Earth, Brown, Carlton, Carver, Cass, Chippewa”—a blur of sound and I loved hearing it. She could play several pieces on the piano by heart, one was by Chopin and the others were not. The Chopin one was sweet and sad and made me think of a drawing of Confederate officers bidding farewell to their wives on a veranda before riding north to die in the swamps of northern Virginia.
At night she would hum me the Chopin tune as we lay in bed, or “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” or “Abide With Me, Fast Falls the Eventide,” and I snuggled up against her broad back and fell asleep in her auntly smell and then the room was bright with sunlight and I dressed and trotted out back to pee and washed my face and sat down to breakfast. And if it was summer, we would stroll out to the garden down a dirt lane beyond the machine shed and hoe corn and weed the onions and beets and tighten up the twine that the beans twined along, and then she said, “How about a nice ripe tomato?” And we each picked one, hot in the sun, and wiped off the sand, and ate it, the juice running down our chins.
5
Precious
Daddy came home from Greenland finally in the summer of 1950. He bought us a big green frame house on Green Street, under a canopy of elms, three blocks down the hill from the high school, two blocks up from Main Street. I stood at the end of our cement walk and a boy rode up on a new red bicycle. He was Leonard Larsen. He asked if I liked reading books. Yes, I said, I do. Mother and Aunt Flo scrubbed and painted and varnished the floors, and Daddy and Uncle LeRoy hauled the furniture in from LeRoy’s garage, where Mother had stored it, piece by piece, and I stood with Leonard and watched it float in the front door. He asked, “Where are you from?” I said, Minneapolis, not wanting to be thought of as a farm person. Our new home was exactly what Mother wanted. The Olders each had a room; the brother filled his with books and model planes and science projects, the sister with fussy grandma furniture and her very own Bible plaques—Jesus Christ, the Same Yesterday, Today and Forever and Where Will You Spend Eternity? and Prayer Changes Things—and I had my room with a bed, a maple desk, a bookshelf, a dresser, a print of the “First Minnesota Repelling Longstreet’s Advance at Gettysburg.” Downstairs was our dining room with walnut paneling and built-in buffet and an arch between it and the living room, which had a brick fireplace. A majestic thing, with brass andirons. Mother’s fairy tale come true. Being Mother, she didn’t gush or cry or make a big speech, but you knew she was supremely happy, directing where each chair and table should go, straightening the lace curtains, supervising the hanging of pictures—a wolf on a snowbank, an old man praying over a loaf of bread, The Harvesters, and a plaque, Jesus Christ, the Silent Listener to Every Conversation, the Unseen Guest at Every Meal, a spooky thought to me, God as Spy.
I didn’t invite Leonard into the house, for fear of what he might think of us. Especially the Bible plaques.
Kate came over. She and Ruth and Sugar lived in a stucco house just around the corner, with no garden in back, one of the few homes in town that didn’t care about fresh tomatoes. “Now you two will really be able to get to know each other,” said Ruth. She had no idea how right she was. Kate walked into our kitchen and reached into the sugar bowl and got out two cubes and sucked on them. “You got any pop?” she said. We had a cola. Daddy considered it as good as Coke at half the price. I poured us two glasses and we sat on the back step that looked toward the birdbath, the clotheslines, the garden, the garage, the wires on the poles in the alley. She asked me if I knew what parallel means. I did and I even could spell it. She was impressed. “How about shitty?” she said. I laughed. I’d never heard anybody in our family say such a word aloud. Shitty. She spelled it. S-h-i-t-t-y. “Now use it in a sentence,” she said. I said, “I feel particularly shitty today.” Actually I felt excited and pleased at having said this word out loud. It certainly filled a blank in my vocabulary.
I was a very good boy right up until the age of 11. Everybody said so. I stayed out of people’s way and didn’t ask too many questions. I sat up straight at meals, and when visiting other people’s homes, I said, Thank you for the lemonade, and Please may I use your bathroom? I never picked my nose except behind closed doors, and when grown-ups spoke I was attentive. I was often pointed out to other children as an example. “Why can’t you behave like Gary? Look at him, he doesn’t wriggle around like a trapped squirrel during Prayer Meeting, he sits up straight and listens and Gets Something Out of It.”
And then, one day in 1953, I said out loud, “Oh, to hell with it,” in connection with a sack of garbage Daddy told me to take to the garbage can. I was standing on one side of the screen door and he on the other. I was wearing khaki trousers and an old Boy Scout shirt of the older brother’s. I was surprised to hear these words myself. They just sprang out, like a sneeze, “Oh, to hell with it.” And a great darkness fell over the earth.
Daddy was on the verge of apoplexy. He thought I had said, “Go to hell,” to him. He marched into the kitchen and thundered around for a while and then Mother came out to speak to me.
“You upset your father terribly w
hen you act that way. Do you realize that? And do you know how sad it makes God to hear you say such a thing?”
The Creator, the Hanger of the Stars and Planets, the Unseen Listener, He Himself mourned for my saying the terrible word.
“Why did you say it?”
Good question. I had often heard men condemn things to hell at various times around town, and it seemed like a powerful thing to say. But Daddy was the wrong one to say it to.
I was sent out to sit in the car. It was a hot day, the sun beat down. I sat in the back seat, the window rolled down, pretending I was on a train to Chicago. Kate came by. I told her what I had said and she grinned. “You’re up shit creek now,” she said.
And then Daddy came out and drove me to the farm. He talked about how hard he worked as a boy and how Grandma brooked no backtalk and if you didn’t toe the mark it was the leather strap for you, but of course Grandma never was like that to me at all. He said, “You go spend a few days on the farm and maybe it’ll make you think twice about the language you use.”
We were quite different, Daddy and I. What he conceived as punishment was often quite enjoyable. “Go to your room and stay there!” Thanks. I’d love to. Why not? My books were there, my tablets, pencils, I could write stories. “Go spend a few days on the farm.” My pleasure. Please don’t throw me into that briar patch, Brer Daddy!
Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 Page 5